Addison may be said to have almost created and wholly perfected English prose as an instrument for the expression of social thought. Prose had of course been written in many different manners before his time. Bacon, Cowley, and Temple had composed essays; Hooker, Sir Thomas Browne, Hobbes, and Locke philosophical treatises; Milton controversial pamphlets; Dryden critical prefaces; Raleigh and Clarendon histories; Taylor, Barrow, South, and Tillotson sermons. But it cannot be said that any of these had founded a prose style which, besides being a reflection of the mind of the writer, could be taken as representing the genius and character of the nation. They write as if they were thinking apart from their audience, or as if they were speaking to it either from an inferior or superior position. The essayists had taken as their model Montaigne, and their style is therefore stamped, so to speak, with the character of soliloquy; the preachers, who perhaps did more than any writers to guide the genius of the language, naturally addressed their hearers with the authority of their office; Milton, even in controversy, rises from the natural sublimity of his mind to heights of eloquence to which the ordinary idioms of society could not have borne him; while Dryden, using the language with a raciness and rhythm probably unequalled in our literature, nevertheless exhibits in his prefaces an air of deference towards the various patrons he addresses. Moreover, many of the earlier prose writers had aimed at standards of diction which were inconsistent with the genius of the English tongue. Bacon, for instance, disfigures his style with the witty antitheses which found favour with the Elizabethan and early Stuart writers; Hooker, Milton, and Browne construct their sentences on a Latin model, which, though it often gives a certain dignity of manner, prevents anything like ease, simplicity, and lucidity of expression. Thus Hooker delights in inversions; both he and Milton protract their periods by the insertion of many subordinate clauses; and Browne “projicit ampullas et sesquipedalia verba” till the Saxon element seems almost eliminated from his style.
Addison took features of his style from almost all his predecessors: he assumes the characters of essayist, moralist, philosopher, and critic, but he blends them all together in his new capacity of journalist. He had accepted the public as his judges; and he writes as if some critical representative of the public were at his elbow, putting to the test of reason every sentiment and every expression. Warton tells us, in his Essay on Pope, that Addison was so fastidious in composition that he would often stop the press to alter a preposition or conjunction; and this evidence is corroborated in a very curious and interesting manner by the MS. of some of Addison’s essays, discovered by Mr. Dykes Campbell in 1858.[95] A sentence in one of the papers on the Pleasures of the Imagination shows, by the various stages through which it passed before its form seemed satisfactory to the writer, what nice attention he gave to the balance, rhythm, and lucidity of his periods. In its original shape the sentence was written thus:
“For this reason we find the poets always crying up a Country Life; where Nature is left to herself, and appears to ye best advantage.”
This is rather bald, and the MS. is accordingly corrected as follows:
“For this reason we find all Fancifull men, and ye poets in particular, still in love with a Country Life; where Nature is left to herself, and furnishes out all ye variety of Scenes yt are most delightful to ye Imagination.”
The text as it stands is this:
“For this reason we always find the poet in love with a country life, where nature appears in the greatest perfection, and furnishes out all those scenes that are most apt to delight the imagination.”[96]
This is certainly the best, both in point of sense and sound. Addison perceived that there was a certain contradiction in the idea of Nature being “left to herself,” and at the same time furnishing scenes for the pleasure of the imagination; he therefore imparted the notion of design by striking out the former phrase and substituting “seen in perfection;” and he emphasised the idea by afterwards changing “delightful” into the stronger phrase “apt to delight.” The improvement of the rhythm of the sentence in its final form is obvious.
With so much elaboration of style it is natural that there should be in Addison’s essays a disappearance of that egotism which is a characteristic—and a charming one—of Montaigne; his moralising is natural, for the age required it, but is free from the censoriousness of the preacher; his critical and philosophical papers all assume an intelligence in his reader equal to his own.
This perfection of breeding in writing is an art which vanishes with the Tatler and Spectator. Other critics, other humourists have made their mark in English literature, but no second Addison has appeared. Johnson took him for his model so far as to convey lessons of morality to the public by means of periodical essays. But he confesses that he addressed his audience in tones of “dictatorial instruction;” and any one who compares the ponderous sententiousness and the elaborate antithesis of the Rambler with the light and rhythmical periods of the Spectator will perceive that the spirit of preaching is gaining ground on the genius of conversation. Charles Lamb, again, has passages which, for mere delicacy of humour, are equal to anything in Addison’s writings. But the superiority of Addison consists in this, that he expresses the humour of the life about him, while Lamb is driven to look at its oddities from outside. He is not, like Addison, a moralist or a satirist; the latter indeed performed his task so thoroughly that the turbulent license of Mohocks, Tityre Tus, and such like brotherhoods, gradually disappeared before the advance of a tame and orderly public opinion. To Lamb, looking back on the primitive stages of society from a safe distance, vice itself seemed pardonable because picturesque, much in the same way as travellers began to admire the loneliness and the grandeur of nature when they were relieved from apprehensions for the safety of their purses and their necks. His humour is that of a sentimentalist; it dwells on odd nooks and corners, and describes quaint survivals in men and things. For our own age, when all that is picturesque in society is being levelled by a dull utilitarianism, this vein of eccentric imagination has a special charm, but the taste is likely to be a transient one. Mrs. Battle will amuse so long as this generation remembers the ways of its grandmothers: two generations hence the point of its humour will probably be lost. But the figure of Sir Roger de Coverley, though it belongs to a bygone stage of society, is as durable as human nature itself, and, while the language lasts, the exquisite beauty of the colours in which it is preserved will excite the same kind of pleasure. Scarcely below the portrait of the good knight will be ranked the character of his friend and biographer, the silent Spectator of men. A grateful posterity, remembering what it owes to him, will continue to assign him the reputation he coveted: “It was said of Socrates that he brought Philosophy down from heaven to inhabit among men; and I shall be ambitious to have it said of me that I have brought Philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell at clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses.”