Addison

by William John Courthope

According to Pope—always a suspicious witness where Addison is concerned—he had not read Spenser when he wrote this criticism on him.[7]

Milton, as a legitimate successor of the classics, is of course appreciated, but not at all after the elaborate fashion of the Spectator; to Dryden, the most distinguished poet of the day, deserved compliments are paid, but their value is lessened by the exaggerated opinion which the writer entertains of Cowley, who is described as a “mighty genius,” and is praised for the inexhaustible riches of his imagination. Throughout the poem, in fact, we observe a remarkable confusion of various veins of thought; an unjust depreciation of the Gothic grandeur of the older English poets; a just admiration for the Greek and Roman authors; a sense of the necessity of good sense and regularity in writings composed for an “understanding age;” and at the same time a lingering taste for the forced invention and far-fetched conceits that mark the decay of the spirit of mediæval chivalry.

With the judgments expressed in this performance it is instructive to compare such criticisms on Shakespeare as we find in No. 42 of the Spectator, the papers on “Chevy Chase” (73, 74), and particularly the following passage:

“As true wit consists in the resemblance of ideas, and false wit in the resemblance of words, according to the foregoing instances, there is another kind of wit which consists partly in the resemblance of ideas and partly in the resemblance of words, which, for distinction’s sake, I shall call mixed wit. This kind of wit is that which abounds in Cowley more than in any author that ever wrote. Mr. Waller has likewise a great deal of it. Mr. Dryden is very sparing in it. Milton has a genius much above it. Spenser is in the same class with Milton. The Italians even in their epic poetry are full of it. Monsieur Boileau, who formed himself upon the ancient poets, has everywhere rejected it with scorn. If we look after mixed wit among the Greeks, we shall find it nowhere but in the epigrammatists. There are, indeed, some strokes of it in the little poem ascribed to Musæus, which by that, as well as many other marks, betrays itself to be a modern composition. If we look into the Latin writers we find none of this mixed wit in Virgil, Lucretius, or Catullus; very little in Horace, but a great deal of it in Ovid, and scarce anything else in Martial.”

The stepping-stone from the immaturity of the early criticisms in the Account of the Greatest English Poets to the finished ease of the Spectator is to be found in the notes to the translation of Ovid.[8]

The time came when he was obliged to form a decision affecting the entire course of his life. Tonson, who had a wide acquaintance, no doubt introduced him to Congreve and the leading men of letters in London, and through them he was presented to Somers and Montague. Those ministers perhaps persuaded him, as a point of etiquette, to write, in 1695, his Address to King William, a poem composed in a vein of orthodox hyperbole, all of which must have been completely thrown away on that most unpoetical of monarchs. Yet in spite of those seductions Addison lingered at Oxford. To retain his Fellowship it was necessary for him to take orders. Had he done so, there can be no doubt that his literary skill and his value as a political partizan would have opened for him a road to the highest preferment. At that time the clergy were far from thinking it unbecoming to their cloth to fight in the political arena or to take part in journalism. Swift would have been advanced to a bishopric, as a reward for his political services, if it had not been for the prejudice entertained towards him by Queen Anne; Boulter, rector of St. Saviour’s, Southwark, having made himself conspicuous by editing a paper called the Freethinker, was raised to the Primacy of Ireland; Hoadley, the notorious Bishop of Bangor, edited the London Journal; the honours that were awarded to two men of such second-rate intellectual capacity would hardly have been denied to Addison. He was inclined in this direction by the example and advice of his father, who was now Dean of Lichfield, and who was urgent on his son to rid himself of the pecuniary embarrassments in which he was involved by embracing the Church as a profession. A few years before he had himself seemed to look upon the Church as his future sphere. In his Account of the Greatest English Poets he says:

“I leave the arts of poetry and verse
To them that practise them with more success.
Of greater truths I’ll now propose to tell,
And so at once, dear friend and muse, farewell.”

Had he followed up his intention we might have known the name of Addison as that of an artful controversialist, and perhaps as a famous writer of sermons; but we should, in all probability, have never heard of the Spectator.

Fortunately for English letters, other influences prevailed to give a different direction to his fortunes. It is true that Tickell, Addison’s earliest biographer, states that his determination not to take orders was the result of his own habitual self-distrust, and of a fear of the responsibilities which the clerical office would involve. But Steele, who was better acquainted with his friend’s private history, on reading Tickell’s Memoir, addressed a letter to Congreve on the subject, in which he says:

“These, you know very well, were not the reasons which made Mr. Addison turn his thoughts to the civil world; and, as you were the instrument of his becoming acquainted with Lord Halifax, I doubt not but you remember the warm instances that noble lord made to the head of the College not to insist upon Mr. Addison’s going into orders. His arguments were founded upon the general pravity and corruption of men of business, who wanted liberal education. And I remember, as if I had read the letter yesterday, that my lord ended with a compliment that, however he might be represented as a friend to the Church, he never would do it any other injury than keeping Mr. Addison out of it.”