No more of Jove's designs than you).
The world's mad business now is o'er,
And I resent your freaks no more;
I to such blockheads set my wit,
I damn such fools—go, go, you're bit!'
Addison, speaking on the very same theme, but with how different a voice, says, in his famous paper on Westminster Abbey (Spectator, No. 26):—“For my own part, though I am always serious, I do not know what it is to be melancholy, and can therefore take a view of nature in her deep and solemn scenes with the same pleasure as in her most gay and delightful ones. When I look upon the tombs of the great, every emotion of envy dies within me; when I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate desire goes out; when I meet with the grief of parents on a tombstone, my heart melts with compassion; when I see the tomb of the parents themselves, I consider the vanity of grieving for those we must quickly follow.” (I have owned [pg 571] that I do not think Addison's heart melted very much, or that he indulged very inordinately in the “vanity of grieving”.) “When,” he goes on, “when I see kings lying by those who deposed them: when I consider rival wits placed side by side, or the holy men that divided the world with their contests and disputes,—I reflect with sorrow and astonishment on the little competitions, factions, and debates of mankind. And, when I read the several dates on the tombs of some that died yesterday and some 600 years ago, I consider that Great Day when we shall all of us be contemporaries, and make our appearance together.”
Our third humourist comes to speak upon the same subject. You will have observed in the previous extracts the characteristic humour of each writer—the subject and the contrast—the fact of Death, and the play of individual thought, by which each comments on it, and now hear the third writer—death, sorrow, and the grave, being for the moment also his theme. “The first sense of sorrow I ever knew,” Steele says in the Tatler, “was upon the death of my father, at which time I was not quite five years of age: but was rather amazed at what all the house meant, than possessed of a real understanding why nobody would play with us. I remember I went into the room where his body lay, and my mother sat weeping alone by it. I had my battledore in my hand, and fell a-beating the coffin, and calling papa; for, I know not how, I had some idea that he was locked up there. My mother caught me in her arms, and, transported beyond all patience of the silent grief she was before in, she almost smothered me in her embraces, and told me in a flood of tears, ‘Papa could not hear me, and would play with me no more: for they were going to put him under ground, whence he would never come to us again.’ She was a very beautiful woman, of a noble spirit, and there was a dignity in her grief amidst all the wildness of her transport, which methought struck me with an instinct of sorrow that, before I was sensible what it was to grieve, seized my very soul, and has made pity the weakness of my heart ever since.”
Can there be three more characteristic moods of minds and men? “Fools, do you know anything of this mystery?” says Swift, stamping on a grave and carrying his scorn for mankind actually beyond it. “Miserable, purblind wretches, how dare you to pretend to comprehend the Inscrutable, [pg 572] and how can your dim eyes pierce the unfathomable depths of yonder boundless heaven?” Addison, in a much kinder language and gentler voice, utters much the same sentiment: and speaks of the rivalry of wits, and the contests of holy men, with the same sceptic placidity. “Look what a little vain dust we are;” he says, smiling over the tombstones, and catching, as is his wont, quite a divine effulgence as he looks heavenward, he speaks in words of inspiration almost, of “the Great Day, when we shall all of us be contemporaries, and make our appearance together”.
The third, whose theme is Death, too, and who will speak his word of moral as Heaven teaches him, leads you up to his father's coffin, and shows you his beautiful mother weeping, and himself an unconscious little boy wondering at her side. His own natural tears flow as he takes your hand and confidingly asks your sympathy. “See how good and innocent and beautiful women are,” he says, “how tender little children! Let us love these and one another, brother—God knows we have need of love and pardon.” So it is each man looks with his own eyes, speaks with his own voice, and prays his own prayer.
When Steele asks your sympathy for the actors in that charming scene of Love and Grief and Death, who can refuse it? One yields to it as to the frank advance of a child, or to the appeal of a woman. A man is seldom more manly than when he is what you call unmanned—the source of his emotion is championship, pity, and courage; the instinctive desire to cherish those who are innocent and unhappy, and defend those who are tender and weak. If Steele is not our friend he is nothing. He is by no means the most brilliant of wits nor the deepest of thinkers: but he is our friend: we love him, as children love their love with an A, because he is amiable. Who likes a man best because he is the cleverest or the wisest of mankind; or a woman because she is the most virtuous, or talks French; or plays the piano better than the rest of her sex? I own to liking Dick Steele the man, and Dick Steele the author, much better than much better men and much better authors.