When Richard Steele, in number 555 of his 'Spectator', signed its last
paper and named those who had most helped him
'to keep up the spirit of so long and approved a performance,'
he gave chief honour to one who had on his page, as in his heart, no
name but Friend. This was
'the gentleman of whose assistance I formerly boasted in the Preface
and concluding Leaf of my 'Tatlers'. I am indeed much more proud of
his long-continued Friendship, than I should be of the fame of being
thought the author of any writings which he himself is capable of
producing. I remember when I finished the 'Tender Husband', I told him
there was nothing I so ardently wished, as that we might some time or
other publish a work, written by us both, which should bear the name
of THE MONUMENT, in Memory of our Friendship.'
Why he refers to such a wish, his next words show. The seven volumes of
the 'Spectator', then complete, were to his mind The Monument, and of
the Friendship it commemorates he wrote,
'I heartily wish what I have done here were as honorary to that sacred
name as learning, wit, and humanity render those pieces which I have
taught the reader how to distinguish for his.'
So wrote Steele; and the 'Spectator' will bear witness how religiously
his friendship was returned. In number 453, when, paraphrasing David's
Hymn on Gratitude, the 'rising soul' of Addison surveyed the mercies of
his God, was it not Steele whom he felt near to him at the Mercy-seat as
he wrote
Thy bounteous hand with worldly bliss
Has made my cup run o'er,
And in a kind and faithful Friend
Has doubled all my store?
The _Spectator_, Steele-and-Addison's _Spectator_, is a monument
befitting the most memorable friendship in our history. Steele was its
projector, founder, editor, and he was writer of that part of it which
took the widest grasp upon the hearts of men. His sympathies were with
all England. Defoe and he, with eyes upon the future, were the truest
leaders of their time. It was the firm hand of his friend Steele that
helped Addison up to the place in literature which became him. It was
Steele who caused the nice critical taste which Addison might have spent
only in accordance with the fleeting fashions of his time, to be
inspired with all Addison's religious earnestness, and to be enlivened
with the free play of that sportive humour, delicately whimsical and
gaily wise, which made his conversation the delight of the few men with
whom he sat at ease. It was Steele who drew his friend towards the days
to come, and made his gifts the wealth of a whole people. Steele said in
one of the later numbers of his _Spectator_, No. 532, to which he
prefixed a motto that assigned to himself only the part of whetstone to
the wit of others,
'I claim to myself the merit of having extorted excellent productions
from a person of the greatest abilities, who would not have let them
appear by any other means.'
There were those who argued that he was too careless of his own fame in
unselfish labour for the exaltation of his friend, and, no doubt, his
rare generosity of temper has been often misinterpreted. But for that
Addison is not answerable. And why should Steele have defined his own
merits? He knew his countrymen, and was in too genuine accord with the
spirit of a time then distant but now come, to doubt that, when he was
dead, his whole life's work would speak truth for him to posterity.
The friendship of which this work is the monument remained unbroken from
boyhood until death. Addison and Steele were schoolboys together at the
Charterhouse. Addison was a dean's son, and a private boarder; Steele,
fatherless, and a boy on the foundation. They were of like age. The
register of Steele's baptism, corroborated by the entry made on his
admission to the Charterhouse (which also implies that he was baptized
on the day of his birth) is March 12, 1671, Old Style; New Style, 1672.
Addison was born on May-day, 1672. Thus there was a difference of only
seven weeks.
Steele's father according to the register, also named Richard, was an
attorney in Dublin. Steele seems to draw from experience--although he is
not writing as of himself or bound to any truth of personal detail--when
in No. 181 of the 'Tatler' he speaks of his father as having died when
he was not quite five years of age, and of his mother as 'a very
beautiful woman, of a noble spirit.' The first Duke of Ormond is
referred to by Steele in his Dedication to the 'Lying Lover' as the
patron of his infancy; and it was by this nobleman that a place was
found for him, when in his thirteenth year, among the foundation boys at
the Charterhouse, where he first met with Joseph Addison. Addison, who
was at school at Lichfield in 1683-4-5, went to the Charterhouse in
1686, and left in 1687, when he was entered of Queen's College, Oxford.
Steele went to Oxford two years later, matriculating at Christ Church,
March 13, 1689-90, the year in which Addison was elected a Demy of
Magdalene. A letter of introduction from Steele, dated April 2, 1711,
refers to the administration of the will of 'my uncle Gascoigne, to
whose bounty I owe a liberal education.' This only representative of the
family ties into which Steele was born, an 'uncle' whose surname is not
that of Steele's mother before marriage, appears, therefore, to have
died just before or at the time when the 'Spectator' undertook to
publish a sheetful of thoughts every morning, and--Addison here speaking
for him--looked forward to
'leaving his country, when he was summoned out of it, with the secret
satisfaction of thinking that he had not lived in vain.'
To Steele's warm heart Addison's friendship stood for all home blessings
he had missed. The sister's playful grace, the brother's love, the
mother's sympathy and simple faith in God, the father's guidance, where
were these for Steele, if not in his friend Addison?
Addison's father was a dean; his mother was the sister of a bishop; and
his ambition as a schoolboy, or his father's ambition for him, was only
that he should be one day a prosperous and pious dignitary of the
Church. But there was in him, as in Steele, the genius which shaped
their lives to its own uses, and made them both what they are to us now.
Joseph Addison was born into a home which the steadfast labour of his
father, Lancelot, had made prosperous and happy. Lancelot Addison had
earned success. His father, Joseph's grandfather, had been also a
clergyman, but he was one of those Westmoreland clergy of whose
simplicity and poverty many a joke has been made. Lancelot got his
education as a poor child in the Appleby Grammar School; but he made his
own way when at College; was too avowed a Royalist to satisfy the
Commonwealth, and got, for his zeal, at the Restoration, small reward in
a chaplaincy to the garrison at Dunkirk. This was changed, for the
worse, to a position of the same sort at Tangier, where he remained
eight years. He lost that office by misadventure, and would have been
left destitute if Mr. Joseph Williamson had not given him a living of
£120 a-year at Milston in Wiltshire. Upon this Lancelot Addison married
Jane Gulstone, who was the daughter of a Doctor of Divinity, and whose
brother became Bishop of Bristol. In the little Wiltshire parsonage
Joseph Addison and his younger brothers and sisters were born. The
essayist was named Joseph after his father's patron, afterwards Sir
Joseph Williamson, a friend high in office. While the children grew, the
father worked. He showed his ability and loyalty in books on West
Barbary, and Mahomet, and the State of the Jews; and he became one of
the King's chaplains in ordinary at a time when his patron Joseph
Williamson was Secretary of State. Joseph Addison was then but three
years old. Soon afterwards the busy father became Archdeacon of
Salisbury, and he was made Dean of Lichfield in 1683, when his boy
Joseph had reached the age of 11. When Archdeacon of Salisbury, the Rev.
Lancelot Addison sent Joseph to school at Salisbury; and when his father
became Dean of Lichfield, Joseph was sent to school at Lichfield, as
before said, in the years 1683-4-5. And then he was sent as a private
pupil to the Charterhouse. The friendship he there formed with Steele
was ratified by the approval of the Dean. The desolate boy with the warm
heart, bright intellect, and noble aspirations, was carried home by his
friend, at holiday times, into the Lichfield Deanery, where, Steele
wrote afterwards to Congreve in a Dedication of the 'Drummer',
'were things of this nature to be exposed to public view, I could show
under the Dean's own hand, in the warmest terms, his blessing on the
friendship between his son and me; nor had he a child who did not
prefer me in the first place of kindness and esteem, as their father
loved me like one of them.'
Addison had two brothers, of whom one traded and became Governor of Fort
George in India, and the other became, like himself, a Fellow of
Magdalene College, Oxford. Of his three sisters two died young, the
other married twice, her first husband being a French refugee minister
who became a Prebendary of Westminster. Of this sister of Addison's,
Swift said she was 'a sort of wit, very like him. I was not fond of her.'
In the latter years of the seventeenth century, when Steele and Addison
were students at Oxford, most English writers were submissive to the new
strength of the critical genius of France. But the English nation had
then newly accomplished the great Revolution that secured its liberties,
was thinking for itself, and calling forth the energies of writers who
spoke for the people and looked to the people for approval and support.
A new period was then opening, of popular influence on English
literature. They were the young days of the influence now full grown,
then slowly getting strength and winning the best minds away from an
imported Latin style adapted to the taste of patrons who sought credit
for nice critical discrimination. In 1690 Addison had been three years,
Steele one year, at Oxford. Boileau was then living, fifty-four years
old; and Western Europe was submissive to his sway as the great monarch
of literary criticism. Boileau was still living when Steele published
his 'Tatler', and died in the year of the establishment of the
'Spectator'. Boileau, a true-hearted man, of genius and sense, advanced
his countrymen from the nice weighing of words by the Précieuses and the
grammarians, and by the French Academy, child of the intercourse between
those ladies and gentlemen. He brought ridicule on the inane politeness
of a style then in its decrepitude, and bade the writers of his time
find models in the Latin writers who, like Virgil and Horace, had
brought natural thought and speech to their perfection. In the preceding
labour for the rectifying of the language, preference had been given to
French words of Latin origin. French being one of those languages in
which Latin is the chief constituent, this was but a fair following of
the desire to make it run pure from its source.
If the English critics who, in Charles the Second's time, submitted to
French law, had seen its spirit, instead of paying blind obedience to
the letter, they also would have looked back to the chief source of
their language. Finding this to be not Latin but Saxon, they would have
sought to give it strength and harmony, by doing then what, in the
course of nature, we have learnt again to do, now that the patronage of
literature has gone from the cultivated noble who appreciates in much
accordance with the fashion of his time, and passed into the holding of
the English people. Addison and Steele lived in the transition time
between these periods. They were born into one of them and--Steele
immediately, Addison through Steele's influence upon him--they were
trusty guides into the other. Thus the 'Spectator' is not merely the
best example of their skill. It represents also, perhaps best
represents, a wholesome Revolution in our Literature. The essential
character of English Literature was no more changed than characters of
Englishmen were altered by the Declaration of Right which Prince William
of Orange had accepted with the English Crown, when Addison had lately
left and Steele was leaving Charterhouse for Oxford. Yet change there
was, and Steele saw to the heart of it, even in his College days.
Oxford, in times not long past, had inclined to faith in divine right of
kings. Addison's father, a church dignitary who had been a Royalist
during the Civil War, laid stress upon obedience to authority in Church
and State. When modern literature was discussed or studied at Oxford
there would be the strongest disposition to maintain the commonly
accepted authority of French critics, who were really men of great
ability, correcting bad taste in their predecessors, and conciliating
scholars by their own devout acceptance of the purest Latin authors as
the types of a good style or proper method in the treatment of a
subject. Young Addison found nothing new to him in the temper of his
University, and was influenced, as in his youth every one must and
should be, by the prevalent tone of opinion in cultivated men. But he
had, and felt that he had, wit and genius of his own. His sensitive mind
was simply and thoroughly religious, generous in its instincts, and
strengthened in its nobler part by close communion with the mind of his
friend Steele.
May we not think of the two friends together in a College chamber,
Addison of slender frame, with features wanting neither in dignity nor
in refinement, Steele of robust make, with the radiant 'short face' of
the 'Spectator', by right of which he claimed for that worthy his
admission to the Ugly Club. Addison reads Dryden, in praise of whom he
wrote his earliest known verse; or reads endeavours of his own, which
his friend Steele warmly applauds. They dream together of the future;
Addison sage, but speculative, and Steele practical, if rash. Each is
disposed to find God in the ways of life, and both avoid that outward
show of irreligion, which, after the recent Civil Wars, remains yet
common in the country, as reaction from an ostentatious piety which laid
on burdens of restraint; a natural reaction which had been intensified
by the base influence of a profligate King. Addison, bred among the
preachers, has a little of the preacher's abstract tone, when talk
between the friends draws them at times into direct expression of the
sacred sense of life which made them one.
Apart also from the mere accidents of his childhood, a speculative turn
in Addison is naturally stronger than in Steele. He relishes analysis of
thought. Steele came as a boy from the rough world of shame and sorrow;
his great, kindly heart is most open to the realities of life, the state
and prospects of his country, direct personal sympathies; actual wrongs,
actual remedies. Addison is sensitive, and has among strangers the
reserve of speech and aspect which will pass often for coldness and
pride, but is, indeed, the shape taken by modesty in thoughtful men
whose instinct it is to speculate and analyze, and who become
self-conscious, not through conceit, but because they cannot help
turning their speculations also on themselves. Steele wholly comes out
of himself as his heart hastens to meet his friend. He lives in his
surroundings, and, in friendly intercourse, fixes his whole thought on
the worth of his companion. Never abating a jot of his ideal of a true
and perfect life, or ceasing to uphold the good because he cannot live
to the full height of his own argument, he is too frank to conceal the
least or greatest of his own shortcomings. Delight and strength of a
friendship like that between Steele and Addison are to be found, as many
find them, in the charm and use of a compact where characters differ so
much that one lays open as it were a fresh world to the other, and each
draws from the other aid of forces which the friendship makes his own.
But the deep foundations of this friendship were laid in the religious
earnestness that was alike in both; and in religious earnestness are
laid also the foundations of this book, its Monument.
Both Addison and Steele wrote verse at College. From each of them we
have a poem written at nearly the same age: Addison's in April, 1694,
Steele's early in 1695. Addison drew from literature a metrical 'Account
of the Greatest English Poets.' Steele drew from life the grief of
England at the death of William's Queen, which happened on the 28th of
December, 1694.
Addison, writing in that year, and at the age of about 23, for a College
friend,
A short account of all the Muse-possest,
That, down from Chaucer's days to Dryden's times
Have spent their noble rage in British rhymes,
was so far under the influence of French critical authority, as accepted
by most cultivators of polite literature at Oxford and wherever
authority was much respected, that from 'An Account of the Greatest
English Poets' he omitted Shakespeare. Of Chaucer he then knew no better
than to say, what might have been said in France, that
... age has rusted what the Poet writ,
Worn out his language, and obscured his wit:
In vain he jests in his unpolish'd strain,
And tries to make his readers laugh in vain.
Old Spenser next, warm'd with poetic rage,
In ancient tales amused a barb'rous age;
But now the mystic tale, that pleased of yore,
Can charm an understanding age no more.
It cost Addison some trouble to break loose from the critical cobweb of
an age of periwigs and patches, that accounted itself 'understanding,'
and the grand epoch of our Elizabethan literature, 'barbarous.' Rymer,
one of his critics, had said, that
'in the neighing of an horse, or in the growling of a mastiff, there
is a meaning, there is as lively expression, and, may I say, more
humanity than many times in the tragical flights of Shakespeare.'
Addison, with a genius of his own helped to free movement by the
sympathies of Steele, did break through the cobwebs of the critics; but
he carried off a little of their web upon his wings. We see it when in
the 'Spectator' he meets the prejudices of an 'understanding age,' and
partly satisfies his own, by finding reason for his admiration of 'Chevy
Chase' and the 'Babes in the Wood', in their great similarity to works
of Virgil. We see it also in some of the criticisms which accompany his
admirable working out of the resolve to justify his true natural
admiration of the poetry of Milton, by showing that 'Paradise Lost' was
planned after the manner of the ancients, and supreme even in its
obedience to the laws of Aristotle. In his 'Spectator' papers on
Imagination he but half escapes from the conventions of his time, which
detested the wildness of a mountain pass, thought Salisbury Plain one of
the finest prospects in England, planned parks with circles and straight
lines of trees, despised our old cathedrals for their 'Gothic' art, and
saw perfection in the Roman architecture, and the round dome of St.
Paul's. Yet in these and all such papers of his we find that Addison had
broken through the weaker prejudices of the day, opposing them with
sound natural thought of his own. Among cultivated readers, lesser
moulders of opinion, there can be no doubt that his genius was only the
more serviceable in amendment of the tastes of his own time, for
friendly understanding and a partial sharing of ideas for which it gave
itself no little credit.
It is noticeable, however, that in his Account of the Greatest English
Poets, young Addison gave a fifth part of the piece to expression of the
admiration he felt even then for Milton. That his appreciation became
critical, and, although limited, based on a sense of poetry which
brought him near to Milton, Addison proved in the 'Spectator' by his
eighteen Saturday papers upon 'Paradise Lost'. But it was from the
religious side that he first entered into the perception of its
grandeur. His sympathy with its high purpose caused him to praise, in
the same pages that commended 'Paradise Lost' to his countrymen, another
'epic,' Blackmore's 'Creation', a dull metrical treatise against
atheism, as a work which deserved to be looked upon as
'one of the most useful and noble productions of our English verse.
The reader,' he added, of a piece which shared certainly with
Salisbury Plain the charms of flatness and extent of space, 'the
reader cannot but be pleased to find the depths of philosophy
enlivened with all the charms of poetry, and to see so great a
strength of reason amidst so beautiful a redundancy of the
imagination.'
The same strong sympathy with Blackmore's purpose in it blinded Dr.
Johnson also to the failure of this poem, which is Blackmore's best.
From its religious side, then, it may be that Addison, when a student at
Oxford, first took his impressions of the poetry of Milton. At Oxford he
accepted the opinion of France on Milton's art, but honestly declared,
in spite of that, unchecked enthusiasm:
Whate'er his pen describes I more than see,
Whilst every verse, arrayed in majesty,
Bold and sublime, my whole attention draws,
And seems above the critic's nicer laws.
This chief place among English poets Addison assigned to Milton, with
his mind fresh from the influences of a father who had openly contemned
the Commonwealth, and by whom he had been trained so to regard Milton's
service of it that of this he wrote:
Oh, had the Poet ne'er profaned his pen,
To varnish o'er the guilt of faithless men;
His other works might have deserved applause
But now the language can't support the cause,
While the clean current, tho' serene and bright,
Betrays a bottom odious to the sight.
If we turn now to the verse written by Steele in his young Oxford days,
and within twelve months of the date of Addison's lines upon English
poets, we have what Steele called 'The Procession.' It is the procession
of those who followed to the grave the good Queen Mary, dead of
small-pox, at the age of 32. Steele shared his friend Addison's delight
in Milton, and had not, indeed, got beyond the sixth number of the
'Tatler' before he compared the natural beauty and innocence of Milton's
Adam and Eve with Dryden's treatment of their love. But the one man for
whom Steele felt most enthusiasm was not to be sought through books, he
was a living moulder of the future of the nation. Eagerly intent upon
King William, the hero of the Revolution that secured our liberties, the
young patriot found in him also the hero of his verse. Keen sense of the
realities about him into which Steele had been born, spoke through the
very first lines of this poem:
The days of man are doom'd to pain and strife,
Quiet and ease are foreign to our life;
No satisfaction is, below, sincere,
Pleasure itself has something that's severe.
Britain had rejoiced in the high fortune of King William, and now a
mourning world attended his wife to the tomb. The poor were her first
and deepest mourners, poor from many causes; and then Steele pictured,
with warm sympathy, form after form of human suffering. Among those
mourning poor were mothers who, in the despair of want, would have
stabbed infants sobbing for their food,
But in the thought they stopp'd, their locks they tore,
Threw down the steel, and cruelly forbore.
The innocents their parents' love forgive,
Smile at their fate, nor know they are to live.
To the mysteries of such distress the dead queen penetrated, by her
'cunning to be good.' After the poor, marched the House of Commons in
the funeral procession. Steele gave only two lines to it:
With dread concern, the awful Senate came,
Their grief, as all their passions, is the same.
The next Assembly dissipates our fears,
The stately, mourning throng of British Peers.
A factious intemperance then characterized debates of the Commons, while
the House of Lords stood in the front of the Revolution, and secured the
permanency of its best issues. Steele describes, as they pass, Ormond,
Somers, Villars, who leads the horse of the dead queen, that 'heaves
into big sighs when he would neigh'--the verse has in it crudity as well
as warmth of youth--and then follow the funeral chariot, the jewelled
mourners, and the ladies of the court,
Their clouded beauties speak man's gaudy strife,
The glittering miseries of human life.
I yet see, Steele adds, this queen passing to her coronation in the
place whither she now is carried to her grave. On the way, through
acclamations of her people, to receive her crown,
She unconcerned and careless all the while
Rewards their loud applauses with a smile,
With easy Majesty and humble State
Smiles at the trifle Power, and knows its date.