What hands commit the beauteous, good, and just,
The dearer part of William, to the dust?
In her his vital heat, his glory lies,
In her the Monarch lived, in her he dies.
...
No form of state makes the Great Man forego
The task due to her love and to his woe;
Since his kind frame can't the large suffering bear
In pity to his People, he's not here:
For to the mighty loss we now receive
The next affliction were to see him grieve.
If we look from these serious strains of their youth to the literary
expression of the gayer side of character in the two friends, we find
Addison sheltering his taste for playful writing behind a Roman Wall of
hexameter. For among his Latin poems in the Oxford 'Musæ Anglicanæ' are
eighty or ninety lines of resonant Latin verse upon 'Machinæ
Gesticulantes, 'anglice' A Puppet-show.' Steele, taking life as he found
it, and expressing mirth in his own way of conversation, wrote an
English comedy, and took the word of a College friend that it was
valueless. There were two paths in life then open to an English writer.
One was the smooth and level way of patronage; the other a rough up-hill
track for men who struggled in the service of the people. The way of
patronage was honourable. The age had been made so very discerning by
the Romans and the French that a true understanding of the beauties of
literature was confined to the select few who had been taught what to
admire. Fine writing was beyond the rude appreciation of the multitude.
Had, therefore, the reading public been much larger than it was, men of
fastidious taste, who paid as much deference to polite opinion as
Addison did in his youth, could have expected only audience fit but few,
and would have been without encouragement to the pursuit of letters
unless patronage rewarded merit. The other way had charms only for the
stout-hearted pioneer who foresaw where the road was to be made that now
is the great highway of our literature. Addison went out into the world
by the way of his time; Steele by the way of ours.
Addison, after the campaign of 1695, offered to the King the homage of a
paper of verses on the capture of Namur, and presented them through Sir
John Somers, then Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. To Lord Somers he sent
with them a flattering dedicatory address. Somers, who was esteemed a
man of taste, was not unwilling to 'receive the present of a muse
unknown.' He asked Addison to call upon him, and became his patron.
Charles Montagu, afterwards Earl of Halifax, critic and wit himself,
shone also among the statesmen who were known patrons of letters. Also
to him, who was a prince of patrons 'fed with soft dedication all day
long,' Addison introduced himself. To him, in 1697, as it was part of
his public fame to be a Latin scholar, Addison, also a skilful Latinist,
addressed, in Latin, a paper of verses on the Peace of Ryswick. With
Somers and Montagu for patrons, the young man of genius who wished to
thrive might fairly commit himself to the service of the Church, for
which he had been bred by his father; but Addison's tact and refinement
promised to be serviceable to the State, and so it was that, as Steele
tells us, Montagu made Addison a layman.
'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 no friend to the Church, he
never would do it any other injury than keeping Mr. Addison out of
it.'
To the good offices of Montagu and Somers, Addison was indebted,
therefore, in 1699, for a travelling allowance of £300 a year. The grant
was for his support while qualifying himself on the continent by study
of modern languages, and otherwise, for diplomatic service. It dropped
at the King's death, in the spring of 1702, and Addison was cast upon
his own resources; but he throve, and lived to become an Under-Secretary
of State in days that made Prior an Ambassador, and rewarded with
official incomes Congreve, Rowe, Hughes, Philips, Stepney, and others.
Throughout his honourable career prudence dictated to Addison more or
less of dependence on the friendship of the strong. An honest friend of
the popular cause, he was more ready to sell than give his pen to it;
although the utmost reward would at no time have tempted him to throw
his conscience into the bargain. The good word of Halifax obtained him
from Godolphin, in 1704, the Government order for a poem on the Battle
of Blenheim, with immediate earnest of payment for it in the office of a
Commissioner of Appeal in the Excise worth £200 a year. For this
substantial reason Addison wrote the 'Campaign'; and upon its success,
he obtained the further reward of an Irish Under-secretaryship.
The 'Campaign' is not a great poem. Reams of 'Campaigns' would not have
made Addison's name, what it now is, a household word among his
countrymen. The 'Remarks on several Parts of Italy, &c.,' in which
Addison followed up the success of his 'Campaign' with notes of foreign
travel, represent him visiting Italy as 'Virgil's Italy,' the land of
the great writers in Latin, and finding scenery or customs of the people
eloquent of them at every turn. He crammed his pages with quotation from
Virgil and Horace, Ovid and Tibullus, Propertius, Lucan, Juvenal and
Martial, Lucretius, Statius, Claudian, Silius Italicus, Ausonius,
Seneca, Phædrus, and gave even to his 'understanding age' an overdose of
its own physic for all ills of literature. He could not see a pyramid of
jugglers standing on each other's shoulders, without observing how it
explained a passage in Claudian which shows that the Venetians were not
the inventors of this trick. But Addison's short original accounts of
cities and states that he saw are pleasant as well as sensible, and here
and there, as in the space he gives to a report of St. Anthony's sermon
to the fishes, or his short account of a visit to the opera at Venice,
there are indications of the humour that was veiled, not crushed, under
a sense of classical propriety. In his account of the political state of
Naples and in other passages, there is mild suggestion also of the love
of liberty, a part of the fine nature of Addison which had been slightly
warmed by contact with the generous enthusiasm of Steele. In his
poetical letter to Halifax written during his travels Addison gave the
sum of his prose volume when he told how he felt himself
... on classic ground.
For here the Muse so oft her harp hath strung,
That not a mountain rears its head unsung;
Renown'd in verse each shady thicket grows,
And ev'ry stream in heav'nly numbers flows.
But he was writing to a statesman of the Revolution, who was his
political patron, just then out of office, and propriety suggested such
personal compliment as calling the Boyne a Tiber, and Halifax an
improvement upon Virgil; while his heart was in the closing emphasis,
also proper to the occasion, which dwelt on the liberty that gives their
smile to the barren rocks and bleak mountains of Britannia's isle, while
for Italy, rich in the unexhausted stores of nature, proud Oppression in
her valleys reigns, and tyranny usurps her happy plains. Addison's were
formal raptures, and he knew them to be so, when he wrote,
I bridle in my struggling Muse with pain,
That longs to launch into a bolder strain.
Richard Steele was not content with learning to be bold. Eager, at that
turning point of her national life, to serve England with strength of
arm, at least, if not with the good brains which he was neither
encouraged nor disposed to value highly, Steele's patriotism impelled
him to make his start in the world, not by the way of patronage, but by
enlisting himself as a private in the Coldstream Guards. By so doing he
knew that he offended a relation, and lost a bequest. As he said of
himself afterwards,
'when he mounted a war-horse, with a great sword in his hand, and
planted himself behind King William III against Louis XIV, he lost the
succession to a very good estate in the county of Wexford, in Ireland,
from the same humour which he has preserved, ever since, of preferring
the state of his mind to that of his fortune.'
Steele entered the Duke of Ormond's regiment, and had reasons for
enlistment. James Butler, the first Duke, whom his father served, had
sent him to the Charterhouse. That first Duke had been Chancellor of the
University at Oxford, and when he died, on the 21st of July, 1688, nine
months before Steele entered to Christchurch, his grandson, another
James Butler, succeeded to the Dukedom. This second Duke of Ormond was
also placed by the University of Oxford in his grandfather's office of
Chancellor. He went with King William to Holland in 1691, shared the
defeat of William in the battle of Steinkirk in August, 1692, and was
taken prisoner in July, 1693, when King William was defeated at Landen.
These defeats encouraged the friends of the Stuarts, and in 1694,
Bristol, Exeter and Boston adhered to King James. Troops were raised in
the North of England to assist his cause. In 1696 there was the
conspiracy of Sir George Barclay to seize William on the 15th of
February. Captain Charnock, one of the conspirators, had been a Fellow
of Magdalene. On the 23rd of February the plot was laid before
Parliament. There was high excitement throughout the country. Loyal
Associations were formed. The Chancellor of the University of Oxford was
a fellow-soldier of the King's, and desired to draw strength to his
regiment from the enthusiasm of the time. Steele's heart was with the
cause of the Revolution, and he owed also to the Ormonds a kind of
family allegiance. What was more natural than that he should be among
those young Oxford men who were tempted to enlist in the Chancellor's
own regiment for the defence of liberty? Lord Cutts, the Colonel of the
Regiment, made Steele his Secretary, and got him an Ensign's commission.
It was then that he wrote his first book, the 'Christian Hero', of which
the modest account given by Steele himself long afterwards, when put on
his defence by the injurious violence of faction, is as follows:
'He first became an author when an Ensign of the Guards, a way of life
exposed to much irregularity; and being thoroughly convinced of many
things, of which he often repented, and which he more often repeated,
he writ, for his own private use, a little book called the 'Christian
Hero', with a design principally to fix upon his own mind a strong
impression of virtue and religion, in opposition to a stronger
propensity towards unwarrantable pleasures. This secret admiration was
too weak; he therefore printed the book with his name, in hopes that a
standing testimony against himself, and the eyes of the world (that is
to say, of his acquaintance) upon him in a new light, would make him
ashamed of understanding and seeming to feel what was virtuous, and
living so contrary a life.'
Among his brother soldiers, and fresh from the Oxford worship of old
classical models, the religious feeling that accompanies all true
refinement, and that was indeed part of the English nature in him as in
Addison, prompted Steele to write this book, in which he opposed to the
fashionable classicism of his day a sound reflection that the heroism of
Cato or Brutus had far less in it of true strength, and far less
adaptation to the needs of life, than the unfashionable Christian
Heroism set forth by the Sermon on the Mount.
According to the second title of this book it is 'an Argument, proving
that no Principles but those of Religion are sufficient to make a Great
Man.' It is addressed to Lord Cutts in a dedication dated from the
Tower-Yard, March 23, 1701, and is in four chapters, of which the first
treats of the heroism of the ancient world, the second connects man with
his Creator, by the Bible Story and the Life and Death of Christ, the
third defines the Christian as set forth by the character and teaching
of St. Paul, applying the definition practically to the daily life of
Steele's own time. In the last chapter he descends from the
consideration of those bright incentives to a higher life, and treats of
the ordinary passions and interests of men, the common springs of action
(of which, he says, the chief are Fame and Conscience) which he declares
to be best used and improved when joined with religion; and here all
culminates in a final strain of patriotism, closing with the character
of King William, 'that of a glorious captain, and (what he much more
values than the most splendid titles) that of a sincere and honest man.'
This was the character of William which, when, in days of meaner public
strife, Steele quoted it years afterwards in the _Spectator_, he broke
off painfully and abruptly with a
... Fuit Ilium, et ingens
Gloria.
Steele's 'Christian Hero' obtained many readers. Its fifth edition was
appended to the first collection of the 'Tatler' into volumes, at the
time of the establishment of the 'Spectator'. The old bent of the
English mind was strong in Steele, and he gave unostentatiously a lively
wit to the true service of religion, without having spoken or written to
the last day of his life a word of mere religious cant. One officer
thrust a duel on him for his zeal in seeking to make peace between him
and another comrade. Steele, as an officer, then, or soon afterwards,
made a Captain of Fusiliers, could not refuse to fight, but stood on the
defensive; yet in parrying a thrust his sword pierced his antagonist,
and the danger in which he lay quickened that abiding detestation of the
practice of duelling, which caused Steele to attack it in his plays, in
his 'Tatler', in his 'Spectator', with persistent energy.
Of the 'Christian Hero' his companions felt, and he himself saw, that
the book was too didactic. It was indeed plain truth out of Steele's
heart, but an air of superiority, freely allowed only to the
professional man teaching rules of his own art, belongs to a too
didactic manner. Nothing was more repugnant to Steele's nature than the
sense of this. He had defined the Christian as 'one who is always a
benefactor, with the mien of a receiver.' And that was his own
character, which was, to a fault, more ready to give than to receive,
more prompt to ascribe honour to others than to claim it for himself. To
right himself, Steele wrote a light-hearted comedy, 'The Funeral', or
'Grief à la Mode'; but at the core even of that lay the great
earnestness of his censure against the mockery and mummery of grief that
should be sacred; and he blended with this, in the character of Lawyer
Puzzle, a protest against mockery of truth and justice by the
intricacies of the law. The liveliness of this comedy made Steele
popular with the wits; and the inevitable touches of the author's
patriotism brought on him also the notice of the Whigs. Party men might,
perhaps, already feel something of the unbending independence that was
in Steele himself, as in this play he made old Lord Brumpton teach it to
his son:
'But be them honest, firm, impartial;
Let neither love, nor hate, nor faction move thee;
Distinguish words from things, and men from crimes.'
King William, perhaps, had he lived, could fairly have recognized in
Steele the social form of that sound mind which in Defoe was solitary.
In a later day it was to Steele a proud recollection that his name, to
be provided for, 'was in the last table-book ever worn by the glorious
and immortal William III.'
The 'Funeral', first acted with great success in 1702, was followed in
the next year by 'The Tender Husband', to which Addison contributed some
touches, for which Addison wrote a Prologue, and which Steele dedicated
to Addison, who would 'be surprised,' he said, 'in the midst of a daily
and familiar conversation, with an address which bears so distant an air
as a public dedication.' Addison and his friend were then thirty-one
years old. Close friends when boys, they are close friends now in the
prime of manhood. It was after they had blended wits over the writing of
this comedy that Steele expressed his wish for a work, written by both,
which should serve as THE MONUMENT to their most happy friendship. When
Addison and Steele were amused together with the writing of this comedy,
Addison, having lost his immediate prospect of political employment, and
his salary too, by King William's death in the preceding year, had come
home from his travels. On his way home he had received, in September, at
the Hague, news of his father's death. He wrote from the Hague, to Mr.
Wyche,
'At my first arrival I received the news of my father's death, and
ever since have been engaged in so much noise and company, that it was
impossible for me to think of rhyming in it.'
As his father's eldest son, he had, on his return to England, family
affairs to arrange, and probably some money to receive. Though attached
to a party that lost power at the accession of Queen Anne, and waiting
for new employment, Addison--who had declined the Duke of Somerset's
over-condescending offer of a hundred a year and all expenses as
travelling tutor to his son, the Marquis of Hertford--was able, while
lodging poorly in the Haymarket, to associate in London with the men by
whose friendship he hoped to rise, and was, with Steele, admitted into
the select society of wits, and men of fashion who affected wit and took
wits for their comrades, in the Kitcat Club. When in 1704 Marlborough's
victory at Blenheim revived the Whig influence, the suggestion of
Halifax to Lord Treasurer Godolphin caused Addison to be applied to for
his poem of the 'Campaign'. It was after the appearance of this poem
that Steele's play was printed, with the dedication to his friend, in
which he said,
'I look upon my intimacy with you as one of the most valuable
enjoyments of my life. At the same time I make the town no ill
compliment for their kind acceptance of this comedy, in acknowledging
that it has so far raised my opinion of it, as to make me think it no
improper memorial of an inviolable Friendship. I should not offer it
to you as such, had I not been very careful to avoid everything that
might look ill-natured, immoral, or prejudicial to what the better
part of mankind hold sacred and honourable.'
This was the common ground between the friends. Collier's 'Short View of
the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage' had been published
in 1698; it attacked a real evil, if not always in the right way, and
Congreve's reply to it had been a failure. Steele's comedies with all
their gaiety and humour were wholly free from the garnish of oaths and
unwholesome expletives which his contemporaries seemed to think
essential to stage emphasis. Each comedy of his was based on
seriousness, as all sound English wit has been since there have been
writers in England. The gay manner did not conceal all the earnest
thoughts that might jar with the humour of the town; and thus Steele was
able to claim, by right of his third play, 'the honour of being the only
English dramatist who had had a piece damned for its piety.'
This was the 'Lying Lover', produced in 1704, an adaptation from
Corneille in which we must allow that Steele's earnestness in upholding
truth and right did cause him to spoil the comedy. The play was
afterwards re-adapted by Foote as the 'Liar', and in its last form, with
another change or two, has been revived at times with great success. It
is worth while to note how Steele dealt with the story of this piece.
Its original is a play by Alarcon, which Corneille at first supposed to
have been a play by Lope de Vega. Alarcon, or, to give him his full
style, Don Juan Ruiz de Alarcon y Mendoza, was a Mexican-born Spaniard
of a noble family which had distinguished itself in Mexico from the time
of the conquest, and took its name of Alarcon from a village in New
Castile. The poet was a humpbacked dwarf, a thorough, but rather
haughty, Spanish gentleman, poet and wit, who wrote in an unusually pure
Spanish style; a man of the world, too, who came to Spain in or about
the year 1622, and held the very well-paid office of reporter to the
Royal Council of the Indies. When Alarcon, in 1634, was chosen by the
Court to write a festival drama, and, at the same time, publishing the
second part of his dramatic works, vehemently reclaimed plays for which,
under disguised names, some of his contemporaries had taken credit to
themselves, there was an angry combination against him, in which Lope de
Vega, Gongora, and Quevedo were found taking part. All that Alarcon
wrote was thoroughly his own, but editors of the 17th century boldly
passed over his claims to honour, and distributed his best works among
plays of other famous writers, chiefly those of Rojas and Lope de Vega.
This was what deceived Corneille, and caused him to believe and say that
Alarcon's 'la Verdad sospechosa', on which, in 1642, he founded his
'Menteur', was a work of Lope de Vega's. Afterwards Corneille learnt how
there had been in this matter lying among editors. He gave to Alarcon
the honour due, and thenceforth it is chiefly by this play that Alarcon
has been remembered out of Spain. In Spain, when in 1852 Don Juan
Hartzenbusch edited Alarcon's comedies for the Biblioteca de Autores
Españoles, he had to remark on the unjust neglect of that good author in
Spain also, where the poets and men of letters had long wished in vain
for a complete edition of his works. Lope de Vega, it may be added, was
really the author of a sequel to 'la Verdad sospechosa', which Corneille
adapted also as a sequel to his 'Menteur', but it was even poorer than
such sequels usually are.
The 'Lying Lover' in Alarcon's play is a Don Garcia fresh from his
studies in Salamanca, and Steele's Latine first appears there as a
Tristan, the gracioso of old Spanish comedy. The two ladies are a
Jacinta and Lucrecia. Alarcon has in his light and graceful play no less
than three heavy fathers, of a Spanish type, one of whom, the father of
Lucrecia, brings about Don Garcia's punishment by threatening to kill
him if he will not marry his daughter; and so the Liar is punished for
his romancing by a marriage with the girl he does not care for, and not
marrying the girl he loves.
Corneille was merciful, and in the fifth act bred in his 'Menteur' a new
fancy for Lucrece, so that the marriage at cross purposes was rather
agreeable to him.
Steele, in adapting the 'Menteur' as his 'Lying Lover', altered the
close in sharp accordance with that 'just regard to a reforming age,'
which caused him (adapting a line in his 'Procession' then unprinted) to
write in his Prologue to it, 'Pleasure must still have something that's
severe.' Having translated Corneille's translations of Garcia and
Tristan (Dorante and Cliton) into Young Bookwit and Latine, he
transformed the servant into a college friend, mumming as servant
because, since 'a prating servant is necessary in intrigues,' the two
had 'cast lots who should be the other's footman for the present
expedition.' Then he adapted the French couplets into pleasant prose
comedy, giving with a light touch the romancing of feats of war and of
an entertainment on the river, but at last he turned desperately
serious, and sent his Young Bookwit to Newgate on a charge of killing
the gentleman--here called Lovemore--who was at last to win the hand of
the lady whom the Liar loved. In his last act, opening in Newgate,
Steele started with blank verse, and although Lovemore of course was not
dead, and Young Bookwit got at last more than a shadow of a promise of
the other lady in reward for his repentance, the changes in construction
of the play took it beyond the bounds of comedy, and were, in fact,
excellent morality but not good art. And this is what Steele means when
he says that he had his play damned for its piety.
With that strong regard for the drama which cannot well be wanting to
the man who has an artist's vivid sense of life, Steele never withdrew
his good will from the players, never neglected to praise a good play,
and, I may add, took every fair occasion of suggesting to the town the
subtlety of Shakespeare's genius. But he now ceased to write comedies,
until towards the close of his life he produced with a remarkable
success his other play, the 'Conscious Lovers'. And of that, by the way,
Fielding made his Parson Adams say that 'Cato' and the 'Conscious
Lovers' were the only plays he ever heard of, fit for a Christian to
read, 'and, I must own, in the latter there are some things almost
solemn enough for a sermon.'
Perhaps it was about this time that Addison wrote his comedy of the
'Drummer', which had been long in his possession when Steele, who had
become a partner in the management of Drury Lane Theatre, drew it from
obscurity, suggested a few changes in it, and produced it--not openly as
Addison's--upon the stage. The published edition of it was recommended
also by a preface from Steele in which he says that he liked this
author's play the better
'for the want of those studied similies and repartees which we, who
have writ before him, have thrown into our plays, to indulge and gain
upon a false taste that has prevailed for many years in the British
theatre. I believe the author would have condescended to fall into
this way a little more than he has, had he before the writing of it
been often present at theatrical representations. I was confirmed in
my thoughts of the play by the opinion of better judges to whom it was
communicated, who observed that the scenes were drawn after Molière's
manner, and that an easy and natural vein of humour ran through the
whole. I do not question but the reader will discover this, and see
many beauties that escaped the audience; the touches being too
delicate for every taste in a popular assembly. My brother-sharers'
(in the Drury Lane patent) 'were of opinion, at the first reading of
it, that it was like a picture in which the strokes were not strong
enough to appear at a distance. As it is not in the common way of
writing, the approbation was at first doubtful, but has risen every
time it has been acted, and has given an opportunity in several of its
parts for as just and good actions as ever I saw on the stage.'
Addison's comedy was not produced till 1715, the year after his
unsuccessful attempt to revive the 'Spectator', which produced what is
called the eighth volume of that work. The play, not known to be his,
was so ill spoken of that he kept the authorship a secret to the last,
and Tickell omitted it from the collection of his patron's works. But
Steele knew what was due to his friend, and in 1722 manfully republished
the piece as Addison's, with a dedication to Congreve and censure of
Tickell for suppressing it. If it be true that the 'Drummer' made no
figure on the stage though excellently acted, 'when I observe this,'
said Steele, 'I say a much harder thing of this than of the comedy.'
Addison's Drummer is a gentleman who, to forward his suit to a soldier's
widow, masquerades as the drumbeating ghost of her husband in her
country house, and terrifies a self-confident, free-thinking town
exquisite, another suitor, who believes himself brought face to face
with the spirit world, in which he professes that he can't believe. 'For
my part, child, I have made myself easy in those points.' The character
of a free-thinking exquisite is drawn from life without exaggeration,
but with more than a touch of the bitter contempt Addison felt for the
atheistic coxcomb, with whom he was too ready to confound the sincere
questioner of orthodox opinion. The only passages of his in the
'Spectator' that border on intolerance are those in which he deals with
the free-thinker; but it should not be forgotten that the commonest type
of free-thinker in Queen Anne's time was not a thoughtful man who
battled openly with doubt and made an independent search for truth, but
an idler who repudiated thought and formed his character upon tradition
of the Court of Charles the Second. And throughout the 'Spectator' we
may find a Christian under-tone in Addison's intolerance of infidelity,
which is entirely wanting when the moralist is Eustace Budgell. Two or
three persons in the comedy of the 'Drummer' give opportunity for good
character-painting in the actor, and on a healthy stage, before an
audience able to discriminate light touches of humour and to enjoy
unstrained although well-marked expression of varieties of character,
the 'Drummer' would not fail to be a welcome entertainment.
But our sketch now stands at the year 1705, when Steele had ceased for a
time to write comedies. Addison's 'Campaign' had brought him fame, and
perhaps helped him to pay, as he now did, his College debts, with
interest. His 'Remarks on Italy', now published, were, as Tickell says,
'at first but indifferently relished by the bulk of readers;' and his
'Drummer' probably was written and locked in his desk. There were now
such days of intercourse as Steele looked back to when with undying
friendship he wrote in the preface to that edition of the 'Drummer'
produced by him after Addison's death:
'He was above all men in that talent we call humour, and enjoyed it in
such perfection, that I have often reflected, after a night spent with
him apart from all the world, that I had had the pleasure of
conversing with an intimate acquaintance of Terence and Catullus, who
had all their wit and nature, heightened with humour more exquisite
and delightful than any other man ever possessed.' And again in the
same Preface, Steele dwelt upon 'that smiling mirth, that delicate
satire and genteel raillery, which appeared in Mr. Addison when he was
free from that remarkable bashfulness which is a cloak that hides and
muffles merit; and his abilities were covered only by modesty, which
doubles the beauties which are seen, and gives credit and esteem to
all that are concealed.'
Addison had the self-consciousness of a sensitive and speculative mind.
This, with a shy manner among those with whom he was not intimate,
passed for cold self-assertion. The 'little senate' of his intimate
friends was drawn to him by its knowledge of the real warmth of his
nature. And his friendships, like his religion, influenced his judgment.
His geniality that wore a philosophic cloak before the world, caused him
to abandon himself in the 'Spectator', even more unreservedly than
Steele would have done, to iterated efforts for the help of a friend
like Ambrose Philips, whose poems to eminent babies, 'little subject,
little wit,' gave rise to the name of Namby-pamby. Addison's quietness
with strangers was against a rapid widening of his circle of familiar
friends, and must have made the great-hearted friendship of Steele as
much to him as his could be to Steele. In very truth it 'doubled all his
store.' Steele's heart was open to enjoyment of all kindly intercourse
with men. In after years, as expression of thought in the literature of
nations gained freedom and sincerity, two types of literature were
formed from the types of mind which Addison and Steele may be said to
have in some measure represented. Each sought advance towards a better
light, one part by dwelling on the individual duties and
responsibilities of man, and his relation to the infinite; the other by
especial study of man's social ties and liberties, and his relation to
the commonwealth of which he is a member. Goethe, for instance, inclined
to one study; Schiller to the other; and every free mind will incline
probably to one or other of these centres of opinion. Addison was a cold
politician because he was most himself when analyzing principles of
thought, and humours, passions, duties of the individual. Steele, on the
contrary, braved ruin for his convictions as a politician, because his
social nature turned his earnestness into concern for the well-being of
his country, and he lived in times when it was not yet certain that the
newly-secured liberties were also finally secured. The party was strong
that desired to re-establish ancient tyrannies, and the Queen herself
was hardly on the side of freedom.
In 1706, the date of the union between England and Scotland, Whig
influence had been strengthened by the elections of the preceding year,
and Addison was, early in 1706, made Under-Secretary of State to Sir
Charles Hedges, a Tory, who was superseded before the end of the year by
Marlborough's son-in-law, the Earl of Sunderland, a Whig under whom
Addison, of course, remained in office, and who was, thenceforth, his
active patron. In the same year the opera of _Rosamond_ was produced,
with Addison's libretto. It was but the third, or indeed the second,
year of operas in England, for we can hardly reckon as forming a year of
opera the Italian intermezzi and interludes of singing and dancing,
performed under Clayton's direction, at York Buildings, in 1703. In
1705, Clayton's _Arsinoe_, adapted and translated from the Italian, was
produced at Drury Lane. Buononcini's _Camilla_ was given at the house in
the Haymarket, and sung in two languages, the heroine's part being in
English and the hero's in Italian. Thomas Clayton, a second-rate
musician, but a man with literary tastes, who had been introducer of the
opera to London, argued that the words of an opera should be not only
English, but the best of English, and that English music ought to
illustrate good home-grown literature. Addison and Steele agreed
heartily in this. Addison was persuaded to write words for an opera by
Clayton--his _Rosamond_--and Steele was persuaded afterwards to
speculate in some sort of partnership with Clayton's efforts to set
English poetry to music in the entertainments at York Buildings, though
his friend Hughes warned him candidly that Clayton was not much of a
musician. _Rosamond_ was a failure of Clayton's and not a success of
Addison's. There is poor jesting got by the poet from a comic Sir
Trusty, who keeps Rosamond's bower, and has a scolding wife. But there
is a happy compliment to Marlborough in giving to King Henry a vision at
Woodstock of the glory to come for England, and in a scenic realization
of it by the rising of Blenheim Palace, the nation's gift to
Marlborough, upon the scene of the Fair Rosamond story. Indeed there can
be no doubt that it was for the sake of the scene at Woodstock, and the
opportunity thus to be made, that Rosamond was chosen for the subject of
the opera. Addison made Queen Eleanor give Rosamond a narcotic instead
of a poison, and thus he achieved the desired happy ending to an opera.
Believe your Rosamond alive.
'King.' O happy day! O pleasing view!
My Queen forgives--
'Queen.' --My lord is true.
'King.' No more I'll change.
'Queen.' No more I'll grieve.
'Both.' But ever thus united live.
That is to say, for three days, the extent of the life of the opera. But
the literary Under-Secretary had saved his political dignity with the
stage tribute to Marlborough, which backed the closet praise in the
'Campaign.'
In May, 1707, Steele received the office of Gazetteer, until then worth
£60, but presently endowed by Harley with a salary of £300 a-year. At
about the same time he was made one of the gentlemen ushers to Queen
Anne's husband, Prince George of Denmark. In the same year Steele
married. Of his most private life before this date little is known. He
had been married to a lady from Barbadoes, who died in a few months.
From days referred to in the 'Christian Hero' he derived a daughter of
whom he took fatherly care. In 1707 Steele, aged about 35, married Miss
(or, as ladies come of age were then called, Mrs.) Mary Scurlock, aged
29. It was a marriage of affection on both sides. Steele had from his
first wife an estate in Barbadoes, which produced, after payment of the
interest on its encumbrances, £670 a-year. His appointment as Gazetteer,
less the £45 tax on it, was worth £255 a-year, and his appointment on
the Prince Consort's household another hundred. Thus the income upon
which Steele married was rather more than a thousand a-year, and Miss
Scurlock's mother had an estate of about £330 a-year. Mary Scurlock had
been a friend of Steele's first wife, for before marriage she recalls
Steele to her mother's mind by saying, 'It is the survivor of the person
to whose funeral I went in my illness.'
'Let us make our regards to each other,' Steele wrote just before
marriage, 'mutual and unchangeable, that whilst the world around us is
enchanted with the false satisfactions of vagrant desires, our persons
may be shrines to each other, and sacred to conjugal faith, unreserved
confidence, and heavenly society.'
There remains also a prayer written by Steele before first taking the
sacrament with his wife, after marriage. There are also letters and
little notes written by Steele to his wife, treasured by her love, and
printed by a remorseless antiquary, blind to the sentence in one of the
first of them:
'I beg of you to shew my letters to no one living, but let us be
contented with one another's thoughts upon our words and actions,
without the intervention of other people, who cannot judge of so
delicate a circumstance as the commerce between man and wife.'
But they are printed for the frivolous to laugh at and the wise to
honour. They show that even in his most thoughtless or most anxious
moments the social wit, the busy patriot, remembered his 'dear Prue,'
and was her lover to the end. Soon after marriage, Steele took his wife
to a boarding-school in the suburbs, where they saw a young lady for
whom Steele showed an affection that caused Mrs. Steele to ask, whether
she was not his daughter. He said that she was. 'Then,' said Mrs.
Steele, 'I beg she may be mine too.' Thenceforth she lived in their home
as Miss Ousley, and was treated as a daughter by Steele's wife. Surely
this was a woman who deserved the love that never swerved from her. True
husband and true friend, he playfully called Addison her rival. In the
_Spectator_ there is a paper of Steele's (No. 142) representing some of
his own love-letters as telling what a man said and should be able to
say of his wife after forty years of marriage. Seven years after
marriage he signs himself, 'Yours more than you can imagine, or I
express.' He dedicates to her a volume of the _Lady's Library_, and
writes of her ministrations to him:
'if there are such beings as guardian angels, thus are they employed.
I will no more believe one of them more good in its inclinations than
I can conceive it more charming in its form than my wife.'
In the year before her death he was signing his letters with 'God bless
you!' and 'Dear Prue, eternally yours.' That Steele made it a duty of
his literary life to contend against the frivolous and vicious ridicule
of the ties of marriage common in his day, and to maintain their sacred
honour and their happiness, readers of the 'Spectator' cannot fail to
find.
Steele, on his marriage in 1707, took a house in Bury Street, St.
James's, and in the following year went to a house at Hampton, which he
called in jest the Hovel. Addison had lent him a thousand pounds for
costs of furnishing and other immediate needs. This was repaid within a
year, and when, at the same time, his wife's mother was proposing a
settlement of her money beneficial to himself, Steele replied that he
was far from desiring, if he should survive his wife, 'to turn the
current of the estate out of the channel it would have been in, had I
never come into the family.' Liberal always of his own to others, he was
sometimes without a guinea, and perplexed by debt. But he defrauded no
man. When he followed his Prue to the grave he was in no man's debt,
though he left all his countrymen his debtors, and he left more than
their mother's fortune to his two surviving children. One died of
consumption a year afterwards, the other married one of the Welsh
Judges, afterwards Lord Trevor.
The friendship--equal friendship--between Steele and Addison was as
unbroken as the love between Steele and his wife. Petty tales may have
been invented or misread. In days of malicious personality Steele braved
the worst of party spite, and little enough even slander found to throw
against him. Nobody in their lifetime doubted the equal strength and
sincerity of the relationship between the two friends. Steele was no
follower of Addison's. Throughout life he went his own way, leading
rather than following; first as a playwright; first in conception and
execution of the scheme of the 'Tatler', 'Spectator', and 'Guardian';
following his own sense of duty against Addison's sense of expediency in
passing from the 'Guardian' to the 'Englishman', and so to energetic
movement upon perilous paths as a political writer, whose whole heart
was with what he took to be the people's cause.
When Swift had been writing to Addison that he thought Steele 'the
vilest of mankind,' in writing of this to Swift, Steele complained that
the 'Examiner',--in which Swift had a busy hand,--said Addison had
'bridled him in point of politics,' adding,
'This was ill hinted both in relation to him and me. I know no party;
but the truth of the question is what I will support as well as I can,
when any man I honour is attacked.'
John Forster, whose keen insight into the essentials of literature led
him to write an essay upon each of the two great founders of the latest
period of English literature, Defoe and Steele, has pointed out in his
masterly essay upon Steele that Swift denies having spoken of Steele as
bridled by his friend, and does so in a way that frankly admits Steele's
right to be jealous of the imputation. Mr. Forster justly adds that
throughout Swift's intimate speech to Stella,
'whether his humours be sarcastic or polite, the friendship of Steele
and Addison is for ever suggesting some annoyance to himself, some
mortification, some regret, but never once the doubt that it was not
intimate and sincere, or that into it entered anything inconsistent
with a perfect equality.'
Six months after Addison's death Steele wrote (in No. 12 of the
'Theatre', and I am again quoting facts cited by John Forster),
'that there never was a more strict friendship than between himself
and Addison, nor had they ever any difference but what proceeded from
their different way of pursuing the same thing; the one waited and
stemmed the torrent, while the other too often plunged into it; but
though they thus had lived for some years past, shunning each other,
they still preserved the most passionate concern for their mutual
welfare; and when they met they were as unreserved as boys, and talked
of the greatest affairs, upon which they saw where they differed,
without pressing (what they knew impossible) to convert each other.'
As to the substance or worth of what thus divided them, Steele only adds
the significant expression of his hope that, if his family is the worse,
his country may be the better, 'for the mortification _he_ has
undergone.'
Such, then, was the Friendship of which the 'Spectator' is the abiding
Monument. The 'Spectator' was a modified continuation of the 'Tatler',
and the 'Tatler' was suggested by a portion of Defoe's 'Review'. The
'Spectator' belongs to the first days of a period when the people at
large extended their reading power into departments of knowledge
formerly unsought by them, and their favour was found generally to be
more desirable than that of the most princely patron. This period should
date from the day in 1703 when the key turned upon Defoe in Newgate, the
year of the production of Steele's 'Tender Husband', and the time when
Addison was in Holland on the way home from his continental travels.
Defoe was then forty-two years old, Addison and Steele being about
eleven years younger.
In the following year, 1704, the year of Blenheim--Defoe issued, on the
19th of February, No. 1 of 'A Weekly Review of the Affairs of France:
Purg'd from the Errors and Partiality of 'News-Writers' and
'Petty-Statesmen', of all Sides,' and in the introductory sketch of its
plan, said:
'After our Serious Matters are over, we shall at the end of every
Paper, Present you with a little Diversion, as anything occurs to make
the World Merry; and whether Friend or Foe, one Party or another, if
anything happens so scandalous as to require an open Reproof, the
World may meet with it there.'
Here is the first 'little Diversion'; the germ of 'Tatlers' and
'Spectators' which in after years amused and edified the town.
'Mercure Scandale:
or,
ADVICE from the Scandalous CLUB. 'Translated out of French'.
This Society is a Corporation long since established in 'Paris', and
we cannot compleat our Advices from 'France', without entertaining the
World with everything we meet with from that Country.
And, tho Corresponding with the Queens Enemies is prohibited; yet
since the Matter will be so honest, as only to tell the World of what
everybody will own to be scandalous, we reckon we shall be welcome.
This Corporation has been set up some months, and opend their first
Sessions about last 'Bartholomew' Fair; but having not yet obtaind a
Patent, they have never, till now, made their Resolves publick.
The Business of this Society is to censure the Actions of Men, not of
Parties, and in particular, those Actions which are made publick so by
their Authors, as to be, in their own Nature, an Appeal to the general
Approbation.
They do not design to expose Persons but things; and of them, none but
such as more than ordinarily deserve it; they who would not be censurd
by this Assembly, are desired to act with caution enough, not to fall
under their Hands; for they resolve to treat Vice, and Villanous
Actions, with the utmost Severity.
The First considerable Matter that came before this Society, was about
'Bartholomew' Fair; but the Debates being long, they were at last
adjourned to the next Fair, when we suppose it will be decided; so
being not willing to trouble the World with anything twice over, we
refer that to next 'August'.
On the 10th of September last, there was a long Hearing, before the
Club, of a Fellow that said he had killd the Duke of 'Bavaria'. Now as
David punishd the Man that said he had killd King 'Saul', whether it
was so or no, twas thought this Fellow ought to be delivered up to
Justice, tho the Duke of 'Bavaria' was alive.
Upon the whole, twas voted a scandalous Thing, That News. Writers
shoud kill Kings and Princes, and bring them to life again at
pleasure; and to make an Example of this Fellow, he was dismissd, upon
Condition he should go to the Queens-bench once a Day, and bear
Fuller, his Brother of the Faculty, company two hours for fourteen
Days together; which cruel Punishment was executed with the utmost
Severity.
The Club has had a great deal of trouble about the News-Writers, who
have been continually brought before them for their ridiculous
Stories, and imposing upon Mankind; and tho the Proceedings have been
pretty tedious, we must give you the trouble of a few of them in our
next.
The addition to the heading, 'Translated out of French,' appears only in
No. 1, and the first title 'Mercure Scandale' (adopted from a French
book published about 1681) having been much criticized for its grammar
and on other grounds, was dropped in No. 18. Thenceforth Defoe's
pleasant comment upon passing follies appeared under the single head of
'Advice from the Scandalous Club.' Still the verbal Critics exercised
their wits upon the title.
'We have been so often on the Defence of our Title,' says Defoe, in
No. 38, 'that the world begins to think Our Society wants
Employment ... If Scandalous must signify nothing but Personal
Scandal, respecting the Subject of which it is predicated; we desire
those gentlemen to answer for us how 'Post-Man' or 'Post-Boy' can
signify a News-Paper, the Post Man or Post Boy being in all my reading
properly and strictly applicable, not to the Paper, but to the Person
bringing or carrying the News? Mercury also is, if I understand it, by
a Transmutation of Meaning, from a God turned into a Book--From hence
our Club thinks they have not fair Play, in being deny'd the Privilege
of making an Allegory as well as other People.'
In No. 46 Defoe made, in one change more, a whimsical half concession of
a syllable, by putting a sign of contraction in its place, and
thenceforth calling this part of his Review, Advice from the Scandal
Club. Nothing can be more evident than the family likeness between this
forefather of the 'Tatler' and 'Spectator' and its more familiar
descendants. There is a trick of voice common to all, and some papers of
Defoe's might have been written for the 'Spectator'. Take the little
allegory, for instance, in No. 45, which tells of a desponding young
Lady brought before the Society, as found by Rosamond's Pond in the Park
in a strange condition, taken by the mob for a lunatic, and whose
clothes were all out of fashion, but whose face, when it was seen,
astonished the whole society by its extraordinary sweetness and majesty.
She told how she had been brought to despair, and her name proved to
be--Modesty. In letters, questions, and comments also which might be
taken from Defoe's Monthly Supplementary Journal to the Advice from the
Scandal Club, we catch a likeness to the spirit of the 'Tatler' and
'Spectator' now and then exact. Some censured Defoe for not confining
himself to the weightier part of his purpose in establishing the
'Review'. He replied, in the Introduction to his first Monthly
Supplement, that many men
'care but for a little reading at a time,' and said, 'thus we wheedle
them in, if it may be allow'd that Expression, to the Knowledge of the
World, who rather than take more Pains, would be content with their
Ignorance, and search into nothing.'
Single-minded, quick-witted, and prompt to act on the first suggestion
of a higher point of usefulness to which he might attain, Steele saw the
mind of the people ready for a new sort of relation to its writers, and
he followed the lead of Defoe. But though he turned from the more
frivolous temper of the enfeebled playhouse audience, to commune in free
air with the country at large, he took fresh care for the restraint of
his deep earnestness within the bounds of a cheerful, unpretending
influence. Drop by drop it should fall, and its strength lie in its
persistence. He would bring what wit he had out of the playhouse, and
speak his mind, like Defoe, to the people themselves every post-day. But
he would affect no pedantry of moralizing, he would appeal to no
passions, he would profess himself only 'a Tatler.' Might he not use, he
thought, modestly distrustful of the charm of his own mind, some of the
news obtained by virtue of the office of Gazetteer that Harley had given
him, to bring weight and acceptance to writing of his which he valued
only for the use to which it could be put. For, as he himself truly says
in the 'Tatler',
'wit, if a man had it, unless it be directed to some useful end, is
but a wanton, frivolous quality; all that one should value himself
upon in this kind is that he had some honourable intention in it.'
Swift, not then a deserter to the Tories, was a friend of Steele's, who,
when the first 'Tatler' appeared, had been amusing the town at the
expense of John Partridge, astrologer and almanac-maker, with
'Predictions for the year 1708,' professing to be written by Isaac
Bickerstaff, Esq. The first prediction was of the death of Partridge,
'on the 29th of March next, about eleven at night, of a raging fever.'