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English Men of Letters
Edited by John Morley
ADDISON
by
W. J. COURTHOPE
Harper & Brothers Publishers
New York and London
1902
* * * * *
ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS.
EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY.
JOHNSON Leslie Stephen.
GIBBON J. C. Morison.
SCOTT R. H. Hutton.
SHELLEY J. A. Symonds.
HUME T. H. Huxley.
GOLDSMITH William Black.
DEFOE William Minto.
BURNS J. C. Shairp.
SPENSER R. W. Church.
THACKERAY Anthony Trollope.
BURKE John Morley.
MILTON Mark Pattison.
HAWTHORNE Henry James, Jr.
SOUTHEY E. Dowden.
CHAUCER A. W. Ward.
BUNYAN J. A. Froude.
COWPER Goldwin Smith.
POPE Leslie Stephen.
BYRON John Nichol.
LOCKE Thomas Fowler.
WORDSWORTH F. Myers.
DRYDEN G. Saintsbury.
LANDOR Sidney Colvin.
DE QUINCEY David Masson.
LAMB Alfred Ainger.
BENTLEY R. C. Jebb.
DICKENS A. W. Ward.
GRAY E. W. Gosse.
SWIFT Leslie Stephen.
STERNE H. D. Traill.
MACAULAY J. Cotter Morison.
FIELDING Austin Dobson.
SHERIDAN Mrs. Oliphant.
ADDISON W. J. Courthope.
BACON R. W. Church.
COLERIDGE H. D. Traill.
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY J. A. Symonds.
KEATS Sidney Colvin.
CARLYLE John Nichol.
12mo, Cloth, 75 cents per volume.
_Other volumes in preparation._
PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK.
_Any of the above works will be sent by mail, postage prepaid, to any part
of the United States, Canada, or Mexico, on receipt of the price._
* * * * *
CONTENTS.
PAGE
CHAPTER I.
THE STATE OF ENGLISH SOCIETY AND LETTERS
AFTER THE RESTORATION 1
CHAPTER II.
ADDISON'S FAMILY AND EDUCATION 21
CHAPTER III.
ADDISON ON HIS TRAVELS 38
CHAPTER IV.
HIS EMPLOYMENT IN AFFAIRS OF STATE 53
CHAPTER V.
THE "TATLER" AND "SPECTATOR" 78
CHAPTER VI.
"CATO" 110
CHAPTER VII.
ADDISON'S QUARREL WITH POPE 125
CHAPTER VIII.
THE LAST YEARS OF HIS LIFE 139
CHAPTER IX.
THE GENIUS OF ADDISON 153
ADDISON.
CHAPTER I.
THE STATE OF ENGLISH SOCIETY AND LETTERS AFTER THE RESTORATION.
Of the four English men of letters whose writings most fully embody the
spirit of the eighteenth century, the one who provides the biographer with
the scantiest materials is Addison. In his _Journal to Stella_, his social
verses, and his letters to his friends, we have a vivid picture of those
relations with women and that protracted suffering which invest with such
tragic interest the history of Swift. Pope, by the publication of his own
correspondence, has enabled us, in a way that he never intended, to
understand the strange moral twist which distorted a nature by no means
devoid of noble instincts. Johnson was fortunate in the companionship of
perhaps the best biographer who ever lived. But of the real life and
character of Addison scarcely any contemporary record remains. The formal
narrative prefixed to his works by Tickell is, by that writer's own
admission, little more than a bibliography. Steele, who might have told us
more than any man about his boyhood and his manner of life in London, had
become estranged from his old friend before his death. No writer has
taken the trouble to preserve any account of the wit and wisdom that
enlivened the "little senate" at Button's. His own letters are, as a rule,
compositions as finished as his papers in the _Spectator_. Those features
in his character which excite the greatest interest have been delineated
by the hand of an enemy--an enemy who possessed an unrivalled power of
satirical portrait-painting, and was restrained by no regard for truth
from creating in the public mind such impressions about others as might
serve to heighten the favourable opinion of himself.
This absence of dramatic incident in Addison's life would lead us
naturally to conclude that he was deficient in the energy and passion
which cause a powerful nature to leave a mark upon its age. Yet such a
judgment would certainly be erroneous. Shy and reserved as he was, the
unanimous verdict of his most illustrious contemporaries is decisive as to
the respect and admiration which he excited among them. The man who could
exert so potent an influence over the mercurial Steele, who could
fascinate the haughty and cynical intellect of Swift, whose conversation,
by the admission of his satirist Pope, had in it something more charming
than that of any other man; of whom it was said that he might have been
chosen king if he wished it; such a man, though to the coarse perception
of Mandeville he might have seemed no more than "a parson in a tye-wig,"
can hardly have been deficient in force of character.
Nor would it have been possible for a writer distinguished by mere
elegance and refinement to leave a lasting impress on the literature and
society of his country. In one generation after another, men representing
opposing elements of rank, class, interest, and taste, have agreed in
acknowledging Addison's extraordinary merits. "Whoever wishes," says
Johnson--at the end of a biography strongly coloured with the
prepossessions of a semi-Jacobite Tory--"whoever wishes to attain an
English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious,
must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison." "Such a mark of
national respect," says Macaulay, the best representative of middle-class
opinion in the present century, speaking of the statue erected to Addison
in Westminster Abbey, "was due to the unsullied statesman, to the
accomplished scholar, to the master of pure English eloquence, to the
consummate painter of life and manners. It was due, above all, to the
great satirist who alone knew how to use ridicule without abusing it; who,
without inflicting a wound, effected a great social reform, and who
reconciled wit and virtue after a long and disastrous separation, during
which wit had been led astray by profligacy, and virtue by fanaticism."
This verdict of a great critic is accepted by an age to which the grounds
of it are, perhaps, not very apparent. The author of any ideal creation--a
poem, a drama, or a novel--has an imprescriptible property in the fame of
his work. But to harmonise conflicting social elements, to bring order out
of chaos in the sphere of criticism, to form right ways of thinking about
questions of morals, taste, and breeding, are operations of which the
credit, though it is certainly to be ascribed to particular individuals,
is generally absorbed by society itself. Macaulay's eulogy is as just as
it is eloquent, but the pages of the _Spectator_ alone will hardly show
the reader why Addison should be so highly praised for having reconciled
wit with virtue. Nor, looking at him as a critic, will it appear a great
achievement to have pointed out to English society the beauties of
_Paradise Lost_, unless it be remembered that the taste of the preceding
generation still influenced Addison's contemporaries, and that in that
generation Cowley was accounted a greater poet than Milton.
To estimate Addison at his real value we must regard him as the chief
architect of Public Opinion in the eighteenth century. But here again we
are met by an initial difficulty, because it has become almost a
commonplace of contemporary criticism to represent the eighteenth century
as a period of sheer destruction. It is tacitly assumed by a school of
distinguished philosophical writers that we have arrived at a stage in the
world's history in which it is possible to take a positive and scientific
view of human affairs. As it is of course necessary that from such a
system all belief in the supernatural shall be jealously excluded, it has
not seemed impossible to write the history of Thought itself in the
eighteenth century. And in tracing the course of this supposed continuous
stream it is natural that all the great English writers of the period
should be described as in one way or another helping to pull down, or
vainly to strengthen, the theological barriers erected by centuries of
bigotry against the irresistible tide of enlightened progress.
It would be of course entirely out of place to discuss here the merits of
this new school of history. Those who consider that, whatever glimpses we
may obtain of the law and order of the universe, man is, as he always has
been and always will be, a mystery to himself, will hardly allow that the
operations of the human spirit can be traced in the dissecting-room. But
it is, in any case, obvious that to treat the great _imaginative_ writers
of any age as if they were only mechanical agents in an evolution of
thought is to do them grave injustice. Such writers are, above all things,
creative. Their first aim is to "show the very age and body of the time
his form and pressure." No work of the eighteenth century, composed in a
consciously destructive spirit, has taken its place among the acknowledged
classics of the language. Even the _Tale of a Tub_ is to be regarded as a
satire upon the aberrations of theologians from right reason, not upon the
principles of Christianity itself. The _Essay on Man_ has, no doubt,
logically a tendency towards Deism, but nobody ever read the poem for the
sake of its philosophy; and it is well known that Pope was much alarmed
when it was pointed out to him that his conclusions might be represented
as incompatible with the doctrines of revealed religion.
The truth indeed seems to be the exact converse of what is alleged by the
scientific historians. So far from the eighteenth century in England being
an age of destructive analysis, its energies were chiefly devoted to
political, social, and literary reconstruction. Whatever revolution in
faith and manners the English nation had undergone had been the work of
the two preceding centuries, and though the historic foundations of
society remained untouched, the whole form of the superstructure had been
profoundly modified.
"So tenacious are we," said Burke, towards the close of the last
century, "of our old ecclesiastical modes and fashions of institution
that very little change has been made in them since the fourteenth or
fifteenth centuries, adhering in this particular as in all else to our
old settled maxim never entirely nor at once to depart from antiquity.
We found these institutions on the whole favourable to morality and
discipline, and we thought they were susceptible of amendment without
altering the ground. We thought they were capable of receiving and
meliorating, and, above all, of preserving the accessories of science
and literature as the order of Providence should successively produce
them. And after all, with this Gothic and monkish education (for such
it is the groundwork), we may put in our claim to as ample and early
a share in all the improvements in science, in arts, and in literature
which have illuminated the modern world as any other nation in Europe.
We think one main cause of this improvement was our not despising the
patrimony of knowledge which was left us by our forefathers."
All this is, in substance, true of our political as well as our
ecclesiastical institutions. And yet, when Burke wrote, the great feudal
and mediæval structure of England had been so transformed by the Wars of
the Roses, the Reformation, the Rebellion, and the Revolution, that its
ancient outlines were barely visible. In so far, therefore, as his words
seem to imply that the social evolution he describes was produced by an
imperceptible and almost mechanical process of national instinct, the
impression they tend to create is entirely erroneous.
If we have been hitherto saved from such corruption as undermined the
republics of Italy, from the religious wars that so long enfeebled and
divided Germany, and from the Revolution that has severed modern France
from her ancient history, thanks for this are due partly, no doubt, to
favouring conditions of nature and society, but quite as much to the
genius of great individuals who prepared the mind of the nation for the
gradual assimilation of new ideas. Thus Langland and Wycliffe and their
numerous followers, long before the Reformation, had so familiarised the
minds of the people with their ideas of the Christian religion that the
Sovereign was able to assume the Headship of the Church without the shock
of a social convulsion. Fresh feelings and instincts grew up in the hearts
of whole classes of the nation without at first producing any change in
outward habits of life, and even without arousing a sense of their logical
incongruity. These mixed ideas were constantly brought before the
imagination in the works of the poets. Shakespeare abounds with passages
in which, side by side with the old feudal, monarchical, catholic, and
patriotic instincts of Englishmen, we find the sentiments of the Italian
Renaissance. Spenser conveys Puritan doctrines sometimes by the mouth of
shepherds, whose originals he had found in Theocritus and Virgil;
sometimes under allegorical forms derived from books of chivalry and the
ceremonial of the Catholic Church. Milton, the most rigidly Calvinistic of
all the English poets in his opinions, is also the most severely classical
in his style.
It was the task of Addison to carry on the reconciling traditions of our
literature. It is his praise to have accomplished his task under
conditions far more difficult than any that his predecessors had
experienced. What they had done was to give instinctive and characteristic
expression to the floating ideas of the society about them; what Addison
and his contemporaries did was to found a public opinion by a conscious
effort of reason and persuasion. Before the Civil Wars there had been at
least no visible breach in the principle of Authority in Church and State.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century constituted authority had been
recently overthrown; one king had been beheaded, another had been
expelled; the Episcopalian form of Church Government had been violently
displaced in favour of the Presbyterian, and had been with almost equal
violence restored. Whole classes of the population had been drawn into
opposing camps during the Civil War, and still stood confronting each
other with all the harsh antagonism of sentiment inherited from that
conflict. Such a bare summary alone is sufficient to indicate the nature
of the difficulties Addison had to encounter in his efforts to harmonise
public opinion; but a more detailed examination of the state of society
after the Restoration is required to place in its full light the
extraordinary merits of the success that he achieved.
There was, to begin with, a vehement opposition between town and country.
In the country the old ideas of Feudalism, modified by circumstances, but
vigorous and deep-rooted, still prevailed. True, the military system of
land-tenure had disappeared with the Restoration, but it was not so with
the relations of life, and the habits of thought and feeling which the
system had created. The features of surviving Feudalism have been
inimitably preserved for us in the character of Sir Roger de Coverley.
Living in the patriarchal fashion, in the midst of tenants and retainers,
who looked up to him as their chief, and for whose welfare and protection
he considered himself responsible, the country gentleman valued above all
things the principle of Loyalty. To the moneyed classes in the towns he
was instinctively opposed; he regarded their interests, both social and
commercial, as contrary to his own; he looked with dislike and suspicion
on the economical principles of government and conduct on which these
classes naturally rely. Even the younger sons of county families had in
Addison's day abandoned the custom, common enough in the feudal times, of
seeking their fortune in trade. Many a Will Wimble now spent his whole
life in the country, training dogs for his neighbours, fishing their
streams, making whips for their young heirs, and even garters for their
wives and daughters.[1]
The country gentlemen were confirmed in these ideas by the difficulties of
communication. During his visit to Sir Roger de Coverley the _Spectator_
observed the extreme slowness with which fashions penetrated into the
country; and he noticed, too, that party spirit was much more violent
there than in the towns. The learning of the clergy, many of whom resided
with the country squires as chaplains, was of course enlisted on the Tory
side, and supplied it with arguments which the body of the party might
perhaps have found it difficult to discover, or at least to express, for
themselves. For Tory tastes undoubtedly lay generally rather in the
direction of sport than of books. Sir Roger seems to be as much above the
average level of his class as Squire Western is certainly below it:
perhaps the Tory fox-hunter of the _Freeholder_, though somewhat
satirically painted, is a fair representative of the society which had its
headquarters at the October Club, and whose favourite poet was Tom
D'Urfey.
The commercial and professional classes, from whom the Whigs derived their
chief support, of course predominated in the towns, and their larger
opportunities of association gave them an influence in affairs which
compensated for their inferiority in numbers. They lacked, however, what
the country party possessed, a generous ideal of life. Though many of them
were connected with the Presbyterian system, their common sense made them
revolt from its rigidity, while at the same time their economical
principles failed to supply them with any standard that could satisfy the
imagination. Sir Andrew Freeport excites in us less interest than any
member of the Spectator's Club. There was not yet constituted among the
upper middle classes that mixed conception of good feeling, good breeding,
and good taste which we now attach to the name of "gentleman."
Two main currents of opinion divided the country, to one of which a man
was obliged to surrender himself if he wished to enjoy the pleasures of
organised society. One of these was Puritanism, but this was undoubtedly
the less popular, or at least the less fashionable. A protracted
experience of Roundhead tyranny under the Long Parliament had inclined the
nation to believe that almost any form of Government was preferable to
that of the Saints. The Puritan, no longer the mere sectarian, as in the
days of Elizabeth and James I., somewhat ridiculous in the extravagance of
his opinions, but respectable from the constancy with which he maintained
them, had ruled over them as a taskmaster, and had forced them, as far as
he could by military violence, to practise the asceticism to which monks
and nuns had voluntarily submitted themselves. The most innocent as well
as the most brutal diversions of the people were sacrificed to his
spiritual pride. As Macaulay well says, he hated bear-baiting, not because
it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectator.
The tendency of his creed was, in fact, anti-social. Beauty in his eyes
was a snare, and pleasure a sin; the only mode of social intercourse which
he approved was a sermon.
On the other hand, the habits of the Court, which gave the tone to all
polite society, were almost equally distasteful to the instincts of the
people. It was inevitable that the inclinations of Charles II. should be
violently opposed to every sentiment of the Puritans. While he was in the
power of the Scots he had been forced into feigned compliance with
Presbyterian rites; the Puritans had put his father to death, and had
condemned himself to many years of exile and hardship in Catholic
countries. He had returned to his own land half French in his political
and religious sympathies, and entirely so in his literary tastes. To
convert and to corrupt those of his subjects who immediately surrounded
him was an easy matter. "All by the king's example lived and loved."
Poets, painters, and actors were forward to promote principles viewed
with favour by their sovereign and not at all disagreeable to themselves.
An ingenious philosopher elevated Absolutism into an intellectual and
moral system, the consequence of which was to encourage the powerful in
the indulgence of every selfish instinct. As the Puritans had oppressed
the country with a system of inhuman religion and transcendental morality,
so now, in order to get as far from Puritanism as possible, it seemed
necessary for every one aspiring to be thought a gentleman to avow himself
an atheist or a debauchee.
The ideas of the man in the mode after the Restoration are excellently hit
off in one of the fictitious letters in the _Spectator_:
"I am now between fifty and sixty, and had the honour to be well with
the first men of taste and gallantry in the joyous reign of Charles
the Second. As for yourself, Mr. Spectator, you seem with the utmost
arrogance to undermine the very fundamentals upon which we conducted
ourselves. It is monstrous to set up for a man of wit and yet deny
that honour in a woman is anything but peevishness, that inclination
is not the best rule of life, or virtue and vice anything else but
health and disease. We had no more to do but to put a lady in a good
humour, and all we could wish followed of course. Then, again, your
Tully and your discourses of another life are the very bane of mirth
and good humour. Prythee, don't value thyself on thy reason at that
exorbitant rate and the dignity of human nature; take my word for it,
a setting dog has as good reason as any man in England."[2]
While opinions, which from different sides struck at the very roots of
society, prevailed both in the fashionable and religious portions of the
community, it was inevitable that Taste should be hopelessly corrupt. All
the artistic and literary forms which the Court favoured were of the
romantic order, but it was romance from which beauty and vitality had
utterly disappeared. Of the two great principles of ancient chivalry, Love
and Honour, the last notes of which are heard in the lyrics of Lovelace
and Montrose, one was now held to be non-existent, and the other was
utterly perverted. The feudal spirit had surrounded woman with an
atmosphere of mystical devotion, but in the reign of Charles II. the
passion of love was subjected to the torturing treatment then known as
"wit." Cowley and Waller seem to think that when a man is in love the
energy of his feelings is best shown by discovering resemblances between
his mistress and those objects in nature to which she is apparently most
unlike.
The ideal of Woman, as she is represented in the _Spectator_, adding
grace, charity, and refinement to domestic life, had still to be created.
The king himself, the presumed mirror of good taste, was notoriously under
the control of his numerous mistresses; and the highest notion of love
which he could conceive was gallantry. French romances were therefore
generally in vogue. All the casuistry of love which had been elaborated by
Mademoiselle de Scudery was reproduced with improvements by Mrs. Aphra
Behn. At the same time, as usually happens in diseased societies, there
was a general longing to cultivate the simplicity of the Golden Age, and
the consequence was that no person, even in the lower grades of society,
who pretended to any reading, ever thought of making love in his own
person. The proper tone of feeling was not acquired till he had invested
himself with the pastoral attributes of Damon and Celadon, and had
addressed his future wife as Amarantha or Phyllis.
The tragedies of the period illustrate this general inclination to
spurious romance. If ever there was a time when the ideal of monarchy was
degraded, and the instincts of chivalrous action discouraged, it was in
the reign of Charles II. Absorbed as he was in the pursuit of pleasure,
the king scarcely attempted to conceal his weariness when obliged to
attend to affairs of State. He allowed the Dutch fleet to approach his
capital and to burn his own ships of war on the Thames; he sold Dunkirk to
the French; hardly any action in his life evinces any sense of patriotism
or honour. And yet we have only to glance at Johnson's _Life of Dryden_ to
see how all the tragedies of the time turn on the great characters, the
great actions, the great sufferings of princes. The Elizabethan drama had
exhibited man in every degree of life and with every variety of character;
the playwright of the Restoration seldom descended below such themes as
the conquest of Mexico or Granada, the fortunes of the Great Mogul, and
the fate of Hannibal. This monotony of subject was doubtless in part the
result of policy, for in pitying the fortunes of Montezuma the imagination
of the spectator insensibly recalled those of Charles the Second.
Everything in these tragedies is unreal, strained, and affected. In order
to remove them as far as possible from the language of ordinary life they
are written in rhyme, while the astonishment of the audience is raised
with big swelling words, which vainly seek to hide the absence of genuine
feeling. The heroes tear their passion to tatters because they think it
heroic to do so; their flights into the sublime generally drop into the
ridiculous; instead of holding up the mirror to nature, their object is to
depart as far as possible from common sense. Nothing exhibits more
characteristically the utterly artificial feeling, both of the dramatists
and the spectators, than the habit which then prevailed of dismissing the
audience after a tragic play with a witty epilogue. On one occasion, Nell
Gwynne, in the character of St. Catherine, was, at the end of the play,
left for dead upon the stage. Her body having to be removed, the actress
suddenly started to her feet, exclaiming,
"Hold! are you mad? you damned confounded dog,
I am to rise and speak the epilogue!"[3]
By way of compensation, however, the writers of the period poured forth
their real feelings without reserve in their comedies. So great, indeed,
is the gulf that separates our own manners from theirs, that some critics
have endeavoured to defend the comic dramatists of the Restoration against
the moralists on the ground that their representations of Nature are
entirely devoid of reality. Charles Lamb, who loved all curiosities, and
the Caroline comedians among the number, says of them:
"They are a world of themselves almost as much as fairy-land. Take one
of their characters, male or female (with few exceptions they are
alike), and place it in a modern play, and my virtuous indignation
shall rise against the profligate wretch as warmly as the Catos of the
pit could desire, because in a modern play I am to judge of the right
and the wrong. The standard of _police_ is the measure of _political
justice_. The atmosphere will blight it; it cannot live here. It has
got into a moral world, where it has no business, from which it must
needs fall headlong--as dizzy and incapable of making a stand as a
Swedenborgian bad spirit that has wandered unawares into his sphere of
Good Men or Angels. But in its own world do we feel the creature is so
very bad? The Fainalls and Mirabels, the Dorimants and Lady
Touchwoods, in their own sphere do not offend my moral sense; in fact,
they do not appeal to it at all. They seem engaged in their proper
element. They break through no laws or conscientious restraints. They
know of none. They have got out of Christendom into the land of-what
shall I call it?--of cuckoldry--the Utopia of gallantry, where
pleasure is duty and the manners perfect freedom. It is altogether a
speculative scene of things, which has no reference whatever to the
world that is."
This is a very happy description of the manner in which the plays of
Etherege, Shadwell, Wycherley, and Congreve affect us to-day; and it is no
doubt superfluous to expend much moral indignation on works which have
long since lost their power to charm: comedies in which the reader finds
neither the horseplay of Aristophanes, nor the nature of Terence, nor the
poetry of Shakespeare; in which there is not a single character that
arouses interest, or a situation that spontaneously provokes laughter; in
which the complications of plot are produced by the devices of fine
gentlemen for making cuckolds of citizens, and the artifices of wives to
dupe their husbands; in which the profuse wit of the dialogue might excite
admiration, if it were possible to feel the smallest interest in the
occasion that produced it. But to argue that these plays never represented
any state of existing society is a paradox which chooses to leave out of
account the contemporary attack on the stage made by Jeremy Collier, the
admissions of Dryden, and all those valuable glimpses into the manners of
our ancestors which are afforded by the prologues of the period.
It is sufficient to quote against Lamb the witty and severe criticism of
Steele in the _Spectator_, upon Etherege's _Man of the Mode_:
"It cannot be denied but that the negligence of everything which
engages the attention of the sober and valuable part of mankind
appears very well drawn in this piece. But it is denied that it is
necessary to the character of a fine gentleman that he should in that
manner trample upon all order and decency. As for the character of
Dorimant, it is more of a coxcomb than that of Fopling. He says of one
of his companions that a good correspondence between them is their
mutual interest. Speaking of that friend, he declares their being much
together 'makes the women think the better of his understanding, and
judge more favourably of my reputation. It makes him pass upon some
for a man of very good sense, and me upon others for a very civil
person.' This whole celebrated piece is a perfect contradiction to
good manners, good sense, and common honesty; and as there is nothing
in it but what is built upon the ruin of virtue and innocence,
according to the notion of virtue in this comedy, I take the shoemaker
to be in reality the fine gentleman of the play; for it seems he is an
atheist, if we may depend upon his character as given by the
orange-woman, who is herself far from being the lowest in the play.
She says of a fine man who is Dorimant's companion, 'there is not such
another heathen in the town except the shoemaker.' His pretension to
be the hero of the drama appears still more in his own description of
his way of living with his lady. 'There is,' says he, 'never a man in
the town lives more like a gentleman with his wife than I do. I never
mind her motions; she never inquires into mine. We speak to one
another civilly; hate one another heartily; and, because it is vulgar
to lie and soak together, we have each of us our several settle-beds.'
"That of 'soaking together' is as good as if Dorimant had spoken it
himself; and I think, since he puts human nature in as ugly a form as
the circumstances will bear, and is a staunch unbeliever, he is very
much wronged in having no part of the good fortune bestowed in the
last act. To speak plain of this whole work, I think nothing but being
lost to a sense of innocence and virtue can make any one see this
comedy without observing more frequent occasion to move sorrow and
indignation than mirth and laughter. At the same time I allow it to be
nature, but it is nature in its utmost corruption and degeneracy."[4]
The truth is, that the stage after the Restoration reflects only too
faithfully the manners and the sentiments of the only society which at
that period could boast of anything like organisation. The press, which
now enables public opinion to exercise so powerful a control over the
manners of the times, had then scarcely an existence. No standard of
female honour restrained the license of wit and debauchery. If the clergy
were shocked at the propagation of ideas so contrary to the whole spirit
of Christianity, their natural impulse to reprove them was checked by the
fear that an apparent condemnation of the practices of the Court might end
in the triumph of their old enemies, the Puritans. All the elements of an
old and decaying form of society that tended to atheism, cynicism, and
dissolute living, exhibited themselves, therefore, in naked shamelessness
on the stage. The audiences in the theatres were equally devoid of good
manners and good taste; they did not hesitate to interrupt the actors in
the midst of a serious play, while they loudly applauded their obscene
allusions. So gross was the character of comic dialogue that women could
not venture to appear at a comedy without masks, and under these
circumstances the theatre became the natural centre for assignations. In
such an atmosphere women readily cast off all modesty and reserve; indeed,
the choicest indecencies of the times are to be found in the epilogues to
the plays, which were always assigned to the female actors.
It at first sight seems remarkable that a society inveterately corrupt
should have contained in itself such powers of purification and vitality
as to discard the literary garbage of the Restoration period in favour of
the refined sobriety which characterises the writers of Queen Anne's
reign. But, in fact, the spread of the infection was confined within
certain well-marked limits. The Court moved in a sphere apart, and was
altogether too light and frivolous to exert a decided moral influence on
the great body of the nation. The country gentlemen, busied on their
estates, came seldom to town; the citizens, the lawyers, and the members
of the other professions steadily avoided the theatre, and regarded with
equal contempt the moral and literary excesses of the courtiers. Among
this class, unrepresented at present in the world of letters, except,
perhaps, by antiquarians like Selden, the foundations of sound taste were
being silently laid. The readers of the nation had hitherto been almost
limited to the nobility. Books were generally published by subscription,
and were dependent for their success on the favour with which they were
received by the courtiers. But, after the subsidence of the Civil War, the
nation began to make rapid strides in wealth and refinement, and the
moneyed classes sought for intellectual amusement in their leisure hours.
Authors by degrees found that they might look for readers beyond the
select circle of their aristocratic patrons; and the book-seller, who had
hitherto calculated his profits merely by the commission he might obtain
on the sale of books, soon perceived that they were becoming valuable as
property. The reign of Charles II. is remarkable not only for the great
increase in the number of the licensed printers in London, but for the
appearance of the first of the race of modern publishers, Jacob Tonson.
The portion of society whose tastes the publishers undertook to satisfy
was chiefly interested in history, poetry, and criticism. It was this for
which Dryden composed his _Miscellany_, this to which he addressed the
admirable critical essays which precede his _Translations from the Latin
Poets_ and his _Versifications of Chaucer_, and this which afterwards gave
the main support to the _Tatler_ and the _Spectator_. Ignorant of the
writings of the great classical authors, as well as of the usages of
polite society, these men were nevertheless robust and manly in their
ideas, and were eager to form for themselves a correct standard of taste
by reference to the best authorities. Though they turned with repugnance
from the playhouse and from the morals of the Court, they could not
avoid being insensibly affected by the tone of grace and elegance which
prevailed in Court circles. And in this respect, if in no other, our
gratitude is due to the Caroline dramatists, who may justly claim to be
the founders of the _social_ prose style in English literature. Before
them English prose had been employed, no doubt, with music and majesty by
many writers; but the style of these is scarcely representative; they had
used the language for their own elevated purposes, without, however,
attempting to give it that balanced fineness and subtlety which makes it a
fitting instrument for conveying the complex ideas of an advanced stage of
society. Dryden, Wycherley, and their followers, impelled by the taste of
the Court to study the French language, brought to English composition a
nicer standard of logic and a more choice selection of language, while the
necessity of pleasing their audiences with brilliant dialogue made them
careful to give their sentences that well-poised structure which Addison
afterwards carried to perfection in the _Spectator_.
By this brief sketch the reader may be enabled to judge of the distracted
state of society, both in politics and taste, in the reign of Charles II.
On the one side, the Monarchical element in the Constitution was
represented by the Court Party, flushed with the recent restoration;
retaining the old ideas and principles of absolutism which had prevailed
under James I., without being able to perceive their inapplicability to
the existing nature of things; feeding its imagination alternately on
sentiments derived from the decayed spirit of chivalry, and on artistic
representations of fashionable debauchery in its most open form--a party
which, while it fortunately preserved the traditions of wit, elegance, and
gaiety of style, seemed unaware that these qualities could be put to any
other use than the mitigation of an intolerable _ennui_. On the other
side, the rising power of Democracy found its representatives in austere
Republicans opposed to all institutions in Church and State that seemed to
obstruct their own abstract principles of government; gloomy fanatics,
who, with an intense intellectual appreciation of eternal principles of
religion and morality, sought to sacrifice to their system the most
permanent and even innocent instincts of human nature. Between the two
extreme parties was the unorganised body of the nation, grouped round old
customs and institutions, rapidly growing in wealth and numbers, conscious
of the rise in their midst of new social principles, but perplexed how to
reconcile these with time-honoured methods of religious, political, and
literary thought. To lay the foundations of sound opinion among the people
at large; to prove that reconciliation was possible between principles
hitherto exhibited only in mutual antagonism; to show that under the
English Constitution monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy might all be
harmonised, that humanity was not absolutely incompatible with religion or
morality with art, was the task of the statesmen, and still more of the
men of letters, of the early part of the eighteenth century.