ADDISON'S FAMILY AND EDUCATION.
Joseph Addison was born on the 1st of May, 1672. He was the eldest son of
Lancelot Addison, at the time of his birth rector of Milston, near
Amesbury, in Wiltshire, and afterwards Dean of Lichfield. His father was a
man of character and accomplishments. Educated at Oxford, while that
University was under the control of the famous Puritan Visitation, he made
no secret of his contempt for principles to which he was forced to submit,
or of his preferences for Monarchy and Episcopacy. His boldness was not
agreeable to the University authorities, and being forced to leave Oxford,
he maintained himself for a time near Petworth, in Sussex, by acting as
chaplain or tutor in families attached to the Royalist cause. After the
Restoration he obtained the appointment of chaplain to the garrison of
Dunkirk, and when that town was ceded to France in 1662, he was removed in
a similar capacity to Tangier. Here he remained eight years, but,
venturing on a visit to England, his post was bestowed upon another, and
he would have been left without resources had not one of his friends
presented him with the living of Milston, valued at £120 a year. With the
courage of his order he thereupon took a wife, Jane, daughter of Dr.
Nathaniel Gulston, and sister of William Gulston, Bishop of Bristol, by
whom he had six children, three sons and three daughters, all born at
Milston. In 1675 he was made a prebendary of Salisbury Cathedral and
Chaplain-in-Ordinary to the King; and in 1683 he was promoted to the
Deanery of Lichfield, as a reward for his services at Tangier, and out of
consideration of losses which he had sustained by a fire at Milston. His
literary reputation stood high, and it is said that he would have been
made a bishop, if his old zeal for legitimacy had not prompted him to
manifest in the Convocation of 1689 his hostility to the Revolution. He
died in 1703.
Lancelot was a writer at once voluminous and lively. In the latter part of
his life he produced several treatises on theological subjects, the most
popular of which was called _An Introduction to the Sacrament_. This book
passed through many editions. The doctrine it contains leans rather to the
Low Church side. But much the most characteristic of his writings were his
works on Mahommedanism and Judaism, the results of his studies during his
residence in Barbary. These show not only considerable industry and
research and powers of shrewd observation, but that genuine literary
faculty which enables a writer to leave upon a subject of a general nature
the impression of his own character. While there is nothing forced or
exaggerated in his historical style, a vein of allegory runs through the
narrative of the _Revolutions of the Kingdoms of Fez and Morocco_, which
must have had a piquant flavour for the orthodox English reader of that
day. Recollections of the Protectorate would have taken nothing of its
vividness from the portrait of the Moorish priest who "began to grow into
reputation with the people by reason of his high pretensions to piety and
fervent zeal for their law, illustrated by a stubborn rigidity of
conversation and outward sanctity of life." When the Zeriffe, with
ambitious designs on the throne, sent his sons on a pilgrimage to Mecca,
the religious buffooneries practised by the young men must have recalled
to the reader circumstances more recent and personal than those which the
author was apparently describing. "Much was the reverence and reputation
of holiness which they thereby acquired among the superstitious people,
who could hardly be kept from kissing their garments and adoring them as
saints, while they failed not in their parts, but acted as much devotion
as high contemplative looks, deep sighs, tragical gestures, and other
passionate interjections of holiness could express. 'Allah, allah!' was
their doleful note, their sustenance the people's alms." And when these
impostors had inveigled the King of Fez into a religious war, the
description of those who "mistrusted their own safety, and began, but too
late, to repent their approving of an armed hypocrisy," was not more
applicable to the rulers of Barbary than to the people of England. "Puffed
up with their successes, they forgot their obedience, and these saints
denied the king the fifth part of their spoils.... By which it appeared
that they took up arms, not out of love for their country and zeal for
their religion, but out of desire of rule." There is, indeed, nothing in
these utterances which need have prevented the writer from consistently
promoting the Revolution of 1688; yet his principles seem to have carried
him far in the opposite direction; and it is interesting to remember that
the assertor in Convocation of the doctrine of indefeasible hereditary
right was the father of the author of the _Whig Examiner_ and the
_Freeholder_. However decidedly Joseph may have dissented from his
father's political creed, we know that he entertained admiration and
respect for his memory, and that death alone prevented him from
completing the monument afterwards erected in Lancelot's honour in
Lichfield Cathedral.
Of Addison's mother nothing of importance is recorded. His second brother,
Gulston, became Governor of Fort St. George, in the East Indies; and the
third, Lancelot, followed in Joseph's footsteps so far as to obtain a
Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford. His sisters, Jane and Anna, died
young; but Dorothy was twice married, and Swift records in her honour that
she was "a kind of wit, and very like her brother." We may readily believe
that a writer so lively as Lancelot would have had clever children, but
Steele was perhaps carried away by the zeal of friendship or the love of
epigram when he said, in his dedication to the _Drummer_: "Mr. Dean
Addison left behind him four children, each of whom, for excellent talents
and singular perfections, was as much above the ordinary world as their
brother Joseph was above them." But that Steele had a sincere admiration
for the whole family is sufficiently shown by his using them as an example
in one of his early _Tatlers_:
"I remember among all my acquaintance but one man whom I have thought
to live with his children with equanimity and a good grace. He had
three sons and one daughter, whom he bred with all the care imaginable
in a liberal and ingenuous way. I have often heard him say he had the
weakness to love one much better than the other, but that he took as
much pains to correct that as any other criminal passion that could
arise in his mind. His method was to make it the only pretension in
his children to his favour to be kind to each other, and he would tell
them that he who was the best brother he would reckon the best son.
This turned their thoughts into an emulation for the superiority in
kind and tender affection towards each other. The boys behaved
themselves very early with a manly friendship; and their sister,
instead of the gross familiarities and impertinent freedoms in
behaviour usual in other houses, was always treated by them with as
much complaisance as any other young lady of their acquaintance. It
was an unspeakable pleasure to visit or sit at a meal in that family.
I have often seen the old man's heart flow at his eyes with joy upon
occasions which would appear indifferent to such as were strangers to
the turn of his mind; but a very slight accident, wherein he saw his
children's good-will to one another, created in him the god-like
pleasure of loving them because they loved each other. This great
command of himself in hiding his first impulse to partiality at last
improved to a steady justice towards them, and that which at first was
but an expedient to correct his weakness was afterwards the measure of
his virtue."[5]
This, no doubt, is the set description of a moralist, and to an age in
which the liberty of manners has grown into something like license it may
savour of formalism and priggishness; but when we remember that the writer
was one of the most warm-hearted of men, and that the subject of his
panegyric was himself, full of vivacity and impulse, it must be admitted
that the picture which it gives us of the Addison family in the rectory of
Milston is a particularly amiable one.
Though the eighteenth century had little of that feeling for natural
beauty which distinguishes our own, a man of Addison's imagination could
hardly fail to be impressed by the character of the scenery in which his
childhood was passed. No one who has travelled on a summer's day across
Salisbury plain, with its vast canopy of sky and its open tracts of
undulating downland, relieved by no shadows except such as are thrown by
the passing cloud, the grazing sheep, and the great circle of Stonehenge,
will forget the delightful sense of refreshment and repose produced by the
descent into the valley of the Avon. The sounds of human life rising from
the villages after the long solitude of the plain, the shade of the deep
woods, the coolness of the river, like all streams rising in the chalk,
clear and peaceful, are equally delicious to the sense and the
imagination. It was, doubtless, the recollection of these scenes that
inspired Addison in his paraphrase of the twenty-third Psalm:
"The Lord my pasture shall prepare,
And feed me with a shepherd's care.
* * * * *
When in the sultry glebe I faint,
Or on the thirsty mountain pant,
To fertile vales and dewy meads
My weary wandering steps he leads,
Where peaceful rivers, soft and slow,
Amid the verdant landscape flow."
At Amesbury he was first sent to school, his master being one Nash; and
here, too, he probably met with the first recorded adventure of his life.
It is said that having committed some fault, and being fearful of the
consequences, he ran away from school, and, taking up his abode in a
hollow tree, maintained himself as he could till he was discovered and
brought back to his parents. He was removed from Amesbury to Salisbury,
and thence to the Grammar School at Lichfield, where he is said to have
been the leader in a "barring out." From Lichfield he passed to the
Charter House, then under the charge of Dr. Ellis, a man of taste and
scholarship. The Charter House at that period was, after Westminster, the
best-known school in England, and here was laid the foundation of that
sound classical taste which perfected the style of the essays in the
_Spectator_.
Macaulay labours with much force and ingenuity to prove that Addison's
classical acquirements were only superficial, and, in his usual
epigrammatic manner, hazards the opinion that "his knowledge of Greek,
though doubtless such as was, in his time, thought respectable at Oxford,
was evidently less than that which many lads now carry away every year
from Eton and Rugby." That Addison was not a scholar of the class of
Bentley or Porson may be readily admitted. But many scattered allusions in
his works prove that his acquaintance with the Greek poets of every
period, if cursory, was wide and intelligent: he was sufficiently master
of the language thoroughly to understand the spirit of what he read; he
undertook while at Oxford a translation of Herodotus, and one of the
papers in the _Spectator_ is a direct imitation of a _jeu d'esprit_ of
Lucian's. The Eton or Rugby boy who, in these days, with a normal appetite
for cricket and football, acquired an equal knowledge of Greek literature,
would certainly be somewhat of a prodigy.
No doubt, however, Addison's knowledge of the Latin poets was, as Macaulay
infers, far more extensive and profound. It would have been strange had it
been otherwise. The influence of the classical side of the Italian
Renaissance was now at its height, and wherever those ideas became
paramount Latin composition was held in at least as much esteem as poetry
in the vernacular. Especially was this the case in England, where certain
affinities of character and temperament made it easy for writers to adopt
Roman habits of thought. Latin verse composition soon took firm root in
the public schools and universities, so that clever boys of the period
were tolerably familiar with most of the minor Roman poets. Pope, in the
Fourth Book of the _Dunciad_, vehemently attacked the tradition as
confining the mind to the study of words rather than of things; but he had
himself had no experience of a public school, and only those who fail to
appreciate the influence of Latin verse composition on the style of our
own greatest orators, and of poets like Milton and Gray, will be inclined
to undervalue it as an instrument of social and literary training.
Proficiency in this art may at least be said to have laid the foundation
of Addison's fortunes. Leaving the Charter House in 1687, at the early age
of fifteen, he was entered at Queen's College, Oxford, and remained a
member of that society for two years, when a copy of his Latin verses fell
into the hands of Dr. Lancaster, then Fellow and afterwards Provost of the
College. Struck with their excellence, Lancaster used his influence to
obtain for him a demyship at Magdalen. The subject of this fortunate set
of verses was "Inauguratio Regis Gulielmi," from which fact we may
reasonably infer that even in his boyhood his mind had acquired a Whig
bias. Whatever inclination he may have had in this direction would have
been confirmed by the associations of his new college. The fluctuations of
opinion in Magdalen had been frequent and extraordinary. Towards the close
of Elizabeth's reign it was notorious for its Calvinism, but under the
Chancellorship of Laud it appears to have adopted, with equal ardour, the
cause of Arminianism, for it was among the colleges that offered the
stoutest opposition to the Puritan visitors in 1647-48. The despotic
tendencies of James II., however, again cooled its loyalty, and its
spirited resistance to the king's order for the election of a Roman
Catholic President had given a mortal blow to the Stuart dynasty. Hough
was now President, but in consequence of the dispute with the king there
had been no election of demies in 1688, so that twice the usual number was
chosen in the following year, and the occasion was distinguished by the
name of the "golden election." From Magdalen Addison proceeded to his
master's degree in 1693; the College elected him probationary Fellow in
1697, and actual Fellow the year after. He retained his Fellowship till
1711.
Of his tastes, habits, and friendships at Oxford there are few records.
Among his acquaintance were Boulter, afterwards Archbishop of
Dublin--whose memory is unenviably perpetuated, in company with Ambrose
Phillips, in Pope's _Epistle to Arbuthnot_,
"Does not one table Bavius still admit,
Still to one Bishop Phillips seem a wit?"--
and possibly the famous Sacheverell.[6] He is said to have shown in the
society of Magdalen some of the shyness that afterwards distinguished him;
he kept late hours, and read chiefly after dinner. The walk under the
well-known elms by the Cherwell is still connected with his name. Though
he probably acted as tutor in the college, the greater part of his quiet
life at the University was doubtless occupied in study. A proof of his
early maturity is seen in the fact that, in his nineteenth year, a young
man of birth and fortune, Mr. Rushout, who was being educated at Magdalen,
was placed under his charge.
His reputation as a scholar and a man of taste soon extended itself to the
world of letters in London. In 1693, being then in his twenty-second year,
he wrote his _Account of the Greatest English Poets_; and about the same
time he addressed a short copy of verses to Dryden, complimenting him on
the enduring vigour of his poetical faculty, as shown in his translations
of Virgil and other Latin poets, some of which had recently appeared in
Tonson's _Miscellany_. The old poet appears to have been highly gratified,
and to have welcomed the advances thus made to him, for he returned
Addison's compliment by bestowing high and not unmerited praise on the
translation of the Fourth Book of the _Georgics_, which the latter soon
after undertook, and by printing, as a preface to his own translation, a
discourse written by Addison on the _Georgics_, as well as arguments to
most of the books of the _Æneid_.
Through Dryden, no doubt, he became acquainted with Jacob Tonson. The
father of English publishing had for some time been a well-known figure in
the literary world. He had purchased the copyright of _Paradise Lost_; he
had associated himself with Dryden in publishing before the Revolution two
volumes of _Miscellanies_; encouraged by the success which these obtained,
he put the poet, in 1693, on some translations of Juvenal and Persius, and
two new volumes of _Miscellanies_; while in 1697 he urged him to undertake
a translation of the whole of the works of Virgil. Observing how strongly
the public taste set towards the great classical writers, he was anxious
to employ men of ability in the work of turning them into English; and it
appears from existing correspondence that he engaged Addison, while the
latter was at Oxford, to superintend a translation of Herodotus. He also
suggested a translation of Ovid. Addison undertook to procure coadjutors
for the work of translating the Greek historian. He himself actually
translated the books called _Polymnia_ and _Urania_, but for some
unexplained reason the work was never published. For Ovid he seems, on the
whole, to have had less inclination. At Tonson's instance he translated
the Second Book of the _Metamorphoses_, which was first printed in the
volume of _Miscellanies_ that appeared in 1697; but he wrote to the
publisher that "Ovid had so many silly stories with his good ones that he
was more tedious to translate than a better poet would be." His study of
Ovid, however, was of the greatest use in developing his critical faculty;
the excesses and want of judgment in that poet forced him to reflect, and
his observations on the style of his author anticipate his excellent
remarks on the difference between True and False Wit in the sixty-second
number of the _Spectator_.
Whoever, indeed, compares these notes with the _Essay on the Georgics_,
and with the opinions expressed in the _Account of the English Poets_,
will be convinced that the foundations of his critical method were laid at
this period (1697). In the _Essay on the Georgics_ he seems to be timid in
the presence of Virgil's superiority; his _Account of the English Poets_,
besides being impregnated with the principles of taste prevalent after the
Restoration, shows deficient powers of perception and appreciation. The
name of Shakespeare is not mentioned in it, Dryden and Congreve alone
being selected to represent the drama. Chaucer is described as "a merry
bard," whose humour has become obsolete through time and change; while the
rich pictorial fancy of the _Faery Queen_ is thus described:
"Old Spenser next, warmed with poetic rage,
In ancient tales amused a barbarous age--
An age that yet uncultivate and rude,
Where'er the poet's fancy led pursued,
Through pathless fields and unfrequented floods,
To dens of dragons and enchanted woods.
But now the mystic tale, that pleased of yore,
Can charm an understanding age no more;
The long-spun allegories fulsome grow,
While the dull moral lies too plain below."
According to Pope--always a suspicious witness where Addison is
concerned--he had not read Spenser when he wrote this criticism on him.[7]
Milton, as a legitimate successor of the classics, is of course
appreciated, but not at all after the elaborate fashion of the
_Spectator_; to Dryden, the most distinguished poet of the day, deserved
compliments are paid, but their value is lessened by the exaggerated
opinion which the writer entertains of Cowley, who is described as a
"mighty genius," and is praised for the inexhaustible riches of his
imagination. Throughout the poem, in fact, we observe a remarkable
confusion of various veins of thought; an unjust depreciation of the
Gothic grandeur of the older English poets; a just admiration for the
Greek and Roman authors; a sense of the necessity of good sense and
regularity in writings composed for an "understanding age;" and at the
same time a lingering taste for the forced invention and far-fetched
conceits that mark the decay of the spirit of mediæval chivalry.
With the judgments expressed in this performance it is instructive to
compare such criticisms on Shakespeare as we find in No. 42 of the
_Spectator_, the papers on "Chevy Chase" (73, 74), and particularly the
following passage:
"As true wit consists in the resemblance of ideas, and false wit in
the resemblance of words, according to the foregoing instances, there
is another kind of wit which consists partly in the resemblance of
ideas and partly in the resemblance of words, which, for distinction's
sake, I shall call mixed wit. This kind of wit is that which abounds
in Cowley more than in any author that ever wrote. Mr. Waller has
likewise a great deal of it. Mr. Dryden is very sparing in it. Milton
has a genius much above it. _Spenser is in the same class with
Milton._ The Italians even in their epic poetry are full of it.
Monsieur Boileau, who formed himself upon the ancient poets, has
everywhere rejected it with scorn. If we look after mixed wit among
the Greeks, we shall find it nowhere but in the epigrammatists. There
are, indeed, some strokes of it in the little poem ascribed to Musæus,
which by that, as well as many other marks, betrays itself to be a
modern composition. If we look into the Latin writers we find none of
this mixed wit in Virgil, Lucretius, or Catullus; very little in
Horace, but a great deal of it in Ovid, and scarce anything else in
Martial."
The stepping-stone from the immaturity of the early criticisms in the
_Account of the Greatest English Poets_ to the finished ease of the
_Spectator_ is to be found in the notes to the translation of Ovid.[8]
The time came when he was obliged to form a decision affecting the entire
course of his life. Tonson, who had a wide acquaintance, no doubt
introduced him to Congreve and the leading men of letters in London, and
through them he was presented to Somers and Montague. Those ministers
perhaps persuaded him, as a point of etiquette, to write, in 1695, his
_Address to King William_, a poem composed in a vein of orthodox
hyperbole, all of which must have been completely thrown away on that most
unpoetical of monarchs. Yet in spite of those seductions Addison lingered
at Oxford. To retain his Fellowship it was necessary for him to take
orders. Had he done so, there can be no doubt that his literary skill and
his value as a political partizan would have opened for him a road to the
highest preferment. At that time the clergy were far from thinking it
unbecoming to their cloth to fight in the political arena or to take part
in journalism. Swift would have been advanced to a bishopric, as a reward
for his political services, if it had not been for the prejudice
entertained towards him by Queen Anne; Boulter, rector of St. Saviour's,
Southwark, having made himself conspicuous by editing a paper called the
_Freethinker_, was raised to the Primacy of Ireland; Hoadley, the
notorious Bishop of Bangor, edited the _London Journal_; the honours that
were awarded to two men of such second-rate intellectual capacity would
hardly have been denied to Addison. He was inclined in this direction by
the example and advice of his father, who was now Dean of Lichfield, and
who was urgent on his son to rid himself of the pecuniary embarrassments
in which he was involved by embracing the Church as a profession. A few
years before he had himself seemed to look upon the Church as his future
sphere. In his _Account of the Greatest English Poets_ he says:
"I leave the arts of poetry and verse
To them that practise them with more success.
Of greater truths I'll now propose to tell,
And so at once, dear friend and muse, farewell."
Had he followed up his intention we might have known the name of Addison
as that of an artful controversialist, and perhaps as a famous writer of
sermons; but we should, in all probability, have never heard of the
_Spectator_.
Fortunately for English letters, other influences prevailed to give a
different direction to his fortunes. It is true that Tickell, Addison's
earliest biographer, states that his determination not to take orders was
the result of his own habitual self-distrust, and of a fear of the
responsibilities which the clerical office would involve. But Steele, who
was better acquainted with his friend's private history, on reading
Tickell's Memoir, addressed a letter to Congreve on the subject, in which
he says:
"These, you know very well, were not the reasons which made Mr.
Addison turn his thoughts to the civil world; and, as you were the
instrument of his becoming acquainted with Lord Halifax, I doubt not
but you remember the warm instances that noble lord made to the head
of the College not to insist upon Mr. Addison's going into orders. His
arguments were founded upon the general pravity and corruption of men
of business, who wanted liberal education. And I remember, as if I had
read the letter yesterday, that my lord ended with a compliment that,
however he might be represented as a friend to the Church, he never
would do it any other injury than keeping Mr. Addison out of it."
No doubt the real motive of the interest in Addison shown by Lord Halifax,
at that time known as Charles Montague, was an anxiety which he shared
with all the leading statesmen of the period, and of which more will be
said presently, to secure for his party the services of the ablest
writers. Finding his _protégé_ as yet hardly qualified to transact affairs
of State, he joined with Lord Somers, who had also fixed his eyes on
Addison, in soliciting for him from the Crown, in 1699, a pension of £300
a year, which might enable him to supplement his literary accomplishments
with the practical experience of travel. Addison naturally embraced the
offer. He looked forward to studying the political institutions of foreign
countries, to seeing the spots of which he had read in his favourite
classical authors, and to meeting the most famous men of letters on the
Continent.
It is characteristic both of his own tastes and of his age that he seems
to have thought his best passport to intellectual society abroad would be
his Latin poems. His verses on the _Peace of Ryswick_, written in 1697
and dedicated to Montague, had already procured him great reputation, and
had been praised by Edmund Smith--a high authority--as "the best Latin
poem since the _Æneid_." This gave him the opportunity of collecting his
various compositions of the same kind, and in 1699 he published from the
Sheldonian Press a second volume of the _Musæ Anglicanæ_--the first having
appeared in 1691--containing poems by various Oxford scholars. Among the
contributors were Hannes, one of the many scholarly physicians of the
period; J. Philips, the author of the _Splendid Shilling_; and Alsop, a
prominent antagonist of Bentley, whose Horatian humour is celebrated by
Pope in the _Dunciad_.[9]
But the most interesting of the names in the volume is that of the once
celebrated Edmond, commonly called "Rag," Smith, author of the _Ode on the
Death of Dr. Pocock_, who seems to have been among Addison's intimate
acquaintance, and deserves to be recollected in connection with him on
account of a certain similarity in their genius and the extraordinary
difference in their fortunes. "Rag" was a man of fine accomplishments and
graceful humour, but, like other scholars of the same class, indolent and
licentious. In spite of great indulgence extended to him by the
authorities of Christ Church, he was expelled from the University in
consequence of his irregularities. His friends stood by him, and, through
the interest of Addison, a proposal was made to him to undertake a history
of the Revolution, which, however, from political scruples he felt himself
obliged to decline. Like Addison, he wrote a tragedy modelled on classical
lines; but, as it had no political significance, it only pleased the
critics, without, like "Cato," interesting the public. Like Addison, too,
he had an opportunity of profiting by the patronage of Halifax, but
laziness or whim prevented him from keeping an appointment which the
latter had made with him, and caused him to miss a place worth £300 a
year. Addison, by his own exertions, rose to posts of honour and profit,
and towards the close of his life became Secretary of State. Smith envied
his advancement, and, ignoring the fact that his own failure was entirely
due to himself, murmured at fortune for leaving him in poverty. Yet he
estimated his wants at £600 a year, and died of indulgence when he can
scarcely have been more than forty years of age.
Addison's compositions in the _Musæ Anglicanæ_ are eight in number. All of
them are distinguished by the ease and flow of the versification, but they
are generally wanting in originality. The best of them is the
_Pygmæo-Gerano-Machia_, which is also interesting as showing traces of
that rich vein of humour which Addison worked out in the _Tatler_ and
_Spectator_. The mock-heroic style in prose and verse was sedulously
cultivated in England throughout the eighteenth century. Swift, Pope,
Arbuthnot, and Fielding, developed it in various forms; but Addison's
Latin poem is perhaps the first composition in which the fine fancy and
invention afterwards shown in the _Rape of the Lock_ and _Gulliver's
Travels_ conspicuously displayed itself.
A literary success of this kind at that epoch gave a writer a wider
reputation than he could gain by compositions in his own language. Armed,
therefore, with copies of the _Musæ Anglicanæ_ for presentation to
scholars, and with Halifax's recommendatory letters to men of political
distinction, Addison started for the Continent.