"which produces incarceration." To be starved to death is "to sink from
inanition into nonentity." Sir Isaac Newton is "the developer of the
skies in their embodied movements;" and Mrs. Thrale, when a party of
clever people sat silent, is said "to have been provoked by the dulness
of a taciturnity that, in the midst of such renowned interlocutors,
produced as narcotic a torpor as could have been caused by a dearth the
most barren of all human faculties." In truth, it is impossible to look
at any page of Madame D'Arblay's later works without finding flowers of
rhetoric like these. Nothing in the language of those jargonists at whom
Mr. Gosport laughed, nothing in the language of Sir Sedley Clarendel,
approaches this new Euphuism.
It is from no unfriendly feeling to Madame D'Arblay's memory that we
have expressed ourselves so strongly on the subject of her style. On the
contrary, we conceive that we have really rendered a service to her
reputation. That her later works were complete failures is a fact too
notorious to be dissembled; and some persons, we believe, have
consequently taken up a notion that she was from the first an overrated
writer, and that she had not the powers which were necessary to maintain
her on the eminence on which good luck and fashion had placed her. We
believe, on the contrary, that her early popularity was no more than the
just reward of distinguished merit, and would never have undergone an
eclipse, if she had only been content to go on writing in her mother
tongue. If she failed when she quitted her own province, and attempted
to occupy one in which she had neither part nor lot, this reproach is
common to her with a crowd of distinguished men. Newton failed when he
turned from the courses of the stars, and the ebb and flow of the ocean,
to apocalyptic seals and vials. Bentley failed when he turned from Homer
and Aristophanes, to edit the Paradise Lost. Inigo failed when he
attempted to rival the Gothic churches of the fourteenth century.
Wilkie failed when he took it into his head that the Blind Fiddler and
the Rent Day were unworthy of his powers, and challenged competition
with Lawrence as a portrait painter. Such failures should be noted for
the instruction of posterity; but they detract little from the permanent
reputation of those who have really done great things.
Yet one word more. It is not only on account of the intrinsic merit of
Madame D'Arblay's early works that she is entitled to honorable mention.
Her appearance is an important epoch in our literary history. Evelina
was the first tale written by a woman, and purporting to be a picture of
life and manners, that lived or deserved to live. The Female Quixote is
no exception. That work has undoubtedly great merit, when considered as
a wild satirical harlequinade; but, if we consider it as a picture of
life and manners, we must pronounce it more absurd than any of the
romances which it was designed to ridicule.
Indeed, most of the popular novels which preceded Evelina were such as
no lady would have written; and many of them were such as no lady could
without confusion own that she had read. The very name of novel was held
in horror among religious people. In decent families, which did not
profess extraordinary sanctity, there was a strong feeling against all
such works. Sir Anthony Absolute, two or three years before Evelina
appeared, spoke the sense of the great body of sober fathers and
husbands when he pronounced the circulating library an evergreen tree of
diabolical knowledge. This feeling, on the part of the grave and
reflecting, increased the evil from which it had sprung. The novelist
having little character to lose, and having few readers among serious
people, took without scruple liberties which in our generation seem
almost incredible.
Miss Burney did for the English novel what Jeremy Collier did for the
English drama; and she did it in a better way. She first showed that a
tale might be written in which both the fashionable and the vulgar life
of London might be exhibited with great force, and with broad comic
humor, and which yet should not contain a single line inconsistent with
rigid morality, or even with virgin delicacy. She took away the reproach
which lay on a most useful and delightful species of composition. She
vindicated the right of her sex to an equal share in a fair and noble
province of letters. Several accomplished women have followed in her
track. At present, the novels which we owe to English ladies form no
small part of the literary glory of our country. No class of works is
more honorably distinguished by fine observation, by grace, by delicate
wit, by pure moral feeling. Several among the successors of Madame
D'Arblay have equalled her; two, we think, have surpassed her. But the
fact that she has been surpassed gives her an additional claim to our
respect and gratitude; for, in truth, we owe to her not only Evelina,
Cecilia, and Camilla, but also Mansfield Park and The Absentee.
FOOTNOTES:
[7] Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay. Five vols. 8vo. London: 1842.
[8] There is some difficulty here as to the chronology. "This
sacrifice," says the editor of the Diary, "was made in the young
authoress's fifteenth year." This could not be; for the sacrifice was
the effect, according to the editor's own showing, of the remonstrances
of the second Mrs. Burney; and Frances was in her sixteenth year when
her father's second marriage took place.
THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ADDISON[9]
_The Edinburgh Review_, July, 1843
Some reviewers are of opinion that a lady who dares to publish a book
renounces by that act the franchises appertaining to her sex, and can
claim no exemption from the utmost rigor of critical procedure. From
that opinion we dissent. We admit, indeed, that in a country which
boasts of many female writers, eminently qualified by their talents and
acquirements to influence the public mind, it would be of most
pernicious consequence that inaccurate history or unsound philosophy
should be suffered to pass uncensured, merely because the offender
chanced to be a lady. But we conceive that, on such occasions, a critic
would do well to imitate the courteous Knight who found himself
compelled by duty to keep the lists against Bradamante. He, we are told,
defended successfully the cause of which he was the champion; but,
before the fight began, exchanged Balisarda for a less deadly sword, of
which he carefully blunted the point and edge.[10]
Nor are the immunities of sex the only immunities which Miss Aikin may
rightfully plead. Several of her works, and especially the very pleasing
Memoirs of the Reign of James the First, have fully entitled her to the
privileges enjoyed by good writers. One of those privileges we hold to
be this, that such writers, when, either from the unlucky choice of a
subject, or from the indolence too often produced by success, they
happen to fail, shall not be subjected to the severe discipline which it
is sometimes necessary to inflict upon dunces and impostors, but shall
merely be reminded by a gentle touch, like that with which the Laputan
flapper roused his dreaming lord, that it is high time to wake.
Our readers will probably infer from what we have said that Miss Aikin's
book has disappointed us. The truth is, that she is not well acquainted
with her subject. No person who is not familiar with the political and
literary history of England during the reigns of William the Third, of
Anne, and of George the First, can possibly write a good life of
Addison. Now, we mean no reproach to Miss Aikin, and many will think
that we pay her a compliment, when we say that her studies have taken a
different direction. She is better acquainted with Shakespeare and
Raleigh, than with Congreve and Prior; and is far more at home among the
ruffs and peaked beards of Theobald's, than among the Steenkirks and
flowing periwigs which surrounded Queen Anne's tea table at Hampton. She
seems to have written about the Elizabethan age, because she had read
much about it; she seems, on the other hand, to have read a little about
the age of Addison, because she had determined to write about it. The
consequence is that she has had to describe men and things without
having either a correct or a vivid idea of them, and that she has often
fallen into errors of a very serious kind. The reputation which Miss
Aikin has justly earned stands so high, and the charm of Addison's
letters is so great, that a second edition of this work may probably be
required. If so, we hope that every paragraph will be revised, and that
every date and fact about which there can be the smallest doubt will be
carefully verified.
To Addison himself we are bound by a sentiment as much like affection as
any sentiment can be, which is inspired by one who has been sleeping a
hundred and twenty years in Westminster Abbey. We trust, however, that
this feeling will not betray us into that abject idolatry which we have
often had occasion to reprehend in others, and which seldom fails to
make both the idolater and the idol ridiculous. A man of genius and
virtue is but a man. All his powers cannot be equally developed; nor can
we expect from him perfect self-knowledge. We need not, therefore,
hesitate to admit that Addison has left us some compositions which do
not rise above mediocrity, some heroic poems hardly equal to Parnell's,
some criticism as superficial as Dr. Blair's, and a tragedy not very
much better than Dr. Johnson's. It is praise enough to say of a writer
that, in a high department of literature, in which many eminent writers
have distinguished themselves, he has had no equal; and this may with
strict justice be said of Addison.
As a man, he may not have deserved the adoration which he received from
those who, bewitched by his fascinating society, and indebted for all
the comforts of life to his generous and delicate friendship, worshipped
him nightly, in his favorite temple at Button's. But, after full inquiry
and impartial reflection, we have long been convinced that he deserved
as much love and esteem as can be justly claimed by any of our infirm
and erring race. Some blemishes may undoubtedly be detected in his
character; but the more carefully it is examined, the more will it
appear, to use the phrase of the old anatomists, sound in the noble
parts, free from all taint of perfidy, of cowardice, of cruelty, of
ingratitude, of envy. Men may easily be named, in whom some particular
good disposition has been more conspicuous than in Addison. But the just
harmony of qualities, the exact temper between the stern and the humane
virtues, the habitual observance of every law, not only of moral
rectitude, but of moral grace and dignity, distinguish him from all men
who have been tried by equally strong temptations, and about whose
conduct we possess equally full information.
His father was the Reverend Lancelot Addison, who, though eclipsed by
his more celebrated son, made some figure in the world, and occupies
with credit two folio pages in the Biographia Britannica. Lancelot was
sent up, as a poor scholar, from Westmoreland to Queen's College,
Oxford, in the time of the Commonwealth, made some progress in learning,
became, like most of his fellow students, a violent Royalist, lampooned
the heads of the University, and was forced to ask pardon on his bended
knees. When he had left college, he earned a humble subsistence by
reading the liturgy of the fallen Church to the families of those sturdy
squires whose manor houses were scattered over the Wild of Sussex. After
the Restoration, his loyalty was rewarded with the post of chaplain to
the garrison of Dunkirk. When Dunkirk was sold to France, he lost his
employment. But Tangier had been ceded by Portugal to England as part of
the marriage portion of the Infanta Catharine; and to Tangier Lancelot
Addison was sent. A more miserable situation can hardly be conceived. It
was difficult to say whether the unfortunate settlers were more
tormented by the heats or by the rains, by the soldiers within the wall
or by the Moors without it. One advantage the chaplain had. He enjoyed
an excellent opportunity of studying the history and manners of Jews and
Mahometans; and of this opportunity he appears to have made excellent
use. On his return to England, after some years of banishment, he
published an interesting volume on the Polity and Religion of Barbary,
and another on the Hebrew Customs and the State of Rabbinical Learning.
He rose to eminence in his profession, and became one of the royal
chaplains, a Doctor of Divinity, Archdeacon of Salisbury, and Dean of
Lichfield. It is said that he would have been made a bishop after the
Revolution, if he had not given offence to the government by strenuously
opposing, in the Convocation of 1689, the liberal policy of William and
Tillotson.
In 1672, not long after Dr. Addison's return from Tangier, his son
Joseph was born. Of Joseph's childhood we know little. He learned his
rudiments at schools in his father's neighborhood, and was then sent to
the Charter House. The anecdotes which are popularly related about his
boyish tricks do not harmonize very well with what we know of his riper
years. There remains a tradition that he was the ringleader in a barring
out, and another tradition that he ran away from school and hid himself
in a wood, where he fed on berries and slept in a hollow tree, till
after a long search he was discovered and brought home. If these stories
be true, it would be curious to know by what moral discipline so
mutinous and enterprising a lad was transformed into the gentlest and
most modest of men.
We have abundant proof that, whatever Joseph's pranks may have been, he
pursued his studies vigorously and successfully. At fifteen he was not
only fit for the University, but carried thither a classical taste and a
stock of learning which would have done honor to a Master of Arts. He
was entered at Queen's College, Oxford; but he had not been many months
there, when some of his Latin verses fell by accident into the hands of
Dr. Lancaster, Dean of Magdalene College. The young scholar's diction
and versification were already such as veteran professors might envy.
Dr. Lancaster was desirous to serve a boy of such promise; nor was an
opportunity long wanting. The Revolution had just taken place; and
nowhere had it been hailed with more delight than at Magdalene College.
That great and opulent corporation had been treated by James, and by his
Chancellor, with an insolence and injustice which, even in such a Prince
and in such a Minister, may justly excite amazement, and which had done
more than even the prosecution of the Bishops to alienate the Church of
England from the throne. A president, duly elected, had been violently
expelled from his dwelling; a Papist had been set over the society by a
royal mandate; the Fellows who, in conformity with their oaths, had
refused to submit to this usurper, had been driven forth from their
quiet cloisters and gardens, to die of want or to live on charity. But
the day of redress and retribution speedily came. The intruders were
ejected; the venerable House was again inhabited by its old inmates;
learning flourished under the rule of the wise and virtuous Hough; and
with learning was united a mild and liberal spirit too often wanting in
the princely colleges of Oxford. In consequence of the troubles through
which the society had passed, there had been no valid election of new
members during the year 1688. In 1689, therefore, there was twice the
ordinary number of vacancies; and thus Dr. Lancaster found it easy to
procure for his young friend admittance to the advantages of a
foundation then generally esteemed the wealthiest in Europe.
At Magdalen Addison resided during ten years. He was, at first, one of
those scholars who are called Demies, but was subsequently elected a
fellow. His college is still proud of his name; his portrait still hangs
in the hall; and strangers are still told that his favorite walk was
under the elms which fringe the meadow on the banks of the Cherwell. It
is said, and is highly probable, that he was distinguished among his
fellow students by the delicacy of his feelings, by the shyness of his
manners, and by the assiduity with which he often prolonged his studies
far into the night. It is certain that his reputation for ability and
learning stood high. Many years later, the ancient Doctors of Magdalen
continued to talk in their common room of his boyish compositions, and
expressed their sorrow that no copy of exercises so remarkable had been
preserved.
It is proper, however, to remark that Miss Aikin has committed the
error, very pardonable in a lady, of overrating Addison's classical
attainments. In one department of learning, indeed, his proficiency was
such as it is hardly possible to overrate. His knowledge of the Latin
poets, from Lucretius and Catullus down to Claudian and Prudentius, was
singularly exact and profound. He understood them thoroughly, entered
into their spirit, and had the finest and most discriminating perception
of all their peculiarities of style and melody; nay, he copied their
manner with admirable skill, and surpassed, we think, all their British
imitators who had preceded him, Buchanan and Milton alone excepted. This
is high praise; and beyond this we cannot with justice go. It is clear
that Addison's serious attention, during his residence at the
University, was almost entirely concentrated on Latin poetry, and that,
if he did not wholly neglect other provinces of ancient literature, he
vouchsafed to them only a cursory glance. He does not appear to have
attained more than an ordinary acquaintance with the political and moral
writers of Rome; nor was his own Latin prose by any means equal to his
Latin verse. 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. A minute
examination of his works, if we had time to make such an examination,
would fully bear out these remarks. We will briefly advert to a few of
the facts on which our judgment is grounded.
Great praise is due to the Notes which Addison appended to his version
of the second and third books of the Metamorphoses. Yet those notes,
while they show him to have been, in his own domain, an accomplished
scholar, show also how confined that domain was. They are rich in
apposite references to Virgil, Statius, and Claudian; but they contain
not a single illustration drawn from the Greek poets. Now, if, in the
whole compass of Latin literature, there be a passage which stands in
need of illustration drawn from the Greek poets, it is the story of
Pentheus in the third book of the Metamorphoses. Ovid was indebted for
that story to Euripides and Theocritus, both of whom he has sometimes
followed minutely. But neither to Euripides nor to Theocritus does
Addison make the faintest allusion; and we, therefore, believe that we
do not wrong him by supposing that he had little or no knowledge of
their works.
His travels in Italy, again, abound with classical quotations, happily
introduced; but scarcely one of those quotations is in prose. He draws
more illustrations from Ausonius and Manilius than from Cicero. Even his
notions of the political and military affairs of the Romans seem to be
derived from poets and poetasters. Spots made memorable by events which
have changed the destinies of the world, and which have been worthily
recorded by great historians, bring to his mind only scraps of some
ancient versifier. In the gorge of the Apennines he naturally remembers
the hardships which Hannibal's army endured, and proceeds to cite, not
the authentic narrative of Polybius, not the picturesque narrative of
Livy, but the languid hexameters of Silius Italicus. On the banks of the
Rubicon he never thinks of Plutarch's lively description, or of the
stern conciseness of the Commentaries, or of those letters to Atticus
which so forcibly express the alternations of hope and fear in a
sensitive mind at a great crisis. His only authority for the events of
the civil war is Lucan.
All the best ancient works of art at Rome and Florence are Greek.
Addison saw them, however, without recalling one single verse of Pindar,
of Callimachus, or of the Attic dramatists; but they brought to his
recollection innumerable passages of Horace, Juvenal, Statius, and Ovid.
The same may be said of the Treatise on Medals. In that pleasing work we
find about three hundred passages extracted with great judgment from the
Roman poets; but we do not recollect a single passage taken from any
Roman orator or historian; and we are confident that not a line is
quoted from any Greek writer. No person, who had derived all his
information on the subject of medals from Addison, would suspect that
the Greek coins were in historical interest equal, and in beauty of
execution far superior, to those of Rome.
If it were necessary to find any further proof that Addison's classical
knowledge was confined within narrow limits, that proof would be
furnished by his Essay on the Evidences of Christianity. The Roman poets
throw little or no light on the literary and historical questions which
he is under the necessity of examining in that Essay. He is, therefore,
left completely in the dark; and it is melancholy to see how helplessly
he gropes his way from blunder to blunder. He assigns, as grounds for
his religious belief, stories as absurd as that of the Cock-Lane ghost,
and forgeries as rank as Ireland's Vortigern, puts faith in the lie
about the Thundering Legion, is convinced that Tiberius moved the senate
to admit Jesus among the gods, and pronounces the letter of Agbarus,
King of Edessa, to be a record of great authority. Nor were these errors
the effects of superstition; for to superstition Addison was by no means
prone. The truth is that he was writing about what he did not
understand.
Miss Aikin has discovered a letter, from which it appears that, while
Addison resided at Oxford, he was one of several writers whom the
booksellers engaged to make an English version of Herodotus; and she
infers that he must have been a good Greek scholar. We can allow very
little weight to this argument, when we consider that his fellow
laborers were to have been Boyle and Blackmore. Boyle is remembered
chiefly as the nominal author of the worst book on Greek history and
philology that ever was printed; and this book, bad as it is, Boyle was
unable to produce without help. Of Blackmore's attainments in the
ancient tongues, it may be sufficient to say that, in his prose, he has
confounded an aphorism with an apothegm, and that when, in his verse, he
treats of classical subjects, his habit is to regale his readers with
four false quantities to a page.
It is probable that the classical acquirements of Addison were of as
much service to him as if they had been more extensive. The world
generally gives its admiration, not to the man who does what nobody else
even attempts to do, but to the man who does best what multitudes do
well. Bentley was so immeasurably superior to all the other scholars of
his time that few among them could discover his superiority. But the
accomplishment in which Addison excelled his contemporaries was then, as
it is now, highly valued and assiduously cultivated at all English seats
of learning. Everybody who had been at a public school had written Latin
verses; many had written such verses with tolerable success, and were
quite able to appreciate, though by no means able to rival, the skill
with which Addison imitated Virgil. His lines on the Barometer and the
Bowling Green were applauded by hundreds, to whom the Dissertation on
the Epistles of Phalaris was as unintelligible as the hieroglyphics on
an obelisk.
Purity of style and an easy flow of numbers are common to all Addison's
Latin poems. Our favorite piece is the Battle of the Cranes and Pygmies;
for in that piece we discern a gleam of the fancy and humor which many
years later enlivened thousands of breakfast tables. Swift boasted that
he was never known to steal a hint; and he certainly owed as little to
his predecessors as any modern writer. Yet we cannot help suspecting
that he borrowed, perhaps unconsciously, one of the happiest touches in
his voyage to Lilliput from Addison's verses. Let our readers judge.
"The Emperor," says Gulliver, "is taller by about the breadth of my nail
than any of his court, which alone is enough to strike an awe into the
beholders."
About thirty years before Gulliver's Travels appeared Addison wrote
these lines:--