said, of Addison, and thus had access to foreign intelligence earlier
and more authentic than was in those times within the reach of an
ordinary news-writer. This circumstance seems to have suggested to him
the scheme of publishing a periodical paper on a new plan. It was to
appear on the days on which the post left London for the country, which
were, in that generation, the Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. It was
to contain the foreign news, accounts of theatrical representations, and
the literary gossip of Will's and of the Grecian. It was also to contain
remarks on the fashionable topics of the day, compliments to beauties,
pasquinades on noted sharpers, and criticisms on popular preachers. The
aim of Steele does not appear to have been at first higher than this. He
was not ill qualified to conduct the work which he had planned. His
public intelligence he drew from the best sources. He knew the town, and
had paid dear for his knowledge. He had read much more than the
dissipated men of that time were in the habit of reading. He was a rake
among scholars, and a scholar among rakes. His style was easy and not
incorrect; and, though his wit and humor were of no high order, his gay
animal spirits imparted to his compositions an air of vivacity which
ordinary readers could hardly distinguish from comic genius. His
writings have been well compared to those light wines which, though
deficient in body and flavor, are yet a pleasant small drink, if not
kept too long, or carried too far.
Isaac Bickerstaff, Esquire, Astrologer, was an imaginary person, almost
as well known in that age as Mr. Paul Pry or Mr. Samuel Pickwick in
ours. Swift had assumed the name of Bickerstaff in a satirical pamphlet
against Partridge, the maker of almanacs. Partridge had been fool enough
to publish a furious reply. Bickerstaff had rejoined in a second
pamphlet still more diverting than the first. All the wits had combined
to keep up the joke, and the town was long in convulsions of laughter.
Steele determined to employ the name which this controversy had made
popular; and, in April, 1709, it was announced that Isaac Bickerstaff,
Esquire, Astrologer, was about to publish a paper called the Tatler.
Addison had not been consulted about this scheme; but as soon as he
heard of it, he determined to give his assistance. The effect of that
assistance cannot be better described than in Steele's own words. "I
fared," he said, "like a distressed prince who calls in a powerful
neighbor to his aid. I was undone by my auxiliary. When I had once
called him in, I could not subsist without dependence on him." "The
paper," he says elsewhere, "was advanced indeed. It was raised to a
greater thing than I intended it."
It is probable that Addison, when he sent across St. George's Channel
his first contributions to the Tatler, had no notion of the extent and
variety of his own powers. He was the possessor of a vast mine rich with
a hundred ores. But he had been acquainted only with the least precious
part of his treasures, and had hitherto contented himself with producing
sometimes copper and sometimes lead, intermingled with a little silver.
All at once, and by mere accident, he had lighted on an inexhaustible
vein of the finest gold.
The mere choice and arrangement of his words would have sufficed to make
his essays classical. For never, not even by Dryden, not even by Temple,
had the English language been written with such sweetness, grace, and
facility. But this was the smallest part of Addison's praise. Had he
clothed his thoughts in the half French style of Horace Walpole, or in
the half Latin style of Dr. Johnson, or in the half German jargon of the
present day, his genius would have triumphed over all faults of manner.
As a moral satirist he stands unrivalled. If ever the best Tatlers and
Spectators were equalled in their own kind, we should be inclined to
guess that it must have been by the lost comedies of Menander.
In wit, properly so called, Addison was not inferior to Cowley or
Butler. No single ode of Cowley contains so many happy analogies as are
crowded into the lines to Sir Godfrey Kneller; and we would undertake to
collect from the Spectators as great a number of ingenious illustrations
as can be found in Hudibras. The still higher faculty of invention
Addison possessed in still larger measure. The numerous fictions,
generally original, often wild and grotesque, but always singularly
graceful and happy, which are found in his essays, fully entitle him to
the rank of a great poet, a rank to which his metrical compositions give
him no claim. As an observer of life, of manners, of all the shades of
human character, he stands in the first class. And what he observed he
had the art of communicating in two widely different ways. He could
describe virtues, vices, habits, whims, as well as Clarendon. But he
could do something better. He could call human beings into existence,
and make them exhibit themselves. If we wish to find anything more
vivid than Addison's best portraits, we must go either to Shakespeare or
to Cervantes.
But what shall we say of Addison's humor, of his sense of the ludicrous,
of his power of awakening that sense in others, and of drawing mirth
from incidents which occur every day, and from little peculiarities of
temper and manner, such as may be found in every man? We feel the charm:
we give ourselves up to it: but we strive in vain to analyze it.
Perhaps the best way of describing Addison's peculiar pleasantry is to
compare it with the pleasantry of some other great satirists. The three
most eminent masters of the art of ridicule, during the eighteenth
century, were, we conceive, Addison, Swift, and Voltaire. Which of the
three had the greatest power of moving laughter may be questioned. But
each of them, within his own domain, was supreme.
Voltaire is the prince of buffoons. His merriment is without disguise or
restraint. He gambols; he grins; he shakes his sides; he points the
finger; he turns up the nose; he shoots out the tongue. The manner of
Swift is the very opposite to this. He moves laughter, but never joins
in it. He appears in his works such as he appeared in society. All the
company are convulsed with merriment, while the Dean, the author of all
the mirth, preserves an invincible gravity, and even sourness of aspect,
and gives utterance to the most eccentric and ludicrous fancies, with
the air of a man reading the commination service.
The manner of Addison is as remote from that of Swift as from that of
Voltaire. He neither laughs out like the French wit, nor, like the Irish
wit, throws a double portion of severity into his countenance while
laughing inwardly; but preserves a look peculiarly his own, a look of
demure serenity, disturbed only by an arch sparkle of the eye, an almost
imperceptible elevation of the brow, an almost imperceptible curl of
the lip. His tone is never that either of a Jack Pudding or of a Cynic.
It is that of a gentleman, in whom the quickest sense of the ridiculous
is constantly tempered by good nature and good breeding.
We own that the humor of Addison is, in our opinion, of a more delicious
flavor than the humor of either Swift or Voltaire. Thus much, at least,
is certain, that both Swift and Voltaire have been successfully
mimicked, and that no man has yet been able to mimic Addison. The letter
of the Abbe Coyer to Pansophe is Voltaire all over, and imposed, during
a long time, on the Academicians of Paris. There are passages in
Arbuthnot's satirical works which we, at least, cannot distinguish from
Swift's best writing. But of the many eminent men who have made Addison
their model, though several have copied his mere diction with happy
effect, none has been able to catch the tone of his pleasantry. In the
World, in the Connoisseur, in the Mirror, in the Lounger, there are
numerous papers written in obvious imitation of his Tatlers and
Spectators. Most of those papers have some merit; many are very lively
and amusing; but there is not a single one which could be passed off as
Addison's on a critic of the smallest perspicacity.
But that which chiefly distinguishes Addison from Swift, from Voltaire,
from almost all the other great masters of ridicule, is the grace, the
nobleness, the moral purity, which we find even in his merriment.
Severity, gradually hardening and darkening into misanthropy,
characterizes the works of Swift. The nature of Voltaire was, indeed,
not inhuman; but he venerated nothing. Neither in the masterpieces of
art nor in the purest examples of virtue, neither in the Great First
Cause nor in the awful enigma of the grave, could he see anything but
subjects for drollery. The more solemn and august the theme, the more
monkey-like was his grimacing and chattering. The mirth of Swift is the
mirth of Mephistopheles; the mirth of Voltaire is the mirth of Puck.
If, as Soame Jenyns oddly imagined, a portion of the happiness of
Seraphim and just men made perfect be derived from an exquisite
perception of the ludicrous, their mirth must surely be none other than
the mirth of Addison; a mirth consistent with tender compassion for all
that is frail, and with profound reverence for all that is sublime.
Nothing great, nothing amiable, no moral duty, no doctrine of natural or
revealed religion, has ever been associated by Addison with any
degrading idea. His humanity is without parallel in literary history.
The highest proof of virtue is to possess boundless power without
abusing it. No kind of power is more formidable than the power of making
men ridiculous; and that power Addison possessed in boundless measure.
How grossly that power was abused by Swift and by Voltaire is well
known. But of Addison it may be confidently affirmed that he has
blackened no man's character, nay, that it would be difficult, if not
impossible, to find in all the volumes which he has left us a single
taunt which can be called ungenerous or unkind. Yet he had detractors,
whose malignity might have seemed to justify as terrible a revenge as
that which men not superior to him in genius wreaked on Bettesworth and
on Franc de Pompignan. He was a politician; he was the best writer of
his party; he lived in times of fierce excitement, in times when persons
of high character and station stooped to scurrility such as is now
practised only by the basest of mankind. Yet no provocation and no
example could induce him to return railing for railing.
Of the service which his Essays rendered to morality it is difficult to
speak too highly. It is true that when the Tatler appeared, that age of
outrageous profaneness and licentiousness which followed the Restoration
had passed away. Jeremy Collier had shamed the theatres into something
which, compared with the excesses of Etherege and Wycherley, might be
called decency. Yet there still lingered in the public mind a
pernicious notion that there was some connection between genius and
profligacy, between the domestic virtues and the sullen formality of the
Puritans. That error it is the glory of Addison to have dispelled. He
taught the nation that the faith and the morality of Hale and Tillotson
might be found in company with wit more sparkling than the wit of
Congreve, and with humor richer than the humor of Vanbrugh. So
effectually, indeed, did he retort on vice the mockery which had
recently been directed against virtue, that, since his time, the open
violation of decency has always been considered among us as the mark of
a fool. And this revolution, the greatest and most salutary ever
effected by any satirist, he accomplished, be it remembered, without
writing one personal lampoon.
In the early contributions of Addison to the Tatler his peculiar powers
were not fully exhibited. Yet from the first, his superiority to all his
coadjutors was evident. Some of his later Tatlers are fully equal to
anything that he ever wrote. Among the portraits, we most admire Tom
Folio, Ned Softly, and the Political Upholsterer. The proceedings of the
Court of Honor, the Thermometer of Zeal, the story of the Frozen Words,
the Memoirs of the Shilling, are excellent specimens of that ingenious
and lively species of fiction in which Addison excelled all men. There
is one still better paper of the same class. But though that paper, a
hundred and thirty-three years ago, was probably thought as edifying as
one of Smallridge's sermons, we dare not indicate it to the squeamish
readers of the nineteenth century.
During the session of Parliament which commenced in November, 1709, and
which the impeachment of Sacheverell has made memorable, Addison appears
to have resided in London. The Tatler was now more popular than any
periodical paper had ever been; and his connection with it was generally
known. It was not known, however, that almost everything good in the
Tatler was his. The truth is that the fifty or sixty numbers which we
owe to him were not merely the best, but so decidedly the best that any
five of them are more valuable than all the two hundred numbers in which
he had no share.
He required, at this time, all the solace which he could derive from
literary success. The Queen had always disliked the Whigs. She had
during some years disliked the Marlborough family. But, reigning by a
disputed title, she could not venture directly to oppose herself to a
majority of both Houses of Parliament; and, engaged as she was in a war
on the event of which her own Crown was staked, she could not venture to
disgrace a great and successful general. But at length, in the year
1710, the causes which had restrained her from showing her aversion to
the Low Church party ceased to operate. The trial of Sacheverell
produced an outbreak of public feeling scarcely less violent than the
outbreaks which we can ourselves remember in 1820 and in 1831. The
country gentlemen, the country clergymen, the rabble of the towns, were
all, for once, on the same side. It was clear that, if a general
election took place before the excitement abated, the Tories would have
a majority. The services of Marlborough had been so splendid that they
were no longer necessary. The Queen's throne was secure from all attack
on the part of Louis. Indeed, it seemed much more likely that the
English and German armies would divide the spoils of Versailles and
Marli than that a Marshal of France would bring back the Pretender to
St. James's. The Queen, acting by the advice of Harley, determined to
dismiss her servants. In June the change commenced. Sunderland was the
first who fell. The Tories exulted over his fall. The Whigs tried,
during a few weeks, to persuade themselves that her Majesty had acted
only from personal dislike to the Secretary, and that she meditated no
further alteration. But, early in August, Godolphin was surprised by a
letter from Anne, which directed him to break his white staff. Even
after this event, the irresolution or dissimulation of Harley kept up
the hopes of the Whigs during another month; and then the ruin became
rapid and violent. The Parliament was dissolved. The Ministers were
turned out. The Tories were called to office. The tide of popularity ran
violently in favor of the High Church party. That party, feeble in the
late House of Commons, was now irresistible. The power which the Tories
had thus suddenly acquired, they used with blind and stupid ferocity.
The howl which the whole pack set up for prey and for blood appalled
even him who had roused and unchained them. When, at this distance of
time, we calmly review the conduct of the discarded Ministers, we cannot
but feel a movement of indignation at the injustice with which they were
treated. No body of men had ever administered the government with more
energy, ability, and moderation; and their success had been proportioned
to their wisdom. They had saved Holland and Germany. They had humbled
France. They had, as it seemed, all but torn Spain from the House of
Bourbon. They had made England the first power in Europe. At home they
had united England and Scotland. They had respected the rights of
conscience and the liberty of the subject. They retired, leaving their
country at the height of prosperity and glory. And yet they were pursued
to their retreat by such a roar of obloquy as was never raised against
the government which threw away thirteen colonies, or against the
government which sent a gallant army to perish in the ditches of
Walcheren.
None of the Whigs suffered more in the general wreck than Addison. He
had just sustained some heavy pecuniary losses, of the nature of which
we are imperfectly informed, when his Secretaryship was taken from him.
He had reason to believe that he should also be deprived of the small
Irish office which he held by patent. He had just resigned his
Fellowship. It seems probable that he had already ventured to raise his
eyes to a great lady, and that, while his political friends were in
power, and while his own fortunes were rising, he had been, in the
phrase of the romances which were then fashionable, permitted to hope.
But Mr. Addison the ingenious writer and Mr. Addison the Chief Secretary
were, in her ladyship's opinion, two very different persons. All these
calamities united, however, could not disturb the serene cheerfulness of
a mind conscious of innocence, and rich in its own wealth. He told his
friends, with smiling resignation, that they ought to admire his
philosophy, that he had lost at once his fortune, his place, his
fellowship, and his mistress, that he must think of turning tutor again,
and yet that his spirits were as good as ever.
He had one consolation. Of the unpopularity which his friends had
incurred, he had no share. Such was the esteem with which he was
regarded that, while the most violent measures were taken for the
purpose of forcing Tory members on Whig corporations, he was returned to
Parliament without even a contest. Swift who was now in London, and who
had already determined on quitting the Whigs, wrote to Stella in these
remarkable words: "The Tories carry it among the new members six to one.
Mr. Addison's election has passed easy and undisputed; and I believe if
he had a mind to be king, he would hardly be refused."
The good will with which the Tories regarded Addison is the more
honorable to him, because it had not been purchased by any concession on
his part. During the general election he published a political Journal,
entitled the Whig Examiner. Of that Journal it may be sufficient to say
that Johnson, in spite of his strong political prejudices, pronounced it
to be superior in wit to any of Swift's writings on the other side. When
it ceased to appear, Swift, in a letter to Stella, expressed his
exultation at the death of so formidable an antagonist. "He might well
rejoice," says Johnson, "at the death of that which he could not have
killed." "On no occasion," he adds, "was the genius of Addison more
vigorously exerted, and on none did the superiority of his powers more
evidently appear."
The only use which Addison appears to have made of the favor with which
he was regarded by the Tories was to save some of his friends from the
general ruin of the Whig party. He felt himself to be in a situation
which made it his duty to take a decided part in politics. But the case
of Steele and of Ambrose Philips was different. For Philips, Addison
even condescended to solicit, with what success we have not ascertained.
Steele held two places. He was Gazetteer, and he was also a Commissioner
of Stamps. The Gazette was taken from him. But he was suffered to retain
his place in the Stamp Office, on an implied understanding that he
should not be active against the new government; and he was, during more
than two years, induced by Addison to observe this armistice with
tolerable fidelity.
Isaac Bickerstaff accordingly became silent upon politics, and the
article of news, which had once formed about one third of his paper,
altogether disappeared. The Tatler had completely changed its character.
It was now nothing but a series of essays on books, morals, and manners.
Steele therefore resolved to bring it to a close, and to commence a new
work on an improved plan. It was announced that this new work would be
published daily. The undertaking was generally regarded as bold, or
rather rash; but the event amply justified the confidence with which
Steele relied on the fertility of Addison's genius. On the second of
January, 1711, appeared the last Tatler. At the beginning of March
following, appeared the first of an incomparable series of papers,
containing observations on life and literature by an imaginary
Spectator.
The Spectator himself was conceived and drawn by Addison; and it is not
easy to doubt that the portrait was meant to be in some features a
likeness of the painter. The Spectator is a gentleman who, after passing
a studious youth at the University, has travelled on classic ground, and
has bestowed much attention on curious points of antiquity. He has, on
his return, fixed his residence in London, and has observed all the
forms of life which are to be found in that great city, has daily
listened to the wits of Will's, has smoked with the philosophers of the
Grecian, and has mingled with the parsons at Child's, and with the
politicians at the St. James's. In the morning, he often listens to the
hum of the Exchange; in the evening, his face is constantly to be seen
in the pit of Drury Lane Theatre. But an insurmountable bashfulness
prevents him from opening his mouth, except in a small circle of
intimate friends.
These friends were first sketched by Steele. Four of the club, the
templar, the clergyman, the soldier, and the merchant, were
uninteresting figures, fit only for a background. But the other two, an
old country baronet and an old town rake, though not delineated with a
very delicate pencil, had some good strokes. Addison took the rude
outlines into his own hands, retouched them, colored them, and is in
truth the creator of the Sir Roger de Coverley and the Will Honeycomb
with whom we are all familiar.
The plan of the Spectator must be allowed to be both original and
eminently happy. Every valuable essay in the series may be read with
pleasure separately; yet the five or six hundred essays form a whole,
and a whole which has the interest of a novel. It must be remembered,
too, that at that time no novel, giving a lively and powerful picture of
the common life and manners of England, had appeared. Richardson was
working as a compositor. Fielding was robbing birds' nests. Smollett was
not yet born. The narrative, therefore, which connects together the
Spectator's Essays, gave to our ancestors their first taste of an
exquisite and untried pleasure. That narrative was indeed constructed
with no art or labor. The events were such events as occur every day.
Sir Roger comes up to town to see Eugenio, as the worthy baronet always
calls Prince Eugene, goes with the Spectator on the water to Spring
Gardens, walks among the tombs in the Abbey, and is frightened by the
Mohawks, but conquers his apprehension so far as to go to the theatre
when the Distressed Mother is acted. The Spectator pays a visit in the
summer to Coverley Hall, is charmed with the old house, the old butler,
and the old chaplain, eats a jack caught by Will Wimble, rides to the
assizes, and hears a point of law discussed by Tom Touchy. At last a
letter from the honest butler brings to the club the news that Sir Roger
is dead. Will Honeycomb marries and reforms at sixty. The club breaks
up; and the Spectator resigns his functions. Such events can hardly be
said to form a plot; yet they are related with such truth, such grace,
such wit, such humor, such pathos, such knowledge of the human heart,
such knowledge of the ways of the world, that they charm us on the
hundredth perusal. We have not the least doubt that, if Addison had
written a novel, on an extensive plan, it would have been superior to
any that we possess. As it is, he is entitled to be considered, not only
as the greatest of the English essayists, but as the forerunner of the
great English novelists.