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 edite the Paradise Lost. Inigo failed when he
attempted to rival the {319}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 honourable
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 {320}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
humour, 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 honourably 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.
THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ADDISON. (1)
(_Edinburgh Review_, July, 1843.)
Some {321}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 rigour 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. (2)
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
(1) _The, Life of Joseph Addison_. By Lucy Aikin. 2 vols.
8vo. London* 1843.
(2) Orlando Furioso, xlv. 68.
{322}her to the privileges enjoyed by good writers. One of those
privileges we hold to be this, that such writer’s, 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 Shakspeare and
Raleigh, than with Congreve and Prior; and is far more at home among
the ruffs and peaked boards 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 {323}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 favourite 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
{324}in his diameter; 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 he 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 {325}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 neighbourhood, 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 {326}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 honour 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 Colleire. 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 {327}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 Magdalene 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 favourite 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 Magdalene
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 {328}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
appeal’ 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 {329}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 {330}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 He about
the Thundering; Lemon, 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-labourers were to have been Boyle and Blackmore. Boyle is
{331}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 apophthegm, 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 favourite piece is the Battle of the Cranes
and Pygmies; for in that piece we discern a gleam of the fancy
and humour which many years later enlivened thousands of breakfast
{332}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, wind: alone is enough to strike an awe into the
beholders.”
About thirty years before Gulliver’s Travels appeared,
Addison wrote these lines:
“Jamque acies inter médias sese arduus infert
Pygmeadnm ductor, qui, inajestate verendus,
Incessuque gravis, reliqius supereminet omnes
Mole gigantea, mediumque exsurgit in ulnam.”
The Latin poems of Addison were greatly and justly admired both at
Oxford and Cambridge, before his name had ever been heard by the
wits who thronged the coffeehouses round Drnry-Lane theatre. In his
twenty-second year, he ventured to appear before the public as a writer
of English verse. He addressed some complimentary lines to Dryden, who,
after many triumphs and many reverses, had at length reached a secure
and lonely eminence among the literary men of that age. Dryden appears
to have been much gratified by the young scholar’s praise; and an
interchange of civilities and good offices followed. Addison was
probably introduced by Dryden to Congreve, and was certainly presented
by Congreve to Charles Montague, who was then Chancellor of the
Exchequer, and leader of the Whig party in the House of Commons.