Addison Part 8

The _Plebeian_ returned to the attack with spirit and with some acrimony in two numbers published March 29th and 30th, and the _Old Whig_ made a somewhat contemptuous reply on April 2nd. "Every reader," says Johnson, "surely must regret that these two ill.u.s.trious friends, after so many years pa.s.sed in confidence and endearment, in unity of interest, conformity of opinion, and fellows.h.i.+p of study, should finally part in acrimonious opposition. Such a controversy was 'Bellum plusquam _civile_,'

as Lucan expresses it. Why could not faction find other advocates? But among the uncertainties of the human state we are doomed to number the instability of friends.h.i.+p."

The rupture seems the more painful when we find Steele, in his third and last _Plebeian_, published April 6th, taunting his opponent with his tardiness in taking the field, at the very moment when his former friend and school-fellow--unknown to him of course--was dying. Asthma, the old enemy that had driven Addison from office, had returned; dropsy supervened, and he died, 17th June, 1719, at Holland House, at the early age of forty-seven. We may imagine the grief, contrition, and remorse that must have torn the affectionate heart of Steele when he had found he had been vexing the last hours of one whom, in spite of all their differences, he loved so well. He had always regarded Addison with almost religious reverence, which did not yield even to acts of severity on his friend's part that would have estranged the feelings of men of a disposition less simple and impulsive. Addison had once lent him 1000 to build a house at Hampton Court, instructing his lawyer to recover the amount when due. On Steele's failure to repay the money, his friend ordered the house and furniture to be sold and the balance to be paid to Steele, writing to him at the same time that he had taken the step to arouse him from his lethargy. B. Victor, the actor, a friend of Steele, who is the authority for the story, says that Steele accepted the reproof with "philosophical composure," and that the incident caused no diminution in their friends.h.i.+p. Political differences at last produced a coldness between them, and in 1717 Steele writes to his wife, "I ask no favour of Mr.

Secretary Addison." Great must have been the revulsion of feeling in a man of his nature when he learned that death had now rendered impossible the renewal of the old a.s.sociations. All the love, admiration, and enthusiasm for Addison, which his heart and memory still preserved, broke out in the letter to Congreve which he prefixed to _The Drummer_.

Of the closing scene of Addison's life we know little except on rumour. A report was current in Johnson's time, and reached the antiquary John Nichols at the close of the last century, that his life was shortened by over-drinking. But as usual the scandal, when traced to its source, seems to originate with Pope, who told Spence that he himself was once one of the circle at b.u.t.ton's, and left it because he found that their prolonged sittings were injuring his health. It is highly probable that Addison's phlegmatic temperament required to be aroused by wine into conversational activity, and that he was able to drink more than most of his companions without being affected by it; but to suppose that he indulged a sensual appet.i.te to excess is contrary alike to all that we know of his character and to the direct evidence of Bishop Berkeley, who, writing of the first performance of _Cato_, says: "I was present with Mr. Addison and a few more friends in a side box, where we had a table and two or three flasks of Burgundy and champagne, with which the author (who is a very sober man) thought it necessary to support his spirits."

Another story, told on the same questionable authority, represents him as having sent on his death-bed for Gay, and asked his forgiveness for some injury which he said he had done him, but which he did not specify. From the more trustworthy report of Young we learn that he asked to see the Earl of Warwick, and said to him, "See in what peace a Christian can die:"

words which are supposed to explain the allusion of the lines in Tickell's elegy--

"He taught us how to live and (oh! too high The price of knowledge) taught us how to die."

His body, after lying in state in the Jerusalem Chamber, was buried by night in Westminster Abbey. The service was performed by Atterbury, and the scene is described by Tickell in a fine pa.s.sage, probably inspired by a still finer one written by his own rival and his friend's satirist:

"Can I forget the dismal night that gave My soul's best part for ever to the grave?

How silent did his old companions tread, By midnight lamps, the mansions of the dead, Through breathing statues, then unheeded things, Through rows of warriors, and through walks of kings!

What awe did the slow solemn march inspire, The pealing organ, and the pausing choir; The duties by the lawn-robed prelate paid, And the last words that dust to dust conveyed!

While speechless o'er the closing grave we bend, Accept these tears, thou dear departed friend!

Oh gone for ever; take this last adieu, And sleep in peace next thy loved Montague."[68]

He left by the Countess of Warwick one daughter, who lived in his old house at Bilton, and died unmarried in 1797.

CHAPTER IX.

THE GENIUS OF ADDISON.

Such is Addison's history, which, scanty as it is, goes far towards justifying the glowing panegyric bestowed by Macaulay on "the unsullied statesman, the accomplished scholar, the consummate painter of life and manners, the great satirist who alone knew how to use ridicule without abusing it; who, without inflicting a wound, effected a great social reform; and who reconciled wit and virtue after a long and painful separation, during which wit had been led astray by profligacy, and virtue by fanaticism." It is wanting, no doubt, in romantic incident and personal interest, but the same may be said of the life of Scott; and what do we know of the personality of Homer and Shakespeare? The real life of these writers is to be found in their work; and there, too, though on a different level and in a different shape, are we to look for the character of the creator of Sir Roger de Coverley. But, while it seems possible to divine the personal tastes and feelings of Shakespeare and Scott under a hundred different ideal forms of their own invention, it is not in these that the genius of Addison most characteristically embodies itself. Did his reputation rest on _Rosamond_ or _Cato_ or _The Campaign_, his name would be little better known to us than any among that crowd of mediocrities who have been immortalised in Johnson's _Lives of the Poets_. The work of Addison consisted in building up a public opinion which, in spite of its durable solidity, seems, like the great Gothic cathedrals, to absorb into itself the individuality of the architect. A vigorous effort of thought is required to perceive how strong this individuality must have been. We have to reflect on the ease with which, even in these days when the foundations of all authority are called in question, we form judgments on questions of morals, breeding, and taste, and then to dwell in imagination on the state of conflict in all matters religious, moral, and artistic, which prevailed in the period between the Restoration and the succession of the House of Hanover. To whom do we owe the comparative harmony we enjoy? Undoubtedly to the authors of the _Spectator_, and first among these, by universal consent, to Addison.

Addison's own disposition seems to have been of that rare and admirable sort which Hamlet praised in Horatio:

"Thou hast been As one in suffering all that suffers nothing: A man that Fortune's buffets and rewards Has ta'en with equal thanks; and blessed are those Whose blood and judgment are so well commingled That they are not a pipe for Fortune's finger To sound what stop she please."

These lines fittingly describe the patient serenity and dignified independence with which Addison worked his way amid great hards.h.i.+ps and difficulties to the highest position in the State; but they have a yet more honourable application to the task he performed of reconciling the social dissensions of his countrymen. "The blood and judgment well commingled" are visible in the standard of conduct which he held up for Englishmen in his writings, as well as in his use of the weapon of ridicule against all aberrations from good breeding and common-sense.

Those only will estimate him at his true worth who will give, what Johnson says is his due, "their days and nights" to the study of the _Spectator_.

But from the general reader less must be expected; and as the first chapter of this volume has been devoted to a brief view of the disorder of society with which Addison had to deal, it may be fitting in the last to indicate some of the main points in which he is to be regarded as the reconciler of parties and the founder of public opinion.

I have shown how, after the final subversion by the Civil War of the old-fas.h.i.+oned Catholic and Feudal standards of social life, two opposing ideals of conduct remained harshly confronting each other in the respective moral codes of the Court and the Puritans. The victorious Puritans, averse to all the pleasures of sense and intolerant of the most harmless of natural instincts, had oppressed the nation with a religious despotism. The nation, groaning under the yoke, brought back its banished monarch, but was soon shocked to find sensual Pleasure exalted into a wors.h.i.+p, and Impiety into a creed. Though civil war had ceased, the two parties maintained a truceless conflict of opinion: the Puritan proscribing all amus.e.m.e.nt because it was patronised by the G.o.dless malignants; the courtiers holding that no gentleman could be religious or strict in his morals without becoming tainted with the cant of the Roundheads. This harsh antagonism of sentiment is humorously ill.u.s.trated by the excellent Sir Roger, who is made to moralise on the stupidity of party violence by recalling an incident of his own boyhood:

"The worthy knight, being but a stripling, had occasion to inquire which was the way to St. Anne's Lane, upon which the person whom he spoke to, instead of answering his question, called him a young Popish cur, and asked him who made Anne a saint. The boy, being in some confusion, inquired of the next he met which was the way to Anne's Lane; but was called a p.r.i.c.k-eared cur for his pains, and, instead of being shown the way, was told that she had been a saint before he was born, and would be one after he was hanged. 'Upon this,'

says Sir Roger, 'I did not think it fit to repeat the former question, but going into every lane of the neighbourhood, asked what they called the name of that lane.'"[69]

It was Addison's aim to prove to the contending parties what a large extent of ground they might occupy in common. He showed the courtiers, in a form of light literature which pleased their imagination, and with a grace and charm of manner that they were well qualified to appreciate, that true religion was not opposed to good breeding. To this cla.s.s in particular he addressed his papers on Devotion,[70] on Prayer,[71] on Faith,[72] on Temporal and Eternal Happiness.[73] On the other hand, he brought his raillery to bear on the super-solemnity of the trading and professional cla.s.ses, in whom the spirit of Puritanism was most prevalent.

"About an age ago," says he, "it was the fas.h.i.+on in England for every one that would be thought religious to throw as much sanct.i.ty as possible into his face, and, in particular, to abstain from all appearances of mirth and pleasantry, which were looked upon as the marks of a carnal mind. The saint was of a sorrowful countenance, and generally eaten up with spleen and melancholy."[74]

It was doubtless for the benefit of this cla.s.s that he wrote his three Essays on Cheerfulness,[75] in which the gloom of the Puritan creed is corrected by arguments founded on Natural Religion.

"The cheerfulness of heart," he observes in a charming pa.s.sage, "which springs up in us from the survey of Nature's works is an admirable preparation for grat.i.tude. The mind has gone a great way towards praise and thanksgiving that is filled with such secret gladness--a grateful reflection on the Supreme Cause who produces it, sanctifies it in the soul, and gives it its proper value. Such an habitual disposition of mind consecrates every field and wood, turns an ordinary walk into a morning or evening sacrifice, and will improve those transient gleams of joy, which naturally brighten up and refresh the soul on such occasions, into an inviolable and perpetual state of bliss and happiness."

The same qualities appear in his dramatic criticisms. The corruption of the stage was to the Puritan, or the Puritanic moralist, not so much the effect as the cause of the corruption of society. To Jeremy Collier and his imitators the theatre in all its manifestations is equally abominable: they see no difference between Shakespeare and Wycherley. Dryden, who bowed before Collier's rebuke with a penitent dignity that does him high honour, yet rallies him with humour on this point:

"Perhaps the Parson stretched a point too far When with our Theatres he waged a war; He tells you that this very Moral Age Received the first infection from the Stage; But sure a banisht Court with Lewdness fraught The seeds of open Vice returning brought; Thus lodged (as vice by great example thrives) It first debauched the daughters and the wives."

Dryden was quite right. The Court after the Restoration was for the moment the sole school of manners; and the dramatists only reflected on the stage the inverted ideas which were accepted in society as the standard of good breeding. All sentiments founded on reverence for religion or the family or honourable industry, were banished from the drama because they were unacceptable at Court. The idea of virtue in a married woman would have seemed prodigious to Shadwell or Wycherley; Vanbrugh had no scruples in presenting to an audience a drunken parson in Sir John Brute; the merchant or tradesman seemed, like Congreve's Alderman Fondlewife, to exist solely that their wives might be seduced by men of fas.h.i.+on. Addison and his disciples saw that these unnatural creations of the theatre were the product of the corruption of society, and that it was men, not inst.i.tutions, that needed reform. Steele, always the first to feel a generous impulse, took the lead in raising the tone of stage morality in a paper which, characteristically enough, was suggested by some reflections on a pa.s.sage in one of his own plays.[76] He followed up his attack by an admirable criticism, part of which has been already quoted, on Etherege's _Man in the Mode_, the hero of which, Sir Fopling Flutter, who had long been the model of young men of wit and fas.h.i.+on, he shows to be "a direct knave in his designs and a clown in his language."[77]

As usual, Addison improves the opportunity which Steele affords him, and with his grave irony exposes the ridiculous principle of the fas.h.i.+onable comedy by a simple statement of fact:

"Cuckoldom," says he, "is the basis of most of our modern plays. If an alderman appears upon the stage you may be sure it is in order to be cuckolded. An husband that is a little grave or elderly generally meets with the same fate. Knights and baronets, country squires, and justices of the quorum, come up to town for no other purpose. I have seen poor Dogget cuckolded in all these capacities. In short, our English writers are as frequently severe upon this innocent, unhappy creature, commonly known by the name of a cuckold, as the ancient comic writers were upon an eating parasite or a vainglorious soldier.

"... I have sometimes thought of compiling a system of ethics out of the writings of these corrupt poets, under the t.i.tle of Stage Morality; but I have been diverted from this thought by a project which has been executed by an ingenious gentleman of my acquaintance.

He has composed, it seems, the history of a young fellow who has taken all his notions of the world from the stage, and who has directed himself in every circ.u.mstance of his life and conversation by the maxims and examples of the fine gentleman in English comedies. If I can prevail upon him to give me a copy of this new-fas.h.i.+oned novel, I will bestow on it a place in my works, and question not but it may have as good an effect upon the drama as Don Quixote had upon romance."[78]

Nothing could be more skilful than this. Collier's invective no doubt produced a momentary flutter among the dramatists, who, however, soon found they had little to fear from arguments which appealed only to that serious portion of society which did not frequent the theatre. But Addison's penetrating wit, founded as it was on truth and reason, was appreciated by the fas.h.i.+onable world. Dorimant and Sir Fopling Flutter felt ashamed of themselves. The cuckold disappeared from the stage. In society itself marriage no longer appeared ridiculous.

"It is my custom," says the _Spectator_ in one of his late papers, "to take frequent opportunities of inquiring from time to time what success my speculations meet with in the town. I am glad to find, in particular, that my discourses on marriage have been well received. A friend of mine gives me to understand, from Doctors' Commons, that more licenses have been taken out there of late than usual. I am likewise informed of several pretty fellows who have resolved to commence heads of families by the first favourable opportunity. One of them writes me word that he is ready to enter into the bonds of matrimony provided I will give it him under my hand (as I now do) that a man may show his face in good company after he is married, and that he need not be ashamed to treat a woman with kindness who puts herself into his power for life."[79]

So, too, in politics, it was not to be expected that Addison's moderation should exercise a restraining influence on the violence of Parliamentary parties. But in helping to form a reasonable public opinion in the more reflective part of the nation at large, his efforts could not have been unavailing. He was a steady and consistent supporter of the Whig party, and Bolingbroke found that, in spite of his mildness, his principles were proof against all the seductions of interest. He was, in fact, a Whig in the sense in which all the best political writers in our literature, to whichever party they may have nominally belonged--Bolingbroke, Swift, and Canning, as much as Somers and Burke--would have avowed themselves Whigs; as one, that is to say, who desired above all things to maintain the const.i.tution of his country. He attached himself to the Whigs of his period because he saw in them, as the a.s.sociated defenders of the liberties of the Parliament, the best counterpoise to the still preponderant power of the Crown. But he would have repudiated as vigorously as Burke the democratic principles to which Fox, under the stimulus of party spirit, committed the Whig connection at the outbreak of the French Revolution; and for that stupid and ferocious spirit, generated by party, which would deny to opponents even the appearance of virtue and intelligence, no man had a more wholesome contempt. Page after page of the _Spectator_ shows that Addison perceived as clearly as Swift the theoretical absurdity of the party system, and tolerated it only as an evil inseparable from the imperfection of human nature and free inst.i.tutions. He regarded it as the parent of hypocrisy and self-deception.

"Intemperate zeal, bigotry, and persecution for any party or opinion, how praiseworthy soever they may appear to weak men of our own principles, produce infinite calamities among mankind, and are highly criminal in their own nature; and yet how many persons, eminent for piety, suffer such monstrous and absurd principles of action to take root in their minds under the colour of virtues! For my own part, I must own I never yet knew any party so just and reasonable that a man could follow it in its height and violence and at the same time be innocent."[80]

As to party-writing, he considered it identical with lying.

"A man," says he, "is looked upon as bereft of common-sense that gives credit to the relations of party-writers; nay, his own friends shake their heads at him and consider him in no other light than as an officious tool or a well-meaning idiot. When it was formerly the fas.h.i.+on to husband a lie and trump it up in some extraordinary emergency it generally did execution, and was not a little useful to the faction that made use of it; but at present every man is upon his guard: the artifice has been too often repeated to take effect."[81]

Sir Roger de Coverley "often closes his narrative with reflections on the mischief that parties do in the country."

"There cannot," says the _Spectator_ himself, "a greater judgment befall a country than such a dreadful spirit of division as rends a government into two distinct people, and makes them greater strangers and more averse to one another than if they were actually two different nations. The effects of such a division are pernicious to the last degree, not only with regard to those advantages which they give the common enemy, but to those private evils which they produce in the heart of almost every particular person. This influence is very fatal both to men's morals and to their understandings; it sinks the virtue of a nation, and not only so, but destroys even common-sense."[82]

Nothing in the work of Addison is more suggestive of the just and well-balanced character of his genius than his papers on Women. It has been already said that the seventeenth century exhibits the decay of the Feudal Ideal. The pa.s.sionate adoration with which women were regarded in the age of chivalry degenerated after the Restoration into a habit of insipid gallantry or of brutal license. Men of fas.h.i.+on found no mean for their affections between a Sacharissa and a d.u.c.h.ess of Cleveland, while the domestic standard of the time reduced the remainder of the s.e.x to the position of virtuous but uninteresting household drudges. Of woman, as the companion and the helpmate of man, the source of all the grace and refinements of social intercourse, no trace is to be found in the literature of the Restoration except in the Eve of Milton's still unstudied poem: it is not too much to say that she was the creation of the _Spectator_.

The feminine ideal, at which the essayists of the period aimed, is very well described by Steele in a style which he imitated from Addison:

"The other day," he writes, in the character of a fict.i.tious female correspondent, "we were several of us at a tea-table, and, according to custom and your own advice, had the _Spectator_ read among us. It was that paper wherein you are pleased to treat with great freedom that character which you call a woman's man. We gave up all the kinds you have mentioned except those who, you say, are our constant visitants. I was upon the occasion commissioned by the company to write to you and tell you 'that we shall not part with the men we have at present until the men of sense think fit to relieve them and give us their company in their stead.' You cannot imagine but we love to hear reason and good sense better than the ribaldry we are at present entertained with, but we must have company, and among us very inconsiderable is better than none at all. We are made for the cements of society, and come into the world to create relations amongst mankind, and solitude is an unnatural being to us."[83]

In contrast with the character of the writer of this letter--a type which is always recurring in the _Spectator_--modest and unaffected, but at the same time shrewd, witty, and refined, are introduced very eccentric specimens of womanhood, all tending to ill.u.s.trate the derangement of the social order--the masculine woman, the learned woman, the female politician, besides those that more properly belong to the nature of the s.e.x, the prude and the coquette. A very graceful example of Addison's peculiar humour is found in his satire on that false ambition in women which prompts them to imitate the manners of men:

"The girls of quality," he writes, describing the customs of the Republic of Women, "from six to twelve years old, were put to public schools, where they learned to box and play at cudgels, with several other accomplishments of the same nature, so that nothing was more usual than to see a little miss returning home at night with a broken pate, or two or three teeth knocked out of her head. They were afterwards taught to ride the great horse, to shoot, dart, or sling, and listed themselves into several companies in order to perfect themselves in military exercises. No woman was to be married till she had killed her man. The ladies of fas.h.i.+on used to play with young lions instead of lap-dogs; and when they had made any parties of diversion, instead of entertaining themselves at ombre and piquet, they would wrestle and pitch the bar for a whole afternoon together.

There was never any such thing as a blush seen or a sigh heard in the whole commonwealth."[84]

The amazon was a type of womanhood peculiarly distasteful to Addison, whose humour delighted itself with all the curiosities and refinements of feminine caprice--the fan, the powder-box, and the petticoat. Nothing can more characteristically suggest the exquisiteness of his fancy than a comparison of Swift's verses on a _Lady's Dressing-Room_ with the following, which evidently gave Pope a hint for one of the happiest pa.s.sages in _The Rape of the Lock_:

"The single dress of a woman of quality is often the product of a hundred climates. The m.u.f.f and the fan come together from the different ends of the earth. The scarf is sent from the torrid zone, and the tippet from beneath the Pole. The brocade petticoat rises out of the mines of Peru, and the diamond necklace out of the bowels of Indostan."[85]

To turn to Addison's artistic genius, the crowning evidence of his powers is the design and the execution of the _Spectator_. Many writers, and among them Macaulay, have credited Steele with the invention of the _Spectator_ as well as of the _Tatler_; but I think that a close examination of the opening papers in the former will not only prove, almost to demonstration, that on this occasion Steele was acting as the lieutenant of his friend, but will also show the admirable artfulness of the means by which Addison executed his intention. The purpose of the _Spectator_ is described in the tenth number, which is by Addison:

"I shall endeavour," said he, "to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality, that my readers may, if possible, both ways find their account in the speculation of the day. And to the end that their virtue and discretion may not be short, transient, intermitting starts of thought, I have resolved to refresh their memories from day to day till I have recovered them out of that desperate state of vice and folly into which the age has fallen."