John Dennis
The Age of Pope
PART II.
THE PROSE WRITERS
CHAPTER IV.
JOSEPH ADDISON – SIR RICHARD STEELE
As essayists, the writings of Addison and of Steele are familiar to all readers of eighteenth-century literature. Their work in other departments may be neglected without much loss; but the student who disregards the Tatler, the Spectator, the Guardian, and some of the essay-volumes which follow in their wake, will be blind to one of the most significant literary features of the period.
The alliance between Addison and Steele was so intimate, that to judge of one apart from the other, would be fair to neither. It may be well, therefore, after giving the leading facts in the lives of the two friends, to bring them together again while considering the work they accomplished in their literary partnership. One point, I think, will come out clearly in this examination, namely, that while Steele might, under very inferior conditions, have produced the Tatler and Spectator without Addison, it is highly improbable that Addison, as an essayist, would have existed without Steele.
Joseph Addison (1672-1719).
Addison lives on the reputation of his prose works, but he thought that he was a poet, and was regarded as a poet by his contemporaries. It was by verse that he won his earliest reputation, and it was on his Pegasus that he rose to be Secretary of State. He was born on May 1st, 1672, at Milston, in Wiltshire, a parish of which his father was the rector, and was educated at the Charterhouse, where he contracted his memorable friendship with Steele. Thence, in 1687, at the boyish age of fifteen, he went up to Queen's College, Oxford, and in a few months, thanks to his Latin verses, gained a scholarship at Magdalen, of which college ten years later he became a fellow.
While at Oxford he acquired, after the fashion of the day, what Johnson calls 'the trade of a courtier.' His Latin poem on the Peace of Ryswick was dedicated to Montague, and two years later a pension of £300 a year, gained through Somers and Montague, enabled him to travel, in order that by gaining a knowledge of French and Italian, he might be fitted for the diplomatic service. Some time after his return to England he published his Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (1705), and dedicated the volume to Swift, 'the most agreeable companion, the truest friend, and the greatest genius of his age.'
Addison's patrons had now lost their power, and he was left to his own exertions. His difficulties did not last long. In 1704 the battle of Blenheim called forth several weak efforts from the poetasters, and as the Government required verse more worthy of the occasion, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, on the recommendation of Montague, now Earl of Halifax, applied to Addison, who, in answer to the appeal, published The Campaign, in 1705. The poem contains the well-known similitude of the angel, and also an apt allusion to the great storm that had lately destroyed fleets and devastated the country.
'So when an angel by divine command
With rising tempests shakes a guilty land,
Such as of late o'er pale Britannia past,
Calm and serene he drives the furious blast;
And, pleased the Almighty's orders to perform,
Rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm.'
The Campaign, which has no other passage worth quoting, proved a happy hit, and was of such service to the Ministry, that Addison found the way to fame and fortune. He was appointed Commissioner of Appeals, and not long after Under Secretary of State. In 1707 he accompanied his friend and patron, Halifax, on a mission to Hanover, and two years later he was appointed Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. In Dublin he gained golden opinions. 'I am convinced,' Swift writes, 'that whatever Government come over, you will find all marks of kindness from any parliament here with respect to your employment; the Tories contending with the Whigs which should speak best of you. In short, if you will come over again when you are at leisure, we will raise an army and make you king of Ireland.' When the Whig Ministry fell in 1710, and Addison lost his appointment, he must have gained a fortune, for he was able to purchase an estate for £10,000.
In the early years of the century the Italian opera, which had been brought into England in the reign of William and Mary, excited the mirth and opposition of the wits. Lord Chesterfield, who called it 'too absurd and extravagant to mention,' said, 'Whenever I go to the opera I leave my sense and reason at the door with my half-guinea, and deliver myself up to my eyes and ears.' Steele, Gay, and Pope ridiculed the new-fangled entertainment, and Colley Cibber, too, pointed his jest at these 'poetical drams, these gin-shops of the stage that intoxicate its auditors, and dishonour their understanding with a levity for which I want a name.' Addison, who has some lively papers on the subject in the Spectator, undertook to give a faithful account of the progress of the Italian opera on the English stage, 'for there is no question,' he writes, 'but our great grandchildren will be very curious to know why their forefathers used to sit together like an audience of foreigners in their own country; and to hear whole plays acted before them in a tongue which they did not understand.'
Before writing thus in the Spectator, Addison, in order to oppose the Italian opera, by what he regarded as a more rational pastime, produced his English opera of Rosamond, which was acted in 1706, and proved a failure on the stage. The music is said to have been bad, and the poetry is the work of a writer destitute of lyrical genius. Lord Macaulay, who finds a merit in almost everything produced by Addison, praises 'the smoothness with which the verses glide, and the elasticity with which they bound,' and considers that if he 'had left heroic couplets to Pope, and blank verse to Rowe, and had employed himself in writing airy and spirited songs, his reputation as a poet would have stood far higher than it now does.' The gliding movement of the verse may be admitted; but lyric poetry demands the higher qualities of music and imaginative treatment, and Addison's 'smoothness,' so far from being a poetical gift, is a mechanical acquisition.
In 1713 his Cato, with its stately rhetoric and cold dignity, received a very different reception. The prologue, written by Pope, is in admirable accordance with the spirit of the play. Addison's purpose is to exhibit a great man struggling with adversity, and Pope writes:
'He bids your breasts with ancient ardour rise,
And calls forth Roman drops from British eyes;
Virtue confessed in human shape he draws,
What Plato thought, and God-like Cato was:
No common object to your sight displays,
But what with pleasure Heaven itself surveys;
A brave man struggling in the storms of fate,
And greatly falling with a falling state!
While Cato gives his little senate laws,
What bosom beats not in his country's cause?'
Addison has proved that he could draw a life-like character in his representation of Sir Roger de Coverley, but the dramatis personæ, who act a part, or are supposed to act one, in Cato, are mere dummies, made to express fine sentiments. There is no flesh and blood in them, and owing to the dramatist's regard for unity of place, the play is full of absurdities. Yet Cato was received with immense applause. It was regarded from a political aspect, and both Whig and Tory strove to turn the drama to party account. 'The numerous and violent claps of the Whig party,' Pope writes, 'on the one side of the theatre, were echoed back by the Tories on the other; while the author sweated behind the scenes with concern to find their applause proceeding more from the hand than the head.'
In another letter he says: 'The town is so fond of it, that the orange wenches and fruit women in the parks offer the books at the side of the coaches, and the prologue and epilogue are cried about the streets by the common hawkers.' It would be interesting to ascertain what there was in the state of public affairs in the spring of 1713, which created this enthusiasm. Swift, writing to Stella, alludes to a rehearsal of the play, but makes no criticism upon it; and Berkeley, who was in London at the time, and had a seat in Addison's box on the first night, is also silent about it. In a letter written, as it happens, by Bolingbroke, on the day that Cato was produced, he indicates the signs of the time, as they appeared to a Tory statesman: 'The prospect before us,' he writes, 'is dark and melancholy. What will happen no man is able to foretell.'
It was this sense of doubt and insecurity in the nation that gave significance to trifles. The political atmosphere was charged with electricity. The Tories, though in office, were far from feeling themselves secure, and both Harley and Bolingbroke were in correspondence with the Pretender. Atterbury, who was heart and soul with him, had just been made a bishop, Protestant ascendancy was in danger, the security of the country seemed to hang on the frail life of the Queen, and the strong party spirit of the time was easily fanned into a flame. We cannot now place ourselves in the position of the spectators whose passions gave such popularity to Cato. Its mild platitudes and rhetorical periods, its coldness and sobriety, seem ill fitted to arouse the fervour of playgoers, but Addison, whose good luck rarely failed him, was especially fortunate in the moment chosen for the representation of the play. Had Cato exhibited genius of the highest order, it could not have been more successful. Cibber writes that it was acted in London five times a week for a month to constantly crowded houses, and when the tragedy was acted at Oxford, 'Our house,' he says, 'was in a manner invested, and entrance demanded by twelve o'clock at noon, and before one it was not wide enough for many who came too late for places.'36
Cato had the good fortune to run in London for thirty-five nights, and gained also some reputation on the continent. It is formed on the French model, and Addison was therefore praised by Voltaire as 'the first English writer who composed a regular tragedy.' He added that Cato was 'a masterpiece.' If so, it is one of the masterpieces that has long ceased to be read. Little could its author have surmised that his tragedy, received with universal praise, had but a brief life to live, while the Essays which he had already contributed to the Tatler and Spectator would make his name familiar to future generations.
Addison's poetry may now be regarded as extinct, and most of the poems he wrote are probably unknown to the present generation of readers even by name. His Latin verses are pronounced excellent by all competent critics, but when a man writes verses in a dead language he does so generally to show his scholarship, and not to express his inspiration. Latin verse is, as M. Taine says, a faded flower. Now and then, indeed, a poem has been written with merits apart from its latinity – witness the Epitaphium Damonis of Milton – but Addison, who lacked poetic fire in his native language, was not likely to find it in a dead tongue. His English poems are generally dull, and sometimes, as in his earliest poem, the Account of the greatest English Poets (1694), the tameness of the verse is matched by the ignorance of the criticism. The student will observe how differently the theme is treated by a true poet like Drayton in his Epistle to Reynolds; or, like Ben Jonson, in the many allusions that he makes to his country's poets. Compare, too, Addison's Letter from Italy (1701) with the lovely lines on a like theme in Goldsmith's Traveller, and the contrast between a verseman and a poet is at once apparent. Addison, it may be added, is remembered for his hymns, which may be found in most selections of sacred verse, and deserve a place in the best of them. As the forerunner of Isaac Watts (1674-1748) and of Charles Wesley (1708-1788), he struck upon what at that time might, in our country, be almost called a new department of literature; and it is remarkable that an age which so dreaded enthusiasm should have originated verse which gives utterance to the most emotional form of spiritual aspiration. As hymn-writers, Englishmen were more than a century behind the best sacred poets of Germany. Luther had taught the German people the power of hymnody, but it was during the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), and after its conclusion, that the spirit of devotion found full expression in religious verse. Just before the engagement at Leipzic, Gustavus Adolphus wrote his well-known battle hymn, and the peace was celebrated in a noble hymn by Martin Rinkart. He was followed by a succession of sacred singers whose devout utterances influenced and in some degree inspired the Wesleys.
"A verse may find him whom a sermon flies,"
says George Herbert, and the enormous power wielded by Methodism owes a large portion of its strength to song.
Amidst much in their writings that is questionable in taste and weak in expression, both Watts and Charles Wesley have written hymns which prove their incontestible right to a place among the poets, and the influence they have exerted over the English-speaking race is beyond the power of the literary historian to estimate. The external divisions of the Christian Church are numerous; its unity is to be seen in the Hymn Book. 'Men whose theological views contrast most strongly,' says Mr. Abbey in his essay on The English Sacred Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 'meet on common ground when they express in verse the deeper aspirations of the heart and the voice of Christian praise.'
In 1714, on the death of the Queen, Addison was once more in office, and held his old position of Irish Secretary. In the following year he defended the Whig Government and Whig principles in the Freeholder, a paper published twice weekly. In it he gives no niggard praise to the Government of George I., and to the King himself, for his 'civil virtues,' and for his martial achievements. Addison's praise disagrees, it need scarcely be said, with the more minute and veracious description of the King given by Thackeray, but a party politician in those days could scarcely be a faithful chronicler. He could see what he wished to see, but found it necessary to shut his eyes when the prospect became unpleasant. George was a heartless libertine, but Addison observes with great satisfaction that the women most eminent for virtue and good sense are in his interest. 'It would be no small misfortune,' he says, 'to a sovereign, though he had all the male part of the nation on his side, if he did not find himself king of the most beautiful half of his subjects. Ladies are always of great use to the party they espouse, and never fail to win over numbers to it. Lovers, according to Sir William Petty's computation, make at least the third part of the sensible men of the British nation, and it has been an uncontroverted maxim in all ages, that though a husband is sometimes a stubborn sort of a creature, a lover is always at the devotion of his mistress. By this means it lies in the power of every fine woman to secure at least half-a-dozen able-bodied men to his Majesty's service. The female world are likewise indispensably necessary in the best causes to manage the controversial part of them, in which no man of tolerable breeding is ever able to refute them. Arguments out of a pretty mouth are unanswerable.'
The essayist thinks it fortunate for the Whigs 'that their very enemies acknowledge the finest women of Great Britain to be of that party;' and in an amusing but rather absurd way he discourses to maids, wives, and widows on the advantages of adhering to the Hanoverian Government. It is characteristic of Addison that a political paper like the Freeholder should be flavoured with the humour and badinage he found so effective in the Spectator. To the ladies he appeals again and again, but not to their reason. He gives them mirth instead of argument, and thinks it more likely to prevail with the 'Fair Sex.' The Freeholder has several papers worthy of the author in his best moods, the best of them, perhaps, being the 'Tory Fox-hunter,' with which, to quote Johnson's words, 'bigotry itself must be delighted.' In the year which gave birth to the Freeholder, The Drummer, a comedy, was acted at Drury Lane, and ran three nights. The play was not acknowledged by Addison, neither was it printed in Tickell's edition of his works; but Steele, who published an edition of the play, with a dedication to Congreve, never doubted, and there is no reason to doubt, that Addison was the author. 'The piece,' Mr. Courthope writes, 'is like Cato, a standing proof of Addison's deficiency in dramatic genius. The plot is poor and trivial, nor does the dialogue, though it shows in many passages traces of its author's peculiar vein of humour, make amends by its brilliancy for the tameness of the dramatic situation.'37
After the Freeholder Addison wrote nothing of importance, unless we except the essay published after his death On the Evidences of Christianity. Of this essay it will suffice to quote the judgment of his most distinguished eulogist. After observing that the treatise shows the narrow limits of Addison's classical knowledge, Lord Macaulay adds: '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.'
In 1716, after having been made one of the Commissioners for Trades and Colonies, he married the Countess Dowager of Warwick, with whom he had been acquainted for some years. The marriage, according to the doubtful authority of Pope, was not a happy one, and is said to have driven Addison to the consolations of the tavern. He did not need them long. In 1717 Sunderland became Prime Minister, and made Addison a Secretary of State, an appointment which he resigned eleven months afterwards; and in 1719 he died at Holland House at the age of forty-seven, leaving one daughter as the memorial of the union. He lies, as is fitting, in the great Abbey of which he has written so beautifully.
Tickell's noble tribute to his friend's memory belongs to the undying poetry which neither age nor fresher forms of verse can render obsolete. It must suffice to quote here a few lines from a poem which, despite some conventional expressions common to the time, is worthy of its theme throughout:
'If pensive to the rural shades I rove,
His shape o'ertakes me in the lonely grove;
'Twas there of Just and Good he reasoned strong,
Cleared some great truth, or raised some serious song;
There patient showed us the wise course to steer,
A candid censor, and a friend severe;
There taught us how to live; and (oh! too high
The price for knowledge) taught us how to die.'
There are few men of literary eminence in the eighteenth century of whom we know so little as of Addison. His own Spectator, who never opened his lips but in his club, is scarcely more silent than the essayist's biographers, so trifling are the details they have to record beyond the bare facts of his official and literary career. Steele knew him better, and, in spite of an unhappy estrangement at the last, probably loved him more than anyone else, and had he written his story, as he once proposed doing, the narrative might have been charming; but, alas for Steele's resolutions!
That Addison was a shy man we know – Lord Chesterfield said he was the most timid man he ever knew – and it speaks well for his resolution and strength of purpose that he should have risen notwithstanding this timidity to so high a position in public affairs. His want of oratorical power was a drawback to his efficiency, and Sir James Macintosh was probably right in saying that Addison as Dean of St. Patrick's, and Swift as Secretary of State, would have been a happy stroke of fortune, putting each into the place most fitted for him. The essayist's reserve, while it closed his lips in general society, did not prevent him from being one of the most fascinating of companions in the freedom of conversation with a few intimate friends. Swift, Steele, and even Pope, testify to Addison's irresistible charm in the select society that he loved. Young said he could chain the attention of every hearer, and Lady Mary Montagu declared that he was the best company in the world.
Richard Steele (1672-1729).
Richard Steele was born in Dublin, 1672, of English parents, and educated at the Charterhouse, where, as we have said, Addison was at the same time a pupil. In 1690 he matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, Addison being then demy at Magdalen. Steele left college without taking a degree, and entered the army as a cadet. After a time he obtained the rank of captain in Lord Lucas's fusiliers, and wrote his treatise, The Christian Hero (1701), with the design, he says, 'principally to fix upon his own mind a strong impression of virtue and religion in opposition to a stronger propensity towards unwarrantable pleasure.' Steele was an honest lover of the things most worthy of love, but his frailty too often proved stronger than his virtue, and the purpose of The Christian Hero was not answered.
Jeremy Collier's Short View of the Immorality and Profanity of the English Stage, published in 1698, had made, as it well might, a powerful impression, and Steele, who was always ready to inculcate morality on other people, wrote four comedies with a moral purpose. The Funeral; or Grief à-la-Mode was acted with success at Drury Lane in 1701, and when published passed through several editions. The Lying Lover followed two years later, and was, in the comfortable judgment of the author, 'damned for its piety.' This was followed, in 1705, by The Tender Husband, a play suggested by the Sicilien of Molière, as The Lying Lover had been founded on the Menteur of Corneille. Many years later Steele's last play, The Conscious Lovers (1722), completed his performances as a dramatist. It was dedicated to the King, who is said to have sent the author £500. The modern reader will find little worthy of attention in the dramas of Steele. His sense of humour enlivens some of the scenes, and is, perhaps, chiefly visible in The Funeral; but for the most part dulness is in the ascendant, and the sentiment is frequently mawkish. The Conscious Lovers, said Parson Adams, contains 'some things almost solemn enough for a sermon.' This may be true, but we do not desire a sermon in a play, and Steele, who is always a lively essayist, loses his liveliness in writing for the stage. It has been observed by Mr. Ward that, taking a hint from Colley Cibber, he 'became the real founder of that sentimental comedy which exercised so pernicious an influence upon the progress of our dramatic literature.' 'It would be unjust,' he adds, 'to hold him responsible for the feebleness of successors who were altogether deficient in the comic power which he undoubtedly even as a dramatist exhibits; but in so far as their aberrations were the result of his example, he must be held to have contributed, though with the best of motives, to the decline of the English drama.'38 One of the prominent offenders who followed in Steele's wake was George Lillo (1693-1739), whose highly moral tragedies, written for the edification of playgoers, have the kind of tragic interest which is called forth by any commonplace tale of crime and misery. In Lillo's two most important dramas, George Barnwell (1731), a play founded on the old ballad, and The Fatal Curiosity (1736), there is a total absence of the elevation in character and language which gives dignity to tragedy. His plays are like tales of guilt arranged and amplified from the Newgate Calendar. The author wrote with a good purpose, and the public appreciated his work, but it is not dramatic art, and has no pretension to the name of literature.
Throughout his life Steele was at war with fortune. His hopefulness was inexhaustible, but he learnt no lessons from experience, and escaped from one slough to fall into another. He was as unthrifty as Goldsmith, whom in many respects he resembles, and his warm, impulsive nature was allied to a combativeness and jealousy which sometimes led him to quarrel with his best friends. Of his passion for the somewhat exacting lady whom he married,39 and of the 400 and odd notelets addressed by the lover-husband to his 'dear, dearest Prue,' and 'absolute Governess,' it is enough to say here, that the story told offhand in his own words, shows how lovable the man was in spite of the faults which he never attempted to conceal. Only about a week before the marriage the lady had fair warning of one probable drawback to her happiness as a wife.40 On the morning of August 30th, 1707, Steele advised his 'fair one' to look up to that heaven which had made her so sweet a companion, and in the evening of that day he wrote:
'Dear lovely Mrs. Scurlock,
'I have been in very good company, where your health, under the character of the woman I loved best, has been often drunk, so that I may say I am dead drunk for your sake, which is more than I die for you.
'Rich. Steele.'
After marriage Steele's extravagance and impecuniosity must have proved a severe trial to Prue. At times he would live in considerable style, and Berkeley, who writes, in 1713, of dining with him frequently at his house in Bloomsbury Square, praises his table, servants, and coach as 'very genteel.' At other times the family were without common necessaries, and on one occasion there was not 'an inch of candle, a pound of coal, or a bit of meat in the house.'
On the 12th April, 1709, Steele issued the first number of the Tatler, its supposed author being the Isaac Bickerstaff, whose name, thanks to Swift, had been 'rendered famous through all parts of Europe.' The essays appeared every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, for the convenience of the post, and at the outset contained political news, which Steele, by his government appointment of Gazetteer, was enabled to supply. After awhile, however, much to the advantage of the Tatler, this news was dropped. The articles are dated from White's Chocolate-house, from Will's Coffee-house, from the Grecian, and from the St. James's. It is probable that the column in Defoe's Review, containing Advice from the Scandal Club, suggested his 'Lucubrations' to Steele. If so, it does not detract from his originality of treatment, for Defoe's town gossip is poor stuff. Addison, who knew nothing of the project beforehand, came, ere long, to his friend's assistance; but it was not until about eighty numbers had appeared, that he became a frequent contributor, and before that time Steele had made his mark. When the essays were afterwards reprinted in four volumes, Steele, who was never wanting in gratitude, generously acknowledged the help he had received. 'I fared,' he says, 'like a distressed prince who calls in a powerful neighbour 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 Tatler still supplies delightful entertainment, and in the almost total absence of amusing and wholesome reading in Steele's time, must have proved a welcome companion. Readers who are inundated by what is called 'light literature' can with difficulty imagine the dearth suffered in Pope's day, when the interminable romances of Calprenède, of Mdlle. de Scuderi and her brother, and of Madame la Fayette, were the liveliest books considered fit for a modest woman to read. A novel, however, in ten volumes, like the Grand Cyrus or Clélie, had one advantage over the cheap fictions of our time, its interest was not soon exhausted.
The Tatler has claims upon the student's attention, apart from the entertainment it affords. Steele, who lived from hand to mouth, and wrote, as he lived, on the impulse of the moment, had unwittingly begun a work destined to form an epoch in English literature. The Essay, as we now understand the word, dates from the Lucubrations of Isaac Bickerstaff, and Steele and Addison, who may boast a numerous progeny, have in Charles Lamb the noblest of their sons.
On the 2nd January, 1711, Steele wrote the final number of the Tatler, partly on the plea that the essays would suffice to make four volumes, and partly because he was known to be the author, and could not, as Mr. Steele, attack vices with the freedom of Mr. Bickerstaff. Addison, who had done so much to assist Steele in his first venture, was as ignorant of his intention to close the work as he was of its initiation. Two months later The Spectator appeared, and this time the friends worked in concert. It proved a brilliantly successful partnership. The second number, in which the characters of the club are introduced, was written by Steele, and to him we owe the first sketch of the immortal Sir Roger de Coverley:
'When he is in town he lives in Soho Square. It is said he keeps himself a bachelor by reason he was crossed in love by a perverse, beautiful widow of the next county to him. Before his disappointment, Sir Roger was what you call a fine gentleman, had often supped with my Lord Rochester and Sir George Etheridge, fought a duel upon his first coming to town, and kicked bully Dawson in a public coffee-house for calling him youngster. But being ill-used by the above-mentioned widow, he was very serious for a year and a half; and though, his temper being naturally jovial, he at last got over it, he grew careless of himself, and never dressed afterwards. He continues to wear a coat and doublet of the same cut that were in fashion at the time of his repulse, which, in his merry humours, he tells us has been in and out twelve times since he first wore it… He is now in his fifty-sixth year, cheerful, gay, and hearty, keeps a good house both in town and country; a great lover of mankind; but there is such a mirthful cast in his behaviour, that he is rather beloved than esteemed. His tenants grow rich, his servants look satisfied, all the young women profess love to him, and the young men are glad of his company. When he comes into a house he calls the servants by their names, and talks all the way upstairs to a visit. I must not omit that Sir Roger is a justice of the quorum; that he fills the chair at a quarter-session with great abilities; and three months ago gained universal applause by explaining a passage in the Game Act.'