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The Project Gutenberg eBook, Addison, by William John Courthope


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Title: Addison


Author: William John Courthope



Release Date: November 27, 2012  [eBook #41496]

Language: English

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English Men of Letters

Edited by John Morley

ADDISON

by

W. J. COURTHOPE







Harper & Brothers Publishers
New York and London
1902

     *       *       *       *       *

ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS.

EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY.

  JOHNSON                Leslie Stephen.
  GIBBON                 J. C. Morison.
  SCOTT                  R. H. Hutton.
  SHELLEY                J. A. Symonds.
  HUME                   T. H. Huxley.
  GOLDSMITH              William Black.
  DEFOE                  William Minto.
  BURNS                  J. C. Shairp.
  SPENSER                R. W. Church.
  THACKERAY              Anthony Trollope.
  BURKE                  John Morley.
  MILTON                 Mark Pattison.
  HAWTHORNE              Henry James, Jr.
  SOUTHEY                E. Dowden.
  CHAUCER                A. W. Ward.
  BUNYAN                 J. A. Froude.
  COWPER                 Goldwin Smith.
  POPE                   Leslie Stephen.
  BYRON                  John Nichol.
  LOCKE                  Thomas Fowler.
  WORDSWORTH             F. Myers.
  DRYDEN                 G. Saintsbury.
  LANDOR                 Sidney Colvin.
  DE QUINCEY             David Masson.
  LAMB                   Alfred Ainger.
  BENTLEY                R. C. Jebb.
  DICKENS                A. W. Ward.
  GRAY                   E. W. Gosse.
  SWIFT                  Leslie Stephen.
  STERNE                 H. D. Traill.
  MACAULAY               J. Cotter Morison.
  FIELDING               Austin Dobson.
  SHERIDAN               Mrs. Oliphant.
  ADDISON                W. J. Courthope.
  BACON                  R. W. Church.
  COLERIDGE              H. D. Traill.
  SIR PHILIP SIDNEY      J. A. Symonds.
  KEATS                  Sidney Colvin.
  CARLYLE                John Nichol.

12mo, Cloth, 75 cents per volume.

_Other volumes in preparation._

PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK.

_Any of the above works will be sent by mail, postage prepaid, to any part
of the United States, Canada, or Mexico, on receipt of the price._

     *       *       *       *       *



CONTENTS.


                                                PAGE

  CHAPTER I.
    THE STATE OF ENGLISH SOCIETY AND LETTERS
      AFTER THE RESTORATION                        1

  CHAPTER II.
    ADDISON'S FAMILY AND EDUCATION                21

  CHAPTER III.
    ADDISON ON HIS TRAVELS                        38

  CHAPTER IV.
    HIS EMPLOYMENT IN AFFAIRS OF STATE            53

  CHAPTER V.
    THE "TATLER" AND "SPECTATOR"                  78

  CHAPTER VI.
    "CATO"                                       110

  CHAPTER VII.
    ADDISON'S QUARREL WITH POPE                  125

  CHAPTER VIII.
    THE LAST YEARS OF HIS LIFE                   139

  CHAPTER IX.
    THE GENIUS OF ADDISON                        153




ADDISON.




CHAPTER I.

THE STATE OF ENGLISH SOCIETY AND LETTERS AFTER THE RESTORATION.


Of the four English men of letters whose writings most fully embody the
spirit of the eighteenth century, the one who provides the biographer with
the scantiest materials is Addison. In his _Journal to Stella_, his social
verses, and his letters to his friends, we have a vivid picture of those
relations with women and that protracted suffering which invest with such
tragic interest the history of Swift. Pope, by the publication of his own
correspondence, has enabled us, in a way that he never intended, to
understand the strange moral twist which distorted a nature by no means
devoid of noble instincts. Johnson was fortunate in the companionship of
perhaps the best biographer who ever lived. But of the real life and
character of Addison scarcely any contemporary record remains. The formal
narrative prefixed to his works by Tickell is, by that writer's own
admission, little more than a bibliography. Steele, who might have told us
more than any man about his boyhood and his manner of life in London, had
become estranged from his old friend before his death. No writer has
taken the trouble to preserve any account of the wit and wisdom that
enlivened the "little senate" at Button's. His own letters are, as a rule,
compositions as finished as his papers in the _Spectator_. Those features
in his character which excite the greatest interest have been delineated
by the hand of an enemy--an enemy who possessed an unrivalled power of
satirical portrait-painting, and was restrained by no regard for truth
from creating in the public mind such impressions about others as might
serve to heighten the favourable opinion of himself.

This absence of dramatic incident in Addison's life would lead us
naturally to conclude that he was deficient in the energy and passion
which cause a powerful nature to leave a mark upon its age. Yet such a
judgment would certainly be erroneous. Shy and reserved as he was, the
unanimous verdict of his most illustrious contemporaries is decisive as to
the respect and admiration which he excited among them. The man who could
exert so potent an influence over the mercurial Steele, who could
fascinate the haughty and cynical intellect of Swift, whose conversation,
by the admission of his satirist Pope, had in it something more charming
than that of any other man; of whom it was said that he might have been
chosen king if he wished it; such a man, though to the coarse perception
of Mandeville he might have seemed no more than "a parson in a tye-wig,"
can hardly have been deficient in force of character.

Nor would it have been possible for a writer distinguished by mere
elegance and refinement to leave a lasting impress on the literature and
society of his country. In one generation after another, men representing
opposing elements of rank, class, interest, and taste, have agreed in
acknowledging Addison's extraordinary merits. "Whoever wishes," says
Johnson--at the end of a biography strongly coloured with the
prepossessions of a semi-Jacobite Tory--"whoever wishes to attain an
English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious,
must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison." "Such a mark of
national respect," says Macaulay, the best representative of middle-class
opinion in the present century, speaking of the statue erected to Addison
in Westminster Abbey, "was due to the unsullied statesman, to the
accomplished scholar, to the master of pure English eloquence, to the
consummate painter of life and manners. It was due, above all, to 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 disastrous separation, during
which wit had been led astray by profligacy, and virtue by fanaticism."

This verdict of a great critic is accepted by an age to which the grounds
of it are, perhaps, not very apparent. The author of any ideal creation--a
poem, a drama, or a novel--has an imprescriptible property in the fame of
his work. But to harmonise conflicting social elements, to bring order out
of chaos in the sphere of criticism, to form right ways of thinking about
questions of morals, taste, and breeding, are operations of which the
credit, though it is certainly to be ascribed to particular individuals,
is generally absorbed by society itself. Macaulay's eulogy is as just as
it is eloquent, but the pages of the _Spectator_ alone will hardly show
the reader why Addison should be so highly praised for having reconciled
wit with virtue. Nor, looking at him as a critic, will it appear a great
achievement to have pointed out to English society the beauties of
_Paradise Lost_, unless it be remembered that the taste of the preceding
generation still influenced Addison's contemporaries, and that in that
generation Cowley was accounted a greater poet than Milton.

To estimate Addison at his real value we must regard him as the chief
architect of Public Opinion in the eighteenth century. But here again we
are met by an initial difficulty, because it has become almost a
commonplace of contemporary criticism to represent the eighteenth century
as a period of sheer destruction. It is tacitly assumed by a school of
distinguished philosophical writers that we have arrived at a stage in the
world's history in which it is possible to take a positive and scientific
view of human affairs. As it is of course necessary that from such a
system all belief in the supernatural shall be jealously excluded, it has
not seemed impossible to write the history of Thought itself in the
eighteenth century. And in tracing the course of this supposed continuous
stream it is natural that all the great English writers of the period
should be described as in one way or another helping to pull down, or
vainly to strengthen, the theological barriers erected by centuries of
bigotry against the irresistible tide of enlightened progress.

It would be of course entirely out of place to discuss here the merits of
this new school of history. Those who consider that, whatever glimpses we
may obtain of the law and order of the universe, man is, as he always has
been and always will be, a mystery to himself, will hardly allow that the
operations of the human spirit can be traced in the dissecting-room. But
it is, in any case, obvious that to treat the great _imaginative_ writers
of any age as if they were only mechanical agents in an evolution of
thought is to do them grave injustice. Such writers are, above all things,
creative. Their first aim is to "show the very age and body of the time
his form and pressure." No work of the eighteenth century, composed in a
consciously destructive spirit, has taken its place among the acknowledged
classics of the language. Even the _Tale of a Tub_ is to be regarded as a
satire upon the aberrations of theologians from right reason, not upon the
principles of Christianity itself. The _Essay on Man_ has, no doubt,
logically a tendency towards Deism, but nobody ever read the poem for the
sake of its philosophy; and it is well known that Pope was much alarmed
when it was pointed out to him that his conclusions might be represented
as incompatible with the doctrines of revealed religion.

The truth indeed seems to be the exact converse of what is alleged by the
scientific historians. So far from the eighteenth century in England being
an age of destructive analysis, its energies were chiefly devoted to
political, social, and literary reconstruction. Whatever revolution in
faith and manners the English nation had undergone had been the work of
the two preceding centuries, and though the historic foundations of
society remained untouched, the whole form of the superstructure had been
profoundly modified.

    "So tenacious are we," said Burke, towards the close of the last
    century, "of our old ecclesiastical modes and fashions of institution
    that very little change has been made in them since the fourteenth or
    fifteenth centuries, adhering in this particular as in all else to our
    old settled maxim never entirely nor at once to depart from antiquity.
    We found these institutions on the whole favourable to morality and
    discipline, and we thought they were susceptible of amendment without
    altering the ground. We thought they were capable of receiving and
    meliorating, and, above all, of preserving the accessories of science
    and literature as the order of Providence should successively produce
    them. And after all, with this Gothic and monkish education (for such
    it is the groundwork), we may put in our claim to as ample and early
    a share in all the improvements in science, in arts, and in literature
    which have illuminated the modern world as any other nation in Europe.
    We think one main cause of this improvement was our not despising the
    patrimony of knowledge which was left us by our forefathers."

All this is, in substance, true of our political as well as our
ecclesiastical institutions. And yet, when Burke wrote, the great feudal
and mediæval structure of England had been so transformed by the Wars of
the Roses, the Reformation, the Rebellion, and the Revolution, that its
ancient outlines were barely visible. In so far, therefore, as his words
seem to imply that the social evolution he describes was produced by an
imperceptible and almost mechanical process of national instinct, the
impression they tend to create is entirely erroneous.

If we have been hitherto saved from such corruption as undermined the
republics of Italy, from the religious wars that so long enfeebled and
divided Germany, and from the Revolution that has severed modern France
from her ancient history, thanks for this are due partly, no doubt, to
favouring conditions of nature and society, but quite as much to the
genius of great individuals who prepared the mind of the nation for the
gradual assimilation of new ideas. Thus Langland and Wycliffe and their
numerous followers, long before the Reformation, had so familiarised the
minds of the people with their ideas of the Christian religion that the
Sovereign was able to assume the Headship of the Church without the shock
of a social convulsion. Fresh feelings and instincts grew up in the hearts
of whole classes of the nation without at first producing any change in
outward habits of life, and even without arousing a sense of their logical
incongruity. These mixed ideas were constantly brought before the
imagination in the works of the poets. Shakespeare abounds with passages
in which, side by side with the old feudal, monarchical, catholic, and
patriotic instincts of Englishmen, we find the sentiments of the Italian
Renaissance. Spenser conveys Puritan doctrines sometimes by the mouth of
shepherds, whose originals he had found in Theocritus and Virgil;
sometimes under allegorical forms derived from books of chivalry and the
ceremonial of the Catholic Church. Milton, the most rigidly Calvinistic of
all the English poets in his opinions, is also the most severely classical
in his style.

It was the task of Addison to carry on the reconciling traditions of our
literature. It is his praise to have accomplished his task under
conditions far more difficult than any that his predecessors had
experienced. What they had done was to give instinctive and characteristic
expression to the floating ideas of the society about them; what Addison
and his contemporaries did was to found a public opinion by a conscious
effort of reason and persuasion. Before the Civil Wars there had been at
least no visible breach in the principle of Authority in Church and State.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century constituted authority had been
recently overthrown; one king had been beheaded, another had been
expelled; the Episcopalian form of Church Government had been violently
displaced in favour of the Presbyterian, and had been with almost equal
violence restored. Whole classes of the population had been drawn into
opposing camps during the Civil War, and still stood confronting each
other with all the harsh antagonism of sentiment inherited from that
conflict. Such a bare summary alone is sufficient to indicate the nature
of the difficulties Addison had to encounter in his efforts to harmonise
public opinion; but a more detailed examination of the state of society
after the Restoration is required to place in its full light the
extraordinary merits of the success that he achieved.

There was, to begin with, a vehement opposition between town and country.
In the country the old ideas of Feudalism, modified by circumstances, but
vigorous and deep-rooted, still prevailed. True, the military system of
land-tenure had disappeared with the Restoration, but it was not so with
the relations of life, and the habits of thought and feeling which the
system had created. The features of surviving Feudalism have been
inimitably preserved for us in the character of Sir Roger de Coverley.
Living in the patriarchal fashion, in the midst of tenants and retainers,
who looked up to him as their chief, and for whose welfare and protection
he considered himself responsible, the country gentleman valued above all
things the principle of Loyalty. To the moneyed classes in the towns he
was instinctively opposed; he regarded their interests, both social and
commercial, as contrary to his own; he looked with dislike and suspicion
on the economical principles of government and conduct on which these
classes naturally rely. Even the younger sons of county families had in
Addison's day abandoned the custom, common enough in the feudal times, of
seeking their fortune in trade. Many a Will Wimble now spent his whole
life in the country, training dogs for his neighbours, fishing their
streams, making whips for their young heirs, and even garters for their
wives and daughters.[1]