Selections from the Writings of Joseph Addison

To the rest neither gods nor men can have much attention; for there is not one amongst them that strongly attracts either affection or esteem. But they are made the vehicles of such sentiments and such expression, that there is scarcely a scene in the play which the reader does not wish to impress upon his memory.1

At the present moment, more than a century after Johnson wrote, it is hard to imagine any surviving reader who should share this wish. Historically, however, Cato retains a certain interest. In Addison's Remarks on Italy occurs the following passage:

Before

The opera that was most in vogue during my stay at Venice, was built on the following subject. Cæsar and Scipio are rivals for Cato's daughter. Cæsar's first words bid his soldiers fly, for the enemies are upon them. Si leva Cesare, e dice a Soldati. A la fugga. A' lo scampo." The daughter gives the preference to Cæsar, which is made the occasion of Cato's death. he kills himself, you see him withdrawn into his library, where, among his books, I observed the titles of Plutarch and Tasso. After a short soliloquy he strikes himself with the dagger that he holds in his hand, but being interrupted by one of his friends, he stabs him for his pains, and by the violence of the blow unluckily breaks the dagger on one of his ribs, so that he is forced to despatch himself by tearing up his first wound.2

This opera is believed to have suggested to Addison the plan of making the story of Cato into a drama which should be a model of form. Four acts of it are said to have been virtually finished before his return to England. The fifth act was almost certainly written shortly before its performance a moment when political contingencies rendered of apt value the patriotic and liberty-loving sentiments which pervade the tragedy. This accident of the moment certainly helped greatly toward the extraordinary success of Cato on

1 Works, ed. Cunningham, II, 161–162.

2 Bohn, I, 392.

the stage. To a great degree, however, this success was due to the very traits in the play which now render it obsolete. Addison, as we have seen, found a hint for his plot in an ephemeral opera of obvious absurdity. The subject thus suggested he proceeded to phrase and to compose according to the strictest rules of that pseudo-classic art which, in common with the best scholarship of his time, he believed permanently excellent. There is perhaps no play in English which more rigidly observes the unities and the other rules of literary decorum which, to our thinking, make the classical tragedies of France such drearily artificial things. Voltaire thought Cato an admirable work of dramatic art. So did the century whose taste Voltaire may stand for.

To us Cato groups itself with the earlier works on which Addison's political fortunes were based. His unquestioning faith in the traditional standards of classical scholarship made this tragedy, where with all the self-consciousness of his own personality he felt bound to do his best, a tissue of tedious and lifeless amenities. Only when masquerading as the imaginary scribbler of essays could Addison ever so abandon himself to his subject as to be a writer of lasting human interest.

VII

Of lasting human interest, however, his essays must always remain. So pleasant have they proved to generation after generation of readers that we are apt now to forget the real work which they did when they were new. The precise function of the Spectator, as we have seen, was to proclaim afresh, after the reckless license of the Restoration, that simple ideal of respectability to which the English race has generally remained loyal. So fully did it accomplish its task that to this day we retain something like a personal memory of its traditions. The eighteenth century, one sometimes feels, survived longer in America than in Europe. At all events a good many

people in America, not yet past middle life, can vividly remember among the older figures who surrounded their youth many an amiable old friend whose thoughts and phrases seemed more in accordance with the England which reveals itself in the literature of Queen Anne and of the early Georges than with that which expresses itself in the literature of Victoria. The traditions of the Spectator are hardly yet extinct in the quieter regions of New England.

What they were in their own day a familiar tragic story of the period reminds us. Among the younger contributors to the Spectator was one Eustace Budgell, a kinsman of Addison's, and to some degree a favorite of his. After Addison's death Budgell went wrong. A wretched career of folly and crime ended in suicide under the arches of London Bridge. The unhappy man, however, retained to the last his reverence for his great kinsman; and after his death there were found in his handwriting these lines, which he had left to justify his self-destruction:

What Cato did, and Addison approved,
Cannot be wrong.

What Addison approved was the test of right to the generation that loved him; and to this day traditional criticism can pay no higher compliment to a prose style than to call it Addisonian.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. FIRST EDITIONS.

A. First editions of Addison's undoubted works published during his lifetime.

B. First editions of Addison's undoubted works published after his death.

C. Doubtful works.

II. COLLECTIVE EDITIONS.

III. BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM.

IV. FURTHER ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE PERIOD.

The abbreviations in parenthesis after each of the rarer titles indicate some of the libraries where that edition is to be found; the star indicates the library whose copy has been used in making this bibliography. Bodl. = Bodleian Library; B. M. = British Museum; B. P. L. = Boston Public Library; H. = Harvard College Library; T. C. D. College Library, Dublin.

I. FIRST EDITIONS

A. Undoubted Works, 1690-1719

Trinity

simi

(Bodl.; B. M.*)

This volume contains an oration, "Nova Philosophia Veteri præferenda est," which has usually been placed among Addison's doubtful works. That it is unquestionably Addison's appears as soon as one examines the "Ordo commissionum Philologicarum in Encaniis prædictis" which follows the title-page:

"I. Johan. Pelling Incept. in Art. ex Æde Christi. Encania aperuit. Oratione soluta.. xiv. Jos. Addison, Rich. Smallbrook, Edv. Taylor, A.BB. è Coll. Magd. Lemma habuerunt. Vetus & Nova [sic] Philosophia. Oratione soluta." The book is not paged. On L 2 back — N 2 back are the three orations in the following order:

"Nova Philosophia Veteri præferenda est."

"Vetus Philosophia Novæ præferenda est."

"Quæritur utrum Vetus Philosophia, an Nova sit præferenda." The first, which is Addison's, begins on the back of the twenty-fourth sheet.

(Bodl.*)

Contains the verses "To Mr. Dryden. By Mr. Jo. Addison," which occupy pp. 247-249, and at the end are dated "Mag. Coll. Oxon, June 2, 1693."

(Bodl.; H.*; T. C. D.)

This includes the following poems by Addison: "2. Fourth Book of Georgics (except the story of Aristeus)." "II. Song for St. Cecilia's Day at Oxford." 12. Story of Salmacis, from the fourth Book of Ovid's Metamorphoses." "47. An Account of the Greatest English Poets. To Mr. H. S. Apr. 3d. 1694." (B. M.; H.*; T. C. D.)

To this Addison contributed "An Essay on the Georgics," (pp. 6) between pp. 48 and 49. (Bodl.; B. M.; H.*; T. C. D.)

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