Churchill1 family to King James II, perhaps, there is nowadays a certain irony about such lines as these: Thy 2 Or from the crimes, or follies of a court; On the firm basis of desert they rise, From long-try'd faith, and friendship's holy tyes.3 After all, however, this is only such formal panegyric as custom demanded; a poet of Queen Anne's time would have been little more conscious of its cant than we are of the affectionate insincerity involved in the prefatory address to every letter we write. The British cant which pervades The Campaign, indeed, resembles that which pervaded the passages about liberty in the Letter from Italy. To foreigners it is bound to seem insincere, just as our own talk about the blessings of freedom seems to foreigners far from heartfelt. The truth is that Englishmen and Americans alike are at once very morally disposed and rather slow of wit; when they believe a thing right, they believe that they ought to assert it true; and if an assertion be right, the truth of it seems to follow. Meanwhile they never think of inquiring whether a comparison of the assertion with observable facts will confirm it. Wherefore those who do not understand them are apt to call them hypocritical, when really they are only innocently stupid in sincere moral fervor. The Campaign thus shows Addison profoundly British. Meanwhile, more than what we have seen before, it shows him quietly sensible. Macaulay points out the pseudo-mythological absurdities into which seventeenth-century panegyric was apt to run. Yet Addison is throughout direct, sensible, 1 Marlborough's sister was the king's mistress; and Marlborough himself deserted James when fortune turned to William. dignified; what he really gives us is a sustained versified narrative of fact, adequately described in its own closing passage : Thus wou'd I fain Britannia's wars rehearse, In the smooth records of a faithful verse; Rais'd of themselves, their genuine charms they boast, Polite, sane, polished, restrained, kept from absurdity by a latent sense of humor, and within the limits of their good sense conventionally admirable, lines like these are what made Addison's fortune. We have seen enough of them to understand both what manner of thing Whig politicians thought fit to patronize, and what manner of man Addison showed himself. What the politicians approved was a superficial pseudo-classic civility. With cool head, with excellent heart, with dulness enough to be innocently canting, with humor enough never to be ridiculous, Addison, as revealed in this earlier work, was almost the ideal of such critics. V So much for the work which established Addison's personal position. In 1709, when the Tatler began to appear, he was already Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Meanwhile his published writings had given little more 1 Campaign, 11. 463–476. evidence of the traits which have made him permanent than appear in the accounts of Monaco and of San Marino1in his Remarks on Italy, or than such an occasional passage as the following, from the same book : I remember when I was at Chateaudun in France, I met with a very curious person, a member of one of the German Universities. He had stayed a day or two in the town longer than ordinary, to take the measures of several empty spaces that had been cut in the sides of a neighbouring mountain. Some of them were supported with pillars formed out of the rock, some were made in the fashion of galleries, and some not unlike amphitheatres. The gentleman had made to himself several ingenious hypotheses concerning the use of these subterraneous apartments, and from thence collected the vast magnificence and luxury of the ancient Chateaudunois. But upon communicating his thoughts upon this subject to one of the most learned of the place, he was not a little surprised to hear that these stupendous works of art were only so many quarries of free-stone, that had been wrought into different figures, according as the veins of it directed the workmen.2 3 In passages like these one feels both the polish of Addison's style and the peculiar quality of his humor. In passages like those about St. Peter's or Siena one feels the conventional civility of his culture. Throughout one feels implied the principles of a stoutly Protestant Whig gentleman of the early eighteenth century. To feel these traits, however, one must study them out from the midst of pretty dry material. Had Addison written no more than we have as yet considered, it is hardly probable that posterity would have turned to him for a literary pleasure which the lapse of generations has not lessened. In Courthope's Life of Addison and in Perry's English Literature in the Eighteenth Century may be found considerable 2 Bohn, I, 432. 1 Bohn, I, 361, 403 ff. 3 Bohn, I, 417, 418; 489. accounts of the origins of journalism in England.1 For our purposes it is enough to remark that when Steele produced the first number of the Tatler, on April 12, 1709, no such thing as a modern newspaper existed. The new periodical, which appeared three times a week, was projected to combine, together with other duties, the offices now performed by journals so various as the Times, the Saturday Review, Truth, and the Queen. The Tatler, in short, represents periodical literature in almost the earliest stage of evolution. It was differentiated from other literature by the fact of its periodicity. Otherwise, at least for a while, it remained amorphous and heterogeneous. It had not even developed the idea of editorial impersonality. Whatever was written, the good sense of the time held, must be written by somebody. At the same time, Steele was not disposed to write in his own person; the instinct which has ultimately made every editor impersonal was already awake. He accordingly assumed the name and character of Isaac Bickerstaff, a mock astrologer, who had lately been invented by Swift to torment an astrologic charlatan named Partridge. In his first Tatler, Mr. Bickerstaff promised to divide his papers into five parts, as follows: All accounts of Gallantry, Pleasure, and Entertainment, shall be under the article of White's Chocolate-House; Poetry under that of Will's Coffee-House; Learning under the title of Grecian; Foreign and Domestic News you will have from Saint James' Coffee-House; and what else I have to offer on any other subject shall be dated from my own apartment. "What else" ultimately swallowed all the rest. Before the Tatler came to an end, at the beginning of 1711, it had become 1 See also Andrews, History of British Journalism, 2 vols., London, 1857; Fox Bourne, English Newspapers, 2 vols., London, 1887; Grant, The Newspaper Press, 3 vols., London, 1871–1872. Cf. too Gay's Present State of Wit (1711) in Arber's English Garner, VI, 503 ff., and John Dunton's Life and Errors. the sort of polite periodical essay which would now be represented by articles in a magazine, and of which the lasting type is the Spectator. In discussing Addison's essays, which remain unsurpassed, we are therefore justified in regarding his contributions to the Tatler as essentially preliminary, and the Freeholder, with his other later works, as merely supplementary. For our purposes the Spectator tells the whole story. This periodical first appeared on March 1, 1711; it continued daily until December 6, 1712; and it was revived, three times a week, between June and December, 1714. Addison, who had contributed to the Tatler since May, 1709, wrote decidedly less than half of the Spectator; Steele wrote almost, if not quite, as much; and a number of other less celebrated wits wrote a good deal. Throughout the Spectator, however, there runs a personal note as strong as that which pervades a modern newspaper whose editor has vigorous individuality. Tradition is probably right in referring this to the great personal influence which Addison had on his collaborators. In permanent literature the names of Addison and of the Spectator seem really identical. To appreciate both the periodical and the man we must remind ourselves of the age which produced them. Broadly speaking, we may say that the men of letters who flourished under Queen Anne were born in the reign of King Charles II. The very name of that sovereign suggests the state of fashionable morals which surrounded Addison's youth. Quite to understand the Restoration, however, and understanding of the Restoration is essential to understanding of the Spectator, we must glance back at the century which preceded it. Whatever else this bewildering century was, it was a period of fiercer passion than the English race had known before or has known since. England remained mediæval so much longer than the continent of Europe that she felt at the same moment |