INTRODUCTION. THERE would be something manifestly incongruous in prefixing a laboured introduction to what, in the first conception, was so airy, brilliant, and unexpected, as the great majority of Addison's papers in the Spectator. The kind humourist throughout the series studied the delectation of his readers; and we shall humbly endeavour to imitate his example in what of prefatory matter we have here to submit,-at any rate, to be as little wearisome as possible. The Spectator, as is well known, grew out of the Tatler. Richard Steele, the descendant probably of some Cromwellian soldier or adventurer1, installed by that victorious Vandal in the possession of an expelled Irish native, but bearing in his nature evident cross-threads of the joyous, reckless, imaginative, Hibernian character, having charge of the Government Gazette under the Whig ministry, while the great war in Spain and Flanders was going on, thought it a good opportunity for trying a fresh literary venture. Captain Steele's success with the pen had not hitherto been great. His Christian Hero, though most commendable and moral, was felt to be somewhat dry; on the whole the public preferred, when in want of a sermon, to go to the 'great and good' Archbishop Tillotson for it, or to Dr. South, or Baxter, or some other recognized divine, rather than to the captain of a marching regiment. His plays again, the 'Conscious Lovers,' the 'Tender Husband,' and the 'Lying Lover,' while free from that grossness which then, for the most part, in spite of Jeremy Collier's invectives, had possession of the stage, were without that brilliancy of dialogue and that skilful entanglement of plot, which might have commanded interest and enhanced attention, even though coarser stimulants were wanting. Impecunious and improvident, Steele 1 The name occurs in the list of adventurers who advanced money in 1649 for the Irish expedition: see Prendergast's Cromwellian Settlement, 2nd edit. was always, like the great Micawber, in a state of financial embarrassment; and now there seemed to present itself, thanks to his official position, a chance which his racy Irish humour might improve to his permanent advantage. Many other papers,— weekly, tri-weekly, or daily, were being circulated in town; it was the year of Malplaquet; rumours of war and negociation filled the air; and the public mind was in that eager and excited condition which made it ready to entertain and hear all appeals to its judgment, though of the most various origin and nature. Steele gave to his new paper the name of 'The Tatler,' meaning that it was for the reading of all companies and ordinary societies of men and women; he ascribed its authorship to 'Isaac Bickerstaff,' because that was the assumed name under which Swift had issued his Predictions for the year 1708, which, with the various other satirical pieces suggested by the fury of poor Partridge the almanack-maker, (who found his trade of charlatan taken out of his hands by this master of mystification), and published under the same name of Bickerstaff, had, as Steele says1, 'rendered it famous through all parts of Europe.' Poor Steele was always thinking of and working for a reformation of society, but never succeeded in making an effectual beginning with himself. 'Arrest thyself,' says Carlyle, 'out of the number of the fools and dastards;' then there will at least be one less. Steele ardently desired to stop all the men and women whom he saw around him from falling into the snares of folly and vice; at the same time he could not cure himself of a sad propensity to drink, a trick of muddling away his money, and a generally dissipated and irregular mode of existence. In the Tatler he proposed to give his advices and reflections' to mankind three times a week, on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. There was to be in it 'something which may be of entertainment to the fair sex;' and according to the nature of the subjects treated, the place of writing was to vary; poetry and criticism were to be dated from Will's coffee house, Covent Garden; learning from the Grecian in the Strand; accounts of gallantry, pleasure, and entertainment' from White's in St. James' Street; foreign and domestic news from St. James' in the same street; and papers on any other subject 'from my own apartment.'1 1 Preface to Vol. I of the Tatler. INTRODUCTION. xiii The first number of the Tatler appeared on the 12th April, 1709. Addison was then in Ireland; but he soon detected the authorship of his old friend and school-fellow, (they had been at the Charter House and at Oxford together,) for in the sixth number there was a remark on the appropriateness with which Virgil, as compared with Homer, distributes his epithets, which Addison knew that he himself, the father of the thought, had communicated to Steele. From that time Addison began to contribute to the Tatler, at first notes and sketches, which Steele was to work up, afterwards finished papers. He is said to have been concerned in the authorship of sixty-nine out of the two hundred and seventy-one papers contained in the Tatler. A large proportion of these are visions, dreams, or allegories, and most of the rest are humorous delineations of manners, among which the papers composing the 'Journal of the Court of Honour' must be included. But towards the end of the Tatler Addison began to indulge his serious vein, and No. 267, which discusses the principle of religious retreats, is quite in the character of many Saturday papers in the Spectator. The fickle Steele had got tired of his undertaking by this time, and he availed himself of the excuse that, with No. 271, the printer informed him that there was sufficient matter to fill four substantial volumes, to take a graceful leave of his subscribers. Swift, in his Journal to Stella, says that it was high time, for that 'he grew cruel dull and dry.' In the preface to the octavo edition of 1711, Steele, with that charming generous frankness which makes us inclined to be lenient to his peccadillos, admits that Addison had assisted him in the Tatler' with such force of genius, humour, wit, and learning, that I fared 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 came to an end in the first week of 1711, and Addison had finally returned from Ireland in the preceding August. For a man naturally shy and retiring, yet fond of fame, the anonymous publication of thoughts and images which he had been accumulating during many years of foreign travel or home observation, in a form calculated to attract a large circle of readers, was exactly that mode of self-utterance which suited him. The genius of Addison, curious and observant rather than penetrating, was allied to a virtuous character, a love of his fellow-men, a reverence for antiquity, and a keen sense of humour. He belonged to a generation which had seen all its political and religious aspirations successively disappointed,—all its ideals by turns discredited,—and which was beset by counsellors, the wits and the deists, who, practically, were inviting it to acquiesce in a life of reckless animalism, as though truth were unattainable, and virtue a dream. The sons of Puritan fathers,of men who had fought for the 'good old cause' and borne it aloft through a long succession of victories,—had seen them die in the sad consciousness that after all they had 'wrought no deliverance upon the earth;' that that glorious theocracy which they had dreamed of, and fancied for a moment they had set up, was as far off as ever, and that of all their conquests they had now no other fruit than a somewhat contemptuous toleration. Toleration! what a chilling and disenchanting sound must the word have had for a party which had been in its day, not tolerated, but triumphant; which over all the land had cut down the hydra of Erastian prelacy, destroyed as far as they could the remaining tokens and emblems of popish superstition, established, as they deemed, a pure spiritual worship; and—only tolerating sectarian differences among themselves-had avowed its intention of extirpating, wherever their power extended, the liturgical Christianity of Catholic Europe1. And now this party in its various forms,-Independents, Baptists, Millenarians, Levellers, Brownists, Quakers, &c.,—was barely tolerated; just allowed to exist; while prelacy and monarchy were to outward appearance as dominant as ever. On the other hand, the sons of the Cavaliers knew that, in spite of the Restoration, their fathers had not passed away before many a pang and sad misgiving as to the present and future of England had distressed their souls. A queen indeed was reigning, and a Stuart; but on what terms ! by virtue of a kind of popular appointment, not by right divine; and her successor was to be an alien prince, foisted in by Whig adroitness and Puritan disaffection to occupy the throne of the exiled Stuarts. The Church of England, indeed, was again 1 If,' wrote Cromwell to the delegates who desired to treat for the surrender of Ross, 'by liberty of conscience you mean a liberty to exercise the mass, I judge it best to use plain dealing, and to let you know, where the parliament of England have power, that will not be permitted.' INTRODUCTION. XV erect, but it was infested by liberals and latitudinarians, and governed by men, some of whom were bishops only in name, but rank dissenters or Socinians in their hearts. The dream which flattered the imaginations of Whitgift, Andrewes, and Laud, of a decently ordered Protestant church, co-extensive with the nation which supported it, moderating between the superstitions of Rome and the fanaticism of Geneva,-must now be resigned for ever; for Whiggism had given toleration to the dissenters, and they were using it to spread themselves and their tenets with an ever increasing alacrity. It was this pervading sense of disappointment which gave rise to the strange irritability and discontent so noticeable among the educated classes in the reigns of William III and Anne. But the depression bore less hardly on the Whigs, because, though the representatives of the republicans of 1649, they had honestly renounced republicanism, and looked for political and other reforms only through the working of a monarchical constitution, tempered by Whiggism. Addison was a typical Whig; though a warm supporter of the Revolution of 1688, his aim was not to establish any theoretically perfect government, but merely to replace an unmanageable by a manageable branch of the royal family; while helping to keep out Charles I's grandson, he spoke of Charles I himself as the 'Royal Martyr;' and, though favourable to toleration, he personally preferred the church as by law established. It was a comfortable system, and it suited the times and the circumstances;—if it rested on no reasoned-out philosophy of the things of heaven and earth, that did not disparage it in the eyes of Addison, whose mind, as we have said, was widely sympathetic and observant rather than penetrating. He might naturally feel that the best advice to be given to an Englishman in 1711 was, 'Spartam, quam nactus es, orna;'-this new settlement of the Crown, this house of Hanover, though nobody loves them, represent the best practicable compromise; this is the system,-as M. Thiers lately said of the republic in France, which divides men the least; let us adopt it then without more ado, and, keeping within its limits, embellish and elevate what remains of life: Ηδ ̓ ἐστὶν ἡ σώζουσα, καὶ ταύτης ἔπι 1 1 Soph. Antig. |