XXX

CHARACTERISTICS OF ADDISON'S STYLE.

Edgar bears a dreadful resemblance to Steele, there is certainly an equally dreadful truth in Mandeville's happy phrase. Steele performed his duties as Spectator by mingling freely in clubs and coffeehouses, while Addison, to use Hurd's expression, remained suaviter subridens, maintaining a dignified aloofness and viewing others with good-humoured contempt. Hc had the national dread of giving a loose rein to emotion, and never indulges his readers with the naïve self-revelation of Goldsmith or of Steele. "When phlegm," however, as M. Taine has said, "is united to gentleness, as in Addison, it is as agreeable as it is piquant. We are not repelled by venomous bitterness, as in Swift, or by continuous buffoonery, as in Voltaire." As compared with Steele, he was a more careful and therefore a better writer. His early practice in verse composition, and his study of Cowley and Tillotson, had trained his ear to appreciate the requirements of prose cadence. His vocabulary was not unusually extensive any more than were his learning and critical acumen, his moralizings are not in advance of Pope's, and his style is purposely loose; but with all this he possessed a quite exceptional power of graceful and euphonious expression, and a complete mastery of polite ridicule. The smoothness of his style often entailed a sacrifice of strength, and the prim propriety of his language stands out in striking contrast to the nervous, unpolished vigour of Defoe. Addison's true greatness lies in his use of a pure and tuneful diction, and in his power of humorous satire. Irony, in his hands, was like a fine rapier which can wound without at

once being felt, and no English writer has excelled him in the deft handling of the weapon.

Besides being the standard model for succeeding essayists, the Spectator in its own day won an astonishing and unprecedented popularity. As regards the improvement of English prose, Steele and Addison occupy only a secondary position. Cowley, Temple, and Dryden among their predecessors, and Swift and Defoe among their contemporaries, left a more veritable mark than they did on the progress of style. But Steele and Addison were the first to combine good style with attractive matter, and thus to convey a prose ideal to a much wider circle than had any before. And further, they diffused a taste for knowledge as none previous had done, they fostered an interest in literary criticism, and exercised generally an incalculable educative influence. That the "lesser immoralities", against which they inveighed, were driven out of fashion is clear from many sources, and there is important contemporary evidence which has been attributed to Gay. "It is impossible to conceive the effect his (Steele's) writings have had on the town; how many thousand follies they have either quite banished or given a very great check to;... how entirely they have convinced our fops and young fellows of the value and advantage of learning." Reformations of manners and customs are not, however, easily effected by strokes of the pen. This panegyric must be accepted with some qualification, but that the Tatler and Spectator did excellent service in the way indicated is indisputable, though it need not be believed that the whole of Queen

Anne society was at once reformed by the fiat of two laughing philosophers. And there was still another result which contemporary estimates could not include, although it is the essay's greatest secondary achievement. It led the way to the perfecting of the English novel. More than a century before the Spectator the writing of Characters was a fashionable kind of composition. In 1608, Bishop Hall wrote a collection of this kind, which gained him from Wotton the title of "our English Seneca", and met with high praise from Fuller for "the pureness, plainness, and fullness of his style". This was followed in 1614 by Sir Thomas Overbury's Witty Descriptions of the Properties of Sundry Persons, and in 1628 by Earle's Microcosmography. All of these were to some extent the forerunners of La Bruyère, they all display a profusion of epigrammatic and sometimes pedantic word-play, but they all painted with too broad a brush, ignoring the individual for the type. characters have no basis in reality, and are merely attempts to body forth the universal by combining a number of individual traits. Of idiosyncrasies they take no account, and accordingly fail to create a personality capable of evoking the slightest sympathy or interest. Overbury, the most representative of these character-writers, has been made the subject of an interesting comparison by Professor Raleigh in his English Novel. By making a selection of passages from the Coverley papers, he has framed a character of Sir Roger analogous to Overbury's character of a country squire, and the comparison of this selection with the fully elabo

Their

rated conception in the Spectator reveals as nothing else could do the magnitude of Addison's advance. "The dreary 'Character' of the seventeenth century", says Professor Raleigh, "which would have rendered Sir Roger as 'An Old Country Knight', and Will Honeycomb as 'A Mere Town Gallant', has received its death-blow in these sketches, drawn by men who loved the individual better than the type, and delighted in precisely those touches of character, eccentricities and surprises, that give life to a literary portrait." The essayists quickened the seventeenthcentury lay-figure into life by endowing it with human emotions and passions, and by making it not merely an isolated object for contemplation but also a unit on the crowded stage of a larger drama. The Spectator opens with the rather ambitious aim of bringing philosophy out of closets and libraries to dwell in clubs and coffee-houses. Steele's more modest valedictory words in the Tatler give a truer estimate of the essay's work, and are significant as being such as Richardson might have fitly used. "I must confess it has been a most exquisite pleasure to me to frame characters of domestic life, and put those parts of it which are least observed into an agreeable view... in a word, to trace human life through all its mazes and recesses." The claim to have framed characters of domestic life is just, and it strikes the key-note of the English novel. The inauguration of the latter by Richardson does not differ from that of other literary forms; the year 1740 marks not so much the birth-year of a new kind of literature as a critical period in the history of a development that had long been going ( M 249)

с

on. Richardson, like others, had his pioneers, some notable, many forgotten. That his work can be so far resolved into its prime factors is no detraction to any literary creator, no reason for any stinting of the praise due to his original contributions. Just as the Tatler shows signs of transition, so Pamela displays but partial emancipation from the essay form. It resembles the letters of the Tatler and Spectator, but with the difference that all are made to revolve round a fixed centre. Even in Fielding's fondness for essay interludes there is a trace of the novel's origin, but Fielding stands to Richardson as the Spectator to the Tatler-the one carries on the other to an inevitable culmination.

None of the other periodicals conducted by Steele and Addison approach the Spectator in point of continuity of interest or brilliancy of execution. The Guardian, the most notable of them all, contains nothing by Steele that he had not already surpassed, and is interesting mainly for the contributions of Pope and for the celebrated critiques on pastoral poetry-critiques which are valuable, not only as illustrating the crafty intriguing of Pope, but as having furnished the foundation for the revival of Scottish poetry in the successful pastorals of Allan Ramsay. Pope's essays on Epic Poetry and on Dedications both smack most unmistakably of the Dunciad, and their author's own practice in the matter both of epic and of dedication hardly justifies the cheap irony and acrimonious wit. His letters, which with their careful workmanship and obvious insincerity present so vivid a contrast to the pathos of the Journal to Stella or to the un