imagination. The essay was the form of literature which they found most available, for it was the nearest artistic reproduction of social intercourse, and the London of the early part of the eighteenth century was the London of coffee-houses, of court manners extending into the multitude of families which allied themselves with the two great parties in English politics, and the London of a commercial class rising into dignity and power. In the essay as Addison and Steele perfected it lay as yet undeveloped the modern novel. The romance was a form of literature recognized and accepted, and when the writers of these essays feigned narratives of distressed or inquiring damsels, they often gave them names out of the romances, as Annabella, Eucratia, Amaryllis, Leonora, and the like. But they fell, also, into the way of calling the fictitious figures Patience Giddy, Thomas Trusty, Sam Hopewell, and similar homely names, and at every stroke came nearer, also, to the familiar forms of actual life. It is apparent that the popularity of The Spectator from the first was due largely to the reality with which its authors invested the characters whom they impersonated. As soon as the Spectator himself had drawn his own portrait, he enlisted the interest and attention of a compact society of readers in London who loved gossip and social intercourse and were delighted to see their taste thus reflected in graceful literature. And when the next day this new paper proceeded to sketch a group of individual men, making them, after the fashion of the day, a club, the possibilities which lay in this reproduction, as in a mirror, of contemporaneous society, were so great that men and women everywhere received with enthusiasm this new creation in letters, and the projectors of the paper were inspirited by their instantaneous success. It cannot be said that either Addison or Steele perceived the full force of what they had done. Their main interest was still in criticism of life, and the figures they so deftly manipulated were rather agreeable reliefs, and even occasional mouthpieces of sentiment, than living persons whose fortunes were of the utmost importance. Still, there these creations were, and from time to time the artists who fashioned them revived them for their delight and added one touch of nature after another. The central figure was that of Sir Roger de Coverley, and the instinct of the artist led Addison with Steele's fine assistance to extend the fullest treatment upon the knight in his country home, rather than in the town. The papers that follow are a few out of the thirty or forty in which Sir Roger's name appears. SIR ROGER DE COVERLEY. THE SPECTATOR'S ACCOUNT OF HIMSELF. Non fumum ex fulgore, sed ex fumo dare lucem I HAVE observed that a reader seldom peruses a book with pleasure 'till he knows whether the writer of it be a black or a fair man, of a mild or choleric disposition, married or a bachelor, with other particulars of the like nature, that conduce very much to the right understanding of an author.2 To gratify this curiosity, which is so natural to a reader, I design this paper and my next as prefatory discourses to my following writings, and shall give some account in 1. His thought it is, not smoke from flame, But out of smoke a steadfast light to bring, That in the light bright wonders he may frame. 2. In his Notes on Walter Savage Landor, De Quincey (iv. 407), commenting on this passage, says: "No reader cares about an author's person before reading his book; it is after reading it, and supposing the book to reveal something of the writer's moral nature, as modifying his intellect; it is for his fun, his fancy, his sadness, possibly his craziness, that any reader cares about seeing the author in person. Afflicted with the very satyriasis of curiosity, no man ever wished to see the author of a Ready Reckoner, or of the Agistment Tithe, or on the Present Deplorable Dry Rot in Potatoes." |