Whig, he continued mode ate in po lemics; and in an age when the winners in the political fight were ready to ruin their opponents or to bring them to the block, he confined himself to show the faults of argument made by the Tories, or to rail courteously at their prejudices. At Dublin he went first of all to shake hands with Swift, his great and fallen adversary. Insulted bitterly by Dennis and Pope, he re fused to employ against them his influence or his wit, and praised Pope to the end. What can be more touching, when we have read his life, than his essay on kindness? we perceive that he is unconsciously speaking of himself : a good style and to fashionable society. A young man in Voltaire's time, on leaving college, had to write his tragedy, as now he must write an article on political economy; it was then a proof that he could converse with ladies, as now it is a proof that he can argue with men. He learned the art of being amusing, of touching the heart, of talking of love; he thus escaped from dry or special studies; he could choose among events or sentiments those which interest or please; he was able to hold his own in good society, to be sometimes agreeable there, never to offend. Such is the culture which these works gave Addison; it is of slight importance that they are poor. In them he dealt with the passions, with humor. He produced in his opera some lively and smiling pictures; in his tragedy some noble or moving accents; he emerged from reasoning and pure dissertation; he acquired the art of rendering morality visible and truth expressive; he knew how to give ideas a physiognomy, and that an attractive one. Thus was the finished writer perfected by contact with ancient and modern, foreign and national urbanity, by the sight of the fine arts, by experience of the world and study success. It is himself that he is unof style, by continuous and delicate veiling; he was very prosperous, and choice of all that is agreeable in things and men, in life and art. "There is no society or conversation to be kept up in the world without good-nature, or something which must bear its appearance, and supply its place. For this reason mankind humanity, which is what we express by the word good-breeding. The greatest wits I have conversed with are men eminent for thei humanity... Good-nature is generally borr with us; health, prosperity, and kind treat. ment from the world are great cherishers of it where they find it." * invent a kind of artificial ... It so happens that he is involuntarily describing his own charm and his own his good fortune spread itself around him in affectionate sentiments, in constant consideration for others, in calm cheerfulness. At College he was distinguished; his Latin verses made him a fellow at Oxford; he spent ten years there in grave amusements and in studies which pleased him. Dryden, the prince of literature, praised him in the highest terms, when Addison was only twenty-two. When he left Oxford, the ministry gave him a pension of three hundred pounds to finish his education, and prepare him for public service. On his return from his travels, his poem on Blenheim placed him in the first rank of the Whigs. He became twice Secretary for Ireland, Under-Secretary of State, a member of Parliament, one of the principal Secretaries of State. Party hatred spared him; amid the His politeness received from his character a singular bent and charm. It was not external, simply voluntary and official; it came from the heart. He was gentle and kind, of refined sensibility, so shy even as to remain silent and seem dull in a large company or before strangers, only recovering his spirits before intimate friends, and confessing that only two persons can converse together. He could not endere an acrimonious discussion; when his opponent was intractable, he pretended to approve, and for punishment, plunged him discreetly into his own folly. He withdrew by preference from political arguments; being invited to deal with them in the Spectator, he contented himself with inoffensive and general subjects, which could interest almost universal defeat of the Whigs, all whilst offending none. It would he was re-elected member of Parliahave pained him to give others pain. ment; in the furious war of Whigs and Though a very decided and steady * Spectator, No. 169. Tories, both united to applaud his tragedy of Cato; the most cruel pamphleteers respected him; his up rightness, his talent, seemed exalted by common consent above discussion. He lived in abundance, activity, and honors, wisely and usefully, amid the assiduous admiration and constant affection of learned and distinguished friends, who could never have too much of his conversation, amid the applause of all the good men and all the cultivated minds of England. If twice the fall of his party seemed to destroy or retard his fortune, he maintained his position without much effort, by reflection and coolness, prepared for all that might happen, accepting mediocrity, confirmed in a natural and acquired calmness, accommodating himself without yielding to men, respectful to the great without degrading himself, free from secret revolt or internal suffering. These are the sources of his talent; into a cheese-shop in order to see for himself all the stages of the manufao ture; he returns, like Addison, pro vided with exact statistics, complete notes; this mass of verified informa tion is the foundation of the common sense of Englishmen. Addison added to it experience of business, having been successively, or at the same time, a journalist, a member of Parliament, a statesman, hand and heart in all the fights and chances of party. Mere literary education only makes good talkers, able to adorn and publish ideas which they do not possess, and which others furnish for them. If writers wish to invent, they must look to events and men, not to books and drawing. rooms; the conversation of special men is more useful to them than the study of perfect periods; they cannot think for themselves, but in so far as they have lived or acted. Addison knew how to act and live. When we could any be purer or finer? could any read his reports, letters, and disthing be more engaging than worldly cussions, we feel that politics and govpolish and elegance, without the fac-ernment have given him half his mind. titious ardor and the complimentary To exercise patronage, to handle falsehoods of the world? Where shall money, to interpret the law, to divine ness Into which nations fell who | passions on the side of truth. He had we look for more agreeable conversation than that of a good and happy man, whose knowledge, taste, and wit, are only employed to give us pleasure? III. This pleasure will be useful to us. Our interlocutor is as grave as he is polite; he will and can instruct as well as amuse us; his education has been as solid as it has been elegant; he even confesses in the Spectator that he prefers the serious to the humorous style. He is naturally reflective, silent, attentive. He has studied literature, men, and things, with the conscientiousness of a scholar and an observer. When he travelled in Italy, it was in the Enghsh style, noting the difference of manners, the peculiarities of the soil, the good and ill effects of various governments, providing himself with precise memoirs, circumstantial statistics on taxes, buildings, minerals, climate, harbors, administration, and on a great many other things.* An English lord, who travels in Holland, goes simply * See, for instance, his chapter on the Republic of San Marino. the motives of men, to foresee the changes of public opinion, to be compelled to judge rightly, quickly, and twenty times a day, on present and great interests, looked after by the pub lic and under the espionage of enemies; all this nourished his reason and sustained his discourses. Such a man might judge and counsel his fellows; his judgments were not amplifications arranged by a process of the brain, but observations controlled by experience: he might be listened to on moral subjects as a natural philosopher was on subjects connected with physics; we feel that he spoke with authority, and that we were instructed. After having listened a little, people felt themselves better; for they recog. nized in him from the first a singularly lofty soul, very pure, so much attached to uprightness that he made it his con stant care and his dearest pleasure. He naturally loved beautiful things, good ness and justice, science and liberty. From an early age he had joined the Liberal party, and he continued in it to the end, hoping the best of human virtue and reason, noting the wretched abandoned their dignity with their independence. He followed the grand discoveries of the new physical sciences, so as to give him more exalted ideas of the works of God. He loved the deep and serious emotions which reveal to us the nobility of our nature and the infirmity of our condition. He employed all his talent and all his writings in giving us the notion of what we are worth and of what we ought to be. Of two tragedies which he composed or contemplated, one was on the death of Cato, the most virtuous of the Romans the other on that of Socrates, the most virtuous of the Greeks. At the end of the first he felt some scruples; and for fear of being accused of finding an excuse for suicide, he gave Cato some remorse. His opera of Rosamond ends with the injunction to prefer pure love to forbidden joys; the Spectator, the Tatler, the Guardian, are mere lay sermons. Moreover, he put his maxims into practice. When he was in office, his integrity was perfect; he conferred often obligations on those whom he did not know-always gratuitously, refusing presents, under whatever form they were offered. When out of office, his loyalty was perfect; he maintained his opinions and friendships without bitterness or baseness, boldly praising his fallen protectors, fearing not thereby to expose himself to the loss of his only remaining resources. He possessed an innate nobility of character, and reason aided him in keeping it. He considered that ❘ there is common sense in honesty. His first care, as he said, was to range his * Letter from Italy to Lord Halifax; O Liberty, thou Goddess heavenly bright, made for himself a portrait of a ration al creature, and he conformed his con duct to this by reflection as much as by instinct. He rested every virtue on an order of principles and proofs. His logic fed his morality, and the upright ness of his mind completed the singie. ness of his heart. His religion, Englis in every sense, was after the like fash ion. He based his faith on a regular succession of historical discussions; he established the existence of God ty a regular series of moral deductions; minute and solid demonstration was throughout the guide and foundation of his beliefs and emotions. Thus disposed, he loved to conceive God as the rational head of the world; he transformed accidents and necessities into calculations and directions; he saw order and providence in the conflict of things, and felt around him the wisdom which he attempted to establish in himself. Addison, good and just himself, trusted in God, also a being good and just. He lived willingly in His knowledge and presence, and thought of the unknown future which was to complete human nature and accom plish moral order. When the end came, he went over his life, and discovered that he had done some wrong or other to Gay: this wrong was doubtless slight, since Gay had never thought of it. Addison begged him come to his bedside, and asked his pardon. When he was about to die, he wished still to be useful, and sent for his step son, Lord Warwick, whose careless life had caused him some uneasiness. He was so weak that at first he could not speak. The young man, after wait ing a while, said to him: "Dear sir, Profuse to bliss, and present you sent for me, I believe; I hope that you have some commands; I shall hold them most sacred." The dying man with an effort pressed his hand, and replied gently: "See in what peace a Christian can die." † Shortly afterwards he expired. light; Eternal pleasures in thy presence reign, And smiling plenty leads thy wanton train. 'Tis Britannia's isle, And makes her barren rocks and her bleak mountains smile."-i. 53. About the Republic of San Marino he writes: "Nothing can be a greater instance of the natural love that mankind has for liberty, and of their aversion to an arbitrary government, than such a savage mountain covered with people, and the Campagna of Rome, which lies in the same country, almost destitute of inhabitants."-Remarks on Italy, ii. 48. + Halifax, for instance. IV. "The great and only end of these speculations," says Addison, in one of * Of the Christian Religion. his Spectators, "is to banish vice and ❘ Of course he sets himself against de ignorance out of the territories of Great Britain." And he kept his word. His papers are wholly moral-advices to families, reprimands to thoughtless women, a sketch of an honest man, remedies for the passions, reflections en God and a future life. I hardly know, or rather I know very well, what success a newspaper full of sermons would have in France. In England it was extraordinary, equa o that of the most popular modern novelists. In the general downfall of the daily and weekly papers ruined by the Stamp Act, the Spectator doubled its price, and held its ground. This was because it offered to Englishmen the picture of English reason: the talent and the teaching were in harmony with the needs of the age and of the country. Let us endeavor to describe this reason, which became gradually eliminated from Puritanism and its rigidity, from the Restoration and its excess. The mind attained its balance, together with religion and the state. It conceived the rule, and disciplined its conduct; it diverged from a life of excess, and confirmed itself in a sensible life; it shunned physical and prescribed moral existence. Addison rejects with scorn gross corporeal pleasure, the brutal joy of noise and motion: "I would nevertheless leave to the consideration of those who are patrons of this monstrous trial of skill, whether or no they are not guilty, in some measure, of an affront to their species, in treating after this manner the human face divine." ; " Is it possible that human nature can rejoice in its disgrace, and take pleasure in seeing its own figure turned to ridicule, ard distorted into forms that raise horror and aversion? There is something disingenuous and immoral in the being able to bear such a sight."§ • The Stamp Act (1712; 10 Anne, c. 19) put ▲ duty of a halfpenny on every printed halfsheet or less, and a penny on a whole sheet, besides twelve pence on every advertisement. This Act was repealed in 1855. Swift writes to Stella (August 7, 1712), "Do you know that a'l Grub Street is ruined by the Stamp Act." -TR. + The sale of the Spectator was considerably diminished through its forced increase of price, and it was discontinued in 1713, the year after the Stamp Act was passed.-TR. Spectator No 173. Tatler, No. 108. liberate shamelessness and the system atic debauchery which were the taste and the shame of the Restoration He wrote whole articles against young fashionable men, "a sort of vermin who fill London with their bastards; against professional seducers, who are the "knights-errant " of vice. "When men of rank and figure pass away their lives in these criminal pursuits and practices, they ought to consider that they render themselves more vile and despicable than any innocent man can be, whatever low station his fortune o birth have placed him in." * He se verely jeers at women who expose themselves to temptations, and whom he calls "salamanders:" " A salamander is a kind of heroine in chastity, that treads upon fire, and lives in the midst of flames without being hurt. A salamander knows no distinction of sex in those she converses with, grows familiar with a stranger at first sight, and is not so narrow-spirited as to ob serve whether the person she talks to be in breeches or petticoats. She admits a male visitant to her bedside, plays with him a whole afternoon at picquet, walks with him two or three hours by moonlight." ↑ He fights like a preacher against the fashion of low dresses, and gravely demands the tucker and modesty of olden times "To prevent these saucy familiar glances, I would entreat my gentle readers to sew on their tuckers again, to retrieve the modesty of their char acters, and not to imitate the nakedness, but the innocence, of their mother Eve. In short, modesty gives the maid greater beauty than even the bloom of youth; it bestows or the wife the dignity of a matron, and reinstates the widow in her virginity." ‡ We find also lectures on masquerades which end with a rendezvous; precepts on the number of glasses people might drink, and the dishes of which they might eat; condemnations of licen tious professors of irreligion and im morality; all maxims now somewhat stale, but then new and useful because Wycherley and Rochester had put inte practice and made popular the oppo * Guardian, No. 123. ↑ Spectator, No. 198 ‡ Guardian, No. 100. site maxims. Debauchery passed for French and fashionable: this is why Addison proscribes in addition all French frivolities. He laughs at women who receive visitors in their dressing-rooms, and speak aloud at the theatre: "There is nothing which exposes a woman to greater dangers, than that gayety and airiness of temper, which are natural to most of the sex. It should be therefore the concern of every wise and virtuous woman to keep this sprightliness from degenerating into levity. On the contrary, the whole discourse and behavior of the French is to make the sex more fantastical, or (as they are pleased to term it) more awakened, than is consistent either with virtue or discretion." * We see already in these strictures the portrait of the sensible housewife, the modest English woman, domestic and grave, wholly taken up with her husband and children. Addison returns a score of times to the artifices, the pretty affected babyisms, the coquetry, the futilities of women. He cannot suffer languishing or lazy habits. He is full of epigrams against flirtations, extravagant toilets, useless visits. † He writes a satirical journal of a man who goes to his club, learns the news, yawns, studies the barometer, and thinks his time well occupied. He considers that time is capital, business duty, and life a task. Is life only a task? If Addison holds himself superior to sensual life, he falls short of philosophical life. His morality, thoroughly English, always drags along among commonplaces, discovering no principles, making no deductions. The fine and lofty aspects of the mind are wanting. He gives useful advice, clear instruction, justified by what happened yesterday, useful for to-morrow. He observes that fathers must not be inflexible, and that they often repent driving their children to despair. He finds that bad books are pernicious, because their durability carries their poison to future ages. He consoles a woman who has lost her sweetheart, by showing her the misfortunes of so many other people who are suffering the greatest evils at the same time. His Spectator • Spectator, No. 45. ↑ Ibid. 317 and 323. is only an honest man's manual, and is often like the Complete Lawyer. It is practical, its aim being not to amuse, but to correct us. The conscientious Protestant, nourished with dissertations and morality, demands an effect ive monitor and guide; he would like his reading to influence his conduct, and his newspaper to suggest a resolu tion. To this end Addison seeks ma tives everywhere. He thinks of the future ife, but does not forget the present; he rests virtue on interest. rightly understood. He strains no princip.e to its limits; he accepts them all, as they are to be met with everywhere, according to their manifest goodness, drawing from them only the primary consequences, shunning the powerful logical pressure which spoils all by expressing too much. Let us observe him establishing a maxim, recommending constancy for instance; his motives are mixed and incongruous: first, inconstancy exposes us to scorn; next, it puts us in continual distraction; again, it hinders us as a rule from attaining our end; moreover, it is the great feature of a human and mortal being; finally, it is most opposed to the inflexible nature of God, who ought to be our model. The whole is illustrated at the close by a quotation from Dryden and a verse from Horace. This medley and jumble describe the ordinary mind which remains on the level of its audience, and the practical mind, which knows how to dominate over its audience. Addison persuades the public, because he draws from the public sources of belief. He is powerful because he is vulgar, and useful because he is narrow. Let us picture now this mind, so characteristically mediocre, limited tc the discovery of good motives of action What a reflective man, always calm and dignified! What a store he has of resolutions and maxims! All rapture, instinct, inspiration, and caprice, are abolished or disciplined. No case surprises or carries him away. He is always ready and protected; so much so, that he is ike an automaton. Argument has frozen and invaded him. Consider, for instance, how he puts us on our guard against involuntary hypocrisy, announc |
