The Common Reader
new thing in the world” the merchant told her; “it was a way of arguing
contrary to the general practise”. But Defoe is the last writer to be
guilty of bald preaching. Roxana keeps our attention because she is
blessedly unconscious that she is in any good sense an example to her
sex and is thus at liberty to own that part of her argument is “of an
elevated strain which was really not in my thoughts at first, at all”.
The knowledge of her own frailties and the honest questioning of her own
motives, which that knowledge begets, have the happy result of keeping
her fresh and human when the martyrs and pioneers of so many problem
novels have shrunken and shrivelled to the pegs and props of their
respective creeds.
But the claim of Defoe upon our admiration does not rest upon the fact
that he can be shown to have anticipated some of the views of Meredith,
or to have written scenes which (the odd suggestion occurs) might have
been turned into plays by Ibsen. Whatever his ideas upon the position of
women, they are an incidental result of his chief virtue, which is that
he deals with the important and lasting side of things and not with the
passing and trivial. He is often dull. He can imitate the matter-of-fact
precision of a scientific traveller until we wonder that his pen could
trace or his brain conceive what has not even the excuse of truth to
soften its dryness. He leaves out the whole of vegetable nature, and a
large part of human nature. All this we may admit, though we have to
admit defects as grave in many writers whom we call great. But that does
not impair the peculiar merit of what remains. Having at the outset
limited his scope and confined his ambitions he achieves a truth of
insight which is far rarer and more enduring than the truth of fact
which he professed to make his aim. Moll Flanders and her friends
recommended themselves to him not because they were, as we should say,
“picturesque”; nor, as he affirmed, because they were examples of evil
living by which the public might profit. It was their natural veracity,
bred in them by a life of hardship, that excited his interest. For them
there were no excuses; no kindly shelter obscured their motives. Poverty
was their taskmaster. Defoe did not pronounce more than a judgement of
the lips upon their failings. But their courage and resource and
tenacity delighted him. He found their society full of good talk, and
pleasant stories, and faith in each other, and morality of a home-made
kind. Their fortunes had that infinite variety which he praised and
relished and beheld with wonder in his own life. These men and women,
above all, were free to talk openly of the passions and desires which
have moved men and women since the beginning of time, and thus even now
they keep their vitality undiminished. There is a dignity in everything
that is looked at openly. Even the sordid subject of money, which plays
so large a part in their histories, becomes not sordid but tragic when
it stands not for ease and consequence but for honour, honesty and life
itself. You may object that Defoe is humdrum, but never that he is
engrossed with petty things.
He belongs, indeed, to the school of the great plain writers, whose work
is founded upon a knowledge of what is most persistent, though not most
seductive, in human nature. The view of London from Hungerford Bridge,
grey, serious, massive, and full of the subdued stir of traffic and
business, prosaic if it were not for the masts of the ships and the
towers and domes of the city, brings him to mind. The tattered girls
with violets in their hands at the street corners, and the old
weather-beaten women patiently displaying their matches and bootlaces
beneath the shelter of arches, seem like characters from his books. He
is of the school of Crabbe, and of Gissing, and not merely a fellow
pupil in the same stern place of learning, but its founder and master.
[Footnote 6: Written in 1919.]
_Addison_[7]
In July, 1843, Lord Macaulay pronounced the opinion that Joseph Addison
had enriched our literature with compositions “that will live as long as
the English language”. But when Lord Macaulay pronounced an opinion it
was not merely an opinion. Even now, at a distance of seventy-six years,
the words seem to issue from the mouth of the chosen representative of
the people. There is an authority about them, a sonority, a sense of
responsibility, which put us in mind of a Prime Minister making a
proclamation on behalf of a great empire rather than of a journalist
writing about a deceased man of letters for a magazine. The article upon
Addison is, indeed, one of the most vigorous of the famous essays.
Florid, and at the same time extremely solid, the phrases seem to build
up a monument, at once square and lavishly festooned with ornament,
which should serve Addison for shelter so long as one stone of
Westminster Abbey stands upon another. Yet, though we may have read and
admired this particular essay times out of number (as we say when we
have read anything three times over), it has never occurred to us,
strangely enough, to believe that it is true. That is apt to happen to
the admiring reader of Macaulay’s essays. While delighting in their
richness, force, and variety, and finding every judgement, however
emphatic, proper in its place, it seldom occurs to us to connect these
sweeping assertions and undeniable convictions with anything so minute
as a human being. So it is with Addison. “If we wish”, Macaulay writes,
“to find anything more vivid than Addison’s best portraits, we must go
either to Shakespeare or to Cervantes”. “We have not the least doubt
that if Addison had written a novel on an extensive plan it would have
been superior to any that we possess.” His essays, again, “fully entitle
him to the rank of a great poet”; and, to complete the edifice, we have
Voltaire proclaimed “the prince of buffoons”, and together with Swift
forced to stoop so low that Addison takes rank above them both as a
humorist.
Examined separately, such flourishes of ornament look grotesque enough,
but in their place—such is the persuasive power of design—they are
part of the decoration; they complete the monument. Whether Addison or
another is interred within, it is a very fine tomb. But now that two
centuries have passed since the real body of Addison was laid by night
under the Abbey floor, we are, through no merit of our own, partially
qualified to test the first of the flourishes on that fictitious
tombstone to which, though it may be empty, we have done homage, in a
formal kind of way, these sixty-seven years. The compositions of Addison
will live as long as the English language. Since every moment brings
proof that our mother tongue is more lusty and lively than sorts with
complete sedateness or chastity, we need only concern ourselves with the
vitality of Addison. Neither lusty nor lively is the adjective we should
apply to the present condition of the _Tatler_ and the _Spectator_. To
take a rough test, it is possible to discover how many people in the
course of a year borrow Addison’s works from the public library, and a
particular instance affords us the not very encouraging information that
during nine years two people yearly take out the first volume of the
_Spectator_. The second volume is less in request than the first. The
inquiry is not a cheerful one. From certain marginal comments and pencil
marks it seems that these rare devotees seek out only the famous
passages and, as their habit is, score what we are bold enough to
consider the least admirable phrases. No; if Addison lives at all, it is
not in the public libraries. It is in libraries that are markedly
private, secluded, shaded by lilac trees and brown with folios, that he
still draws his faint, regular breath. If any man or woman is going to
solace himself with a page of Addison before the June sun is out of the
sky to-day, it is in some such pleasant retreat as this.
Yet all over England at intervals, perhaps wide ones, we may be sure
that there are people engaged in reading Addison, whatever the year or
season. For Addison is very well worth reading. The temptation to read
Pope on Addison, Macaulay on Addison, Thackeray on Addison, Johnson on
Addison rather than Addison himself is to be resisted, for you will
find, if you study the _Tatler_ and the _Spectator_, glance at _Cato_,
and run through the remainder of the six moderate-sized volumes, that
Addison is neither Pope’s Addison nor anybody else’s Addison, but a
separate, independent individual still capable of casting a clear-cut
shape of himself upon the consciousness, turbulent and distracted as it
is, of nineteen hundred and nineteen. It is true that the fate of the
lesser shades is always a little precarious. They are so easily obscured
or distorted. It seems so often scarcely worth while to go through the
cherishing and humanising process which is necessary to get into touch
with a writer of the second class who may, after all, have little to
give us. The earth is crusted over them; their features are obliterated,
and perhaps it is not a head of the best period that we rub clean in the
end, but only the chip of an old pot. The chief difficulty with the
lesser writers, however, is not only the effort. It is that our
standards have changed. The things that they like are not the things
that we like; and as the charm of their writing depends much more upon
taste than upon conviction, a change of manners is often quite enough to
put us out of touch altogether. That is one of the most troublesome
barriers between ourselves and Addison. He attached great importance to
certain qualities. He had a very precise notion of what we are used to
call “niceness” in man or woman. He was extremely fond of saying that
men ought not to be atheists, and that women ought not to wear large
petticoats. This directly inspires in us not so much a sense of distaste
as a sense of difference. Dutifully, if at all, we strain our
imaginations to conceive the kind of audience to whom these precepts
were addressed. The _Tatler_ was published in 1709; the _Spectator_ a
year or two later. What was the state of England at that particular
moment? Why was Addison so anxious to insist upon the necessity of a
decent and cheerful religious belief? Why did he so constantly, and in
the main kindly, lay stress upon the foibles of women and their reform?
Why was he so deeply impressed with the evils of party government? Any
historian will explain; but it is always a misfortune to have to call in
the services of any historian. A writer should give us direct certainty;
explanations are so much water poured into the wine. As it is, we can
only feel that these counsels are addressed to ladies in hoops and
gentlemen in wigs—a vanished audience which has learnt its lesson and
gone its way and the preacher with it. We can only smile and marvel and
perhaps admire the clothes.
And that is not the way to read. To be thinking that dead people
deserved these censures and admired this morality, judged the eloquence,
which we find so frigid, sublime, the philosophy to us so superficial,
profound, to take a collector’s joy in such signs of antiquity, is to
treat literature as if it were a broken jar of undeniable age but
doubtful beauty, to be stood in a cabinet behind glass doors. The charm
which still makes _Cato_ very readable is much of this nature. When
Syphax exclaims,
So, where our wide Numidian wastes extend,
Sudden, th’ impetuous hurricanes descend,
Wheel through the air, in circling eddies play,
Tear up the sands, and sweep whole plains away,
The helpless traveller, with wild surprise,
Sees the dry desert all around him rise,
And smother’d in the dusty whirlwind dies,