The Common Reader
we cannot help imagining the thrill in the crowded theatre, the feathers
nodding emphatically on the ladies’ heads, the gentlemen leaning forward
to tap their canes, and every one exclaiming to his neighbour how vastly
fine it is and crying “Bravo!” But how can we be excited? And so with
Bishop Hurd and his notes—his “finely observed”, his “wonderfully
exact, both in the sentiment and expression”, his serene confidence that
when “the present humour of idolising Shakespeare is over”, the time will
come when _Cato_ is “supremely admired by all candid and judicious
critics”. This is all very amusing and productive of pleasant fancies,
both as to the faded frippery of our ancestors’ minds and the bold
opulence of our own. But it is not the intercourse of equals, let alone
that other kind of intercourse, which as it makes us contemporary with
the author, persuades us that his object is our own. Occasionally in
_Cato_ one may pick up a few lines that are not obsolete; but for the
most part the tragedy which Dr. Johnson thought “unquestionably the
noblest production of Addison’s genius” has become collector’s
literature.
Perhaps most readers approach the essays also with some suspicion as to
the need of condescension in their minds. The question to be asked is
whether Addison, attached as he was to certain standards of gentility,
morality, and taste, has not become one of those people of exemplary
character and charming urbanity who must never be talked to about
anything more exciting than the weather. We have some slight suspicion
that the _Spectator_ and the _Tatler_ are nothing but talk, couched in
perfect English, about the number of fine days this year compared with
the number of wet the year before. The difficulty of getting on to equal
terms with him is shown by the little fable which he introduces into one
of the early numbers of the _Tatler_, of “a young gentleman, of moderate
understanding, but great vivacity, who . . . had got a little smattering
of knowledge, just enough to make an atheist or a freethinker, but not a
philosopher, or a man of sense”. This young gentleman visits his father
in the country, and proceeds “to enlarge the narrowness of the country
notions; in which he succeeded so well, that he had seduced the butler
by his table-talk, and staggered his eldest sister. . . . ’Till one day,
talking of his setting dog . . . said ‘he did not question but Tray was
as immortal as any one of the family’; and in the heat of the argument
told his father, that for his own part, ‘he expected to die like a dog’.
Upon which, the old man, starting up in a very great passion, cried out,
‘Then, sirrah, you shall live like one’; and taking his cane in his
hand, cudgelled him out of his system. This had so good an effect upon
him, that he took up from that day, fell to reading good books, and is
now a bencher in the Middle-Temple.” There is a good deal of Addison in
that story: his dislike of “dark and uncomfortable prospects”; his
respect for “principles which are the support, happiness, and glory of
all public societies, as well as private persons”; his solicitude for
the butler; and his conviction that to read good books and become a
bencher in the Middle Temple is the proper end for a very vivacious
young gentleman. This Mr. Addison married a countess, “gave his little
senate laws”, and, sending for young Lord Warwick, made that famous
remark about seeing how a Christian can die which has fallen upon such
evil days that our sympathies are with the foolish, and perhaps fuddled,
young peer rather than with the frigid gentleman, not too far gone for a
last spasm of self-complacency, upon the bed.
Let us rub off such incrustations, so far as they are due to the
corrosion of Pope’s wit or the deposit of mid-Victorian lachrymosity,
and see what, for us in our time, remains. In the first place, there
remains the not despicable virtue, after two centuries of existence, of
being readable. Addison can fairly lay claim to that; and then, slipped
in on the tide of the smooth, well-turned prose, are little eddies,
diminutive waterfalls, agreeably diversifying the polished surface. We
begin to take note of whims, fancies, peculiarities on the part of the
essayist which light up the prim, impeccable countenance of the moralist
and convince us that, however tightly he may have pursed his lips, his
eyes are very bright and not so shallow after all. He is alert to his
finger tips. Little muffs, silver garters, fringed gloves draw his
attention; he observes with a keen, quick glance, not unkindly, and full
rather of amusement than of censure. To be sure, the age was rich in
follies. Here were coffee-houses packed with politicians talking of
Kings and Emperors and letting their own small affairs go to ruin.
Crowds applauded the Italian opera every night without understanding a
word of it. Critics discoursed of the unities. Men gave a thousand
pounds for a handful of tulip roots. As for women—or “the fair sex”, as
Addison liked to call them—their follies were past counting. He did his
best to count them, with a loving particularity which roused the ill
humour of Swift. But he did it very charmingly, with a natural relish
for the task, as the following passage shows:
I consider woman as a beautiful romantic animal, that may be adorned
with furs and feathers, pearls and diamonds, ores and silks. The lynx
shall cast its skin at her feet to make her a tippet; the peacock,
parrot, and swan, shall pay contributions to her muff; the sea shall be
searched for shells, and the rocks for gems; and every part of nature
furnish out its share towards the embellishment of a creature that is
the most consummate work of it. All this I shall indulge them in; but as
for the petticoat I have been speaking of, I neither can nor will allow
it.
In all these matters Addison was on the side of sense and taste and
civilisation. Of that little fraternity, often so obscure and yet so
indispensable, who in every age keep themselves alive to the importance
of art and letters and music, watching, discriminating, denouncing and
delighting, Addison was one—distinguished and strangely contemporary
with ourselves. It would have been, so one imagines, a great pleasure to
take him a manuscript; a great enlightenment, as well as a great honour,
to have his opinion. In spite of Pope, one fancies that his would have
been criticism of the best order, open-minded and generous to novelty,
and yet, in the final resort, unfaltering in its standards. The boldness
which is a proof of vigour is shown by his defence of “Chevy Chase”. He
had so clear a notion of what he meant by the “very spirit and soul of
fine writing” as to track it down in an old barbarous ballad or
rediscover it in “that divine work” “Paradise Lost”. Moreover, far from
being a connoisseur only of the still, settled beauties of the dead, he
was aware of the present; a severe critic of its “Gothic taste”,
vigilant in protecting the rights and honours of the language, and all
in favour of simplicity and quiet. Here we have the Addison of Will’s
and Button’s, who, sitting late into the night and drinking more than
was good for him, gradually overcame his taciturnity and began to talk.
Then he “chained the attention of every one to him”. “Addison’s
conversation”, said Pope, “had something in it more charming than I have
found in any other man.” One can well believe it, for his essays at
their best preserve the very cadence of easy yet exquisitely modulated
conversation—the smile checked before it has broadened into laughter,
the thought lightly turned from frivolity or abstraction, the ideas
springing, bright, new, various, with the utmost spontaneity. He seems
to speak what comes into his head, and is never at the trouble of
raising his voice. But he has described himself in the character of the
lute better than any one can do it for him.
The lute is a character directly opposite to the drum, that sounds very
finely by itself, or in a very small concert. Its notes are exquisitely
sweet, and very low, easily drowned in a multitude of instruments, and
even lost among a few, unless you give a particular attention to it. A
lute is seldom heard in a company of more than five, whereas a drum will
show itself to advantage in an assembly of 500. The lutanists,
therefore, are men of a fine genius, uncommon reflection, great
affability, and esteemed chiefly by persons of a good taste, who are the
only proper judges of so delightful and soft a melody.
Addison was a lutanist. No praise, indeed, could be less appropriate
than Lord Macaulay’s. To call Addison on the strength of his essays a
great poet, or to prophesy that if he had written a novel on an
extensive plan it would have been “superior to any that we possess”, is
to confuse him with the drums and trumpets; it is not merely to
overpraise his merits, but to overlook them. Dr. Johnson superbly, and,
as his manner is, once and for all has summed up the quality of
Addison’s poetic genius:
His poetry is first to be considered; of which it must be confessed that
it has not often those felicities of diction which give lustre to
sentiments, or that vigour of sentiment that animates diction; there is
little of ardour, vehemence, or transport; there is very rarely the
awfulness of grandeur, and not very often the splendour of elegance. He
thinks justly; but he thinks faintly.
The Sir Roger de Coverley papers are those which have the most
resemblance, on the surface, to a novel. But their merit consists in the
fact that they do not adumbrate, or initiate, or anticipate anything;
they exist, perfect, complete, entire in themselves. To read them as if
they were a first hesitating experiment containing the seed of greatness
to come is to miss the peculiar point of them. They are studies done
from the outside by a quiet spectator. When read together they compose a
portrait of the Squire and his circle all in characteristic
positions—one with his rod, another with his hounds—but each can be
detached from the rest without damage to the design or harm to himself.
In a novel, where each chapter gains from the one before it or adds to
the one that follows it, such separations would be intolerable. The
speed, the intricacy, the design, would be mutilated. These particular
qualities are perhaps lacking, but nevertheless Addison’s method has
great advantages. Each of these essays is very highly finished. The
characters are defined by a succession of extremely neat, clean strokes.
Inevitably, where the sphere is so narrow—an essay is only three or
four pages in length—there is not room for great depth or intricate
subtlety. Here, from the _Spectator_, is a good example of the witty and
decisive manner in which Addison strikes out a portrait to fill the
little frame:
Sombrius is one of these sons of sorrow. He thinks himself obliged in
duty to be sad and disconsolate. He looks on a sudden fit of laughter as
a breach of his baptismal vow. An innocent jest startles him like
blasphemy. Tell him of one who is advanced to a title of honour, he
lifts up his hands and eyes; describe a public ceremony, he shakes his
head; shew him a gay equipage, he blesses himself. All the little
ornaments of life are pomps and vanities. Mirth is wanton, and wit
profane. He is scandalized at youth for being lively, and at childhood
for being playful. He sits at a christening, or at a marriage-feast, as
at a funeral; sighs at the conclusion of a merry story, and grows devout
when the rest of the company grow pleasant. After all Sombrius is a
religious man, and would have behaved himself very properly, had he
lived when Christianity was under a general persecution.
The novel is not a development from that model, for the good reason that