Volume I Part 2 (2/2)

and was her lover to the end. Soon after marriage, Steele took his wife to a boarding-school in the suburbs, where they saw a young lady for whom Steele showed an affection that caused Mrs. Steele to ask, whether she was not his daughter. He said that she was. 'Then,' said Mrs.

Steele, 'I beg she may be mine too.' Thenceforth she lived in their home as Miss Ousley, and was treated as a daughter by Steele's wife. Surely this was a woman who deserved the love that never swerved from her. True husband and true friend, he playfully called Addison her rival. In the _Spectator_ there is a paper of Steele's (No. 142) representing some of his own love-letters as telling what a man said and should be able to say of his wife after forty years of marriage. Seven years after marriage he signs himself, 'Yours more than you can imagine, or I express.' He dedicates to her a volume of the _Lady's Library_, and writes of her ministrations to him:

'if there are such beings as guardian angels, thus are they employed.

I will no more believe one of them more good in its inclinations than I can conceive it more charming in its form than my wife.'

In the year before her death he was signing his letters with 'G.o.d bless you!' and 'Dear Prue, eternally yours.' That Steele made it a duty of his literary life to contend against the frivolous and vicious ridicule of the ties of marriage common in his day, and to maintain their sacred honour and their happiness, readers of the 'Spectator' cannot fail to find.

Steele, on his marriage in 1707, took a house in Bury Street, St.

James's, and in the following year went to a house at Hampton, which he called in jest the Hovel. Addison had lent him a thousand pounds for costs of furnis.h.i.+ng and other immediate needs. This was repaid within a year, and when, at the same time, his wife's mother was proposing a settlement of her money beneficial to himself, Steele replied that he was far from desiring, if he should survive his wife, 'to turn the current of the estate out of the channel it would have been in, had I never come into the family.' Liberal always of his own to others, he was sometimes without a guinea, and perplexed by debt. But he defrauded no man. When he followed his Prue to the grave he was in no man's debt, though he left all his countrymen his debtors, and he left more than their mother's fortune to his two surviving children. One died of consumption a year afterwards, the other married one of the Welsh Judges, afterwards Lord Trevor.

The friends.h.i.+p--equal friends.h.i.+p--between Steele and Addison was as unbroken as the love between Steele and his wife. Petty tales may have been invented or misread. In days of malicious personality Steele braved the worst of party spite, and little enough even slander found to throw against him. n.o.body in their lifetime doubted the equal strength and sincerity of the relations.h.i.+p between the two friends. Steele was no follower of Addison's. Throughout life he went his own way, leading rather than following; first as a playwright; first in conception and execution of the scheme of the 'Tatler', 'Spectator', and 'Guardian'; following his own sense of duty against Addison's sense of expediency in pa.s.sing from the 'Guardian' to the 'Englishman', and so to energetic movement upon perilous paths as a political writer, whose whole heart was with what he took to be the people's cause.

When Swift had been writing to Addison that he thought Steele 'the vilest of mankind,' in writing of this to Swift, Steele complained that the 'Examiner',--in which Swift had a busy hand,--said Addison had 'bridled him in point of politics,' adding,

'This was ill hinted both in relation to him and me. I know no party; but the truth of the question is what I will support as well as I can, when any man I honour is attacked.'

John Forster, whose keen insight into the essentials of literature led him to write an essay upon each of the two great founders of the latest period of English literature, Defoe and Steele, has pointed out in his masterly essay upon Steele that Swift denies having spoken of Steele as bridled by his friend, and does so in a way that frankly admits Steele's right to be jealous of the imputation. Mr. Forster justly adds that throughout Swift's intimate speech to Stella,

'whether his humours be sarcastic or polite, the friends.h.i.+p of Steele and Addison is for ever suggesting some annoyance to himself, some mortification, some regret, but never once the doubt that it was not intimate and sincere, or that into it entered anything inconsistent with a perfect equality.'

Six months after Addison's death Steele wrote (in No. 12 of the 'Theatre', and I am again quoting facts cited by John Forster),

'that there never was a more strict friends.h.i.+p than between himself and Addison, nor had they ever any difference but what proceeded from their different way of pursuing the same thing; the one waited and stemmed the torrent, while the other too often plunged into it; but though they thus had lived for some years past, shunning each other, they still preserved the most pa.s.sionate concern for their mutual welfare; and when they met they were as unreserved as boys, and talked of the greatest affairs, upon which they saw where they differed, without pressing (what they knew impossible) to convert each other.'

As to the substance or worth of what thus divided them, Steele only adds the significant expression of his hope that, if his family is the worse, his country may be the better, 'for the mortification _he_ has undergone.'

Such, then, was the Friends.h.i.+p of which the 'Spectator' is the abiding Monument. The 'Spectator' was a modified continuation of the 'Tatler', and the 'Tatler' was suggested by a portion of Defoe's 'Review'. The 'Spectator' belongs to the first days of a period when the people at large extended their reading power into departments of knowledge formerly unsought by them, and their favour was found generally to be more desirable than that of the most princely patron. This period should date from the day in 1703 when the key turned upon Defoe in Newgate, the year of the production of Steele's 'Tender Husband', and the time when Addison was in Holland on the way home from his continental travels.

Defoe was then forty-two years old, Addison and Steele being about eleven years younger.

In the following year, 1704, the year of Blenheim--Defoe issued, on the 19th of February, No. 1 of 'A Weekly Review of the Affairs of France: Purg'd from the Errors and Partiality of 'News-Writers' and 'Petty-Statesmen', of all Sides,' and in the introductory sketch of its plan, said:

'After our Serious Matters are over, we shall at the end of every Paper, Present you with a little Diversion, as anything occurs to make the World Merry; and whether Friend or Foe, one Party or another, if anything happens so scandalous as to require an open Reproof, the World may meet with it there.'

Here is the first 'little Diversion'; the germ of 'Tatlers' and 'Spectators' which in after years amused and edified the town.

'Mercure Scandale:

or,

ADVICE from the Scandalous CLUB. 'Translated out of French'.

This Society is a Corporation long since established in 'Paris', and we cannot compleat our Advices from 'France', without entertaining the World with everything we meet with from that Country.

And, tho Corresponding with the Queens Enemies is prohibited; yet since the Matter will be so honest, as only to tell the World of what everybody will own to be scandalous, we reckon we shall be welcome.

This Corporation has been set up some months, and opend their first Sessions about last 'Bartholomew' Fair; but having not yet obtaind a Patent, they have never, till now, made their Resolves publick.

The Business of this Society is to censure the Actions of Men, not of Parties, and in particular, those Actions which are made publick so by their Authors, as to be, in their own Nature, an Appeal to the general Approbation.

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