Part 29 (1/2)
The s.p.a.cious firmament on high.
HIS PERSON AND CHARACTER.--In closing this brief sketch of Addison, a few words are necessary as to his personality, and an estimate of his powers.
In 1716 he married the Countess-Dowager of Warwick, and parted with independence to live with a coronet. His married life was not happy. The lady was cold and exacting; and, it must be confessed, the poet loved a bottle at the club-room or tavern better than the luxuries of Holland House; and not infrequently this conviviality led him to excess. He died in 1719, in his forty-eighth year, and made a truly pious end. He wished, he said, to atone for any injuries he had done to others, and sent for his sceptical and dissolute step-son, Lord Warwick, to show him how a Christian could die. A monument has been erected to his memory in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey, and the closing words of the inscription upon it calls him ”the honor and delight of the English nation.”
As a man, he was grave and retiring: he had a high opinion of his own powers; in company he was extremely diffident; in the main, he was moral, just, and consistent. His intemperance was in part the custom of the age and in part a physical failing, and it must have been excessive to be distinguished in that age. In the Latin-English of Dr. Johnson, ”It is not unlikely that Addison was first seduced to excess by the manumission which he obtained from the servile timidity of his sober hours.” This failing must be regarded as a blot on his fame.
He was the most accomplished writer of his own age, and in elegance of style superior to all who had gone before him.
In the words of his epitaph, his prose papers ”encouraged the good and reformed the improvident, tamed the wicked, and in some degree made them in love with virtue.” His poetry is chiefly of historical value, in that it represents so distinctly the Artificial School; but it is now very little read. His drama ent.i.tled _Cato_ was modelled upon the French drama of the cla.s.sical school, with its singular preservation of the unities.
But his contributions to _The Spectator_ and other periodicals are historically of great value. Here he abandons the artificial school; nothing in his delineations of character is simply statuesque or pictorial. He has done for us what the historians have left undone. They present processions of automata moving to the sound of trumpet and drum, ushered by Black Rod or Garter King-at-arms; but in Addison we find that Promethean heat which relumes their life; the galvanic motion becomes a living stride; the puppet eyes emit fire; the automata are men. Thus it is, that, although _The Spectator_, once read as a model of taste and style, has become antiquated and has been superseded, it must still be resorted to for its life-like portraiture of men and women, manners and customs, and will be found truer and more valuable for these than history itself.
CHAPTER XXVI.
STEELE AND SWIFT.
Sir Richard Steele. Periodicals. The Crisis. His Last Days. Jonathan Swift--Poems. The Tale of a Tub. Battle of the Books. Pamphlets. M. B.
Drapier. Gulliver's Travels. Stella and Vanessa. His Character and Death.
Contemporary with Addison, and forming with him a literary fraternity, Steele and Swift were besides men of distinct prominence, and clearly represent the age in which they lived.
SIR RICHARD STEELE.--If Addison were chosen as the princ.i.p.al literary figure of the period, a sketch of his life would be incomplete without a large mention of his lifelong friend and collaborator, Steele. If to Bacon belongs the honor of being the first writer and the namer of the English _essay_, Steele may claim that of being the first periodical essayist.
He was born in Dublin, in 1671, of English parents; his father being at the time secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. He received his early education at the Charter-House school, in London, an inst.i.tution which has numbered among its pupils many who have gained distinguished names in literature. Here he met and formed a permanent friends.h.i.+p with Addison. He was afterwards entered as a student at Merton College, Oxford; but he led there a wild and reckless life, and leaving without a degree, he enlisted as a private in the Horse Guards. Through the influence of his friends, he was made a cornet, and afterwards a captain, in the Fusileers; but this only gave him opportunity for continued dissipation.
His principles were better than his conduct; and, haunted by conscience, he made an effort to reform himself by writing a devotional work called _The Christian Hero_; but there was such a contrast between his precepts and his life, that he was laughed at by the town. Between 1701 and 1704 he produced his three comedies. _The Funeral, or Grief a la Mode_; _The Tender Husband_, and _The Lying Lover_. The first two were successful upon the stage, but the last was a complete failure. Disgusted for the time with the drama, he was led to find his true place as the writer of those light, brilliant, periodical essays which form a prominent literary feature of the reign of Queen Anne. These _Essays_ were comments, suggestions, strictures, and satires upon the age. They were of immediate and local interest then, and have now a value which the writers did not foresee: they are unconscious history.
PERIODICALS.--The first of these periodicals was _The Tatler_, a penny sheet, issued tri-weekly, on post-days. The first number appeared on the 12th of April, 1709, and a.s.serted the very laudable purpose ”to expose the deceits, sins, and vanities of the former age, and to make virtue, simplicity, and plain-dealing the law of social life.” ”For this purpose,”
in the words of Dr. Johnson,[34] ”nothing is so proper as the frequent publication of short papers, which we read not as study, but amus.e.m.e.nt. If the subject be slight, the treatise is short. The busy may find time, and the idle may find patience.” One _nom de plume_ of Steele was _Isaac Bickerstaff_, which he borrowed from Swift, who had issued party-pamphlets under that name.
_The Tatler_ was a success. The fluent pen of Addison gave it valuable a.s.sistance; and in January, 1711, it was merged into, rather than superseded by, _The Spectator_, which was issued six days in the week.
In this new periodical, Steele wrote the paper containing the original sketch of Sir Roger de Coverley and The Club; but, as has been already said, Addison adopted, elaborated, and finished this in several later papers. Steele had been by far the larger contributor to _The Tatler_. Of all the articles in _The Spectator_, Steele wrote two hundred and forty, and Addison two hundred and seventy-four; the rest were by various hands.
In March, 1713, when _The Spectator_ was commencing its seventh volume, _The Guardian_ made its appearance. For the first volume of _The Guardian_, Addison wrote but one paper; but for the second he wrote more than Steele. Of the one hundred and seventy-six numbers of that periodical, eighty-two of the papers were by Steele and fifty-three by Addison. If the writings of Addison were more scholarly and elegant, those of Steele were more vivacious and brilliant; and together they have produced a series of essays which have not been surpa.s.sed in later times, and which are vividly delineative of their own.
THE CRISIS.--The career of Steele was varied and erratic. He held several public offices, was a justice of the peace, and a member of parliament. He wrote numerous political tracts, which are not without historical value.
For one pamphlet of a political character, ent.i.tled _The Crisis_, he was expelled from parliament for libel; but upon the death of Queen Anne, he again found himself in favor. He was knighted in 1715, and received several lucrative appointments.
He was an eloquent orator, and as a writer rapid and brilliant, but not profound. Even thus, however, he catered to an age at once artificial and superficial. Very observant of what he saw, he rushed to his closet and jotted down his views in electrical words, which made themselves immediately and distinctly felt.
HIS LAST DAYS.--Near the close of his life he produced a very successful comedy, ent.i.tled _The Conscious Lover_, which would have been of pecuniary value to him, were it not that he was already overwhelmed with debt. His end was a sad one; but he reaped what his extravagance and recklessness had sown. Shattered in health and ruined in fortune, he retreated from the great world into homely retirement in Wales, where he lived, poor and hidden, in a humble cottage at Llangunnor. His end was heralded by an attack of paralysis, and he died in 1729.