That is to say, his design was "to hold as "twere the mirror up to nature," so that the conscience of society might recognise in a dramatic form the character of its lapses from virtue and reason. The indispensable instrument for the execution of this design was the _Spectator_ himself, the silent embodiment of right reason and good taste, who is obviously the conception of Addison.
"I live in the world rather as a spectator of mankind than as one of the species by which means I have made myself a speculative statesman, soldier, merchant, and artizan, without ever meddling with any practical part in life. I am very well versed in the theory of a husband, or a father, and can discern the errors in the economy, business, and diversion of others better than those who are engaged in them, as standers-by discover blots which are apt to escape those who are in the game. I never espoused any party with violence, and am resolved to observe an exact neutrality between the Whigs and Tories unless I shall be forced to declare myself by the hostilities of either side. In short, I have acted in all the parts of my life as a looker-on, which is the character I intend to preserve in this paper."
In order, however, to give this somewhat inanimate figure life and action, he is represented as the princ.i.p.al member of a club, his a.s.sociates consisting of various representatives of the chief "interests" of society.
We can scarcely doubt that the club was part of the original and central conception of the work; and if this be so, a new light is thrown on some of the features in the characters of the _Spectator_ which have hitherto rather perplexed the critics.
"The _Spectator"s_ friends," says Macaulay, "were first sketched by Steele. Four of the club--the templar, the clergyman, the soldier, and the merchant--were uninteresting figures, fit only for a background.
But the other two--an old country baronet and an old town rake--though not delineated with a very delicate pencil, had some good strokes.
Addison took the rude outlines into his own hands, retouched them, coloured them, and is in truth the creator of the Sir Roger de Coverley and the Will Honeycomb with whom we are all familiar."
This is a very misleading account of the matter. It implies that the characters in the _Spectator_ were mere casual conceptions of Steele"s; that Addison knew nothing about them till he saw Steele"s rough draft; and that he, and he alone, is the creator of the finished character of Sir Roger de Coverley. But, as a matter of fact, the character of Sir Roger is full of contradictions and inconsistencies; and the want of unity which it presents is easily explained by the fact that it is the work of four different hands. Sixteen papers on the subject were contributed by Addison, seven by Steele, three by Budgell, and one by Tickell. Had Sir Roger been, as Macaulay seems to suggest, merely the stray phantom of Steele"s imagination, it is very unlikely that so many different painters should have busied themselves with his portrait. But he was from the first intended to be a _type_ of a country gentleman, just as much as Don Quixote was an imaginative representation of many Spanish gentlemen whose brains had been turned by the reading of romances. In both cases the type of character was so common and so truly conceived as to lend itself easily to the treatment of writers who approached it with various conceptions and very unequal degrees of skill. Any critic, therefore, who regards Sir Roger de Coverley as the abstract conception of a single mind is certain to misconceive the character. This error lies at the root of Johnson"s description of the knight:
"Of the characters," says he, "feigned or exhibited in the _Spectator_, the favourite of Addison was Sir Roger de Coverley, of whom he had formed a very delicate and discriminated idea, which he would not suffer to be violated; and therefore when Steele had shown him innocently picking up a girl in the Temple and taking her to a tavern, he drew upon himself so much of his friend"s indignation that he was forced to appease him by a promise of forbearing Sir Roger for the time to come.... It may be doubted whether Addison ever filled up his original delineation. He describes his knight as having his imagination somewhat warped; but of this perversion he has made very little use. The irregularities in Sir Roger"s conduct seem not so much the effects of a mind deviating from the beaten track of life, by the perpetual pressure of some overwhelming idea, as of habitual rusticity and that negligence which solitary grandeur naturally generates. The variable weather of the mind, the flying vapours of incipient madness, which from time to time cloud reason without eclipsing it, it requires so much nicety to exhibit, that Addison seems to have been deterred from prosecuting his own design."
But Addison never had any design of the kind. Steele, indeed, describes Sir Roger in the second number of the _Spectator_ as "a gentleman that is very singular in his behaviour," but he added that "his singularities proceed from his good sense, and are contradictions to the manners of the world, only, as he thinks, the world is in the wrong." Addison regarded the knight from a different point of view. "My friend Sir Roger," he says, "amidst all his good qualities is _something of a humourist_; his virtues as well as imperfections are, as it were, tinged by a certain extravagance which makes them particularly his, and distinguishes them from those of other men. This cast of mind, as it is generally very innocent in itself, so it renders his conversation highly agreeable and more delightful than the same degree of sense and virtue would appear in their common and ordinary colours."
The fact is, as I have already said, that it had evidently been predetermined by the designers of the _Spectator_ that the Club should consist of certain recognised and familiar types; the different writers, in turns, worked on these types, each for his own purpose and according to the bent of his own genius. Steele gave the first sketch of Sir Roger in a few rough but vigorous strokes, which were afterwards greatly refined and altered by Addison. In Steele"s hands the knight appears indeed as a country squire, but he has also a town-house in Soho Square, then the most fashionable part of London. He had apparently been originally "a fine gentleman," and only acquired his old-fashioned rusticity of manners in consequence of a disappointment in love. All his oddities date from this adventure, though his heart has outlived the effects of it. "There is," we are told, "such a mirthful cast in his behaviour that he is rather beloved than esteemed." Steele"s imagination had evidently been chiefly caught by the humour of Sir Roger"s love affair, which is made to reflect the romantic cast of poetry affected after the Restoration, and forms the subject of two papers in the series; in two others--recording respectively the knight"s kindness to his servants, and his remarks on the portraits of his ancestors--the writer takes up the idea of Addison; while another gives an account of a dispute between Sir Roger and Sir Andrew Freeport on the merits of the moneyed interest. Addison, on the other hand, had formed a far finer conception of the character of the country gentleman, and one that approaches the portrait of Don Quixote. As a humourist he perceived the incongruous position in modern society of one nourished in the beliefs, principles, and traditions of the old feudal world; and hence, whenever the knight is brought into contact with modern ideas, he invests his observations, as the _Spectator_ says, with "a certain extravagance"
which const.i.tutes their charm. Such are the papers describing his behaviour at church, his inclination to believe in witchcraft, and his Tory principles; such, in another vein, are his criticisms in the theatre, his opinions of Spring Gardens, and his delightful reflections on the tombs in Westminster Abbey. But Addison was also fully alive to the beauty and n.o.bility of the feudal idea, which he brings out with great animation in the various papers describing the patriarchal relations existing between Sir Roger and his servants, retainers, and tenants, closing the series with the truly pathetic account of the knight"s death. It is to be observed that he drops altogether Steele"s idea of Sir Roger having once been a man of fashion, which is indeed discarded by Steele himself when co-operating with his friend on the picture of country life. Addison also quite disregards Steele"s original hint about "the humble desires" of his hero; and he only once makes incidental mention of the widow.
Budgell contributed three papers on the subject--two in imitation of Addison; one describing a fox-hunt, and the other giving Sir Roger"s opinion on beards; the third, in imitation of Steele, showing Sir Roger"s state of mind on hearing of the addresses of Sir David Dundrum to the widow. The number of the _Spectator_ which is said to have so greatly displeased Addison was written, not, as Johnson says, by Steele, but by Tickell. It goes far to confirm my supposition that the characters of the Club had been agreed upon beforehand. The trait which Tickell describes would have been natural enough in an ordinary country gentleman, though it was inconsistent with the fine development of Sir Roger"s character in the hands of Addison.
In his capacity of critic Addison has been variously judged, and, it may be added, generally undervalued. We find that Johnson"s contemporaries were reluctant to allow him the name of critic. "His criticism," Johnson explains, "is condemned as tentative or experimental rather than scientific; and he is considered as deciding by taste rather than by principles." But if Aristotle is right in saying that the virtuous man is the standard of virtue, the man of sound instincts and perceptions ought certainly to be accepted as a standard in the more debatable region of taste. There can, at any rate, be no doubt that Addison"s artistic judgments, founded on instinct, were frequently much nearer the mark than Johnson"s, though these were based on principle. Again, Macaulay says, "The least valuable of Addison"s contributions to the _Spectator_ are, in the judgment of our age, his critical papers;" but he adds, patronisingly, "The very worst of them is creditable to him when the character of the school in which he had been trained is fairly considered. The best of them were much too good for his readers. In truth, he was not so far behind our generation as he was before his own." By "the school in which he had been trained," Macaulay doubtless meant the critical traditions established by Boileau and Bouhours, and he would have justified the disparagement implied in his reference to them by pointing to the pedantic intolerance and narrowness of view which these traditions encouraged. But in all matters of this kind there is loss and gain. If Addison"s generation was much more insensible than our own to a large portion of imaginative truth, it had a far keener perception of the laws and limits of expression; and, granted that Voltaire was wrong in regarding Shakespeare as an "inspired barbarian," he would never have made the mistake which critics now make every day of mistaking nonsense for poetry.
But it may well be questioned if Addison"s criticism is only "tentative and experimental." The end of criticism is surely to produce a habit of reasoning rightly on matters of taste and imagination; and, with the exception of Sir Joshua Reynolds, no English critic has accomplished more in this direction than Addison. Before his time Dryden had scattered over a number of prefaces various critical remarks, admirably felicitous in thought and racy in expression. But he had made no attempt to write upon the subject systematically; and in practice he gave himself up without an effort to satisfy the tastes which a corrupt Court had formed, partly on the "false wit" of Cowley"s following, partly on the extravagance and conceit of the French school of Romance. Addison, on the other hand, set himself to correct this depraved fashion by establishing in England, on a larger and more liberal basis, the standards of good breeding and common-sense which Boileau had already popularised in France. Nothing can be more just and discriminating than his papers on the difference between true and false wit.[86] He was the first to endeavour to define the limits of art and taste in his essays on the _Pleasures of the Imagination_;[87]
and though his theory on the subject is obviously superficial, it sufficiently proves that his method of reasoning on questions of taste was much more than "tentative and experimental." "I could wish," he says, "there were authors who, beside the mechanical rules which a man of very little taste may discourse upon, would enter into the very spirit and soul of fine writing, and show us the several sources of that pleasure which rises in the mind on the perusal of a n.o.ble work." His studies of the French drama prevented him from appreciating the great Elizabethan school of tragedy, yet many stray remarks in the _Spectator_ show how deeply he was impressed by the greatness of Shakespeare"s genius, while his criticisms on Tragedy did much to banish the tumid extravagance of the romantic style. His papers on Milton achieved the triumph of making a practically unknown poem one of the most popular cla.s.sics in the language, and he was more than half a century before his age in his appreciation of the beauties of the English ballads. In fact, finding English taste in hopeless confusion, he left it in admirable order; and to those who are inclined to depreciate his powers as a critic the following observations of Johnson--not a very favourable judge--may be commended:
"It is not uncommon for those who have grown wise by the labour of others to add a little of their own, and overlook their masters.
Addison is now despised by some who perhaps would never have seen his defects but by the light he afforded them. That he always wrote as he would write now cannot be affirmed; his instructions were such as the characters of his readers made proper. That general knowledge which now circulates in common talk was in his time rarely to be found. Men not professing learning were not ashamed of ignorance; and in the female world any acquaintance with books was distinguished only to be censured. His purpose was to infuse literary curiosity by gentle and unsuspected conveyance into the gay, the idle, and the wealthy; he therefore presented knowledge in the most alluring form, not lofty and austere, but accessible and familiar. When he showed them their defects, he showed them likewise that they might be easily supplied.
His attempt succeeded; inquiry awakened and comprehension expanded. An emulation of intellectual elegance was excited, and from this time to our own life has been gradually exalted, and conversation purified and enlarged."[88]
The essence of Addison"s humour is irony. "One slight lineament of his character," says Johnson, "Swift has preserved. It was his practice, when he found any man invincibly wrong, to flatter his opinions by acquiescence and sink him yet deeper to absurdity." The same characteristic manifests itself in his writings under a great variety of forms. Sometimes it appears in the seemingly logical premises from which he draws an obviously absurd conclusion, as for instance:
"If in a mult.i.tude of counsellors there is safety, we ought to think ourselves the securest nation in the world. Most of our garrets are inhabited by statesmen, who watch over the liberties of their country, and make a shift to keep themselves from starving by taking into their care the properties of all their fellow-subjects."[89]
On other occasions he ridicules some fashion of taste by a perfectly grave and simple description of its object. Perhaps the most admirable specimen of this oblique manner is his satire on the Italian opera in the number of the _Spectator_ describing the various lions who had fought on the stage with Nicolini. This highly-finished paper deserves to be quoted _in extenso_:
"There is nothing of late years has afforded matter of greater amus.e.m.e.nt to the town than Signor Nicolini"s combat with a lion in the Haymarket, which has been very often exhibited to the general satisfaction of most of the n.o.bility and gentry in the kingdom of Great Britain. Upon the first rumour of this intended combat it was confidently affirmed, and is still believed by many in both galleries, that there would be a tame lion sent from the tower every opera in order to be killed by Hydaspes. This report, though altogether groundless, so universally prevailed in the upper regions of the playhouse, that some of the refined politicians in those parts of the audience gave it out in a whisper that the lion was a cousin-german of the tiger who made his appearance in King William"s days, and that the stage would be supplied with lions at the public expense during the whole session. Many, likewise, were the conjectures of the treatment which this lion was to meet with at the hands of Signor Nicolini; some supposed that he was to subdue him in recitativo, as Orpheus used to serve the wild beasts in his time, and afterwards to knock him on the head; some fancied that the lion would not pretend to lay his paws upon the hero, by reason of the received opinion that a lion will not hurt a virgin; several, who pretended to have seen the opera in Italy, had informed their friends that the lion was to act a part in High Dutch, and roar twice or thrice to a thorough-ba.s.s before he fell at the feet of Hydaspes. To clear up a matter that was so variously reported, I have made it my business to examine whether this pretended lion is really the savage he appears to be or only a counterfeit.
"But, before I communicate my discoveries, I must acquaint the public that upon my walking behind the scenes last winter, as I was thinking upon something else, I accidentally jostled against an enormous animal that extremely startled me, and, upon my nearer survey of it, appeared to be a lion rampant. The lion, seeing me very much surprised, told me, in a gentle voice, that I might come by him if I pleased; "for,"
says he, "I do not intend to hurt anybody." I thanked him very kindly and pa.s.sed by him, and in a little time after saw him leap upon the stage and act his part with very great applause. It has been observed by several that the lion has changed his manner of acting twice or thrice since his first appearance; which will not seem strange when I acquaint my reader that the lion has been changed upon the audience three several times. The first lion was a candle-snuffer, who, being a fellow of testy, choleric temper, overdid his part, and would not suffer himself to be killed so easily as he ought to have done; besides, it was observed of him that he became more surly every time he came out of the lion; and having dropped some words in ordinary conversation as if he had not fought his best, and that he suffered himself to be thrown on his back in the scuffle, and that he could wrestle with Mr. Nicolini for what he pleased out of his lion"s skin, it was thought proper to discard him; and it is verily believed to this day that, had he been brought upon the stage another time, he would certainly have done mischief. Besides, it was objected against the first lion that he reared himself so high upon his hinder paws and walked in so erect a posture that he looked more like an old man than a lion.
"The second lion was a tailor by trade, who belonged to the playhouse, and had the character of a mild and peaceable man in his profession.
If the former was too furious, this was too sheepish for his part, insomuch that, after a short, modest walk upon the stage, he would fall at the first touch of Hydaspes, without grappling with him and giving him an opportunity of showing his variety of Italian trips. It is said, indeed, that he once gave him a rip in his flesh-coloured doublet; but this was only to make work for himself in his private character of a tailor. I must not omit that it was this second lion who treated me with so much humanity behind the scenes.
"The acting lion at present is, as I am informed, a country gentleman, who does it for his diversion, but desires his name may be concealed.
He says, very handsomely in his own excuse, that he does not act for gain; that he indulges an innocent pleasure in it; and that it is better to pa.s.s away an evening in this manner than in gaming and drinking; but he says at the same time, with a very agreeable raillery upon himself, that, if his name were known, the ill-natured world might call him "the a.s.s in the lion"s skin." This gentleman"s temper is made out of such a happy mixture of the mild and the choleric that he outdoes both his predecessors, and has drawn together greater audiences than have been known in the memory of man.
"I must not conclude my narrative without taking notice of a groundless report that has been raised to a gentleman"s disadvantage of whom I must declare myself an admirer; namely, that Signor Nicolini and the lion have been seen sitting peaceably by one another and smoking a pipe together behind the scenes; by which their common enemies would insinuate that it is but a sham combat which they represent upon the stage; but upon inquiry I find that, if any such correspondence has pa.s.sed between them, it was not till the combat was over, when the lion was to be looked on as dead, according to the received rules of the drama. Besides, this is what is practised every day in Westminster Hall, where nothing is more usual than to see a couple of lawyers who have been tearing each other to pieces in the court embracing one another as soon as they are out of it."[90]
In a somewhat different vein, the ridicule cast by the _Spectator_ on the fashions of his day, by antic.i.p.ating the judgment of posterity on himself, is equally happy:
"As for his speculations, notwithstanding the several obsolete words and obscure phrases of the age in which he lived, we still understand enough of them to see the diversions and characters of the English nation in his time; not but that we are to make allowance for the mirth and humour of the author, who has doubtless strained many representations of things beyond the truth. For, if we must interpret his words in their literal meaning, we must suppose that women of the first quality used to pa.s.s away whole mornings at a puppet show; that they attested their principles by their patches; that an audience would sit out an evening to hear a dramatical performance written in a language which they did not understand; that chairs and flowerpots were introduced as actors upon the British stage; that a promiscuous a.s.sembly of men and women were allowed to meet at midnight in masks within the verge of the Court; with many improbabilities of the like nature. We must, therefore, in these and in the like cases, suppose that these remote hints and allusions aimed at some certain follies which were then in vogue, and which at present we have not any notion of."[91]
His power of ridiculing keenly without malignity is of course best shown in his character of Sir Roger de Coverley, whose delightful simplicity of mind is made the medium of much good-natured satire on the manners of the Tory country gentlemen of the period. One of the most exquisite touches is the description of the extraordinary conversion of a dissenter by the Act against Occasional Conformity.
"He (Sir Roger) then launched out into praise of the late Act of Parliament for securing the Church of England, and told me with great satisfaction that he believed it already began to take effect, for that a rigid dissenter who chanced to dine in his house on Christmas day had been observed to eat very plentifully of his plum-porridge."[92]
The mixture of fashionable contempt for book-learning, blended with shrewd mother-wit, is well represented in the character of Will Honeycomb, who "had the discretion not to go out of his depth, and had often a certain way of making his real ignorance appear a seeming one." One of Will"s happiest flights is on the subject of ancient looking-gla.s.ses. "Nay," says he, "I remember Mr. Dryden in his _Ovid_ tells us of a swinging fellow called Polypheme, that made use of the sea for his looking-gla.s.s, and could never dress himself to advantage but in a calm."
Budgell, Steele, and Addison seem all to have worked on the character of Will Honeycomb, which, however, presents none of the inconsistencies that appear in the portrait of Sir Roger de Coverley. Addison was evidently pleased with it, and in his own inimitable ironic manner gave it its finishing touches by making Will, in his character of a fashionable gallant, write two letters scoffing at wedlock and then marry a farmer"s daughter. The conclusion of the letter in which he announces his fate to the _Spectator_ is an admirable specimen of Addison"s humour:
"As for your fine women I need not tell thee that I know them. I have had my share in their graces; but no more of that. It shall be my business hereafter to live the life of an honest man, and to act as becomes the master of a family. I question not but I shall draw upon me the raillery of the town, and be treated to the tune of "The Marriage-hater Matched;" but I am prepared for it. I have been as witty as others in my time. To tell thee truly, I saw such a tribe of fashionable young fluttering c.o.xcombs shot up that I do not think my post of an _homme de ruelle_ any longer tenable. I felt a certain stiffness in my limbs which entirely destroyed the jauntiness of air I was once master of. Besides, for I must now confess my age to thee, I have been eight-and-forty above these twelve years. Since my retirement into the country will make a vacancy in the Club, I could wish that you would fill up my place with my friend Tom Dapperwit. He has an infinite deal of fire, and knows the town. For my own part, as I have said before, I shall endeavour to live hereafter suitable to a man in my station, as a prudent head of a family, a good husband, a careful father (when it shall so happen), and as
"Your most sincere friend and humble servant, "WILLIAM HONEYCOMB."[93]
I have already alluded to the delight with which the fancy of Addison played round the caprices of female attire. The following--an extract from the paper on the "fair s.e.x" which specially roused the spleen of Swift--is a good specimen of his style when in this vein:
"To return to our female heads. The ladies have been for some time in a kind of moulting season with regard to that part of their dress, having cast great quant.i.ties of ribbon, lace, and cambric, and in some measure reduced that part of the human figure to the beautiful globular form which is natural to it. We have for a great while expected what kind of ornament would be subst.i.tuted in the place of those antiquated commodes. But our female projectors were all the last summer so taken up with the improvement of their petticoats that they had not time to attend to anything else; but having at length sufficiently adorned their lower parts, they now begin to turn their thoughts upon the other extremity, as well remembering the old kitchen proverb, "that if you light your fire at both ends, the middle will shift for itself.""[94]
Addison may be said to have almost created and wholly perfected English prose as an instrument for the expression of _social_ thought. Prose had of course been written in many different manners before his time. Bacon, Cowley, and Temple had composed essays; Hooker, Sir Thomas Browne, Hobbes, and Locke philosophical treatises; Milton controversial pamphlets; Dryden critical prefaces; Raleigh and Clarendon histories; Taylor, Barrow, South, and Tillotson sermons. But it cannot be said that any of these had founded a prose style which, besides being a reflection of the mind of the writer, could be taken as representing the genius and character of the nation.
They write as if they were thinking apart from their audience, or as if they were speaking to it either from an inferior or superior position. The essayists had taken as their model Montaigne, and their style is therefore stamped, so to speak, with the character of soliloquy; the preachers, who perhaps did more than any writers to guide the genius of the language, naturally addressed their hearers with the authority of their office; Milton, even in controversy, rises from the natural sublimity of his mind to heights of eloquence to which the ordinary idioms of society could not have borne him; while Dryden, using the language with a raciness and rhythm probably unequalled in our literature, nevertheless exhibits in his prefaces an air of deference towards the various patrons he addresses.
Moreover, many of the earlier prose writers had aimed at standards of diction which were inconsistent with the genius of the English tongue.
Bacon, for instance, disfigures his style with the witty ant.i.theses which found favour with the Elizabethan and early Stuart writers; Hooker, Milton, and Browne construct their sentences on a Latin model, which, though it often gives a certain dignity of manner, prevents anything like ease, simplicity, and lucidity of expression. Thus Hooker delights in inversions; both he and Milton protract their periods by the insertion of many subordinate clauses; and Browne "projicit ampullas et sesquipedalia verba" till the Saxon element seems almost eliminated from his style.
Addison took features of his style from almost all his predecessors: he a.s.sumes the characters of essayist, moralist, philosopher, and critic, but he blends them all together in his new capacity of journalist. He had accepted the public as his judges; and he writes as if some critical representative of the public were at his elbow, putting to the test of reason every sentiment and every expression. Warton tells us, in his _Essay on Pope_, that Addison was so fastidious in composition that he would often stop the press to alter a preposition or conjunction; and this evidence is corroborated in a very curious and interesting manner by the MS. of some of Addison"s essays, discovered by Mr. d.y.k.es Campbell in 1858.[95] A sentence in one of the papers on the _Pleasures of the Imagination_ shows, by the various stages through which it pa.s.sed before its form seemed satisfactory to the writer, what nice attention he gave to the balance, rhythm, and lucidity of his periods. In its original shape the sentence was written thus:
"For this reason we find the poets always crying up a Country Life; where Nature is left to herself, and appears to y{e} best advantage."
This is rather bald, and the MS. is accordingly corrected as follows:
"For this reason we find all Fancifull men, and y{e} poets in particular, still in love with a Country Life; where Nature is left to herself, and furnishes out all y{e} variety of Scenes y{t} are most delightful to y{e} Imagination."
The text as it stands is this:
"For this reason we always find the poet in love with a country life, where nature appears in the greatest perfection, and furnishes out all those scenes that are most apt to delight the imagination."[96]
This is certainly the best, both in point of sense and sound. Addison perceived that there was a certain contradiction in the idea of Nature being "left to herself," and at the same time _furnishing_ scenes for the pleasure of the imagination; he therefore imparted the notion of design by striking out the former phrase and subst.i.tuting "seen in perfection;" and he emphasised the idea by afterwards changing "delightful" into the stronger phrase "apt to delight." The improvement of the rhythm of the sentence in its final form is obvious.
With so much elaboration of style it is natural that there should be in Addison"s essays a disappearance of that egotism which is a characteristic--and a charming one--of Montaigne; his moralising is natural, for the age required it, but is free from the censoriousness of the preacher; his critical and philosophical papers all a.s.sume an intelligence in his reader equal to his own.
This perfection of breeding in writing is an art which vanishes with the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_. Other critics, other humourists have made their mark in English literature, but no second Addison has appeared. Johnson took him for his model so far as to convey lessons of morality to the public by means of periodical essays. But he confesses that he addressed his audience in tones of "dictatorial instruction;" and any one who compares the ponderous sententiousness and the elaborate ant.i.thesis of the _Rambler_ with the light and rhythmical periods of the _Spectator_ will perceive that the spirit of preaching is gaining ground on the genius of conversation. Charles Lamb, again, has pa.s.sages which, for mere delicacy of humour, are equal to anything in Addison"s writings. But the superiority of Addison consists in this, that he expresses the humour of the life about him, while Lamb is driven to look at its oddities from outside. He is not, like Addison, a moralist or a satirist; the latter indeed performed his task so thoroughly that the turbulent license of Mohocks, t.i.tyre Tus, and such like brotherhoods, gradually disappeared before the advance of a tame and orderly public opinion. To Lamb, looking back on the primitive stages of society from a safe distance, vice itself seemed pardonable because picturesque, much in the same way as travellers began to admire the loneliness and the grandeur of nature when they were relieved from apprehensions for the safety of their purses and their necks. His humour is that of a sentimentalist; it dwells on odd nooks and corners, and describes quaint survivals in men and things. For our own age, when all that is picturesque in society is being levelled by a dull utilitarianism, this vein of eccentric imagination has a special charm, but the taste is likely to be a transient one. Mrs. Battle will amuse so long as this generation remembers the ways of its grandmothers: two generations hence the point of its humour will probably be lost. But the figure of Sir Roger de Coverley, though it belongs to a bygone stage of society, is as durable as human nature itself, and, while the language lasts, the exquisite beauty of the colours in which it is preserved will excite the same kind of pleasure. Scarcely below the portrait of the good knight will be ranked the character of his friend and biographer, the silent Spectator of men. A grateful posterity, remembering what it owes to him, will continue to a.s.sign him the reputation he coveted: "It was said of Socrates that he brought Philosophy down from heaven to inhabit among men; and I shall be ambitious to have it said of me that I have brought Philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell at clubs and a.s.semblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses."
THE END.