Historical Characters in the Reign of Queen Anne by Mrs. Oliphant - HTML preview

CHAPTER V
 ADDISON, THE HUMORIST

THERE is not a name in the entire range of English literature to which so full and universal an appreciation has been given by posterity as that of Addison. He had his critics in his day. He had, indeed, more than critics, and from one quarter at least has received in his breast the finest and sharpest sting which a friend estranged could put into poetic vengeance. But the burden even of contemporary voices was always overwhelmingly in his favor, and nowadays there is no one in the world, we believe, that has other than gentle words for the gentle writer—the finest critic, the finest gentleman, the most tender humorist of his age. It is not only admiration, but a sort of personal affection with which we look back, detecting in all the bustling companies of that witty and depraved period his genial figure, with a delightful simplicity in the midst of all the formalism, and whole-heartedness among the conceits and pretensions, of the fops and wits, the intriguing statesmen and busy conspirators, of an age in which public faith can scarcely be said to have existed at all. He had his little defects, which were the defects of the time. And perhaps his age would not have loved him as it did had he been entirely without a share in its weaknesses. As it was, no one could call him a milksop then, as no one would venture to record any offensive name against him now. The smile of benevolent good nature, of indulgent humor, of observation always as sweet and merciful as it is acute and refined, is never absent from his countenance. He treats no man hardly; the ideal beings whom he creates are the friends of all: we could, indeed, more easily spare dozens of living acquaintances than we could part with Sir Roger de Coverley. Addison is the very embodiment of that delightful gift of humor on which we pride ourselves so much as a specially English quality; his soft laugh touches all the chords of sympathy and loving comprehension with a tender ridicule in which the applauses of admiration are conveyed with double effect. That his style is the perfection, in its way, of English style is less dear and delightful to us than that what it conveys is the perfection of feeling. His art is the antipodes of that satirical art which allows human excellence only to gird at it, and insinuate motives which diminish or destroy. Addison, on the other hand, allows imperfections which his interpretation turns into something more sweet than virtue, and throws a delightful gleam of love and laughter upon the eccentricities and characteristic follies of individual nature. That he sees everything is one of the conditions of his genial forgiveness of everything that is not mean or base or cruel. With these he makes no terms. They are not within the range of his treatment. Non ragionam di lor. He passes by to the genial rural circle where all is honest, simple, and true; or to town, where in the coffee-houses themselves a kind soul will find humors enough to keep him cheerful without harm to any of his fellow-creatures—even the post-writers whom he jocularly recommends to a supplementary Chelsea as having killed more men in the wars than any general ever did, or the “needy persons” hungry for news, whom he promises to keep supplied with good and wholesome sentiments. He was at the same time the first of his kind. Thackeray associates Congreve—one does not exactly know why—with this nobler name: but at once makes it clear that there could be no comparison between them, since the world of the comedy-writer was an entirely fictitious world, altogether unlike the human nature of the essayist. Of the humorists we may venture to say that Addison is the first, as well as the most refined and complete. Swift draws a heavier shaft, which lacerates and kills, and Pope sends his needle-pointed arrows, all touched with poisonous venom, to the most vulnerable points; but Addison has no heart to slay. He transfixes the veil of folly with light, shining, irresistible darts, and pins it aloft in triumph, but he lets the fool go free—perhaps lets you see even, by some reflection from his swift-flying polished spear, a gleam of human meaning in the poor wretch’s face which touches your heart. Even when he diverts himself with Tom Folio or Ned Softly, instead of plunging these bores into a bottomless gulf of contempt, he plays with them as one might with a child, a twinkle of soft fun in his eye, drawing out their simple absurdities. That habit of his which Swift describes to Stella, as one which she herself shared, of seeming to consent to follies which it is not worth while contradicting, and which Pope venomously characterizes as “assents with evil leer,” lures him, and us along with him, into byways of human nature which the impatient critic closes with a kick, and in which there is much amusement and little harm. Molière’s Trissotin is a social conspirator meaning to build advancement upon his bad verses; but Addison’s poetaster is only an exposition of harmless vanity, humored by the gently malicious, but kind and patient, listener, who amid his laughter finds a certain pleasure in pleasing the victim too. There is sympathy even in the dissection, a conjunction of feelings which is of the very nature of the true humorist. These, no doubt, are of a very different caliber from that creation which still charms the reader—the delightful figure of Sir Roger, and all the simple folks full of follies and of virtues who surround him; but they are scarcely less remarkable. The lesser pictures, taken at a sitting in which the author has had no time to elaborate those features of human character which always draw forth his tenderness, are yet full of this instinctive sweetness, as well as of insight, keen, though always tempered, as the touch of Ithuriel’s spear. The angel, indeed, was far more severe, disclosing the demon under his innocent disguise; but Addison has nothing to do with demons, he has no deep-laid plan of mischief to unveil. The worst he does is to smile and banter the little absurdities out of us—those curious little delusions which deceive ourselves as well as the world.

This most loved of English writers was the son of one of those English parsons who confuse our belief in the extremely unfavorable account, given by both the graver and the lighter historians of the time, of the condition of country clergymen. Neither Parson Adams in his virtue, nor Parson Trulliber in his grossness, nor Macaulay’s keen and clear picture, nor Thackeray’s fine disrespectful studies of the chaplain who marries the waiting-maid, seem to afford us any guidance to the nature of the household which the Rev. Launcelot Addison, after many wanderings and experiences, set up in the little parish of Milston in Wiltshire somewhere about the year 1670. Steele’s description of it has, no doubt, the artificial form affected by the age, and sets it forth as one of those models of perfection and examples to the world which nowadays we are more disposed to distrust and laugh at than to follow. “I remember among all my acquaintances,” he says, “but one man whom I have thought to live with his children with equanimity and a good grace”; and he goes on to describe the “three sons and one daughter whom he bred with all the care imaginable in a liberal and ingenious way—their thoughts turned into an emulation for the superiority in kind and generous affection toward each other,” the boys behaving themselves with a manly friendship, their sister treated by them with as much complaisance as any other young lady of their acquaintance. “It was an unspeakable pleasure to visit or sit at a meal in this family,” he adds. “I have often seen the old man’s heart flow at his eyes with joy upon occasions which would appear indifferent to such as were strangers to the turn of his mind; but a very slight accident wherein he saw his children’s good will to one another created in him the Godlike pleasure of loving them because they loved one another.” The family tenderness thus inculcated no doubt came from a mind full of the milk of human kindness, and happily transmitting that possession to the gentle soul of the eldest son, who probably was the one whom the father “had the weakness to love much better than the others”—a weakness which “he took as much pains to correct as any other criminal passion that could arise in his mind.” Such a paternity and training does something to account for the prevailing gentleness of Addison’s temper and judgments.

Dr. Addison had seen the world not in a very brilliant or luxurious way. He had been chaplain at Dunkirk, and afterward at Tangier among the Moors, upon which latter strange experience he wrote a book: and he rose afterward to be Dean of Lichfield, a dignified clergyman. One of the brothers went to India, and attained to some eminence; the other was eventually, like Joseph, a fellow of Magdalen. They dispersed themselves in the world as the children of a clergyman might very well do at the present day, and it is evident belonged distinctly to the caste of gentlemen. The sons, or at least the son with whom we have specially to do, after sundry local schoolings went to Charterhouse, which he left at fifteen for Oxford, perhaps because of his unusual advancement, more probably because the custom of the time sent boys earlier to the university, as is still the practice in Scotland. Addison was much distinguished in that elegant branch of learning, the writing of Latin verse, a kind of distinction which remains dear to the finest minds, in spite of all the remarks concerning its inutility and the time wasted in acquiring the art, which the rest of the world has so largely indulged in. A copy of verses upon the accession of King William, written while he was still a very youthful scholar at Queen’s College, no more than seventeen, got him his first promotion. The boy’s verses came—perhaps from some proud tutor at Queen’s, boasting what could be done under the cupola in the High street, finer than anything attempted in more distinguished seats of learning—into the hands of the Provost of Magdalen, to the amazement and envy of that more learned corporation. There had been no election of scholars in the previous year, during the melancholy time when the college was embroiled with King James, and the courtly Quaker Penn had all the disturbed and troubled fellows under his heel; but now that freedom had returned with the revolution and the heaven-sent William, there was room for a double number of distinguished poor demies. Dr. Lancaster of Magdalen decided at once that to leave such Latinity as that of the young author of these verses to a college never very great in such gifts would be a sin against his own: and young Addison was accordingly elected to all the privileges of a Magdalen demyship. It is with this beautiful college that his name is connected in Oxford. There could be no more fit association. The noble trees and velvet lawns of Magdalen speckled with deer, shy yet friendly creatures that embellish the retired and silent glades—the long-winding walk by the Cherwell round the meadows where the fritillaries grow, the time-worn dignity of the place with its graceful old-world architecture and associations, are all in the finest keeping with the shy and silent student who talked so little and thought so much, living among his books in his college rooms, keeping his lamp alight half through the night, or musing under the elms, where the little stream joins the greater. It is dreadful to think that in all probability Addison thought the imposing classicism of Queen’s, at which the cultivated scholar of to-day shudders, much finer than Magdalen: for he had no opinion of Gothic, and lamented the weakness, if not wickedness, of those mistaken ages which wasted ornament upon such antiquated forms; but at least he loved his retired promenade under the trees, with all its sweetness of primrose and thrush in spring, and the wonderful yellow sunsets over the floods in winter, and the pleasant illusions of the winding way. There the stranger may realize still in the quiet of the cloistered shades how the shy young student wandered in Addison’s Walk and pondered his verses, and formed the delicate wealth of speech which was to distinguish him from all his fellows. He spent about ten years in his college, first as a student and then as a fellow, in the position which, perhaps, is more ideal for a scholar than any other in Christendom. But the young man was not much more enlightened than the other young men of his age, notwithstanding his genius at Latin verses, and that still finer genius which had not as yet come to utterance. He wrote an “Account of the Greatest English Poets,” not much wiser than the school-boy essays of our own day which set Lord Tennyson and Mr. Browning down in their right places. Addison went further. He leaves out all mention of Shakspere, and speaks of Cowley as a “mighty genius.” He describes “the spacious times of great Elizabeth” as “a barbarous age,” amused by “Old Spenser” with “long-spun allegories” and “dull morals,” which have lost all power to charm an age of understanding. The youth, indeed, ran amuck among all the greatest names till we shiver at his temerity. But he knew better afterward; and, if he still condescended a little to his elders and betters, learned to love and comprehend them too.

It would seem that he wavered for a time whether he should not take orders, a step necessary to retain his fellowship, and dedicate himself to the church, as was the wish of his father. It would have been entirely suitable to him one cannot but think; to his meditative mood, and shy temper, and high moral tone. He would have missed the humors of town, the coffee-houses, and the wits, and the vagaries of the beaus and belles; but with still a tenderer and more genial humor might have made his villagers live before us, and found out all the amusing follies of the knights and squires, which even in London town did not escape his smiling observation. The manner in which the question was decided is curiously characteristic of the age. That he was not himself inclined that way seems probable, since he bids his muse farewell after the fashion of the time, when this ending seemed imminent, with something like regret, and it is said that he distrusted his own fitness for the sacred office. At all events, the matter came to the ears of Charles Montague, afterward Lord Halifax, himself an elegant scholar, and at that time in office. Young Addison had addressed to him, on the occasion of the Peace of Ryswick in 1697, one of those pieces of Latin verse for which the young man was known among the scholars of his time. He accompanied the gift with a letter couched in the hyperbole of the age, deprecating his patron’s possible disapproval of “the noble subject debased by my numbers,” and justifying himself by the poverty of the verses already published on the same theme. “For my part,” he says, “I never could prevail on myself to offer you a poem written in our native tongue, since you yourself deter all others by your own Compositions from such an Attempt, as much as you excite them by your Favour and Humanity.” Montague returned this compliment by interfering in the young poet’s concerns as soon as he heard of the danger that so promising a youth might fall into the gulf of the church, and be lost to the other kinds of work more useful to statesmen. He wrote to the authorities of Magdalen begging that Addison might not be urged into holy orders, and in the mean time took more active measures to secure him for the state. Lord Somers had also received the dedication of some of Addison’s verses, and was equally interested in the young man’s career. Between them the two statesmen secured for him a pension of three hundred a year, on no pretense of work to be done or duty fulfilled, but merely that he might be able to prepare himself the better for the public service, and be thus at hand and ready when his work was wanted. Public opinion has risen up nowadays against any such arrangement, and much slighter efforts at patronage would be denounced now over all England as a job. And yet one wonders whether it was so profitless a proceeding as we think it. Addison was worth more than the money to England. To be sure, without the money he would still have been Addison; yet something, no doubt, of the mellow sweetness of humanity in him was due to this fostering of his youth.

He went abroad in 1699, and addressed himself in the first place to the learning of French, which he did slowly at Blois, without apparently gaining much enlightenment as to the state of France or the other countries which he visited in his prolonged tour. No doubt, with his pension and the income of his fellowship, Addison traveled like a young man of fortune and fashion in those times of leisure, with excellent introductions everywhere, seeing the best society, and the greatest men both in rank and letters. Boileau admired his Latin verses as much as the English statesmen did, and the young man went upon his way more and more convinced that Latin verses were the highroad to fame. From France he went to Italy, making a classical pilgrimage. “Throughout,” says Mr. Leslie Stephen, quaintly, “if we are to judge by his narrative, he seems to have considered the scenery as designed to illustrate his beloved poets.” The much-debated uses of travel receive a new question from the records of such a journey, pursued with the fullest leisure and under the best auspices; and one wonders whether the man who hurries across a continent in a few weeks, catching flying impressions, and forming crude judgments, is, after all, much less advantaged than he who, oblivious of all the human interests around him, discusses Rome, for instance, as if it had no interest later than Martial or Silius Italicus—as if neither Church, nor Pope, nor all the convulsions of the Middle Ages, nor Crusader, nor Jesuit, had ever been. This extraordinary impoverishment of the imagination was the fashion of the time, just as it has been the fashion in other days to fix upon the vile records of the Renaissance as the one thing interesting in the history of a noble country. According to that fashion, however, Addison did everything that a young man of the highest culture could be expected to do. He traced the footsteps of Æneas, and remembered every spot on which a classical battle had been fought, or an ode sung. He wrote an eloquent essay upon medals, and lingered among the sculptures of the museums; and he picked up a subject for a heroic tragedy from the suggestion of a foolish play which he saw at a Venetian theater. With his head full of such themes, he had gone out from Oxford, and with a deepened sense of their importance he came back again. Though in after days he touches lightly with his satiric dart the young man who can talk of nothing better on his return than how “he had like to have been drowned at such a place; how he fell out of a chaise at another”; yet in the hymn of praise with which he celebrates his own return from all the dangers of foreign travel something like the same record is made, though in a more imposing manner:

In foreign Realms and Lands remote,

Supported by thy care,

Thro’ burning Climes I passed unhurt,

And breath’d in Tainted Air.

Thy mercy sweetened every Soil,

Made every Region please,

The hoary Alpine Hills it warmed,

And smooth’d the Tyrrhene Seas.

 
JOSEPH ADDISON.
 ENGRAVED BY T. JOHNSON, FROM MEZZOTINT BY JEAN SIMON, AFTER PAINTING BY SIR GODFREY KNELLER.

It is only the vulgarity of our modern imagination that makes us think of hot water-pipes when the idea of warming the Alps is presented to our profane minds. The burrowing of the railway that climbs the St. Gothard may be taken as a large contribution to the carrying out of this suggestion.

When Addison returned home after these four years of classical wanderings, it was to prospects sadly overcast. King William had died a year before, which had stopped his pension; Halifax was out of office, and all the hopes of public life, for which he had been training himself, seemed to drop as he came back. It is said that during the last year he had charge of a pupil; but there is no proof of the statement, nor has any pupil ever been identified by name. An offer was made to him to accompany upon his travels a son of the Duke of Somerset, his services to be paid by the present of a hundred guineas at the year’s end, which did not seem to Addison an advantageous offer: but this, which came to nothing, is the only authentic reference to any possible “bear-leading” such as Thackeray refers to in “Esmond”; and fine as is the sketch made by that kindred humorist, he seems to exaggerate at once the poverty and the neglect into which for the moment Addison fell.

He returned to England in 1703, being then thirty-one, full of every accomplishment, but with only his fellowship to depend upon, and the uncertain chances of Jacob Tonson’s favor instead of the king’s. He is said to have sunk, or rather risen, to a poor lodging in London, in the Haymarket, up three pairs of stairs, which was indeed a sad change from the importance of his position as a rich young Englishman making the grand tour. But if he carried a disappointed or despondent heart to those elevated quarters, he never made any moan on the subject, and it is very likely enjoyed his freedom and the happy sense of being at home like other young men; and he seems to have been at once advanced to the membership of the Kit-Cat Club, which would supply him with the finest of company, and a center for the life which otherwise must have appeared as if it had come to a broken end. It was not long, however, that this period of neglect was suffered to last, and once more the transaction which elevated Addison to the sphere in which he passed the rest of his life is admirably characteristic of the period, and alas! profoundly unlike anything that could happen to a young man of genius now.

We will not return again to any bewildering discussion of the Whigs and Tories of Queen Anne, but only say that Godolphin and Marlborough, those “great twin brethren” of the state, had come into possession of England at this great crisis, and that every means by which they could secure the suffrages of both parties were doubly necessary, considering the disappointment on one side that the policy of the country remained unchanged, and on the other that it had to be carried out by Whig, not Tory, hands. Nothing could be better adapted than the great victory of Blenheim to arouse an outburst of national feeling, and sweep, for a time at least, the punctilios of party away. The lord treasurer, who had everything in his hands at home, while his great partner fought and conquered abroad, was almost comically at a loss how to sound the trumpet of warlike success so as to excite the country, and, if possible, turn the head of the discontented. In one of Leopardi’s fables there is an account of the tremendous catastrophe with which the world was threatened when his illustrious excellency the Sun declined one morning to rise and tread his old-world course around the earth for the comfort of mankind. “Let her in her turn go round me if she wants my warmth and light,” says the potentate—with great reason, it must be allowed, since Copernicus was born, and everything in the celestial spheres was about to be set right. But how to persuade the earth that she must now undertake this circuit? Let a poet be found to do it is the first suggestion. “La via più spedita è la più sicura è di trovare un poeta ovvero un filosofo che persuada alla Terra di muoversi.” Godolphin found himself in the same position as that in which the luckless agencies of the Universe were left when the Sun struck work. A poet!—but where to find a poet he knew not, being himself addicted to other modes of exercise and entertainment. He went to Halifax to ask where he should find what was wanted—a poet. But that statesman was coy and held back. He could, indeed, produce the very man; but why should he interfere to betray neglected merit and induce a man of genius to labor for those who would leave him to perish in obscurity? Godolphin, however, was ready to promise anything in the great necessity of the case; and Halifax permitted himself to be persuaded to mention the name which no doubt was bursting from his lips. He would not, however, undertake to be the ambassador, but insisted that the real possessors of power should ask in their own persons, and with immediate and substantial proofs of their readiness to recompense the service they demanded. That day, all blazing in gold lace and splendor, the coach of the chancellor of the exchequer stopped before the little shop in the Haymarket over which the young scholar had his airy abode: and that great personage clambered up the long flights of stairs carrying with him, very possibly, the patent of the appointment which was an earnest of what the powers that were could do for Addison. This was how the great poem of the “Campaign,” that illustrious composition, was brought into being. Poems made to order seldom fulfil expectation, but in this case there was no disappointment. Godolphin and England alike were delighted, and Addison’s life and success were at once secured.

No one now, save as an illustration of history, would think of reading the “Campaign,” though most readers are familiar with the famous simile which dazzled a whole generation:

’T was there great Marlborough’s mighty soul was proved,

That in the shock of charging hosts unmoved,

Amidst confusion, horror, and despair

Examined all the dreadful scenes of war,

In powerful thought the field of death surveyed,

To fainting squadrons sent the timely aid,

Inspired repulsed battalions to engage,

And taught the doubtful battle where to rage.

So when an angel by Divine command

With rising tempest shakes a guilty land,

Such as of late o’er pale Britannia past,

Calm and serene he drives the furious blast;

And, pleased the Almighty’s orders to perform,

Rides in the whirlwind, and directs the storm.

Macaulay points out with much felicity how the fact of the Great Storm—so called in English history—which had passed over England in the previous year, and was yet full in the memory of all, gave strength and meaning to this famous simile, which at once opened to Addison the gates of fortune and of fame. Two years after he was promoted to be one of the undersecretaries of state, and from that time languished no more in the cold shade of obscurity where Halifax had upbraided the Government for leaving him. He was not a man born to linger there. Shy though he was, and little apt to put himself forward, this favorite of the muses—to use the phraseology of his time—was also the favorite of fortune. Everything that he touched throve with him. The gifts he possessed were all especially adapted to the requirements of his time. At no other period, perhaps, in history did the rulers of the country bethink themselves of a poet as the auxiliary most necessary: and his age was the only one that relished poetry of Addison’s kind.

This event brought more than mere prosperity to the fortunate young man. If he had been already of note enough to belong to the Kit-Cat Club, with what a blaze of modest glory would he now appear—not swelling in self-conceit, like so many of the wits; not full of silent passion, like the strange big Irish clergyman who pushed into the chattering company in the coffee-house and astounded them with his masterful and arrogant ways: but always modest—never heard at all in a large company, opening out a little when the group dispersed, and an audience fit but few gathered around him—but with one companion half divine. The one companion by and by became often that very same Irishman whose silent prowl about the room in which he knew nobody had amused all the luckier members. Swift found himself in a kind of coffee-house paradise when he got Addison alone, and the two took their wine together, spending their half-crowns according to the stranger’s thrifty record, and wishing for no third. They were as unlike as could be conceived in every particular, and yet what company they must have been, as they sat together, the wine going a little too freely—though Swift was always temperate, and Addison, notwithstanding that common peccadillo, the most irreproachable of men! It was then that the “Travels in Italy” were published, while still the fame of the “Campaign” was warm; and Addison gave his new friend a copy inscribed to “Jonathan Swift, the most Agreeable Companion, the Truest Friend, and the Greatest Genius of his Age.” What quick understanding, what recognition as of two who had been born to know each other! They were both in their prime—Swift thirty-eight, Addison five years younger, still young enough to hope for everything that can befall a man; the one fully entered upon the path of fortune, the other surely so much nearer it for being thus received and welcomed. Addison gave “his little senate laws” for many years in these convivial meetings, and all who surrounded him adored him. But Swift was never again so close a member of the little company. Politics, and the curious part which the Irish parson took in them, separated him from the consistent and moderate politician, who acted faithfully with his party, and who was always true whoever might be false. But Swift held fast to Addison so far at least as feeling was concerned. Over and over he repeated the sentiment, that “if he had a mind to be king he would hardly be refused.” Their meetings ceased, and all those outflowings of wit and wisdom, and the talk long into the night which was the most delightful thing in life; but for years after Swift still continued to say that there was nothing his friend might not be if he would: that his election was carried without a word of opposition when every other member had to fight for his life, and that he might be king in Ireland, or anywhere else, had he the mind. They were used to terms of large applause in those days, but to no one else did it take this particular form.

In 1708 Addison lost his post as under-secretary by a change of the ministry, or rather of the minister, it being the habit in those days to form a government piecemeal, a Whig here, a Tory there, as favor or circumstances required, so that it was by no means needful that all should go out or come in together. In fact, no sooner was the under-secretary deprived of one place than he obtained another, that of secretary to the lord lieutenant of Ireland, the same office, we presume, as that which is now cal