The Sir Roger de Coverley Papers. Joseph Addison
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ridotto or over the card table.
Yet if society at this time had its seamy side, it was in the age of Anne that Englishmen began to feel the charm of wit and manners, of fashion and breeding. To the man about town, this murky London was the centre of all that was best and brightest in a new society. It was not so large but that he felt at home in every part of it. In one coffee-house he met the wits and men of letters, in another the scholars and clergy, in another the merchants, in another the men of fashion and gallantry, and in all he could hear bright talk upon the news of the day. In the theatre he could see the latest play, written by Mr. Congreve or Mr. Addison, and with a prologue by Mr. Pope. He probably belonged to two or three clubs; and in the drawing-room or at the assembly he enjoyed the society of women with the charm of gentle manners and brilliant conversation. All that served to make life attractive and character urbane he found between Hyde Park and the Bank.
Now it was to this quickened social sense that The Tatler and The Spectator made appeal. They pictured the life of the town from day to day, especially in its lighter, more humorous phases. And this was always done with some underlying moral purpose. As the months go past, we have in these papers an exhaustless flow of kindly satire upon the manners and minor morals of society,—on behaviour at church, on ogling the ladies, on snuff-taking, on the folly of enormous petticoats and low tuckers, on the brainless fops that display themselves in club windows and the brainless flirts that display themselves in stage boxes. We have bits of keen character-painting too—the small poet who assures you that poets are born, not made; the beau who is caught practising before the mirror to catch a careless air; the man who is so ambitious to be thought wise that he sets up for a free-thinker and talks atheism all day at the club, though he says his prayers very carefully every night at home. One can imagine with what pleasure the town must have seen its follies taken off so smartly. Occasionally, too, there are short stories—usually written by Steele—bits of domestic narrative showing the peace and purity of home. In The Spectator, the papers are somewhat longer and more ambitious than those of The Tatler, and here are many essays on graver themes, and carefully elaborated critical studies, like the famous series by Addison on Milton's Paradise Lost. Yet, from first to last, the most interesting papers, both of The Tatler and The Spectator, are those which depict with kindly irony the daily life of the town. There is not to be found in English literature up to that time any satire so wholesome, any pictures of contemporary society so vivid and so entertaining. Indeed, it may perhaps be said that, of the sort, we have had nothing better in English literature since.
For such writing as this it would be difficult to imagine two men better fitted than Richard Steele and Joseph Addison. Each supplied the deficiencies of the other. Steele was an impulsive, warm-hearted man of the world. Few men knew the society of that day in all its phases better than he did, and certainly no man liked it better. No English writer before him feels so keenly the charm of the passing hour, or takes such brisk and cheery interest in all the thousand events of daily experience. His sympathies, too, were warm as well as broad. His heart was tender, and he always carried it on his sleeve. This amiable and ingenuous temper made his writing very attractive, and still goes far to atone for all its imperfections. Addison, on the other hand, was a rather cool, self-contained, observant man, who loved to sit in his club with a little circle of admirers about him, and promote the good-nature of the world in a somewhat superior and distant fashion. His temper, less buoyant than Steele's, was more thoughtful and reflective; his humour, more delicate and subtle. And if his observation was not so broad as that of Steele, it was nicer and more penetrating. Steele, seeing life at more points, struck out more new incidents and characters; Addison had more skill to elaborate them.
In point of style the work of Addison is manifestly superior to that of Steele. Steele's writing has, indeed, the great merit of spontaneity. It is full of himself. To read his easy, lively page is like hearing him talk at your elbow; and, now and then, when his emotions are warmed, he can snatch a grace beyond the reach of art. But he was too impulsive and eager to stay for that painstaking correction without which literary finish is impossible. His rhetoric and even his grammar are sometimes sadly to seek. The faults of his extempore writing were matter of caustic comment by the critics of his own day; and ever since it has been customary to award the literary honours of The Tatler and The Spectator not to Steele but to Addison. Nor is this unjust. For Addison was the first of our writers to perceive clearly that simple and popular prose was capable of finished, artistic treatment. That minute care, that trained skill which hitherto had been reserved for poetry, he bestowed upon his prose. He had naturally a nice taste, an especially quick sense of movement and melody in prose, and he took infinite pains. He would stop the press to change a phrase, or set right a conjunction. And this effort issued in a style in which all sense of effort is lost in graceful ease. His thought is never profound, and seldom vigorous; his range is not wide; on serious subjects he is sometimes a little dull, and on lighter subjects sometimes a little trivial; but his manner is always suave, refined, urbane. He was the first Englishman who succeeded in writing prose at once familiar, idiomatic to the very verge of colloquialism, and at the same time highly finished. You think such writing is easily done until you try it yourself; then you soon find your mistake.
III. The Sir Roger de Coverley Papers
The Sir Roger de Coverley papers are often said to be the precursor of the modern English novel. And in a very real sense they are. There are, to be sure, crude specimens of prose fiction in the preceding century that may perhaps dispute this title, though most of them, like the long-winded romances that found place in the library of Sir Roger's lady friend, were of French origin or pattern. But these romances, while they supply the element of plot and adventure most liberally, were deficient in genuine characters. There are no real men and women in them. Moreover, they made no attempt to depict contemporary life as it was. But Sir Roger de Coverley is no personage of romance. He is a hearty, red-blooded, Tory gentleman who lives in Worcestershire. And he has no adventures more striking than might naturally befall a country squire who comes up to London for the season once a year. There were scores of just such men in every shire in England. His speech, his habits, his prejudices, are all shown us with simple truth. And yet this is done with so much art and humour that Sir Roger is one of the most living persons in our literature. He is as immortal as Hamlet or Julius Cæsar. We know him as well as we know our nearest neighbour; and we like him quite as well as we like most of our neighbours.
Now this was something new in English literature. Sir Roger is the earliest person in English imaginative prose that is really still alive. There are men and women in our poetry before his day—in the drama there is, of course, a great host of them; but in prose literature Sir Roger is the first. Furthermore, the men and women of the drama, even in that comedy of manners which professed to reflect most accurately contemporary society, were almost always drawn with some romantic or satiric exaggeration; but there is no exaggeration in the character of Sir Roger. Here was the beginning of a healthy realism. It was only necessary for Richardson and Fielding, thirty years later, to bring together several such genuine characters into a group, and to show how the incidents of their lives naturally ran into plot or story—and we have a novel.
The original suggestion for the character of Sir Roger seems to have come from Steele, who wrote that account of the Spectator Club (Spectator, No. 2) in which the knight first appears. But it is to Addison's keener perception and nicer art that we owe most of those subtle and humorous touches of characterization which make the portrait so real and so human. There is more of movement and incident in Steele's papers, and there is more of sentiment. It is Steele, for example, who tells the story of the Journey to London, and recounts the adventures of the Coverley ancestry; it is Steele, too, who has most to say of the widow. But in the best papers by Addison, like the Visit to the Abbey or the Evening at the Theater, there is hardly a line that does not reveal, in speech, or manner, or notion, some peculiarity of the kindly gentleman we know and love so well. If Steele outlined the portrait, it was left for Addison to elaborate it. Moreover, a careful reading of the papers will show that Steele's conception of the character was slightly different from Addison's. Steele's Sir Roger is whimsical and sentimental, but a man of good sense; not only beloved but respected. Addison dwells