Steele.
Steele and Addison are the Twins among the stars of the age of Queen Anne. Swift impresses us as a greater genius than either Steele or Addison, but he is not loved, and he is not read as they are. Their lives, till two or three years before Addison's death, were united. They were schoolfellows at Charterhouse, fellow-undergraduates at Oxford, each was apt to take a hand in the other's play when the stage attracted them; they wrote together in the two famous journals, "The Tatler" and "The Spectator," which Steele created; some essays therein are a patchwork of pieces from both hands. They were both anxious to cleanse the stage; to bring decent morals and manners into fashion In the original manuscript of Steele's comedy, "The Conscious Lovers" (1722), are rough notes for a preface, written after Addison's death, "The fourth act was the business of the play. The case of duelling I have fought nor shall I ever fight again... Addison told me I had a faculty of drawing tears... Be that as it will, I shall endeavour to do what I can to promote noble things...."
Both men were moralists, but while Addison was the more moral, Steele was infinitely the more greatly given to moralizing. His heart was in the right place. He honoured women and pure affection, and temperance, and the wedded state. But his many brief notes to his second wife "Prue" (Miss Scurlock), written from all manner of places and at all sorts of hours, prove that poor Prue had often to dine alone. Business detained her Richard; he came home with the milk, and had a terrible headache[Pg 395] next day. With the posts which he held under Government, with what he gained by his pen (and he was the owner of his own paper, and his own paymaster), with Mrs. Steele's fortune, they had resources enough, but Richard at intervals sends Prue a guinea or two; Richard is constantly in hiding from the bailiffs; is never out of debt; sometimes there is no coal, candle, or meat in the house. Steele was the most affectionate of men and the most generous. He boasted that the world owed Addison's essays to him, because he had made Addison overcome his laziness, and he told the world how greatly Addison was his superior. He wishes that they might write together some work to be called "The Monument," the memorial of their friendship. He took the side of poor discharged soldiers, whipped from parish to parish for their poverty. He adored children; his tears were as ready and heroic as the tears of Homer's warriors. But when he yielded to the temptations of the bottle and of extravagance, his wife and children had to suffer just as much as if Richard, in place of being a Christian Hero, had been no better than the wicked. Like Balzac he was a man of debts and of projects; he even wasted money on alchemy, and had a scheme for getting wealth in connexion with a lottery, a scheme which even then was found to be illegal. Mr. Swinburne called Steele "a sentimental debauchee," and indeed he shone more in preaching than in practice. Addison calls him "poor Dick," he is "poor Dick" to all the world now, if he were Sir Richard "to all Europe". But, when lip preached, he meant what he said, and his pleasant sermons, or rather pleas for goodness, kindness, faith, did "promote noble things," and he left the world more decent and more human than he found it.
Steele was born in Dublin in 1672; his family were not Celtic Irish folk; his father was in what is reckoned the less noble branch of the legal profession. When Sir Richard assumed heraldic bearings he calmly annexed those of another family of Steele, as' the elder Osborne, in "Vanity Fair," was supplied by his coachbuilder with the arms of the House of Leeds. Like the cousin of Mr. Isaac Bickerstaff, in "The Tatler" (No. 14), he was guilty of "treason against the Kings at Arms". Of his childhood we know only what he tells in that pathetic passage[Pg 396] about his father's funeral: "I had a battledore in my hand and fell a-beating the coffin, and calling papa, for, I know not how, I had some idea that he was locked up there.... My mother was a very beautiful woman, of a noble spirit, and there was a dignity in her grief amidst all the wildness of her transport, which methought struck me with an instinct of sorrow that, before I was sensible what it was to grieve, seized my very soul and has made pity the weakness of my heart ever since" ("Tatler," No. 181). "Hence it is that in me good nature is no merit, but having been so frequently overwhelmed with her tears before I knew the cause of any affliction... I imbibed consideration, remorse, and an unmanly gentleness of mind, which has since ensnared me into ten thousand calamities...." So a "Night of Memories and Sighs" is consecrated by Richard to his beloved dead, "when my servant knocked at the door with a letter, attended by a hamper of wine, of the same sort with that which is to be put on sale at Garraway's coffee house. Upon the receipt of it I sent for three friends.... We drank two bottles a man," and, as Mr. Arthur Pendennis says, found that there "was not a headache in a hogshead".
The fluid, in fact, as we know from the advertisement in this number of "The Tatler," was "extraordinary French claret". Dick conscientiously tested its merits, and gave it a puff in addition to the advertisement which was paid for. Thus he "promoted everything noble," including the vintage of Bordeaux, and, as Thackeray saw, there is no more characteristic essay of Steele's than this meditation on death and grief and loyal memory: à léal souvenir!
Steele lost his mother also in his childhood. He had an uncle, Henry Gascoigne, who, like Swift's uncle, provided for his education, but more generously. Attached to "Erin's high Ormonde," Gascoigne obtained for Steele a nomination to Charterhouse (1684) (Thackeray's school), where Steele met Addison, and their friendship began. In 1689 Steele went up to Christ Church, Addison being at Magdalen; in 1691 Steele gained a "postmastership" (a scholarship) at Merton, a college to which he was warmly attached, presenting its ancient library with the volumes of "The Tatler". He left just before his Schools (that is his examination for a[Pg 397] degree). In 1694 he entered the Duke of Ormonde's Guards as a trooper, apparently gentlemen did this as a way of approaching a commission. Steele got his as a reward for a poem on the death of Queen Mary—the piece was dedicated to Lord Cutts, Colonel of the Coldstreams. He befriended Steele, who, stationed at the Tower, made the acquaintance of Congreve and the wits, and defeated Captain Kelly in a duel. Probably the contrast between the delicacy of Steele's sentiments, and his vein of sincere piety, on one hand, with his addiction to mundane pleasures, on the other, made him as notable in his regiment as Aramis, Abbé d'Herblay, among the Musketeers of Louis XIV.
Steele, when once he took a pen in his hand, wrote much against duelling, exposing the ludicrousness of the institution. His remarks had no effect; what killed the duel in England was the use of the pistol: unromantic, fatal, and fortuitous. His duel may have made men more wary of bantering Steele, but his "Christian Hero," a work of military devotion (1701) lowered his character in the regiment. To restore it he wrote his comedy "The Funeral" (1701); to show that blasphemy and intrigue were no necessary components of a play: for he was wholly of the party of Jeremy Collier. The idea of the plot, the revival of Lord Brampton while his coffin is waiting for him, and his watching of the man?uvres of his hateful widow, while his fair ward, Lady Sharlot, escapes in the coffin from her enemies (a common situation in ancient ballads) is too grotesque. But the scenes with the hired mutes, with the poor broken soldiers, with Lady Brampton and her maid, are very amusing. Steele's exposure of the low tricks of lawyers, his appeal for cheap and accessible justice for all, are much in, Dickens's manner, and the loves of Lord Hardy and Lady Sharlot are as pure as bonny Kilmeny, while Lady Sharlot, in her encounter with Lady Brampton, gives proof of high spirit, and Lady Harriet is a flirt as harmless as lively.
Like the other wits, Steele was presented with lucrative posts, such as the editorship of the colourless official "Gazette". In the same year, 1707, he married his second wife, Miss Scurlock, the adored Prue, a woman of some property. He had a house at[Pg 398] Hampton Wick, horses, gardeners, footmen, everything handsome about him. In 1709 he founded "The Tatler," a folio sheet of printed matter, appearing thrice a week and containing news, political and social, correspondence, and the charming essays which soon became most important. Steele wrote 188 of these papers, Addison, forty-two, in thirty-six both men took a hand. Swift wrote very seldom. The essays, with those which he wrote in "The Spectator," and in other papers, are the foundation of the fame of Steele. They vary much in theme and style. To digest the "Iliad" into a journal, and reckon up the days of the events, cannot have much amused the public. There is plenty of dramatic criticism. Steele openly avows that he is a member of the Society for the Reformation of Manners; blames the plays of Wycherley and the rest, and calls in the name of Virtue for frequent representations of Shakespeare. "The apt use of the theatre is the most agreeable and easy way of making a polite and moral gentry, which would end in making the rest of the people regular in their behaviour," a pleasing opinion which is not quite justified by experience.
Dick was a constant patron of the best plays, but regular his behaviour was not. Various, excellent, and amiable as are Steele's essays, neither in style nor in thought do they wear quite so well as Addison's. Yet it is scarcely just to draw a distinction which may rest only on individual taste.
"The Tatler's" last appearance was on 2 January, 1711. Steele ended with a paper in which he generously attributes to his friend the essays which he deemed of most value. On 1 March the first number of "The Spectator" appeared—it ceased to exist on 6 December, 1712. Steele's new journal, "The Guardian," lasted for six months in 1713; he was elected as member for Stockbridge, and then came a quarrel of Whig and Tory with Swift, who wrote in "The Examiner". The arrival of George I from Hanover procured various lucrative posts, a patent for a theatre, and a knighthood for Steele: he edited "The Englishman," and attacked Swift's fallen friends, Harley and St. John; and in 1716 he got an income of ￡1000 a year as one of the commissioners of the estates forfeited by the Scottish Jacobites[Pg 399] who were out for their King in the rising of 1715. This was not a pleasant appointment to a man of feeling. Of the coolness between Steele and Addison we speak elsewhere.
In 1722 Steele's "Conscious Lovers," with another attack on duelling was acted with success, and dedicated to the "gracious and amiable sovereign," George I. Cibber the actor added scenes rather more gay than the rest, for so moral is this drama that Fielding's Parson Adams, in "Joseph Andrews," said "it contains some things almost solemn enough for a sermon". His connexion with the theatre brought Steele into more than one lawsuit; his failing health, and the assiduities of his creditors caused him to prefer to reside in Wales; he died in Carmarthen on I September, 1729. Like Goldsmith, Charles Lamb, Walton, and Scott, he has made all his readers his friends, and if his plays are not acted much, the Lydia Languish of Sheridan, and the Tony Lumpkin of Goldsmith, are reflections from his Biddy and Humphrey in "The Tender Husband," a not successful comedy of 1705.
Addison.
There were few forms of literature, from the sacred hymn to the libretto of an opera, in which Addison did not adventure himself with success more than respectable. It is, however, as an essayist that he survives, and is read and admired. Born on 1 May, 1672, he was the eldest son of the Rev. Lancelot Addison, who, after acting as chaplain to the garrisons of Dunkirk and, later, of Tangier, obtained the small living of Milston, married the sister of a bishop, and in 1683 received the Deanery of Lichfield. He was something of a Jacobite, and as an author had pleasing traits of humour and irony. His son Joseph passed through two local schools, and thence to Charterhouse (Thackeray's school) whence first to Queen's, then to Magdalen, Oxford, where he held a demyship (scholarship), and was later a Fellow.
"Addison's Walk" is in the little wood round which two branches of the Cherwell meander with a mazy motion. Addison was soon admired for the excellence of his Latin verses: he made Dryden's acquaintance, and complimented him in verse; he began[Pg 400] a translation of Ovid for Tonson, in the usual ten-syllable rhyming couplets.
Some of the stories of the Metamorphoses remain, with notes of literary criticism, including a compliment to William III. "The smoothness of our English verse," he casually remarks, "is too much lost by the repetition of proper names," which, in fact, are sonorous ornaments of the verse of Milton, Scott, Tennyson, and others. But Addison, bent on "smoothness" had not yet come to appreciate Milton; still less, in his early "Account of the English Poets," Spenser, who
Can charm an understanding age no more.
The young champion of smoothness and common sense unblushingly rhymed "success" to "verse".
Reluctant to take Orders, without which his Fellowship must lapse, Addison, through Congreve, was introduced to Charles Montagu (later Halifax) who, with Somers, wished to enlist Addison for his powers as a writer. They obtained for him a travelling pension of ￡300 yearly, and in December, 1699, left Marseilles for Italy.
His published remarks on Italy, written in a simple and easy style, are of interest mainly because they are so unlike modern ecstasies about the country. What most pleased Addison was to compare the scenes and towns which he saw, with the descriptions of them which, in Latin authors, he had read. To the natural beauties of the land, and to the works of Christian art, he is almost blind; Paul Veronese leaves him cold; at Verona he says nothing of the tomb of Romeo and Juliet, which, perhaps, was not yet shown. At Venice he is most concerned about the military strength of the place; "Tintoret is in greater esteem than in other parts of Italy," and that is enough about Tintoret! The Venetian comedies "are more lewd than in other countries". Addison paid a good deal of attention to ancient coins; and Pope wrote commendatory verses for his "Dialogues on Medals," and hoped that, on medals, Addison and Craggs will be represented: Craggs's effigy is to have an inscription in six heroic lines. Though the Dialogues be antiquated as arch?ology the description[Pg 401] of collectors of coins is amusing: one of the speakers hastens to add that the science "must appear ridiculous to those who have not taken the pains to examine it". Addison, in a kind humorous way, strove to convince his age that ignorance is not the best judge of the historical, social, and artistic value of numismatics.
Returning to England in 1703 Addison was poor, and had no prospect of employment. The Whigs, however, wanted to make the most of Marlborough's victory at Blenheim. Strange as it seems to us, poetry had influence, a poet was needed, Halifax recommended Addison; the Chancellor of the Exchequer found him "up three pairs of stairs," and "The Campaign" was written. The scene is familiar to readers of "Esmond". Thackeray, devoted to Addison as he was, asks "how many fourth form boys at Mr. Addison's school of Charterhouse could write as well as that now?" as well as Addison writes in several passages of "The Campaign". Probably no fourth form boys would write
With floods of gore that from the vanquished fell,
The marshes stagnate, and the rivers swell.
However the simile of the Angel has been reckoned fine, and the poem "fulfilled the purpose for which it was written. It strengthened the position of the Whig Ministry" (what a task for the Muse!) and obtained patent places for the poet. As Under-secretary of State, Addison had leisure to write the libretto of "Rosamond," an opera, in which Queen Eleanor does not poison Rosamond, but gives her, like Juliet, a sleeping draught. The King says
O quickly relate
This riddle of fate!
My impatience forgive
Does Rosamond live?
Eleanor explains the situation:—
Soon the waking nymph shall rise
And, in a convent placed, admire
The cloistered walls and virgin choir:
With them in songs and hymns divine
The beauteous penitent shall join.
[Pg 402]
Finally the King and Queen sing
Who to forbidden joys would rove
That know the sweets of virtuous love?
Who indeed?
The rise of Blenheim Palace is prophesied, and Marlborough is flattered ingeniously by the Muse of Whiggery. The "understanding age" was not charmed: it was not absolutely destitute of humour. Nor was Addison. The intentionally funny parts of the opera, though not so comic as the serious passages, are not unworthy of Sir W. S. Gilbert. Sir Trusty, finding Rosamond's corpse, as he supposes, says
The King this doleful news shall read
In lines of my inditing;
Great Sir
Your Rosamond is dead,
As I'm at present writing.
Addison's unacknowledged comedy, "The Drummer," based on the famous rapping spirit at Tedworth (1662), was a failure, and died on its third night (1715).
Of his lucky tragedy, "Cato," he seems to have written four acts in Italy. As early as April, 1711, Addison confided his ideas on Tragedy to the Town ("Spectator," No. 39). They show us how far the wits of "the understanding age" of Anne, had moved from the taste of the Restoration stage. Addison is "very much offended when I see a play in rhyme; which is as absurd in English, as a tragedy of hexameters would have been in Greek or Latin". But blank verse is "in such due medium between rhyme and prose that it seems wonderfully adapted to tragedy," as the Elizabethan tragedians had not failed to discover. The thoughts of English tragic writers, especially of Shakespeare, "are often obscured by the sounding phrases, hard metaphors, and forced expressions in which they are clothed". These expressions, however, have been admired by many. The English tragedian is apt to make his hero successful in the fifth act: Addison does not approve of a modernization of "Lear," in which, as in the chronicles which told the story, King Lear and Cordelia triumph[Pg 403] in the end. Aristotle says, Addison reports, that the populace preferred tragedies which ended ill (but Addison himself has made the tale of Fair Rosamond end happily). He makes no universal rule, only protests that a tragedy should not be compelled to conclude with comfort. There is "nothing which delights and terrifies our English theatre so much as a ghost, especially when he appears in a bloody shirt. A spectre has very often saved a play." Addison applauds the handling of the ghost in "Hamlet": ghosts, in fact, need delicate handling. For the moving of pity, our principal machine is the handkerchief; and the introduction of an orphan or two, but not of half a dozen fatherless children. "That dreadful butchering of one another," with the use of racks, thumbscrews, and other instruments of torture, gives occasion to French critics to think us a people who delight in blood.
In practice, Addison produced a tragedy which political accidents made highly successful at the moment, and which has enriched the stock of quotations. But Dr. Johnson described it as rather a poem in dialogue than a drama, rather a succession of just sentiments in elegant language than a representation of natural affections.... The events are expected without solicitude, and are remembered without joy or sorrow. The "love interest," Pope says, was a popular after-thought, and Pope told Addison that the play was better fitted to be read than to be acted. Thanks to the habit of mingling literature with politics, the play (13 April, 1713) was "expected" with "solicitude" by Whigs and Tories. "All the foolish industry possible has been used to make it thought a party play," says Pope. The leaders of each party clapped loudly at each remark that might be twisted into a political allusion, while Addison, with Dr. Berkeley and two or three friends, in a side-box "had a table and two or three flasks of Burgundy and champagne, with which the author (though a very sober man) thought necessary to support his spirits". A run of thirty-five nights, a great marvel then, also sustained the spirits of Addison.
Addison does not hold his high and enviable place in our literature by virtue of his plays, poems, and work on Medals, but of his brief Essays in "The Tatler" and "The Spectator". We[Pg 404] have already seen how Steele and he worked, in the most pleasant, kindly, and humorous tone, for the improvement of morals and manners in the Court and Town.
The aim of Addison was "to temper wit with morality and to enliven morality with wit," and he succeeded so well that, to this day, if one opens a volume of "The Spectator" for any reason, one cannot lay it down. The spectacle of that world comes before us in all its aspects—toy shops, theatres, streets, coffee-houses, masquerades: there are allegories, sportive or serious, reflections at the opera, or among the monuments of the dead at Westminster Abbey; there are letters, real or "done in the office," asking for advice on points of etiquette; there are musical strains of solemn prose, or passages of exquisite banter; there are creations of character, Sir Roger de Coverley, Will Wimble, and the rest. There are criticisms, as of Milton, which led taste back from the fantasies of the Restoration to that great poet who lived lonely, fallen on evil days and evil tongues. Even the folk-poetry of the past, "songs and fables that are come from father to son, and are most in vogue among the common people of the countries through which I passed," give Addison "a particular delight," he says, in his paper on Chevy Chase, "the favourite ballad of the common people of England". In our time, a critic would fall back on the history of the ballad, showing how "Chevy Chase" is a later version of "Otterbourne," a poem common, with patriotic variations, to England and Scotland. For Addison "Chevy Chase" is an heroic poem: as such he treats it, and shows how touches of Nature make it akin to Homer and Virgil.
Here we are far away from the Restoration, and the age of conceits; we are on the way to the romantic movement, to Scott and "The Lay of the Last Minstrel". In quite another style take Addison's musings on a "lady's library," mixed with "a thousand odd figures in China ware," Japanese lacquer, and old silver. Leonora has "all the Classic Authors—in wood," dummies! "A set of Elzevirs," small classic volumes of the famous Dutch press, "by the same hand"—the cabinetmaker's. There are several of the huge wandering heroic French romances, and "Locke of Human Understanding, with a paper of patches in it": "Clelia,[Pg 405] which opened of itself in the place that describes two lovers in a bower." Most of the books were bought, not "for her own use," but "because the lady had heard them praised, or because she had seen the authors of them".
Addison, it must be confessed, did not take the learning of the sex very seriously. Now the learning of many of them is serious indeed; but, we ask, are either men or women more seriously inclined, on the whole, to study than they were in Queen Anne's day? Addison, says Thackeray, "walks about the world watching women's pretty humours—fashions, follies, flirtations, rivalries, and noting them with the most charming humour". It was not he, but Steele, who found in a lady's society "a liberal education". But it was Addison whom Lady Mary Wortley Montagu proclaimed to be "the best companion in the world".
There is still no better companion: we can still hear him "sweetly talk and sweetly smile" in his Essays. He knows so much, and he is never tedious in giving information. Like Coleridge in talk with Keats, he deals in ghost stories: and this child of an age of reason does not scout them. He makes the judicious remark that Lucretius, the Roman materialist, does not believe that the soul can exist apart from the body, yet "makes no doubt of the reality of apparitions, and that men often appeared after their death... he was so pressed with the matter of fact, which he could not have the confidence to deny...." He explains by "one of the most absurd unphilosophical notions that was ever started"—in a different way of statement this theory of Lucretius has lately been revived.
What a variety of themes Addison illustrates and adorns! His writings are like better conversation than was ever held save in the Fortunate Islands by the happy Dead.
The humour and the drawing of character in the papers on Sir Roger de Coverley, have a delicacy, a minuteness, a happy humour, which we scarcely meet again in our literature till they reappear, a century later, in the novels of Miss Austen. It must be admitted that Addison's manner of writing sent son vieux temps, is not "up to date," but this only lends an agreeable quaintness. Nobody, to-day, in writing of the scene in the "Odyssey" where the[Pg 406] hero beholds, in the next world, "the far-renowned brides of ancient song," would speak of them as "a circle of beauties," "the finest women". Nor, when the hero says "each of them gave me an account of her birth and family," would a critic now say "this is a gentle satire upon female vanity"! To give such an account is the universal practice in Homer, when strangers meet, whether men or women.
"The Spectator" was dropped after running for about two years, not before Addison had praised in his paper Pope's "Essay on Criticism". Steele introduced Pope to Addison; perhaps they never were very attached friends, for a man of Addison's sense could not but be watchful of himself in the company of the vain and irritable little satirist. Pope's jealousy and suspicions produced a coldness, and, after Addison was dead, Pope emitted his venom in the poisonous character of "Atticus":—
Blest with each talent and each art to please,
And born to live, converse, and write with ease;
yet,
Bears, like the Turk, no brother near the throne,"
and so forth. Nothing that inspired skill and spite can do is better than this satire; had Addison been alive when it was given to the world he could not have hit a return blow, for cruelty was not in his nature, and Pope was so sensitive that any retort on him was cruel.
In 1715 Addison conducted for six months another paper, "The Freeholder," in the Whig interest; was made one of the Commissioners for Trade and the Colonies, and married the Dowager-Countess of Warwick. He died in 1719, "three years after that splendid but dismal union," says Thackeray. A dowager-countess is not usually splendid, and we really have no reason to think that the union was "dismal". Addison's position as Secretary of State was sufficiently good, not to speak of his fame, popularity, and genius. In 1719 Addison was matched against Steele in a newspaper controversy: Steele probably was not welcome to Lady Warwick at Holland House, but the two men, says Steele, "still preserved the most passionate concern for their mutual welfare. When they met they were as unreserved as boys...."
[Pg 407]
Addison with Steele, founded a school of essayists of merit, who never came near the supremacy of their masters: Addison not only delighted his world, but left it better than he found it; not by preaching violent sermons, not by "lashing the vices of the age," but by sensibly lowering the tyranny of the fashion which insisted on the duty of being vicious.
Swift.
Concerning the genius, character, and career of Jonathan Swift there are interesting varieties of opinion, but nobody denies that the genius was great or that the career was sad, strange, even mysterious. In an old-fashioned comedy of Humours, Swift would have been cast for the part of Wycherley's Captain Manly in "The Plain Dealer"; the man of tender heart who hates an age and a society that do not come up to his ideals. Swift had, indeed, depths of affection, and a noble capacity for friendship, but, unlike Captain Manly, he would never have made Fidelia, or any other woman, happy. He lived in this world the life of a flogging schoolmaster. He expresses a hope, at about the age of 26, that, in his poems,
Each line shall stab, shall blast, like daggers and like fire.
He hopes, at the same hopeful period, that
My hate, whose lash just heaven has long decreed,
Shall on a day make Sin and Folly bleed.
He lashed away, but Sin and Folly remained "more than usual calm," they did not hear, they did not heed him; and the presentable part of his most comprehensive and ferocious satire of humanity, the one book published by him which is still generally known, "Gulliver's Travels," has been an innocent source of amusement to many generations of children.
At about the age of 37, Swift, in a private letter, wrote thus of his own case, "I envy very much your prudence and temper, and love of peace and settlement: the reverse of which has been the great uneasiness of my life, and is like to continue so". He recognizes one source of his sorrows. As to[Pg 408] "prudence," Swift had even too much of it, if "prudence" were the motive which made him put off marriage with the woman ("Stella," Esther Johnson) whom he loved, and who loved him. But for "peace and settlement," he had no partiality; and his temper was no better than he deemed it.
The curses of Swift were, first, his just consciousness of powers far superior to those of the great politicians who adulated, and used, and failed to reward him. With their wine, and their amours, and their bitter, petty jealousies, they let the great opportunity go by, and, lo! Harley is in the Tower; and Bolingbroke, a fugitive, drinks, and loves, and intrigues in France, vituperating the Prince whose cause he has helped to ruin; while Swift eats out his own heart in that Ireland which he hated.
Another curse was that he had attached himself as a priest to the Church of England; while the author of "The Tale of a Tub," however loyal he might be in practice, certainly cannot have been "a trusty and undoubting Church of England man". Of all the creeds, of all the Churches and Sects, in his heart he thought like the Jupiter of his poem,
You, who in various Sects were shamm'd,
And come to hear each other damn'd.
This bleak lucidity of soul, this consciousness of being able "to see forward with a fatal clearness," this knowledge of the greatness of his own genius,—thwarted by poverty, driven wild by servitude, lacerated by the torments of a mysterious disease, crushed by terrible forebodings of the appointed end; these things drove Swift to cut himself among the tombs, and to curse in the wilderness.
Though born in Dublin (30 Nov. 1667) Swift was no Irishman: his father belonged to an old Yorkshire, his mother to an old Leicestershire family. But on his father's death, his mother being left ill-provided, Swift's was the position of a poor relation. His training at Kilkenny school and Trinity College, Dublin, was paid for by his uncle, Godwin Swift, who was either poor or penurious. Men like Swift seldom yield much attention to their tutors; and Swift, though he did well in Greek and Latin, failed[Pg 409] in physics and took no pains with his Latin essay. He was, however, allowed to pass. In 1688 he went to England, to his mother at Leicester, and in the following year entered the household of Sir William Temple, a politician and diplomatist, retired from active life, busy with literature and gardening, but in friendly relations with William III and with men of affairs.
Sir William Temple (1628-1699) was himself a writer admired for his style, especially in his Essay on Poetry. His periods, though long, are graceful and well balanced, but seldom have such brief melancholy cadences as this reflection "when all is done, human life is, at the greatest and the best, but like a froward child, that must be played with and humoured a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over".
Swift's position, at first, was between those of a secretary and an upper servant; he left Temple's house for Ireland, in 1690; returned in 1691: next year obtained a degree at Oxford; and in 1694, in Ireland, took Orders, and received a small benefice, Kilroot, near Belfast, where the people were Presbyterians, and he had no congregation worth mentioning. He entangled himself with a Miss Waring (Varina) and wrote "Pindaric" poems. Dryden, a remote cousin of his, told him that he would never be a poet, and no other reason has been discovered for Swift's flouts and jeers at Dryden's reputation. The anecdote may be untrue, and, as a Catholic, Dryden would be disapproved of by Swift.
In 1696 Swift was reconciled with Temple, and during the next two years was treated with more favour, met politicians, met the King; educated Stella, an inmate of Temple's house, then a girl of 15; read much in Temple's library, and was about to attach himself to the double-dyed traitor, Sunderland, when Sunderland was dismissed from office. Swift went back to Ireland, held a living at Laracor, lived much with Lord Berkeley at the Castle, Dublin; wrote lively verses of the lighter sort, wrote a political pamphlet which was successful, and showed leanings towards the Whig party. In London (1704) his "Tale of a Tub" was published anonymously: it had been composed in 1696-1697.
In "An Apology" (1709) Swift, still, as always, anonymous,[Pg 410] writes "the book seems calculated to live as long as our language and our taste admit no great alterations". In taste great alterations have been admitted. Though excellent judges still applaud this whimsical allegory, few readers who approach it with high expectations are likely to escape disappointment. The allegory of Peter (Rome) Martin (Anglicans and Lutherans) and Jack (Presbyterians and all other Protestant sects), is utterly incoherent. At present no self-respecting person would write of the religions of Islam and Buddha in such terms and such temper as Swift wrote about the Churches and sects of Christianity. Whatever we may think of Transubstantiation and Vestments, we do not make uproarious fun of them.
Already Swift indulges his half-insane delight in malodorous references; the wit of the dirty schoolboy scrawling on the walls. Few things in the work are more witty than this on Dryden: "he has often said to me in confidence, that the world would never have suspected him to be so great a poet, if he had not assured them so frequently in his prefaces, that it was impossible they could ever doubt or forget it".
Thackeray remarks, "I think the world was right, and the Bishops who advised Queen Anne not to appoint the author of 'The Tale of the Tub' to a Bishopric, gave perfectly good advice". James IV did not give Dunbar a benefice: the line must be drawn somewhere. Swift, in his "Apology," denied that he had attacked religion: be it so, he had written on matters ecclesiastical with amazingly bad taste. His "Argument against Abolishing Christianity" (1708) is not the sort of argument that we expect from a bishop-postulant, but its irony seems as charming and dexterous now as it did two centuries ago. In "The Tale of a Tub," on the other hand, we seldom find a passage that wins a smile, except in "those fine curses" which Peter spoke, and in some of the gambols of Jack. The apologue, in feet, is heavy-handed; the author does not clearly know where he is making for; the perfect clearness of his later style is absent. (These observations, entirely candid, are at odds with the usual applause of "The Tale of a Tub".)
With "The Tale of a Tub" was published, in the same volume,[Pg 411] "The Battle of the Books," written about 1697; this was a now belated contribution to the controversy as to the relative merits of the Ancients and the Moderns, begun in France by Charles Perrault, the author of our most familiar fairy tales. As it happened, Temple, in an essay, had taken up the cause of the Ancients, and had chosen, as proofs of superiority of the oldest books, the Fables ascribed to ?sop, and the Letters attributed to Phalaris, the half-mythical tyrant of Agrigentum. The matter of the fables is prehistoric, but the crooked slave, ?sop, did not contribute their form; and the Letters of Phalaris were a literary exercise composed long after the tyrant's date. Wotton, with some help from the greatest scholar of his day, Richard Bentley, King's Librarian, and (1700) Master of Trinity, Cambridge, replied to Temple, and Charles Boyle, of Christ Church, Oxford, introduced a personal squabble with Bentley. The Christ Church wits, including the formidable Atterbury, sided with Boyle,—there was a war between elegant scholars, on Boyle's side; and the nascent science of the Royal Society allied with perfect scholarship and Bentley, on the other. Boyle did not insist that the Letters of Phalaris were genuine; Bentley displayed his sagacious learning in his proof that they were not. Temple was discreetly silent, but Swift espoused the cause of the wits in "The Battle of the Books". The Books in the King's Library, Ancient and Modern, meet in a parody of a fight in Homer. The goddess, Dulness, befriends the Moderns, as Aphrodite, in Homer, protects Paris and ?neas. The mock-Homeric manner was not then outworn, and it amused; while Swift heaped personal scorn on Bentley, and, of course, on Dryden, who is ridiculed for being old. Bentley, crooked-legged and hump-backed, is armed with a flail, and "a vessel full of ordure". Boyle transfixes Bentley and Wotton as a cook spits a brace of woodcocks—and that is the humour of it.
Infinitely more amusing were Swift's predictions of the death of a prophetic almanac-maker, Partridge (1708), and the sequel of that jest. Swift styled himself Isaac Bickerstaff, and lent the name to Steele, for use in his new paper "The Tatler". He lived in close friendship with Addison, Steele, Congreve, and Prior; and began his love affair with Miss Vanhomrigh, the[Pg 412] unfortunate Vanessa, rival of Stella. Like Lord Foppington, Swift probably coveted nothing less than her heart, which she gave, and his difficulty was "to get rid of the rest of her body".
After a visit to Ireland, Swift returned to find the Tories in power, "a new world" (September, 1710). He met Harley (Lord Oxford), took service under him, and for three years was the Achitophel of the Tories, writing for them lampoons and political pamphlets which "were cried up to the skies". For half a year (1710-1711) Swift's papers appeared in "The Examiner". Swift dined with Harley and St. John—they called him, "Jonathan"; he snubbed their attempts to treat him as a mere gentleman of the Press; and in the delightful pages of his familiar "Journal to Stella," he paints the age, and himself, triumphant, adulated, powerful, but "seeing all his own mischance"; "I believe they will leave me Jonathan as they found me".
Among the pamphlets of this period are "The Hue and Cry after Dismal" (Lord Nottingham,'ancestor of Horace Walpole's "black funereal Finches"), and the more important "Conduct of the Allies". By 1713 Swift hoped "that the present age and posterity would learn who were the real enemies of the country". The old question of Tory Short and Whig Codlin! But he had cruelly offended the Duchess of Somerset by "The Windsor Prophecy"; and the Queen could not endure the author of "The Tale of a Tub". He asked for his reward, and with much trouble obtained the Deanery of St. Patrick's, Dublin (June, 1713). He went to Ireland, but he could not get rid of Vanessa. Her letters pursued him; other letters called him to town—Harley and St. John were at odds, and he was needed. He engaged in a paper war with Steele, now an enemy; he wrote "The Public Spirit of the Whigs"; he offended the Scottish members, and the Duke of Argyll, the hero of Malplaquet, an ill man to meddle with. He was consoled by the friendship of Pope, Gay, and Arbuthnot, a good man and a great humorist. They founded the Martinus Scriblerus Club, for the writing of facetious papers: but politics went ill, Harley and St. John quarrelled in the Queen's presence: her death was near; Harley was overthrown by St. John; St. John had no courage, and, on the death of Anne, was[Pg 413] checked by Argyll and his regiment. Bishop Atterbury would have proclaimed the King, King James over the Water; the laymen dared not back him; the Elector of Hanover occupied the throne; and of Swift's great friends St. John fled to France, and Harley was imprisoned in the Tower; while Swift, hooted by the pressmen whom he had bullied, made for Ireland. The Jacobite Cause was lost, and we cannot here ask, would Swift (as St. John says in "Esmond") have accepted the Primacy of England from la bonne cause, the young Catholic King?
My life is now a burden grown
To others, ere it be my own,
Swift wrote. He corresponded (1716) with Atterbury, and Atterbury was at the head of the Jacobite party in England. In 1719 Swift dedicated to a Swedish diplomatist, Count Gyllenborg, a History of England. "My intention was to inscribe it to the King, your late Master, for whose great virtues I had ever the highest admiration, as I shall continue to bear to his memory." This King, Charles XII, in 1716 meant to land in Britain with an army in support of the Jacobites, and Gyllenborg, his ambassador, managed the plot in England. Charles had invited Swift, at an earlier date, to Sweden: now Swift dwells "in a most obscure disagreeable country" (Ireland), "and among a most profligate and abandoned people".
All this does not look like zeal for the Protestant succession.
The years 1719-1723 saw the completion of Swift's ambiguous poem, "Cadenus and Vanessa," and the arrival of Vanessa in Swift's neighbourhood. "In vain he protested, he vowed, he soothed and bullied; the news of the Dean's marriage to Stella at last reached her; and it killed her,—Vanessa died of that passion" (Thackeray). The marriage is still matter of controversy.
In 1724 Swift, who hated the English Government if he did not love Ireland, wrote the famous "Drapier's Letters" against a job in copper currency, and gained high popularity.
In 1726 he gave to the world the most famous of his books, "Gulliver's Travels," in which his gift of narrative, his amazing power of being truthful in the minutest details of the most[Pg 414] extravagant imaginations, his misanthropy, his irony, and his delight in unsavoury things, are all carried to the highest perfection. In 1729 came the "Modest Proposal" for eating Irish children; in 1738 his "Polite Conversation" and "Directions to Servants," with the same merit of humour, and the same inveterate fault.
In visits to London (1726, 1727) Swift had enjoyed the society of his old friends and comrades in letters; and hoped there, perhaps, to find a Fountain of Youth. He felt himself slipping into the vice of hoarding; and rusting in a second-rate society. Bolingbroke had been allowed to return from exile; the banished King had found him worthless as a statesman: he had said his worst against the banished King; nobody wanted Bolingbroke and nobody was afraid of him. He played the philosopher, and Swift did not believe in his affectation of philosophy. Arbuthnot, Swift loved, Pope he had always admired; and he tried to protect Gay from his own reckless improvidence. He ridiculed, in "Gulliver," the proofs brought against Atterbury as a Jacobite agent: if Swift was not convinced by the evidence he must have shut his eyes very hard.
In January, 1728, Stella died: Swift tried to fill the gap in his life by activity in Irish politics. His disease, apparently some malady of the ear which gradually affected the brain, became more unendurable, but he had still to write some of his most powerful satires in verse. Then his memory began to fail, and he drifted slowly into the half-unconscious dotage of his last five years, dying on 19 October, 1745, unconscious, probably, of the meteoric adventure of Prince Charles.
The failure of his party, of his political ambition, and measureless hopes of greatness, gave Swift the retirement and the leisure to produce his greatest works. If fortune had "bantered us" as Bolingbroke said, he turned and bantered Fate and mankind. In the long array of his volumes, so seldom opened, are many brief flights, in verse and prose, which are full of entertainment, of wild fancy, orderly and gravely presented; and there is the "Journal to Stella," with its infinite tenderness of affection; and the Letters, the confidences of the wits from romantic Charles Wogan, who rescued from prison the bride of a King, and died as Governor of[Pg 415] the appropriate province of La Mancha, to those of Pope and Arbuthnot and Gay. The works of Swift are a library in themselves.
De Foe.
"One man in his time plays many parts," and no man played more parts than Daniel Foe or De Foe. The son of a butcher in St. Giles's, born in 1661, he received at a Nonconformist school an education that was a sufficient basis for literary undertakings, but not tending to such "classical" flights as led young University men to profitable sinecures under Government. He is said to have been out under Monmouth in 1685. He betook himself to commerce of various kinds, thus acquiring little or no money (in 1692 he "broke," like Mr. Badman), but a competent knowledge of the currents of trade, and the courses of financial speculation, exhibited in his "Essay on Projects," projects, educational and social as well as financial (1698). In 1701 his "True Born Englishman," showing in the interest of William III that the English are a mixed race, was successful.
In 1702 his famous "Shortest Way with the Dissenters" was discovered to be, not a candid plea for the Church of England, but an irritating parody of High Church pretensions, nearly as serious as Swift's apology for cannibalism. De Foe was pilloried, but not pelted, and imprisoned for his waggery; was released, probably through the agency of Harley, Lord Oxford, the wavering and enigmatic "Dragon" of Swift's correspondence; and while editing and indeed writing a weekly "Review," the precursor in its social columns of Steele's "Tatler," De Foe served Harley in divers subterranean ways. In Scotland, in the autumn of 1706, he acted as Harley's spy and newsagent: his letters to Harley contain an admirable picture of the struggles for and against the union of Scotland and England, and of De Foe's own versatile, acute and daring character. He made himself "all things to all men," could talk to each citizen as a member of his own trade, explained all the economic conditions of the country, understood, and did not revere, the Kirk, and the preachers; and, by securing the services of that lively and humorous rogue and sham-fanatic,[Pg 416] Ker of Kersland, broke up an unholy alliance between the extreme "Cameronians" and the Jacobite gentry and clansmen of Perthshire and Angus. They had intended to break up the Parliament; but the wild Whigs did not keep tryst.
It is plain that Harley treated De Foe very ill, and that, like most spies, he was underpaid. Still he was working for a cause which he had at heart; as he was later, when, to all appearance, playing the part of journalist in the Tory or even Jacobite interest under Government.
The needy De Foe was a man of dark corners, an absolute "Johannes Factotum". Swift called him "a grave, sententious, dogmatical rogue". He professed that he received assistance from "The Divine Spirit".
No man who wrote so much and so variously has written so well. His favourite topic, if we may judge by the frequency with which he handled it, was "psychical research". Like Glanvill, Henry More, and other writers in the sceptical age of the Restoration, he collected, and told in his own inimitable manner, many current anecdotes of wraiths, death-warnings, second sight, and phantasms of the dead. The most prominent merit of De Foe, in fiction, is his power of convincing the reader by the minute and sober realism of his details. Some of his novels, in autobiographic form, have caused disputes as to whether they be romances, or actual memoirs.
"A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal, on September 8, 1705" (published in 1706) has been described as "the first instance of De Foe's wonderful lies like truth". "This relation is matter of fact," said De Foe in the Preface. Sir Walter Scott, a ghost-hunter himself, explained the "fact" by saying that De Foe invented and wrote the story as a puff of Drelincourt "On Death," which the appearance of Mrs. Veal, on the day after her death recommended to her friend (who believed her to be alive), Mrs. Bargrave.
But Mr. George Aitken has proved "that the piece was, as De Foe said, 'a true relation of matter of fact,'" that is, De Foe merely wrote the story as told by Mrs. Bargrave—"the percipient"—the person who saw and conversed with the dead Mrs. Veal[Pg 417] about her gown—"a scoured silk, newly made up". Mr. Aitken found a manuscript note of 21 May, 1714, by some one who had interviewed Mrs. Bargrave, and for whom Mrs. Bargrave made three or four minute additions. As for Mrs. Veal herself, she died on 7 September, appeared on 8 September to Mrs. Bargrave, and we have the record of her burial on 10 September, in the register of St. Mary's, Dover.
In another case, "The Botethan Ghost," told in an appendix to De Foe's "Duncan Campbell," the tale was really written, as De Foe says, not by himself, but by one of the people who saw the spectre, the Rev. Mr. Ruddle of Launceston in Cornwall, in June, 1665; the narrative was written on 4 September of the same year.
Thus De Foe's extraordinary gift of making things fictitious seem true has caused him to be charged with inventing stories which he merely retold, or printed from the manuscript of another.
De Foe was 60 years of age, and had suffered from apoplexy, when he wrote the masterpiece which made him immortal, "Robinson Crusoe" (1719). New editions appeared in May, June, and August; a sequel followed which few read; still more scarce are readers of De Foe's "Serious Reflections and Vision of the Angelic World" (1720). The "metapsychical" world was always very near De Foe, practical and shrewd man as he was.
"Crusoe" is based on Captain Rogers's narrative of the adventures of Alexander Selkirk, a mariner of Largo, in Fife, marooned (1704) on the Island of Juan Fernandez. An allegory of De Foe's own life has been suspected, the idea is unimportant.
It is superfluous to dilate on the sterling merits of "Robinson Crusoe". Before he published it a critic had recognized "the little art he is truly master of, of forging a story, and imposing it on the world for truth". The style is as simple as Swift's, and more "homely". The tale of love was not De Foe's trade, any more than "the moving accident" was Wordsworth's. "Moll Flanders," and "Roxana" are no doubt meant to have a moral influence; but their readers are looking for something else: like the readers of the edifying Monsieur Zola.
De Foe was one of the fathers of journalism, and almost "the[Pg 418] only begetter" of the story of adventure, the desert island romance, and, in "Memoirs of a Cavalier," and "A Journal of the Plague Year," of the historical autobiographical novel. "It was about the beginning of September, 1664, that I, among the rest of my neighbours, heard, in ordinary discourse, that the plague was returned again in Holland...." That keynote reverberates in scores of the historical romances of 1885-1900.
The modern novelist, of course, avoids De Foe's strict statistical method. De Foe's story reads precisely like a historical document, and the modern reader dislikes nothing more than that sort of reading. De Foe's hero saw a number of people looking at "a ghost walking on a grave stone". Less fortunate Mr. Pepys "went forth, to see (God forgive my presumption!) whether I could see any dead corpse going to the grave, but, as God would have it, did not".
By a truly realistic touch De Foe's contemplative saddler closes his journal with "a coarse but sincere stanza of my own,"
A dreadful plague in London was
In the year sixty-five,
Which swept an hundred thousand souls
Away; yet I alive!
The modern reader finds that De Foe's fictions are too like facts, and, often, in the moral and religious reflections, too like tracts, for his taste. On the other hand, to a contemplative mind, "Robinson Crusoe," carefully read, and compared with its descendants in fiction, is a source of delight. De Foe, at the age of 60, must have been, while he wrote it, as happy as his innumerable readers. For example, we compare Robinson's felling of a cedar tree "five feet ten inches diameter at the lower part..." and his construction of a vessel "fit to carry twenty-six men," a vessel quite unlaunchable, with the practicable coracle, the most "home-made" of things in "Treasure Island". We compare the trial trips of the two crafts (Robinson's second boat); we see that R. L. Stevenson has produced the less impossible narrative of the twain, and that both rejoice the heart.
The mass, and the variety, of what must be called the "pot-boilers"[Pg 419] of De Foe are unequalled. In better conditions of authorship he would have been a rich man, but he died poor, in distress, and under a cloud, in 1731.
A history of literature is not necessarily a history of philosophical, metaphysical, and theological speculation. In such speculation the age was rich that saw the volcanic eruption of sects and heresies during the religious frenzy of the Civil War, and also beheld the reaction from all "enthusiasm" to the passion for common sense and for science as "organized common sense" which came in with the Restoration. Hobbes's works did not encourage religious "enthusiasm," or mysticism, or belief in the ineffable spiritual experiences of devout men, from John Bunyan with his visions, to Ralph Cudworth (1617-1688), an Anglican divine, with his Neoplatonic hints at union with the Absolute ("True Intellectual System of the Universe," "Eternal and Immutable Morality"). The learned and the unlearned wrote books on either side, sceptical or in favour of belief.
The Royal Society impartially included Joseph Glanvill (16361680) with his "Vanity of Dogmatising," and his "Sadducismus Triumphatus," the pioneer of Psychical Research, with its tales of Poltergeists, wraiths, and levitations, some of them fairly well authenticated. The Royal Society also gave a place to the far more famous philosopher of liberal common sense philosophy, John Locke (1632-1704). Locke's first eighteen years were passed under the shadow of the Great Rebellion, and at Christ Church, Oxford, under a Head who was an Independent divine. He did not like the new freedom, in which he found the old slavery, but after the Restoration he found liberty for discussion, in which "enthusiasm" was not permitted to enter. His attitude towards mental philosophy was not unlike that of Bacon. He disliked Aristotelianism as then held at Oxford, thinking that words usurped the place of facts, and in his "Essay on the Human Understanding" he employed that plain style which the Royal Society enjoined. The work was written at intervals during seventeen years, disturbed when as a friend of Shaftesbury, Dryden's Achitophel, the turbulent patron of Titus Oates, he was sent into exile. The burden of the essay, which appeared in 1690,[Pg 420] is opposition to the theory of "innate ideas"—the terms need defining—and insistence that we derive our ideas from the presentations of our senses. "Average common sense was always kept in his view," and "he wrote for the most part in the language of the market-place". He wanted man to think as a human being very limited in his faculties, "to distinguish between what is, and what is not comprehensible by us," and his treatise had the most potent and enduring effects on continental as well as on English Philosophy. He was a friend of his junior, Berkeley, whose philosophic fancy took a wider and more audacious range. His "Treatise on Government" and "Thoughts on Education" followed rapidly. He obtained a place as Commissioner of Trade and Plantations (Colonies), and advised England to anticipate Scotland in founding an emporium at Darien, in Spanish territory, as the Scots were to discover.
We have not space for much more than the names of other prose writers of this great age. John Arbuthnot (1667-1735), a Scot in London, was an admirable humorist, a great physician, and the friend of all the wits; himself a good-humoured Swift in prose satire. Bishop Atterbury (1662-1732) excited an enthusiastic devotion in Pope, who proposed to accompany this clerical conspirator into exile, after his great Jacobite plot was crushed in 1723. Atterbury was an accomplished general writer, while the great scholar and Master of Trinity, Richard Bentley (1662-1742), gave to his classical criticism of the forged "Epistles of Phalaris" the merit of vigorous literature. His conjectural various readings in Milton's text are now and then comical, and seem a parody of classical criticism. The Viscount Bolingbroke, Henry St. John (1678-1751), was a wit among politicians, the patron, friend, and inspiration of the wits; he had his fame as an eloquent rhetorician in his life, and as a daring thinker, but he really wrote best when he wrote simply and humorously, as in his satire of his Jacobite allies, "The Epistle to Windham" (1716). His "Ideal of a Patriot King" also preserves his literary reputation (1738). Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), was an elegant philosopher, a thinker of taste; while George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne (born at Kilkenny 1685, died 1753), was an idealistic[Pg 421] philosopher and man of science ("The Theory of Vision") whose style, in grace and irony, is akin to the manners of Plato and of Pascal. The best and most delightful of his works is the dialogue "Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher," directed against the Sceptics, and deistical writers. Berkeley's character was not less admirable than his works.