JOSEPH ADDISON. After a Portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller. IR GODFREY KNELLER, painter of this portrait of Addison, was the rival of Sir Peter Lely for the first place among English portrait painters in his generation. He was born at Lubeck 1646, but settled in England in 1675, where he soon came into high favor at court. He kept his place under Charles II., James II., William III., and Queen Anne. He was knighted in 1691. So great was his reputation, that he painted the portraits of ten sovereigns reigning during his lifetime. JOSEPH ADDISON (1672-1719) AINE says of Addison that "after listening to him for a little, people feel themselves better, for they recognize in him from the first a singularly lofty soul, very pure and so much attached to uprightness that he made it his constant care and dearest pleasure." Perhaps no other sentence has been written which has in it so much of the secret of Addison's greatness, but Taine quotes from Addison himself one which suggests scarcely less: "There is no society or conversation to be kept up in the world without good nature or something which must bear its appearance and supply its place. The greatest wits I have conversed with were men eminent for their humanity." This gift of good nature which Addison had observed in "the greatest wits" is the reward "lofty souls, very pure and simple," receive for the attachment to uprightness through which it becomes their "constant care and dearest pleasure." It is in itself at once the greatest reward genius can receive, and the mode through which it operates to express that fellow-feeling for humanity which is its own essence. Everywhere in Addison's essays we see this good nature operating as the source of their inspiration and the secret of their expression. It is not mere good humor, though good humor is a part of it, but good nature itself -the quality of mind and soul which "is not puffed up," "doth not behave itself unseemly," "is not easily provoked," »«thinketh no evil." If we wish to know what this means not merely in spirit, but in its effects on style, we have only to compare one of Addison's essays with one of the critical essays which characterize several well-known English reviews at the close of the nineteenth century. We will see then that Addison has grace while they have "gnosis »- that untranslatable something which, according to Saint Paul, "puffeth up" - which we translate "knowledge," though it has its foundations deep-laid in the pride of contemptuous superiority rather than in such pleasant pedantry as that of the Spectator in the days of Queen Anne when Horace still went trippingly on the tongues of those who made no great pretensions to learning. A recent critic has made a considerable collection of examples of what he considers false syntax from the Spectator; another has been at pains to prove that Addison's reading of the classics did not extend beyond the poets and that he had no considerable depth of learning, all of which Addison had long ago answered conclusively in saying: "The greatest wits I have conversed with were men eminent for their humanity." He meant simply what he had implied in the preceding sentence, that they were eminently good-natured men. They had grace as he had; as the intellectually great Swift did not and could not have; as the closing decade of the nineteenth century has not had in its attempts at "higher criticism" of everything most true and hence most subtly ethereal in the realm both of the natural and the supernatural. If it were fully admitted that Addison's syntax was sometimes slovenly, if it were undeniable that he knew nothing of comparative philology, of biology, of sociology and political economy, he would remain, nevertheless, a model for the English writers of all times, and more especially of this our own critical time, because of the quality of gracious and truthful good nature which permeates all he writes. "A mere literary education," writes Taine, "only makes good talkers, able to adorn and publish ideas which they do not possess - which others furnish for them. If writers wish to invent, they must look to events and men, not to books and drawing-rooms. The conversation of men is more useful to them than the study of perfect periods. They cannot think for themselves but in so far as they have lived or acted. Addison knew how to act and live.» If we examine his life to find what this means, we find that he knew how to act and live in sympathy with others, that he was not shut off from them by that insolence of mind which is the result of recent or of unused intellectual acquisition. All literature that is either good or great must express what is best and most worthy of expression in common humanity; and no one can acquire it except by the sympathy which, as a habit of mind, enables him without conscious effort and with conscious pleasure to put himself in the place of men of every class and every type, living their lives in his imagination, occupying through sympathy with them their usual standpoints of observation, and reaching easily and naturally their customary conclusions. When men who have "gnosis " rather than grace attempt this, they patronize us so insufferably that we want none of their sympathy and as little as possible of their acquaintance. But the great poets, the great essayists, the great novelists who give a high and truthful expression to what we have expressed only clumsily and inadequately, they are our friends, our benefactors through whose grace we realize our own highest possibilities as we could not otherwise. They do not preach to us. They converse with us as Addison always does in the easiest and most natural way, developing our thought as it rises in our minds before we ourselves can express it. This is the highest gift a writer can have, and it characterizes Addison more than any other writer of English essays-with the single exception of Bacon, who belongs to a wholly different school. -- Addison was born May 1st, 1672, in Wiltshire, where his father Lancelot Addison was dean of Litchfield. At Oxford where he graduated with honors, he showed the taste for classical verse which characterized him all his life and contributed no doubt to give his style the easy elegance in which it approximates the highest productions of classical antiquity. In his politics he was a Whig; and after holding various positions under Whig administrations, he became, under George I., one of the principal Secretaries of State, a position from which he retired after eleven months with a pension of £1,500 a year. His work as a politician and as a poet need be touched on in this connection only as it is connected with the great work of his life,— the essays which created what is likely always to remain a distinct school of English prose in strong contrast, both of motive and method, with the academic style of prose Latin and its imitations in Ciceronian English. The Spectator, in which Addison's best work appeared, issued its first number on March 1st, 1711, succeeding the Tatler to which Addison was also a contributor. When the Spectator ceased to appear, Steele founded the Guardian to which Addison contributed fifty-three essays on much the same range of topics as characterized the Spectator. The superior popularity of the Spectator is largely due to Steele's invention of the Spectator club and the character of Sir Roger de Coverley which was developed, chiefly by Addison, with an ease and naturalness not attained in the character studies of any other essays of the time. The Coverley papers are rightly a favorite with his readers because of their fine and free humor and the loving care with which they depict the virtuous simplicity of the good nature Addison so valued. They are perhaps his masterpieces, but, in contrast with the interminable prolixity of the later critical review, even the most careless of his essays is a model of expression. Of his pedantry, his love of snatches of classical verse which in later times may seem to deform the page with a display of outlandish learning, it must be remembered that in the time of Queen Anne there may have still existed those to whom such quotations from the "dead languages" stood for strains of living melody, rarer than we can imagine from our own verse and full of the same magic of expression which compels the eye in the Apollo Belvedere and the Venus of Milo. If such a one then survived from the time when the realities of the classics were still something more than a scholastic tradition, Addison might well have been that one. If such a one come again, he may find the simple grace of Addison's prose in harmony with the subtlest secrets of form in the great works of those mastersingers of antiquity whom he studied with admiration so loving that we have no right to call it pedantry. W. V. B. |