English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History Part 29

The s.p.a.cious firmament on high.

HIS PERSON AND CHARACTER.--In closing this brief sketch of Addison, a few words are necessary as to his personality, and an estimate of his powers.

In 1716 he married the Countess-Dowager of Warwick, and parted with independence to live with a coronet. His married life was not happy. The lady was cold and exacting; and, it must be confessed, the poet loved a bottle at the club-room or tavern better than the luxuries of Holland House; and not infrequently this conviviality led him to excess. He died in 1719, in his forty-eighth year, and made a truly pious end. He wished, he said, to atone for any injuries he had done to others, and sent for his sceptical and dissolute step-son, Lord Warwick, to show him how a Christian could die. A monument has been erected to his memory in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey, and the closing words of the inscription upon it calls him "the honor and delight of the English nation."

As a man, he was grave and retiring: he had a high opinion of his own powers; in company he was extremely diffident; in the main, he was moral, just, and consistent. His intemperance was in part the custom of the age and in part a physical failing, and it must have been excessive to be distinguished in that age. In the Latin-English of Dr. Johnson, "It is not unlikely that Addison was first seduced to excess by the manumission which he obtained from the servile timidity of his sober hours." This failing must be regarded as a blot on his fame.

He was the most accomplished writer of his own age, and in elegance of style superior to all who had gone before him.

In the words of his epitaph, his prose papers "encouraged the good and reformed the improvident, tamed the wicked, and in some degree made them in love with virtue." His poetry is chiefly of historical value, in that it represents so distinctly the Artificial School; but it is now very little read. His drama ent.i.tled _Cato_ was modelled upon the French drama of the cla.s.sical school, with its singular preservation of the unities.

But his contributions to _The Spectator_ and other periodicals are historically of great value. Here he abandons the artificial school; nothing in his delineations of character is simply statuesque or pictorial. He has done for us what the historians have left undone. They present processions of automata moving to the sound of trumpet and drum, ushered by Black Rod or Garter King-at-arms; but in Addison we find that Promethean heat which relumes their life; the galvanic motion becomes a living stride; the puppet eyes emit fire; the automata are men. Thus it is, that, although _The Spectator_, once read as a model of taste and style, has become antiquated and has been superseded, it must still be resorted to for its life-like portraiture of men and women, manners and customs, and will be found truer and more valuable for these than history itself.

CHAPTER XXVI.

STEELE AND SWIFT.

Sir Richard Steele. Periodicals. The Crisis. His Last Days. Jonathan Swift--Poems. The Tale of a Tub. Battle of the Books. Pamphlets. M. B.

Drapier. Gulliver's Travels. Stella and Vanessa. His Character and Death.

Contemporary with Addison, and forming with him a literary fraternity, Steele and Swift were besides men of distinct prominence, and clearly represent the age in which they lived.

SIR RICHARD STEELE.--If Addison were chosen as the princ.i.p.al literary figure of the period, a sketch of his life would be incomplete without a large mention of his lifelong friend and collaborator, Steele. If to Bacon belongs the honor of being the first writer and the namer of the English _essay_, Steele may claim that of being the first periodical essayist.

He was born in Dublin, in 1671, of English parents; his father being at the time secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. He received his early education at the Charter-House school, in London, an inst.i.tution which has numbered among its pupils many who have gained distinguished names in literature. Here he met and formed a permanent friendship with Addison. He was afterwards entered as a student at Merton College, Oxford; but he led there a wild and reckless life, and leaving without a degree, he enlisted as a private in the Horse Guards. Through the influence of his friends, he was made a cornet, and afterwards a captain, in the Fusileers; but this only gave him opportunity for continued dissipation.

His principles were better than his conduct; and, haunted by conscience, he made an effort to reform himself by writing a devotional work called _The Christian Hero_; but there was such a contrast between his precepts and his life, that he was laughed at by the town. Between 1701 and 1704 he produced his three comedies. _The Funeral, or Grief a la Mode_; _The Tender Husband_, and _The Lying Lover_. The first two were successful upon the stage, but the last was a complete failure. Disgusted for the time with the drama, he was led to find his true place as the writer of those light, brilliant, periodical essays which form a prominent literary feature of the reign of Queen Anne. These _Essays_ were comments, suggestions, strictures, and satires upon the age. They were of immediate and local interest then, and have now a value which the writers did not foresee: they are unconscious history.

PERIODICALS.--The first of these periodicals was _The Tatler_, a penny sheet, issued tri-weekly, on post-days. The first number appeared on the 12th of April, 1709, and a.s.serted the very laudable purpose "to expose the deceits, sins, and vanities of the former age, and to make virtue, simplicity, and plain-dealing the law of social life." "For this purpose,"

in the words of Dr. Johnson,[34] "nothing is so proper as the frequent publication of short papers, which we read not as study, but amus.e.m.e.nt. If the subject be slight, the treatise is short. The busy may find time, and the idle may find patience." One _nom de plume_ of Steele was _Isaac Bickerstaff_, which he borrowed from Swift, who had issued party-pamphlets under that name.

_The Tatler_ was a success. The fluent pen of Addison gave it valuable a.s.sistance; and in January, 1711, it was merged into, rather than superseded by, _The Spectator_, which was issued six days in the week.

In this new periodical, Steele wrote the paper containing the original sketch of Sir Roger de Coverley and The Club; but, as has been already said, Addison adopted, elaborated, and finished this in several later papers. Steele had been by far the larger contributor to _The Tatler_. Of all the articles in _The Spectator_, Steele wrote two hundred and forty, and Addison two hundred and seventy-four; the rest were by various hands.

In March, 1713, when _The Spectator_ was commencing its seventh volume, _The Guardian_ made its appearance. For the first volume of _The Guardian_, Addison wrote but one paper; but for the second he wrote more than Steele. Of the one hundred and seventy-six numbers of that periodical, eighty-two of the papers were by Steele and fifty-three by Addison. If the writings of Addison were more scholarly and elegant, those of Steele were more vivacious and brilliant; and together they have produced a series of essays which have not been surpa.s.sed in later times, and which are vividly delineative of their own.

THE CRISIS.--The career of Steele was varied and erratic. He held several public offices, was a justice of the peace, and a member of parliament. He wrote numerous political tracts, which are not without historical value.

For one pamphlet of a political character, ent.i.tled _The Crisis_, he was expelled from parliament for libel; but upon the death of Queen Anne, he again found himself in favor. He was knighted in 1715, and received several lucrative appointments.

He was an eloquent orator, and as a writer rapid and brilliant, but not profound. Even thus, however, he catered to an age at once artificial and superficial. Very observant of what he saw, he rushed to his closet and jotted down his views in electrical words, which made themselves immediately and distinctly felt.

HIS LAST DAYS.--Near the close of his life he produced a very successful comedy, ent.i.tled _The Conscious Lover_, which would have been of pecuniary value to him, were it not that he was already overwhelmed with debt. His end was a sad one; but he reaped what his extravagance and recklessness had sown. Shattered in health and ruined in fortune, he retreated from the great world into homely retirement in Wales, where he lived, poor and hidden, in a humble cottage at Llangunnor. His end was heralded by an attack of paralysis, and he died in 1729.

After his death, his letters were published; and in the private history which they unfold, he appears, notwithstanding all his follies, in the light of a tender husband and of an amiable and unselfish man. He had principle, but he lacked resolution; and the wild, vacillating character of his life is mirrored in his writings, where _The Christian Hero_ stands in singular contrast to the comic personages of his dramas. He was a genial critic. His exuberant wit and humor reproved without wounding; he was not severe enough to be a public censor, nor pedantic enough to be the pedagogue of an age which often needed the lash rather than the gentle reproof, and upon which a merciful clemency lost its end if not its praises. He deserves credit for an attempt, however feeble, to reward virtue upon the stage, after the wholesale rewards which vice had reaped in the age of Charles II.

Steele has been overshadowed, in his connection with Addison, by the more dignified and consistent career, the greater social respectability, and the more elegant and scholarly style of his friend; and yet in much that they jointly accomplished, the merit of Steele is really as great, and conduces much to the reputation of Addison. The one husbanded and cherished his fame; the other flung it away or lavished it upon his colleagues. As contributors to history, they claim an equal share of our grat.i.tude and praise.

JONATHAN SWIFT.--The grandfather of Swift was vicar of Goodrich, in Herefordshire. His father and mother were both English, but he was born in Dublin, in the year 1667. A posthumous child, he came into the world seven months after his father's death. From his earliest youth, he deplored the circ.u.mstances among which his lot had been cast. He was dependent upon his uncle, G.o.dwin Swift, himself a poor man; but was not grateful for his a.s.sistance, always saying that his uncle had given him the education of a dog. At the University of Dublin, where he was entered, he did not bear a good character: he was frequently absent from his duties and negligent of his studies; and although he read history and poetry, he was considered stupid as well as idle. He was more than once admonished and suspended, but at length received his degree, _Speciali gratia_; which special act of grace implied that he had not fairly earned it. Piqued by this, he set to work in real earnest, and is said to have studied eight hours a day for eight years. Thus, from an idle and unsuccessful collegian, he became a man of considerable learning and a powerful writer.

He was a distant connection of Sir William Temple, through Lady Temple; and he went, by his mother's advice, to live with that distinguished man at his seat, Shene, in Moor Park, as private secretary.

In this position Swift seems to have led an uncomfortable life, ranking somewhere between the family and the upper servants. Sir William Temple was disposed to be kind, but found it difficult to converse with him on account of his moroseness and other peculiarities. At Shene he met King William III., who talked with him, and offered him a captaincy in the army. This Swift declined, knowing his unfitness for the post, and doubtless feeling the promptings of a higher ambition. It was also at Shene that he met a young girl, whose history was thenceforth to be mingled with his in sadness and sorrow, during their lives. This was Esther Johnson, the daughter of Temple's housekeeper, and surmised, at a later day, to be the natural daughter of Temple himself. When the young secretary first met her, she was fourteen years of age, very clever and beautiful; and they fell in love with each other.

We cannot dwell at length upon the events of his life. His versatile pen was prolific of poetry, sentimental and satirical; of political allegories of great potency, of fiction erected of impossible materials, and yet so creating and peopling a world of fancy as to illude the reader into temporary belief in its truth.

POEMS.--His poems are rather sententious than harmonious. His power, however, was great; he managed verse as an engine, and had an entire mastery over rhyme, which masters so many would-be poets. His _Odes_ are cla.s.sically constructed, but ma.s.sive and c.u.mbrous. His satirical poems are eminently historical, ranging over and attacking almost every topic, political, religious, and social. Among the most characteristic of his miscellaneous verses are _Epigrams and Epistles, Clever Tom Pinch Going to be Hanged, Advice to Grub Street Writers, Helter-Skelter, The Puppet Show_, and similar odd pieces, frequently scurrilous, bitter, and lewd in expression. The writer of English history consults these as he does the penny ballads, lampoons, and caricatures of the day,--to discern the _animus_ of parties and the methods of hostile factions.

But it is in his inimitable prose writings that Swift is of most value to the historical student. Against all comers he stood the Goliath of pamphleteers in the reign of Queen Anne, and there arose no David who could slay him.

THE TALE OF A TUB.--While an unappreciated student at the university, he had sketched a satirical piece, which he finished and published in 1704, under the t.i.tle of _The Tale of a Tub_. As a tub is thrown overboard at sea to divert a whale, so this is supposed to be a sop cast out to the _Leviathan_ of Hobbes, to prevent it from injuring the vessel of state.

The story is a satire aimed against the Roman Catholics on the one hand, and the Presbyterians on the other, in order that he may exalt the Church of England as, in his judgment, free from the errors of both, and a just and happy medium between the two extremes. His own opinion of its merits is well known: in one of his later years, when his hand had lost its cunning, he is said to have exclaimed, as he picked it up, "What a genius I had when I wrote that book!" The characters of the story are _Peter_ (representing St. Peter, or the Roman Catholic Church), _Martin_ (Luther, or the Church of England), and _Jack_ (John Calvin, or the Presbyterians).

By their father's will each had been left a suit of clothes, made in the fashion of his day. To this Peter added laces and fringes; Martin took off some of the ornaments of doubtful taste; but Jack ripped and tore off the tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs of his dress to such an extent that he was in clanger of exposing his nakedness. It is said that the invective was so strong and the satire so bitter, that they presented a bar to that preferment which Swift might otherwise have obtained. He appears at this time to have cared little for public opinion, except that it should fear his trenchant wit and do homage to his genius.

THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS.--In the same year, 1704, he also published _The Battle of the Books_, the idea of which was taken from a French work of Courtraye, ent.i.tled "_Histoire de la guerre nouvellement declaree entre les Anciens et les Modernes_." Swift's work was written in furtherance of the views of his patron, Temple, who had some time before engaged in the controversy as to the relative merits of ancient and modern learning, and who, in the words of Macaulay, "was so absurd as to set up his own authority against that of Bentley on questions of Greek history and philology."

_The Battle of the Books_ is of present value, as it affords information upon the opinions then held on a question which, in various forms, has been agitating the literary world ever since. In it Swift compares Dryden, Wotten, and Bentley with the old authors in St. James's Library, where the battle of the books is said to have taken place.

Upon the death of Sir William Temple, in 1699, Swift had gone to London.

He was ambitious of power and money, and when he found little chance of preferment among the Whigs, he became a Tory. It must be said, in explanation of this change, that, although he had called himself a Whig, he had disliked many of their opinions, and had never heartily espoused their cause. Like others already referred to, he watched the political horizon, and was ready for a change when circ.u.mstances should warrant it.

This change and its causes are set forth in his _Bickerstaff's Ridicule of Astrology_ and _Sacramental Test_.

The Whigs tried hard to retain him; the Tories were rejoiced to receive him, and modes of preferment for him were openly canva.s.sed. One of these was to make him Bishop of Virginia, with metropolitan powers in America; but it failed. He was also recommended for the See of Hereford; but persons near the queen advised her "to be sure that the man she was going to make a bishop was a Christian." Thus far he had only been made rector of Agher and vicar of Laracor and Rathbeggin.

VARIOUS PAMPHLETS.--His _Argument Against the Abolition of Christianity_, Dr. Johnson calls "a very happy and judicious irony." In 1710 he wrote a paper, at the request of the Irish primate, pet.i.tioning the queen to remit the first-fruits and twentieth parts to the Irish clergy. In 1712, ten days before the meeting of parliament, he published his _Conduct of the Allies_, which, exposing the greed of Marlborough, persuaded the nation to make peace. A supplement to this is found in _Reflections on the Barrier Treaty_, in which he shows how little English interests had been consulted in that negotiation.

His pamphlet on _The Public Spirit of the Whigs_, in answer to Steele's _Crisis_, was so terrible a bomb-sh.e.l.l thrown into the camp of his former friends, and so insulting to the Scotch, that 300 were offered by the queen, at the instance of the Scotch lords, for the discovery of the author; but without success.

At last his versatile and powerful pen obtained some measure of reward: in 1713 he was made Dean of St. Patrick's, in Dublin, with a stipend of 700 per annum. This was his greatest and last preferment.

On the accession of George I., in the following year, he paid his court, but was received with something more than coldness. He withdrew to his deanery in Dublin, and, in the words of Johnson, "commenced Irishman for life, and was to contrive how he might be best accommodated in a country where he considered himself as in a state of exile." After some misunderstanding between himself and his Irish fellow-citizens, he espoused their cause so warmly that he became the most popular man in Ireland. In 1721 he could write to Pope, "I neither know the names nor the number of the family which now reigneth, further than the prayer-book informeth me." His letters, signed _M. B. Drapier_, on Irish manufactures, and especially those in opposition to Wood's monopoly of copper coinage, in 1724, wrought upon the people, producing such a spirit of resistance that the project of a debased coinage failed; and so influential did Swift become, that he was able to say to the Archbishop of Dublin, "Had I raised my finger, the mob would have torn you to pieces." This popularity was increased by the fact that a reward of 300 was offered by Lord Carteret and the privy council for the discovery of the authorship of the fourth letter; but although it was commonly known that Swift was the author, proof could not be obtained. Carteret, the Lord Lieutenant, afterwards said, "When people ask me how I governed Ireland, I said that I pleased Doctor Swift."

Thus far Swift's literary labors are manifest history: we come now to consider that great work, _Gulliver's Travels_,--the most successful of its kind ever written,--in which, with all the charm of fiction in plot, incident, and description, he pictures the great men and the political parties of the day.

GULLIVER'S TRAVELS.--Lemuel Gulliver, a surgeon's mate, finds himself shipwrecked on the sh.o.r.e of the country of Lilliput, the people of which are only six inches in height. His adventures are so vividly described that our charmed fancy places us among them as we read, and we, for a time, abandon ourselves to a belief in their reality. It was, however, begun as a political satire; in the insignificance of the court of pigmies, he attacks the feebleness and folly of the new reign. _Flimnap_, the prime minister of Lilliput, is a caricature of Walpole; the _Big Indians_ and _Little Indians_ represent the Protestants and Roman Catholics; the _High Heels_ and _Low Heels_ stand for the Whigs and Tories; and the heir-apparent, who wears one heel high and the other low, is the Prince of Wales, afterwards George II., who favored both parties in order to gain both to his purpose.