and told him, he had been the greatest man upon earth; that he readily resigned up all the merit of his own works to him. Upon which, Addison gave him a gracious smile, and clapping him on the back with much solemnity, cried out, "Well said, Dick!" Fielding was too young, of course, to have known Addison personally. At the same time he was as near to him in years as men now in middle life are to Thackeray. Though not quite contemporary, this satirical portrait may accordingly be held fairly to represent contemporary tradition. Fielding was never ill-natured; and with all his faults he really hated humbug. Very clearly, in his opinion, the late Mr. Addison was by no means free from this trait. So far as we may now judge, it seems to follow that Addison was one of those men, at once shy and prudent, whose very diffidence makes them incapable of unrestraint. The real goodness of his nature combined with the peculiarly poised sense of humor evident in his essays to endear him to those who really knew him. To others, particularly if they were of a free and open nature, he was bound to seem self-conscious, a bit pretentious, and generally more respectable in phrase and conduct than any full-blooded human being could possibly be by instinct. In brief, the worst faults which those who liked him least could find with him seem traceable to his misfortune of shyness. III In Macaulay's essay on Addison, in Mr. Courthope's Life of Addison, in Mr. Perry's English Literature in the Eighteenth Century, and in M. Beljame's Le public et les hommes de lettres en Angleterre au dix-huitième siècle, may be found detailed accounts of the general circumstances of English literature during Addison's career. The gist of these is that until the Spectator began to sell by thousands there was hardly any literary public in England. Men who lived by their pens were accordingly obliged to depend on patronage; and this patronage, in the times of William III and Queen Anne, came chiefly from political parties who needed professional literary advocates. Such a public career as Addison's would have been possible under no other circumstances. As the author of some promising verse, he received a travelling pension of £300. His later writings brought him public offices of which the emoluments fairly amounted to a fortune. While in this respect, too, his career was probably the most successful of his time, it was broadly typical. Whoever wrote effectively was apt in consequence to get some part of the public funds. Admirable as tradition has sometimes declared this state of affairs, it can hardly command the approval of an age like our own, which advocates general reform of the Civil Service. The times when English taxpayers were compelled, willy-nilly, to patronize such literature as happened to suit the Ministry involved a carnival of spoils such as has hardly yet delighted the United States. Nor yet was this state of affairs really favorable to literature. Literature, far from being independent, remained, as in the preceding generation, at the feet of patrons; the only difference was that patronage, once social, had become political. In view of this, Addison's poems become more interesting than they at first appear. Though intrinsically commonplace, by no means such as enrich world-literature, they at once throw light on the artistic temperament of their writer and indicate the sort of writing which in the times of King William and of Queen Anne attracted the patronizing approval of Whig politicians. IV At least in English literature, writers who have become distinguished for excellent prose have generally served their apprenticeship in verse. A true poet never stops versifying. Whoever, on the other hand, at once lacks the divine spark and possesses strong good sense ultimately confines himself to something nearer the dialect of life. Though in themselves insignificant, however, the verses of the great prose writers are almost indispensable preliminaries to the excellent prose which follows them. The honest maker of verse gains even from unfruitful efforts an acuteness of literary perception hardly to be acquired by any less arduous means than laborious experiments with rhyme and metre. It is by no means fair, either, to intimate that Addison's verse is valueless. Had he never written anything else, he would have remained among the literary notables of his time. Only the great merit of his essays in prose obscures the respectability of his essays in poetry. Coming to these, as we come to them here, by themselves, we may find them well worth attention. Though Addison's first poetical production was a short, formal address to Dryden, and though his first publication was An Account of the Greatest English Poets,1 which was published, together with translations from the Georgics and from Ovid, in 1694,2 the most notable verses of his earlier years were in Latin. These, which are still pronounced by some critics to be the best Latin verses ever made by an Englishman, and which certainly commanded the approval of so sharp a critic as Boileau, remain admirable types of a kind of composition always dear to conservative England. The making of Latin verses is an art which almost anybody can acquire by painful study, and which, without painful study, is at once unattainable and unintelligible. In the whole range of scholarship, accordingly, there are few tests which can more immediately separate the learned from the vulgar than a taste for Latin versifying. The world may be precisely classified into 8 1 Adequately discussed by Perry, pp. 131 ff. Addison omits to mention Shakspere, but speaks highly of "Sprat's successful labours." 2 See Bibliography, p. xlvi. 8 Tickell, ed. 1721, I, vi; Miss Aikin's Life, I, 89–93. people who can make and enjoy Latin verses, and people who cannot. The former group is very small, and at least in the matter of formal culture very select. As such it is clearly a group thoroughly congenial to such temper as Addison's. In this group Addison's position is acknowledged to be among the highest. Early in life he thus proved himself able to excel other men in a kind of polite, intensely artificial accomplishment which has a double value. First, it distinctly removes its possessor from low company; as much as any single thing, indeed, it has helped to maintain the aristocratic isolation of the great English universities: secondly, it persistently cultivates and develops a fastidious sense of literary form. A modern writer of Latin verse is not expected to say anything new; what he strives for is the utmost possible felicity of expression. He is constantly hampered, too, by the precedents from which the rules of his art forbid him to stray. He must know his classics so well that no word or syllable shall invade his work without indubitable classical authority; he must imitate incessantly; yet he must never plagiarize. In short, he must play the most difficult literary game which centuries of ingenious scholarship have invented. Success in this game is said still to attract in England admiring attention, somewhat akin to that attracted by athletic prowess. In Addison's time, too, this peculiarly civilized amusement had a certain patriotic value now long obsolete. On the Continent England was commonly thought rather barbarous. To accomplished people there it presented itself partly because of their own polite ignorance much as America still presents itself to untravelled Europeans. The same feeling of national pride which now and again leads our Presidents to give diplomatic appointments to college professors led the British politicians of King William's time to look with marked favor on promising youths who could make fluent verses in Latin. So to Addison himself these Latin poems had practical value. Apart from this, they had a decided influence on both his literary and his personal development. Their literary effect pervades his whole work; no English writer has ever had a more fastidious sense of technical form. Their personal effect is palpable both in his English poems and in many of his later writings. As Macaulay points out, Addison's knowledge of classical Latin poetry was wide and accurate; apart from this, his technical scholarship seems not to have been extraordinary. When he went to Italy, the things which most engaged his attention were consequently things which Roman poets had written about. Take, for example, the following passage: 1 We saw the lake Benacus in our way, which the Italians now call Lago di Garda: it was so rough with tempests when we passed by it, that it brought into my mind Virgil's noble description of it. Anne lacus tantos, te Lari maxime, teque Fluctibus et fremitu assurgens, Benace, marino.2 Here vexed by winter storms Benacus raves, So loud the tempest roars, so high the billows rise. This lake perfectly resembles a sea when it is worked up by storms. It is thirty-five miles in length, and twelve in breadth. At the lower end of it we crossed the Mincio. - Tardis ingens ubi flexibus errat Mincius, et tenerâ praetexit arundine ripas.3 Where the slow Mincius through the valley strays; And reeds defend the winding water's brink. — DRYDEN. The river Adige runs through Verona; so much is the situation of the town changed from what it was in Silius Italicus his time. 1 Bohn, I, 376 ff. 2 Virgil, Georg., ii, 159, 160, 8 Virgil, Georg., iii, 14, 15. |