Read Ebook: Addison by Courthope William John

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 205 lines and 64039 words, and 5 pages

Illustrator: William Strang J. B. Clark Aubrey Beardsley

Translator: Francis Hickes

LUCIAN'S TRUE HISTORY

TRANSLATED BY FRANCIS HICKES ILLUSTRATED BY WILLIAM STRANG J. B. CLARK AND AUBREY BEARDSLEY WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY CHARLES WHIBLEY

A. H. BULLEN

LONDON

MCMII

AFTER THE TEMPEST ADORATION "A SNARE OF VINTAGE" SPIDERS OF MIGHTY BIGNESS THE BATTLE OF THE TURNIPS THE SUPPER OF FISH UNDERPROPPING THE WHALE'S CHOPS SOCRATES' GARDEN THE BANQUET OF BEANS THE PILLAR OF BERYLSTONE OWLS AND POPPIES DREAMS THE HALCYON'S NEST THE FLOATING FOREST THE ISLAND WOMEN WATER INCARNADINE

INTRODUCTION.

It is a commonplace of criticism that Lucian was the first of the moderns, but in truth he is near to our time because of all the ancients he is nearest to his own. With Petronius he shared the discovery that there is material for literature in the debased and various life of every day--that to the seeing eye the individual is more wonderful in colour and complexity than the severely simple abstraction of the poets. He replaced the tradition, respected of his fathers, by an observation more vivid and less pedantic than the note-book of the naturalist. He set the world in the dry light of truth, and since the vanity of mankind is a constant factor throughout the ages, there is scarce a page of Lucian's writing that wears the faded air of antiquity. His personages are as familiar to-day as they were in the second century, because, with his pitiless determination to unravel the tangled skein of human folly, he never blinded his vision to their true qualities. And the multiplicity of his interest is as fresh as his penetration. Nothing came amiss to his eager curiosity. For the first time in the history of literature we encounter a writer whose ceaseless activity includes the world. While others had declared themselves poets, historians, philosophers, Lucian comes forth as a man of letters. Had he lived to-day, he would have edited a newspaper, written leading articles, and kept his name ever before the public in the magazines. For he possessed the qualities, if he avoided the defects, of the journalist. His phrase had not been worn by constant use to imbecility; his sentences were not marred by the association of commonness; his style was still his own and fit for the expression of a personal view. But he noted such types and incidents as make an immediate, if perennial, appeal, and to study him is to be convinced that literature and journalism are not necessarily divorced.

But even more remarkable than his many-coloured interest is Lucian's understanding. He was, so to say, a perfect Intelligence thrown by accident into an age of superstition and credulity. It is not only that he knew all things: he saw all things in their right relation. If the Pagan world had never before been conscious of itself, it had no excuse to harbour illusions after his coming. Mr. Pater speaks of the intellectual light he turned upon dim places, and truly no corner of life escaped the gleam of his lantern. Gods, philosophers, necromancers, yielded up their secrets to his enquiry. With pitiless logic he criticized their extravagance and pretension; and actively anticipating the spirit of modern science, he accepted no fact, he subscribed to no theory, which he had not examined with a cold impartiality.

It was the task of Addison to carry on the reconciling traditions of our literature. It is his praise to have accomplished his task under conditions far more difficult than any that his predecessors had experienced. What they had done was to give instinctive and characteristic expression to the floating ideas of the society about them; what Addison and his contemporaries did was to found a public opinion by a conscious effort of reason and persuasion. Before the Civil Wars there had been at least no visible breach in the principle of Authority in Church and State. At the beginning of the eighteenth century constituted authority had been recently overthrown; one king had been beheaded, another had been expelled; the Episcopalian form of Church Government had been violently displaced in favour of the Presbyterian, and had been with almost equal violence restored. Whole classes of the population had been drawn into opposing camps during the Civil War, and still stood confronting each other with all the harsh antagonism of sentiment inherited from that conflict. Such a bare summary alone is sufficient to indicate the nature of the difficulties Addison had to encounter in his efforts to harmonise public opinion; but a more detailed examination of the state of society after the Restoration is required to place in its full light the extraordinary merits of the success that he achieved.

There was, to begin with, a vehement opposition between town and country. In the country the old ideas of Feudalism, modified by circumstances, but vigorous and deep-rooted, still prevailed. True, the military system of land-tenure had disappeared with the Restoration, but it was not so with the relations of life, and the habits of thought and feeling which the system had created. The features of surviving Feudalism have been inimitably preserved for us in the character of Sir Roger de Coverley. Living in the patriarchal fashion, in the midst of tenants and retainers, who looked up to him as their chief, and for whose welfare and protection he considered himself responsible, the country gentleman valued above all things the principle of Loyalty. To the moneyed classes in the towns he was instinctively opposed; he regarded their interests, both social and commercial, as contrary to his own; he looked with dislike and suspicion on the economical principles of government and conduct on which these classes naturally rely. Even the younger sons of county families had in Addison's day abandoned the custom, common enough in the feudal times, of seeking their fortune in trade. Many a Will Wimble now spent his whole life in the country, training dogs for his neighbours, fishing their streams, making whips for their young heirs, and even garters for their wives and daughters.

The commercial and professional classes, from whom the Whigs derived their chief support, of course predominated in the towns, and their larger opportunities of association gave them an influence in affairs which compensated for their inferiority in numbers. They lacked, however, what the country party possessed, a generous ideal of life. Though many of them were connected with the Presbyterian system, their common sense made them revolt from its rigidity, while at the same time their economical principles failed to supply them with any standard that could satisfy the imagination. Sir Andrew Freeport excites in us less interest than any member of the Spectator's Club. There was not yet constituted among the upper middle classes that mixed conception of good feeling, good breeding, and good taste which we now attach to the name of "gentleman."

"I am now between fifty and sixty, and had the honour to be well with the first men of taste and gallantry in the joyous reign of Charles the Second. As for yourself, Mr. Spectator, you seem with the utmost arrogance to undermine the very fundamentals upon which we conducted ourselves. It is monstrous to set up for a man of wit and yet deny that honour in a woman is anything but peevishness, that inclination is not the best rule of life, or virtue and vice anything else but health and disease. We had no more to do but to put a lady in a good humour, and all we could wish followed of course. Then, again, your Tully and your discourses of another life are the very bane of mirth and good humour. Prythee, don't value thyself on thy reason at that exorbitant rate and the dignity of human nature; take my word for it, a setting dog has as good reason as any man in England."

Everything in these tragedies is unreal, strained, and affected. In order to remove them as far as possible from the language of ordinary life they are written in rhyme, while the astonishment of the audience is raised with big swelling words, which vainly seek to hide the absence of genuine feeling. The heroes tear their passion to tatters because they think it heroic to do so; their flights into the sublime generally drop into the ridiculous; instead of holding up the mirror to nature, their object is to depart as far as possible from common sense. Nothing exhibits more characteristically the utterly artificial feeling, both of the dramatists and the spectators, than the habit which then prevailed of dismissing the audience after a tragic play with a witty epilogue. On one occasion, Nell Gwynne, in the character of St. Catherine, was, at the end of the play, left for dead upon the stage. Her body having to be removed, the actress suddenly started to her feet, exclaiming,

"Hold! are you mad? you damned confounded dog, I am to rise and speak the epilogue!"

This is a very happy description of the manner in which the plays of Etherege, Shadwell, Wycherley, and Congreve affect us to-day; and it is no doubt superfluous to expend much moral indignation on works which have long since lost their power to charm: comedies in which the reader finds neither the horseplay of Aristophanes, nor the nature of Terence, nor the poetry of Shakespeare; in which there is not a single character that arouses interest, or a situation that spontaneously provokes laughter; in which the complications of plot are produced by the devices of fine gentlemen for making cuckolds of citizens, and the artifices of wives to dupe their husbands; in which the profuse wit of the dialogue might excite admiration, if it were possible to feel the smallest interest in the occasion that produced it. But to argue that these plays never represented any state of existing society is a paradox which chooses to leave out of account the contemporary attack on the stage made by Jeremy Collier, the admissions of Dryden, and all those valuable glimpses into the manners of our ancestors which are afforded by the prologues of the period.

"It cannot be denied but that the negligence of everything which engages the attention of the sober and valuable part of mankind appears very well drawn in this piece. But it is denied that it is necessary to the character of a fine gentleman that he should in that manner trample upon all order and decency. As for the character of Dorimant, it is more of a coxcomb than that of Fopling. He says of one of his companions that a good correspondence between them is their mutual interest. Speaking of that friend, he declares their being much together 'makes the women think the better of his understanding, and judge more favourably of my reputation. It makes him pass upon some for a man of very good sense, and me upon others for a very civil person.' This whole celebrated piece is a perfect contradiction to good manners, good sense, and common honesty; and as there is nothing in it but what is built upon the ruin of virtue and innocence, according to the notion of virtue in this comedy, I take the shoemaker to be in reality the fine gentleman of the play; for it seems he is an atheist, if we may depend upon his character as given by the orange-woman, who is herself far from being the lowest in the play. She says of a fine man who is Dorimant's companion, 'there is not such another heathen in the town except the shoemaker.' His pretension to be the hero of the drama appears still more in his own description of his way of living with his lady. 'There is,' says he, 'never a man in the town lives more like a gentleman with his wife than I do. I never mind her motions; she never inquires into mine. We speak to one another civilly; hate one another heartily; and, because it is vulgar to lie and soak together, we have each of us our several settle-beds.'

"That of 'soaking together' is as good as if Dorimant had spoken it himself; and I think, since he puts human nature in as ugly a form as the circumstances will bear, and is a staunch unbeliever, he is very much wronged in having no part of the good fortune bestowed in the last act. To speak plain of this whole work, I think nothing but being lost to a sense of innocence and virtue can make any one see this comedy without observing more frequent occasion to move sorrow and indignation than mirth and laughter. At the same time I allow it to be nature, but it is nature in its utmost corruption and degeneracy."

The truth is, that the stage after the Restoration reflects only too faithfully the manners and the sentiments of the only society which at that period could boast of anything like organisation. The press, which now enables public opinion to exercise so powerful a control over the manners of the times, had then scarcely an existence. No standard of female honour restrained the license of wit and debauchery. If the clergy were shocked at the propagation of ideas so contrary to the whole spirit of Christianity, their natural impulse to reprove them was checked by the fear that an apparent condemnation of the practices of the Court might end in the triumph of their old enemies, the Puritans. All the elements of an old and decaying form of society that tended to atheism, cynicism, and dissolute living, exhibited themselves, therefore, in naked shamelessness on the stage. The audiences in the theatres were equally devoid of good manners and good taste; they did not hesitate to interrupt the actors in the midst of a serious play, while they loudly applauded their obscene allusions. So gross was the character of comic dialogue that women could not venture to appear at a comedy without masks, and under these circumstances the theatre became the natural centre for assignations. In such an atmosphere women readily cast off all modesty and reserve; indeed, the choicest indecencies of the times are to be found in the epilogues to the plays, which were always assigned to the female actors.

ADDISON'S FAMILY AND EDUCATION.

Joseph Addison was born on the 1st of May, 1672. He was the eldest son of Lancelot Addison, at the time of his birth rector of Milston, near Amesbury, in Wiltshire, and afterwards Dean of Lichfield. His father was a man of character and accomplishments. Educated at Oxford, while that University was under the control of the famous Puritan Visitation, he made no secret of his contempt for principles to which he was forced to submit, or of his preferences for Monarchy and Episcopacy. His boldness was not agreeable to the University authorities, and being forced to leave Oxford, he maintained himself for a time near Petworth, in Sussex, by acting as chaplain or tutor in families attached to the Royalist cause. After the Restoration he obtained the appointment of chaplain to the garrison of Dunkirk, and when that town was ceded to France in 1662, he was removed in a similar capacity to Tangier. Here he remained eight years, but, venturing on a visit to England, his post was bestowed upon another, and he would have been left without resources had not one of his friends presented him with the living of Milston, valued at ?120 a year. With the courage of his order he thereupon took a wife, Jane, daughter of Dr. Nathaniel Gulston, and sister of William Gulston, Bishop of Bristol, by whom he had six children, three sons and three daughters, all born at Milston. In 1675 he was made a prebendary of Salisbury Cathedral and Chaplain-in-Ordinary to the King; and in 1683 he was promoted to the Deanery of Lichfield, as a reward for his services at Tangier, and out of consideration of losses which he had sustained by a fire at Milston. His literary reputation stood high, and it is said that he would have been made a bishop, if his old zeal for legitimacy had not prompted him to manifest in the Convocation of 1689 his hostility to the Revolution. He died in 1703.

"I remember among all my acquaintance but one man whom I have thought to live with his children with equanimity and a good grace. He had three sons and one daughter, whom he bred with all the care imaginable in a liberal and ingenuous way. I have often heard him say he had the weakness to love one much better than the other, but that he took as much pains to correct that as any other criminal passion that could arise in his mind. His method was to make it the only pretension in his children to his favour to be kind to each other, and he would tell them that he who was the best brother he would reckon the best son. This turned their thoughts into an emulation for the superiority in kind and tender affection towards each other. The boys behaved themselves very early with a manly friendship; and their sister, instead of the gross familiarities and impertinent freedoms in behaviour usual in other houses, was always treated by them with as much complaisance as any other young lady of their acquaintance. It was an unspeakable pleasure to visit or sit at a meal in that family. I have often seen the old man's heart flow at his eyes with joy upon occasions which would appear indifferent to such as were strangers to the turn of his mind; but a very slight accident, wherein he saw his children's good-will to one another, created in him the god-like pleasure of loving them because they loved each other. This great command of himself in hiding his first impulse to partiality at last improved to a steady justice towards them, and that which at first was but an expedient to correct his weakness was afterwards the measure of his virtue."

This, no doubt, is the set description of a moralist, and to an age in which the liberty of manners has grown into something like license it may savour of formalism and priggishness; but when we remember that the writer was one of the most warm-hearted of men, and that the subject of his panegyric was himself, full of vivacity and impulse, it must be admitted that the picture which it gives us of the Addison family in the rectory of Milston is a particularly amiable one.

Though the eighteenth century had little of that feeling for natural beauty which distinguishes our own, a man of Addison's imagination could hardly fail to be impressed by the character of the scenery in which his childhood was passed. No one who has travelled on a summer's day across Salisbury plain, with its vast canopy of sky and its open tracts of undulating downland, relieved by no shadows except such as are thrown by the passing cloud, the grazing sheep, and the great circle of Stonehenge, will forget the delightful sense of refreshment and repose produced by the descent into the valley of the Avon. The sounds of human life rising from the villages after the long solitude of the plain, the shade of the deep woods, the coolness of the river, like all streams rising in the chalk, clear and peaceful, are equally delicious to the sense and the imagination. It was, doubtless, the recollection of these scenes that inspired Addison in his paraphrase of the twenty-third Psalm:

"The Lord my pasture shall prepare, And feed me with a shepherd's care.

When in the sultry glebe I faint, Or on the thirsty mountain pant, To fertile vales and dewy meads My weary wandering steps he leads, Where peaceful rivers, soft and slow, Amid the verdant landscape flow."

"Does not one table Bavius still admit, Still to one Bishop Phillips seem a wit?"--

and possibly the famous Sacheverell. He is said to have shown in the society of Magdalen some of the shyness that afterwards distinguished him; he kept late hours, and read chiefly after dinner. The walk under the well-known elms by the Cherwell is still connected with his name. Though he probably acted as tutor in the college, the greater part of his quiet life at the University was doubtless occupied in study. A proof of his early maturity is seen in the fact that, in his nineteenth year, a young man of birth and fortune, Mr. Rushout, who was being educated at Magdalen, was placed under his charge.

"Old Spenser next, warmed with poetic rage, In ancient tales amused a barbarous age-- An age that yet uncultivate and rude, Where'er the poet's fancy led pursued, Through pathless fields and unfrequented floods, To dens of dragons and enchanted woods. But now the mystic tale, that pleased of yore, Can charm an understanding age no more; The long-spun allegories fulsome grow, While the dull moral lies too plain below."

According to Pope--always a suspicious witness where Addison is concerned--he had not read Spenser when he wrote this criticism on him.

"I leave the arts of poetry and verse To them that practise them with more success. Of greater truths I'll now propose to tell, And so at once, dear friend and muse, farewell."

Fortunately for English letters, other influences prevailed to give a different direction to his fortunes. It is true that Tickell, Addison's earliest biographer, states that his determination not to take orders was the result of his own habitual self-distrust, and of a fear of the responsibilities which the clerical office would involve. But Steele, who was better acquainted with his friend's private history, on reading Tickell's Memoir, addressed a letter to Congreve on the subject, in which he says:

"These, you know very well, were not the reasons which made Mr. Addison turn his thoughts to the civil world; and, as you were the instrument of his becoming acquainted with Lord Halifax, I doubt not but you remember the warm instances that noble lord made to the head of the College not to insist upon Mr. Addison's going into orders. His arguments were founded upon the general pravity and corruption of men of business, who wanted liberal education. And I remember, as if I had read the letter yesterday, that my lord ended with a compliment that, however he might be represented as a friend to the Church, he never would do it any other injury than keeping Mr. Addison out of it."

ADDISON ON HIS TRAVELS.

On some of the stronger and more enthusiastic minds the chief effect of the grand tour was to produce a violent hatred of all foreign manners. Dennis, the critic, for instance, who, after leaving Cambridge, spent some time on the Continent, returned with a confirmed dislike to the French, and ostentatiously displayed in his writings how much he held "dragoons and wooden shoes in scorn;" and it is amusing to find Addison at a later date making his Tory fox-hunter declare this anti-Gallican temper to be the main fruits of foreign travel.

But, in general, what was intended to be a school for manners and political instruction proved rather a source of unsettlement and dissipation; and the vigorous and glowing lines in which Pope makes the tutor describe to Dullness the doings of the "young AEneas" abroad, may be taken as a faithful picture of the travelled pupil of the period:

It is needless to say that Addison's experiences of travel were of a very different kind. He left England in his twenty-eighth year, with a mind well equipped from a study of the best authors, and with the intention of qualifying himself for political employment at home, after familiarising himself with the languages and manners of foreign countries. His sojourn abroad extended over four years, and his experience was more than usually varied and comprehensive. Crossing from Dover to Calais, some time in the summer of 1699, he spent nearly eighteen months in France making himself master of the language. In December, 1700, he embarked at Marseilles for a tour in Italy, and visited in succession the following places: Monaco, Genoa, Pavia, Milan, Brescia, Verona, Padua, Venice, Ferrara, Ravenna, Rimini, S. Marino, Pesaro, Fano, Sinigaglia, Ancona, Loreto, Rome , Naples, Capri, whence he came back to Rome by sea, the various towns in the neighbourhood of Rome, Siena, Leghorn, Pisa, Lucca, Florence, Bologna, Modena, Parma, and Turin. Thus, in the course of this journey, which lasted exactly a twelvemonth, he twice crossed the Apennines, and made acquaintance with all the more important cities in the northern part of the Peninsula. In December, 1701, he passed over Mont Cenis to Geneva, proceeding then by Fribourg, Berne, Soleure, Zurich, St. Gall, Linden, Insbruck, Hall, to Vienna, where he arrived in the autumn of 1702. After making a brief stay in the Austrian capital he turned his face homewards, and having visited the Protestant cities of Germany, and made a rather longer stay in Hamburg than in any other, he reached Holland in the spring of 1703, and remained in that country till his return to England, some time in the autumn of the same year.

"I don't believe, as good a poet as you are, that you can make finer Lanskips than those about the King's houses, or with all yo descriptions build a more magnificent palace than Versailles. I am, however, so singular as to prefer Fontainebleau to the rest. It is situated among rocks and woods that give you a fine variety of Savage prospects. The King has Humoured the Genius of the place, and only made of so much art as is necessary to Help and regulate Nature, without reforming her too much. The Cascades seem to break through the Clefts and Cracks of Rocks that are covered over with Moss, and look as if they were piled upon one another by Accident. There is an artificial wildness in the Meadows, Walks, and Canals, and y Garden, instead of a Wall, is Fenced on the Lower End by a Natural Mound of Rock-work that strikes the eye very agreeably. For my part, I think there is something more charming in these rude heaps of Stone than in so many Statues, and wou'd as soon see a River winding through Woods and Meadows as when it is tossed up in such a variety of figures at Versailles."

Here and there, too, his correspondence exhibits traces of that delicate vein of ridicule in which he is without a rival, as in the following inimitable description of Le Brun's paintings at Versailles:

"The painter has represented his most Xtian Majesty under y figure of Jupiter throwing thunderbolts all about the ceiling, and striking terror into y Danube and Rhine, that lie astonished and blasted a little above the Cornice."

Of his life at Blois a very slight sketch has been preserved by the Abbe Philippeaux, one of the many gossipping informants from whom Spence collected his anecdotes:

"Mr. Addison stayed above a year at Blois. He would rise as early as between two and three in summer, and lie abed till between eleven and twelve in the depth of winter. He was untalkative while here, and often thoughtful; sometimes so lost in thought that I have come into his room and have stayed five minutes there before he has known anything of it. He had his masters generally at supper with him, kept very little company beside, and had no amour whilst here that I know of, and I think I should have known it if he had had any."

The following characteristic letter to a gentleman of Blois, with whom he seems to have had an altercation, is interesting as showing the mixture of coolness and dignity, the "blood and judgment well commingled" which Hamlet praised in Horatio, and which are conspicuous in all Addison's actions as well as in his writings:

"Sir,--I am always as slow in making an Enemy as a Friend, and am therefore very ready to come to an Accommodation with you; but as for any satisfaction, I don't think it is due on either side when y Affront is mutual. You know very well that according to y opinion of y world a man would as soon be called a Knave as a Fool, and I believe most people w be rather thought to want Legs than Brains. But I suppose whatever we said in y heat of discourse is not y real opinion we have of each other, since otherwise you would have scorned to subscribe yourself as I do at present, S, y very, etc.

A. Mons L'Espagnol, Blois, 10 1699."

In general, Addison's remarks on the French character are not complimentary. He found the vanity of the people so elated by the elevation of the Duke of Anjou to the throne of Spain that they were insupportable, and he felt no reluctance to quit France for Italy. His observations on the national manners, as seen at Blois, are characteristic:

"Truly, by what I have yet seen, they are the Happiest nation in the world. 'Tis not in the pow'r of Want or Slavery to make 'em miserable. There is nothing to be met with in the Country but Mirth and Poverty. Ev'ry one sings, laughs, and starves. Their Conversation is generally Agreeable; for if they have any Wit or Sense they are sure to show it. They never mend upon a Second meeting, but use all the freedom and familiarity at first Sight that a long Intimacy or Abundance of wine can scarce draw from an Englishman. Their Women are perfect Mistresses in this Art of showing themselves to the best Advantage. They are always gay and sprightly, and set off y worst faces in Europe with y best airs. Ev'ry one knows how to give herself as charming a look and posture as S Godfrey Kneller c draw her in."

"Poetic fields encompass me around, And still I seem to tread on classic ground; For here the Muse so oft her harp has strung, That not a mountain rears its head unsung; Renowned in verse each shady thicket grows, And every stream in heavenly numbers flows."

"The fatigue of our crossing the Apennines, and of our whole journey from Loretto to Rome, was very agreeably relieved by the variety of scenes we passed through. For, not to mention the rude prospect of rocks rising one above another, of the deep gutters worn in the sides of them by torrents of rain and snow-water, or the long channels of sand winding about their bottoms that are sometimes filled with so many rivers, we saw in six days' travelling the several seasons of the year in their beauty and perfection. We were sometimes shivering on the top of a bleak mountain, and a little while afterwards basking in a warm valley, covered with violets and almond-trees in blossom, the bees already swarming over them, though but in the month of February. Sometimes our road led us through groves of olives, or by gardens of oranges, or into several hollow apartments among the rocks and mountains, that look like so many natural greenhouses, as being always shaded with a great variety of trees and shrubs that never lose their verdure."

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet