MR. DOBSON'S LIFE OF STEELE.* DR. JOHNSON called Steele "the
most agreeable rake that ever trod the rounds of indulgence ;" but the term, like many another clever saying, is but partially true. Steele had his faults, which he is frank enough to confess. Like his friend Addison, he sometimes drank too much ; like his countryman Goldsmith, he was extravagant and careless of money. He acknowledges that he yielded to temptation, as wiser and stronger men have been known to do ; but he never ceased to love and aspire after what is good, and all he did as a man of letters justly entitles him to rank among our "English Worthies."
It is impossible, indeed—unless, with Mr. Dobson, we are able to live in Steele's age—to realise how much the country owes to him for what he did and caused to be done in literature. The brilliant dramatists of the Restoration had created a world of wit that was wholly without morality. In that world, purity and honour, domestic love and Christian charity, have no place ; every married woman is unfaithful, and the worst of vices only afford food for laughter. Collier's Short View of the immorality of the stage, published in 1698, was, as every reader knows, a powerful and brilliant attack on the most popular literature of the age ; but Steele was a greater reformer than Collier, not, indeed, through his didactic dramas, one of which, as he imagined, was "damned for its piety," but by the publication of the Tatter in 1709. He showed, for the first time in that age, how possible it was to be witty without being offensive, to be serious without making the reader yawn, to laugh at the follies and to satirise the vices of the age with a liveliness and a humour at once charming and instructive. We do not forget, of course, what splendid assistance Addison afforded his friend in the Tatter and Spectator, nor the generous way in which Steele acknowledged it. "I fared," he writes, "like a distressed Prince who calls in a powerful neighbour to his aid : I was undone by my auxiliary ; when I had once called him in, I could not subsist without dependence on him." But even if we were to adopt Lord Macaulay's extravagant assertion, that any five numbers of the Tatter which we owe to Addison are more valuable than all the two hundred numbers in which he had no share, it must not be forgotten that in all pro- bability we owe everything that charms us in Addison to his friend Steele. He started the Tatter, and had pro- duced about eighty numbers before Addison became a fre- quent contributor ; and if Addison acted in concert with his friend in the Spectator, the project seems to have been due to
• English Worthies : Richard Steele. By Austin Dobson. London: Longmans.
Steele, who brought the journal to an end, and started the Guardian, without asking the advice of any one.
"I prefer open-hearted Steele with all his faults, to Addison with all his essays," was the exclamation of Leigh Hunt. The preference is excusable. The exquisite art of Addison, his con- summate humour, his calm wisdom, his delicacy of style, his character-drawing, are beyond the range of Steele. Bat Steele as a man is more loveable ; and the freshness and pathos of his essays, their ease and vivacity, make them singularly attractive. There is nothing in the Tatter to compete with the immortal creation of Sir Roger de Coverley ; but the book, though inferior to the Spectator n iterary art, is livelier and more amusing. The following estimate of the position held by the two friends in relation to the Tatter seems to us eminently just :—
" The praise that cannot be withheld from the merit of Addison's performance must not mislead us into forgetting that he was after all only a contributor, and a contributor, moreover, whose aid was tendered when the periodical for which he worked was already well
established It was Steele who originated and designed it ; it was Steele upon whom fell the burden and heat of the day ; and upon Steele devolved the duty of providing an unfailing supply of material. Neither these conditions, nor Steele's own literary habits, were favourable to the best kind of work. We find, as we might expect to find, frequent traces of haste and hurry ; we find also, not as in Addison's case, careful elaborations from some remote suggestion, but rapidly improvised utterances springing from the casual prompting of the moment—a face at a window, a word in a club, a cry from a crowd. Addison seems to have transported his idea from the coffee-house to his quiet White- hall office; Steele to have found his in the street, and scribbled it down in the coffee.honse. . . . . . Each writer has naturally the defects of his qualities. If Addison delights us by his finish, lie repels us by his restraint and absence of fervour ; if Steele is care. less, he is always frank and genial. Addison's papers are faultless in their art, and in this way achieve an excellence beyond the reach of Steele's quicker and more impulsive nature. But for words which the heart finds when the head is seeking ; for phrases glowing with the white-heat of a generous emotion ; for sentences which throb and tingle with manly pity or courageous indignation, we must turn to the essays of Steele."
This is sound criticism, and none the less worthy of quotation because we have read most of it before in the introduction to Mr. Dobson's Selections from Steele. There is another passage, quite new to us and admirably written, which we are glad to quote before turning from Steele as an essayist to Steele as a man. Here is the kind of pleasure the modern reader will obtain from a perusal of the Taller,—that is to say, if he is blessed with Mr. Dobson's eyes, and is able, like him, to revivify the past :—
"The social sketches of the Tatler must always retain a certain interest. The whole of the time is mirrored in its pages. We see the theatre, with Betterton and Bracegirdle on the stage, or that 'romp,' Mrs. Bicknell, dancing ; we see the side-box bowing from its inmost rows' at the advent of the radiant 'Cynthia of the minute ;' we hear the shrill cries of the orange-wenches, or admire at the pert footmen keeping guard over their mistresses' bouquets. We see the church, with its high pews, and its hour-glass by the pulpit ; we hear, above the rustle of the fans and the cough- ing of the open-breasted beaux, the sonorous periods of Burnet or Atterbury ; we scent the fragrance of Bergamot and Lavender and Hungary-water. We follow the gilded chariots moving slowly round the Ring in Hyde Park, where the lackeys fight and play chuck- farthing at the gates ; we take the air in the Mall with the Bucks and Pretty Fellows; we trudge after the fine lady, bound, in her glass chair, upon her interminable how-dees.' We smile at the showy young Templars lounging at Squire's or Serb's in their brocaded night-gowns and strawberry sashes ; we listen to the politicians at White's or the Cocoa-Tree; we company with the cits at Batson's and the Jews and stock-brokers at Jonathan's. We cheapen our Pekoe or Bohea at Motteux's China Warehouse ; we fill our boxes with musty or right Spanish' at Charles Lillie's in Beaufort Buildings ; we chose a dragon-cane or a jambee at Mather's toyshop in Fleet Street. We ask at Lintott's or Tonson's for Swift in Verse and Prose ; we call for the latest Tatler at Morphew's, by Stationers' Hall. It is not true that Queen Anne is dead ; we are living in her very reign : and the Victorian era, with its steam and its socialism, its electric light and its local option, has floated away from us like a
dream."
There are portions of Steele's life of which we know little, and probably shall never know more. His career as a soldier lies in obscurity, and it is but recently that the name of his first wife has been discovered,—the "dear friend" whose death pre- vented her husband from finishing a comedy. She died at the close of 1706, and the next year Steele was making love to Miss Mary Scurlock, a lady whom we have to thank for preserving upwards of four hundred letters or notelets from her devoted husband. In the most insignificant of them the character of the man is exhibited. Swift, when he was not on good terms with Steele, accused him of being henpecked by his wife. There is no indication of it in these domestic missives, written off evidently without premeditation, on the most trivial
subjects. Sometimes he is angry with his "dear, dearest Prue," sometimes it is evident she has been angry with him, not always without good cause; but these are lovers' quarrels, and do not prevent him from showering upon her all kinds of endearing epithets. "My dear little peevish, beautiful, wise governess, God bless you!" is the conclusion of one letter ; and in another he writes, "Thou art such a foolish, tender thing, that there is no living with thee ;" and in another, "I love you better than the light of my eyes or the life-blood in my heart ; but when I have let you know that, you are also to understand that neither my sight shall be so enchanted, or my affection so much master of me, as to make me forget our common interests. To attend my business as I ought, and improve my fortune, it is necessary that my time and my will should be under no direction but my own." These are not the words of a man living under his wife's government; but if, as one judges from the letters, his "dear Fran" was not always submissive and gentle, there were frequent grounds of provoca- tion that must have moved any woman of spirit. Steele was extravagant and careless, and there were times when, after much profusion, there was not "an inch of candle, a pound of coal, or a bit of meat in the house." In marrying him, his wife, who brought him some fortune, expected, to use her own words, "a competency in worldly goods to make easy," and she found difficulties and debt. That there were tiffs between them, as between most married folk, there can be.no doubt ; but there was probably no serious estrangement, and we know that Steele's "lovely charmer" charmed him to the last.
In our review, about a year ago, of Mr. Dobson's Selections from Steele, we dwelt at some length on the character of the eighteenth-century essay. That essay is wholly unlike any literary production of our day, and its extraordinary popularity may seem strange to the modern reader. The Taller and Spectator, however, supplied a great want. They treated of the events, the fashions, the morals of the day, in language which everybody could understand. Their authors wrote for family reading, and knew how "to come home to men's business and bosoms." The novelty of the work was captivating, and many a man of greater literary genius than Steele has won far less fame ; for when we think of him, it is not only with gratitude for his own characteristic essays, but also for the more perfect work given us by his friend. If there are poets sown by Nature who lack the accomplishment of verse, so no doubt are there born essayists who are prevented by circumstances from discovering their power. There is no reason to suppose that Addison, whose repute was that of a poet and dramatist, would have given proof of the genius which places him above all English essay-writers with the single exception of Charles Lamb, had it not been for Richard Steele.
We may add, in conclusion, that no living writer is better qualified than Mr. Dobson, by his knowledge of the period and by the love of it, to write the life of Steele. It is the first time the work has been done well. Admirable essays have been written about the essayist, but no biography worthy of the name. Mr. Dobson has, therefore, filled up a gap in literature. His monograph is full of matter, keen in criticism, brilliant in execution, and not likely to be superseded. From this praise some readers may be inclined to make a deduction. Even Mr. Dobson's literary affluence has not prevented him from borrow- ing largely from himself, and it is a little irritating, perhaps, to find many of his best passages transferred bodily, or with slight verbal alterations, from another volume. This has been done, and without acknowledgment.
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