Addison's Way
By WALTER TAPLIN MR. PETER SMITHERS says in the preface to his admirable biography of Joseph Addison* that his feelings towards his subject "are those of deep admiration for a man who set himself a noble pattern of life in youth, and who, in spite of defects of character which he mastered, lived and died consistently therein." This state- ment, made after fourteen years of patient and detailed research into the available material on Addison's life and embodied in a full-length biography which puts all past efforts in this field completely out of date, ought on the face of it to command careful attention. Yet it is very ddubtful whether it will alter current literary opinion, which seems to be firmly fixed in the judgement that little good can be said of Addison. Mr. Eliot has damned him with faint dispraise; and Mr. C. S. Lewis, with civil leer, has pinned the damaging label ` Victorian ' on him. The chorus of other contemporary critics neither unwilling to wound nor afraid to strike this man now safely dead for two hundred and thirty-five years is loud, and perhaps a little monotonous. It might have been more polite to read Mr. Smithers's book with the care it deserves and to examine further the facts on which he bases his opinion. Such a scrutiny could not, of course, settle the question, still unanswered, which still overhangs Addison's personality as it was observed by his contemporaries. We still do not know, even after all Mr. Smithers's researches, what sort of man the joint editor of the original Spectator was. His tracks are covered, and the presumption persists that he covered them himself. Positive interest in Addison's personality is now at a low ebb; but it should at least be noticed, before all thought of further search is abandoned, that if Addison was in fact as contemptible as he is now generally made out to be, a number of respectable authorities made a mistake about him. Mr. Smithers, speaking of the young don at Magdalen, says : "Every witness who has spoken of Addison from intimate knowledge has told us of the almost magical attraction which he exercised in private and personal relationships." Swift, for all the ups and downs of their acquaintance, delighted in his company. Dr. Johnson always thought of him as a great man. And even Pope who had not much reason to remember with pleasure the "great Turk in poetry" presiding at the sessions in Button's coffee-house, said admiring things about him in the end? Add to this a few useful virtues—Addison was a conscientious public servant, never sank deep in corruption, and seems to have done 1 his best to practise what he preached in the field of manners- , and we may at least suspend judgement on him as a man. • But it so happens that most of the complaints about him as a man really amount to complaints about the long-term influences of his work on English literature and manners. It is obviously impossible to get to the 'bottom of so largo a question as that, though Mr. Smithers is confident that even a study of Addison's influences would produce a result favourable to him. All that can be said here is that before any result whatever could emerge the air would have to be cleared of myths. Myths of one kind or another have been woven round the writings and personality of Addison from the very beginning. His poem The Campaign celebrating Marlborough's victory at Blenheim was received with an enthusiasm which it never deserved as poetry. Voltaire called it "monument plus durable que le palais de Blenheim." Time's answer to that still lies heavy on the Oxfordshire earth. The • The Life of Joseph Addison. By Peter Smithers. (Oxford. Clarendon Press. 35s.) enthusiastic reception given to his drama Cato seems to have been based at the beginning on the assumption that it was a political play. It was pretty poor stuff as drama. And as for the Taller and the Spectator the amazing thing is that their high reputation endured for so long, for—after all—they were only journalism, written at high speed, under pressure, and 'often without adequate preliminary thought. Was it Addison's fault that all that he wrote was so pleasing to his own generation, and those which followed it for nearly two centuries ? Only if he was the creator of the myth that has been built around him. , It is here that we get to the heart of the matter. For Mr. Smithers makes it reasonably clear that Addison was, in part, the creator of his own myth. He did not disclaim the reputation as a great writer and an arbiter of taste which The Campaign, Cato, the Tatler and the Spectator won for him. While having little doubt about the solid foundation of his fortune, which was the great and tireless service ha gave to the State, he was reasonably content to accept with complacency, as the tribute to solid worth, the fame he won in the less important paths of journalism. He was, of course, a fantastically successful journalist. He even had some of the shallower outward attributes of scribblers. He sat in coffee- houses, he drank hard, he wrote quickly, he even—always an easy journalistic trick, this—set up as an arbiter of morals. He still sits in the centre of the most persistent picture of all. the picture of which millions of English-speaking people are vaguely aware, even though they may not have read a word of the eighteenth-century Spectator—the picture, now encrusted with myths, of the Town, of the wits, of the coffee-houses, and of Mr. Addison pronouncing judgement on everything with 'benevolence, delicately flavoured with contempt.'
The picture is perhaps worth something in itself. There are still sentimental persons who would have liked to talk at Button's coffee-house with a two-headed phenomenon called Addisonandsteele. But it was here that the myth of the arbiter of taste was borrb—twisted from birth. Addison's immense prestige might possibly have been justified if his circle at Button's had consisted of great critics to a man and if Addison at their head had been expounding a truly great tradition. But it was not so. Many of his judgements, and in particular his views on poetry, were shoddy. The circle of admirers may always have been what it manifestly - became later, a conspiracy of second-rate men. Pope's Atticus lines had some justification. Macaulay's comment on Addison's scholar- ship: it is melancholy to see how helplessly he gropes his way from blunder to blunder," was certainly justified. Yet perhaps It would not have mattered, but for the fact that posterity swallowed Addison whole. And even that might not have mattered but for the fact that he was clearly willing to be swallowed. Of course he has been the victim of many myths. But possibly nothing he could have done would have altered the fact that the age wanted just such a man. Had he gone one stage further, disclaimed greatness a little more firmly, he might not be quite so unfashionable today. But it was not entirely his fault that he was so astoundingly fashionable in 1711.
It is the great merit of Mr. Smithers's book that he makes it possible for those who want to understand Addison to come nearer to success than they have ever been before. It is a thorough, cool, thoughtful and sympathetic book, written in a 'firmly elegant style well suited to the subject. 'It is to be hoped that no new myth will grow up—a myth that this book puts paid to Addison and makes it unnecessary to bother about him any more. It is a first-class biography, a book to be read for its own sake. If it confirms the fashionable dislike for Addison, it is still a book to be read. If it never justifies the stock cliché and drives readers back to the works of Addison, It may still drive some back to the study of the era which produced him and approved him. It may drive a few, if only by repulsion, to Swift and Pope.
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