SOURCE: Introduction to Critical Essays from The Spectator by Joseph Addison with four Essays by Richard Steele, Clarendon Press, 1970, pp. ix-xxi.

[In the essay that follows, Bond analyzes Addison's efforts in the Spectator to redefine the scope and methods of literary criticism.]

The series of daily essays published by Addison and Steele in 1711-12, from the pen of ‘Mr. Spectator’, ranged in subject-matter from the follies of contemporary fashion to the more serious problems of ethics and religion. From the beginning an imaginary club was devised, with members of broadly varying interests, whose topics of conversation might presumably be drawn upon as material for the essays. Besides Mr. Spectator, who acted as secretary, the club included an old-fashioned country squire, a prosperous City merchant, a young lawyer of the Inner Temple (and frequenter of the play-houses) a soldier, an elderly beau, and a grave clergyman.

The omission of a professional critic from the group seems at first sight a little strange, unless Mr. Spectator himself was designed for the role. (At the University, he tells us in the opening essay, ‘I applied myself with so much diligence to my studies, that there are few celebrated books, either in the learned or the modern tongues, which I am not acquainted with.’) But the label of literary critic is not applied to him. To the ordinary reader of Queen Anne's day ‘critic’ would no doubt call to mind the unlovable Richard Bentley, formidable classicist of Cambridge and victor over the Christ Church wits in the recent Phalaris controversy, or it might suggest the ‘sour, undistinguishing’ John Dennis, who cast a severe eye over contemporary literature and found most of it bad.

‘Criticism’, Dryden had remarked, shortly before his death in 1700, ‘is now become mere hangman's work, and meddles only with the faults of authors.’ Dryden himself was responsible for some of the best criticism of the age, mainly in the form of prefaces to his own work, but his verdict doubtless met with general endorsement. A generation earlier, in ‘The Author's Apology for Heroic Poetry and Poetic Licence’, he had characterized the 1670s as ‘an age of illiterate, censorious, and detracting people who, thus qualified, set up for critics’, but in the same important essay he formulated an admirable statement of critical procedure.

I must take leave to tell them that they wholly mistake the nature of criticism who think its business is principally to find fault. Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant a standard of judging well; the chiefest part of which is to observe those excellencies which should delight a reasonable reader. If the design, the conduct, the thoughts, and the expressions of a poem be generally such as proceed from a true genius of poetry, the critic ought to pass his judgment in favour of the author.¹

Dryden, throughout his life, had insisted that the best judges of literary merit were the creative artist and the gentleman of liberal education. Before his death, however, he had seen a change in the world of letters—the rise of a professional class of critics. On the one hand there were the scholarly reviewers for such serious journals as the History of the Works of the Learned, and on the other the contributors to periodicals like the Gentleman's Journal of Motteux, each issue of which generally carried a ‘critique’ of a new play, romance, or book of poems. The Rymers, Gildons, and Bentleys of the seventeenth century were of course not all given to fault-finding, but there was enough to cause uneasiness on the part of creative writers like Dryden. The ‘image’ of the professional critic had become—even before Addison and Steele had begun to write for the polite world of the age of Anne—decidedly unamiable, a creature of pedantry and dullness, inhabiting the musty cell of a university library or a garret in Grub Street.

It was less than a decade before the commencement of the Spectator that Swift, in a notable passage in the Battle of the Books, had drawn an allegorical portrait of the goddess Criticism—a frightful creature with ‘claws like a cat’, and with head, ears, and voice resembling those of an ass.

At her right hand sat Ignorance, her father and husband, blind with age; at her left, Pride her mother, dressing her up in the scraps of paper herself had torn. There, was Opinion her sister, light of foot, hoodwinkt, and headstrong, yet giddy and perpetually turning. About her play'd her children, Noise and Impudence, Dullness and Vanity, Positiveness, Pedantry, and Ill-Manners.

Similar views continued to be expressed throughout the reigns of Anne and the first Georges—by Swift himself in Part III of Gulliver's Travels; by Dr. Arbuthnot and other ‘Scriblerians’ in the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus; and most notably, of course, by Pope in the Dunciad, with its elaborate panoply of footnotes and other learned apparatus. Addison too, in No. 470 of the Spectator, parodied the scholar-critic's approach to literature by presenting a short poem ‘in a new edition, with the several various readings which I find of it in former editions, and in ancient manuscripts’.

There were good reasons, therefore, for not making a professional critic a member of the Spectator Club. But the lively and constructive comment on books which forms the subject-matter of some of the best essays in the new journal doubtless helped to a considerable degree in creating a better ‘public image’ of the literary critic. More important, it brought the reasonable discussion of literature within the range of the ordinary middle class reader. ‘I shall be ambitious to have it said of me’, Addison had announced in a well-known passage in No. 10, ‘that I have brought philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables, and in coffee-houses.’ An important part of such ‘philosophy’ would be literature itself, and there is a great deal of evidence, as the Spectator went on, of an encouraging ‘reader response’—at tea-tables as well as in coffee-houses—to papers dealing with literary subjects, both ancient and modern.

A year or so earlier, in Tatler 165, Addison had devoted an entire paper to a description of ‘that importunate, empty, and conceited animal’ known as a critic.

This, in the common acceptation of the word, is one that, without entering into the sense and soul of an author, has a few general rules, which, like mechanical instruments, he applies to the works of every writer, and as they quadrate with them, pronounces the author perfect or defective. He is master of a certain set of words, as unity, style, fire, flegm, easy, natural, turn, sentiment, and the like; which he varies, compounds, divides, and throws together, in every part of his discourse, without any thought or meaning.

From this point he goes on to what looks like a reminiscence of an actual critic pontificating in the coffee-house.

The marks you may know him by are, an elevated eye, and dogmatical brow, a positive voice and a contempt for every thing that comes out, whether he has read it or not. He dwells altogether in generals. He praises or dispraises in the lump. He shakes his head very frequently at the pedantry of universities, and bursts into laughter when you mention an author that is not known at Will's. He hath formed his judgment upon Homer, Horace, and Virgil, not from their own works, but from those of Rapin and Bossu. He knows his own strength so well, that he never dares praise any thing in which he has not a French author for his voucher.²

The satiric portrait is interesting as a sketch of all that Addison abhorred. The physical description—the elevated eye, dogmatical brow, and positive voice—would be the very opposite of his own cautious and reserved manner. It applies, on the other hand, to all we know of John Dennis, who, in Pope's words,

… Stares tremendous, with a threatening eye,
Like some fierce tyrant in old tapestry.

More important, however, than the physical description is the point made in the opening lines—the bad critic's habit of judging by mechanical rules, ‘without entering into the sense and soul of an author’. To perceive the qualities in a writer which affect and please us, to discover why we are moved by great works of art, and left cold and indifferent by others—this Addison seems always to have had in mind as the job of the critic. He uses almost identical words in Spectator 409, the essay which introduces the series on the pleasures of the imagination. ‘I could wish there were authors’, he writes, ‘who would enter into the very spirit and soul of fine writing, and show us the several sources of that pleasure which rises in the mind upon the perusal of a noble work.’

Thus although in poetry it be absolutely necessary that the unities of time, place and action, with other points of the same nature should be thoroughly explained and understood; there is still something more essential to the art, something that elevates and astonishes the fancy, and gives a greatness of mind to the reader, which few of the critics besides Longinus have considered.

The two longest sustained pieces of criticism in the Spectator—the eighteen Saturday papers on Paradise Lost and the eleven essays on the pleasures of the imagination—are addressed to this problem, the first an exercise in ‘practical criticism’, the other an attempt to explore the theoretical foundations.

The earliest critical essays in the Spectator, however, are prompted by current excesses—in opera, in modern tragedy, and in poetry. It is on the absurdities of Italian opera, then at the height of its popularity, that Addison levels his first attacks. A half-dozen lively papers point out the mixture of representational and realistic stage effects in the opera, with live birds and animals introduced on the stage, ‘painted dragons spitting wild-fire … and real cascades in artificial landscapes’. A few days later he turns to a more important subject, with four papers on contemporary tragedy, as it succeeds or falls short of the great aim of this ‘noblest production of human nature. … Diversions of this kind wear out of our thoughts every thing that is mean and little. They cherish and cultivate that humanity which is the ornament of our nature. They soften insolence, soothe affliction, and subdue the mind to the dispensations of Providence.’ While the works of the Ancients—and those of Corneille and Racine—reach this ideal, modern English tragedies, by contrast, frequently prove to be empty and devoid of substance. ‘Their language is very often noble and sonorous, but the sense either very trifling or very common.’ Addison then specifies some of the methods used by modern writers to compensate for this emptiness—high-sounding language (including rants), extravagant costume, drums and trumpets, ghosts and spectres, daggers, poniards, and other instruments of death. These are all futile if the play itself is hollow. ‘Can all the trappings or equipage of a king or hero’, he asks, ‘give Brutus half that pomp and majesty which he receives from a few lines in Shakespeare?’ These stage-effects are not in themselves bad, but only as they are offered in place of ‘proportionable sentiments and expressions in the writing’. In Hamlet the appearance of the Ghost is made effective ‘by the discourses that precede it: his dumb behaviour at his first entrance, strikes the imagination very strongly; but every time he enters, he is still more terrifying. Who can read the speech with which young Hamlet accosts him, without trembling?’ Addison draws his illustrations for the most part from the current repertory at Drury Lane Theatre, and he effectively contrasts contemporary plays which depend on extraneous spectacle with the tragedies of the Ancients and those of Corneille, Racine, and Shakespeare.

It was his attack on ‘the ridiculous doctrine of poetic justice’, however, which remains the most interesting feature of these early papers on drama. The dogma itself had the authority of most of the influential seventeenth-century French critics, and to a certain degree the support of Dryden. According to its advocates, the writer of tragedy, since drama is ideally an agent of moral instruction, must see that virtue is recompensed and vice punished. It receives its most pronounced expression in The Tragedies of the Last Age (1678) of Rymer, and it is not always put in such extreme terms; but in most moralistic critics—Dennis, for example—there is the same assumption, implicit if not expressed, of an equal distribution of rewards and punishments.

Steele, in Tatler 82, had deplored the playwrights' method of ‘disposing the fortune of the persons represented … and letting none be unhappy, but those who deserve it’. The remark, however, is made only incidentally, in a general discussion of the calamities incident to human life. Addison's objection to poetic justice is that it is contrary to the very purpose of tragedy. ‘We find that good and evil happen alike to all men on this side the grave; and as the principal design of tragedy is to raise commiseration and terror in the minds of the audience, we shall defeat this great end, if we always make virtue and innocence happy and successful.’ Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare—providing happy endings to Romeo and Juliet and King Lear—Addison sees as conspicuous examples of poetic justice which defeat the end of tragedy. Lear, he observes, is an admirable tragedy as Shakespeare wrote it, ‘but as it is reformed according to the chimerical notion of poetical justice, in my humble opinion it has lost half its beauty’.

It was this paper that aroused the wrath of one of the principal advocates of the doctrine. According to a satirical account written by Pope two years later, John Dennis had walked into the bookshop of Bernard Lintott on the morning of 17 May 1712, ‘and opening one of the volumes of the Spectator, in the large paper, did suddenly, without the least provocation, tear out that of No. 40 where the author treats of poetical justice, and cast it into the street’.³ Dennis in fact composed a reply, ‘To the Spectator, upon his Paper on the 16th of April’, which he published in 1712 with his Essay on the Genius and Writings of Shakespeare. His indignation seems to have been prompted in great part by personal resentment against Steele (who he thought had written the offending paper), since he believed that Steele was at this time systematically attempting to undermine his reputation.⁴ Although his objections do not seem to have attracted much attention, a later Spectator (No. 548) alludes to the attack and gives a more detailed defence of Addison's views.⁵

The most perfect man has vices enough to draw down punishments upon his head, and to justify Providence in regard to any miseries that may befall him. For this reason I cannot think, but that the instruction and moral are much finer, where a man who is virtuous in the main of his character falls into distress, and sinks under the blows of fortune at the end of a tragedy, than when he is represented as happy and triumphant. Such an example corrects the insolence of human nature, softens the mind of the beholder with sentiments of pity and compassion, comforts him under his own private affliction, and teaches him not to judge of men's virtues by their successes.

Besides these papers on Italian opera and modern tragedy Addison printed a single short essay (No. 35) on humour, without naming names but calling attention to the popularity of ‘several writers, who set up for men of humour’. Here the general theme of cruelty inherent in satire and lampoons is stressed, but there is also condemnation of the ‘irregular fancies’ and ‘unnatural distortions of thought’ to be found in these would-be humorists. The paper concludes with contrasting genealogical tables of True and False Humour. The essay itself is rather slight, and seems to have been written partly to find out whether readers of the Spectator would welcome these ventures into criticism.

The reaction was favourable. ‘I find by my bookseller’, Addison writes just a month later (in No. 58), ‘that these papers of criticism [those upon Italian opera and modern tragedy], with that upon humour, have met with a more kind reception than indeed I could have hoped for from such subjects’. Accordingly, he then gave his readers a consecutive series of six papers, lasting the entire week (7 to 12 May), on the larger topic of true and false wit in poetry (Nos. 58-63).

As in the papers on opera and tragedy, current trends provide the point of departure. ‘I observed there were attempts on foot last winter to revive some of those antiquated modes of wit that have been long exploded out of the commonwealth of letters.’ Addison is thinking of poems in acrostics, and this leads naturally into a discussion of all forms of ‘false wit’—poems in typographical shapes, rebuses, ‘echo poems’, anagrams, chronograms, bouts rimés, and similar tricks with words and sounds. The greater part of the series is taken up with these matters, all supported by examples from literature ancient and modern. After engaging his readers' interest, Addison then (in No. 62) enlarges the scope of the inquiry into a serious discussion of true versus false wit, or, if we take the terms in the broadest sense, the difference between poetry enlivened by creative genius and that which depends for its effects on manipulation of verbal counters.

The function of wit, Locke had said, lay in the assemblage of ideas—‘putting those together with quickness and variety, wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity thereby to make up pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in the fancy’. This definition Addison quotes with approval, but he adds an important element: the resemblance of ideas must give not only delight but surprise to the reader. Comparing a white object with milk or snow does not constitute true wit, unless there is some further, surprising resemblance. ‘Thus when a poet tells us, the bosom of his mistress is as white as snow, there is no wit in the comparison; but when he adds, with a sigh, that it is as cold too, it then grows into wit.’

The resemblance, moreover, must be between ideas and not between mere words, syllables, or letters. It is in this respect that the typographical poems, anagrams, and acrostics described in the earlier essays fail—and by implication much of the eccentric and ‘private’ poetry of the seventeenth century. As for poets who have a share of true wit but who also indulge in some of these vagaries—whose wit consists partly in the congruity of ideas and partly in that of words—these may be called poets of ‘mixed wit’.

This kind of wit is that which abounds in Cowley, more than in any author that ever wrote. Mr. Waller has likewise a great deal of it. Mr. Dryden is very sparing in it. Milton had a genius much above it. Spenser is in the same class with Milton. … If we look into the Latin writers, we find none of this mixed wit in Virgil, Lucretius, or Catullus; very little in Horace, but a great deal of it in Ovid, and scarce any thing else in Martial.

Of the poets named, none, of course, is a poet of false wit, but Ovid and Martial among the ancients, and Waller and Cowley among the moderns, are guilty of a great deal of mixed wit.⁶ Milton and Spenser ‘had a genius much above it’. Addison clearly has in mind the difference between the metaphysical poets of the previous century (Herbert is singled out particularly in No. 58) and those whom he would place in the first rank—Virgil among the Ancients and Milton among the Moderns. The entire neo-classical movement was essentially one of reformation, toward a poetry which is without idiosyncrasy, simple in structure, and universal in appeal. Addison consistently judges a work of art by these standards, and it is for these reasons that he can praise the popular ballads as well as Paradise Lost. In each case it is

that natural way of writing, … which we so much admire in the compositions of the ancients; and which no body deviates from, but those who want strength of genius to make a thought shine in its own natural beauties. Poets who want this strength of genius to give that majestic simplicity of nature … are forced to hunt after foreign ornaments, and not to let any piece of wit of what kind soever escape them. I look upon these writers as Goths in poetry, who, like those in architecture, not being able to come up to the beautiful simplicity of the old Greeks and Romans, have endeavoured to supply its place with all the extravagancies of an irregular fancy

[No. 62].

The three papers (Nos. 70, 74, and 85) devoted to the two popular ballads, ‘Chevy Chase’ and ‘The Children in the Wood’, attracted perhaps more attention than any of the others on literary topics. ‘Chevy Chase’ Addison probably knew in the form of a broadside ballad, printed frequently in song collections of the time. The many allusions to it in contemporary literature show that it was by no means unknown, but that it was associated with an old-fashioned and somewhat rustic taste. For his praise of these ballads Addison has been hailed as a pre-romanticist, since ballads were admired and imitated at the height of the Romantic movement. One does not have to read far, however, to see that the qualities that Addison praises in the ballads are those he admires in Virgil and Milton—simplicity, truth to nature, and universality of appeal.

The same standards, with added emphasis on sublimity, appear in the series of papers on Paradise Lost. Addison had been anticipated in praise of Milton by Dennis, who a few years earlier (chiefly in The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, 1704) had taken many of his examples from Paradise Lost to illustrate the importance of sublimity and enthusiasm in poetry.⁷ Neither Addison nor Steele, of course, held Dennis in high esteem, and although Dennis does anticipate the Spectator in a few points, Addison's series of papers, covering systematically the whole poem and written with more literary grace, was undoubtedly of greater importance in advancing Milton's reputation throughout the century and making Paradise Lost better understood and appreciated by the ordinary cultivated reader.⁸ By the middle of the century the Lives of the Poets published under Theophilus Cibber's name could affirm that owing to Addison's papers ‘it had become even unfashionable not to have read’ Milton. The prestige which they long maintained is suggested by Thomas Newton's statement in the Preface to his edition of Paradise Lost in 1749.

It was recommended to me indeed to print entire Mr. Addison's Spectators upon the Paradise Lost, as ingenious essays which had contributed greatly to the reputation of the poem, and having been added to several editions they could not well be omitted in this edition: and accordingly those papers, which treat of the poem in general, are prefixed in the nature of a preliminary discourse; and those, which are written upon each book separately, are inserted under each book, and interwoven in their proper places.

The eighteen essays were collected and further revised in 1719, as Notes upon the Twelve Books of Paradise Lost, written by Mr. Addison. A French translation was frequently reprinted with French editions of Milton's poem, notably by Louis Racine in 1755.

So far as we know, these essays—published on Saturdays from January to May 1712—were written directly for publication in the Spectator. For his other extended series of critical essays, those on ‘the pleasures of the imagination’, Addison drew on an earlier work, composed probably during his college days.⁹ As the work of a young man, written presumably for the eye of a college tutor, it is a remarkable document, going as it does directly to the problem of the imaginative response to art. In the essay on taste (No. 409), which Addison composed as an introduction to the series, he relates the inquiry to the general movement of reform he had undertaken in earlier Spectator essays, particularly those on false wit.

I have endeavoured in several of my Speculations to banish this Gothic taste which has taken possession among us. I entertained the town for a week together with an essay upon wit, in which I endeavoured to detect several of those false kinds which have been admired in the different ages of the world; and at the same time to show wherein the nature of true wit consists. I afterwards gave an instance of the great force which lies in a natural simplicity of thought to affect the mind of the reader, from such vulgar pieces as have little else besides this single qualification to recommend them. I have likewise examined the works of the greatest poet which our nation or perhaps any other has produced, and particularized most of those rational and manly beauties which give a value to that divine work. I shall next Saturday enter upon an essay on the pleasures of the imagination. …

These ‘pleasures’, it is clear from the context, are those which the mind receives in response to outside stimuli—from scenes of external nature or from the productions of art—the kind of thing that moves it strongly, which ‘lifts it out of itself’, which ‘elevates and astonishes the fancy’ (No. 409). Imagination, as used here, is not the creative faculty of the poet, but the mind's apprehension of sense-impressions or ‘phantasms’.¹⁰ We find ourselves moved in a pleasurable way by certain kinds of natural scenery, by certain kinds of poetry, painting, architecture, and so on. What are these kinds, and why is the response to them pleasing?

The sensation is immediate and spontaneous. ‘It is but the opening of the eye and the scene enters. … We are struck we know not how, with the symmetry of any thing we see, and immediately assent to the beauty of an object.’ Those which are striking because of their novelty, or their grandeur and size, or their symmetry and colour (the uncommon, the great, and the beautiful) arouse emotions which are pleasurable, even though the pleasure may be mixed with melancholy and sorrow, or with apprehension and terror.

Not only here but throughout the Spectator one notes how frequently Addison calls attention to the effects of outward phenomena upon the mind. In one essay he remembers the ‘pleasing astonishment’ and ‘agreeable horror’ inspired by the ocean,¹¹ in others the vastness of the heavens and the universe, ‘adorned with stars and meteors’.¹² The beauty of the country ‘disposes us to be serious’,¹³ particularly the ‘rude kind of magnificence’ in mountains and precipices, and other ‘stupendous works of nature’.¹⁴ At Sir Roger de Coverley's country place the ivy-covered ruined abbey and other rural scenes ‘naturally raise seriousness and attention’, especially when ‘night heightens the awfulness of the place’.¹⁵ The world of minute nature revealed by the microscope also fills the mind with a pleasurable awe.¹⁶ Devotion ‘opens the mind to great conceptions’,¹⁷ and the reading of poetry awakens the mind to a pleasurable exercise and the realization of its capacities. ‘The reader comes in for half of the performance’ and is ‘both a reader and a composer’.¹⁸

Addison's purpose, he had said in No. 409, was to determine ‘the several sources of that pleasure which rises in the mind upon the perusal of a noble work’, and in the series on the pleasures of the imagination he applies these categories of the Great, the Uncommon, and the Beautiful to the works respectively of Homer, Ovid, and Virgil—and, as he says, to a writer who combines the three in his own work, namely Milton. Here, as throughout the Spectator, what is noteworthy is not so much the originality of the ideas as the ease and sureness with which they are expressed, in terminology and with illustrations readily understood by the common reader.

Homer strikes the imagination with scenes of violence and heroic greatness, so that he often inspires terror; Virgil, with his peculiar note of beauty tinged with melancholy, often leaves the reader with a sensation of sadness and pity (what the French critics call the tendre); while Ovid, particularly in the enchanted ground of the Metamorphoses, affects the imagination with a pleasing sense of the uncommon and strange. These sensations are directly felt, and their province is that of the imagination, not the reason or judgement. They are not to be discovered by the formal critic, who is likely to judge by rules and hence to find imperfections while overlooking ‘concealed beauties’ (No. 291). Throughout the critical papers in the Spectator one finds the assumption that two kinds of writers exist—the ‘little genius’ who obeys all the rules, and the great ‘natural genius’ whose work, though it may violate the critic's standards, universally pleases. (No. 160, on the two kinds of genius, gives the most complete statement of this point, in a comparison between the learned and the natural genius.) ‘Our inimitable Shakespeare is a stumbling-block to the whole tribe of these rigid critics. Who would not rather read one of his plays, where there is not a single rule of the stage observed, than any production of a modern critic, where there is not one of them violated?’ (No. 592.)

The series on the pleasures of the imagination, then, may be considered the foundation for the whole programme of reform undertaken by the Spectator, so far as criticism is concerned. The first precept in poetry is to please (No. 592), and the greatest artists are not those who conform to rule but those whole beauties are to be apprehended by the universal consent of mankind. The principles of the arts, Addison had written in an early number of the Spectator, are to be deduced ‘from the general sense and taste of mankind, and not from the principles of those arts themselves; or in other words, the taste is not to conform to the art, but the art to the taste’ (No. 29).

In stressing simplicity and universality of appeal the Spectator was, of course, expressing the central doctrine of neo-classicism, but in his emphasis on taste and what has recently been called ‘the perspective of receptivity’,¹⁹ Addison, more than any other critic of his time, opened up a line of speculation which was to gain increasing adherence in the time of Wordsworth. His critical essays, in short, not only stated perfectly the dominant opinion in his own day but charted paths which others were to follow.

Wherever we go in eighteenth-century criticism, whatever the specific subject of speculation, we almost invariably find that Addison has been there. If it is Hutcheson on beauty and aesthetic response, we find parallels to or echoes of Addison's ‘Pleasures of the Imagination’; if it is Burke on taste and sublimity and beauty, Young and Tucker on original genius, Hume and Gerard, and Kames, Blair and Alison on taste, imagination, sublimity and novelty, the association of ideas and original genius, we are again in the presence of theory partially developed or at least adumbrated in the Spectator papers.²⁰

It is worth noting, finally, that these critical essays (with the exception of the series on the pleasures of the imagination) were written as articles for a daily paper rather than as chapters in a formal treatise. They are addressed not to the world of the learned but to the ordinary man and woman, to be read in the coffee-house or at the tea-table. Addison was well aware of the difficulties in such writing. ‘We must immediately fall into our subject and treat every part of it in a lively manner, or our papers are thrown by as dull and insipid. Our matter must lie close together, and either be wholly new in itself, or in the turn it receives from our expressions’ (No. 124). It was, in fact, this very informality that made them so popular on their first appearance, and helped to create a taste for reading among many who had hitherto taken little heed of ‘literature’. What Johnson said of Addison's papers on Milton is true of the entire range of critical essays.

Had he presented Paradise Lost to the public with all the pomp of system and severity of science, the criticism would perhaps have been admired, and the poem still have been neglected; but by the blandishments of gentleness and facility he has made Milton an universal favourite, with which readers of every class think it necessary to be pleased.

Notes

1. Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays, ed. George Watson (Everyman's Library, 1962), i. 196-7. The sentence quoted earlier is from the Life of Lucian published in 1711 (ii. 213).

2. One may compare the general remarks on criticism and critics in Spectator 291 (pages 80-3 of the present volume). Molière, whom Addison must have read, had expressed similar views in the Critique de l'École des femmes. See K. E. Wheatley in RES, N.S. 1 (1950), 245-7.

3. The Narrative of Dr. Robert Norris (Pope's Prose Works, ed. Norman Ault, i. 166).

4. E. N. Hooker, Critical Works of Dennis, ii. 435-6.

5. Although this number is unsigned, it is almost certainly the work of Addison himself. Curiously enough, it has more than once been ascribed to Dennis. On the general subject see Arthur N. Wilkins, ‘John Dennis and Poetic Justice’, N & Q, 102 (1957), 421-4; and Amrih Singh, ‘The Argument on Poetic Justice (Addison versus Dennis)’, Indian Journal of English Studies, 3 (1962), 61-77.

6. Cf. R. L. Morris, ‘Addison's mixt wit’, MLN, 57 (1942), 666-8.

7. For a general discussion of the subject see the long note (i. 511-14) in Hooker's Critical Works of John Dennis, which lists the passages in Paradise Lost selected for praise by both Dennis and Addison (less than a dozen in all), and points out aspects of the poem in which both critics concur.

8. ‘Almost every turn of thought in Addison's mind seems to have found some illustration in Paradise Lost; and he had the ability to make others feel this vital connection between Milton and all that was most worth thinking about in life’ (John Walter Good, Studies in the Milton Tradition (University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, Vol. I, nos. 3-4, 1915), p. 153). See further Raymond D. Havens, The Influence of Milton in English Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1922), Ch. i.

9. The manuscript, now in the library of Harvard University, was first published by J. Dykes Campbell in 1864. It contains a number of revisions, made probably at the time Addison divided the material for publication as daily essays in the Spectator.

10. A writer a few years later than the Spectator defines it as ‘that faculty which presents to the mind's view the images or ideas of external sensible objects, or by which the mind perceives them’ (Zachary Mayne, Two Dissertations concerning Sense and the Imagination, 1728, pp. 69-70).

11. ‘[Of all objects] there is none which affects my imagination so much as the sea or ocean’ (No. 489).

12. Nos. 565, 412.

13. ‘In our retirements every thing disposes us to be serious; in courts and cities we are entertained with the works of man, in the country with those of God’ (No. 465).

14. No. 412.

15. No. 110.

16. ‘Every part of matter is peopled; every green leaf swarms with inhabitants’ (No. 519).

17. No. 201.

18. ‘The mind is never so much pleased as when she exerts her self in any action that gives her an idea of her own perfections and abilities’ (No. 512).

19. ‘Addison has well formulated what we may call the perspective of receptivity’ (Herbert Dieckmann, ‘Esthetic Theory and Criticism in the Enlightenment: Some Examples of Modern Trends’, in Introduction to Modernity: A Symposium on Eighteenth Century Thought, ed. Robert Mollenauer (Austin, 1965), p. 73. Professor Dieckmann points out the shift of emphasis at this time, ‘away from the consideration of the work of art itself and the norms to which it has to conform, towards the study of the process of its creation, the faculties that create it, and towards the response to art, that is, towards the nature of esthetic pleasure’.

20. C. D. Thorpe, ‘Addison's Contribution to Criticism’, in The Seventeenth Century: Studies in the History of English Thought and Literature from Bacon to Pope, by Richard Foster Jones and Others Writing in his Honor (Stanford, 1951), p. 324.