[In the essay that follows, Bateson credits Richard Steele with the invention of the periodical essay but argues that it was Joseph Addison's brilliant prose style that assured the success of the genre.]

I

The crucial innovations in a literature occur when some sub-literary form—such as the folk-song, the popular sermon, the melodramatic romance, to give three familiar examples—ceases to be ‘trash’ and becomes the vehicle of aesthetic experience. The ultimate causes of such a metamorphosis are usually traceable to some cataclysm in the particular society where it occurs, or at any rate in some change in its ruling class or dominant groups. But between the social revolution and the emergence of the new literary form which is its by-product a temporal interval must apparently occur. Augustan satire was essentially an after-effect on the literary plane of what might be called the Royalist resistance movement to the Commonwealth; but though its political sources go back to the 1640s the satire itself does not find effective literary expression before Butler's Hudibras (Part I, 1662). Restoration comedy, which came to its maturity in the 1670s, was the product of a second wave in the anti-Puritan reaction that followed the return of Charles II from France. The eighteenth-century periodical essay, on the other hand, was the result of a reaction against that reaction. Addison and Steele were both Whigs, and the emergence of The Tatler, twenty years after the Glorious Revolution that had expelled the Stuarts and established a constitutional monarchy, was its aesthetic after-product. The sub-literature out of which the periodical essay evolved was, of course, the polemical journalism of the later seventeenth century. But the political function of that journalism had ceased with the discrediting of the Jacobite cause. The stage was now set, therefore, for a higher journalism, which could rebuke or reform the individual rather than the nation, one that was moral and social in its objectives rather than political, and with some innocent entertainment not altogether precluded. And under these new conditions the sub-literature of Restoration journalism became Augustan literature. Steele may be called the engineer of the transition—though there had been one or two periodicals of amusement before The Tatler (those of Ned Ward and Peter Motteux, for example, and the curious ‘Scandal Club’ in Defoe's Review)—but its hero, its genius, was Addison.

II

The quality that immediately differentiates Joseph Addison (1672-1719) from all the rest of the Queen Anne's men is an elusive, perverse, Ariel-like refinement. ‘Who would not weep’, Pope asked in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot at the end of his brilliantly plausible caricature, ‘if Atticus were he?’ But Addison was not Atticus, even if Pope has done his malicious best to make us think he was. Somehow a rarer dimension in the man, of which Pope was only partly conscious, had got left out. The Victorians, who preferred him to Pope, were apt to identify Addison's refinement with their own gentility. Macaulay's long and still very readable essay¹ consists, apart from the biographical sections, of a series of testimonials to the morality of Addison's satire—‘the moral purity, which we find even in his merriment’, respectability somehow combined with a ‘wit more sparkling than the wit of Congreve, and … humour richer than the humour of Vanbrugh’. The last sentence of Macaulay's essay sums up the whole Victorian attitude. Addison, we are told, was the ‘great satirist, who alone knew how to use ridicule without abusing it, who, without inflicting a wound, effected a great social reform, and who reconciled wit and virtue, after a long and disastrous separation, during which wit has been led astray by profligacy, and virtue by fanaticism.’ And Thackeray's ‘Congreve and Addison’ in The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century (1853) is to the same general effect, if there is rather more emphasis on Addison's naturalness and gaiety and rather less on his morality. To both, however, his special distinction is to have rescued English humour from the obscenity of Restoration comedy. Addison's fun, they insist, was clean. What they did not ask, or if they did it was only intermittently and superficially, was whether the fun was more than a rescue operation.

The question was asked again some forty years ago by Bonamy Dobrée in a substantial essay² that is probably the best criticism we have of Addison, and the answer suggested that there is something unpleasant, almost neurotic, in his sense of humour because of the prevailing if unconscious condescension. In other words, Addison was too self-centred to be a true satirist. Atticus, according to Pope, ‘without sneering’ used to ‘teach the rest to sneer’. According to Dobrée, however, Addison himself is continually sneering—not perhaps at single identifiable individuals perhaps but at anybody and everybody, at the whole human race (especially that half of it that Addison called ‘the fair sex’). And why? Simply because they have not had the supreme good fortune apparently to be—Joseph Addison.

Dobrée, who was of the school of Lytton Strachey, made out a morally damning case against ‘The First Victorian’, as he calls Addison. A small but very effective point in that case was to point to the curious habit Addison had of inserting the epithet secret when there seems to be no real justification for it in the context: secret joy, secret pleasure, secret satisfaction, secret pride, secret approbation, and so on. The attitude to his contemporaries suggested by this recurrent stylistic tic is not an attractive one. Addison seems to be preening himself on being a sort of psychological know-all, an observer of his contemporaries who knows all their secrets—especially the discreditable ones that the human object under observation is unaware of himself. In the quarrel with Pope we find ourselves decidedly on Pope's side.

Addison's claim upon our critical attention is not, however, as the Victorians (and Dobrée too) tended to think, because of his personality but in spite of his personality. Nor does it rest primarily upon the brilliance of his satirical humour. As a humourist he is no better really than his school-fellow and coadjutor Steele, who in founding The Tatler in 1709 provided Addison with the ideal medium for the exhibition of his one supreme talent, which was the ability to write excellent English. Addison's prose style is probably the best, considered simply as style, in the whole range of English literature—more consistently excellent even than Shakespeare's, Dryden's, Sterne's, Matthew Arnold's, Bernard Shaw's or George Orwell's. And although, measured in the number of its words, a Tatler or a Spectator may not seem very long, it must be remembered that Addison's perfection of style in The Spectator, where it is most brilliant, had to be maintained three or even sometimes six times a week.

Johnson, who practised a prose style very different from Addison's, has said what is still faute de mieux the last word on this matter:

His prose is the model of the middle style; on grave subjects not formal, on light occasions not groveling; pure without scrupulosity and exact without apparent elaboration; always equable, and always easy, without glowing words or pointed sentences. Addison never deviates from his track to snatch a grace; he seeks no ambitious ornaments, and tries no hazardous innovations. His page is always luminous, but never blazes in unexpected splendour …

Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.³

What is this middle style in which Addison excelled? There is no text-book definition, but Johnson was presumably applying to prose the neo-classic gradation applied by critics such as the elder Scaliger to Greek and Latin poetry. The most highly respected genres—the epic, tragedy and the ‘great ode’ (such as Pindar's)—demanded a high or ‘sublime’ style, because they described the actions and conversations of princes and nobles. Next to them came comedy and satire, which were supposed to be restricted to the depiction of the urban middle class. The lowest form of drama or poetry in Renaissance critical theory, because it was theoretically limited to the description of farm-workers like shepherds, was the pastoral. Applied to prose the high style is characterized linguistically by long sentences, with many subordinate clauses, a polysyllabic vocabulary, and a general suggestion of artifice. The low style, on the other hand, was essentially colloquial. The period immediately preceding Addison and Steele had in fact been dominated by this ‘pert’ style, as Pope called it, which even penetrated into literary criticism in Thomas Rymer's vigorous attacks on Elizabethan drama (including Othello), and Jeremy Collier's pious onslaught on Restoration comedy. A popular preacher like Bunyan and a journalist like Defoe never employed anything but the low style, which is lively and immediately intelligible but without much subtlety.

Addison's middle style must be presumed to have combined in the eyes of Johnson the virtues of both the high and the low styles. It was not an accident that he was by birth of the upper-middle class (his father, Lancelot Addison, was a successful High Churchman who finally became Dean of Lichfield), even if by marrying in middle age the dowager Countess of Warwick he finally penetrated into the aristocracy. The special fascination however that Addison's style still exerts has never been satisfactorily explained. Macaulay was no doubt right in saying that ‘the mere choice and arrangement of his words would have sufficed to make his essays classical’, but as criticism the dictum does not take analysis very far. What is there specifically ‘classical’ about either Addison's choice of words or their arrangement? The eulogy floats ineffectively in the air.

The most elaborate of the eighteenth-century criticisms of Addison's style is that in Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), in which the first four of the essays in The Spectator on the pleasures of the imagination are subjected to a prolonged scrutiny. But Blair's method is to proceed sentence by sentence and either improve on it, as he imagined, or else pronounce it unimprovable and ‘elegant’. Blair was the Professor of Rhetoric at Edinburgh and spoke broad Scots, as we know from Boswell, and his comments need not therefore be taken very seriously. It is precisely in the clash between colloquial speech and ‘learned’ English, or more strictly, by the exploitation of such verbal clashes, that Addison's stylistic brilliance seems to consist, just as his ‘delicacy’—a term that he borrowed from his favourite French critic Bouhours—lies in his refusal to over-exploit such contrasts.

A few examples will illustrate the point. A characteristic passage in The Tatler, no. 116, concludes (after poking fun at some contemporary extravagances of feminine fashion such as the hooped petticoat):

I consider woman as a beautiful romantic animal, that may be adorned with furs and feathers, pearls and diamonds, ores and silks. The lynx shall cast its skin at her feet to make her a tippet; the peacock, parrot, and swan shall pay contributions to her muff; the sea shall be searched for shells, and the rocks for gems; and every part of nature furnish out its share towards the embellishment of a creature that is the most consummate work of it.

Here the ambivalence of Addison's attitude to women, which is similar to that of Pope in The Rape of the Lock, is reflected in the mocking contrast between the elaborate paratactic clauses and their homely objects—a tippet and a muff. A woman is an animal, a sub-human creature, but ‘a beautiful romantic animal’, an animal who is also the lovely princess in a romance. The clash between compliment and disparagement is epitomized in the two words animal (colloquial) and romantic (a non-popular word only introduced into the language in 1650, which had already bifurcated into a eulogistic sense, ‘exciting like a romance’, and a dyslogistic sense, ‘impossible to credit like a romance’). The ‘delicacy’ of the passage lies in its equipoise of statement and irony. Addison does not commit himself one way or the other and the two antithetic connotations are allowed to add piquancy to each other.

The description of Will Wimble in The Spectator, no. 108, is a stylistic masterpiece in another genre. Will's letter to Sir Roger de Coverley is blunt and particularized. Later on in the essay we are provided with other similar concrete details such as the tulip-root in his pocket, the puppies that he exchanges, and the garters that he knits for the mothers or sisters of his friends. But the particularity is again given piquancy by the elaborateness of the syntax, as in the following passage:

He hunts a Pack of Dogs better than any Man in the Country, and is very famous for finding out a Hare. He is extremely well versed in all the little Handicrafts of an idle Man: He makes a May-fly to a Miracle; and furnishes the whole Country with Angle-Rods.

On the one hand we are presented with convincingly concrete details of country life. A real river still runs at the bottom of the rectory garden in Wiltshire where he was born and grew up, and the flies and fishing rods that Will makes are clearly drawn from the life. On the other hand, the verbal skill Addison displays in finding a different formula for praising each of Will Wimble's several activities is breath-taking (in ‘He makes a May-fly to a Miracle’ alliteration is added to variation). A brilliant rhetorician is unostentatiously at work as well as a man with his eye firmly fixed on rural objects. The two approaches are not strictly compatible with each other; the fascination lies in this persuasive incompatibility.

Addison was much more of a poet in his prose than in his poems. The Campaign (1705), the poem written to celebrate Marlborough's victory at Blenheim, is unreadable today, its simile of the angel and the storm, which was greatly admired at the time, surviving, in so far as it survives at all, as a characteristic specimen of the bogus neo-classicism of the period. Cato (1713), Addison's Racinian tragedy, is better but it is still at best second-rate. Matthew Arnold's notorious pronouncement that ‘Dryden and Pope are not classics of our poetry, they are classics of our prose’⁴ might be inverted in Addison's case. He is a classic of our poetry by virtue of his prose. What we are aware of in Addison's best prose is not the subject-matter but the inevitable, apparently effortless sequence of the best words in the best order. But considered simply as subject-matter what the modern reader is most conscious of in Addison's essays is their triviality. Their author had an uninteresting mind. Although the illusion of thinking, the parade of philosophy, is frequently proffered—especially in the Saturday essays in The Spectator, which were intended to provide edifying matter for the following Sunday—the barrenness of the thought-processes is distressingly evident. Addison discusses almost every subject under the sun and he has nothing original or stimulating to say about any of them. But, as far as his literary status is concerned, does this ultimately matter? Ought it to matter?

The proper critical approach to the problem set by the best of Addison's Spectator essays is that adopted by T. S. Eliot in What is a Classic? Macaulay had used the term, but he had failed to define it. Eliot, however, has suggested four criteria that a work of literature must satisfy if it is to be admitted into the rank of the classics. The relevance of the four tests to the difficulties that the modern reader unquestionably has in not liking Addison is that they are essentially extra-personal. Eliot demands ‘maturity of mind, maturity of manners, maturity of language and perfection of the common style’ in his ideal literary classic, but the crux of his argument is that these qualities must reside in a society rather than in any one member of it. In the long history of English literature such a society has only existed once, according to Eliot—and its representative individual ought to be Pope. But Pope won't do because of the limitations of his verse, and Eliot has to content himself with the lame conclusion that in England ‘we have no classic age and no classic poet’, though Pope is as it were a near-miss for one.⁵

Addison's name only occurs once in Eliot's essay, which was primarily concerned with ‘What is a Classic?’ in poetry. But if classical prose is included, as it clearly must be in any adequate definition, Addison is a much more plausible representative of the English classic moment than Pope. If, as Eliot asserts, ‘the realization of classical qualities by Pope was obtained at a high price—to the exclusion of some greater potentialities of English verse’,⁶ the objection does not apply equally to Addison's prose considered simply as a medium. Eliot's further point that the nearest thing we have in English to the perfection of a common style in poetry comparable to Dante's or Racine's is again Pope is also challenged by Addison. Eliot's criterion for such a common style is ‘one which makes us exclaim, not “this is a man of genius using the language” but “this realizes the genius of the language”’. And this is exactly the impression that Addison's prose gives. This is a prose style that does realize the potential genius of the English language.

But to Eliot's four criteria a fifth may be added, whether it is a question of classical poetry or of classical prose. The fifth criterion can only be applied with the hindsight of literary history, but it is none the less crucial—more important perhaps in the long run than any of Eliot's tests. A classical style must look backwards to earlier styles in the language and cognate tongues (Latin, for example), but it must also look forward—and this is where an individual writer's stylistic genius or intuition becomes relevant—to what is to come in the immediate future. The seeds of the future were in Addison's loins; in Pope, on the other hand, the early pre-romantic aspirations were crude and melodramatic, as he came to recognize himself:

Soft were my Numbers; who could take offence
While pure Description held the place of Sense?

To a literary critic what is of special interest about Addison is the degree to which he seems to anticipate almost all the significant developments of the next hundred and fifty years of English literature. The prose style, as it detaches itself from both its author and its content, almost jumps a century and a half to la poésie pure. As Walter Pater recommended, it has begun to aspire to the condition of music. But his boldest critical gesture was to take up the cause of the popular ballad. The essays on a ‘Chevy Chase’ (The Spectator, nos. 70, 74) are a milestone in the history of literary taste. The contrast between them and the eighteen papers on Paradise Lost (beginning with no. 267) is between the forward-looking and the backward-looking mode of criticism. Addison is accomplished at both. As a critic of Milton Addison was applying at length if in a more readable form the commonplaces of French criticism, particularly those of Le Bossu, which were themselves derived from the sixteenth-century Italian commentators on Aristotle's Poetics. Addison, who had read almost everything, quotes the inevitable tribute from Sir Philip Sidney's The Defence of Poesy: ‘Certainly I must confess mine own barbarousness; I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet. …’ There is no doubt a similar theoretical contradiction between Sidney's neo-classicism and what he looked into his heart and read. But in Sidney the rude style of the blind minstrel to which he responded with such surprising intensity is an incidental lapse from the central argument; with Addison two whole essays are devoted entirely to ‘Chevy Chase’, and although some parallel passages are cited from the Aeneid there is no suggestion that the noble ‘simplicity’ of the ballad is inferior to Vergil. An even bolder essay in rehabilitation is The Spectator, no. 85 on ‘The Babes in the Wood’, which Addison calls ‘The Two Children in the Wood’. Although the ballad, which is now classified as a broadside or street ballad and is excluded as such from Child's great collection, is not actually quoted by Addison as ‘Chevy Chase’ had been, it is described as ‘a plain simple Copy of Nature’ exhibiting genuine and unaffected sentiments that are able ‘to move the Mind of the most polite Reader with inward Meltings of Humanity and Compassion’. What could be less neo-classic? The fact that Wordsworth quoted a stanza from this ballad in the preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads is a striking confirmation of the incipient Romanticism in Addison. The gap between him and a typical Augustan is indicated by Gay's Bowzybeus, the drunken protagonist in the ‘Saturday’ of his The Shepherd's Week (1714). Bowzybeus is about as ‘low’ a figure as any in Augustan satire and two of the songs he sings when drunk are ‘The Children in the Wood’ and ‘Chevy Chase’, both of which are paraphrased in some detail. What was pathetic and even ‘noble’ to Addison was merely ridiculous to Gay, Swift and Pope. Swift, it may be remembered, wrote a number of ballads, but their initial assumption was always that a ballad degrades whatever it describes. The critical volte face that Addison's admiration for the popular or street ballad implies—and that was to make possible not only Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) but also ‘The Ancient Mariner’ and ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’—was revolutionary in its consequences.

Addison's ‘Romanticism’ can also be detected in his interest in the creative imagination, in which he is the tentative precursor of Coleridge, though The Spectator, no. 411, which initiates the series on the pleasures of the imagination, refuses to distinguish between imagination and fancy (‘which I shall use promiscuously’). The use of dreams, notably in the Vision of Mirza (The Spectator, no. 159), as a literary genre also makes Addison a precursor of De Quincey. By restricting ‘imagination’ to the visual imagination Addison is also in effect an enthusiastic prophet of ‘the picturesque’, including even landscape gardening (no. 414). And the predilection for ‘amiable’ humour rather than satire made him an important influence, especially through the de Coverley series (The Spectator, nos. 106 ff.), on the nineteenth-century novel. (Sir Roger paradoxically was a Tory whereas Addison was a prominent Whig.)

In spite of an unattractive personality, then, Addison retains his place in English literature by virtue of his brilliant prose style. His importance in English literary history is also assured: English Romanticism was, it is not too much to say, almost his invention. Or, if that is an overstatement, at least the progress to Romanticism in England was decidedly facilitated by his influence.

Until wine had loosened Addison's tongue his contemporaries—he had no intimate friends, though he had many protégés—found it impossible to penetrate his reserve. The marriage late in life to the Countess of Warwick was a disastrous failure. Even Steele, who had thought himself a friend (they had been at Charterhouse and Oxford together) quarrelled with him in the end. A statement made by Pope to Spence in April 1739 may partly explain the psychological problem Addison's character poses. According to Spence what Pope said was this:

Addison and Steele [were] a couple of H——s. I am sorry to say so, and there are not twelve people in the world that I would say it to at all.⁷

By ‘H——s’ Pope seems to have meant ‘hermaphrodites’, the usual term in the eighteenth century for a homosexual. The fact, if it is a fact, may explain the curious animus against women, except as objects of ornament, to which Dobrée has called attention. ‘His intuition’ Dobrée writes, ‘warned him against commerce with the fair sex, which, however, he never ceased to ridicule or try to improve. For although he knew their nature was antipathetic to his, it was not altogether foreign; some effeminacy in his own nature made them strangely fascinating to him; he could not leave them alone in his essays.’ Dobrée's essay incidentally was published some forty years before Spence's note was made public. Another modern commentator has called attention to the apologies with which Addison tempers his misogyny: ‘It is as if this misogyny of Addison's was pathological, the product not of conviction but of some psychological ‘fault’, and that Addison himself, in his waking moments, was dismayedly conscious of the exaggerations he could not help falling into.⁸ The neurotic element in Addison's psyche provides for the literary critic one more link between the ‘pure poetry’ of his essays and the subjectivism of the typical Romantic. The pearls presuppose a morbid secretion in the originating shell-fish.

III

It is difficult to believe that Sir Richard Steele (1672-1729) was a ‘H—’. Spence's editor refers us to the angry interchange with Addison in The Old Whig and The Plebeian, two rival short-lived periodicals that the old collaborators conducted in 1719, primarily, it would almost seem, to throw mud at each other in public. In the second number of The Plebeian Steele significantly introduced a digression on the homosexual ephors of Sparta, though, as he at least asserts, without intending ‘the least appearance of personal reflection.’

The innuendo is typical of Steele's heavy-handed methods. There is nothing Addisonian here, or indeed, except superficially, in anything else that he wrote. His letters to his ‘Prue’ (whose real name was Mary) convince us that he was an affectionate husband. That she was an heiress—as his first wife had also been, who died only two years after she had become Mrs. Steele—and a ‘cried-up beauty’ (as Kneller's portrait demonstrates) must be conceded. And the interval between the death of the first wife and the marriage to the second was perhaps too short (about six months). But the long series of letters now in the British Museum to his ‘absolute governess’ show that the absence of subtlety and refinement was compensated for by a natural sincerity and kindness of heart. Steele is much more likeable than Addison; he is not in the same class as a writer. And he is quite without the fineness of touch and delicacy of feeling, both as man and as writer, that characterize Addison.

It may seem paradoxical to accuse Steele of coarseness, since he was continually pounding the moral drum. But there is a crudity in the critical gospel that he preaches that convicts him of a lack of literary sensibility. The paper on Etherege's The Man of Mode (The Spectator, no. 65) is a typical Puritan denunciation; it concludes as follows:

To speak plainly 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.

Steele's sentimental comedies—of which the first, The Funeral (1701), is much the best—are practical dramatic applications of this formula. Everything possible is done to gloss over the corruptness of human nature, and the spectators are incited to enjoy their tears over any corruptions that remain.

Steele's place in the text-books is probably a higher one than he deserves. If he is to be defended the merit to insist on is a certain sturdy independence. The kind of sentimental comedy that he practised is different from that of his immediate predecessors—Colley Cibber's, for example, or George Farquhar's—because it is clearly not motivated by mere box-office considerations. Steele wanted to say something. Unfortunately he had not the specific literary talent required to develop his intuitions; his last comedy, The Conscious Lovers (1722), is undoubtedly his worst just as the later essays are also inferior to the early ones.

But Steele did invent the periodical essay. Addison was in Ireland, the secretary of the Lord Lieutenant, when Steele launched The Tatler (no. 1, 12 April 1709) and he has no share in the innovation on the exploitation of which his own reputation now rests. If Steele owed anything to anybody—apart from his own nose for a possibly profitable speculation (the furnaces that he built a few years earlier to produce a ‘philosopher's stone’ had not been profitable)—it was to Swift. The first number like all the succeeding numbers is headed ‘By Isaac Bickerstaff Esq.^re’ and the connection with Swift's Bickerstaff Papers (1708-9), is explicitly made in its section headed ‘From my own Apartment’, which ends with this advertisement:

‘A Vindication of ISAAC BICKERSTAFF, Esq. against what is objected to him by Mr. Partridge in his Almanack for the present year 1709.’ By the said ISAAC BICKERSTAFF, Esq. London, printed in the year 1709.

The pamphlet advertised was the last of Swift's Bickerstaff papers and demonstrated in his best ironical manner that Partridge (whose death on March the 29th 1708 had been foretold in the first Bickerstaff pamphlet) was really dead in spite of Partridge's own protests that he was still alive. Steele also paid a special tribute, in the preface to the fourth volume of The Tatler, to Swift ‘whose pleasant writings, in the name of BICKERSTAFF, created an inclination in the town towards any thing that could appear in the same disguise.’ He admitted a further debt ‘at my first entering upon this work’ to ‘a certain uncommon way of thinking, and a turn in conversation peculiar’ to Swift that ‘rendered his company very advantageous to one whose imagination was to be continually employed upon obvious and common subjects.’ The ‘uncommon way of thinking’ was a more important stimulus than the persona of the astrologist.

Swift's voice is continually making itself heard in the early numbers of The Tatler, which bear something of the same relation to the newspapers of the time that Bickerstaff's Predictions for the Year 1708 bear to the contemporary almanacs. The dry ironic tone is as unmistakable as the continuous suggestion of parody. It must be remembered that the original sheets of The Tatler looked exactly like the common-or-garden newspaper. Like The Daily Courant, The Observator and The Flying Post, it was printed in double columns on both sides of a single folio sheet of paper. It came out, like The Evening Post, The Post Boy and Defoe's Review, three times a week—on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. If there was any difference it was that The Tatler was more carelessly printed and on even worse paper than its less literary competitors.

The disguise of a mock-newspaper has all the outward signs of Swift's satiric technique. The title may even be due to Swift. To tattle meant more at the time than to gossip; it included the probability that the gossip was false and malicious—a sense immortalized in Mr. Tattle of Congreve's Love for Love (1695), one of the most popular plays of the period and, as it happens, one specially commended by Steele in no. 1. To Swift the news reported in newspapers was precisely tattle, whereas Steele, much of whose income at this time was derived from his official post as Gazeteer or editor of The London Gazette, can hardly have been as sceptical of the contents of newspapers. Elsewhere too, in these early numbers, though the pen was always Steele's, the words are sometimes Swift's. The promise made in no. 4 to publish a treatise against operas, with ‘a very elaborate digression upon the London cries, wherein he [a great critic] has shown from reason and philosophy why oysters are cried, card-matches sung, and turnips and all other vegetables neither cried, sung nor said but sold with an accent and tone neither natural to man or beast’ has been identified by Swift's latest editor as essentially Swiftian. The list could easily be extended.

There are good things in the early numbers of The Tatler, but it is formless and too heterogeneous in its subject-matter. The initial formula was to use White's Chocolate-House as the source of ‘accounts of gallantry, pleasure and entertainment’, with Will's Coffee-House, where Dryden had lorded it ten years earlier, for poetry, the Grecian in the Strand for learning, and St. James's Coffee-House for foreign and domestic news. And ‘what else I shall offer’ from Mr. Bickerstaff's own apartment. Steele was living at the time in Bury Street, Piccadilly, with all the coffee-houses at a convenient distance. He was of the genial, sociable temperament that one associates with those of Anglo-Irish origin (he was born in Dublin), and a coffee-house (where stronger liquors than coffee or chocolate were also obtainable) was his natural element. But the retailer of coffee-house news was finding it difficult to double the part with that of Bickerstaff, the eccentric astrologer (who has a familiar spirit called Pacolet in his service). It was fortunate that Addison came to his rescue at this point.

Addison penetrated Bickerstaff's disguise on reading the sixth number. Steele had repeated there an observation made to him by Addison himself many years before to the effect that Virgil had shown his discrimination in not calling Aeneas pius or pater, the standard epithets, in the cave episode with Dido where he substituted dux Trojanus instead, ‘for he very well knew a loose action might be consistent enough with the usual manners of a soldier, though it became neither the chastity of a pious man nor the gravity of the father of a people’.

Addison's first contribution to The Tatler was the account of ‘the Distress of the News-Writers’ in no. 18. The exact number of papers or parts of papers for which he was responsible is not known. It was certainly more than the 62 papers (out of a total of 271) printed by Tickell, Addison's literary executor, in the collected edition of Addison's writings that was published in 1721, immediately after his death. Nevertheless, measured quantitatively The Tatler is undoubtedly mainly Steele's. It also includes most of his best writing, such as the touching account of his father's death in no. 181:

The first sense of sorrow I ever knew was upon the death of my father, at which time I was not quite five years of age; but was rather amazed at what all the house meant, than possessed with a real understanding why nobody was willing to play with me. I remember I went into the room where his body lay, and my mother sat weeping alone by it. I had my battledore in my hand, and fell a-beating the coffin, and calling Papa; for, I know not how, I had some slight idea that he was locked up there. My mother catched me in her arms, and, transported beyond all patience of the silent grief she was before in, she almost smothered me in her embraces and told me in a flood of tears, ‘Papa could not hear me, and would play with me no more, for they were going to put him under ground, whence he could never come to us again.’ She was a very beautiful woman, of a noble spirit …

Such autobiographical passages are unfortunately rare, and most of the essays—on duelling, on fashionable visits, on the education of girls, on the evils of drinking—now have a merely historical interest. Addison's beneficent influence can be recognized in the trend away from disconnected episodes based on the separate coffee-houses and with each number now becoming a single coherent essay. But for the modern reader there is too much Steele, especially too much of Steele the moralist, and too little of Addison and Swift.

Between Steele's terminating The Tatler (2 January 1711) and the first number of The Spectator (1 March 1711) the interval in time was short. The crucial difference—apart from the change from three numbers a week to six—was that the supply of ‘copy’ was now divided equally and on equal terms between Addison and Steele, instead of Steele paying Addison for whatever material he provided. Altogether there were 555 numbers to 6 December 1712, the last number being again signed by Steele who pays a proper tribute to Addison in it, though again as in the last paper of The Tatler without mentioning his name. Addison contributed 251 essays; Steele's total is also 251 essays. (Friends and correspondents, some of them not identifiable now, provided the other 53 papers.) Qualitatively, however, Steele's essays are not in the same class. The coarseness of spiritual fibre almost always present in Steele's work is exemplified in three heavy-handed essays in the Sir Roger de Coverley series. The perverse widow (no. 113) who still fascinates the elderly Sir Roger is drawn with spirit, but the comedy is much too obvious. In no. 118 Steele returns to her and the dangerous influence of confidants, but here the point has to be reinforced by Sir Roger's game-keeper who is discovered sitting by the side of his inamorata by ‘a transparent fountain’ in which his Betty is reflected. Sir Roger and the Spectator overhear the game-keeper addressing the reflection:

Oh thou dear Picture, if thou could'st remain there in the Absence of that fair Creature whom you repreent in the Water, how willingly could I stand here satisfied for ever. …

And so on for half an unconvincing page. Apparently Betty had been listening to the spiteful gossip of Kate Willow about the game-keeper and Susan Holliday. The modern reader cannot help comparing Sir Roger's pompous game-keeper with the idiom of Lady Chatterley's lover.

Steele shows himself a competent enough journalist in The Spectator, but rarely much more than that. The moralizing is what The Tatler has prepared us for—the art of pleasing, the right choice in marriage, the relationship between parents and children, and similar topics—and though Steele's attitude is always humane the actual presentation shows no advance. Steele had been deprived of his Gazeteership by Harley and the items of foreign news that are a distracting element in The Tatler were no longer available for The Spectator. Their place tends to be taken, however, by letters sometimes written by Steele himself and sometimes—to judge by specimens still extant at Blenheim Palace—by genuine letters from readers that Steele has touched up. As literature most of the numbers for which he was responsible are at best second-rate. The Spectator survives in spite of Steele and because of Addison. The judgement is one that it would be futile to question.

IV

The periodical essay was an immediate success as a literary genre. Between the first number of The Tatler and the end of the eighteenth century no less than 314 imitations made a longer or shorter appearance (excluding The Spectator itself). And the editor/authors included such eminent literary or political figures as Swift, Lord Bolingbroke, Fielding, Lord Chesterfield, Christopher Smart, Smollett, John Wilkes, ‘Junius’, Burke, Boswell, Canning and Coleridge. But only two or three series merit special discussion or reference in this chapter.

The Guardian was the immediate successor of The Spectator with Steele again the nominal editor, and only 51 of its 175 numbers were by Addison. The lesser contributors included Berkeley, already established as the most original philosopher of the age, and Young, the future author of Night Thoughts. But only one essay in The Guardian is still remembered. This is Pope's devastating mock-eulogy of the pastorals of Ambrose Philips, a special favourite of Addison's, which is accompanied by a mock-depreciation of his own pastorals that had been pointedly ignored by Tickell, another Addisonian, in an earlier series of papers on the pastoral. The essay (no. 40) needs to be read in its entirety for its comic impudence to be appreciated. Steele did not, apparently, realize the hilarious implications of the ‘simplicity’ Pope professed to be praising.

The Guardian ran from 12 March to 1 October 1713. On 18 June 1714 Addison revived The Spectator for a further 80 numbers, but this time without Steele who was now deeply engaged in politics. Addison's twenty-five essays are pleasantly written, as indeed are those in The Guardian, but they cannot compete with the best essays in The Spectator.

Addison's immediate successors in the periodical essay suffer from being too Addisonian. The elegance of the middle style has been diluted in the process of imitation. It is only with the arrival of The Rambler in 1750 that a new note is to be heard. But what is of most interest in The Rambler does not come from what it owes to the periodical essay tradition but to its idiosyncratic author. The Rambler, as well as The Adventurer (1752-4) and The Idler (1759), and Johnson's contributions to miscellaneous periodicals are therefore discussed in a later chapter.

The case of Oliver Goldsmith (1730?-1774) is different. In the words of Johnson's Latin epitaph on his friend and protégé there was nothing Goldsmith touched that he did not adorn. This is not the place to discuss The Vicar of Wakefield or the two comedies or the poems, but admirable though these all are in their several ways he was not primarily a novelist, a dramatist or a poet so much as a general man of letters, a professional writer who could turn his pen to anything—from the review to the text-book, from the anthology to the potted biography. To such a man's mill the periodical essay was obvious grist and Goldsmith contributed essays in Addison's manner to at least eight journals between 1759 and 1773. But the essays are generally discontinuous, more prophetic of Lamb and Hazlitt than reminiscent of Addison and Steele. The exception is the 119 ‘Chinese Letters’ that appeared in The Public Ledger between 24 January 1760 and 14 August 1761 and were reprinted separately in 1762 as The Citizen of the World; or, Letters from a Chinese Philosopher, Residing in London, to his Friends in the East. This series has dramatis personae who reappear regularly in the manner of Sir Roger, Sir Andrew Freeport, Will Honey-combe, Captain Sentry and the other members of Mr. Spectator's Club.

The Chinese element in The Citizen of the World is the least successful part. The device of a visiting Oriental who writes letters home describing the curious habits of Europe was a favourite of the French philosophes (Montesquieu's Letters Persanes [1721] is the masterpiece of the genre), although Goldsmith's immediate source seems to have been an anonymous pamphlet by Horace Walpole on the trial of Admiral Byng which uses Chinese correspondents with names similar to his. But all this, as Austin Dobson put it in an excellent essay on The Citizen of the World, is ‘practically dead wood’.⁹ Goldsmith's real advance on Addison and Steele is to use the periodical form as essentially a novel in instalments. The best of the essays are those describing the comic adventures and misadventures of such characters as the eccentric Man in Black and a certain Beau Tibbs, who is really a pathetic lower-middle-class aspirant to being a ‘dog’. And the reader is left at the end of each essay wondering what odd or paradoxical situation he will find the familiar figures in next.

The Citizen of the World is an embryonic Dickens novel. Take Letter LXXI. Although it is ‘From Lien Chi Altangi, to Fum Hoam, first president of the Ceremonial Academy at Pekin, in China’, the reader finds it difficult to remember that the ‘I’ is either Chinese or a philosopher. He and the Man in Black, Mr. Tibbs and his wife (‘in flimsy silk, dirty gauze instead of linen, and an hat as big as an umbrella’), and a pawnbroker's widow have made up a party to visit Vauxhall Gardens. After the supper Mr. Tibbs tries to persuade his affected wife ‘to favour the company’. But at first Mrs. Tibbs cannot be persuaded: ‘“for you know very well, my dear, says she, that I am not in voice today, and when one's voice is not equal to one's judgment, what signifies singing?”’ And, in the context of such realistic comedy as this, what signifies style?

It is all very good fun, but the formal structure of the essay has been stretched to its limits. Even the most realistic of the Coverley series remained within the conceptual confines originally determined by Montaigne and Bacon. It is true that Goldsmith was also interested in intellectual problems, but even in treating them the tone is noticeably different. Goldsmith ‘plays’ with ideas; his Chinese philosopher is not concerned with their logical validity, but with the humour he can derive from the paradoxes he picks up in the streets of London.

The periodical essay survived Goldsmith's attempts—which were largely unconscious, of course—to pervert it from its Addisonian norm. The collections with such titles as The British Essayists by Harrison (1796-7), Drake (1811), Chalmers (1808, 1817, 1823), Ferguson (1819) and Lynam (1827), many of them in thirty or forty volumes, prove the continuing popularity of the genre at the beginning of the nineteenth century. And series like Henry Mackenzie's The Mirror (1779-80), Richard Cumberland's The Observer (1785), Vicesimus Knox's various lucubrations and even The Microcosm (1786-7, conducted by George Canning and Hookham Frere while they were still schoolboys at Eton), or The Loiterer (1780-90, in which two of Jane Austen's brothers had a hand when Oxford undergraduates), still make pleasant bed-side reading. In these series the middle style does survive. But it is not the classical middle style of Addison, a style that looks forward to the nineteenth century, but a conservative, regressive, monotonous style, because (as Eliot emphasizes in What is a Classic?) ‘the resources of the language have, for the time at least, been exhausted’. Goldsmith, who ‘wrote like an angel’ (according to Garrick), was almost alone in the premonitions he offered of the future of the English essay. But angels prefer not to write in the middle style. Or so the example of Oliver Goldsmith would suggest.

Notes

1. ‘The Life and Writings of Addison,’ Edinburgh Review, lxxviii (July, 1843), 193-260.

2. ‘The First Victorian,’ in Essay in Biography 1680-1726, London, 1925, pp. 197-345.

3. Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. B. Hill, 3 vols., Oxford, 1905, ii. 149-50.

4. ‘The Study of Poetry’ (1880) in Essays in Criticism. Second Series, London, 1888, pp. 41-2.

5. What is a Classic?, London, 1945, pp. 16, 17.

6. Ibid., p. 22.

7. Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes and Characters of Books and Men, ed. J. M. Osborn, 2 vols., Oxford, 1966, i. 80.

8. F. W. Bateson, ‘The Errata in The Tatler,’ Review of English Studies, v (1929), 11.

9. ‘The Citizen of the World,’ Eighteenth Century Vignettes, London, 1892, p. 117.

Works Cited

I. Editions

Donald F. Bond's elaborate edition of The Spectator, 5 vols., Oxford, 1965, supersedes its many predecessors. In addition to a long and judicious introduction there are footnotes explaining topical or learned allusions.

Professor Bond is preparing a similar edition of The Tatler: the best edition to date is that by John Nichols and others, 6 vols., London, 1786.

There is no scholarly edition of The Guardian but a number of Steele's minor periodicals have been edited: The Englishman (1713-14), ed. R. Blanchard, Oxford, 1955; Richard Steele's Periodical Journalism 1714-16, ed. R. Blanchard, Oxford, 1959; and The Theatre (1720), ed. J. Loftis, Oxford, 1962.

There are modern editions of three of Fielding's series of essays: The Covent Garden Journal, ed. G. E. Jensen, New Haven, 1915; The Voyages of Mr. Job Vinegar from The Champion (1740), ed. S. J. Sackett (Augustan Reprint Society no. 67, 1958); and The True Patriot (a facsimile text), ed. M. A. Locke, Alabama Univ., 1964.

The Citizen of the World will be found with the rest of Goldsmith's essays in the definitive edition of his Works, ed. Arthur Friedman, 5 vols., Oxford, 1966.

For a general view of the essay-periodicals it is still necessary to use such collections as that by Alexander Chalmers, 45 vols., London, 1808, 1817 and 38 vols., London, 1823.

II. Modern Surveys

Walter Graham, English Literary Periodicals, New York, 1930; reprinted 1966. The standard work.

Bonamy Dobrée, English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century, Oxford, 1959; vol. vii of The Oxford History of English Literature. Has lengthy sections on Addison and Steele and useful bibliographies. As criticism the section on Addison is inferior to the discussion in his Essays in Biography 1680-1726, London, 1925.