SOURCE: “Society, Journalism, and the Essay: Two Spectators,” in Continuum: Problems in French Literature from the Late Renaissance to the Early Enlightenment. Volume 3: Poetics of Exposition & Libertinage and the Art of Writing 1, edited by David Lee Rubin, AMS Press, pp. 85-112.

[In the following excerpt, France discusses the role of the Spectator in the development of the essay form, noting the characteristic “blend of seriousness and ease, Christianity and worldliness” in the pieces printed in the journal.]

[The Spectator points to] a crucial element in the development of the essay, and that is the role of the periodical press. Journals such as the Mercure galant or the Gentleman's Magazine clearly played an essential role in the creation and maintenance of a polite culture of sociability. Before the Tatler and the Spectator, however, the essay was not an important ingredient in such journalism. With the latter, in particular, we see the appearance of the issue of a newspaper devoted to one single subject. In other words, the subscriber to the Spectator could expect to receive every day between March, 1711, and December, 1712, a paper which was more or less an essay.

The essays in question are short—a far cry from Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding—though the same subject may be treated in a succession of issues. They are also extremely varied in character, ranging from disquisitions on serious topics, by way of exchanges of real or fictional letters, to anecdotes and satirical or picturesque descriptions of contemporary life. It is therefore hard to make any valid generalizations about them. In this discussion I shall concentrate on the first 100 numbers.

The obvious starting point is No. 10, in which Addison sets out the aims of the authors. He begins by speaking with modest irony of the success of his “morning lectures.” Then, without abandoning the bantering tone, he makes a serious declaration:

It was said of Socrates that he brought philosophy down from heaven to inhabit among men; and I shall be ambitious to have it said of me 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.

(1:44)

One can see how this anticipates what Hume has to say in “On Essay-Writing”. The world of the essay, or at least of the Spectator essay, is the sociable world. Alongside the coffee-house, stronghold of male sociability, we have the female tea-table, and Addison is quite plain, here and elsewhere, that he is writing very largely for a female public (“There are none to whom this paper will be more useful than to the female world” [1:46]). What Addison and Steele offered their readers, both male and female, was a new model of polite conversation, not the frivolous or immoral conversation of courts, but a proper blend of seriousness and ease, Christianity and worldliness. In this they were extraordinarily successful. The Spectator was read, discussed and imitated by a relatively broad public all over Britain and beyond. It has been argued for instance that one of the main planks of the Scottish Enlightenment was the introduction of “Addisonian politeness” into a provincial and backward society (Phillipson 19-40). “Spectator clubs” sprang up likewise all over England, one of the best documented being that of Spalding in Lincolnshire, where a group of gentlemen formed to meet, read and discuss the Spectator (Ross 625-49).

The journal is presented from the outset not as the writings of two authors, but as the emanation of a club—and this club is connected with the main London coffee-houses. In the second number we meet the individual members of the club in all their variety; they represent both town and country and such different social types as the lawyer, the merchant, the soldier and the man about town. The Spectator thus incorporates in its text some of its typical readers, even if only the male ones; as Addison writes in No. 34, “my readers … have the satisfaction to find that there is no rank or degree among them who have not their representative in this club” (1:142). The essay invites imaginary participation. And soon after the first issue, actual readers began to respond to the invitation to write to “Mr. Spectator”. Their letters were incorporated in an increasingly polyphonic text. In this way the essay can become a kind of dialogue, or a concert of voices, in much the same way that the Lettres persanes, that nearly contemporaneous work, combined various voices and subjects in a succession of short pieces which could almost be numbers of a periodical.

While the Spectator thus contributes to a new kind of sociability, its authors are far from tender towards many existing forms. No. 9 for instance begins: “Man is said to be a sociable animal,” and launches into a satirical description of “those little nocturnal assemblies which are commonly known by the name of clubs” (1:39)—comic examples being the club of fat men or the Humdrum Club of boring silent men. In the same way the Spectator contains much ridicule of fashionable society, its theatres, operas and assemblies. On the whole, sociability is no doubt a virtue, if it can be properly formed. But it is interesting to note that although the Spectator is supposed to represent a social group, the spectator figure himself is shown in a distinctly anti-social light. He may be a member of the club, but he plays no part in it. The essay-writer, rather than being Hume's ambassador from the realms of learning to the fashionable world, is more like a spy. Or rather, his persona is close to that of the traditional isolated philosopher as he can be seen in La Bruyère's Caractères—less a misanthropist, perhaps, than a proponent of the true virtues which keep society together, but perforce something of an eccentric and an outsider in society as it is.

This comes out most clearly in No. 12, where the portrayal of the essayist is the main subject of the essay. We have previously learned (in No. 1) that Mr. Spectator is a middle-aged man, learned and rather odd, distinguished for his silence, a traveller among men and societies, known to few, neutral in politics, “a spectator of mankind rather than … one of the species” (1:4). Much later, in No. 264, he will reveal that like Marivaux's spectateur, he has been crossed in love. Hardly the most sociable of men. And in No. 12 this solitary eccentricity is carried to the point of grotesque oddity. He recounts his first arrival in London:

I then fell into an honest family, and lived very happily for above a week; when my landlord, who was a jolly good-natured man, took it into his head that I wanted company, and therefore would frequently come into my chamber to keep me from being alone. This I bore for two or three days; but telling me one day that he was afraid I was melancholy, I thought it was high time for me to be gone, and accordingly took new lodgings that very night … I am now settled with a widow woman, who has a great many children, and complies with my humour in everything. I do not remember that we have exchanged a word together these five years.

(1:52)

There seems to be a strange contradiction here between the drive to sociability that characterizes the Spectator essay and the character chosen to embody it. Perhaps the two can be reconciled in a type of Stoic detachment which goes hand in hand with the proper performance of social duties—the Ciceronian model for the English gentleman as against the French courtier. No. 10 describes such people, Mr. Spectator's “brothers and allies”:

the fraternity of spectators who live in the world without having anything to do in it, and either by the affluence of their fortunes or laziness of their dispositions, have no other business with the rest of mankind but to look upon them.

(1:45)

Could we not see the essay precisely as a genre designed for this sort of person, privileged to lead a life of contemplative leisure? If so, one essential element in its poetics will be the creation of the appropriate type of spectator persona.

When we consider the actual form of the Spectator essays, one of the main questions is that of order. It is not easy to generalize here. Addison's Saturday sermons are very different in nature from the more picturesque and comic pieces, and are on the whole constructed more in accordance with traditional rhetorical norms. But in all cases, a balance is struck between chaos and the excess of method which (according to Diderot) destroys the life of a piece of writing, removing it from the coffee-house to the study. It will be helpful here to analyze just one essay, even though a single one cannot stand for all.

No. 94, dated Monday, June 18, 1711, and written by Addison, is in fact the continuation of the preceding essay, a well organized discourse on the paradox of the shortness of our lives and the difficulties we have in filling them. In it Addison has proposed various “useful and innocent” ways of filling up our time, including the pursuit of knowledge, which he leaves for fuller discussion in No. 94. This begins, like all the rest, with a Latin tag, and throughout the essay Addison intersperses his own reflexions with those of other writers. After Martial, we have a brief reminiscence of Boyle and then a long quotation from Locke's Essay and a reference to Malebranche's Recherche de la vérité. The first part of the essay moves quickly from the initial question (Addison declines to engage on such “beaten subjects” as the usefulness of knowledge) to a related speculation that is “more uncommon, and may therefore perhaps be more entertaining.” This concerns the subjective nature of our perception of time and the way in which it can be modified by the perceiver's concentration on one subject to the exclusion of all others—or conversely by our moving very rapidly from one subject to another. At this point, Addison feels the need to shift from philosophy to story-telling, and recounts one after another two marvellous stories from the Turkish Tales. In each tale, however, the philosophical import is clearly indicated, and the second story concludes with a theological moral. Having taken his readers off into the realms of legend, Addison then returns them explicitly to the original subject, but leaves them to spell out the connections:

I shall leave my reader to compare these Eastern fables with the notions of those two great philosophers whom I have quoted in this paper; and shall only, by way of application, desire him to consider how we may extend life beyond its natural dimensions by applying ourselves diligently to the pursuits of knowledge.

(1:401)

The essay then concludes with a paragraph of echoing maxims about the wise man and the wise man, and a final paragraph in which a leisurely comparison likens their respective views of past life to desert and a garden. This highly philosophical essay can thus end on the words “some beautiful plant or flower.”

Several things strike one about the construction of this essay. In the first place, its unity: there is nothing in it which is not relevant to its central theme. In the second place, to counterbalance this, its variety: narrative against philosophy, direct statement against quotation, maxim against comparison. But above all, the unobtrusive and easy way in which it unfolds. The connections between paragraphs are well marked, but without any sense of overbearing organization. Take the beginning of the second story:

There is a very pretty story in the Turkish Tales which relates the passage of that famous imposter Mohammed, and bears some affinity to the subject we are now upon. A Sultan of Egypt. …

(1:400)

Addison does not allow his reader to lose sight of “the subject we are now upon”, yet the primary impulse seems to be that of story-telling. The opening has the kind of directness we might expect in conversation. By the end of the essay, the reader feels that he or she has been led on a leisurely and entertaining walk through the realms of high philosophy and exotic legend, without ever losing sight of the author's main concern.

A final point is the almost inevitable mix of story (or description) and reflection in the essay. The proportions of these can vary infinitely, as indeed they can in fiction. Story can be no more than a brief illustration in a predominantly discursive text, or it may virtually take over. In almost all cases, though, the point of the essay emerges not so much from rational deduction as from the reader's ability to relate example and idea. We shall see with Marivaux how the essay fares in the hands of a moralist who is above all a dramatist and story-teller.

Other numbers of the Spectator are certainly less well ordered than No. 94, but Addison and Steele never give way to the temptations of coq-à-l'âne—or even the relative disorder of a Montaigne. No. 46 is an interesting case, for here Addison speaks directly of the rhetoric of essay-writing, and particularly of its inventio, the gathering of copy. He creates a comic scene out of his journalist's notes, “a whole sheetful of hints that would look like a rhapsody of nonsense to anybody but myself.” As he puts it, “they are my speculations in the first principles, that (like the world in its chaos) are void of all light, distinction and order.” Like Pope's Newton, Addison will bring light from dark, order from chaos. The list begins like this:

Sir Roger de Coverley's country seat.—Yes, for I hate long speeches.—Query, if a good Christian may be a conjurer.—Childermas-day, salt-cellar, house-dog, screech-owl, cricket—Mr Thomas Inkle of London in the good ship called the Achilles. Yarico.—Aegrescitque medendo.—Ghosts.—The ladies' library.—Lion by trade a tailor.—Dromedary called Bucephalus.

(1:196-97)

It is as if Addison were setting a puzzle to his readers: make a text of that if you can. But in fact about half of the list is no more than a table of contents for some preceding issues of the Spectator. Taken together, the collection of essays is indeed a pot-pourri, but in each individual piece the original notation has been drawn out into a satisfying ordered whole. Nevertheless, this essay is placed under the sign of chaos, and Addison feels free to conclude with two quite separate letters, two vignettes which have no connection with each other or with the rest of the essay. Here the Spectator is closer to the medley principle which governed its predecessor, Steele's Tatler.

Perhaps the aspect of the Spectator which won greatest praise from eighteenth-century readers was its style. There are many testimonies to the fact that contemporaries took Addison and Steele's easy elegance as a model (Bond, 1:xcviii-ciii). It was above all in language that the essayist was able to imitate and propagate the ideal qualities of good polite conversation and writing, witty but not ostentatious or absurd, reasonable without being boring. Addison himself often reflects at length on such matters, for instance in the series of papers (Nos. 58-63) devoted to true and false wit. His doctrine will seem bland to a present-day taste, not unlike that of one of his models, Father Bouhours.¹ Once again, it is not easy to illustrate the practice of the Spectator from any one example, but here is a passage of Steele's witty moralizing (a more formal and impersonal piece than some). It comes from No. 64:

The general affectation among men of appearing greater than they are, makes the whole world run into the habit of the court. You see the lady, who the day before was as various as a rainbow, upon the time appointed for beginning to mourn, as dark as a cloud. This humour does not prevail only on those whose fortunes can support any change in their equipage, not on those only whose incomes demand the wantonness of new appearances; but on such also who have just enough to clothe them. An old acquaintance of mine, of ninety pounds a year, who has naturally the vanity of being a man of fashion deep at his heart, is very much put to it to bear the mortality of princes. He made a new black suit upon the death of the King of Spain, he turned it for the King of Portugal, and he now keeps his chamber while it is scouring for the emperor. He is a good economist in his extravagance, and makes only a fresh black button upon his iron-grey suit for any potentate of small territories; he indeed adds his crape hatband for a prince whose exploits he has admired in the Gazette. But whatever compliments may be made on these occasions, the true mourners are the mercers, silkmen, lacemen and milliners. A prince of a merciful and royal disposition would reflect with great anxiety upon the prospect of his death, if he considered what numbers would be reduced to misery by that accident alone. He would think it of moment enough to direct that in the notification of his departure the honour to him might be restrained to those of the household of the prince to whom it should be signified. He would think a general mourning to be in a less degree the same ceremony which is practised in barbarous nations, of killing their slaves to attend the obsequies of their kings.

(1: 276)

Several characteristics of the Spectator style can be seen here: the reference to accepted commonplaces (men affect to appear greater than they are), the illustration with examples which are both general (“the lady”) and particularized (“an old acquaintance of mine”), the use of the personal pronouns “you” and “I” (“we” is also common, as one might expect, but does not appear here), the taste for nicely balanced sentences (“This humour … clothe them”). A playful, ironic wit pervades the passage, surfacing in the vision of the lady “as various as a rainbow” and “as dark as a cloud”, in the contrast between the “mortality of princes” and the financial embarrassment of men of fashion, in the comic physical detail of the transformations undergone by the mourning clothes, and in the ironic lessons to princes contained in the last three sentences, culminating in the extravagant—yet thought-provoking—comparison between the killing of slaves and the ruining of subjects. The sentences are all well-formed, not casual, yet pompous only in a tongue-in-cheek way. The language is quite plain in places (“he is very much put to it”), but never vulgar. Nothing here is abrupt or shocking, obscure or demanding. The essayist is present, but not aggressively so; he offers his reader an easy but agreeable entertainment. It is not exciting, but it is polite.

The Spectator was immediately much admired, translated and imitated on the continent. In 1717, the Journal littéraire de la Haye noted that the French had nothing to equal it (Bond, 1:xcvi). In 1721, Marivaux rose to the challenge in his Spectateur français.

Note

1. De la manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages d'esprit (1687). See comments on this work in my article “Equilibrium and Excess.”

Works Cited

France, Peter. “Equilibrium and Excess.” The Equilibrium of Wit. Ed. P. Bayley and D. G. Coleman. Lexington, Kentucky: French Forum, 1982. 249-61.

Phillipson, N. “The Scottish Enlightenment.” The Enlightenment in National Context. Ed. R. Porter and M. Teich. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981.

Ross, A. “The Rise of the Periodical in England.” The Modern World. Vol. 4 of Literature and Western Civilization. Ed. D. Daiches and A. K. Thorlby. London: Aldus Books, 1975.

The Spectator. Ed. Donald F. Bond. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965.