The Coverley Papers | Page 5

by a vain laugh of his own, and a
deep silence of all the rest of the company. I had nothing left for it but
to fall fast asleep, which I did with all speed.' [Footnote: Spectator 132.]
His, too, is the charming little idyll of the huntsman and his Betty, who
fears that her love will drown himself in a stream he can jump across,
[Footnote: Spectator 118.] and the whole fragrant story of Sir Roger's
thirty years' attachment to the widow. [Footnote: Spectator 113, 118.]
But above all, we must not overlook the fact that without Steele, as he
himself says in his dedication to The Drummer, Addison would never
have brought himself to give to the world these familiar, informal
essays. Addison was naturally both cautious and shy; the mask which
Steele invented lent him just the security which he needed, and the
Spectator endures as the monument of a great friendship, a memorial
such as Steele had always desired. [Footnote: Spectator 555.]
Steele himself explained the other advantages of the disguise: 'It is
much more difficult to converse with the world in a real than in a
personated character,' he says, both because the moral theory of a man
whose identity is known is exposed to the commentary of his life, and
because 'the fictitious person ... might assume a mock authority without
being looked upon as vain and conceited'. [Footnote: Spectator 555.] It
is to the influence of this mask that much of the self- complacent
superiority which has been attributed to Addison may be referred; one
'having nothing to do with men's passions and interests', [Footnote:

Spectator 4.] one 'set to watch the manners and behaviour of my
countrymen and contemporaries,' [Footnote: Spectator 435.] and to
extirpate anything 'that shocks modesty and good manners', [Footnote:
Spectator 34.] such a censor was bound to place himself on a pinnacle
above the passions and foibles which he was to rebuke. Yet
occasionally Addison does appear a trifle self-satisfied. Pope's
indictment of his character in the person of Atticus cannot be entirely
set aside. His creed, as implied in Spectator 115, esteems the welfare of
man as the prime end of a fostering Providence, and such an opinion as
this, held steadily without doubt or struggle, would tend to give a man a
strong sense of his own importance. The superiority of his attitude to
women, which, however, does not appear in the Coverley Papers, is
attributable partly to his office of censor, and partly to their position at
the time. This sort of condescension appears most distinctly in his
treatment of animals. He is far more humane in his feeling for them
than are the majority of his contemporaries, but although he likes to
moralize over Sir Roger's poultry, [Footnote: Spectator 120, 121.] he
really looks down on them from the elevation which a reasonable being
must possess over the creatures of instinct. Yet how does he know so
certainly that instinct is actually inferior to reason?
Addison is essentially a townsman, and his treatment of nature is
always cold. The one passage in these papers which evinces a genuine
love of the country is Steele's description of his enjoyment when he is
strolling in the widow's grove. He is 'ravished with the murmur of
waters, the whisper of breezes, the singing of birds; and whether I
looked up to the heavens, down on the earth, or turned to the prospects
around me, still struck with new sense of pleasure'. [Footnote:
Spectator 118.] The style of the two writers reflects the qualities of
their minds. Addison's writing is fluent, easy, and lucid. He wrote and
corrected with great care, and his words very closely express his
thought. Landor speaks of his prose as a 'cool current of delight', and
Dr. Johnson, in an often quoted passage, calls it 'the model of the
middle style ... always equable and always easy, without glowing
words or pointed sentences.... His page is always luminous, but never
blazes in unexpected splendour. He is never feeble, and he did not wish
to be energetic.... 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.'
Steele was a far more rapid writer, and even grammatical faults are not
infrequent in his papers. He explicitly declares that 'Elegance, purity,
and correctness were not so much my purpose, as in any intelligible
manner as I could to rally all those singularities of human life ... which
obstruct anything that was really good and great'. [Footnote: Dedication
to The Drummer.] His style varies with his mood, and with the degree
of his interest. Occasionally it reaches the simple, rhythmic prose of the
passage quoted above, but generally it is somewhat