The Coverley Papers | Page 5

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 abrupt and a little toneless. But now and again we find the 'unexpected splendour' in which Addison is wanting, in phrases like 'a covered indigence, a magnificent poverty', [Footnote: Spectator 114.] or in the sparkling antitheses of Sir Roger's description of his ancestors. [Footnote: Spectator 109.] Yet Steele's claim on our admiration rests not on the quality of his style, but, as Mr. John Forster has said, on 'the soul of a sincere