JOSEPH ADDISON (1672-1719)

In the pleasant art of living with one’s fellows, Addison is easily a master.  It is due to his perfect expression of that art, of that new social life which, as we have noted, was characteristic of the Age of Anne, that Addison occupies such a large place in the history of literature.  Of less power and originality than Swift, he nevertheless wields, and deserves to wield, a more lasting influence.  Swift is the storm, roaring against the ice and frost of the late spring of English life.  Addison is the sunshine, which melts the ice and dries the mud and makes the earth thrill with light and hope.  Like Swift, he despised shams, but unlike him, he never lost faith in humanity; and in all his satires there is a gentle kindliness which makes one think better of his fellow-men, even while he laughs at their little vanities.

Two things Addison did for our literature which are of inestimable value.  First, he overcame a certain corrupt tendency bequeathed by Restoration literature.  It was the apparent aim of the low drama, and even of much of the poetry of that age, to make virtue ridiculous and vice attractive.  Addison set himself squarely against this unworthy tendency.  To strip off the mask of vice, to show its ugliness and deformity, but to reveal virtue in its own native loveliness,—­that was Addison’s purpose; and he succeeded so well that never, since his day, has our English literature seriously followed after false gods.  As Macaulay says, “So effectually did he retort on vice the mockery which had recently been directed against virtue, that since his time the open violation of decency has always been considered amongst us a sure mark of a fool.”  And second, prompted and aided by the more original genius of his friend Steele, Addison seized upon the new social life of the clubs and made it the subject of endless pleasant essays upon types of men and manners. The Tatler and The Spectator are the beginning of the modern essay; and their studies of human character, as exemplified in Sir Roger de Coverley, are a preparation for the modern novel.

LIFE.  Addison’s life, like his writings, is in marked contrast to that of Swift.  He was born in Milston, Wiltshire, in 1672.  His father was a scholarly English clergyman, and all his life Addison followed naturally the quiet and cultured ways to which he was early accustomed.  At the famous Charterhouse School, in London, and in his university life at Oxford, he excelled in character and scholarship and became known as a writer of graceful verses.  He had some intention, at one time, of entering the Church, but was easily persuaded by his friends to take up the government service instead.  Unlike Swift, who abused his political superiors, Addison took the more tactful way of winning the friendship of men in large places.  His lines to Dryden won that literary leader’s instant favor, and one of his Latin poems, “The Peace of Ryswick” (1697), with its kindly appreciation of King William’s statesmen, brought him into favorable political notice.  It brought him also a pension of three hundred pounds a year, with a suggestion that he travel abroad and cultivate the art of diplomacy; which he promptly did to his own great advantage.