7 ADDISON

'I have always', said Addison, 'preferred Chearfulness to Mirth. The latter I consider as an Act, the former as an Habit of the Mind'; (Note: Spectator 381, vol. V, p. 233. All text-references are to The Spectator: The Text Edited and Annotated, in eight volumes, ed. G. Gregory Smith, with an introductory essay by Austin Dobson (London, 1897-8)) or again, 'Though I am always serious, I do not know what it is to be melancholy.' (Note: Ibid., 26, vol. I, p. 98) These sentences pretty well give us the measure, if not of the man, yet of the work; just as the limpidity of their style, conveying a distinction of almost a scholastic precision in such manner that even a 'tea-table' could not fail to understand it, gives us the measure of his talent. They serve also to mark the most profound difference between the Whig essayist and his two great Tory contemporaries.

Swift and Pope were by no means always serious and they knew very well what it was to be melancholy. One would have found more mirth in their conversation than in Addison's: not only epigram and repartee, but frolic and extravaganza - even buffoonery. It is true that they regarded satire as a 'sacred weapon', but we must not so concentrate on that idea as to forget the sheer vis comica which brightens so much of their work. Swift's 'favourite maxim was vive la bagatelle'. (Note: Samuel Johnson, 'Life of Swift', in Lives of the English Poets, vol. III, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford, 1905), pp. 45-6) Gulliver and the Dunciad and the whole myth of Scriblerus have missed their point if they do not sometimes make us 'laugh and shake in Rabelais' easy chair'. Even their love of filth is, in my opinion, much better understood by schoolboys than by psychoanalysts: if there is something sinister in it, there is also an element of high-spirited rowdiness. Addison has a sense of humour; the Tories have, in addition, a sense of fun. But they have no habit of cheerfulness. Rage, exasperation, and something like despair are never far away. It is to this that they owe their sublimity - for Pope, no less than Swift, can be sublime. We suspect that the picture he paints of himself is historically false Yes, I am proud, I must be proud to see

Men not afraid of God, afraid of me.

(Note: Pope, Epilogue to the Satires, Dial. ii, 208)

But it is a sublime poetical image. The picture of surly, contemptuous virtue had often been attempted before - in Chapman's Bussy and Clermont, in Dryden's Almanzor, in Wycherley's Manly, even in the Christ of Paradise Regained; but I would give Pope the palm, for in Milton the discrepancy between the known historical character of his Hero and the 'Senecal man' he has painted is more shocking than that between the real and the imagined Pope. There is nothing of so high a reach in Addison. The grandeur of 'cynical asperity' is a flower that grows only in a tropical climate, and in passing to Addison's world we pass to a world where such things are impossible. Surly virtue is not cheerful nor equable: in the long run it is not, perhaps, perfectly consistent with good sense.

This contrast between Addison and the Tories comes out with special clarity in their treatment of enemies. For the Tories, every enemy - whether it be the Duchess of Marlborough or only a Shakespearian editor found guilty of some real English scholarship - becomes a grotesque. All who have, in whatever fashion, incurred their ill will are knaves, scarecrows, whores, bugs, toads, bedlamites, yahoos; Addison himself a smooth Mephistopheles. It is good fun, but it is certainly not good sense; we laugh, and disbelieve. Now mark Addison's procedure. The strength of the Tory party is the smaller country gentry with their Jacobite leanings and their opposition to the moneyed interest. All the material for savage satire is there. Addison might have anticipated Squire Western (as he did later in the Freeholder) and painted merely the blockheaded, fox-hunting sot, the tyrant of his family and his village. Instead, with the help of Steele, he invents Sir Roger de Coverley. The measure of his success is that we can now think of Sir Roger for a long time without remembering his Toryism; when we do remember it, it is only as a lovable whimsy.

In all our Journey from London to his House we did not so much as bait at a Whig Inn ... This often betrayed us into hard Beds and bad Cheer; for we were not so inquisitive about the Inn as the Innkeeper; and provided our Landlord's Principles were sound, did not take any Notice of the Staleness of his Provisions. (Note: Spectator 126, vol. ii, p. 163) As a natural consequence, Mr Spectator soon 'dreaded entering into an House of any one that Sir Roger had applauded for an honest Man '. (Note: Spectator 126, vol. II, p.163) It is so beautifully done that we do not notice it. The enemy, far from being vilified, is being turned into a dear old man. The thought that he could ever be dangerous has been erased from our minds; but so also the thought that anything he said could ever be taken seriously. We all love Sir Roger; but of course we do not really attend to him as we do - well, to Sir Andrew Freeport. All through the century which Addison ushered in, England was going to attend more and more seriously to the Freeports, and the de Coverleys were to be more and more effectually silenced. The figure of the dear old squire dominates - possibly, on some views, corrupts - the national imagination to the present day. This is indeed to 'make a man die sweetly'. That element in English society which stood against all that Addison's party was bringing in is henceforth seen through a mist of smiling tenderness - as an archaism, a lovely absurdity. What we might have been urged to attack as a fortress we are tricked into admiring as a ruin.

When I say 'tricked' I am not implying that Steele and Addison calculated the whole effect of their creation just as I have set it down. The actual upshot of their work is obvious; their conscious intentions are another matter. I am inclined to think that Addison really loved Sir Roger - with that 'superior love' which, in England, the victorious party so easily accords to the remnants of a vanishing order. Addison is not a simple man; he is, in the older sense of the word, 'sly'. I do not believe for one moment that he was the fiendlike Atticus; but one sees how inevitably he must have appeared so to the losers. He is so cool, so infuriatingly sensible, and yet he effects more than they. A satiric portrait by Pope or Swift is like a thunderclap; the Addisonian method is more like the slow operations of ordinary nature, loosening stones, blunting outlines, modifying a whole landscape with 'silent overgrowings' so that the change can never quite be reversed again. Whatever his intentions, his reasonableness and amiability (both cheerful 'habits' of the mind) are stronger in the end than the Tory spleen. To rail is the sad privilege of the loser.

I have used the word 'amiability'. Should we go further and say 'charity'? I feel that this Christian word, with its doctrinal implications, would be a little out of place when we are speaking of Addison's essays. About the man, as distinct from the work, I will not speculate. Let us hope that he practised this theological virtue. The story that he summoned Lord Warwick to his deathbed to see how a Christian can die is ambiguous; (Note: Edward Young, describing Addison's death in his Conjectures on Original Composition (London, 1759), wrote: 'After a long ... struggle with his distemper, he dismissed his physicians, and ... sent for a youth nearly related, and finely accomplished, but not above being the better for good impressions from a dying friend: He came; but life now glimmering in the socket, the dying friend was silent: After a decent, and proper pause, the youth said, 'Dear Sir! you sent for met believe, and I hope, that you have some commands; I shall hold them most sacred:" ... Forcibly grasping the youth's hand, he softly said, "See in what peace a Christian can die." He spoke with difficulty, and soon expired' (pp. 101-2)) It can be taken either as evidence of his Christianity or a very brimstone proof of the reverse. I give no vote: my concern is with books. And the essays do not invite criticism in terms of any very definite theology. They are everywhere 'pious'. Rational Piety, together with polite Letters and Simplicity, is one of the hall-marks of the age which Addison was partly interpreting but partly also bringing into existence. And Rational Piety is by its very nature not very doctrinal. This is one of the many ways in which Addison is historically momentous. He ushers in that period - it is just now drawing to a close - in which it is possible to talk of 'piety' or (later) 'religion' almost in the abstract; in which the contrast is no longer between Christian and Pagan, the elect and the world, orthodox and heretic, but between 'religious' and 'irreligious'. The transition cannot be quite defined: absence of doctrine would have to become itself doctrinal for that to be possible. It is a change of atmosphere, which every reader of sensibility will feel if he passes suddenly from the literature of any earlier period to that of the eighteenth century. Hard rocks of Calvinism show up amidst the seemingly innocuous surface of an Arcadia or a Faerie Queene; Shakespearian comedy reckons on an audience who will at once see the point of jokes about the controversy on Works and Faith. Here also, no doubt, it is difficult to bring Addison to a point. Perhaps the most illuminating passage is the essay on 'Sir Roger at Church', and specially the quotation from Pythagoras prefixed to it - 'Honour first the immortal gods according to the established mode.' (Note: Aqanatous men prwta qeous nomwi ws diakeitai tima Spectator 112, vol. ix, p. 109) That is the very note of Rational Piety. A sensible man goes with his society, according to local and ancestral usage. And he does so with complete sincerity. Clean clothes and the sound of bells on Sunday morning do really throw him into a mood of sober benevolence, not 'clouded by enthusiasm' but inviting his thoughts to approach the mystery of things.

In this matter of Rational Piety one must not draw too sharp a contrast between Addison and the Tories. They are infected with it themselves, and Swift quotes with equal approval the Pagan maxim about worshipping 'according to the laws of the Country'. (Note: Swift, 'Sentiments of a Church-of-England Man', in Writings on Religion and the Church, vol. I, ed. Temple Scott (London, 1898), p. 62. (This volume is itself vol. III of the complete Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., ed. Temple Scott, with a biographical introduction by the Rt. Hon. W. E. H. Lecky (London, 1898).)) But I think there is some contrast. The Tories are a little nearer than Addison to the old period with its uncompromising creeds. Pope's Romanism is not nearly so superficial as some have supposed, and the 'Pantheism' of the Essay on Man owes a good deal of its notoriety to critics who would make a very poor shape at defining pantheism. He made an edifying end, and he perhaps understands the conflict In Eloise's mind - it is not simply a conflict of virtue and vice - better than Addison would have done. Swift is harder to classify. There is, to be sure, no doubt of his churchmanship, only of his Christianity, and this, of itself, is significant. If Swift were (as I do not think he is) primarily a Church of England man, only secondly a Christian, and not 'pious' or 'religious' at all, we might say that in Addison's writings the proportions are reversed. And some things would lend colour to such an interpretation of Swift. In the 'Sentiments' his religion seems to be purely political. 'I leave it among the divines to dilate upon the danger of schism, as a spiritual evil, but I would consider it only as a temporal one.' (Note: Ibid., pp. 61-2) Separation from the established worship, 'although to a new one that is more pure and perfect', is dangerous. (Note: Ibid., p. 62) More disquieting still are the tormented aphorisms of 'Thoughts on Religion'. To change fundamental opinions is ordinarily wicked 'whether those opinions be true or false', (Note: 'Thoughts on Religion', op . cit ., ed. Scott, p. 307) and 'The want of belief is a defect that ought to be concealed when it cannot be overcome.' (Note: Ibid ., p. 308) Some parts of Gulliver seem inconsistent with any religion - except perhaps Buddhism. The 'Further Thoughts on Religion' open with the assertion that the Mosaic account of creation is 'most agreeable of all others to probability' and immediately cite - the making of Eve Out of Adam's rib (Note: 'Further Thoughts on Religion', op . cit ., ed. Scott, p. 310). Is it possible that this should not be irony? And yet there is much to set on the other side. His priestly duties were discharged with a fidelity rare in that age. The ferocity of the later Gulliver all works up to that devastating attack on Pride which is more specifically Christian than any other piece of ethical writing in the century, if we except William Law. The prayers offered at Stella's deathbed have a scholastic firmness in their implied moral theology. ('Keep her from both the sad extremes of presumption and despair.' (Note: Three Prayers used by the Dean for Mrs Johnson, in her Last Sickness 1727', op. cit., ed. Scott, p. 311) 'Forgive the sorrow and weakness of those among us, who sink under the grief and terror of losing so dear and useful a friend.' (Note: Ibid., p. 314)) The sermon 'On the Trinity', taken at its face value, preaches a submission of the reason to dogma which ought to satisfy the sternest supernaturalist. And I think it should be taken at its face value. If we ever think otherwise, I believe the explanation to lie in that peculiar ungraciousness which Swift exercised upwards as well as downwards. He gave alms 'without tenderness or civility', so that 'those who were fed by him could hardly love him'. (Note: Johnson, op. cit., pp. 57-8) As below, so above. He practises obedience without humility or meekness, takes his medicine with a wry face. But the alms, however given, were hard cash, and I think his acceptance of Christian doctrine is equally real, though offered (as it were) under protest, as if he were resentful of Heaven for putting him in such a ridiculous position. There is a tension and discomfort about all this, but that very tension suggests depths that Addison never knew. It is from those depths that Swift is writing when he says there can be no question in England of any but a nominal Christianity - 'the other having been for some time wholly laid aside by general consent, as utterly inconsistent with our present schemes of wealth and power'. (Note: 'Argument against abolishing Christianity', op. cit., ed. Scott, p. 7) This is a far cry from Mr Spectator's pleasing reflections on the Royal Exchange.

As I am a great Lover of Mankind, my Heart naturally overflown with Pleasure at the sight of a prosperous and happy Multitude, insomuch that at many publick Solemnities I cannot forbear expressing my Joy with Tears that have stolen down my Cheeks. For this reason I am wonderfully delighted to see such a Body of Men thriving in their own private Fortunes, and at the same time promoting the Publick Stock; or in other Words, raising Estates for their own Families, by bringing into their Country whatever is wanting, and carrying out of it what'ver is superfluous. (Note: Spectator 69, vol. I, p. 261) Compared with this, Swift's remark is like a scorching wind from the hermitages of the Thebaid.

Addison is never blasphemous or irreverent; Swift can be both. That, I think, helps to confirm the kind of distinction I am drawing between them. Swift still belongs, at any rate in part, to the older world. He would have understood Rochester in both Rochester's phases better than he could understand Addison. Rochester unconverted was a Bad Man of the old, thoroughgoing kind,

he drunk, he fought, he whored,

He did despite unto the Lord.

(Note: This couplet is, I expect, a paraphrase of some lines in John Masefield's The Everlasting Mercy (London, 1911), a narrative in the first-person about the conversion to Christianity of a rural ruffian who says (p. 2): From '61 to '67 - I lived in disbelief of heaven. - I drunk, I fought, I poached, I whored, - I did despite unto the Lord) Rochester converted was a deathbed penitent. One cannot imagine Mr Spectator or Sir Andrew emulating him in either achievement.

The mention of Rochester suggests yet another gulf between Addison and the preceding age. We may be sure that Rochester's manners lacked that 'simplicity' which the Whig essayists recommended. It is, of course, a commonplace that they addressed themselves to the reform of manners; but I sometimes wonder whether the very degree of their success does not conceal from us the greatness of the undertaking. I sometimes catch myself taking it for granted that the marks of good breeding were in all ages the same as they are today - that swagger was always vulgar, that a low voice, an unpretentious manner, a show (however superficial) of self-effacement, were always demanded. But it is almost certainly false. We catch a glimpse of the truth in Johnson's remark: 'Lord Southwell was the highest-bred man without insolence that I ever was in company with ... Lord Orrery was not dignified: Lord Chesterfield was, but he was insolent.' (Note CSLewis: Boswell, 23 March 1783) Insolence, for us, is a characteristic of the 'beggar on horseback', a mark of ill breeding; we have little idea of the genuine 'high' manners that bordered on it. We catch another glimpse in Polonius's advice, 'Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy', (Note: Hamlet, I, iii, 70) and again in Hotspur's humorous indignation at the 'sarcenet' insipidity of his wife's oaths. (Note: Henry IV, Pt. III, i, 251) We perceive from many scenes of Elizabethan comedy and from the stir among the servants at Gawain's arrival in the Green Knight that the old courtesy was not a 'pass school' (as it is with us where a man either knows the right thing to do or not) but an 'honours school' where competing extravagances of decorum and compliment could go to any height. I am inclined to think that if we saw it now we should mistake that high breeding for no breeding at all. The walk of the courtier would seem to us a Janissary's strut, his readiness to find quarrel in a straw would seem a yokel touchiness, his clothes an intolerable ostentation. Even to this day, when we meet foreigners (only think of some young Frenchmen) who have not been subjected to the Addisonian 'reform', we have to 'make allowances' for them. I do not suggest that Addison and Steele, simply by writing essays, abolished the old flamboyancy. Doubtless they gave expression to a tendency which would have existed even without them. But to express is partly to mould. That sober code of manners under which we still live today, in so far as we have any code at all, and which foreigners call hypocrisy, is in some important degree a legacy from the Tatler and the Spectator. It is certainly not to be explained as a mere imposition of the code of the citizens upon the gentry. No one denies that a rapprochement between the 'cit' and the courtier was an essential part of the Addisonian synthesis. Sir Andrew Freeport mixes with those whose grandfather would have regarded his grandfather simply as a 'cuckoldand'. But the shop and the counting-house are not of themselves schools of modest and obliging deportment: least of all when they are prosperous. There was real novelty in the new manners.

These new manners were a little restrictive; in adopting them we lost, along with some cruelties and absurdities, a good deal of 'the unbought grace of life'. But in other respects Addison is a liberator. His famous defence of 'Chevy Chase' is sometimes taken to show a 'romantic' side in him, but that, I think, is not the best way of considering it. The word 'romantic' is always ambiguous. (Note: See Lewis's sevenfold classification of what may he meant by 'romantic' in the Preface to the revised edition of his book, The Pilgrim's Regress (London, 1943), pp. 5-6) The paper on 'Chevy Chase' is to be taken in its context. (Note: 'Chevy Chase' is discussed in Spectator 70 and 74) It follows a discussion on False Wit. False Wit is taken up by poets who lack the 'Strength of Genius' which gives 'majestick Simplicity to Nature' and who are therefore forced 'to hunt after foreign Ornaments' (Note: Spectator 62, vol. I, p. 235) These writers are to poetry what the Goths were to architecture. Ovid is the type of such 'Gothick' poets, and 'the Taste of most of our English Poets, as well as Readers, is extremely Gothick'. (Note: Ibid ., p. 236) One mark of true poetry is that it 'pleases all Kinds of Palates', whereas the Gothic manner pleases 'only such as have formed to themselves a wrong artificial Taste upon little fanciful Authors'. (Note: Ibid., 70, p. 264) It is, therefore, to be expected that common songs or ballads which are 'the Delight of the common People' should be 'Paintings of Nature'. (Note: Ibid ) It is after this preamble that Addison proceeds to examine 'Chevy Chase' - according to the rules of Le Bossu - and pronounces in its favour.

No more classical piece of criticism exists. In it Addison touches hands with Scaliger on the one side and Matthew Arnold on the other. What complicates it is, of course, his peculiar use of the word 'Gothick'. Addison must have known perfectly well that the ballad is just the sort of thing to which his contemporaries would spontaneously have applied that word, and that Ovid and Cowley are not. Very well, then; he will prove that it is the ballad which really follows Nature and that the true Goths are the authors whom the Town in fact prefers. In other words he is calling the neo-classical bluff. It is as if he said, 'You all profess to like a great subject, a good moral, unity of action, and truth to Nature. Well, here they all are in the ballad which you despise; and yonder, in the Cowley which you really enjoy, they are not.' One cannot be certain here, as one could not be certain about the invention of Sir Roger, whether Addison is being 'sly' or really innocent. One sees again what is behind the image of Atticus. The man who writes thus will certainly appear 'sly' to his opponents. But is he consciously setting a trap, or is he merely following the truth as he sees it in all simplicity? Perhaps it does not much matter, for the trap is inherent in the facts, and works whether Addison meant to set it or no; in the sense that if the nominal standards of Augustan criticism are ever taken seriously they must work out in favour of the ballads (and much medieval literature) and against most of the poetry the Augustans themselves produced. In other words, if we insist on calling an appreciation of ballads 'romantic', then we must say that Addison becomes a romantic precisely because he is a real classic, and that every real classic must infallibly do the same. It is inconceivable that Aristotle and Horace, had they known them, should not have put the Chanson de Roland above the Davideis. Antiquity and the Middle Ages are not divided from each other by any such chasm as divides both from the Renaissance.

But it is better not to use the word 'romantic' in this context at all. What Addison really shows by his appreciation of the Ballad is his open-mindedness, his readiness to recognize excellence wherever he finds it, whether in those periods which Renaissance Humanism had elected to call 'classical' or in those far longer extents of time which it ignored. The obscurantism of the Humanists is still not fully recognised. Learning to them meant the knowledge and imitation of a few rather arbitrarily selected Latin authors and some even fewer Greek authors. They despised metaphysics and natural science; and they despised all the past outside the favoured periods. They were dominated by a narrowly ethical purpose. Referenda ad mores omnia, said Vives; (Note CSLewis: De Tradendis Disciplinis , IV) and he thought it fortunate that the Attic dialect contained nearly all the Greek worth reading reliquis utuntur auctores carminum quos non tanti est tntelligi. (Note CSLewis: Ibid ., III) Their philistine attitude to metaphysics is prettily carried off in modern histories by phrases about 'brushing away scholastic cobwebs', but the Humanist attack is really on metaphysics itself. In Erasmus, In Rabelais, in the Utopia one recognizes the very accent of the angry belle-lettrist railing, as he rails in all ages, at 'jargon' and 'straw-splitting'. On this side Pope and Swift are true inheritors of the Humanist tradition. It is easy, of course, to say that Laputa is an attack not on science but on the aberrations of science. I am not convinced. The learning of the Brobdingnagians and the Horses is ruthlessly limited. Nothing that cannot plead the clearest immediate utility - nothing that cannot make two blades of grass grow where one grew before - wins any approval from Swift . Bentley is not forgiven for knowing more Greek than Temple, nor Theobald for knowing more English than Pope. Most of the history of Europe is a mere wilderness, not worth visiting, in which 'the Monks finish'd what the Goths begun'. (Note CSLewis: Pope, Essay on Criticism , 692) The terror expressed at the end of the Dunciad is not wholly terror at the approach of ignorance: it is also terror lest the compact little fortress of Humanism should be destroyed, and new knowledge is one of the enemies. Whatever is not immediately intelligible to a man versed in the Latin and French classics appears to them to be charlatanism or barbarity. The number of things they do not want to hear about is enormous.

But Addison wants to hear about everything. He is quite as good a classical scholar as the Tories but he does not live in the Humanist prison. He notes with satisfaction 'that curiosity is one of the strongest and most lasting Appetites Implanted in us, and that Admiration is one of our most pleasing Passions'. (Note: Spectator 237, Vol. III, p. 254) He delights to introduce his readers to the new philosophy of Mr Locke and to explain by it, with aid from Malebranche, 'a famous Passage in the Alcoran ' (Note: Ibid., 94, vol. II, p. 51) He remembers with pleasure how 'Mr. Boyle, speaking of a certain Mineral, telis us, That a Man may consume his whole Life in the Study of it, without arriving at the Knowledge of all its Qualities'. (Note: Ibid ., p. 49) He gazes on the sea ('the Heavings of this prodigious Bulk of Waters') with 'a very pleasing Astonishment'. (Note: Ibid., 489, vol. VII, p. 58) Astronomy, revealing the immensities of space, entertains him with sublime meditations, (Note: Ibid., 565, vol. VIII, pp. 34 ff.) and his reading, he tells us, 'has very much lain among Books of natural History' (Note: Ibid., 120, vol. II, p. 138) Mysteries attract him. He loves to lose himself in an o altitudo whether on the marvels of animal instinct (Note: Ib id., p. 139) or on those of the powers enjoyed by the soul in dreams in which he quotes Browne himself. (Note: Ibid., 487, vol. VII, pp. 52-3) He lives habitually in a world of horizons and possibilities which Pope touched, I think, only in the Essay on Man, and Swift hardly touches at all. It is a cool, quiet world after that of the Tories - say, a watercolour world, but there is more room in it. On those things which it illuminates at all, the wit of Swift and Pope casts a sharper and (in a sense) more beautiful light; but what huge regions of reality appear to them, as Addison says that life itself appears to ignorance and folly, a 'Prospect of naked Hills and Plains which produce nothing either profitable or ornamental'! (Note: Ibid., 94, vol. II, p. 53)

This open-mindedness is not particularly 'romantic', though without it we should have had no Wartons, no Ritson, no Percy, and perhaps no Scott; for the medievalism of the eighteenth century, whatever else it may be, is a mighty defeat of sheer ignorance. But Addison is much more closely connected with the Romantic Movement in quite a different way. He stands at the very turning-point in the history of a certain mode of feeling.

I think that perhaps the best piece of criticism Raleigh ever wrote is in the fourth chapter of his Wordsworth, where he sets Claudio's shuddering speech ('To lie imprisoned in the viewless winds') beside Wordsworth's longing to retain a body 'endued with all the nice regards of flesh and blood' and yet surrender it to the elements 'As if it were a spirit'. (Note: Sir Walter Raleigh, 'Nature', Wordsworth (London, 1903), p. 152) He points out, quite justly, that what is Hell to Claudio is almost Heaven to Wordsworth. Between the two passages a profound change in human sentiment has taken place. Briefly put - for the story has often been told before - it is the change from an age when men frankly hated and feared all those things in Nature which are neither sensuously pleasing, useful, safe, symmetrical, or gaily coloured, to an age when men love and actually seek out mountains, waste places, dark forests, cataracts, and storm-beaten coasts. What was once the ugly has become a department (even the major department) of the beautiful. The first conflict between the old and the new taste received striking expression when Addison was already nine years old, in Thomas Burnet's Telluris Theoria Sacra. Burnet cannot quite conceal a certain joy in the awfulness of the Alps, but his very argument depends on the conception that they are deformities longaeva illa, tristia et squalentia corpora. (Note CSLewis: Telluris Theoria Sacra, I, ix) Not that they are the only offence. In the face of this Earth as a whole we find multa sunt superflua, multa inelegantia: such beauty (ornamentum) as it possesses comes chiefly cultu et Habitatione Hominum. (Note CSLewis: Ibid., x ) The position of Addison in this story is very interesting. He divides the sources of imaginative pleasure into three classes - the Great, the Uncommon, and the Beautiful. As specimens of the Great he mentions 'an open Champian Country, a vast uncultivated Desart, of huge Heaps of Mountains, high Rocks and Precipices, or a wide Expanse of Waters' - all of which produce 'a delightful Stilness and Amazement in the Soul'. (Note: Spectator 412, vol. VI. p. 59) To a later writer many of these things would have seemed beautiful; to an earlier one they would have seemed simply unpleasant. Addison does not find beauty in them, but he includes them among the sources of pleasure. His category of the Great, clearly distinguished from the Beautiful, exists precisely to make room for them. A similar distinction was, of course, the basis of Burke's treatise on 'The Sublime and Beautiful', and dominated the aesthetic thought of the century. Whether it was not much more sensible than the modern practice of bundling Alps and roses together into the single category of Beauty, I do not here inquire. The interesting thing is that Addison stands exactly at the turn of the tide.

Equally important for the historian of taste is Spectator, No. 160, where he contrasts the original 'genius' (which tends to be 'nobly wild and extravagant') and the Bel Esprit 'refined by Conversation, Reflection, and the Reading of the most polite Authors' (Note: Spectator 160, vol.II, p. 283). The taste for 'noble extravagance' is not itself a novelty, for audacities in art and graces that overleap the rules are praised by Dryden, Boileau, and Pope. What is interesting is Addison's belief that even the greatest genius is 'broken' by the rules and in becoming learned 'falls unavoidably into Imitation' (Note: Ibid .). This pessimistic view of culture as something naturally opposed to genius received, no doubt, its extreme expression in Macaulay's essay on Milton; but I think it had also a great deal to do with that crop of forgeries which the eighteenth century produced. If sublime genius lies all in the past, before civilization began, we naturally look for it in the past. We long to recover the work of those sublime prehistoric bards and druids who must have existed. But their work is not to be found; and the surviving medieval literature conspicuously lacks the sublimity and mysteriousness we desire. In the end one begins inventing what the 'bards', 'druids', and 'minstrels' ought to have written. Ossian, Rowley, and Otranto are wish-fulfilments. It is always to be remembered that Macpherson had written original epics about prehistoric Scotland before he invented Ossian. By a tragic chance he and Chatterton discovered that their work was marketable, and so make-believe turned into fraud. But there was a sincere impulse behind it: they were seeking in the past that great romantic poetry which really lay in the future, and from intense imagination of what it must be like if only they could find it they slipped into making it themselves.

So far I have been trying to obey Arnold's precept - to get myself out of the way and let humanity decide. I have not attempted to assess the value of Addison's work, having wished rather to bring out its immense potency. He appears to be (as far as any individual can be) the source of a quite astonishing number of mental habits which were still prevalent when men now living were born. Almost everything which my own generation ignorantly called Victorian seems to have been expressed by Addison. It is all there in the Spectator the vague religious sensibility, the insistence on what came later to be called Good Form, the playful condescension towards women, the untroubled belief in the beneficence of commerce, the comfortable sense of security which, far from excluding, perhaps renders possible the romantic relish for wildness and solitude. If he is not at present the most hated of our writers, that can only be because he is so little read. Everything the moderns detest, all that they call smugness, complacency, and bourgeois ideology, is brought together in his work and given its most perfect expression.

And certainly, if it were at all times true that the Good is the enemy of the Best, it would be hard to defend Addison. His Rational Piety, his smiling indulgence to 'the fair sex', his small idealisms about trade, certainly fail short of actual Christianity, and plain justice to women, and true political wisdom. They may even be obstacles to them; palliatives and anodynes that prolong the disease. In some moods I cannot help seeing Addison as one who, at every point, 'sings charms to ills that ask the knife'. I believe he could defend himself. He is not attempting to write sermons or philosophy, only essays; and he certainly could not foresee what the search for markets would finally make of international trade. These hostile criticisms, made on the basis of our modern experience when all issues have become sharper, cannot really be maintained. All we can justly say is that his essays are rather small beer; there is no iron in them as in Johnson; they do not stir the depths.

And yet, if I were to live in a man's house for a whole twelvemonth, I think I should be more curious about the quality of his small beer than about that of his wine; more curious about his bread and butter and beef than about either. Writers like Addison who stand on the common ground of daily life and deal only with middle things are unduly depreciated today. Pascal says somewhere that the cardinal error of Stoicism was to suppose that we can do always what we do sometimes. No one lives always on the stretch. Hence one of the most pertinent questions to be asked about any man is what he falls back on. The important thing about Malory's world, for example, is that when you fall back from the quest of the Grail you fall back into the middle world of Arthur's court: not plumb down into the level of King Mark. The important thing about many fierce idealists in our own day is that when the political meeting or the literary movement can be endured no longer they fall plumb down to the cinema and the dance band. I fully admit that when Pope and Swift are on the heights they have a strength and splendour which makes everything in Addison look pale; but what an abyss of hatred and bigotry and even silliness receives them when they slip from the heights! The Addisonian world is not one to live in at all times, but It is a good one to fall back into when the day's work is over and a man's feet on the fender and his pipe in his mouth. Good sense is no substitute for Reason; but as a rest from Reason it has distinct advantages over Jargon. I do not think Addison's popularity is likely to return; but something to fill the same place in life will always be needed - some tranquil middle ground of quiet sentiments and pleasing melancholies and gentle humour to come in between our restless idealisms and our equally restless dissipations. Do we not after all detect in the charge of smugness and complacency the note of envy? Addison is, above all else, comfortable. He is not on that account to be condemned. He is an admirable cure for the fidgets.

8 AFTER PRIGGERY - WHAT?

No doubt priggery is a horrid thing, and the more moral the horrider. To avoid a man's society because he is poor or ugly or stupid may be bad; but to avoid it because he is wicked - with the all but inevitable implication that you are less wicked (at least in some respect) - is dangerous and disgusting. We could all go on to develop this theme at any length and without the slightest effort. Smug - complacent - Pharisaical - Victorian parable of the Pharisee and the Publican... it writes itself. Upon my word, I have some difficulty in bridling the pen.

But the real question is what are we to put in the place of priggery. Private vices, we were taught long ago, are public benefits. Which means that when you remove a vice you must put a virtue in its place - a virtue which will produce the same public benefits. It will not do simply to cut out priggery and leave it at that.

These reflections arose out of the sort of conversation one often has. Suppose a man tells me that he has recently been lunching with a gentleman whom we will call Cleon. My informant is an honest man and a man of good will. Cleon is a wicked journalist, a man who disseminates for money falsehoods calculated to produce envy, hatred, suspicion and confusion. At least that is what I believe Cleon to be; I have caught him lying myself. But it does not matter for purposes of the present argument whether my judgement of Cleon is correct or no. The point is that my honest friend fully agreed with it. The very reason why he mentioned the lunch party was that he wanted to tell me some more than usually foetid instance of Cleon's mendacity.

That, then, is the position we are in after the expulsion of priggery. My friend believes Cleon to be as false as hell; but he meets him on perfectly friendly terms over a lunch table. In a priggish or self righteous society Cleon would occupy the same social status as a prostitute. His social contacts would extend only to clients, fellow-professionals, moral welfare-workers, and the police. Indeed, in a society which was rational as well as priggish (if such a combination could occur) his status would be a good deal lower than hers. The intellectual virginity which he has sold is a dearer treasure than her physical virginity. He gives his patrons a baser pleasure than she. He infects them with more dangerous diseases. Yet not one of us hesitates to eat with him, drink with him, joke with him, shake his hand, and, what is much worse, very few of us refrain from reading what he writes.

It will hardly be maintained that this complaisance springs from a sudden increase of our charity. We are not associating with Cleon as a friar or a clergyman from a mission or a member of the Salvation Army might associate with the prostitute. It is not our Christian love for the villain that has conquered our hatred of the villainy. We do not even pretend to love the villain; I have never in my life heard anyone speak well of him. As for the villainy, if we do not love it, we take it as a thing of course with a tolerant laugh or a shrug. We have lost the invaluable faculty of being shocked - a faculty which has hitherto almost distinguished the man or woman from the beast or the child. In a word, we have not risen above priggery; we have sunk below it.

The result is that things are a good deal too easy for Cleon. Even when the rewards of dishonesty are strictly alternative to those of honesty some men will choose them. But Cleon finds he can have both. He can enjoy all the sense of secret power and all the sweets of a perpetually gratified inferiority complex while at the same time having the entree to honest society. From such conditions what can we expect but an increasing number of Cleons? And that must be our ruin. If we remain a democracy they render impossible the formation of any healthy public opinion. If - absit omen - the totalitarian threat is realized, they will be the cruellest and dirtiest tools of government.

I submit, therefore, that the rest of us must really return to the old and "priggish" habit of sending such people to Coventry (Note: i.e., to refuse to associate with them.) And I am not quite convinced that we need to be prigs in doing so. The charge brought against us - Cleon himself will do it very well, possibly next week - will be that in cold-shouldering a man for his vices we are claiming to be better than he. This sounds very dreadful: but I wonder whether it may not be a turnip ghost?

If I meet a friend in the street who is drunk and pilot him home, I do, by the mere act of piloting him, imply that I am sober. If you press it this implies the claim that I am, for that one moment and in that one respect, "better" than he. Mince it as you will, the mere brute fact is that I can walk straight and he can't. I am not saying in the least that I am in general a better man. Or again, in a lawsuit, I say I am in the right and the other man is in the wrong. I claim that particular superiority over him. It is really quite off the point to remind me that he has qualities of courage, good-temper, unselfishness and the like. It may well be so. I never denied it. But the question was about the title to a field or the damage done by a cow.

Now it seems to me that we can (and should) blackball Cleon at every club and avoid his society and boycott his paper without in the least claiming any general superiority to him. We know perfectly well that he may be in the last resort a better man than we. We do not know by what stages he became the thing he is, nor how hard he may have struggled to be something better. Perhaps a bad heredity... unpopularity at school... complexes... a disgraceful record from the last war but one still nagging him on wakeful nights... a disastrous marriage. Who knows? Perhaps strong and sincere political convictions first bred intense desire that his side should prevail, and this first taught him to lie for what seemed a good cause and then, little by little, lying became his profession. God knows, we are not saying that we, placed as Cleon, would have done better. But for the moment, however it came about - and let us sing non nobis loud enough to lift the roof - we are not professional liars and he is. We may have a hundred vices from which he is free. But on one particular matter we are, if you insist, "better" than he.

And that one thing which he does and we do not do is poisoning the whole nation. To prevent the poisoning is an urgent necessity. It cannot be prevented by the law: partly because we do not wish the law to have too much power over freedom of speech, and partly, perhaps, for another reason. The only safe way of silencing Cleon is by discrediting him. What cannot be done - and indeed ought not to be done - by law, can be done by public opinion. A "sanitary cordon" can be drawn round Cleon. If no one but Cleon's like read his paper, much less meet him on terms of social intercourse, his trade will soon be reduced to harmless proportions.

To abstain from reading - and a fortiori from buying - a paper which you have once caught telling lies seems a very moderate form of asceticism. Yet how few practise it! Again and again I find people with Cleon's dirty sheets in their hands. They admit that he is a rogue but "one must keep up with the times, must know what is being said". That is one of the ways Cleon puts it across us. It is a fallacy. If we must find out what bad men are writing, and must therefore buy their papers, and therefore enable their papers to exist, who does not see that this supposed necessity of observing the evil is just what maintains the evil? It may in general be dangerous to ignore an evil; but not if the evil is one that perishes by being ignored.

But, you say, even if we ignore it others will not. Cleon's readers are not all the half heartedly honest people whom I describe. Some of them are real rascals like Cleon himself. They are not interested in truth. That, no doubt, is so. But I am not convinced that the number of thoroughgoing rascals is large enough to keep Cleon afloat. In the present "tolerant" age he has the support and countenance not only of the rascals but of thousands of honest people as well. Is it not at least worth our while to try the experiment of leaving him and the rascals alone? We might try it for five years. Let him for five years be sent to Coventry. I doubt if you will find him still rampant at the end. And why not begin today by countermanding your order for his paper?

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