The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase. Джозеф Аддисон
on the broken wave," &c.
The survivor of a shipwreck is, or should be, ever afterwards a sadder and a wiser man. And Addison continued long to feel subdued and thankful, and could hardly have been more so though he had outlived that shipwreck which bears now the relation to all recent wrecks which "the storm" of November 1703, as we shall see, bore to all inferior tempests—the loss of the Royal Charter,—the stately and gold-laden bark, which, on Wednesday the 26th October 1859, when on the verge of the haven which the passengers so much desired to see, was lifted up by the blast as by the hand of God, and dashed into ten thousand pieces,—hundreds of men, women, and, alas! alas! children, drowned, mutilated, crushed by falling machinery, and that, too, at a moment when they had just been assured that there was no immediate danger, and when hope was beginning to sparkle in the eyes that were sinking into despair,—sovereigns, spray, and the mangled fragments of human bodies massed together as if in the anarchy of hell, and hurled upon the rocks. Addison, no more than one of the escaped from that saloon of horror and sea of death, could forget the special Providence by which he was saved; and the hymn above referred to, and that other still finer, commencing—
"When all Thy mercies, O my God!
My rising soul surveys,"
seem a pillar erected on the shore to Him that had protected and redeemed him.
From Genoa he went to Milan, and thence to Venice, where he saw a play on the subject of Cato enacted, and began himself to indite his celebrated tragedy, of which he completed four acts ere he quitted Italy. On his way to Rome, he visited the miniature mountain republic of San Marino, which he contemplated and described with much the same feeling of interest and amazement, as afterwards, in the Guardian, the little colony of ants immortalised there. Like Swift, (whom Macaulay accuses of stealing from Addison's Latin poem on the "Pigmies," some hints for his Lilliput,) Addison had a finer eye for the little than for the vast. He enjoyed Marino, therefore, and must have chuckled over the description of it in the geography, as much as if it had been a stroke of his own inventive pen. "Besides the mountain on which the town stands, the republic possesses two adjoining hills." At Rome he did not stay long at this time, but as if afraid of the attractions of the approaching Holy Week—that blaze of brilliant but false light in which so many moths have been consumed—he hurried to Naples and saw Vesuvius burning over its beautiful bay with less admiration than has been felt since by many inferior men. He returned to Rome and lived there unharmed during the sickly season; thence he went to Florence, surveying with interest the glories of its art; and in fine he crossed the Alps by Mount Cenis to Geneva, composing on his way a poetical epistle to Montague, now Lord Halifax. The Alps do not seem to have much delighted his imagination. There are a few even still who look upon mountains as excrescences and deformities, and give to Glencoe only the homage of their unaffected fears, which is certainly better than the false raptures of others. But, in Addison's day, admiration for wild scenery was neither pretended nor felt. Our poet loved, indeed, the great silent starry night, and has whispered and stammered out some beautiful things in its praise. But he does this, so to speak, below his breath, while the white Alps, seeming the shrouded corpses of the fallen Titans, take that breath away, and he shudders all the road through them, and descends delightedly to the green pastures and the still waters of lower regions.
At Geneva, where he arrived in December 1701, he remained some time, expecting from Lord Manchester the official appointment for which he was now qualified. But while waiting there, he heard the tidings of King William's death, which put an end to his hopes as well as to those of his party. His pension, too, was stopped, and he was obliged to become a tutor to a young Englishman of fortune. With him he visited many parts of Switzerland and Germany, and spent a portion of his leisure in writing, not only his "Travels," but his recondite "Dialogue on Medals,"—a book of considerable research and great ingenuity, which was not published, however, till after his death. From Germany he passed to Holland, where he heard the sad intelligence that his father was no more. During his stay in Holland, he watched with keen, yet kindly eye, the manners of the inhabitants; and in his letters hits at their drinking habits with a mixture of severity and sympathy which is very characteristic. Toward the close of 1703 he returned home, and, we doubt not, felt at first desolate enough. His father was dead, his pension withdrawn, his political patrons out of power, and his literary fame not yet fully established. But, on the other hand, he was only thirty-one; he had made some new and influential friends on the Continent, particularly the eminent Edward Wortley Montague, husband of the still more celebrated Mary Wortley Montague, and he had in his portfolio a volume of "Travels" of some mark and likelihood, nearly ready for the press. Besides, the Whigs, low as they were now in political influence, were still true to their party, and they welcomed Addison, as one of their rising hopes, into the famous "Kit-Cat Club," an omniumgaiherum of all whose talents, learning, accomplishments, wit, or wealth were thought useful to the Whig cause.
Addison's arrival in England seems to have synchronised or preceded the great tempest of November 1703, to which we have already referred, and to which he afterwards alludes in his simile of the Angel in "The Campaign"—
"Such as of late o'er pale Britannia past."
Our readers will find a sketch of this terrific tempest in the commencement of Ainsworth's "Jack Shepherd." Macaulay says of it, "It was the only tempest which, in our latitude, has equalled the rage of a tropical hurricane. No other tempest was ever in this country the occasion of a Parliamentary address, or of a national fast. Whole fleets had been cast away. Large mansions had been blown down; one prelate had been buried beneath the ruins of his palace. London and Bristol had presented the appearance of cities just sacked. Hundreds of families were thrown into mourning. The prostrate trunks of large trees, and the ruins of houses attested, in all the southern counties, the fury of the blast." How Addison felt or fared during this storm, we have no means of knowing. Perhaps his timid nature shrank from it in spite of its appeal to imagination, or perhaps the poetry that was in him triumphed over his fears, and as he felt what Zanga was afterwards to say—
"I love this rocking of the battlements,"
the image of the Angel, afterwards to be dilated into the vast form of Wrath, described in the "Campaign," rose on his vision, and remained there indelibly fixed till the time arrived when, used with artistic skill, it floated him into fame.
Meanwhile, he spent this winter and spring of 1703-4 in a rather precarious manner, and like a true poet. He was lodging in an obscure garret in the Haymarket, up three stairs, when one day the Right Honourable Henry Boyle, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, called on him and communicated a project that had been concocted between Godolphin and Halifax. The Whigs were now again in the ascendant, and the battle of Blenheim, fought on the 13th August 1704, had brought their triumph to a climax. Halifax and Godolphin were mortified at the bad poems in commemoration of it which poured from the press. Their feeling was sincerely that which Byron affected in reference to Wellington and Waterloo—
"I wish your bards would sing it rather better."
They bethought themselves of Addison, and sent Boyle to request him to write some verses on the subject. He readily undertook the task, and when he had half-finished the "Campaign," he shewed it to Godolphin, who was delighted, especially with the Angel, and in gratitude, instantly appointed the lucky poet to a commissionership worth about £200 a-year, and assured him that this was only a foretaste of greater favours to come. The poem soon after appeared. It was received with acclamation, and Addison felt that his fortune and his fame were both secured.
Yet, in truth, the "Campaign" is not a great poem, nor, properly speaking, if we except the Angel, a poem at all. It is simply a Gazette done into tolerable rhyme; and its chief inspiration comes from its zealous party-feeling. Marlborough, though a first-rate marshal, was not a great man, not by any means so great as Wellington, far less as Napoleon; and how can a heroic poem be written without a hero? Yet the poem fell in with the humour of the times, and was cried up as though it had been another book of the Iliad. Shortly afterwards he published his "Travels," which were thought rather cold and classical. To them succeeded the opera of "Rosamond," which, being ill-set to music, failed on the stage; but became, and is still, a favourite