Addison. William John Courthope
better poet would be.” His study of Ovid, however, was of the greatest use in developing his critical faculty; the excesses and want of judgment in that poet forced him to reflect, and his observations on the style of his author anticipate his excellent remarks on the difference between True and False Wit in the sixty-second number of the Spectator.
Whoever, indeed, compares these notes with the Essay on the Georgics, and with the opinions expressed in the Account of the English Poets, will be convinced that the foundations of his critical method were laid at this period (1697). In the Essay on the Georgics he seems to be timid in the presence of Virgil’s superiority; his Account of the English Poets, besides being impregnated with the principles of taste prevalent after the Restoration, shows deficient powers of perception and appreciation. The name of Shakespeare is not mentioned in it, Dryden and Congreve alone being selected to represent the drama. Chaucer is described as “a merry bard,” whose humour has become obsolete through time and change; while the rich pictorial fancy of the Faery Queen is thus described:
“Old Spenser next, warmed with poetic rage,
In ancient tales amused a barbarous age—
An age that yet uncultivate and rude,
Where’er the poet’s fancy led pursued,
Through pathless fields and unfrequented floods,
To dens of dragons and enchanted woods.
But now the mystic tale, that pleased of yore,
Can charm an understanding age no more;
The long-spun allegories fulsome grow,
While the dull moral lies too plain below.”
According to Pope—always a suspicious witness where Addison is concerned—he had not read Spenser when he wrote this criticism on him.[7]
Milton, as a legitimate successor of the classics, is of course appreciated, but not at all after the elaborate fashion of the Spectator; to Dryden, the most distinguished poet of the day, deserved compliments are paid, but their value is lessened by the exaggerated opinion which the writer entertains of Cowley, who is described as a “mighty genius,” and is praised for the inexhaustible riches of his imagination. Throughout the poem, in fact, we observe a remarkable confusion of various veins of thought; an unjust depreciation of the Gothic grandeur of the older English poets; a just admiration for the Greek and Roman authors; a sense of the necessity of good sense and regularity in writings composed for an “understanding age;” and at the same time a lingering taste for the forced invention and far-fetched conceits that mark the decay of the spirit of mediæval chivalry.
With the judgments expressed in this performance it is instructive to compare such criticisms on Shakespeare as we find in No. 42 of the Spectator, the papers on “Chevy Chase” (73, 74), and particularly the following passage:
“As true wit consists in the resemblance of ideas, and false wit in the resemblance of words, according to the foregoing instances, there is another kind of wit which consists partly in the resemblance of ideas and partly in the resemblance of words, which, for distinction’s sake, I shall call mixed wit. This kind of wit is that which abounds in Cowley more than in any author that ever wrote. Mr. Waller has likewise a great deal of it. Mr. Dryden is very sparing in it. Milton has a genius much above it. Spenser is in the same class with Milton. The Italians even in their epic poetry are full of it. Monsieur Boileau, who formed himself upon the ancient poets, has everywhere rejected it with scorn. If we look after mixed wit among the Greeks, we shall find it nowhere but in the epigrammatists. There are, indeed, some strokes of it in the little poem ascribed to Musæus, which by that, as well as many other marks, betrays itself to be a modern composition. If we look into the Latin writers we find none of this mixed wit in Virgil, Lucretius, or Catullus; very little in Horace, but a great deal of it in Ovid, and scarce anything else in Martial.”
The stepping-stone from the immaturity of the early criticisms in the Account of the Greatest English Poets to the finished ease of the Spectator is to be found in the notes to the translation of Ovid.[8]
The time came when he was obliged to form a decision affecting the entire course of his life. Tonson, who had a wide acquaintance, no doubt introduced him to Congreve and the leading men of letters in London, and through them he was presented to Somers and Montague. Those ministers perhaps persuaded him, as a point of etiquette, to write, in 1695, his Address to King William, a poem composed in a vein of orthodox hyperbole, all of which must have been completely thrown away on that most unpoetical of monarchs. Yet in spite of those seductions Addison lingered at Oxford. To retain his Fellowship it was necessary for him to take orders. Had he done so, there can be no doubt that his literary skill and his value as a political partizan would have opened for him a road to the highest preferment. At that time the clergy were far from thinking it unbecoming to their cloth to fight in the political arena or to take part in journalism. Swift would have been advanced to a bishopric, as a reward for his political services, if it had not been for the prejudice entertained towards him by Queen Anne; Boulter, rector of St. Saviour’s, Southwark, having made himself conspicuous by editing a paper called the Freethinker, was raised to the Primacy of Ireland; Hoadley, the notorious Bishop of Bangor, edited the London Journal; the honours that were awarded to two men of such second-rate intellectual capacity would hardly have been denied to Addison. He was inclined in this direction by the example and advice of his father, who was now Dean of Lichfield, and who was urgent on his son to rid himself of the pecuniary embarrassments in which he was involved by embracing the Church as a profession. A few years before he had himself seemed to look upon the Church as his future sphere. In his Account of the Greatest English Poets he says:
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