Let us drink and sport to-day! Ours is not to-morrow! Love with Youth flies swift away! Age is nought but sorrow! Time's on the wing! Life never knows the return of Spring. Chorus. Let us drink and sport to-day, &c. 10 CHAPTER VI A CONFLICT OF STYLES FROM this movement and interplay of social life there followed, in the reign of Queen Anne, a noticeable advance in the popularity of the newspaper. During the seventeenth century our periodical press had maintained against odds a scanty and intermittent life; at the turn of the eighteenth it grew rapidly into unwonted vigour and importance. The Daily Courant appeared in 1703; the Review, edited by Daniel Defoe, in 1704; in 1710 came the Examiner, with Prior and Bolingbroke on the staff; and the impetus once in motion gathered and augmented in steadily increasing volume. The Public Advertiser, famous afterwards for the letters of Junius, was first published in 1726; the Morning Chronicle in 1769; the Morning Post in 1772; the Times1 in 1785; by the last quarter of the century we are told that there were over fifty newspapers in London alone. From the outset these papers aimed at something more than the narration of current events. Defoe, for example, issued a weekly supplement of satire and criticism; and they thus served to arouse a literary interest which found in the great Periodic Essays its proper satisfaction. First among these came the Tatler, of which the opening number was printed by Steele in the spring of 1709. Addison was at the time away in Ireland; but as soon as he heard of the project he gave it his complete approval and support, contributed many of the best numbers; and when, in 1711, the Spectator 1 It was first called the Universal Register, and assumed its present title in 1788. followed, assumed the predominant place in its control. 'I fared,' says Steele, 'like a distressed prince who calls in a more powerful neighbour to his aid. I was undone by my auxiliary.' And in this halfhumorous complaint there is some truth. Of the two men Steele had the more impulse, the greater originality; Addison was incomparably the better equipped in character and education, he had a larger and serener outlook on life, and (though Steele's English is admirable) a more sustained and dignified manner. Posterity has decided to rank Addison's work at the higher estimate; and in width of range, depth of insight, and power of critical judgement, he is undoubtedly the greater of the two. The success of their collaboration was immediate and widespread. Everybody in the town waited for the Friday paper on literature and the Saturday paper on philosophy'1; every taste was met by a scheme which ranged from Milton to Sir Roger de Coverley, from the English ballad to misbehaviour in church, from the Patriarchs to the Everlasting Club, from the principles of morality to the shape of a furbelow. And every successive topic is treated with sincerity and truth and humour, which makes it a permanent possession. We should give other names to Portia and Will Wimble and Mr. Froth, but we offer them none the less a recognition and a welcome. In the generations that followed the tradition was worthily carried on. The robust sense of Johnson, the delicate sympathy of Goldsmith, appealed to a thousand readers who would have found Locke difficult and Berkeley paradoxical, who would have revolted from the dogmatic certainty of Clarke and 1 'I have brought philosophy,' said Addison, 'out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses.' See Mr. Stopford Brooke's English Literature, p. 128. met Hume with his own scepicitsm. Questions of life and conduct, of law and expediency, were treated in a manner which the plain reader could understand, which needed no philosophic training, which stated the deepest problems in a language free from technicality. Then, when the form had achieved its purpose, it sank gradually into decay. In the Idler and the Rambler it maintained the standard which had been set by the Augustan age; in the later collections of Colman and his contemporaries it passed away into mere levity and anecdote. · Among the essayists of the middle eighteenth century, Johnson is conspicuous for his theory of a literary diction. Addison and Steele perfected the conversational speech of their time; the words that they used were the common currency of the market-place; their art lay in aptitude of choice and in supreme mastery of rhythm. But with Johnson there is a definite separation of the written from the spoken phrase. His talk, as recorded by Boswell, is in a simple nervous English, which hit the nail on the head without flourish or gesticulation; his composition is sometimes overweighted with a sense of its own responsibility. The 'dirty fellow' of whom he complained in the Highlands becomes in his journal 'black as a Cyclops from the forge'; the comedy which had not wit enough to keep it sweet', on second thoughts 'does not possess vitality to preserve it from putrefaction'. If he had written a fable about the little fishes he would, as Goldsmith said, have made the little fishes talk like whales. And it is therefore interesting to observe that among his contemporaries we can trace, more clearly than in any preceding epoch of English literature, the growing divorce between style and colloquialism. No doubt earlier instances may be found-Hooker, Sir Thomas Browne, perhaps Milton (though this is more doubtful)-but Jonson, Dryden, Walton, Swift, Addison wrote as we may imagine them to have spoken, with the same idioms, the same vocabulary, and something of the same cadence. With Burke, on the other hand, we find deliberate artifice, the heightened melody, the ennobled phrase, the long-wrought period which, like a tune of Beethoven, has been returned again and again to the anvil. And with Gibbon this tendency is even more apparent. A page of his history is like a sheet of metal: the light reverberates from its polished lustre until the splendour is almost more than the eye can bear. Contrast him with Clarendon: it is a difference not of century but of ideal. There has come into our literature the conception of a 'grand style', by which, for good or ill, its later development has been largely affected. JOSEPH ADDISON (1672-1719) was educated at Charterhouse, and afterwards at Magdalen College, Oxford. He was noted for his scholarship, and the Latin poems which he wrote while at the University were much admired. In 1699 he went abroad, and the next three years were spent in travelling. He published an account of his travels in 1705 under the title Remarks on several parts of Italy. In 1704 he was commissioned to write a poem on the Duke of Marlborough's victory, and produced The Campaign, which brought him at once into prominence. He was given an under-secretaryship, and from this time onwards became a political force. He was always an ardent Whig, and in 1710 he endeavoured to counteract the influence of the Tory organ by publishing the Whig Examiner. In 1709 Steele started The Tatler, to which Addison contributed forty-one papers, besides collaborating with Steele in thirty-four. The Tatler was succeeded by The Spectator, which was published daily from March 1, 1711, to December 6, 1712. In 1713 Addison's one tragedy, Cato, was acted at Drury Lane, with great success. The Spectator revived for a short time in 1713, and Addison also wrote for Steele's new paper, The Guardian. In 1715 his comedy of The Drummer failed |