of ideas and in many directions so prejudiced could have brought its expression in terms of style to so delicate a pitch of perfection.

All this is clear enough, if Addison is taken out of his historical perspective. It is a fair criticism of his personality, but hardly of his artistic achievement. Most of the text-books call him an essayist; many of them the first of the English essayists—a claim which, with Bacon, Sidney, Cowley, Owen Feltham of the "Resolves," Overbury, Earle, and Dryden behind him, has no sort of substance. Decidedly Addison was not an essayist, but an occasional journalist. He neither wrote nor created the essay; he adapted it to daily journalism. Even that is not quite accurate. The essay is a soliloquy, and the soliloquy is a form of expression which may bring a public to you, but does not necessarily bring you to the public. What Addison did was to take over from Steele and see in it what the inventor did not, an entirely original form of social literature, which should bring him hot-foot from the press every morning to the breakfast tables of his audience. Addison had no illusions on the subject himself: "I have brought philosophy," he says in a famous passage, "out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses." It is this which clamps Addison so firmly to his age. The Queen Anne period, so far as the generous diffusion of rather precise and narrow literary interests was concerned, was the most scrupulously enlightened in our history. The Elizabethan literary impulse was one of many; the literary prose tendencies of the seventeenth century were too confused and disrupted, too mutilated by the Civil War, to admit of a consistent,

unequivocal appeal; the isolated poets, essayists and thinkers of the Romantic Revival wrote for individuals and not a public, however select. Our own society is too vast, too amorphous, too fortuitous, yes, and too busy for a representative culture. After the storms of the Puritan revolution and the peace of the Restoration, the serene and uniform Augustan age created just that atmosphere of taste and judgment that Addison wanted. It was a prejudiced and limited taste, and, to some extent, a superficial judgment; but its consciousness of itself as a community made the Tatler and the Spectator its inevitable mouthpiece, and Addison its indispensable arbiter of elegance. It was ready to be entertained, but only by Epicurean ways amenable to polite sentiments that prided themselves on their virtuosity. It was accessible to sermons, so long as they were neither "barbarous" (i.e. enthusiastic), dull nor drastic. It wanted a debating society for all subjects that came within its range and comprehension, and Addison was its obvious president. It wanted an easy, discursive, tolerant and domesticated literature, spiced with chaff and amiable preaching, for leisurely perusal and to supply topics of conversation for the coffee-houses. The benignant Addison and the more human, sprightly Steele, were just the men for it.

It is when Addison is thus cut to his social cloth that his real significance emerges. If he had been more brilliant and less respectable the society which had made him their patriarch would have dethroned him. His prestige depended not so much upon his literary genius as upon the capacity of his audience to assimilate it. His primness, his mediocrity, his occasional obtuseness, his very prejudices aided rather than hindered him from

E

stamping and permeating the spirit of his age. His supreme inspiration was to have an educated public at his back. And if the daily journalism of the Tatler, the Spectator, and the Guardian was of great service in preserving a practical criterion of taste in his readers, of how much greater service was it to Addison's artistic quality. The exigencies of interesting those readers and of keeping them interested several times a week over a period of years kept his faculties well sharpened and burnished. Steele, with his naturally more alert and sensitive mind, would have spun his liveliness even into a theological treatise. But Addison, with his square and phlegmatic temperament, needed the spur of an intelligent and recurrent public demand to keep him braced. In other circumstances he might very well have been-he was— dull; as it was he could not afford to be. On the other hand the solid and conservative virtues of his mind invested his gossip with weightiness and good sense and cleared out of it all the fripperies and "chattiness" ("levity" he would have called it) to which the daily journalist is only too liable. Pull Addison out of his Augustan background and the plump geniality of his work is rather hollow.

Need I compare Addison's type of journalism with the daily journalism of to-day? Granted that he was a man who created a system; to-day it is the profitable system which creates and fashions the man. Addison was the arbiter (far more than Dr. Johnson, who had to combat romantic tendencies and was something of a romantic himself) of an educated age: the system, levelling all types of expression, is the deliberately illiberal arbiter of ours. Addison too not only catered

for his public nearly every day for a space of two years, but conformed to the fashion and average thought of his age. The comparison need not be laboured. It leaves him on a sufficiently high pedestal. He, Addison, was the Northcliffe of his age. Lord Northcliffe is the Addison of this. Addison-Northcliffe had his thousands of readers; Northcliffe-Addison has his millions. The moral shows what literature can do, even with a man like Addison (the style of a humdrum journalist with ten thousand readers survives to-day as a model of English prose idiom). It also shows what business can do with a man like Northcliffe.

MY DEAR X,

X

THE PREFATORY POEM (1)

You are, I know, one of the arm-chair sort, and a cloud is surely the very best upholstery for spirits. There you watch poor Time being dragged by the forelock fussily through the market-place. There too you can examine geological impresses at your leisure. On turning over the work of some young Oxford poets a while ago, I noticed two or three prefatory poems at the heels of the title-page. I wonder if they realized they were, so far as modern custom goes, a relic of the tertiary period. For in the seventeenth century "Panegyricall Verses " were an art in themselves. Jacobean literature is full of them; they even drew an asthmatic breath through the early years of the Restoration. There are, for instance, seven to the first edition of the "Matchless Orinda's " poems in 1664-one from the Earl of Roscommon, one from Lord Orrery, another from "Philo-Philippa," and two from Cowley. Even so late as 1684, the fourth edition of Rochester's poems inspired a few drooping elegies from Mrs. Behn, Waller and Flatman. But they are already diluted by the water of prose "characters" from Anthony Wood, Dr. Burnet (the bosom of Roches