As his readers were
interested in eccentricity, Bickerstaff becomes an aged recluse
living a lonely and mysterious life, surrounded, as Swift had sug-
gested, by the old-fashioned paraphernalia of astrology and
attended by his familiar Pacolet®, like the now discredited ma-
gicians of the previous century.
interested in eccentricity, Bickerstaff becomes an aged recluse
living a lonely and mysterious life, surrounded, as Swift had sug-
gested, by the old-fashioned paraphernalia of astrology and
attended by his familiar Pacolet®, like the now discredited ma-
gicians of the previous century.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v09
Each new expansion of trade
gave them a fresh hold on society, while the civil war, which had
decimated or ruined the nobility, conferred on the middle class
a political importance of which their fathers had never dreamt.
As a rule, members of the citizen class who have risen in the social
scale intermarry with the aristocracy and imitate the manners, and
especially the vices, of the class into which they enter. But, in the
great political revolution of the seventeenth century, merchants and
traders had triumphed through their moral character even more
than by their material prosperity. The time had come when England
was weary of all the medieval fanaticism, brutality and prejudice
which had risen to the surface in the civil war, and it was the citizen
class, apart from the zealots on both sides, which had first
upheld moderation. The feud which Greene, a century before,
## p. 27 (#51) ##############################################
-
Beginnings of the new Civilization 27
had symbolised as a quaint dispute between the velvet breeches
and cloth breeches had entered upon its last phase. Votaries of
Caroline elegance and dissipation had become a set apart. They still
had all the glamour of wealth and fashion; but they had lost their
influence on the civilization of the country. The middle class had
broken away from their leadership and had pressed forward to the
front rank of national progress. It has already been shown? how they
had trodden down the relics of a less humane and less reasonable
age, reforming the laws for debt and the administration of prisons,
refuting the superstition of witchcraft, attacking scholasticism in
the universities and founding the Royal Society-nay, more, how
the more enlightened had pleaded for a purer and simpler morality,
for gentler manners, for a more modest yet dignified self-respect.
To the superficial observer, these protests and appeals must have
sounded like isolated voices in a confused multitude. In reality,
they were indications of a new civilization which was already
fermenting underneath. A new London had sprung up since the
great fire and, with it, a generation of Londoners whose tempera-
ment and occupations led them to form a standard of culture,
honour and religion peculiar to themselves. Such progress is the
work of a whole class. It is never initiated by individuals, though
one or two thinkers are generally needed to give form and ex-
pression to the tendencies of the rest. In this case, the victory of
'cloth breeches' was not complete until Steele and Addison had
discovered in what quarter to look for the movement and in what
form to reveal to men their own ideas. These writers saw further
and deeper than their contemporaries, because each, according to
his own character, had first been born again.
It was Steele who led the way. Nature had endowed him with
the instincts and temperament of one of king Charles I's cavaliers.
He had the same generosity, love of pleasure, restlessness, chivalry
and tincture of classical culture. Like many others of this class,
he was extremely impressionable; but, unlike his prototypes, he
lived in an age when recklessness and self-indulgence, though still
fashionable in some circles, ran counter to the better tendencies of
the time. Thus, the conviviality and gallantry which were popular
in the guardroom caused him many searchings of heart, when
confronted by the disapproval of scholars and moralists. In such
moments of inward discontent, the gay life of the capital lost its
glamour; the puritan spirit came over him, and he perceived that the
1 Ante, vol. VII, chap. XVI, pp. 385–97.
## p. 28 (#52) ##############################################
28
Steele and Addison
dissipation of the young man-about-town was, at best, a pose and
the moral teaching of the ancients a lamentable protection against
the temptation of the senses. Cicero, Seneca and Plutarch had
proved persuasive monitors to many a Jacobean and Caroline
essayist, because the renascence had endowed the classics with
almost scriptural authority. But, though Steele belonged to the
class which still clung to these guides from respect for the old
times, he also came daily into contact with the new enlightened
religion of the middle class. He committed to paper the thoughts
which passed through his mind in these moments of reflection and
published them in 1701 for the edification of others under the title
The Christian Hero.
This booklet is an attempt to persuade educated men into
accepting the Bible as a moral counsellor. Steele describes how
Cato, Caesar, Brutus and Cassius died, and argues that heathen
philosophy failed each in the great crisis of his life. He then
tells over again the story of the creation of Adam and Eve and
how, after their fall, men became corrupt and so a prey to ambition
and the love of ostentation. This dependence on the applause
of the world is, to Steele, the root of all evil ; even the tales
which young fellows tell of debauches and seductions are prompted
by 'fame'; even 'heathen virtues, which were little else but dis-
guised or artificial passions (since the good was in fame) must rise
or fall with disappointment or success. ' Christ, and then St Paul,
by their labours and death, first brought men help, teaching them
that the true guide in conduct is conscience. Man sins or suffers
through dependence on the world; he is saved by the inwardness
and self-effacement of Christianity. In the spiritual distress which
drove Steele to write this pamphlet, he had learnt to think for
himself. The description of Eve's creation shows that he had
studied Milton, then an unfashionable author; the passage on
chivalrous respect for women's virtue was a defiance to the con-
ventionality which regarded immorality as a sign of high spirits ;
the advice that a man should do a kindness as if he would rather
have his generosity appear an enlarged self-love than a diffusive
bounty' was a new ideal for good taste; in his contention that the
false ideals of society led men to err, he touched the true weakness
of his times.
Thus, The Christian Hero is important because it foreshadows
Steele's message to his age. But, though the book passed through
a second edition within the same year and continued to be popular
i Chap. II.
## p. 29 (#53) ##############################################
Steelė's Comedies
29
6
with readers of a certain religious temperament, it was not other-
wise a success. The prosperous middle class, busy with the peaceful
round of city life, did not need to be warned against choosing
Caesar or Brutus for their model or Seneca for their spiritual
pastor. Nor, again, if they ever. opened this little manual of
meditations, would they find it clearly explained how the self-
sacrifice of St Paul and the divinity of Christ could guide them
amid the thousand little perplexities of their growing social
system. Steele sermonised on heroism to readers who were
interested in manners, and deserved the fate that from being
thought no undelightful companion, he was soon reckoned a
disagreeable fellow? '
This missionary spirit, when roused, impelled him to other forms
of expression. Having not yet found his peculiar bent, he was
inevitably attracted to the drama. During a century, comedy and
tragedy, with intervals of repression, had been one of the most
popular outlets for an author and must have seemed exactly the
medium for a man with Steele's sense of humour and knowledge
of character. Besides, the moral movement among the people,
which had been influencing Steele, had also caught the theatre.
Sir Richard Blackmore and Jeremy Collierº were calling for a
pure and reformed drama, and so Steele's conscience, as well as his
tastes, urged him to put his ideas on the stage. Since the restora-
tion, writers of comedies had aimed at brilliance and cleverness.
As the court was amused at cuckoldry, they represented seducers
and seduced as endowed with all the wit, ingenuity, or beauty which
society admired, while intrigues leading to adultery could always
be rounded off into a well constructed, if somewhat unoriginal,
plot. Steele went over the same ground-love, courtship, married
life, intrigue; his purpose, however, was avowedly to paint virtue
and vice in their true colours. Following the example of
Molière, from whom he borrowed freely, he covered his bad
characters with ridicule and confusion. But he was not content
to let them occupy the front of the stage, as Molière had done.
He wished to champion virtue; so his villains, for the most part,
are minor characters, dismissed with humiliation at the dénouement,
while his leading figures are quite ordinary people, whose careers
begin and end in the triumph of homely virtues. Such characters,
however desirable in a book of devotions, lack true comic interest,
and Steele was obliged to lead his heroes and heroines through a
1 Mr Steele's Apology for Himself and his Writings, 1714.
9 Cf. ante, vol. VIII, pp. 163 ff.
a
## p. 30 (#54) ##############################################
30
Steele and Addison
6
series of domestic calamities and surprises, in order to sustain
sympathy. In The Funeral, or Grief-à-la-mode (1701), his first and
best constructed comedy, the defunct Lord Brumpton has to be kept
secretly alive all through the play, in order to shame his worldly
widow's enjoyment of affluence and freedom, and to reward his
daughters' two suitors. In The Lying Lover (1703), copied from
Corneille's Menteur, young Bookwit becomes drunk, then fights
and appears to kill his rival, is arrested, suffers all the pangs of
remorse and the horrors of Newgate and, after this gruesome
lesson against intemperance and duelling, learns that his victim
still lives and ends by marrying the sweetheart whom he had
courted with a fidelity rare on the stage. In The Tender
Husband (1705), the third and last of Steele's plays at this
period of his career, he rises to one of Molière's leading ideas,
in the conception that a son tyrannised till manhood in a boorish
home will end by deceiving his father and contracting a foolish
marriage, and that a girl, left to the companionship of French
romances, will become a 'Quixote in petticoats. ' But, when the
elder Clerimont is represented as despatching his mistress,
disguised as a gallant, to tempt the virtue of his wife and then,
on the failure of the seducer, tearfully seeking a reconciliation,
all dramatic propriety is sacrificed, in order to give a by no means
convincing picture of conjugal tenderness. Such was the tone
which the moral movement of queen Anne's reign introduced into
the theatre, and, since succeeding dramatists came under this
influence, Steele may be regarded as the founder of sentimental
comedy? Unhappily, as in the case of most comedies with a
purpose, plots are sacrificed to the moral, and, apart from im-
probability of incident, Steele’s plays show but little of that
correctness of construction which the age exacted.
If Steele's dramatic work added scant laurels to his reputation,
it was of the first importance in forming his mind. He had come
to his task with the same stock of ideas as had served him in
composing The Christian Hero. But, as a playwright, he had
to make these ideas talk and act. He had to penetrate be-
neath the surface of life, and to show how often a profession or
training degrades a man; how servants inevitably become mimics
of their masters' excesses and frivolities; how women, who are
untrained in the serious responsibilities of life, fall victims
to fulsome adulation and often end in a marriage of convenience;
i Ward, A. W. , A History of English Dramatic Literature, revised ed. 1899, vol. m
P. 493.
## p. 31 (#55) ##############################################
Influence of the Coffeehouses 31
how the best of them, for lack of moral sense, become
tyrannical and fastidious before wedlock, and how others prey
like vampires on their deluded husbands. Thus, Steele had
learnt to look inside the domestic circle and to note how fashion
and conventionality were warping the natural goodness of his
fellow creatures. Here and there, he hints at the conception of the
purer and simpler, though rather emotional, family life which he
was afterwards to depict. But, as we have seen, comedy was not
a suitable medium for teaching of this nature. Although an
atmosphere of earnest enquiry and reflection bad formed itself
in London, and had reached the stage, the public of the play.
house was not yet in a mood for social and moral speculation.
It still expected wit and amusement. Steele had yet to discover
where the world of thought that embodied the qualities which he
had in mind was to be found, and how he was to approach it.
He discovered it five years later in the coffeehouses. Here
could be met serious-minded, progressive citizens, who were
steadily outnumbering and overbearing the votaries of the old
social regime. Matthew Arnold has said that, when 'England
entered the prison of Puritanism,' it 'turned the key on its in-
tellectual progress for two hundred years. ' In reality, it was
precisely this class, made up of inheritors of puritan narrowness
and perseverance, which created a new culture for England out of
its coffeehouses. It has already been shown how Londoners, as
early as the protectorate, began to assemble in these rendezvous
and how, by daily intercourse, they learned to feel interest in each
other's manners and habits of thought. As they cared little for
the more frivolous diversions of the capital, they tended more and
more to seek the pleasures of news and conversation, until, by the
beginning of the eighteenth century, coffeehouses had become the
most striking feature of London life? Men who gathered day
after day in these resorts were not only interested in their com-
panions' ideas and demeanour; they cultivated an eye for trivial
actions and utterances, a gift for investigating other people's
prejudices and partialities, and they realized the pleasure of
winning their way into the intricacies of another man's mind.
Hence, they acquired a new attitude towards their fellow
creatures. Characters which would formerly have been ridiculed
or despised were now valued as intellectual puzzles, eccentricities
attracted sympathetic attention, and it became the note of
1 Ante, vol. vii, chap. XVI, pp. 389, 390.
2 Macaulay, History of England, chap. III.
## p. 32 (#56) ##############################################
32
Steele and Addison
intelligent men to be tolerant. Besides this sentiment of friend-
liness, the mere conditions of clublife imposed a new code of
manners. If men were to enjoy daily intercourse, they had to
respect each other's opinions and to cultivate self-suppression.
Thus, consideration for others became the fashion, and the
middle class, besides studying character, came to regard courtesy
as a part of civilization
Men learned other things in coffeehouses besides the amenities
of social intercourse. Clubland had taken so universal a hold on
London that nearly every man of intelligence frequented some
resort of this kind. Now, these were just the people who read
and wrote books; they created thought and taste; the future of
literature depended on their ideas and ways of expression. Until
the time of the restoration, neither writers nor readers had
practised the studied simplicity of true conversation. Even
pamphleteers like Nashe, Dekker or Rowlands, whose one aim
was to follow popular taste, had never broken away from
book knowledge, despite their slipshod style, and the literary
cliques which handed round manuscript essays and characters
had reproduced in their writings only such conversation as
might be a vehicle for their clinches and conceits. Men
had confined their literary interests to the library and, as a
consequence, their style was either ponderous or precious. The
Royal Society had already started a movement against redundance
of phrase; but it may well be doubted whether the protests of
Sprat, Evelyn and South? would have had lasting effect with-
out the influence of coffeehouses. It was here that, besides
,
practising benevolence in small things, men learnt to unravel
literary ideas in a style that was colloquial as well as cultured.
Conversation has a mysterious power of awakening thought.
Commonplaces and trifles appear in a new light, and fresh notions
are continually struck off like sparks. The man who has formed
his mind by intercourse is more versatile and alert than he whose
intellect has grown by reading, and he has learnt to speak in short
simple sentences, because the ear cannot, like the eye, follow long
periods. Moreover, he must abandon the phraseology of books,
* It is true that one has only to read The Dunciad (though not written by a coffee-
house habitué) to be convinced that St Grobian still had votaries no less ardent than
Nashe or Harvey. Flytings' continued as a literary tradition, and their existence
does not disprove the taste for gentler manners, which grew up in coffeehouses and
influenced literature. Compare The Coffee Scuffle (1662) or A Coffee-House Dialogue
(1679) (see ante, vol. vni, p. 390) with any scene from The Tatler or The Spectator.
Ante, vol. Vini, chap. XVI.
2
## p. 33 (#57) ##############################################
Beginnings of The Tatler
33
because the written word had long assumed a formal, almost im-
personal, air, and must borrow turns and phrases from daily
parlance to give an individual touch to his theories.
Thus, the middle classes were accomplishing their own
education. They were becoming thinkers with a culture and a
standard of manners born of conversation and free from pedantry
of thought or expression. Coffeehouses had given them a kind
of organisation; a means of exchanging ideas and forming the
public opinion of their class. But this spirit was at present manifest
only in the atmosphere where it had been formed. It was not
found in theatres, universities or salons. Coffeehouses bad
unconsciously become fraternities for the propagation of a new
humanism, and a writer could come into touch with the ideas and
sentiments of the age only in those centres.
This movement was so inchoate that the middle classes them-
selves were hardly conscious of it. Steele certainly did not perceive
into what a world of thought and sentiment he was penetrating
when he ventured, in The Tatler, to appeal to coffeehouses. After
writing The Tender Husband, he seems to have relinquished the
theatre for the more lucrative career of a court favourite. He,
probably, never lived within his income and, after losing, in 1708,
his position of gentleman-waiter to prince George of Denmark and
failing to obtain two other posts, he returned to literature in order
to meet his debts. Since the censorship had been removed from
the press, journalism had become a profitable enterprise, and
Steele's chief motive in starting The Tatler on 12 April 1709, was,
undoubtedly, the fear of bankruptcy. However, the desire to
improve his fellow creatures was as strong as in the days of The
Christian Hero. Steele was himself a frequenter of coffeehouses.
He knew how confused and misguided their political discussions
often were, thanks to the irresponsible news-sheets which flooded
London ; and he also realized how many other topics were wrongly
or superficially canvassed in those daily and nightly gatherings.
So, he set himself to enlighten, as well as to entertain, his fellow
talkers. As gazetteer, he could give the most trustworthy foreign
news, and, as a man of culture and society, he could tell them
what to think concerning other matters which occupied a discursive
and critical generation. The paper came out three times a week,
and each issue (unlike The Spectator) contained several essays,
dated, according to their subjects, from particular coffeehouses ? .
1 All accounts of gallantry, pleasure, and entertainment, shall be under the
article of White's Chocolate house; poetry, under that of Will's coffee-house; learning,
E, L. IX. CH. II.
3
## p. 34 (#58) ##############################################
34
Steele and Addison
Thus, in its original conception, The Tatler was hardly more
than an improved imitation of Defoe's Review and The Athenian
Mercury. From the first, Steele aimed at making his paper
more comprehensive. He perceived that different coffeehouses
stood for widely different interests, and he laid them all under
contribution. He persevered in finding instruction or amusement
for every taste, till The Tatler became almost as diversified as the
opinions of its readers. In the hands of most editors, so undis-
criminating a policy would soon have reduced a journal to a
periodical miscellany, and Steele the essayist is certainly not free
from charges of inconsistency and confusion. But it must be re-
membered that his long struggle after a sober, scholarly existence,
though hardly successful in his personal life, had rendered him
keenly responsive to kindred influences around him, and enabled
him to discover and give expression to the spirit of humanised
puritanism which existed beneath the babel of coffeehouses.
Like all originators, he had to feel his way. He began by making
a feature of foreign intelligence and theatrical news and, full of
middle-class disgust at frivolity and incompetence, exposed the
vagaries of prominent social characters, apparently convinced
that offenders would mend, if pilloried under a pseudonymº.
Inspired by the same respect for order and regularity, he gave
expression, in some rather commonplace articles“, to the public
antipathy against gambling, and argued, in a series of papers 5,
that duelling was a senseless, guilty practice, observed by exquisites
as an affectation of bravery but secretly condemned by level-
headed burghers. He warned his readers against swindlers, pointing
at certain wellknown sharpers as dogs, but without a touch of the
old English amusement at roguery. Indeed, except for two jestbook
stories, a mock testament and a few sentimental extravagances
in the style of seventeenth century romancese, his earlier attempts
in a lighter vein consist of coffeehouse discussions on literary
9
under the title of Grecian; foreign and domestic news, you will have from St James's
coffee-house; and what else I shall on any other subject offer, shall be dated from
my own apartment. ' The Tatler, no. 1.
i See ante, chap. I.
Nos. 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 14, 20, 21, 59 and 66 (by Swift), 191, 203 (Swift and Steale).
3 E. g. Colonel Pickel and Florimel, no. 7; Florimel and Prudentia at Bath, no. 16;
Lord Hinchinbroke, nos. 22, 58, 85; Tom Colson, no. 46; Dr John Radcliffe, no. 44 ;
Henry Cromwell, no. 47; Beau Feilding, nos. 50, 51; Duke of Ormond, no. 54.
• Nos. 13, 14, 15, 56.
5 Nos. 25, 26, 28, 29, 31, 38, 39.
6 Nos. 2, 42.
7 No. 7.
8 E. g. Unnion and Valentine, no. 5.
1
## p. 35 (#59) ##############################################
Character of Isaac Bickerstaff 35
questions and talks on current topics of city life such as changes
in slanga and the abuse of the title esquires.
These and similar performances were half-hearted, because
Steele was finding his true level in the alleged lucubrations of
Isaac Bickerstaff. He had borrowed this pseudonym from Swift's
famous pamphlet, as being the best known type of intellectual
detective and watchman. Soon, coffeehouses began to make
their influence felt, and, as he gradually marked out as his
province the intimate world of conduct and courtesy, he tended
more and more to invest his figurehead with a new personality.
The literature of coffeehouses must be as light and informal as
their discussions*; so, he puts his moral counsels into the mouth of
Bickerstaff, in order to preserve a conversational style and an air
of persuasive authority quite acceptable to men who looked up to a
self-constituted oracle in all their debates.
As his readers were
interested in eccentricity, Bickerstaff becomes an aged recluse
living a lonely and mysterious life, surrounded, as Swift had sug-
gested, by the old-fashioned paraphernalia of astrology and
attended by his familiar Pacolet®, like the now discredited ma-
gicians of the previous century. And yet this atmosphere of
unreality gives effectiveness to Bickerstaff's character. His isola-
tion enables him to study his fellow creatures dispassionately, and
Pacolet, like the diable boiteux of Lesage, reveals to him the
inaccessible secrets of other people. As the numbers of The Tatler
increased, he developed into the first, and rather roughdrawn,
portrait of eighteenth century civilization. He has the reason-
ableness and insight of coffeehouses, a sympathy with common
things, out of which the domestic novel was to come, and a spirit of
independent thought, coupled with respect for order and religion,
such as the seventeenth century never knew.
In this thin disguise, Steele touched on all those questions of
breeding, good taste, courtesy and chivalry where the middle class
had discarded old aristocratic ideals, without having yet learnt to
trust entirely to their own. No wonder The Tatler became im-
mensely popular when its readers found their half-formed notions
· Nos. 6, 17, 43.
No. 12.
8 No. 19.
See no. 62, on the propriety of words and thoughts, in which it is maintained
that conversation 'is not to savour in the least of study' and that literary style . is to
adrit of something like the freedom of discourse. '
See The Character of a Coffee-house, 1673, The Spectator, no. 24.
• The name appears to have been taken from a character in the romance of Valentine
and Orson, whose horse was enchanted. Sir Philip Sidney alludes to the horse in An
Apologie for Poetrie (1581).
3-2
## p. 36 (#60) ##############################################
36
Steele and Addison
confirmed and proclaimed. One of their perplexities centred
round the ideal of what they called a gentleman. In aristocratic
circles, men still emulated the type set forth by Jacobean
essayists? and affected 'warmth of imagination, quick relish of
?
pleasure and the manner of becoming it? ' Such lubricity and
self-assertion would be intolerable where friendly intercourse was
the foundation of culture, and Steele points out that the first
quality of a gentleman is not brilliance but forbearance and the
art of accommodating another's susceptibilities without sacrificing
one's own. Many recognise this ideal, but have not the tact to
combine compliance with self-respect, and become 'pretty fellows3'
or even 'very pretty fellows*,' or, again, affect an unwarrantable
familiarity and merely succeed in becoming 'whisperers without
business and laughers without occasion. ' Society being now
mosaic of different units, all of them seeking some common ground
of intellectual fellowship, men of one interest, such as are many
scholars and soldiersº, are shown to be as superficial as those who
think that boisterous good humour will make up for a lack of
ideas? . But, again and again, Steele insists that a man's first duty
is to please his hearers, showing how often the 'wag' and the
wit’ of the old school still abuse the privileges of acquaintanceship
merely to gain a reputation for smartness and satire 8.
The puritan desire to see the seriousness of life in every word
and deed was now being humanised into a standard of good taste,
and, if Londoners refused to admire cleverness devoid of charity,
they were even more ready to be warned against coarser methods
of self-advertisement. Affectation in dress and manner, such as
the manipulation of the snuff-box or the wearing a cane on the
fifth button, is mercilessly ridiculedº; the man who uses ex-
pletives to make his conversation forcible is declared to be merely
empty-headed 10; the whole fraternity of fops is characterised as
'the order of the insipids 11'; but the severest strictures are passed
on the pretence of viciousness which was part of the dandies'
pose 12. Thus, the two nations pass before us. On the one hand,
the degenerate imitators of Jacobean cavaliers and restoration
a
a
6
(
i Ante, vol. IV, chap. XVI. · The Tatler, no. 21.
3 No. 21.
4 No. 24.
6 No. 38.
6 No. 61, nicknamed by Steele 'men of fire. '
7 No. 63.
8 Nos. 184, 219, 225, 244, 264.
• Nos. 27, 35, 96.
10 No. 137.
11 No. 166.
12 Nos. 77, 191 and 213 in which Tom Springly pretends to be preparing for an
assignation with a married woman at Rosamond's Pond, when he is really going to
evening prayers.
## p. 37 (#61) ##############################################
The Tatler on Women
37
courtiers, with the underworld of sharpers and gamesters; on the
other, the middle class coffeehouses, where citizens learnt to
become urbane without ceasing to be pious. Steele belonged
to both classes and traces the conflict between them. In many
of his papers, after gibbeting the false ideal, he presents the
true model, and it is not surprising that his own moral struggle,
which gave him this insight, is sometimes recorded. In one paper,
he pleads for the rake, claiming that he sins, repents and sins
again only because his natural passions are too strong for him? .
Later, in a fit of self-humiliation, he confesses that goodnature is
often laziness, and, towards the end of The Tatlers, he denounces
his own besetting sin, declaring that the drunkard cannot be either
a friend, a gentleman, a master, or a subject, and is especially
,
dastardly when he has a virtuous wife.
If, however, the middle classes had much to reform in the
manners of men, they had far more to criticise in the social position
of women. When Madame de Rambouillet brought together
in her salon the most cultured men and the most beautiful
women in France, she created a new standard of social refinement
for Europe. The management of intimate relations between the
two sexes became a proof of good breeding, and the civilisation of
any court could almost be measured by the influence which ladies
enjoyed in it. In the earlier Stewart times, the English aris-
tocracy readily adopted this cult, and all people of quality practised
the art of inspiring or suffering the passion of love. But, so soon
as this accomplishment became a fashion, it was perverted to most
ignoble uses. The coarser types of the restoration gained caste
by affecting the same delicacy of sentiment and purity of devotion,
while they really gratified their lusts. Immorality was invested
with a ritual of compliments, odes, assignations and addresses,
and, when the rising middle class came into touch with the beau
monde, many well-intentioned young people were too inexperienced
to detect the baseness which underlay this glitter and polish.
Steele had primarily designed The Tatler to be an organ of the
coffeehouses, and his first few papers on women are hardly any-
thing but what one might expect from the gossip of the smoking-
room". But, in the stage of social evolution thus reached, the follies
of men and women were so inextricable that Steele could not satirise
rakes and fops without penetrating into the lives of their victims
or deceivers. So far back as the protectorate, moralists had begun
1 No. 27.
* No. 241.
4 E. g. nos. 10, 20, 23.
2 No. 76.
## p. 38 (#62) ##############################################
38
Steele and Addison
to abandon the savage invective which Elizabethan and Jacobean
misogynists had affected, and filled pamphlets with more humane,
but none the less searching, ridicule of female frivolities! Steele
is continuing a puritan tradition as well as breaking new ground,
when he allows us to catch sight of the treachery and dishonour
hidden beneath these hypocritical observances; sometimes, dwelling
on the persecutions and outrages to which girls unwittingly exposed
themselves and, at other times, revealing the jealousies and intrigues
of more experienced matrons who looked on marriage, for all its
euphemisms, as a game of skill or a masque of vanity? Now and
then, he gives us glimpses of the amours of those who shrink
from matrimony or dwells upon the more horrible tedium and dis-
illusionment of marriages made without loveHad Steele lived in
an age of decadence, he would, like most satirists in such periods,
have confined himself to invective. But, if he helped to push one
social order into the grave, he also helped to bring another to the
light. As in his papers on men’s manners, so now, after exposing
vice, he holds up to admiration virtue, especially in his wellknown
portrait of Lady Elizabeth Hastings, whose passion is so high-
souled and graceful that 'to love her is a liberal education. '
Such portraits would have had but little effect if Steele had
not also pointed out the change which must inevitably befall
the moral training of youth. While showing that vice was often
concealed under a veil of refinement and liberality, he argued
that the young give way to its allurements from a false idea of
manliness or by way of revolt against parental tyranny. The old
puritan methods of education had to be softened and humanised.
He argued that children could be kept from extravagance and
sensuality only by a sense of self-respect and by awakening in
them tender memories of a father or mother whom they had
learnt to love. He then explains how the parent or guardian
must be their companion, and encourage their confidence if he is
to understand their characters, ending with the portrait of a
perfect father, Dr Lancelot Addison, the one man 'among all
my acquaintances, whom I have thought to live with his children
with equanimity and good graceº. '
1 Ante, vol. vni, chap. XVI, p. 387.
9 Nos. 33, 139, 198, 248 ; 22, 91, 98, 107, 200, 212, 245, 247, 248.
3 Nos. 49, 53, 149, 199.
* No. 49. Congreve had already described her under the name of Aspasia, no. 42.
Other models of conjugal virtue will be found in the translation of Pliny's letters to
bis wife, no. 149, and the story of Antiochus and Stratonice, no. 185.
• Nos. 9, 60, 61, 83, 185.
6 Nos. 30, 189, 207, 235.
## p. 39 (#63) ##############################################
6
The Short Story. ' Jenny Distaff 39
·
In his charming papers on childhood, as well as in his moral
essays on men and women, Steele writes like a man at one
with his audience. He does not feel the need to argue or con-
vince; it is enough to appeal to the sense of right and wrong.
As he said himself, when exposing the tyranny of husbands-,
touching upon the malady tenderly is half way to the cure; and
there are some faults which need only to be observed, to be
amended. ' His business was not so much to create sentiments as
to awaken them by a vivid description, and teach his readers to
recognise their own principles in some poignant situation. As
civilization became complex and peaceful, the affairs of daily life
assumed greater importance; men concerned themselves with
little things, and Steele found himself enabled to play on the
deeper springs of thought and emotion, by describing an everyday
episode. In this way, he discovered the modern short story,' that
is to say, a tale which suggests fundamental ideas or convictions?
Among the problems of social life which he thus illumined with
imagination or even with emotion, none lay nearer Steele's own
heart than questions of family life. To heighten and illustrate such
reflections, he invented a lady editor, Jenny Distaff, Bickerstaff's
half-sister, a typical middle class girl, who, from time to time,
gives her views on women's affairs? . But, as he returned again
and again to this congenial theme, Jenny's personality grew upon
him till she became the heroine of his domestic sketches. When
reminding his female readers that matrimony is not a flight of
romance, but a resolve to stake one's happiness on union with
a partial stranger, he makes Jenny's marriage with Tranquillus the
occasion for counsels based on this view, and gives a lively descrip-
tion of the wedding festivities. From time to time, the young couple
reappear to illustrate the experiences of married life. We have the
first inevitable passing cloud which is happily smoothed over and
forgotten'. Like sensible bourgeois, they learn to understand one
* No. 149.
* Compare, in this connection, the best tales of earlier times, from the story of
Rhampsinitus's Treasure Chamber (Herodotus, bk 11, chap. 121) to Jean de Bove's Des
Trois Larrons or no. 16 of A C. Mery Talys, with such productions as Balzac's Chef
deuvre inconnu, or Turgenev's The Jew. Even when old stories are retold with all
the art of a modern raconteur (e. g. Li Amitiez de Ami et Amile and Aucasrin et Nicolette,
by Pater, W. , in Renaissance Studies (last ed. ) 1910 and La Légende de St Julien
Hospitalier, by Flaubert, G. , in Trois Contes (last ed. ) 1908), the difference is still
apparent. The story of Philippus (Horace, Epist. 1, 7) resembles the modern type,
because the Romans of the empire had learned to see a whole background of philosophy
and sentiment behind the affairs of daily life.
3 Nos. 10, 83, 36, 37.
4 No. 79.
o No. 85.
8
## p. 40 (#64) ##############################################
40
Steele and Addison
another, and Steele gives a picture of the lady's character maturing
in wedlock. She and her husband dine with her half-brother, and
she enters the room with a decent and matronlike behaviour'
The household thrives, and the perils of prosperity are dwelt on.
Jenny calls on the astrologer, and, this time, he notices ‘in her
manner and air, something . . . a little below that of the women
of first breeding and quality but at the same time above the
simplicity and familiarity of her usual deportment? ' Bickerstaff
then discovers that his sister had fallen a victim to the love of
display and writes to warn her husband of the folly of aiming
above their station in life. Thus, besides discovering the short
story, Steele might well have invented the serial domestic novel,
if only the conditions of his work had permitted more continuity
of application. For, in his writing, we find, for the first time, the
temperament which is drawn to the pathos, and even the tragedy,
of family life. He gave up one paper to a picture of perfect
domestic happiness, describing it as 'a complication of all the
pleasures of life and a retreat from its inquietudes'; and, five
weeks later, he introduces us to the same family plunged in the
deepest woe as they gather round the death-bed of their mother.
In these and other fugitive papers of like nature, we may notice the
rise of that sentimentality which dominated the taste of the mid-
eighteenth century and survives so late as Thackeray's novels.
Steele, thanks to his double character, was one of the first to find
that he could combat his own wayward, bohemian nature by culti-
vating a tenderness for home affections. The next generation either
followed his example or discovered the same secret, fleeing from
the crudity of their own civilization by exaggerating the softer
side of life, till lachrymose sensibility became the mark of refine-
ment. He tells us himself how he was often driven to seek a
steadying force in solemn and melancholy thoughts, and admits
that he reserved certain times to revive the old places of grief
in our memory and ponder step by step on past life. ' Thus, out
of distant memories, Steele recalled many intimate and pathetic
scenes which a less effusive writer would have shielded from
public gaze. Had it occurred to him to weave such incidents as
the oft-quoted description of his father's death and of his
mother's passionate grief into the history of Jenny Distaff, the
domestic novel would, in a rudimentary form, have been invented.
1 No. 104.
4 No. 114.
2 No. 143.
5 No. 181.
3 No. 95.
6 Ibid.
## p. 41 (#65) ##############################################
Variety of Topics in The Tatler
41
As it was, he ended the story with a sequel in which an unex-
pected hamper of wine vanishes among boon companions.
Steele touched on many more topics. As was to be expected
from the mouthpiece of the coffeehouses and from the self-
appointed 'Censor of Great Britain,' he is full of contempt for
feudal prejudices and the arrogance of the rich'. He sided with
Hoadly, bishop of Winchester, against Blackall, bishop of Exeter,
on the doctrine of passive obedience? He worked up Roger
Grant's supposed healing of a blind boy into an enthusiastic
description not unlike a broadside. He criticised the lack of
pulpit eloquence". He composed, or published, some charming
letters on the pleasures of country life. Just as John Dunton
had constituted himself an oracle for all questioners in The
Athenian Mercury, so Steele, sometimes, filled whole numbers
with the correspondence he received or pretended to receive. In
his constant endeavour to 'extirpate. . . all such as are either pre-
judicial or insignificant to society”, his characterisation is often
onesided and becomes caricature. But, now and then, he pierced
beneath the superficiality almost inseparable from satire, and
hinted at the profound complexity of the civilized mind, showing,
in several papers, how the ordinary human character is inex-
tricably interwoven with the social fabric to which it belongs and
becomes as particoloured as the woof itself. While society grows
more heterogeneous, conflicting principles exist side by side, and,
as men are bound, in some measure, to think according to their
environment, they misunderstand each other on the commonest
topics, fluctuate between opposite ideals and often end by dis-
trusting their own instincts and mistaking their own emotions.
These more complex and impressionable personalities are distin-
guished from simpler types: first, society nonentities, subordinate
characters of men such as Tim Dapper, who are like pegs in a
building, they make no figure in it but hold the structure
together, and, then, the vast workaday world, which stedfastly
Nos. 66, 144, 180, 181, 196. In the same spirit, he gave some striking sketches of
character in low life--the ungraciously humorous account of Guardeloop the French
tailor's wedding (no. 7), with its picture of 'low gallantry' being succeeded by
sergeant Hall's letter to sergeant Cabe (no. 87), full of cheerful and unaffected heroism,
and the escapades of the imperturbable Will Rosin (no. 105), 'a man of tranquillity
without reading Seneca. '
• Nos. 44, 50.
gave them a fresh hold on society, while the civil war, which had
decimated or ruined the nobility, conferred on the middle class
a political importance of which their fathers had never dreamt.
As a rule, members of the citizen class who have risen in the social
scale intermarry with the aristocracy and imitate the manners, and
especially the vices, of the class into which they enter. But, in the
great political revolution of the seventeenth century, merchants and
traders had triumphed through their moral character even more
than by their material prosperity. The time had come when England
was weary of all the medieval fanaticism, brutality and prejudice
which had risen to the surface in the civil war, and it was the citizen
class, apart from the zealots on both sides, which had first
upheld moderation. The feud which Greene, a century before,
## p. 27 (#51) ##############################################
-
Beginnings of the new Civilization 27
had symbolised as a quaint dispute between the velvet breeches
and cloth breeches had entered upon its last phase. Votaries of
Caroline elegance and dissipation had become a set apart. They still
had all the glamour of wealth and fashion; but they had lost their
influence on the civilization of the country. The middle class had
broken away from their leadership and had pressed forward to the
front rank of national progress. It has already been shown? how they
had trodden down the relics of a less humane and less reasonable
age, reforming the laws for debt and the administration of prisons,
refuting the superstition of witchcraft, attacking scholasticism in
the universities and founding the Royal Society-nay, more, how
the more enlightened had pleaded for a purer and simpler morality,
for gentler manners, for a more modest yet dignified self-respect.
To the superficial observer, these protests and appeals must have
sounded like isolated voices in a confused multitude. In reality,
they were indications of a new civilization which was already
fermenting underneath. A new London had sprung up since the
great fire and, with it, a generation of Londoners whose tempera-
ment and occupations led them to form a standard of culture,
honour and religion peculiar to themselves. Such progress is the
work of a whole class. It is never initiated by individuals, though
one or two thinkers are generally needed to give form and ex-
pression to the tendencies of the rest. In this case, the victory of
'cloth breeches' was not complete until Steele and Addison had
discovered in what quarter to look for the movement and in what
form to reveal to men their own ideas. These writers saw further
and deeper than their contemporaries, because each, according to
his own character, had first been born again.
It was Steele who led the way. Nature had endowed him with
the instincts and temperament of one of king Charles I's cavaliers.
He had the same generosity, love of pleasure, restlessness, chivalry
and tincture of classical culture. Like many others of this class,
he was extremely impressionable; but, unlike his prototypes, he
lived in an age when recklessness and self-indulgence, though still
fashionable in some circles, ran counter to the better tendencies of
the time. Thus, the conviviality and gallantry which were popular
in the guardroom caused him many searchings of heart, when
confronted by the disapproval of scholars and moralists. In such
moments of inward discontent, the gay life of the capital lost its
glamour; the puritan spirit came over him, and he perceived that the
1 Ante, vol. VII, chap. XVI, pp. 385–97.
## p. 28 (#52) ##############################################
28
Steele and Addison
dissipation of the young man-about-town was, at best, a pose and
the moral teaching of the ancients a lamentable protection against
the temptation of the senses. Cicero, Seneca and Plutarch had
proved persuasive monitors to many a Jacobean and Caroline
essayist, because the renascence had endowed the classics with
almost scriptural authority. But, though Steele belonged to the
class which still clung to these guides from respect for the old
times, he also came daily into contact with the new enlightened
religion of the middle class. He committed to paper the thoughts
which passed through his mind in these moments of reflection and
published them in 1701 for the edification of others under the title
The Christian Hero.
This booklet is an attempt to persuade educated men into
accepting the Bible as a moral counsellor. Steele describes how
Cato, Caesar, Brutus and Cassius died, and argues that heathen
philosophy failed each in the great crisis of his life. He then
tells over again the story of the creation of Adam and Eve and
how, after their fall, men became corrupt and so a prey to ambition
and the love of ostentation. This dependence on the applause
of the world is, to Steele, the root of all evil ; even the tales
which young fellows tell of debauches and seductions are prompted
by 'fame'; even 'heathen virtues, which were little else but dis-
guised or artificial passions (since the good was in fame) must rise
or fall with disappointment or success. ' Christ, and then St Paul,
by their labours and death, first brought men help, teaching them
that the true guide in conduct is conscience. Man sins or suffers
through dependence on the world; he is saved by the inwardness
and self-effacement of Christianity. In the spiritual distress which
drove Steele to write this pamphlet, he had learnt to think for
himself. The description of Eve's creation shows that he had
studied Milton, then an unfashionable author; the passage on
chivalrous respect for women's virtue was a defiance to the con-
ventionality which regarded immorality as a sign of high spirits ;
the advice that a man should do a kindness as if he would rather
have his generosity appear an enlarged self-love than a diffusive
bounty' was a new ideal for good taste; in his contention that the
false ideals of society led men to err, he touched the true weakness
of his times.
Thus, The Christian Hero is important because it foreshadows
Steele's message to his age. But, though the book passed through
a second edition within the same year and continued to be popular
i Chap. II.
## p. 29 (#53) ##############################################
Steelė's Comedies
29
6
with readers of a certain religious temperament, it was not other-
wise a success. The prosperous middle class, busy with the peaceful
round of city life, did not need to be warned against choosing
Caesar or Brutus for their model or Seneca for their spiritual
pastor. Nor, again, if they ever. opened this little manual of
meditations, would they find it clearly explained how the self-
sacrifice of St Paul and the divinity of Christ could guide them
amid the thousand little perplexities of their growing social
system. Steele sermonised on heroism to readers who were
interested in manners, and deserved the fate that from being
thought no undelightful companion, he was soon reckoned a
disagreeable fellow? '
This missionary spirit, when roused, impelled him to other forms
of expression. Having not yet found his peculiar bent, he was
inevitably attracted to the drama. During a century, comedy and
tragedy, with intervals of repression, had been one of the most
popular outlets for an author and must have seemed exactly the
medium for a man with Steele's sense of humour and knowledge
of character. Besides, the moral movement among the people,
which had been influencing Steele, had also caught the theatre.
Sir Richard Blackmore and Jeremy Collierº were calling for a
pure and reformed drama, and so Steele's conscience, as well as his
tastes, urged him to put his ideas on the stage. Since the restora-
tion, writers of comedies had aimed at brilliance and cleverness.
As the court was amused at cuckoldry, they represented seducers
and seduced as endowed with all the wit, ingenuity, or beauty which
society admired, while intrigues leading to adultery could always
be rounded off into a well constructed, if somewhat unoriginal,
plot. Steele went over the same ground-love, courtship, married
life, intrigue; his purpose, however, was avowedly to paint virtue
and vice in their true colours. Following the example of
Molière, from whom he borrowed freely, he covered his bad
characters with ridicule and confusion. But he was not content
to let them occupy the front of the stage, as Molière had done.
He wished to champion virtue; so his villains, for the most part,
are minor characters, dismissed with humiliation at the dénouement,
while his leading figures are quite ordinary people, whose careers
begin and end in the triumph of homely virtues. Such characters,
however desirable in a book of devotions, lack true comic interest,
and Steele was obliged to lead his heroes and heroines through a
1 Mr Steele's Apology for Himself and his Writings, 1714.
9 Cf. ante, vol. VIII, pp. 163 ff.
a
## p. 30 (#54) ##############################################
30
Steele and Addison
6
series of domestic calamities and surprises, in order to sustain
sympathy. In The Funeral, or Grief-à-la-mode (1701), his first and
best constructed comedy, the defunct Lord Brumpton has to be kept
secretly alive all through the play, in order to shame his worldly
widow's enjoyment of affluence and freedom, and to reward his
daughters' two suitors. In The Lying Lover (1703), copied from
Corneille's Menteur, young Bookwit becomes drunk, then fights
and appears to kill his rival, is arrested, suffers all the pangs of
remorse and the horrors of Newgate and, after this gruesome
lesson against intemperance and duelling, learns that his victim
still lives and ends by marrying the sweetheart whom he had
courted with a fidelity rare on the stage. In The Tender
Husband (1705), the third and last of Steele's plays at this
period of his career, he rises to one of Molière's leading ideas,
in the conception that a son tyrannised till manhood in a boorish
home will end by deceiving his father and contracting a foolish
marriage, and that a girl, left to the companionship of French
romances, will become a 'Quixote in petticoats. ' But, when the
elder Clerimont is represented as despatching his mistress,
disguised as a gallant, to tempt the virtue of his wife and then,
on the failure of the seducer, tearfully seeking a reconciliation,
all dramatic propriety is sacrificed, in order to give a by no means
convincing picture of conjugal tenderness. Such was the tone
which the moral movement of queen Anne's reign introduced into
the theatre, and, since succeeding dramatists came under this
influence, Steele may be regarded as the founder of sentimental
comedy? Unhappily, as in the case of most comedies with a
purpose, plots are sacrificed to the moral, and, apart from im-
probability of incident, Steele’s plays show but little of that
correctness of construction which the age exacted.
If Steele's dramatic work added scant laurels to his reputation,
it was of the first importance in forming his mind. He had come
to his task with the same stock of ideas as had served him in
composing The Christian Hero. But, as a playwright, he had
to make these ideas talk and act. He had to penetrate be-
neath the surface of life, and to show how often a profession or
training degrades a man; how servants inevitably become mimics
of their masters' excesses and frivolities; how women, who are
untrained in the serious responsibilities of life, fall victims
to fulsome adulation and often end in a marriage of convenience;
i Ward, A. W. , A History of English Dramatic Literature, revised ed. 1899, vol. m
P. 493.
## p. 31 (#55) ##############################################
Influence of the Coffeehouses 31
how the best of them, for lack of moral sense, become
tyrannical and fastidious before wedlock, and how others prey
like vampires on their deluded husbands. Thus, Steele had
learnt to look inside the domestic circle and to note how fashion
and conventionality were warping the natural goodness of his
fellow creatures. Here and there, he hints at the conception of the
purer and simpler, though rather emotional, family life which he
was afterwards to depict. But, as we have seen, comedy was not
a suitable medium for teaching of this nature. Although an
atmosphere of earnest enquiry and reflection bad formed itself
in London, and had reached the stage, the public of the play.
house was not yet in a mood for social and moral speculation.
It still expected wit and amusement. Steele had yet to discover
where the world of thought that embodied the qualities which he
had in mind was to be found, and how he was to approach it.
He discovered it five years later in the coffeehouses. Here
could be met serious-minded, progressive citizens, who were
steadily outnumbering and overbearing the votaries of the old
social regime. Matthew Arnold has said that, when 'England
entered the prison of Puritanism,' it 'turned the key on its in-
tellectual progress for two hundred years. ' In reality, it was
precisely this class, made up of inheritors of puritan narrowness
and perseverance, which created a new culture for England out of
its coffeehouses. It has already been shown how Londoners, as
early as the protectorate, began to assemble in these rendezvous
and how, by daily intercourse, they learned to feel interest in each
other's manners and habits of thought. As they cared little for
the more frivolous diversions of the capital, they tended more and
more to seek the pleasures of news and conversation, until, by the
beginning of the eighteenth century, coffeehouses had become the
most striking feature of London life? Men who gathered day
after day in these resorts were not only interested in their com-
panions' ideas and demeanour; they cultivated an eye for trivial
actions and utterances, a gift for investigating other people's
prejudices and partialities, and they realized the pleasure of
winning their way into the intricacies of another man's mind.
Hence, they acquired a new attitude towards their fellow
creatures. Characters which would formerly have been ridiculed
or despised were now valued as intellectual puzzles, eccentricities
attracted sympathetic attention, and it became the note of
1 Ante, vol. vii, chap. XVI, pp. 389, 390.
2 Macaulay, History of England, chap. III.
## p. 32 (#56) ##############################################
32
Steele and Addison
intelligent men to be tolerant. Besides this sentiment of friend-
liness, the mere conditions of clublife imposed a new code of
manners. If men were to enjoy daily intercourse, they had to
respect each other's opinions and to cultivate self-suppression.
Thus, consideration for others became the fashion, and the
middle class, besides studying character, came to regard courtesy
as a part of civilization
Men learned other things in coffeehouses besides the amenities
of social intercourse. Clubland had taken so universal a hold on
London that nearly every man of intelligence frequented some
resort of this kind. Now, these were just the people who read
and wrote books; they created thought and taste; the future of
literature depended on their ideas and ways of expression. Until
the time of the restoration, neither writers nor readers had
practised the studied simplicity of true conversation. Even
pamphleteers like Nashe, Dekker or Rowlands, whose one aim
was to follow popular taste, had never broken away from
book knowledge, despite their slipshod style, and the literary
cliques which handed round manuscript essays and characters
had reproduced in their writings only such conversation as
might be a vehicle for their clinches and conceits. Men
had confined their literary interests to the library and, as a
consequence, their style was either ponderous or precious. The
Royal Society had already started a movement against redundance
of phrase; but it may well be doubted whether the protests of
Sprat, Evelyn and South? would have had lasting effect with-
out the influence of coffeehouses. It was here that, besides
,
practising benevolence in small things, men learnt to unravel
literary ideas in a style that was colloquial as well as cultured.
Conversation has a mysterious power of awakening thought.
Commonplaces and trifles appear in a new light, and fresh notions
are continually struck off like sparks. The man who has formed
his mind by intercourse is more versatile and alert than he whose
intellect has grown by reading, and he has learnt to speak in short
simple sentences, because the ear cannot, like the eye, follow long
periods. Moreover, he must abandon the phraseology of books,
* It is true that one has only to read The Dunciad (though not written by a coffee-
house habitué) to be convinced that St Grobian still had votaries no less ardent than
Nashe or Harvey. Flytings' continued as a literary tradition, and their existence
does not disprove the taste for gentler manners, which grew up in coffeehouses and
influenced literature. Compare The Coffee Scuffle (1662) or A Coffee-House Dialogue
(1679) (see ante, vol. vni, p. 390) with any scene from The Tatler or The Spectator.
Ante, vol. Vini, chap. XVI.
2
## p. 33 (#57) ##############################################
Beginnings of The Tatler
33
because the written word had long assumed a formal, almost im-
personal, air, and must borrow turns and phrases from daily
parlance to give an individual touch to his theories.
Thus, the middle classes were accomplishing their own
education. They were becoming thinkers with a culture and a
standard of manners born of conversation and free from pedantry
of thought or expression. Coffeehouses had given them a kind
of organisation; a means of exchanging ideas and forming the
public opinion of their class. But this spirit was at present manifest
only in the atmosphere where it had been formed. It was not
found in theatres, universities or salons. Coffeehouses bad
unconsciously become fraternities for the propagation of a new
humanism, and a writer could come into touch with the ideas and
sentiments of the age only in those centres.
This movement was so inchoate that the middle classes them-
selves were hardly conscious of it. Steele certainly did not perceive
into what a world of thought and sentiment he was penetrating
when he ventured, in The Tatler, to appeal to coffeehouses. After
writing The Tender Husband, he seems to have relinquished the
theatre for the more lucrative career of a court favourite. He,
probably, never lived within his income and, after losing, in 1708,
his position of gentleman-waiter to prince George of Denmark and
failing to obtain two other posts, he returned to literature in order
to meet his debts. Since the censorship had been removed from
the press, journalism had become a profitable enterprise, and
Steele's chief motive in starting The Tatler on 12 April 1709, was,
undoubtedly, the fear of bankruptcy. However, the desire to
improve his fellow creatures was as strong as in the days of The
Christian Hero. Steele was himself a frequenter of coffeehouses.
He knew how confused and misguided their political discussions
often were, thanks to the irresponsible news-sheets which flooded
London ; and he also realized how many other topics were wrongly
or superficially canvassed in those daily and nightly gatherings.
So, he set himself to enlighten, as well as to entertain, his fellow
talkers. As gazetteer, he could give the most trustworthy foreign
news, and, as a man of culture and society, he could tell them
what to think concerning other matters which occupied a discursive
and critical generation. The paper came out three times a week,
and each issue (unlike The Spectator) contained several essays,
dated, according to their subjects, from particular coffeehouses ? .
1 All accounts of gallantry, pleasure, and entertainment, shall be under the
article of White's Chocolate house; poetry, under that of Will's coffee-house; learning,
E, L. IX. CH. II.
3
## p. 34 (#58) ##############################################
34
Steele and Addison
Thus, in its original conception, The Tatler was hardly more
than an improved imitation of Defoe's Review and The Athenian
Mercury. From the first, Steele aimed at making his paper
more comprehensive. He perceived that different coffeehouses
stood for widely different interests, and he laid them all under
contribution. He persevered in finding instruction or amusement
for every taste, till The Tatler became almost as diversified as the
opinions of its readers. In the hands of most editors, so undis-
criminating a policy would soon have reduced a journal to a
periodical miscellany, and Steele the essayist is certainly not free
from charges of inconsistency and confusion. But it must be re-
membered that his long struggle after a sober, scholarly existence,
though hardly successful in his personal life, had rendered him
keenly responsive to kindred influences around him, and enabled
him to discover and give expression to the spirit of humanised
puritanism which existed beneath the babel of coffeehouses.
Like all originators, he had to feel his way. He began by making
a feature of foreign intelligence and theatrical news and, full of
middle-class disgust at frivolity and incompetence, exposed the
vagaries of prominent social characters, apparently convinced
that offenders would mend, if pilloried under a pseudonymº.
Inspired by the same respect for order and regularity, he gave
expression, in some rather commonplace articles“, to the public
antipathy against gambling, and argued, in a series of papers 5,
that duelling was a senseless, guilty practice, observed by exquisites
as an affectation of bravery but secretly condemned by level-
headed burghers. He warned his readers against swindlers, pointing
at certain wellknown sharpers as dogs, but without a touch of the
old English amusement at roguery. Indeed, except for two jestbook
stories, a mock testament and a few sentimental extravagances
in the style of seventeenth century romancese, his earlier attempts
in a lighter vein consist of coffeehouse discussions on literary
9
under the title of Grecian; foreign and domestic news, you will have from St James's
coffee-house; and what else I shall on any other subject offer, shall be dated from
my own apartment. ' The Tatler, no. 1.
i See ante, chap. I.
Nos. 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 14, 20, 21, 59 and 66 (by Swift), 191, 203 (Swift and Steale).
3 E. g. Colonel Pickel and Florimel, no. 7; Florimel and Prudentia at Bath, no. 16;
Lord Hinchinbroke, nos. 22, 58, 85; Tom Colson, no. 46; Dr John Radcliffe, no. 44 ;
Henry Cromwell, no. 47; Beau Feilding, nos. 50, 51; Duke of Ormond, no. 54.
• Nos. 13, 14, 15, 56.
5 Nos. 25, 26, 28, 29, 31, 38, 39.
6 Nos. 2, 42.
7 No. 7.
8 E. g. Unnion and Valentine, no. 5.
1
## p. 35 (#59) ##############################################
Character of Isaac Bickerstaff 35
questions and talks on current topics of city life such as changes
in slanga and the abuse of the title esquires.
These and similar performances were half-hearted, because
Steele was finding his true level in the alleged lucubrations of
Isaac Bickerstaff. He had borrowed this pseudonym from Swift's
famous pamphlet, as being the best known type of intellectual
detective and watchman. Soon, coffeehouses began to make
their influence felt, and, as he gradually marked out as his
province the intimate world of conduct and courtesy, he tended
more and more to invest his figurehead with a new personality.
The literature of coffeehouses must be as light and informal as
their discussions*; so, he puts his moral counsels into the mouth of
Bickerstaff, in order to preserve a conversational style and an air
of persuasive authority quite acceptable to men who looked up to a
self-constituted oracle in all their debates.
As his readers were
interested in eccentricity, Bickerstaff becomes an aged recluse
living a lonely and mysterious life, surrounded, as Swift had sug-
gested, by the old-fashioned paraphernalia of astrology and
attended by his familiar Pacolet®, like the now discredited ma-
gicians of the previous century. And yet this atmosphere of
unreality gives effectiveness to Bickerstaff's character. His isola-
tion enables him to study his fellow creatures dispassionately, and
Pacolet, like the diable boiteux of Lesage, reveals to him the
inaccessible secrets of other people. As the numbers of The Tatler
increased, he developed into the first, and rather roughdrawn,
portrait of eighteenth century civilization. He has the reason-
ableness and insight of coffeehouses, a sympathy with common
things, out of which the domestic novel was to come, and a spirit of
independent thought, coupled with respect for order and religion,
such as the seventeenth century never knew.
In this thin disguise, Steele touched on all those questions of
breeding, good taste, courtesy and chivalry where the middle class
had discarded old aristocratic ideals, without having yet learnt to
trust entirely to their own. No wonder The Tatler became im-
mensely popular when its readers found their half-formed notions
· Nos. 6, 17, 43.
No. 12.
8 No. 19.
See no. 62, on the propriety of words and thoughts, in which it is maintained
that conversation 'is not to savour in the least of study' and that literary style . is to
adrit of something like the freedom of discourse. '
See The Character of a Coffee-house, 1673, The Spectator, no. 24.
• The name appears to have been taken from a character in the romance of Valentine
and Orson, whose horse was enchanted. Sir Philip Sidney alludes to the horse in An
Apologie for Poetrie (1581).
3-2
## p. 36 (#60) ##############################################
36
Steele and Addison
confirmed and proclaimed. One of their perplexities centred
round the ideal of what they called a gentleman. In aristocratic
circles, men still emulated the type set forth by Jacobean
essayists? and affected 'warmth of imagination, quick relish of
?
pleasure and the manner of becoming it? ' Such lubricity and
self-assertion would be intolerable where friendly intercourse was
the foundation of culture, and Steele points out that the first
quality of a gentleman is not brilliance but forbearance and the
art of accommodating another's susceptibilities without sacrificing
one's own. Many recognise this ideal, but have not the tact to
combine compliance with self-respect, and become 'pretty fellows3'
or even 'very pretty fellows*,' or, again, affect an unwarrantable
familiarity and merely succeed in becoming 'whisperers without
business and laughers without occasion. ' Society being now
mosaic of different units, all of them seeking some common ground
of intellectual fellowship, men of one interest, such as are many
scholars and soldiersº, are shown to be as superficial as those who
think that boisterous good humour will make up for a lack of
ideas? . But, again and again, Steele insists that a man's first duty
is to please his hearers, showing how often the 'wag' and the
wit’ of the old school still abuse the privileges of acquaintanceship
merely to gain a reputation for smartness and satire 8.
The puritan desire to see the seriousness of life in every word
and deed was now being humanised into a standard of good taste,
and, if Londoners refused to admire cleverness devoid of charity,
they were even more ready to be warned against coarser methods
of self-advertisement. Affectation in dress and manner, such as
the manipulation of the snuff-box or the wearing a cane on the
fifth button, is mercilessly ridiculedº; the man who uses ex-
pletives to make his conversation forcible is declared to be merely
empty-headed 10; the whole fraternity of fops is characterised as
'the order of the insipids 11'; but the severest strictures are passed
on the pretence of viciousness which was part of the dandies'
pose 12. Thus, the two nations pass before us. On the one hand,
the degenerate imitators of Jacobean cavaliers and restoration
a
a
6
(
i Ante, vol. IV, chap. XVI. · The Tatler, no. 21.
3 No. 21.
4 No. 24.
6 No. 38.
6 No. 61, nicknamed by Steele 'men of fire. '
7 No. 63.
8 Nos. 184, 219, 225, 244, 264.
• Nos. 27, 35, 96.
10 No. 137.
11 No. 166.
12 Nos. 77, 191 and 213 in which Tom Springly pretends to be preparing for an
assignation with a married woman at Rosamond's Pond, when he is really going to
evening prayers.
## p. 37 (#61) ##############################################
The Tatler on Women
37
courtiers, with the underworld of sharpers and gamesters; on the
other, the middle class coffeehouses, where citizens learnt to
become urbane without ceasing to be pious. Steele belonged
to both classes and traces the conflict between them. In many
of his papers, after gibbeting the false ideal, he presents the
true model, and it is not surprising that his own moral struggle,
which gave him this insight, is sometimes recorded. In one paper,
he pleads for the rake, claiming that he sins, repents and sins
again only because his natural passions are too strong for him? .
Later, in a fit of self-humiliation, he confesses that goodnature is
often laziness, and, towards the end of The Tatlers, he denounces
his own besetting sin, declaring that the drunkard cannot be either
a friend, a gentleman, a master, or a subject, and is especially
,
dastardly when he has a virtuous wife.
If, however, the middle classes had much to reform in the
manners of men, they had far more to criticise in the social position
of women. When Madame de Rambouillet brought together
in her salon the most cultured men and the most beautiful
women in France, she created a new standard of social refinement
for Europe. The management of intimate relations between the
two sexes became a proof of good breeding, and the civilisation of
any court could almost be measured by the influence which ladies
enjoyed in it. In the earlier Stewart times, the English aris-
tocracy readily adopted this cult, and all people of quality practised
the art of inspiring or suffering the passion of love. But, so soon
as this accomplishment became a fashion, it was perverted to most
ignoble uses. The coarser types of the restoration gained caste
by affecting the same delicacy of sentiment and purity of devotion,
while they really gratified their lusts. Immorality was invested
with a ritual of compliments, odes, assignations and addresses,
and, when the rising middle class came into touch with the beau
monde, many well-intentioned young people were too inexperienced
to detect the baseness which underlay this glitter and polish.
Steele had primarily designed The Tatler to be an organ of the
coffeehouses, and his first few papers on women are hardly any-
thing but what one might expect from the gossip of the smoking-
room". But, in the stage of social evolution thus reached, the follies
of men and women were so inextricable that Steele could not satirise
rakes and fops without penetrating into the lives of their victims
or deceivers. So far back as the protectorate, moralists had begun
1 No. 27.
* No. 241.
4 E. g. nos. 10, 20, 23.
2 No. 76.
## p. 38 (#62) ##############################################
38
Steele and Addison
to abandon the savage invective which Elizabethan and Jacobean
misogynists had affected, and filled pamphlets with more humane,
but none the less searching, ridicule of female frivolities! Steele
is continuing a puritan tradition as well as breaking new ground,
when he allows us to catch sight of the treachery and dishonour
hidden beneath these hypocritical observances; sometimes, dwelling
on the persecutions and outrages to which girls unwittingly exposed
themselves and, at other times, revealing the jealousies and intrigues
of more experienced matrons who looked on marriage, for all its
euphemisms, as a game of skill or a masque of vanity? Now and
then, he gives us glimpses of the amours of those who shrink
from matrimony or dwells upon the more horrible tedium and dis-
illusionment of marriages made without loveHad Steele lived in
an age of decadence, he would, like most satirists in such periods,
have confined himself to invective. But, if he helped to push one
social order into the grave, he also helped to bring another to the
light. As in his papers on men’s manners, so now, after exposing
vice, he holds up to admiration virtue, especially in his wellknown
portrait of Lady Elizabeth Hastings, whose passion is so high-
souled and graceful that 'to love her is a liberal education. '
Such portraits would have had but little effect if Steele had
not also pointed out the change which must inevitably befall
the moral training of youth. While showing that vice was often
concealed under a veil of refinement and liberality, he argued
that the young give way to its allurements from a false idea of
manliness or by way of revolt against parental tyranny. The old
puritan methods of education had to be softened and humanised.
He argued that children could be kept from extravagance and
sensuality only by a sense of self-respect and by awakening in
them tender memories of a father or mother whom they had
learnt to love. He then explains how the parent or guardian
must be their companion, and encourage their confidence if he is
to understand their characters, ending with the portrait of a
perfect father, Dr Lancelot Addison, the one man 'among all
my acquaintances, whom I have thought to live with his children
with equanimity and good graceº. '
1 Ante, vol. vni, chap. XVI, p. 387.
9 Nos. 33, 139, 198, 248 ; 22, 91, 98, 107, 200, 212, 245, 247, 248.
3 Nos. 49, 53, 149, 199.
* No. 49. Congreve had already described her under the name of Aspasia, no. 42.
Other models of conjugal virtue will be found in the translation of Pliny's letters to
bis wife, no. 149, and the story of Antiochus and Stratonice, no. 185.
• Nos. 9, 60, 61, 83, 185.
6 Nos. 30, 189, 207, 235.
## p. 39 (#63) ##############################################
6
The Short Story. ' Jenny Distaff 39
·
In his charming papers on childhood, as well as in his moral
essays on men and women, Steele writes like a man at one
with his audience. He does not feel the need to argue or con-
vince; it is enough to appeal to the sense of right and wrong.
As he said himself, when exposing the tyranny of husbands-,
touching upon the malady tenderly is half way to the cure; and
there are some faults which need only to be observed, to be
amended. ' His business was not so much to create sentiments as
to awaken them by a vivid description, and teach his readers to
recognise their own principles in some poignant situation. As
civilization became complex and peaceful, the affairs of daily life
assumed greater importance; men concerned themselves with
little things, and Steele found himself enabled to play on the
deeper springs of thought and emotion, by describing an everyday
episode. In this way, he discovered the modern short story,' that
is to say, a tale which suggests fundamental ideas or convictions?
Among the problems of social life which he thus illumined with
imagination or even with emotion, none lay nearer Steele's own
heart than questions of family life. To heighten and illustrate such
reflections, he invented a lady editor, Jenny Distaff, Bickerstaff's
half-sister, a typical middle class girl, who, from time to time,
gives her views on women's affairs? . But, as he returned again
and again to this congenial theme, Jenny's personality grew upon
him till she became the heroine of his domestic sketches. When
reminding his female readers that matrimony is not a flight of
romance, but a resolve to stake one's happiness on union with
a partial stranger, he makes Jenny's marriage with Tranquillus the
occasion for counsels based on this view, and gives a lively descrip-
tion of the wedding festivities. From time to time, the young couple
reappear to illustrate the experiences of married life. We have the
first inevitable passing cloud which is happily smoothed over and
forgotten'. Like sensible bourgeois, they learn to understand one
* No. 149.
* Compare, in this connection, the best tales of earlier times, from the story of
Rhampsinitus's Treasure Chamber (Herodotus, bk 11, chap. 121) to Jean de Bove's Des
Trois Larrons or no. 16 of A C. Mery Talys, with such productions as Balzac's Chef
deuvre inconnu, or Turgenev's The Jew. Even when old stories are retold with all
the art of a modern raconteur (e. g. Li Amitiez de Ami et Amile and Aucasrin et Nicolette,
by Pater, W. , in Renaissance Studies (last ed. ) 1910 and La Légende de St Julien
Hospitalier, by Flaubert, G. , in Trois Contes (last ed. ) 1908), the difference is still
apparent. The story of Philippus (Horace, Epist. 1, 7) resembles the modern type,
because the Romans of the empire had learned to see a whole background of philosophy
and sentiment behind the affairs of daily life.
3 Nos. 10, 83, 36, 37.
4 No. 79.
o No. 85.
8
## p. 40 (#64) ##############################################
40
Steele and Addison
another, and Steele gives a picture of the lady's character maturing
in wedlock. She and her husband dine with her half-brother, and
she enters the room with a decent and matronlike behaviour'
The household thrives, and the perils of prosperity are dwelt on.
Jenny calls on the astrologer, and, this time, he notices ‘in her
manner and air, something . . . a little below that of the women
of first breeding and quality but at the same time above the
simplicity and familiarity of her usual deportment? ' Bickerstaff
then discovers that his sister had fallen a victim to the love of
display and writes to warn her husband of the folly of aiming
above their station in life. Thus, besides discovering the short
story, Steele might well have invented the serial domestic novel,
if only the conditions of his work had permitted more continuity
of application. For, in his writing, we find, for the first time, the
temperament which is drawn to the pathos, and even the tragedy,
of family life. He gave up one paper to a picture of perfect
domestic happiness, describing it as 'a complication of all the
pleasures of life and a retreat from its inquietudes'; and, five
weeks later, he introduces us to the same family plunged in the
deepest woe as they gather round the death-bed of their mother.
In these and other fugitive papers of like nature, we may notice the
rise of that sentimentality which dominated the taste of the mid-
eighteenth century and survives so late as Thackeray's novels.
Steele, thanks to his double character, was one of the first to find
that he could combat his own wayward, bohemian nature by culti-
vating a tenderness for home affections. The next generation either
followed his example or discovered the same secret, fleeing from
the crudity of their own civilization by exaggerating the softer
side of life, till lachrymose sensibility became the mark of refine-
ment. He tells us himself how he was often driven to seek a
steadying force in solemn and melancholy thoughts, and admits
that he reserved certain times to revive the old places of grief
in our memory and ponder step by step on past life. ' Thus, out
of distant memories, Steele recalled many intimate and pathetic
scenes which a less effusive writer would have shielded from
public gaze. Had it occurred to him to weave such incidents as
the oft-quoted description of his father's death and of his
mother's passionate grief into the history of Jenny Distaff, the
domestic novel would, in a rudimentary form, have been invented.
1 No. 104.
4 No. 114.
2 No. 143.
5 No. 181.
3 No. 95.
6 Ibid.
## p. 41 (#65) ##############################################
Variety of Topics in The Tatler
41
As it was, he ended the story with a sequel in which an unex-
pected hamper of wine vanishes among boon companions.
Steele touched on many more topics. As was to be expected
from the mouthpiece of the coffeehouses and from the self-
appointed 'Censor of Great Britain,' he is full of contempt for
feudal prejudices and the arrogance of the rich'. He sided with
Hoadly, bishop of Winchester, against Blackall, bishop of Exeter,
on the doctrine of passive obedience? He worked up Roger
Grant's supposed healing of a blind boy into an enthusiastic
description not unlike a broadside. He criticised the lack of
pulpit eloquence". He composed, or published, some charming
letters on the pleasures of country life. Just as John Dunton
had constituted himself an oracle for all questioners in The
Athenian Mercury, so Steele, sometimes, filled whole numbers
with the correspondence he received or pretended to receive. In
his constant endeavour to 'extirpate. . . all such as are either pre-
judicial or insignificant to society”, his characterisation is often
onesided and becomes caricature. But, now and then, he pierced
beneath the superficiality almost inseparable from satire, and
hinted at the profound complexity of the civilized mind, showing,
in several papers, how the ordinary human character is inex-
tricably interwoven with the social fabric to which it belongs and
becomes as particoloured as the woof itself. While society grows
more heterogeneous, conflicting principles exist side by side, and,
as men are bound, in some measure, to think according to their
environment, they misunderstand each other on the commonest
topics, fluctuate between opposite ideals and often end by dis-
trusting their own instincts and mistaking their own emotions.
These more complex and impressionable personalities are distin-
guished from simpler types: first, society nonentities, subordinate
characters of men such as Tim Dapper, who are like pegs in a
building, they make no figure in it but hold the structure
together, and, then, the vast workaday world, which stedfastly
Nos. 66, 144, 180, 181, 196. In the same spirit, he gave some striking sketches of
character in low life--the ungraciously humorous account of Guardeloop the French
tailor's wedding (no. 7), with its picture of 'low gallantry' being succeeded by
sergeant Hall's letter to sergeant Cabe (no. 87), full of cheerful and unaffected heroism,
and the escapades of the imperturbable Will Rosin (no. 105), 'a man of tranquillity
without reading Seneca. '
• Nos. 44, 50.
