SPECTATOR, The. Tuesday, 12 April 1709, deserves to be remembered as an impor tant date in the history of English literature. For on that day Richard Steele issued the first number of The Taller. This modest half sheet, issued thrice a week, was in reality the begin ning of English periodical literature. Defoe had founded his Review two years before; but that was a little sheaf of political news and opinions with no charm of literary quality. It was the merit of Steele to perceive the oppor tunity for a new form of journal which should picture, in entertaining fashion and in a temper of kindly satire, the manners and conduct of contemporary society. He put at the head of his first number a couplet from Juvenal: "Whatever men do, or say, or think, or dream Our motley paper seizes for its theme." Addison, it seems, had not been informed of Steele's project, and did not recognize the hand of his friend until the sixth number. He is supposed to have written the eighteenth paper, but did not join Steele as a regular con tributor until near the close of the year 1709. In the next two years his aid became indispen sable. As Steele himself said, "I fared like a distressed prince who called in a powerful neighbor to his aid, and when I had called him in I could not subsist without him." On 2 Jan. 1711, The Tatler was brought suddenly to an end, but after an interval of two months was followed by that more famous paper, The Spec tator. The Spectator is usually spoken of as Addison's; but in fact it was under the joint conduct of Addison and Steele, and the con tributions of the two men were about equal in number.
Yet it is not without good reason that we speak of Addison's Spectator. Addison's humor, if less buoyant and convivial than Steele's, was more subtle, delicate and widely observant. Steele was the typical man about town, who threw himself heartily into the life of the hour; Addison was rather, as he styled himself, a spectator who sat in his arm-chair at Buttons and watched the varied play of life about him with quiet, superior satisfaction. Mr. Spectator is always courteous, refined, ur bane. You feel in his page the charm of man ners and the grace of good society; and if in many of his papers there is a flavor of pretty malice, it is directed against the follies and foibles, the petty meannesses that often hide under outward good breeding. His best papers are doubtless those devoted to this kindly social satire.
Yet it is possible that Addison himself esti mated more highly the critical and the ethical essays which usually appeared, the one kind on Fridays and the other on Saturdays. Some of the critical papers, especially the famous series on Milton's Paradise Lost, have been greatly admired and frequently reprinted. But the reader of to-day will probably not find them of absorbing 'interest. Their criticism is purely formal and academic; Addison is trying to prove by Aristotle's rules, that Milton was a great poet. Of all such criticism it may be said that, if the reader knows his Milton, it is needless; if he does not, it is useless. The eth ical and religious papers though perhaps less often mentioned, are some of them rather more entertaining. Addison was the son of a dean
and always something of a preacher himself. °He's a parson in a said Mandeville. And when the parson in a tie-wig preaches to us from The Spectator's chair of a Saturday, the sermon may sometimes be a little prosy, but it is always wholesome and genuine. It is a calm and winning religion Mr. Addison has to recommend, and he exemplified it himself. It is quite possibly true, as some one has said, that The Tatter and The Spectator did more for English society than all the sermons preached in the Queen Anne time; for they brought religion and morality into fashion.
But most of the humor and the wisdom of The Spectator might have perished had it not been for the perfection of the style in which they were conveyed. Steele wrote as he talked, in rapid, careless fashion; he would not stay for careful elaboration or tedious cor rection. Addison, on the contrary, was careful, even finical in all matters of expression; but his effort issued in a style simple, suave, ur bane. He succeeded in combining idiomatic ease with perfect finish as no other writer of his time could do, and very few have done since. Everybody remembers the admiring dic tum of Johnson: °Whoever would attain in English style, familiar but not coarse, elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the study of Addison?' The critic to-day may find his thought lacking in depth, and his manner lacking in energy; but few writers have known better how to marry their thought and feeling with perfect phrase.
The immediate success of The Tatter and The Spectator is significant of an important change in English society. For some 50 years there had been growing up in England a great middle class, shrewd, intelligent and rap idly gaining wealth. They owned a great part of the national debt that England had been rap idly piling up; they were actively interested in politics; they formed the majority of the Whig party that was to rule for nearly a hundred years. It was this class that furnished for the first time in England a large reading public. By the Queen Anne time they were crowded into London, where they were readily accessible to the pamphleteer and journalist. Eighty thousand copies of Defoe's 'True Born Eng lishman' were sold on the streets of London, and Swift's 'Conduct of the Allies' ran through four editions in one week. It was Steele and Addison who first hit upon the new literary form adapted to the wants of such a class of readers. They were the creators of English popular literature. It was Addison, especially, who saw that such writing, however familiar or even trivial its themes, is susceptible of that exquisite finish that ensures its per manence. The Spectator had scores of imita tors in the course of the century, the most fa mous of them being The Rambler and The Idler of Samuel Johnson; but none of them equaled their model in variety of theme or charm of treatment. Consult Johnson, Samuel, 'Lives of the Poets' ; Courthope, 'English Men of Let ters' ; Stephen, Leslie, 'Dictionary National Biography' ; Thackery. 'English Humorists' 'Cambridge History of English Literature' (Vol. IX, ch. 2).