Is there anywhere a People more unsteady, more apt to discontent, more saturnine, dark and melancholic than ourselves? Are we not of all People the most unfit to be alone, and most unsafe to be trusted with ourselves? Are there not more Self-murderers and melancholic Lunatics in England, heard of in one Year, than in the great part of Europe besides?52
Congreve argued—replying to Collier—that London needed its comic plays just to cheer itself up. With the same faith in literature to reshape national behaviour, Addison now used the ironic register of Mr Spectator to teach pragmatic humanism and stoicism to his readers (though Addison and Steele thought the philosophy of Stoicism inferior to Christianity). These qualities, far more than the melancholy Congreve described, remain the essence of how other nationalities still view Englishmen today: at best an understated courage, at worst an emotional autism.
Addison stated that The Spectator's vast readership was ‘more just than private Clubs or Assemblies in distinguishing between what is Wit and what is Ill-nature’.53 Steele, who privately sympathized with Collier's critique of the London stage, similarly condemned the ‘unhappy Affectation of being Wise rather than Honest, Witty [rather] than Good-natured’54 among the London literati. This was where, he implied, the town's elite had something to learn from the country's moral majority. Addison and Steele thought the best recipe was a mixture of the old aristocratic code—taken from a manual like The Gentleman's Recreation (1710), which recommended every would-be gentleman to see the works of Congreve or Vanbrugh—and the more bourgeois, pious tone of a handbook like A Help to National Reformation (1700). Mr Spectator resembled, on the one hand, a spying informer working for the Society for the Reformation of Manners, and on the other, an expansively generous Sir John Falstaff, telling his readers to avoid giving of themselves only ‘upon the Tilt’ so that the recipient has to ‘Taste of the Sediments’ from the cask of one's soul.55
The Spectator's effort to make Whiggery synonymous with Englishness did not go unchallenged by the Tories, who could still count upon widespread anti-war, anti-Junto feeling at this date. The year after The Spectator started, Dr Arbuthnot published his pamphlets on The History of John Bull (1712). The first pamphlet was entitled Law is a Bottomless Pit and was an anti-Marlborough tract complaining about crippling wartime taxation. In it, the Scottish-born Arbuthnot portrayed the English Everyman, ‘John Bull’, as a small cloth merchant duped by his lawyers into pursuing a long and costly lawsuit. This was an allegory for the British public being duped by the Junto into pursuing a long and costly war for the Junto's personal profit.
Arbuthnot portrayed Bull as ‘an honest, plain dealing fellow, choleric, bold and of a very unconstant temper’. The irony was that there had always been something of this character within the Junto and the Kit-Cats, in the uncouth habits of men like Wharton and Manchester, or the dumb-but-honest characters of Shannon and Grafton, or the crude ballads of Maynwaring. Even Steele, the rear end of the pantomime horse that was ultra-polite ‘Mr Spectator’, was known to get drunk and disgrace himself at the Kit-Cat Club. They had a clear ideal of how a gentleman ought to behave, with moderation and wit, but it was not always how they did behave.
John Bull morphed, in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, into the iconic image of the Whig nation, growing increasingly obese and obdurate. But, before the Tory-invented British bulldog became the dominant satirical image, the Kit-Cats tried to project a far more positive image of an enlightened, cultured and well-travelled Englishman. Their agenda for improvement of the arts had continued after the Whig fall in 1710, with Lord Manchester, for example, bringing George Frederick Handel, the Kapellmeister and star composer at the Hanoverian Court, to London.
Handel's first opera in England, Rinaldo, was performed at the Kit-Cat-built Queen's Theatre in February 1711. It proved such a phenomenal success that it offended the national pride of Addison and Steele, who feared the popularity of Handel's Italian operas would retard the development of indigenous English music, and steal audiences away from English drama. They tolerated imported Italian singers, but believed they should only sing compositions in English. Five days after Rinaldo's premiere, The Spectator ran a letter from a tone-deaf Englishman, complaining there was nothing for him to enjoy at the opera since he spoke no Italian. Addison, still smarting from Rosamund's failure in 1707, mocked the ludicrousness of audiences listening to operas in a language they did not understand. He predicted it would be a short-lived fad that would mislead later historians into imagining the average eighteenth-century Londoner understood Italian fluently. The Spectator also published scathing reviews of the crowd-pleasing special effects used during Rinaldo, including a flock of sparrows and finches released in the theatre that defecated on the audience's heads. In April 1711, Mr Spectator lectured that the Italian ingredient in English music was too overpowering a flavour: ‘Let the Infusion be as strong as you please, but still let the Subject Matter of it be English.’56 This position was derived from a wider aesthetic philosophy that music should be subordinated to words, as passions to reason.
The castrato Nicolini was therefore paid to sing an ‘English Opera’ (English words set to Italian music) called Calypso and Telemachus with a libretto by a protégé of Addison's. This production had no greater success than Rosamund, leading Mr Spectator to tell English musicians to forget opera and write church music instead. Steele meanwhile attempted to rival Handel's operas by producing a series of music and poetry recitals to showcase British talents like Thomas Clayton, alongside foreign musicians. The venue was a hired, crumbling hall in York Buildings, on Buckingham Street near Charing Cross, between the Strand and the river. The opening performance was on 24 May 1711. The day before, Harley was created Earl of Oxford and Mortimer (and shall henceforth be referred to as ‘Lord Oxford’ or ‘Oxford’). Steele invited Oxford to the show in a spirit of party neutrality, hoping this would attract a larger audience. Despite The Spectator's support, the event was not a success, ticket sales failing to fill the 200-seat hall for the rest of the series. Steele lost money, just as Vanbrugh had lost money pursuing the Kit-Cat's patriotic agenda at the Queen's Theatre a few years earlier.
Robert Walpole, with time on his hands while out of political office, also contributed to the Kit-Cats' cultural programme by organizing a burlesque show, mocking Italian opera, in the winter of 1711. In contrast to Steele's approach of inviting Tories to his audience, Walpole reportedly stood at the theatre entrance, checking no Tories were admitted who might try to wreck the show.
Addison and Steele used The Spectator as a vehicle for theatre criticism beyond denigration of Handel's operas. Soon they found that, though they could not direct the nation's musical tastes, they could exercise unprecedented power to make or break literary careers by reviewing, endorsing and advertising plays. When Addison's friend, a lean young poet named Ambrose Philips, produced a new English tragedy, The Distressed Mother, to which Steele wrote the Prologue and Addison's cousin Budgell, under Addison's supervision, wrote the Epilogue, The Spectator endorsed the play shamelessly. Both its authors invested in the production, and Maynwaring's mistress, Mrs Oldfield, played the lead role. Tonson published the script shortly after the opening night, dedicated to the Duke of Montagu's wife Mary. A less biased critic said The Spectator's glowing review won the play an undeservedly large audience, especially after the paper reviewed it a second time through the fiction of Sir Roger de Coverley going to see it.
Addison reviewed the theatre audience as much as the plays, reprimanding people who were noisy and immodest in imitation of what he called French audience manners, or who were too engrossed in themselves to appreciate the play. Addison rebuked fashionable young wits who exaggerated their indifference because they were ‘supposed [to be] too well acquainted with what the Actor is going to say to be moved at it’, regretting the popular preference for bawdy comedy over any ‘inward Sentiment of Soul’.57 At times, Mr Spectator sounded not unlike killjoy Collier, but laying the blame fo
r the theatre's degeneracy more on hard-hearted audiences than the country's godless dramatists.
Mr Spectator's theatre reviews were an innovation—far more conversational and accessible than the scholarly forms of criticism shared among the elite before. Unfortunately Addison and Steele never retrospectively reviewed the restaged works of their fellow Kit-cats, the Orange Comedians. Perhaps, given the extent to which they shared qualms about the cynicism and anti-clericalism of those plays, it was tactful not to do so. Whenever they referred to their friend Congreve, however, it was with the implication that everyone with sense knew he was a great writer. In one essay, Addison remarked that since Congreve and Vanbrugh had retired as dramatists, no one had equalled them.
Critical taste became, in a new and Whiggish way, an essential aspect of being an English gentleman. Mr Spectator in one essay observed that all a self-made man needed for social acceptance was at least two suits of new clothing a year and ‘the Words “Delicacy”, “Idiom”, “fine Images”, “Structure of Periods”, “Genius”, “Fire”, and the rest, [which] made use of with a frugal and comely Gravity, will maintain the figure of immense Reading and depth of Criticism’.58 Pleasantly surprised to find that there was a popular market for such literary criticism, Addison produced in May 1711 a further week-long essay series on comedy. He introduced the series with a statement that demonstrates how much The Spectator was about making learning accessible to a wider public:
I shall endeavour to make what I say intelligible to ordinary Capacities; but if my Readers meet with any Paper that in some Parts of it may be a little out of their Reach, I would not have them discouraged, for they may assure themselves the next shall be much clearer.59
In one of these essays, Addison summarized John Locke on the difference between ‘Wit’ and ‘Judgement’ (as, respectively, the facility for rapidly combining ideas and discriminating between them), and added his own thought that wit must also ‘Delight and Surprise’.60 The series owed much to Congreve's Letter Concerning Humour (1695), with its criticism of those who used wit to stir up social discord and its belief that satire should be compassionately aimed only at faults we are able to change. Addison further declared his purpose was to ‘banish’ certain ‘Gothic’ tastes in wit and so reform ‘Our general Taste in England’.61
Addison continued this English literature course—remarkable for appearing at a time when no such course was taught in any school or university—with essays on the virtues of the old English ballad form, like the ballad of ‘Chevy Chase’.62 To give such a ‘low’ form serious critical attention, comparing it to Virgil, was radical, and several parodies promptly appeared, scornful of The Spectator in the same way that some people today might scorn a doctoral thesis on rap lyrics. Once again, this populist strand must be credited to the Kit-Cat Club: Mr Spectator referred to the late Lord Dorset as having collected old English ballads, which he admired for their simplicity. ‘I can affirm,’ Addison added, ‘the same of Mr Dryden, and know several of the most refined Writers of our present Age who are of the same Humour.’63
The Spectator's literary criticism returned in January 1712, with Addison publishing essays elucidating Milton's Paradise Lost: one every Saturday until 3 May. This epic poem had some success before Tonson bought the rights to it, but did not sit on the pedestal in the English literary canon that it does today. Tonson devoted much energy to increasing public appreciation (and sales) of the poem at the start of his career, and by 1711 he was printing its ninth edition. Addison now promoted Milton as a specifically English genius and his epic as ‘an Honour to the English Nation’.64 It is debatable which of the two men, publisher or critic, did more for the dead poet's reputation, but together they may be credited with Milton's subsequent reputation.
As in his 1694 poem flattering Charles Montagu, Addison wrote in September 1711 on the subject of literary genius, distinguishing between ‘Natural’ and ‘Learned’ genius. The former category included Shakespeare. The second group—those whose writing is more like a well-tended garden than a wild landscape—included Milton and Sir Francis Bacon. Addison added a new emphasis on originality and individuality, which gestured towards the Romantic age to come, stating that ‘very few Writers make an extraordinary Figure in the World who have not something in their Way of writing and expressing themselves that is peculiar to them and entirely their own’.65 In another Spectator, Addison went further and suggested that poetic genius showed itself, rather like the best personal manners, in knowing when to break rules: ‘Our inimitable Shakespeare is a Stumbling-block to the whole Tribe of…rigid Critics,’ he declared.66
After Milton and Shakespeare, the English author most often named in the essays of Addison and Steele was Edmund Spenser. The Faerie Queene inspired the allegories in The Spectator, and Spenser's chivalric, Protestant imagery appealed to the Whigs during the decades of war against Catholic France. Sounding like Congreve when he argued that English comic dramas were a necessary antidote to national melancholia, Addison argued that Spenser's ‘fairie way of writing’ was needed to entertain the fancies of a nation generally disposed to gloom.67 Though several Tory critics and poets also admired and imitated Spenser in the 1700s, it was the first generation of Kit-Cat members who initially rehabilitated Spenser's reputation, most notably Tonson and Somers with the republication of The Faerie Queene in 1692. Somers, when painted for his Kit-cat portrait, chose to wear no badge or staff of office but held an octavo edition of Spenser's Faerie Queene.
To revive a golden age of English literature, the Kit-Cats sought to teach their countrymen to take pride in the Elizabethan authors above all others. British national identity during the following 200 years formed around the heritage of English literature to a remarkable extent, and The Spectator (educated by the Kit-Cat Club) was one of the first and most influential sources of this pride at a time when English was not yet considered a major European language.
As Mr Spectator held forth on tragedy, comedy, ballads, Milton, Spenser, the nature of literary genius and the pleasures of the imagination, the public thought Steele, not Addison, was writing these scholarly essays. The essays that were in fact composed by Steele increasingly relied on lengthy quotation of readers' letters, Steele supplying just an introductory line or two. The vitality and gaiety of his stories provided welcome relief from Addison's intellectual criticism, but—now that scholars have separated whose essays were whose—we can see that the efforts of the men's contributions were growing increasingly unequal. Perhaps Steele's assumption that his friend was the greater writer and thinker was so deeply ingrained that it did not even cross his mind to compete or keep up.
In 1712, having been friends for twenty-six years, they both turned 40—an age at which, Addison noted, ‘there is no dallying with Life’.68 The strength of friendship between Addison and Steele at this time of intense creative collaboration is difficult to measure, largely because their private correspondence has not survived.69 In print, we know Steele unequivocally called Addison ‘the man I best loved’.70 As if to compensate for the rather tight-lipped, strait-laced persona Addison sometimes projected, Steele testified in print to Addison's ‘smiling Mirth’, ‘delicate Satire’ and ‘genteel Raillery’ when he was ‘free among Intimates’.71 No matching declaration of love for Steele was ever penned by Addison, though he did compose the following lyrics for a hymn in 1712:
Thy Bounteous Hand with worldly bliss
Has made my cup run o'er,
And in a kind and faithful Friend
Has doubled all my store.72
For Addison, the more private the conversation the better, and most friendships, even in a club like the Kit-Cat, remained too politic—too driven by professional quid pro quo—to be trusted.73 Addison quoted Cicero, Bacon and Ecclesiastes on the need to have ‘a bosom Friend’,74 or ‘one Counsellor of a Thousand’, rather than friends who are each ‘a Companion at the Table, and will not continue in the Day of thy Affliction’.75 Steele was such a friend, though Steele
's ‘days of affliction’ were so much more numerous than Addison's that their friendship had become something of a one-way street. And when Addison was ever in trouble, he turned not to Steele but to his former travelling companion, Edward Wortley Montagu.76 Wortley Montagu, in return, confided in Addison that he was conducting an affair with Lord Kingston's daughter, Lady Mary. Mary's father opposed the match, forcing the couple to elope in 1712, and afterwards Addison owed some apology to his Kit-Cat colleague for having kept secret his bosom friend's plans.
Alexander Pope described how Addison sometimes teased Steele for holding him in such high regard, and when Steele described their collaborative working relationship, Steele's excitement at his own submissive position is palpable: ‘I rejoiced in being excelled, and made those little talents, whatever they are which I have, give way and be subservient to the superior qualities of a friend whom I loved.’77 As a further compliment to his friend, Steele described Addison's contribution to The Tatler as eclipsing his own: ‘I fared like a distressed Prince who calls in a powerful neighbour to his aid. I was undone by my auxiliary; when I had once called him in, I could not subsist without dependence on him.’78 There is an un intentional hint of resentment here—like the hint of resentment Steele barely concealed towards all his patrons and benefactors—and in the end Steele could not help remarking on his galvanizing role (living up to his own name) in persuading Addison to publish journalism and in getting the paper out six days a week. As Steele fairly put it, whatever he owed to Addison, the world owed Addison to Steele.
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