THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

are self evident in an educated observation of creation. The imaginative faculty has been implanted in humankind by a
loving Creator ‘so that it is impossible for us to behold his works with coldness or indifference, and to survey so many
beauties without a secret satisfaction and complacency’.
The 1712 essays on the imagination, and the notable series of Saturday essays on the genius of Milton of the same
year, are attempts to refine public taste by offering short, reasoned, and accessible articles on ancient and modern
literature. They also aim to interlink the study of literature with scientific theory, with recent developments in
philosophical, political, and moral thought, and with the pervasive religious optimism of the period. Addison defines
taste as ‘that faculty of the soul, which discerns the beauties of an author with pleasure, and the imperfections with
dislike’. In other words, ‘taste’ is the result of the refinement of a susceptible natural faculty. ‘Conversation with men
of a polite genius’, he further affirms, ‘is another method for improving our natural taste’ and it was in the role of ‘the
polite genius’, the embodiment of the refined spirit of the age, that he habitually cast himself. Addison, the self
appointed definer of cultural rules and cultural boundaries for a broad spectrum of society, consistently returned to the
idea of inner assurance contained in his expression ‘secret satisfaction and complacency’. This assurance was
essentially religious in origin. It has all too readily been confused with an easy, spiritual smugness. Addison’s is an
amiable religion, dually founded on a sense of the just proportions of the observed world and on a projection of private
justification. It elevates morality over faith and Newtonian physics over revelation; it prefers ‘strong, steady,
masculine piety’ to the kind of ‘enthusiasm’ and ‘zeal’ which Addison all too readily related to the anti-social
spiritual vices of ‘Pride, Interest and Ill-nature’.
Addison was an insistent popular propagator of what he took to be ‘the best ideas’ of his time. In the tenth number
of the highly influential daily journal, The Spectator (co-founded with Richard Steele in March 1711), he published
what is virtually a manifesto of his aims: ‘I shall be ambitious to have it said of me, that I have brought Philosophy
out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables, and in Coffee-
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Houses.’ Clubs and coffee-houses, both the subjects of Spectator essays, had proliferated in late seventeenth- and early
eighteenth-century London. With the relative decline of both the court influence and a court culture they offered nonaristocratic
male cliques an important focus for discussion and debate. These informal institutions never came to rival
the salons of the French nobility as centres of intellectual life, nor did they ever serve to disseminate knowledge on the
scale with which they were once credited, but their members did provide the kind of normative, influential model on
which Addison and Steele based the assumed reader of their journals. The success of their assumption seemed proven
in their calculation that each issue of The Spectator was reaching some 60,000 readers in London alone. ‘Mr
Spectator’, who purportedly wrote these papers, was a man of broad education, well-travelled and politically alert.
Around him there was gathered a small club representative of different aspects of modern English life, a club which
included the Tory country squire (Sir Roger de Coverley), the rich, Whiggish, City merchant (Sir Andrew Freeport),
the army officer (Captain Sentry), and the man-about-town (Will Honeycomb). Sir Roger’s provincial idiosyncrasies
are described with an amused tolerance intended both to divert a sophisticated London audience and gently to laugh
eccentric Tory backwoodsmen out of their old-fashioned and benighted prejudices. The optimistic tone of the
assumptions of ‘Mr Spectator’ is that of a thoroughgoing metropolitan supporter of the ‘Glorious Revolution’
settlement, though he rarely expresses a direct political opinion and generally prefers to avoid controversy. He
interests himself in financial and international affairs, approvingly observing the actions and opinions of Sir Andrew
Freeport at the Exchange and in his transactions in a London that has developed into ‘a kind of emporium for the
whole earth’. He is proudly patriotic, insularly confident about the opening future, and modestly progressive (though
he tends to look down on women as frivolous, ostentatious, and ill-educated). Essentially he is Addison’s ideal
persona, the observant generalizer who seeks out the serenity of the middle way, the educated common man speaking
directly to, and on behalf of, his less articulate fellows. He is the father of British journalism.
Addison’s sometime fellow-student and later literary collaborator, the Dublin-born Sir Richard Steele (1672-
1729), has often been unjustly relegated to a place in his shadow. Steele’s professional life was complex, colourful,
and often contradictory. If much that he wrote has failed to find a sympathetic audience in the twentieth century it is
not for lack of variety. After a brief, but successful, career as a rakish officer in the Coldstream Guards he produced
his worthy treatise, The Christian Hero: An Argument proving that no Principles but those of Religion are Sufficient
to make a great Man (1701). The military life, he explained to his readers, was ‘exposed to much Irregularity’ and his
principled tract was specifically designed to fix upon his own mind impressions of religion and virtue as opposed to ‘a
stronger Propensity towards unwarrantable Pleasures’. The Christian Hero, which steadily rejects stoicism in favour
of Christian
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