109 and is annoyed that the other receives the overture coldly (22nd October, 1710); when he suspects the one of preventing the other's visit to Harley (15th November, 1710); when he treats a service to the one as not less a service to the other (14th January, 1710-11); when he reproaches the one as ungrateful for what he had done for the other (15th January, 1710-11); when he calls himself a fool for spending his credit in favour of both (16th March, 1710-11); and when he has promised my Lord Treasurer never again to speak for either (29th June, 1711); he shows you, still, that he is speaking of an intercourse upheld by the strongest attachments, and into which, whatever the respective merits of the men, there could have entered no element of "scorn." It is quite true, however, that some coldness and estrangement did grow between Steele and Addison as time went on, though to the last it was never so complete as Mr. Macaulay would wish to convey. To this, and its causes, we shall have to advert hereafter; but in connection with it we have so express and affecting a statement from Steele himself, only six months after his friend's death, and in reply to a coarse assailant whom it silenced, that as to the general fact it leaves no doubt whatever. There never, he says, was a more strict friendship than between himself and Addison, nor had they ever any difference but what proceeded from their different way of pursuing the same thing; the one waited and stemmed the torrent, while the other too often plunged into it; but though they thus had lived for some years last past, shunning each other, they still preserved the most passionate concern for their mutual welfare; and when they met," they were as unreserved as boys, " and talked of the greatest affairs, upon which they saw "where they differed, without pressing (what they knew impossible) to convert each other." As to the substance or worth of what thus divided them, Steele only adds the significant expression of his hope that, if his 66 1 The Theatre, No. xii. Feb. 9, 1719-20. When a man is indiscreet, inquire what passion it is family is the worse, his country may be the better, for the mortification he has undergone. There is something in that. it is not beside the matter to that urges him to indiscretion. It may be the actual good of others, or it may be a fancied good for himself. Mr. Allworthy did so many kindnesses for so many people, that he made enemies of the whole parish; and it will perhaps generally be found that the man who cares least for his neighbours, is very far from the least likely to pass. for good-natured among them. It will not do to judge off-hand, even between the impetuosity which plunges into the torrent, and the placidity which waits upon the brink. Each temperament has its advantages, within a narrow or a more extended range; and where the passion for public affairs has been so incorrigible that it refused to take regard of its own or others' convenience in its manifestations, we must not too hastily resolve to take part either against the hostility it provokes, or with the sympathy it repels. So much, before passing in review Steele's actual character and story, it will be well to keep in mind; though there can be no manner of doubt that his course, whether in other respects ill or well taken, put him at grave disadvantage with the world. Even in regard to this, however, there is no need to take any special tone of pity; and too much stress has perhaps been laid on Addison's own regrets in the matter. It was when the good Mr. Hughes thought he saw an opportunity, on the sudden cessation of Mr. Steele's Guardian, to get Mr. Addison's services for a little scheme of his own; and, with many flourishes about the regret with which all the more moderate Whigs saw their common friend's thoughts turned entirely on politics and disengaged from pursuits more entertaining and profitable, had propounded his plan for a Register; that Mr. Addison, foreseeing little glory in working with Mr. Hughes, and sending a civil No, I thank you, I must now rest and lay in a little fuel, proceeded, merely upon the hint his cor respondent had thrown out, to speak of Steele in language often quoted, and used against him by Mr. Macaulay. "In the mean time I should be glad if you would set "such a project on foot, for I know nobody else capable "of succeeding in it, and turning it to the good of man"kind, since my friend has laid it down. I am in a "thousand troubles for poor Dick, and wish that his zeal "for the public may not be ruinous to himself; but he has "sent me word that he is determined to go on, and that 66 any advice I can give him in this particular will have "no weight with him." Formerly, as now, these expressions have been pointed to a sense not exactly intended by them. Taken with what induced them, and read as they were written, they are certainly unmingled with scorn. There is pity in them, to be sure; and there is what Mr. Macaulay calls the "trying with little success to keep "him out of scrapes;" both which must pass for what they are worth. There is also the "poor Dick," which has been so lavishly repeated since; but we must take the liberty to add, with a feeling and for a purpose far less worthy. It is our belief that no man so much as Steele has suffered from compassion. It was out of his own bitter experience he shrewdly called it, himself, the best disguise of malice, and said that the most apposite course to cry a man down was to lament him.' Mr. Macaulay is incapable of malice, even if the motive for it were in such 1 The sketch in which this occurs (No. 4) is of a class of men who (making allowance for special differences in themselves) would not be ill represented by De Foe and Steele. It is very difficult, he says, with an obvious tone of self-reference, to put them down. It is thought enough to shrug your shoulders, take snuff, and say something in pity of them. But yet the man you so lament is after all too hardy a creature to be so discountenanced and undone. "He "is never mortified but when "truth, honour, and reason are "against him; which as soon as he "perceives, he, without ceremony, or a case conceivable; but whatever praise he gives to Steele is always in the way of condescension, and he cannot bring himself to state a virtue in him which he does not at the same time extenuate with its equal vice or drawback. We much fear there are few characters that would stand this kind of analysis,―very few in which the levelling circumstance might not be detected, that more or less brings down the high, the wise, the strong, and the fortunate to the lower level with their fellow-men. An ill mending of the matter it would be, indeed, to extenuate vice itself as a set-off to the extenuation of virtue; but both have need of a more considerate reflectionthan they are generally apt to receive, in connection with such a life as we shall shortly retrace. For not a few years of that life, we dare say, Captain Steele might have pleaded, with Captain Plume, that for all his exuberance of spirits he was yet very far from the rake the world. imagined. “I have got an air of freedom," says Farquhar's pleasant hero, "which people mistake in me, just as in "others they mistake formality for religion." It is a kind of mistake committed in many forms; and Pope was hinting at it when he remarked that whereas, according to La Rochefoucauld, a great many virtues are disguised vices, he would engage, by the same mode of reasoning, to prove a great many vices to be disguised virtues. Take the love of ourselves for example, and say that in it lies the motive of most of our actions, good or bad; yet it by no means would follow that the number are not much greater wherein the self-love of some men incline them to please others, than where the self-love of others is employed wholly in pleasing themselves. Steele had said the same thing several years before in his Christian Hero, when he remarked that there can really be no greater love of self than to love others, nor any more secure way to obtain good offices than to do them. Not that any such modes of reasoning may sufficiently excuse a life spent, if what Mr. Macaulay tell us be true, in sinning and repenting, in inculcating what was right and doing what was wrong. A profitless life to himself, beyond a doubt, if such indeed was Steele's; but suggestive also of the remark, that, since the wrong that was done has passed away, and the right that was inculcated remains, others decidedly may have profited though he did not. For ourselves, holding with the philosophy which teaches us that depravity of disposition is less pardonable than any kind of frailty of passion, we know of no offence against virtue so grave as to speak of it in disparagement; and no worse practice in regard to vice than the systematic praise and recommendation of it. With the latter, at least, no one has ever been so reckless, in our day or even in his own, as to charge Richard Steele. He had a real love and reverence for virtue, Pope told Spence. He had the best nature in the world, and was a man of almost boundless benevolence, said Young. Lady Mary Montagu lived much with all the wits, and knew no one with the kind nature of Steele. It is his admitted weakness to have yielded to the temptation which yet he never lost the strength to condemn ; but we know who has said that, if at all times to do were as easy as to teach what is good to be done, chapels had been churches and poor men's cottages princes' palaces.' Let us add that even Addison himself could not always do both; and that, if the strict rule were applied universally, never to accept unreservedly what is good in a man, and praise it accordingly, without minute measuring-off of what may also be condemned for evil, with detraction at least equal to the praise, there would be altogether an end at last to all just judgments, and a woful general confusion of right and wrong. That Addison had not Steele's defects; that Steele's defects, graver though they may have been, were yet not those of Addison; should surely be far from matter of complaining with us, since in no small degree it has served to contribute to the more complete instruction and entertainment of the world. There is a wise little 1 Hamlet: one of the wisest and most profound, we must surely say, of all human compositions. |