Adult Education
THERE was no dearth of painless reading matter When the first Spectator appeared; yet it did not attempt to conceal from its readers that its object Was to civilise them. Clearly there was a general desire for improvement, so long as it was some- times amusing and always elegant. The Spectator arrived six days a week with the morning tea, indefatigably ransacking the moral world for instructive amusement, much as merchants traversed the physical world for the china, the tea and the sugar. But although the ladies might always expect to be entertained by the advertisements, they had no guarantee that the day's essay might not be one of Addison's lay sermons, those exposi- tions of modish philosophy, which might open like this : The soul, considered abstractedly from its Passions, is of a remiss and sedentary Nature, slow in its Resolves, and languishing in its executions. The Use therefore of the Passions, &c.' This came out on a Saturday, but Addison contin- ued it on Monday and Tuesday. Once he devoted the Papers of a whole week to an essay on Wit; later, Imagination occupied a fortnight without relief. From January 5 to May 3, 1712, the Satur- day issues, sometimes double numbers, were given OVer entirely to Milton; yet the demand for them was so great that Addison had `no Reason to rePent' this journalistic enterprise. The Spectator was not all Roger de Coverley, Will Honeycomb and Steele 'fairsexing it,' as Swift sourly said. Yet its circulation rose from a satisfactory 3,000 to more than 10,000, with a Possible peak of 14,000 in No. 384, an unusual Political scoop. In the twenty-one months of its life, before Addison removed first Sir Roger and the others, and then himself, from the scene, the success of the paper was such as to establish it an event of major social significance. Through- out seven of the eight familiar volumes (the last one hardly counts, being the record of an artificial revival of the paper in 1714) the authors main- tained, and frequently also proclaimed, an admir- Ole balance between good humour and serious- ness of purpose. They must have, kept in very close touch with their readers, who appeared to enjoy Addison's lectures on such topics as Exercise and Temperance as well as Sieele's serial report on prostitution and the little naughtinesses that crept in here and there; these enabled a later generation to congratulate itself on being even More refined than Addison's. The paper justifiably claimed that from day to day it contributed `sonic- thing to the polishing of Men's Minds'—and Women's, too. Even Johnson said that these Whig ,thogs excited 'an emulation of intellectual elegance; they contrived 'to enliven morality with Wit, and to temper wit with morality.' For more than a century the Spectator was the Castiglione of the English gentleman. There have been excessive tributes, Macaulay's for instance; and Courthope in 1884 represented Addison as. virtually the saviour of his country, the man who calmed our social and political turbulence and established `the comparative har- nlony we now enjoy.' Having given up the har- ,.nlony and the Whigs, we may now find less time for Addison; he is probably not much read now, even by schoolboys. As it grows dense with a-numinous objects, we derive less and less com- fort from the spacious firmament on high; the Market studied by Mr. Davenport has not the simplicity of Sir Andrew Freeport's; and if you think of the two squires, Sir Roger and Strix, cer- tain differences present themselves as obvious. The current Spectator has never devoted even one issue
to Milton or the Pleasures of the Imagination.
The 2,000 pages of this new edition contain a good many yawns, but the publishers are to be congratulated on giving us the whole thing and not a selection; this is a book fit both for dippers and for scholars. The notes, compiled long ago by Gregory Smith, remain admirable. It is very proper that this journal (b. 1828), which goes rather more deviously, though still with great determination, about the business of improving its readers, should offer its ancestor (1711-12) a civil
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