Free essays: success of Addison
admin @ December 20, 2007
Free essays: The enormous success of Addison in shaping polite society seems to have been achieved by his ability to present his substantial learning in an accessible manner and to clarify complex arguments. This is done with good-humored wit, in an easy tone, and always from a moral viewpoint. He claimed, "I have brought Philosophy out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables, and in Coffee-Houses" (Spectator no. 10). He is thus a popularizer who found (and made) a public eager to learn but alienated by pedantry, obscurity, and vicious partisan controversy.
Free essays: Certain groups of essays provide (in easy "sound-bites," as it were) both the most accessible, and the most advanced, treatment of current topics. In literature the series on "The Pleasures of the Imagination" (nos. 411-21) constitutes an important source for the development of Romantic theory and sensibility emerging from Lockean psychology, establishing key terms such as "fancy" and "beauty" (as well as "imagination" itself) and distinguishing between primary natural sources and those to be found in literature. Addison’s social agenda is always prominent: "A Man of a Polite Imagination is let into a great many Pleasures, that the Vulgar are not capable of receiving. He can converse with a Picture, and find an agreeable Companion in a Statue. He meets with a secret Refreshment in a Description, and often feels a greater Satisfaction in the Prospect of Fields and Meadows, than another does in the Possession" (no. 411).
Free essays: The religious agenda is implicit in setting the long series of essays on Paradise Lost on Saturdays, the lay-sermon days (nos. 267-369), but the emphasis here is on the pleasure of a great Christian poem, amply represented by quotation and easily placed within the classical tradition: "I have therefore bestowed a Paper upon each Book, and endeavoured not only to prove that the Poem is beautiful in general, but to point out its particular Beauties, and to determine wherein they consist. I have endeavoured to show how some Passages are beautiful by being Sublime, others, by being Soft, others, by being Natural; which of them are recommended by the Passion, which by the Moral, which by the Sentiment, and which by the Expression" (no. 369).
Free essays: But for many readers it has been Addison’s and Steele’s Sir Roger de Coverley who runs away with the text. In this respect he is a median figure between Shakespeare’s Falstaff (who destabilizes the ideology of the History plays) and characters in the sentimental novel like Laurence Sterne’s Uncle Toby in Tristram Shandy. His objection to anyone sleeping in church except himself (no. 112), his remedy for love in fox hunting (no. 115), or the account of his death by his servant, Edward Biscuit (no. 517), show both how much the essay here owes to drama, and how much it is involved with the development of the heteroglossia of the novel. Thus, Biscuit: "Upon his coming home, the first Complaint he made was, that he had lost his Roast-Beef Stomach, not being able to touch a Sirloin, which was served up according to Custom: and you know how he used to take great Delight in it. From that Time forward he grew worse and worse, but still kept a good Heart to the last."
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