Joseph Addison and General Education: Moral Didactics in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain

Abstract

Joseph Addison’s (1672–1719) essays in The Spectator occupy contradictory positions in the history of aesthetics. While they are generally considered central to the institution of aesthetics as a scholarly discipline, their reception has throughout history entailed a strong questioning of their philosophical and scholarly importance. In the following paper, I consider this dual feature as regards reception, and set out to clarify how this has come about. A re-examination of the arguments advanced by Addison makes clear that his role is not that of a philosopher, but that of a public educator. As such he aims to raise the standard of general education of the British ‘middling orders’ in the early eighteenth century, and by using art for didactic purposes he seeks to contribute to the shaping of morally accomplished individuals.

Full text

JOSEPH ADDISON AND GENERAL EDUCATION: MORAL DIDACTICS
IN EARLY EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN
KARL AXELSSON
Joseph Addison’s (1672–1719) essays in The Spectator occupy contradictory positions in
the history of aesthetics. While they are generally considered central to the institution of
aesthetics as a scholarly discipline, their reception has throughout history entailed
astrong questioning of their philosophical and scholarly importance. In the following
paper, I consider this dual feature as regards reception, and set out to clarify how this has
come about. A re-examination of the arguments advanced by Addison makes clear that
his role is not that of a philosopher, but that of a public educator. As such he aims to raise
the standard of general education of the British ‘middling orders’ in the early eighteenth
century, and by using art for didactic purposes he seeks to contribute to the shaping of
morally accomplished individuals.
Joseph Addison und die Allgemeinbildung: Das Lehren von Moral im England des frühen
18. Jahrhunderts
Joseph Addisons (1672–1719) Essays in der Wochenschrift The Spectator nehmen in der
Geschichte der Ästhetik einen widersprüchlichen Platz ein. Während ihnen für die Konsti-
tution von Ästhetik als Wissenschaft zentrale Bedeutung zugeschrieben wird, wurde ihre
philosophische und wissenschaftliche Bedeutung im Laufe ihrer Rezeptionsgeschichte im-
mer wieder nachdrücklich in Frage gestellt. Im Zentrum der folgenden Überlegungen
steht dieser Doppelaspekt im Hinblick auf die Rezeption; dabei versuche ich zu erhellen,
wie es dazu kommen konnte. Analysiert man Addisons Argumente, so wird klar, dass seine
Rolle nicht die eines Philosophen, sondern die eines Erziehers der Öffentlichkeit ist. Als ein
solcher ist er bemüht, mittels Kunst als didaktisches Medium das Niveau der Allgemeinbil-
dung der britischen Mittelschicht des frühen 18. Jahrhunderts anzuheben und so einen
Beitrag zur Bildung moralisch wohlerzogener Individuen zu leisten.
I. INTRODUCTION
If the institution of aesthetics as a scholarly discipline in the eighteenth century has
an initiator, it may well be Joseph Addison (1672–1719). While his vision, launched
in the single-essay periodical The Spectator, might seem remote from the science of
sensible cognition proposed later by Alexander Baumgarten (1714–1762), it has
nevertheless been suggested that it provided a ground-breaking channel for
the discipline to follow.
1
Such suggestions are, however, not universally prevalent.
Alarge part of the reception has in fact always revealed an unyielding refusal to
144 Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, XLVI, II, 2009, 144–166
Historizität und intersubjektivität der ästhetischen erfahrung. Eine positioierung zwischen jauss und kant
1
See, for example, Jerome Stolnitz, ‘On the Origins of “Aesthetic Disinterestedness”’,
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 20 (1961): 143; William H. Youngren,
‘Addison and the Birth of Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics’, Modern Philology 79 (1982):
268; Basil W. Worsfold, The Principles of Criticism: An Introduction to the Study of
Literature (Port Washington, NY, and London: Kennikat Press, 1970), 51–2 and 94;
John George Robertson, Studies in the Genesis of Romantic Theory in the Eighteenth
Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923), 235–49.
zlom2 12.11.2009 16:01 Stránka 144

accept the importance of Addison’s essays, exuding throughout history strong
claims of denunciation about the essays’lack of philosophical and scholarly depth.
It now appears that such refusals have prevailed and it is fair to say that
Addison’s essays are conspicuous by their absence in most contemporary debates
in aesthetics.
2
In view of these circumstances, I shall attempt to do two things in the following
paper. First, I will cast new light on the ‘dual perspective’ in the treatment of
Addison’s essays – a perspective which has hitherto been overlooked by
historians of aesthetics. By dual perspective I mean the persistent inclination
of readers to view Addison’s periodical essays as innovative on the one hand
and as philosophically superficial and unimposing on the other.
3
Second, I aim to explain why the dual features of the reception of his essays
may be regarded as rational and as something that aesthetics would benefit
considerably from being involved in. I tackle the position of Addison’s writings
from the perspective of his essays in the British essay-periodical The Spectator –
established by Addison and Richard Steele (1672–1729), and published first
between 1711 and 1712 and then again in 1714. It is by approaching Addison
as a public educator who endeavoured to raise the standard of general
education that we can begin to recognize the importance of the essays.
The ‘Human Soul without Education’ is, in Addison’s words, ‘like Marble in
the Quarry’, and as such it requires a chisel to reveal its virtues.
4
Rather than to
dismiss such a didactic project as philosophically superficial and ingratiating, or
– as has occasionally been the case in the affirmative part of his reception –
simply to regard it as part of a democratic or egalitarian vision,
5
Idemonstrate
that it is challenging in a very different sense.
Different in manner (not news-based or explicitly political) and form (a single
unified essay), The Spectator was a triumph from its launch in March 1711.
The function of Addison’s essays is extraordinary because, with a circulation of
approximately 3,000 daily issues from the start (each essay was read, according to
Addison, by about twenty readers), it influenced a substantial part of the expanding
Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, XLVI/II, 00–00 145
Karl Axelsson
2
The attention paid to the status of Addison’s essays is of course very different in
the academic study of English literature. See, for example, John Richetti, ed.,
The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), in particular 405–6, 485–7; Paul Poplawski, ed., English
Literature in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 271–4; Edward
A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom, Joseph Addison’s Sociable Animal: in the Market Place,
on the Hustings, in the Pulpit (Providence: Brown University Press, 1971).
3
My focus here is scholarship on the history of aesthetics, written in English.
4
Joseph Addison, The Spectator, vol. 2, ed. by Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1965), 338.
5
See, for example, Alexandre Beljame, Le public et les hommes de lettres en Angleterre au
dix-huitième siècle, 1660–1744 (Paris: Hachette, 1881), 288–9.
zlom2 12.11.2009 16:01 Stránka 145

stratum of the British ‘middling orders’. When speaking about the early
eighteenth century, the term ‘middle class’ is an anachronism and it evokes
ideas about awareness and social unity, which are deceptive when applied to
pre-industrialized social orders.
6
The extensive stratum of the middling orders
ranges from near-aristocratic standards of living to the ways of life of craftsmen
and retailers, including shopkeepers, manufacturers, independent artisans, civil
servants, professionals, and lesser merchants.
7
As has been demonstrated
elsewhere, the expansion of the middling orders in the first half of the eighteenth
century was related to the growth of the free market and commercial culture.
8
The publication of Addison’s periodical essays was squeezed in between what
Larry Shiner characterizes as the old patronage system of art and the new
market system of fine art.
9
Many of the new goods made available at this time
were indispensable for the improved standard of living, while other products
were expected to meet a more abstract need. One such need was edification
and culture, meeting an essential demand for social and moral markers. To
the same extent that a new domestic consumer product might signify rising
private prosperity, the assimilation of the arts and confident behaviour in
relation to them could imply personal moral aptitude.
While serious attention to Addison’s essays is absent from contemporary
debates on aesthetics, a critique of the reception of his political agenda as
purely a bourgeois ideological project within the awakening middle-class,
capitalist order has emerged in the study of eighteenth-century literature. Such
acritique does not primarily set out to depoliticize the essays, but rather to
identify the excessively intransigent socio-political examination of them.
10
Though
such a critique is indeed appreciated, I shall have little to say about it here. I do not
wish to have the essays predictably reduced to a single matter of group-interest –
be it in the political interest of the landowning gentry, the emerging bourgeoisie,
or the Whigs.
11
Addison’s essays were not predisposed merely to one
146 Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, XLVI/II, 00–00
Joseph Addison and General Education: Moral Didactics in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain
6
Concerning the daily circulation of The Spectator, see Addison, The Spectator, vol. 1, 44.
7
See Frank O’Gorman, The Long Eighteenth Century: British Political & Social History,
1688–1832 (London: Hodder Arnold, 1997), 108. See also Margaret R. Hunt, The Mid-
dling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680–1780 (Berkeley: Universi-
ty of California Press, 1996), 15.
8
O’Gorman, The Long Eighteenth Century, 108–13.
9
Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago & London: The University
of Chicago Press, 2001), 126–9.
10
See, for example, William Walker, ‘Ideology and Addison’s Essays on the Pleasures of
the Imagination’, Eighteenth-Century Life 24 (2000).
11
For the claim that Addison’s concern was with the landowning gentry, see Nick Grindle,
‘Virgil’s Prospects: The Gentry and the Representation of Landscape in Addison’s
Theory of the Imagination’, Oxford Art Journal 29 (2006): 185–95. For the claim that
Addison’s concern was with the Whigs, see Walker, ‘Ideology and Addison’s Essays’.
zlom2 12.11.2009 16:01 Stránka 146

homogeneous political aim or task, which strictly has to be related to politics to be
properly recognized. The readers of the periodical essays came from remarkably
diverse social backgrounds, but shared a mutual need for moral guidance. One
aspect which makes Addison’s essays so fascinating is that they managed to reach
out and provide for an educational demand of such a large and heterogeneous
category of the population. So, when referring to the middling orders we need to
bear in mind the extremely varied body of individuals within such a stratum, as
well as the fact that the ideological implications of Addison’s essays, and the role
assigned to the arts, is but one of a number of factors which need to be examined
before we can recognize Addison’s position in the history of aesthetics. As
historians we should not only consider which stratum of the public was addressed,
but also begin to take into account what distinguished the moral and educative
substance of such an address.
Itherefore consider the educational vision of Addison’s criticism to be marked
by a determinate representation of civil society and the public of the early
eighteenth century, which is in fact to claim that the essays manifest an ideological
position towards the readers.
12
‘Fine Taste’ is, according to Addison, ‘the utmost
perfection of the accomplished man’, and the line of arguments pursued in
the essays interpellate readers by means of art, and occasionally nature, as a way
didactically to help the readers, in acknowledging the interpellation, to evolve into
morally accomplished subjects.
13
One way Addison promotes his project of
general education is, as I will demonstrate, by encouraging the introspective
practice of imagining, thus enabling the reader to achieve his or her full potential
as a moral subject, separating him or her from an objectionable way of life.
II. THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY RECEPTION
Apart from John Dennis’s (1657–1734) letters and his unfavourable study of
Addison’s tragedy Cato (1713), the reception of Addison’s writings was
homogenous during the first decades of the eighteenth century.
14
One voice
Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, XLVI/II, 00–00 147
Karl Axelsson
12
Regarding the concept of ‘criticism’ we should bear in mind that it is considered
unknown prior to the eighteenth century and is closely linked to the public sphere.
See Peter Uwe Hohendahl, ‘Literaturkritik und Öffentlichkeit’, Lili: Zeitschrift für
Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 1 (1971): 14–19.
13
Iapply the notion of the subject developed by Althusser, where the subject is
constitutive of ideology. See Louis Althusser, ‘Idéologie et appareils idéologiques
d’état (Notes pour une recherche)’, La Pensée 151 (1970): 31: ‘toute idéologie interpelle
les individus concrets en sujets concrets, par le fonctionnement de la catégorie de
sujet.’
14
Dennis was disapproving in his examination of Cato in ‘Remarks upon Cato, a Tragedy’,
The Critical Works of John Dennis, vol. 2, ed. by Edward Niles Hooker (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins Press, 1943), 41–80. Dennis also wrote a number of letters to The Spectator and
Richard Steele, whom he had a dispute with. See ibid., 18–22.
zlom2 12.11.2009 16:01 Stránka 147

that is heard in the crowd is provided by a brief remark made by Voltaire
(1694–1778) while in exile in England between 1726 and 1728. As expected,
Voltaire eulogizes Addison as a poet in Letters Concerning the English Nation
(1733), and he argues that Addison’s play Cato (produced 1712) is a ‘Master-
piece both with regard to the Diction, and to the Beauty and Harmony of the
Numbers’.
15
Interestingly enough, however, Voltaire also draws attention to
atrait in Addison’s manner as a poet, indeed an ingratiating remark in
Addison’s mind-set towards his addressees, which would later reverberate in
the disapproving reactions to his essays: ‘Mr. Addison had the effeminate
Complaisance to soften the Severity of his dramatic Character so, as to adapt it
to the Manners of the Age; and from an Endeavour to please, quite
ruin’d a Master-Piece in its kind.’
16
Although Voltaire certainly is greatly in favour
of Addison as a poet, he nevertheless caught sight of a writer somewhat too
concerned with pleasing the general taste of the age. What Voltaire unconsciously
put his finger on was a way of approaching art as well as the public, which was
to go a long way towards obliterating Addison’s standing in the history of
aesthetics.
The first rather indiscreet British critique of Addison’s essays came a couple
of decades later, written by Richard Hurd (1720–1808) in a dissertation
published in Horace’s Q. Horatii Flacci epistolae ad Pisones, et Augustum (1753).
Commenting on the merits of Longinus, Dominique Bouhours (1628–1702),
and Addison, Hurd unexpectedly feels ‘obliged to add an observation
concerning their defects’as well.
17
These critics may have a scholarly method,
Hurd argues, but the ‘real service, they have done to criticism, is not very
considerable’.
18
The reason, he claims, is that ‘they dwell too much in generals:
that is, not only the genus, to which they refer their species, is too large, but
those very subordinate species themselves are too comprehensive’.
19
Addison’s ‘criticism’ is, according to Hurd, ‘by no means, his talent’.
20
His ‘taste
was truly elegant; but he had neither that vigour of understanding, nor
chastised, philosophical spirit, which are so essential to this character’.
21
The lack of
philosophical depth is, furthermore, Hurd argues, related to a trait of
148 Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, XLVI/II, 00–00
Joseph Addison and General Education: Moral Didactics in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain
15
Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nation, trans. by John Lockman (London: C. Davis
and A. Lyon, 1733), 178. Originally written in French, this work was first published in
English translation, before being published as Lettres Philosophiques.
16
Ibid., 179.
17
Richard Hurd, Q. Horatii Flacci epistolae ad Pisones, et Augustum, vol. 2, 2nd ed.
(London: W. Thurlbourne, 1753), 104.
18
Ibid., 105.
19
Ibid.
20
Ibid., 106.
21
Ibid.
zlom2 12.11.2009 16:01 Stránka 148

cursoriness. Not managing to display substantial philosophical erudition, and
not attaining the requisite philosophical or scholarly depth, plainly suggests
superficiality. In his criticism of John Milton (1608–1674), Addison is, according
to Hurd, too dependent on Aristotle (384–322 BC) and René Le Bossu
(1631–1680), and when making his own observations they are ‘so general and
indeterminate, as to afford but little instruction to the reader, and are, not
unfrequently, altogether frivolous’.
22
The two features of Addison’s writings insinuated by Voltaire in his remarks
on Cato, and stated more resolutely by Hurd, may be further illustrated by a key
figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, Hugh Blair (1718–1800), in his Lectures on
Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783). Commenting on the celebrated essays of
‘The Pleasures of the Imagination’, Blair asserts that Addison’s ‘speculations on
this subject, if not exceedingly profound, are, however, very beautiful and
entertaining; and he has the merit of having opened a track, which was before
unbeaten’.
23
Blair has efficiently amalgamated the essays’ability to strike out an
important new course in criticism of the arts while managing to be both
pleasurable and, if not superficial, at least not remarkably profound. What Blair
points out is a dual trait that appears over and over again in the reception of
Addison’s essays.
As approving as Blair is, the strongly sympathetic criticism of Addison’s
essays wanes slightly towards the end of the century. Samuel Johnson
(1709–1784) captures the spirit of the times rather well in The Lives of the Poets
(1780–81), when he remarks that a critic is a ‘name which the present
generation is scarcely willing to allow’
24
Addison, and that his ‘criticism is
condemned as tentative or experimental rather than scientific’.
25
The impression
that Addison’s periodical essays are philosophically unsophisticated and not
challenging enough for the reader is touched upon by Johnson as well, though
he actually mentions this in support of Addison: superficiality, he says, made
Addison easy to comprehend and could ‘prepare the mind for more
attainments’.
26
When The Spectator was re-published in yet another edition in 1793–94, the
historian and novelist Robert Bisset (c. 1758–1805) felt called upon to defend
Addison mainly against the claim of being scientifically or philosophically
Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, XLVI/II, 00–00 149
Karl Axelsson
22
Ibid.
23
Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, vol. 1 (Dublin: printed for Messrs.
A. Gilbert, L. White, P. Byrne, J. Moore, W. Jones, and J. Rice, 1783), 52.
24
Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; with critical observations
on their works, vol. 3, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 36.
25
Ibid.
26
Ibid., 37.
zlom2 12.11.2009 16:01 Stránka 149

deficient and ingratiating. Bisset recapitulated the continuing debate, where it
had been ‘objected’ that Addison was ‘rather experimental than scientific’ and
where ‘as a historian […], he collects and narrates the facts, but does not as
aphilosopher investigate and ascertain the principles’.
27
Addison stood, in the
straightforward language of Bisset, ‘accused of not having entered into the
subject with philosophical accuracy and depth’.
28
The underlying reason for
the accusation was the fact that the philosophy evolved by Addison was,
according to Bisset, made unpretentious and plain to the common man; it was
aphilosophy ‘simplified to ordinary capacities’.
29
Complexity was not
conducive to Addison’s writings and aim. Since ‘knowledge was then much
less generally diffused than now’and ‘philosophical discussions were confined
to a few’, Addison sought, according to Bisset, to reach out to as many readers
as possible.
30
Complexity would have interfered with Addison’s intention and,
according to Bisset, ‘he therefore acted judiciously in taking a contrary course,
and answered an important purpose, by dispelling false taste, and introducing
true’.
31
III. THE DECLINE OF THE PERIODICAL ESSAY
As the eighteenth century drew to a close, Addison’s essays met with more
explicit disapproval. William Godwin (1756–1836), writing in The Enquirer:
Reflections on Education, Manners and Literature (1797), thought it was high time
to view the writers of the ‘Age of Queen Anne’ with ‘fairness and impartiality’,
32
and claimed: ‘nothing can be more glaringly exaggerated than praise’ of Addison.
33
Godwin concluded: ‘it were an endless task to hunt this author through all his
negligences, uncouthnesses and solecisms’.
34
As a formalist and neo-classical
poet, writing in compliance with the Horatian principles of ‘to instruct’
(prodesse) and ‘to delight’ (delectare), Addison was to some extent out of date as
well.
35
His style was considered cursory, and as an essayist his observations
frequently seemed to many to be obsolete and unimpressive. Though literature
150 Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, XLVI/II, 00–00
Joseph Addison and General Education: Moral Didactics in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain
27
Robert Bisset, The Spectator. A New Edition in Eight Volumes … to which are prefixed the lives
of the authors, vol. 1 (London: 1793–1794), 29–30.
28
Ibid., 24.
29
Ibid., 20.
30
Ibid., 24.
31
Ibid.
32
William Godwin, The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners and Literature; In a Series
of Essays (New York: Augustas M. Kelley, 1965), 437.
33
Ibid., 438.
34
Ibid., 442.
35
See, for example, August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst
und Litteratur, vol. 2 (Heidelberg: Mohr und Zimmer, 1811), 328–32.
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remained a largely public matter, and as such a moral matter as well, the attitude
to the essays of Addison had changed considerably since the early eighteenth
century. This was not only because of the moral principles they advanced, but
also because of the changing preferences concerning the structure in which
the morals were developed.
An interesting article that throws light on the matter appears in The Edinburgh
Magazine and Literary Miscellany of June 1819. The article has the enlightening
title ‘On the Declining Popularity of the British Essayists’, and is written in
astraightforward tone. The essayists, among whom Addison and Steele are
naturally deemed men of light and leadership, ‘are visibly losing the high
rank they once held, as manuals to form our sentiments, and models to
guide our taste’, and ‘writers ambitious of being thought fashionable, who
catch and reflect the taste of the day, no longer expect to gain credit or
popularity by strewing their pages with beauties of thought and expression
culled from the essayists’.
36
Addison helped, according to this anonymous writer in The Edinburgh
Magazine and Literary Miscellany, to ‘spread the colours of fancy and sentiment
over the routine of existence, and taught that most useful philosophy which
consists in occupying our sensibility and taste with the objects of common
and domestic life immediately around us’.
37
An essayist like Addison allegedly
required no ‘stimulus of great events or dignified objects’.
38
The force of the
essays, it is claimed, reside in their capacity to develop from the ‘simplest
incidents’ and conclude in enduring truths.
39
But public preferences had
changed considerably. New modes of literature added to the decline of the
periodical essay, and cleared new ground for debates on moral matters. The
‘works of fiction’ – especially the novel, which had then developed into the
most powerful of literary genres – had replaced the periodical essay, and was,
according to the writer in The Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany, ‘now
the medium by which men of wit and talent communicate to the world’.
40
The periodical essays held, in the view of the author of the article, an unfortunate
intermediate position with regard to philosophy and science on the one hand
and poetry and fiction on the other, a position that rested on shaky ground. To
be modern, a writer needed ‘either [to] exercise the reason or stir the feelings
strongly’, but essayists ‘who appeal to the reason without depth of thinking,
Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, XLVI/II, 00–00 151
Karl Axelsson
36
Anon., ’On the Declining Popularity of the British Essayists’, The Edinburgh Magazine
and Literary Miscellany; a new series of the Scots Magazine 83 (1819): 538–9.
37
Ibid., 539.
38
Ibid.
39
Ibid.
40
Ibid., 540.
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and to the fancy without enthusiasm or passion, cannot enjoy a high degree of
popularity’.
41
The status of the moral essays written by Addison, as well as the position of
the essayists themselves, had therefore undeniably fallen into decline by
the mid-nineteenth century. As the Scottish author, publisher, and natural
philosopher Robert Chambers (1802–1871) stated in Cyclopœdia of English
Literature (1844): ‘[I]t cannot be concealed, that since the beginning of the present
century, their [the British essayists’] popularity has undergone a considerable
decline.’
42
And Leigh Hunt (1784–1859), an esteemed writer of periodical essays
himself, remarked in The Indicator and the Companion (1834), ‘Addison and Steele
were too much given up to Button’s [Coffee-house] and the town’, and periodical
writing was ‘not favourable to reading’ since ‘it becomes too much a matter of
business, and will either be attended to at the expense of the writer’s books, or
books, the very admonishers of his industry, will make him idle’.
43
With its ‘gossiping
nature’the periodical essay can, according to Hunt, merely re-produce ‘experiences
familiar to the existing community’.
44
As Hunt mulls over his book-collection,
he appears ill at ease about the fact that it even contains the essays of Addison,
and though he indeed supports the undertaking of the essays as such (‘to
regulate the minor morals of society’), he remarks that they had nothing to do
with scholarship.
45
The outcome of Addison’s essays was no longer regarded as entirely
productive. In a letter of 28 January 1810, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
remarks to his friend Thomas Poole that he had indeed ‘studied the Spectator –
& with increasing pleasure & admiration’.
46
But as regards the effect of the essays,
Coleridge was critical, claiming that the essays had ‘innocently contributed to
the general taste for unconnected writing – just as if ‘Reading made easy’
should act to give men an aversion to words of more than two syllables, instead
of drawing them thro’those words into the power of reading Books in
general’.
47
Intellectually, the essays had but a limited scope and it was,
according to Coleridge, ‘evident’ that there was a ‘class of Thoughts & Feelings,
and these too the most important, even practicably, which it would be
152 Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, XLVI/II, 00–00
Joseph Addison and General Education: Moral Didactics in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain
41
Ibid., 541.
42
Robert Chambers, Cyclopœdia of English Literature (Edinburgh: W. & R. Chambers,
1844), 604–5.
43
Leigh Hunt, The Indicator and the Companion; a miscellany for the fields and the fire-side,
vol. 2 (London: published for Henry Colburn by R. Bentley, 1834), 200.
44
Ibid., 201.
45
Ibid.
46
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 3 (1807–1814),
ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 801.
47
Ibid.
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impossible to convey in the manner of Addison’.
48
It is fair to say that the
nineteenth-century critics looked back at the criticism advanced by Addison in
his periodical essays and saw a thinker of great magnitude, but it was,
nevertheless, someone that they had difficulty appreciating.
In a lengthy essay entitled ‘Remarks on the Writings of Addison and Steele’,
published in The Western Monthly Magazine in April 1835, the writer, J.J.J. (Isaac
Appleton Jewett), provides one of the most critical studies of Addison’s essays
thus far in the debate. One explicit characteristic of periodical literature is,
Jewett remarks, the morals it evolves, different sets of principles, which
Addison, according to Jewett, has failed to make relevant, since ‘the moral
teachings of this literature want life’, ‘want energy’, and ‘want the fire and the
outbreak of a strong devotional spirit’.
49
Addison was allegedly lacking in the
sentiments requisite of a moral educator. Moral suggestions (for example, on
the subject of being a good husband or a good citizen) or a categorization of
the appearance of virtue as beautiful is, Jewett argues, simply not acceptable
from someone lecturing on the indispensability of specific morals. Addison was
too formal, too middling, and too vain to meet the high standards of a moral
educator. The periodical essays, Jewett argues, lack a sense of enthusiasm,
adeficiency which tends to make them morally unconvincing. Addison was,
Jewett claims, too set on pleasing a metropolitan sphere of the public to be
able to speak convincingly from his heart.
50
Here, as elsewhere, the critical failure of Addison revolves around a specific
kind of superficiality, in the sense that his essays frequently appear to lack
philosophical complexity: ‘[W]e are disposed to smile at his efforts in criticism,
while we can hardly refrain from laughing outright at his philosophical
reasonings.’
51
Because of a lack of ‘time and space’, Jewett does not go into
what such philosophical reasoning might consist in. But Addison’s failure in
philosophical analysis is, he argues, on the one hand attached to the formal and
artificial spirit of neo-classical values, as well as Aristotelian principles, which
Addison is allegedly defending, and, on the other hand, his hasty analysis:
‘The two characteristics of these essays, which we apprehend, cannot but be
manifest to the most superficial reader, are, a prim starched, formal narrowness
of conception, and a most unpardonable slovenliness of reasoning.’
52
A more
particularized autonomous approach to contemplating the arts would have
Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, XLVI/II, 00–00 153
Karl Axelsson
48
Ibid.
49
J.J.J. [Isaac Appleton Jewett], ‘Remarks on the Writings of Addison and Steele’, The Western
Monthly Magazine 3 (1835): 235.
50
Ibid.
51
Ibid., 236.
52
Ibid., 238.
zlom2 12.11.2009 16:01 Stránka 153

resulted in the accomplishment of a more circumspect manner, but Addison
appears, according to Jewett, to be in the firm grip of a hampering, conformist
mode of philosophical thinking, which makes him too formal and uncritical.
Addison is not, however, only restricted by neo-classical values as such; he is
also restricted by his personal intellectual limitations as a critic. He lacks,
according to Jewett, a ‘large intellectual reach’ and his ‘mental glances did not
shoot to and fro, athwart the darkness of the moral world, and reveal its
mysteries’; his ‘reasonings are full of non sequiters’.
53
Furthermore, Addison’s
‘propositions are not bound together by strong, invincible chains of ratiocination’.
54
The example Jewett gives here is the discrepancy between Addison’s aim,
which was to improve general morals, and his method, which consisted in
creating fine taste for the public. There is no natural connection between aim
and method. In fact, ‘not only a priori reasoning, but all the past is full of
refutations of this unsound conclusion’, according to Jewett.
55
By the late nineteenth century, then, a characteristic portrait of Addison would
mention the ground-breaking effect of his periodical essays, yet would not
consider this effect to be truly proportional to its deficiencies. When we look at
their reception in the twentieth century, we see that the position of periodical
essays has become increasingly problematic. A twentieth-century scholar, such
as Bonamy Dobrée (1891–1974), who feared too strong a division between
‘lachrymose adoration’ on the one hand and ‘depreciation’ on the other, has in
fact had all his misgivings verified.
56
Addison is, as Leopold Damrosch, Jr
recognized some thirty years ago, ‘one of those writers whose reputation, which
once seemed established for all time, has fallen so drastically that literate people
feel no shame in admitting complete ignorance of him’.
57
How did this happen?
Part of the answer lies in the twentieth-century analytic movement in aesthetics.
To draw on the highly influential terminology of Monroe C. Beardsley (1915–1985),
we could refer to philosophical aesthetics concerned with the meaning and truth
of critical statements, rather than psychological aesthetics dealing with the cause
and effect of an artwork.
58
For aesthetics to develop into the philosophical
discipline it is today it has been necessary to align the historical narrative of
aesthetics to suit its scholarly status and aim.
154 Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, XLVI/II, 00–00
Joseph Addison and General Education: Moral Didactics in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain
53
Ibid.
54
Ibid.
55
Ibid.
56
Bonamy Dobrée, English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century: 1700–1740 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1959), 102.
57
Leopold Damrosch, Jr, ‘The Significance of Addison’s Criticism’, Studies in English Lite-
rature, 1500–1900 19 (1979): 421.
58
Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Art, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing, 1981), 7.
zlom2 12.11.2009 16:01 Stránka 154

As aesthetics has become gradually more focused on philosophical problems
consistent with analytic methodologies – naturally concentrating on non-
evaluative and ahistorical ideas rather than their connection with socio-political
conditions, an interaction which produced the modern system of the fine arts –
the discipline’s introspection and philosophical-historical narrative has been
steadily transformed.
59
To put it more bluntly, one could say that we have moved
from the glorious mess of the eighteenth-century literati, politicians, laymen of
the arts, publishers, poets and artists, towards a canonized set of eighteenth-
century philosophers who fit into a required philosophical continuum. As a result,
the discipline has of course gained in scholarly rigour, but has also lost a sense
of historical complexity. It is difficult to dispel the impression that an excessive
focus on philosophical problems that can be addressed in an analytic discourse
without interference from outside has resulted in a disregard for Addison’s
periodical essays. Though the analytic movement in aesthetics is a twentieth-
century phenomenon, the conditions – especially the divided loyalty to
the philosophical merits of Addison’s essays – have, as we have observed, been
present since the mid-eighteenth century, a circumstance that has naturally
contributed to the current neglect. Add to this – as has been effectively
demonstrated by Brian McCrea in Addison and Steele Are Dead (1990) – the quest for
the autonomy and professionalization of the discipline of literature in the twentieth
century, the force of New Criticism, especially in post-1945 USA, with its accent on
the text as an autonomous whole, and we begin to sense just how the periodical
essays have lost a good deal of their interest among scholars.
60
Not surprisingly,
Addison – a critic who never produced an extensive philosophical work on art, but
only brief, entertaining, periodical essays in a form (the single unified essay
published daily) that was unique for his generation – is absent from many
twentieth-century accounts of the history of aesthetics, especially anthologies,
which are such effective instruments in setting up and preserving the narrative.
61
Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, XLVI/II, 00–00 155
Karl Axelsson
59
Arecognized feature of analytic philosophy and analytic aesthetics is a neglect of
the social and political structure of ideas. See Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen,
eds, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: The Analytic Tradition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004),
2. See also Richard Shusterman, ed., Analytic Aesthetics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 10.
60
Brian McCrea, Addison and Steele Are Dead: The English Department, Its Canon, and
the Professionalization of Literary Criticism (London: Associated University Presses, 1990),
esp. 171–216.
61
Addison’s periodical essays are generally not included in anthologies on aesthetics. See,
for example, Morris Weitz, ed., Problems in Aesthetics (New York: Macmillan, 1959);
Patricia H. Werhane, ed., Philosophical Issues in Art (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall,
1984); Steven M. Cahn and Aaron Meskin, eds, Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2008); Frank A. Tillman and Steven M. Cahn, eds, Philosophy of Art
and Aesthetics: From Plato to Wittgenstein (New York: Harper & Row, 1969); Carolyne
Korsmeyer, ed., Aesthetics: The Big Questions (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).
zlom2 12.11.2009 16:01 Stránka 155

IV. DIDACTICS, ETHICS, AND ART
One of the questions that we have not asked ourselves thus far relates not only to
why Addison has been perceived as unscholarly or unphilosophical and
ingratiating, but, what is more important, why he was in fact both unscholarly and
unphilosophical. If we acknowledge that a large part of the reception of his work
reveals an important trait, the next sensible step would be to look for the reasons
behind such a characteristic rather than removing it altogether from the discipline.
To identify the historical analysis of Addison’s periodical essays, it is essential
to recognize the didactic undertaking that aimed to serve and increase
the standard of general education. The moral-didactic aim of the periodical
essays is manifest from the very commencement of The Spectator. In an early
essay, published on 12 March 1711, Addison famously states that he is attempting
to ‘enliven Morality with Wit, and to temper Wit with Morality’, and ‘to recover’
his readers ‘out of that Desperate state of Vice and Folly into which the Age is
fallen’.
62
In an essay published a couple of months later, we learn that such
amoral moulding of public opinion is intimately mixed with an accurate
judgement of writing, when Addison, true to his overall aim to ‘banish Vice and
Ignorance out of the Territories of Great Britain’, sets out to ‘establish among us
aTaste of polite Writing’.
63
The moral manifesto established here is perfectly
clear about whom to address: men and women of ‘ordinary capacities’.
64
Such
acategory is important not only because of its conceivable magnitude, but also
because the largest part of such a category was, early in the century, not greatly
involved in the arts.
Most works of art in the last few decades of the seventeenth century were
confined to the courts of royalty and the nobility, which had limited finances
for the arts. The Protestant church was, as John Brewer remarks, opposed to
the creation of music and the display of art, and there was also a ban on
the importing of foreign art.
65
Performances of spoken drama were limited to
two ‘patent theatres’ in England, and there was no such thing as concert series,
public exhibitions of art, operas, daily newspapers, magazines, reviews, art-dealers,
professional (that is, self-supporting) writers, or professional artists or musicians.
Nor was there of course a qualified public audience for any of these artistic and
intellectual activities, and hence no proper market for the arts.
66
Amultitude of
156 Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, XLVI/II, 00–00
Joseph Addison and General Education: Moral Didactics in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain
62
Addison, The Spectator, vol. 1, 44.
63
Ibid., 245.
64
Ibid.
65
John Brewer, ‘Cultural Production, Consumption, and the Place of the Artist in
Eighteenth-Century England’, in Towards a Modern Art World, ed. Brian Allen (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1995), 8.
66
Ibid.
zlom2 12.11.2009 16:01 Stránka 156

radical changes occurred throughout the eighteenth century, which revolutionized
the traditional scenario for the arts, the artists, and the public, and initiated
the establishment of the modern system of the fine arts. By the late eighteenth
century, one could, as Brewer notes, attend the opera or concerts in London
every evening, and in the 1760s there were more than 12,000 theatre-goers
aweek.
67
Furthermore, public pleasure gardens – like Vauxhall and Ranelagh –
had been established with performances of small-scale operas and concerts,
and the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695 signified the end of censorship and
the old press monopoly held by the Stationers’Company.
68
During the first few decades of the eighteenth century the need for
straightforward guidelines for ethics and art was therefore considerable in the
expanding middling orders. The readers of The Spectator were educated,
though, as Robert DeMaria, Jr observes, ‘not as learned as the audience for
periodical writing in many of the ‘“Reviews”, “Works of the Learned”, journals of
societies […], and even book catalogues’.
69
The readers of Addison’s periodical
essays held learning and culture in the highest regard, but, for a number of
reasons, they were unable to continue studying.
70
Addison set out to meet this
growing demand. The edification of the ‘ordinary capacities’ was, from this
perspective, a triumphant project, partly because self-respect and good taste
were so firmly entwined at the time, which made the motivating force behind
the cultivation of the arts resolute and effective.
General education in the arts was not, however, impartial. Rather it was
educational encouragement to the readers to use all their creative abilities, an
ideological implementation, so to speak, in the material forms of the readers’
daily life. By recognizing Addison’s claims on art and ethics, the readers
interacted with the ideological position of the arguments, and by doing so
developed into morally accomplished subjects. To demonstrate moral virtue,
such a subject needed to be cultured in the arts. Art was therefore not an end
in itself, but a means to a desirable social status, and, indeed, an instrument for
social discrimination.
71
Ajudgement of taste was also the dividing line between
Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, XLVI/II, 00–00 157
Karl Axelsson
67
Ibid., 8–9.
68
Ibid.
69
Robert DeMaria, Jr, ‘The eighteenth-century periodical essay’, in Richetti, Cambridge
History of English Literature, 528.
70
Ibid.
71
Concerning this point, see Peter de Bolla, The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape,
and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2003), 40: ‘The aesthetics is, from its earliest formulations, engaged in the process of
social discrimination: one argument has it that art is only art insofar as it is out of the
reach of the vulgar.’ De Bolla makes this claim with reference to Addison’s separation of
the polite from the vulgar, which I discuss later in this paper.
zlom2 12.11.2009 16:02 Stránka 157

morality and immorality, between accomplishment and deficiency, between
politeness and vulgarity. As commercial culture intensified, social transformation
by means of commodities also accelerated. Status consciousness could be verified
in numerous ways, but to be cultured in the arts was essential at all times as an
apparent sign of moral self-confidence and power.
The arts (here, music, architecture, painting, poetry, and oratory) should, in
the words of Addison, ‘deduce their Laws and Rules from the general Sense and
Taste of Mankind, and not from the Principles of those Arts themselves; or in
other Words, the Taste is not to conform to the Art, but the Art to the Taste’.
72
Art must simply adapt to public taste, and not the other way around. This did
not, however, imply that art was incapable of fostering moral development, or
was prevented from teaching and cultivating the public and forming them into
morally accomplished subjects. Art was not lacking in self-determination and
inventiveness. What Addison suggested was rather that art required a specific
sensibility precisely because it had the important responsibility to provide the
public with moral instruction. Art had then to ensure that it was compatible
with public taste, to be able to make advancement as steadfastly and
influentially as possible. The mimetic model which Addison depended on here
placed a strong emphasis on art as a representation of a refined nature, that is
to say, nature (chiefly human nature) as conceived by most members of the
public. The ambition was not to bring about a radical transformation of public
taste, but rather to be consistent with a large part of public taste, keenly aware
of the direction it might move in next, and when it did, efficiently to reinforce
its inclination. In this sense, the ideology and the subject of the middling
orders, evolving from the periodical essays of the early eighteenth century,
were inseparable, since the latter was utterly constitutive of the first.
It is by regarding Addison as a moral moulder of general education – rather
than a philosopher expressing himself within a specialized scholarly discourse –
that we can begin to recognize his standing as a central critic in the history of
aesthetics. Addison reached out as no one had before, addressing a previously
ignored stratum of a public that was largely removed from the arts. It is also by
regarding the other part of the dualism – the claim that his essays lack scholarly
or philosophical depth – that we can distinguish what the project of general
education actually required from its leading figure. The pervasive influence
arose from moral simplicity and straightforward language, both of which were
essential for achieving the aim of general education leading to morality. To
speak productively with the ‘ordinary capacities’, to interpellate readers as
subjects, Addison expressed himself in the established idiom of a public that
158 Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, XLVI/II, 00–00
Joseph Addison and General Education: Moral Didactics in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain
72
Addison, The Spectator, vol. 1, 123.
zlom2 12.11.2009 16:02 Stránka 158

was inexperienced in the arts, and whenever the readers felt that the essays
were, as Addison himself put it, a ‘little out of their Reach’, he ‘would not have
them [the readers] discouraged, for they may assure themselves the next shall
be much clearer’.
73
In the interaction between Addison and the readers the term ‘philosophy’
has the plain connotation of the pursuit of leisure, a dignified pastime for the
inexperienced layman who is nevertheless keen to be taught. In a letter,
published on 15 October 1711, a reader recommends Addison to ‘speak of the
Way of Life which plain Men may pursue, to fill up the Spaces of Time with
Satisfaction’.
74
Such a pastime is to the reader closely associated with
aparticular notion of philosophy and what it ought to accomplish: ‘It is
alamentable Circumstance, that Wisdom, or as you call it Philosophy, should
furnish Ideas only for the Learned, and that a Man must be a Philosopher to
know how to pass away his Time agreeably.’
75
The letter formulates the edifying
ambition of the essays well: they should provide wisdom, or philosophy, in an
uncomplicated manner that might aid the everyday pursuit of leisure. Though
this scarcely corresponds to a professional notion of philosophy, nor indeed has
it produced any serious interest in contemporary debates in aesthetics, it is
important to recognize that it served an essential purpose for the layman of the
middling orders in the early eighteenth century, which desired straightforward
moral guidance germane to daily labours and duties. It was with a great sense
of contentment that Addison himself observed the close similarities between
his educational project and the position of Socrates in ancient Greece. While it
was said of the latter ‘that he brought Philosophy down from Heaven, to inhabit
among Men’, Addison wrote that he was ‘ambitious to have it said of [himself],
that [he had] brought Philosophy out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and
Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables and in Coffee-
Houses’.
76
V. THE LIVES OF AURELIA AND FULVIA
The regimen for how to develop into a morally accomplished subject was
considerably introspective in the way it was practised. The development and
refinement of virtues corresponded to increasing familiarity with, and
sophistication and self-assurance in, the arts. The final purpose of an introspective
practice like that was not an absolute experience of art and nature, though
Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, XLVI/II, 00–00 159
Karl Axelsson
73
Ibid., 245.
74
Ibid., vol. 2, 269.
75
Ibid.
76
Ibid., vol. 1, 44.
zlom2 12.11.2009 16:02 Stránka 159

such genuine experiences were compulsory for the objective with which Addison
was truly concerned: morals. The moral regimen advanced by Addison dealt with
the materiality of daily life, and it was essentially introspective, implying that
the emerging subject of the middling orders was advised to achieve intellectual
balance by cultivating the inner, productive faculty of the imagination. The inner
life was reflected in the actions and manners of the subject, and moral actions
became appropriate by refining the faculty of the imagination.
The notion of the imagination – famously developed by Addison – is often
regarded solely as a critical means to judge and experience art and nature. In
fact it is also important in the moral shaping of the subject.
77
It is in the essays
published between 21 June and 3 July 1712 that Addison develops his ideas
about the imagination. Without bearing in mind the model of the accomplished
moral subject elaborated in the previous essays, however, it is, I believe, difficult
really to do justice to the implications of the concept.
Addison makes a distinction between someone possessing a polite imagination
and someone who is merely vulgar. The distinction presents an explicit vision of
the kind of moral subject that is brought into being through the introspective
practice of the imagination. ‘A Man of Polite Imagination is’, according to
Addison, ‘let into a great many Pleasures, that the Vulgar are not capable of
receiving’.
78
The polite, educated, and sophisticated are separated from the vulgar,
the uneducated:
160 Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, XLVI/II, 00–00
Joseph Addison and General Education: Moral Didactics in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain
77
The notion of the imagination has of course a long history in British philosophy and
science, where observations on the creative role of the imagination are frequently
combined with scepticism regarding its undisciplined power and its relevance for
science. Bacon – who shaped much of the conditions of the scientific and philosophical
debate during the seventeenth century – assigned a certain status to the category of
the imagination in his structure of human learning, in Of the Proficience and
Advancement of Learning Divine and Human (1605), in Collected Works of Francis Bacon,
vol. 3, ed. by James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath (1876)
(London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1996), 329. Hobbes made crucial remarks about
the creative power of the imagination. See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or the Matter,
Form and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil (1651), in The Collected Works
of Thomas Hobbes, vol. 3, ed. William Molesworth (London: Routledge/Thoemmes,
1992), 3–17. See also Thomas Hobbes, The Answer of Mr. Hobbes to Sir William Davenant’s
Preface Before Gondibert (1650), in The Collected Works of Thomas Hobbes, vol. 4, ed.
William Molesworth (London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1992), 441–58; and Thomas
Hobbes, The Iliads and Odysses of Homer. Translated out of Greek into English, by
Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (1675), 2nd ed. (1677), in The Collected Works of Thomas
Hobbes, vol. 10, ed. William Molesworth (London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1992), 3–10.
Locke did not concern himself specifically with the notion of fancy or imagination,
but, through his claims regarding the creative power of forming complex ideas, he
nevertheless had an important impact on the debate on the inventive structure of
the imagination. See John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690),
5th ed. (1706) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 96–7.
78
Addison, The Spectator, vol. 3, 538.
zlom2 12.11.2009 16:02 Stránka 160

He [a man of polite imagination] 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. It gives him, indeed, a kind of Property in everything he sees,
and makes the most rude uncultivated Part of Nature administer to his Pleasures: So
that he looks upon the World, as it were, in another Light, and discovers in it
aMultitude of Charms, that conceal themselves from the generality of Mankind.
79
The arguments evolved here may well be considered in the light of Addison’s
notion of happiness and unobtrusive nature. ‘True Happiness’, he argues, ‘is of
aretired Nature, and an Enemy to Pomp and Noise’.
80
Such a nature is the product
of virtuous self-knowledge, where the manners of the subject are well balanced
from the perspective of the context, while appearing to be almost indifferent to
any opinion that such a milieu might have of the manners of the subject: ‘In
short, it [true happiness] feels every thing it wants within it self, and receives no
Addition from Multitudes of Witnesses and Spectators.’
81
The self-confidence
which underpins these manners is essentially a unified whole: the moral compass
is at this point so entrenched and confident that nothing might disrupt its
actions. What is cultivated in the case of polite imagination, then, is a sensitivity
distinguishing the morally accomplished subjects from the vulgar. While the latter
are restless, untrained, and unable to face anything but disorder in nature,
asubject with a polite imagination has enough social self-confidence carefully
to contemplate and take pleasure in such disorder. The distinction also takes us
back to Addison’s fable, in the same essay, on the lives of Aurelia and Fulvia,
two opposites. The opening motto of the essay – ‘Parva leves capiunt animos’
(Light minds are pleased with trifles) – is from Ovid’s (43 BC–AD 17) Ars amatoria,
and refers here to the discourse of women, who appear ostentatiously to focus
solely on superficial exteriors. This leads Addison to moralize on the lives of Aurelia
and Fulvia.
While Aurelia (‘a Woman of Great Quality’) ‘delights in the Privacy of a Country
Life, and passes away a great part of her Time in her own Walks and Gardens’,
Fulvia ‘lives in a perpetual Motion of Body, and Restlessness of Thought, and is
never easie in any one Place when she thinks there is more Company in
another’.
82
The morals advanced here touch upon the complexity of living
conditions, guiding principles, and objects in life. Aurelia and her husband
‘abound with good Sense, consummate Virtue, and a mutual Esteem’.
83
Aurelia
Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, XLVI/II, 00–00 161
Karl Axelsson
79
Ibid.
80
Ibid., vol. 1, 67.
81
Ibid., 68.
82
Ibid.
83
Ibid.
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is apparently established in the upper, privileged stratum of the middling orders.
The sine qua non for pleasure and virtue is sound finances: confident access to
capital and property (the family divides its time between the town and the country,
depending on their frame of mind). To elaborate on the subject of wealth,
however, suits neither Addison’s purpose nor his manners, since he refers to
avirtuous life that transcends material conditions. But we learn, at any rate, that
private economy is of such a nature that Aurelia and her family form part of
adesirable ‘little Common-wealth within it self’.
84
Fulvia, on the other hand, considers her ‘Life lost in her own Family, and
fancies her self out of the World when she is not in the Ring, the Playhouse, or
the Drawing-Room’ and ‘pities all the valuable Part of her own Sex, and calls
every Woman of a prudent modest retired Life, a poor-spirited unpolished
Creature’.
85
By ‘setting her self to view’ Fulvia is ‘exposing her self’, and Addison
concludes with ill-concealed disdain that she ‘grows Contemptible by being
Conspicuous’.
86
What is displayed in the fable of Aurelia and Fulvia is nothing less than
the difference between a polite imagination and a vulgar imagination, as well
as a morally accomplished subject and a morally unaccomplished one. While
one of the women will be able to educate herself by means of the arts, and as
aresult nurture a proper judgement of taste which, according to Addison,
indeed provides ‘another Sense’,
87
the other will arguably end up in the position
that distinguishes the ‘Distracted Person’, where the ‘Imagination is troubled,
and [the] whole Soul disordered and confused’.
88
Through her virtuous manners, Aurelia will naturally also act in accordance
with Christian religious conviction. Elements of contentment originate from
acontemplation filled with awe of the ‘Supreme Author of our Being [who] has
so formed the Soul of Man, that nothing but himself can be its last, adequate,
and proper Happiness’.
89
Man is then by nature enthralled by ‘great’and ‘unlimited’
creations, by which he experiences ‘Admiration, which is avery pleasing Motion
of the Mind’.
90
At this point our admiration ‘immediately rises at the Consideration
of any Object that takes up a great deal of room in the Fancy’, which is exactly
what Addison is implying when he remarks that Aurelia spends much of her
162 Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, XLVI/II, 00–00
Joseph Addison and General Education: Moral Didactics in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain
84
Ibid.
85
Ibid., 68–9.
86
Ibid., 69.
87
Ibid., 397: ‘A Man that has a Taste of Musick, Painting, or Architecture, is like one that
has another Sense, when compared with such as have no Relish of those Arts.’
88
Ibid., vol. 2, 579.
89
Ibid., vol. 3, 545.
90
Ibid.
zlom2 12.11.2009 16:02 Stránka 162

time sauntering about in the privacy of nature.
91
Since God has ‘given almost
every thing about us the Power of raising an agreeable Idea in the Imagination’,
it is, according to Addison, ‘impossible […] to behold his Works with Coldness
or Indifference’.
92
Thus, when Aurelia demonstrates her sensitive contemplation
of nature, and exercises her polite imagination, she acts according to nature
and displays her religious conviction as well. And since ‘Faith and Morality
naturally produce each other’ Aurelia will reinforce her moral conduct.
93
Because of her socio-economic position, though the structures of such
aposition remain merely implied, Aurelia is able to engage in the introspective
practice in which the imagination is refined and its cultivation displayed in her
self-assured sense of contemplation, where she uncovers and explores her
imaginative capability. Aurelia is involved in the prolific project of self-fulfilment
suggested by Addison, a project where she has recognized the ideological
interpellation, and will expose her morality in her refined judgement and be
regarded as a morally accomplished subject. Fulvia, on the other hand, with her
uneasy, narcissistic yet extroverted, character, never single-minded in any
experience of the arts, constantly perceptive yet evidently insensible to her
own creative faculty, will not display any such morals. While Aurelia turns
inwards, exploring her imaginative power (primary as well as secondary
pleasures of the imagination), and is able to display her morals in her manners
and dissociate herself from uncouth behaviour, Fulvia turns outwards, exposing
only insecurity and lack of culture. As Addison examines the imagination,
famously claiming that we are ‘flung into a pleasing Astonishment at […]
unbounded Views, and feel a delightful Stillness and Amazement in the Soul at
the Apprehension of them’, the reader cannot help recalling the daily life of
Aurelia, who epitomizes all such virtuous qualities.
94
By analyzing the morals developed by Addison, aesthetics begins to open
itself up to less recognized parts of its history, parts contending with structures,
power, and discrimination. More than anything, the history of aesthetics is
aheterogeneous body of ideas, and as such should not be arranged to suit
present-day trends in scholarship. Instead, it should be accepted with all its
inadequacies and unimposing claims. Addison’s essays do not provide multifaceted
criticism ready to be reinterpreted and applied to modern conditions. What
Addison did was to reach out to a previously uninitiated stratum and invite
its members to reflect on the arts, and he demonstrated how the arts could
Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, XLVI/II, 00–00 163
Karl Axelsson
91
Ibid.
92
Ibid., 546.
93
Ibid., vol. 4, 143.
94
Ibid., vol. 3, 540.
zlom2 12.11.2009 16:02 Stránka 163

be used to separate the cultured and morally accomplished subject from
the unaccomplished. In so doing, Addison not only broke new ground for
the debate on the arts, which naturally also aided the establishment of aesthetics,
but he also aroused topical interest in how the arts could operate morally as
asign to distinguish a virtuous and educated way of life from a substandard one.
Karl Axelsson
Department of Philosophy,
Uppsala University,
Box 627, SE-751 26 Uppsala, Sweden
karl.axelsson@estetik.uu.se
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