'Those Little Cracklings of Mirth and Folly'

Who is being described and who is doing the describing:

“His prose is the model of the middle style; on grave subjects not formal, on light occasions not grovelling; pure without scrupulosity, and exact without apparent elaboration; always equable, and always easy, without glowing words or pointed sentences. [He] never deviates from his track to snatch a grace; he seeks no ambitious ornaments, and tries no hazardous innovations. His page is always luminous, but never blazes in unexpected splendour.”

 

A respectable guess as to the identity of the writer whose prose is being assessed might be Daniel Defoe. Perhaps John Bunyan. With a bit of a stretch, even Jonathan Swift or John Dryden. No, it’s the less well-remembered Joseph Addison (1672-1719) and the encomiast is Dr. Johnson in his “Life of Addison.” Addison is best remembered as a pioneering periodical essayist, a precursor to Johnson himself, but he was also a poet, a Member of Parliament and a playwright. Though painfully shy he was a very public man and writer.

 

I came late to Addison, and he was presented to me as one half of a double act, like Laurel or Hardy: Addison and Steele. Together they founded The Spectator in 1711 and the Guardian two years later. Richard Steele had already founded The Tatler in 1609 and Addison became a regular contributor. Here is Addison’s opening paragraph from the May 17, 1712, edition of The Spectator:

 

“I have always preferred Chearfulness to Mirth. The latter, I consider as an Act, the former as an Habit of the Mind. Mirth is short and transient. Chearfulness fixed and permanent. Those are often raised into the greatest Transports of Mirth, who are subject to the greatest Depressions of Melancholy: On the contrary, Chearfulness, tho’ it does not give the Mind such an exquisite Gladness, prevents us from falling into any Depths of Sorrow. Mirth is like a Flash of Lightning, that breaks thro a Gloom of Clouds, and glitters for a Moment; Chearfulness keeps up a kind of Day-light in the Mind, and fills it with a steady and perpetual Serenity.”

 

The prose is readily understood by most readers. His psychologizing will remind some of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy or Hamlet’s “I have of late—but wherefore I know not--lost all my mirth . . .” Addison's essay is an endorsement of mental health. Those with a capacity for mirth are likely to be sane. Most nut jobs, cranks and fanatics are humor deficient. Addison concludes:

 

“Such Considerations, which every one should perpetually cherish in his Thoughts, will banish, from us all that secret Heaviness of Heart which unthinking Men are subject to when they lie under no real Affliction, all that Anguish which we may feel from any Evil that actually oppresses us, to which I may likewise add those little Cracklings of Mirth and Folly that are apter to betray Virtue than support it; and establish in us such an even and chearful Temper, as makes us pleasing to our selves, to those with whom we converse, and to him whom we were made to please.”

 

Johnson concludes his “Life of Addison” with a further assessment of the essayist’s prose:

 

“What he attempted, he performed; he is never feeble, and he did not wish to be energetick; he is never rapid, and he never stagnates. His sentences have neither studied amplitude, nor affected brevity: his periods, though not diligently rounded, are voluble and easy. Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.”

 

Addison was born on today’s date, May 1, in 1672, and died in 1719 at age forty-seven.