34 Prosscr Hall Frye 



"Since I have raised to myself so great an audience," says Addison, 

 speaking, in this instance as in so many others, for his age in speaking for 

 himself, "I shall spare no pains to make their instruction agreeable, and 

 their diversion useful. For which reasons I shall endeavor to enliven 

 morality with wit, and temper wit with morality, that my readers may, if 

 possible, both ways find their account in the speculation of the day. And 

 to the end that their virtue and discretion may not be short, transient, in- 

 termittent starts of thought, I have resolved to refresh their memories from 

 day to day, till I have rescued them out of that desperate state of vice and 

 folly into which the age is fallen.'" 



Such is their professed aim with hardly an exception. Even the 

 later novehsts lay claim to it. And if the claim is in some cases 

 a pretense, a mere form of words, as it surely is with Fielding 

 and Smollett, even then it shows what a hold the conception had 

 acquired. In fact, it might not be impossible to deduce all the 

 literary forms of the period from this one principle. Even the 

 restoration comed}- of manners, from which many of them derive 

 directly or indirectly, though it seems itself to have taken leave of 

 morality entirely, has its roots in the same soil — an interest in the 

 social creature. And if that comedy perished, or rather transmi- 

 grated, it did so in part because it had ceased to represent the so- 

 cial being in accordance with the fair sense of the general public 

 regarding him. It would take too long to attempt to trace the 

 affiliations of the various genres; but it is easy to observe the mo- 

 ral essav of Addison and the poetic satire assuming certain of the 

 social functions of the comedy of manners as far as that comedy 

 is idealh- a criticism of society and transforming them by the ad- 

 mixture of a didactically moral purpose ; while it is still easier to 

 detect in Fielding's novel certain other such 'functions, at the same 

 time that Richardson picks up the Addisonian essay and by a 

 change of proportions, in enlarging the anecdotal and illustrative 

 portions and reducing the critical and discoursive, produces 

 Clarissa Harlowe. But at all events this one point is clear — the 

 culmination of the movement resulted in a serious confusion of 

 poetical and critical .methods. And to this cause is referable in 

 the main the relative inferiority of its poetry. 



^Addison. Spectator, no. 10. 



34 



