IT happens often if not always to men whose high purposes and prophetic insight are accompanied by extreme weakness of will, that their “glory is given to another.” It happened so to Steele. He is the real founder of the “Addisonian school” of essay writing. In the Tatler, which he founded April 12th, 1709, he developed the methods and suggested the style in which Addison peculiarly excelled. It is not too much to say of Steele that he inspired Addison and gave direction to that which posterity accepts as most characteristically “Addisonian.” And it is eminently characteristic of Steele himself that he did this consciously and with good-natured contempt of his own impotence. “I fared like a distressed prince,” he writes, “who calls in a powerful neighbor to his aid; I was undone by my auxiliary. When I had once called him in, I could not subsist without dependence upon him.” This was written in acknowledging the papers contributed to the Tatler by Addison who began to write for it after Steele had founded it. It applies to the Spectator as fully as to the Tatler. Indeed, it suggests the relation which existed between the two friends during the epoch of their greatest creative activity. Addison had the better education in books; he also had the benevolence which ennobled Steele and was the bond of union between them; but he had what Steele lacked—what he never acquired—what was wholly incompatible with his habits of life and of work,—the calmness of habitual self-control. It may not be true that Addison, without losing his dignity, his sweetness, or his calm self-poise—without even “rumpling a ruffle,” as has been said, could drink the whole of the third bottle, the half of which would make Steele uproariously forgetful of all the high purposes of his life; but even if this is picturesque exaggeration, something not unlike it is fundamentally true of the two friends. They were born in the same year, 1672,—a year in which curled, ruffled, and powdered Reactionists, with unspeakable morals of the latest Parisian fashion, were endeavoring to set back all the clocks in England to the time of Henry VIII. Steele was eleven years old when these exquisites and wits sent Algernon Sidney to the scaffold, and only thirteen when Richard Rumbold was hanged, eviscerated, and cut into quarters for holding the belief that God is not sufficiently a respecter of persons to give one man a title from heaven to master another. It was in 1660, only twelve years before Steele’s birth, that Thomas Harrison had been actually eviscerated alive in accordance with the sentence of a court controlled by the “Merry Monarch.” It is not pleasant to remember such things; but if they are forgotten, it will be impossible to understand Steele or his mission. In 1701, when he began what he always considered his apostolate by writing “The Christian Hero,” the morals of England were indescribably corrupt. He was at the time a captain in Lord Lucas’s Fusiliers, having left Oxford without a degree to join the army as a private soldier. Debauchery and cruelty characterized the modes through which the pride of the ruling class manifested its impulses of domination. Captain Steele who wrote “The Christian Hero” in the hope that the standard of morals he thus set for others would incidentally elevate his own, was so far defeated in his purpose of shaming himself into sobriety and dignity, that in defending the ethics of “The Christian Hero.” he felt obliged to fight a duel and wound dangerously one of the Wildrakes who had insulted him for advocating meekness, temperance, and soberness. In an eminently characteristic way, Steele followed this up by writing “The Funeral,” “The Conscious Lover,” and other comedies, with the well-defined purpose of redeeming himself from the suspicion of too much sanctity, or, as he says, “to enliven” his character. He had a deep, underlying, and governing purpose, however, which he never abandoned—drunk or sober! It was to use his pen to reform the manners of his time. The frequency of his own lapses under temptation served to make him more steadfast in this governing purpose by convincing him the more deeply of the need for his work as a means of helping to redeem others from sufferings of which his own infirmities made him aware. Thus we have illustrated in his life the remarkable contradiction of a feeble will joined to extraordinary tenacity of life purpose. In such feebleness, controlled by the inspiration of hopes of usefulness, he was one of the very “babes and sucklings” out of whose mouths is perfected the praise which belongs in fullness only to the perfect expression of the Divinely Human. Steele is often absurd, and sometimes irresistibly ludicrous in his career as a reformer and prophet. But whether he was writing essays on virtue for the Tatler and Spectator, or drunk under the table over which Addison presided with still unruffled dignity; whether he was accepting Addison’s charity as the only means of escaping imprisonment for debt, or founding the Plebeian to oppose the Toryism into which he feared even Addison had lapsed,—at all times, in all the follies and mischances of his life, he had always in him the strength of the same idea which gave greatness to Chatham and Burke, to Brougham and Macaulay. He believed in the divine right of every man to grow better, larger, and stronger; he believed also in the divine duty of attempting it, no matter how feebly; he feared and fought against that “merriness” of morals which he saw destroying the people as he felt it destroying himself. His ideal was of larger liberty and higher living for England and all the world. No man was ever weaker against temptation, but this high purpose saved and glorified him. If it did not make him an Addison, it fitted him to become at some later stage of the continuous existence throughout the eternity in which he believed the “Christian hero” he had longed to be in this life—the hero we may say with certainty that Addison never even attempted to be. For certainly though the “wit,” who scarcely rumpled his ruffles when in the extremest stages of dissolute living, may reform and become a saint,—as Addison did,—there is nothing specially characteristic of the hero in him.

  Steele was born in Dublin in March, 1672. He first met Addison when they were boys together at the Charterhouse School, and they were afterwards college mates at Oxford. After leaving the army with the rank of Captain, Steele, through his favor of influential Whigs, was elected to Parliament, from which he was not very long afterwards expelled for “seditious language” published in the Crisis. George I. knighted him and appointed him to various offices, because of his ability as a Whig pamphleteer. Between 1709 and 1711 he founded and edited the Tatler, and followed it up with the Spectator, in which he was associated with Addison (1711–12). He founded successively the Guardian, Town Talk, the Tea Table, Chit Chat, the Plebeian, and the Theatre, none of which were notable successes financially. Steele was usually more concerned, however, with some moral, literary, or political purpose than with money-making or with “establishing a property.” When he could find no other way of exerting his influence at what seemed to him a crisis, he would found a paper (as he did the Plebeian, in which he opposed Addison) and run it, either until money failed or he had accomplished his purpose. It is hard to tell which of the two events was more apt to be fatal to his newspaper enterprises, as without a definite, moral purpose to inspire him, he seems to have been incapable of long-sustained effort. He died September 1st, 1729, leaving his memory for a jest to his lovers and his influence on English literature for a blessing to the remotest posterity.