Essays and comedy notes

Steele’s paper (Bond’s Spectator, commonly No. 2) introduces the club that will supply types for the periodical essay. The Spectator himself is a silent observer; the club is the social world made portable. Sir Roger de Coverley is the country gentleman: humour, old-fashioned honour, a Tory weather, beloved even in his oddities. The Templar has chambers in the law but his heart is in the theatre and in books. Sir Andrew Freeport is the London merchant: industry, trade, a Whig trust in commerce. Captain Sentry is the soldier who has served, modest about rank, exact about duty. Will Honeycomb is the man of town and fashion, who reads the age in wigs and in women. A clergyman of sound learning and a quiet life sits with them. The point of the list is not gossip. It is a map of estates — land, law, trade, army, town, church — so that a daily paper can speak as if a city were in one room.

Unit 1’s periodical essay lives here: a short, regular prose piece, moral and social, written for a mixed public, not a private letter and not a sermon only. Addison will walk an abbey in another number; Steele here staffs the voice. Realism of type (not Crusoe’s inventory) is the method: each member is recognisable without being a full novel. Do not call this a comedy of manners play. It is prose character. Do not replace Sir Roger with Lamb’s dream-children. The club is waking London; Elia is a reverie by the fire.

Addison’s essay (Bond’s Spectator, commonly No. 26) is a walk among tombs in the capital. Gray’s elegy walked unnamed village mounds; this prose walks marble and public names. The method is still periodical: a day’s thought, civil, not a sermon in a pulpit and not an ode. He looks at dates worn off monuments, at the ages of the dead, at titles that once filled a room. Rival statesmen, wits, beauties lie in the same dust. An undated coffin strikes him: even the record of a name can fail. Some inscriptions boast; the stone is quieter than the words. He leaves in what he calls a serious cheerfulness — mortality without Gray’s argument about mute Miltons, yet the same equality before death.

Place the essay on this paper’s map. Neo-Classical social prose: London, a named abbey, a reader of the Spectator who can visit the place. Graveyard poetry is a verse climate; this is the essay echo of that climate, not a second elegy. Personification is lighter than Collins’s Evening; the dead do not sit up. Imagery is stone, date, dust. If a question says “meditations on death,” start from Gray for verse and Addison for the periodical walk. Do not import Crusoe’s island, and do not turn the Abbey into Goldsmith’s drawing-room.

Hazlitt’s essay, in the Table-Talk climate Bromwich studies, opens with a fact of skill. Indian jugglers at the Adelphi keep balls in the air so exactly that the body seems to have become a machine of attention. The spectator’s first feeling is wonder, then a sting: why can a man do this with his hands, and why does the critic’s or the painter’s labour look less finished? Hazlitt does not sneer at the jugglers. He uses them to think what excellence is. Mechanical perfection is one kind: the trick can be done as it should be done, and the eye can judge it at once. Fine art is another kind: the end is not a caught ball but a mind made visible, and the judgment takes longer. Both still ask the same question: has the thing been done as well as it can be done?

The essay then names John Cavanagh, the fives player, as an English instance of doing a thing as well as it can be done — speed, wrist, place, a life spent inside one game. Excellence, for Hazlitt, is not only a poem. It is a standard of performance. The jugglers remain the image that starts the thought: India here is the troupe in London, not a Unit 5 bhakti pad. Bromwich’s critic is a man who tests genius against craft. Beside Steele’s club types, this is Romantic-age personal essay: “I saw,” “I felt,” then an argument. Beside Lamb’s reverie, it is wide awake. Do not reduce it to “Hazlitt likes sports.” Hold juggling as perfect bodily skill, art as a different test, Cavanagh as the home example, and the question of what it means to do a thing completely.

Lamb’s essay, in Lucas’s Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, is Elia by the fire, not Steele’s club. The subtitle is the method: a reverie. Children seem to sit on his knees — Alice and John — while he tells family stories. Grandmother Field kept a great house in Norfolk (the rumoured haunted room, the faded tapestries, the charity). Uncle John was brave and kind and died. The children’s mother, Alice, is the woman he loved and did not marry. As he talks, the little faces hold him with their eyes. Then the turn: they grow thin; they tell him they are not of Alice, nor of thee, nor are they children at all — only what might have been. He wakes in his bachelor armchair. Bridget sits unchanged beside him; the little ones are gone. The love-story never became a household. The children were a wish with names.

This is the personal essay Unit 1 distinguished from the periodical club piece. The “I” is intimate, self-accusing, tender, and finally empty. Personification is not Autumn on a granary floor; absence itself takes a body for a page and then drops it. Beside Addison’s public tombs, Lamb’s dead are private (Field, John, the Alice who was not a wife). Beside Hazlitt’s jugglers, there is no skill to applaud — only a mind that almost had a family. Do not retell Goldsmith’s Kate as if she were Alice. Keep the title’s two halves: dream-children, and the waking that ends the reverie.

Goldsmith’s play (1773) is the set comedy. Ford’s life-and-works and Kelly’s biography place the Irish-born writer in London theatre against sentimental comedy: Unit 1 already said laughing comedy wants the audience to laugh at folly, not to weep at virtue. This is not Restoration 1670, not a tragedy, not The Spectator in dialogue. Hold the household first. Mr Hardcastle loves old things and a country house; Kate is his daughter. Mrs Hardcastle, his second wife, loves town fashions; Tony Lumpkin is her son by a former marriage — Hardcastle’s stepson, Kate’s stepbrother — and she wants him to marry her niece Constance Neville. Young Marlow is to meet Kate; his father, Sir Charles, is Hardcastle’s friend. Hastings comes with Marlow and loves Constance. Marlow is modest to the point of silence with ladies of rank, and free with women he thinks are below him. That split in manners is the engine. Tony, playing the inn-wit at the Three Pigeons, directs Marlow and Hastings to the Hardcastle house as if it were an inn. They arrive as guests who think they are customers.

Marlow therefore treats Hardcastle as a landlord: orders, hats, the ease of a man at an inn. Hardcastle is insulted and bewildered. Hastings loves Constance Neville, whose jewels Mrs Hardcastle keeps; the pair plot to gain the casket and to elope. Kate learns of Marlow’s two manners. She will stoop — appear as a barmaid of the supposed inn — so that the shy gentleman can speak. Tony’s mischief, the garden taken for a horse-pond road, the stolen jewels that are not stolen as planned: the first half is the mistake of place. Keep the names. A plot that only says “there is a misunderstanding” has not yet stooped.

Kate’s stoop is the title. In the supposed barmaid Marlow finds a voice; he can court when he does not fear a lady’s rank. She tests him and hears both the libertine ease and the better heart. Sir Charles Marlow and old Hardcastle watch from a screen in the later turns; the shy suitor is found out. Hastings and Constance are blocked, then freed: Tony cannot read well enough, or will not, and Mrs Hardcastle’s authority over the jewels and over Constance’s marriage cracks. Tony is declared of age. The garden night, Mrs Hardcastle’s terror of highwaymen, Hardcastle standing where a robber was feared — laughing comedy makes fear ridiculous instead of pious. The couples are promised: Marlow and Kate, Hastings and Constance. Tony escapes a match he does not want.

What to write as genre. Comedy of manners watches social codes (inn versus house, lady versus barmaid). Sentimental comedy would ask you to cry at Kate’s virtue; Goldsmith asks you to laugh at Marlow’s snobbery and at Tony’s tricks, and still to like them. Satire is present as social bite, not as a verse lampoon. The last sentence of an answer should still name the stoop: she lowers her standing so that he can raise his courage, and the house stops being an inn.