Joseph Addison
Image Credit

 

The Spectator

No. 209. Tuesday, October 30, 1711

There are no authors I am more pleased with, than those who show human nature in a variety of views, and describe the several ages of the world in their different manners. A reader cannot be more rationally entertained, than by comparing the virtues and vices of his own times, with those which prevailed in the times of his forefathers; and drawing a parallel in his mind between his own private character, and that of other persons, whether of his own age, or of the ages that went before him. The contemplation of mankind under these changeable colors, is apt to shame us out of any particular vice, or animate us to any particular virtue; to make us pleased or displeased with ourselves in the most proper points, to clear our minds of prejudice and prepossession, and rectify that narrowness of temper which inclines us to think amiss of those who differ from ourselves.

If we look into the manners of the most remote ages of the world, we discover human nature in her simplicity; and the more we come downward towards our own times, may observe her hiding herself in artifices and refinements, polished insensibly out of her original plainness, and at length entirely lost under form and ceremony, and (what we call) good breeding. Read the accounts of men and women as they are given us by the most ancient writers, both sacred and profane, and you would think you were reading the history of another species.

Among the writers of antiquity, there are none who instruct us more openly in the manners of their respective times in which they lived, than those who have employed themselves in satire, under what dress soever it may appear; as there are no other authors whose province it is to enter so directly into the ways of men, and set their miscarriages in so strong a light.

Semonides, a poet famous in his generation, is I think author of the oldest satire that is now extant; and, as some say, of the first that was ever written. This poet flourished about four hundred years after the fall of Troy; and shows, by his way of writing, the simplicity, or rather coarseness, of the age in which he lived. I have taken notice, in my hundred and sixty first speculation, that the rule of observing what the French call the bienseance, in an allusion, has been found out of latter years; and that the ancients, provided there was a likeness in their similitudes, did not much trouble themselves about the decency of the comparison. The satires or iambics of Semonides, with which I shall entertaion my readers in the present paper, are a remarkable instance of what I formerly advanced. The subject of this satire is Woman. He describes the sex in their several characters, which he derives to them from a fanciful supposition upon the doctrine of pre-existence. He tells us, that the gods formed the sould of women out of those seeds and principles which compose several kinds of animals and elements; and that their good or bad dispositions arise in them according as such and such seeds and principles predominate in their constitutions. I have translated the author very faithfully, and if not word for word (which our language would not bear) at least so as to comprehend every one of his sentiments, without adding any of my own. I have already apologized for this author's want of delicacy, and must further premise, that the following satire affects only some of the lower part of the sex, and not those who have been refined by a polite education, which was not so common in the age of this poet.

[Addison's translation of the poem follows here.]

I shall conclude these iambics with the motto of this paper, which is a fragment of the same author: "A man cannot possess any thing that is better than a good woman, nor any thing that is worse than a bad one."

As the poet has shown a great penetration in this diversity of female characters, he has aboided the fault which Juvenal and Monsieur Boileau are guilty of, the former in his sixth, and the other in his last satire, where they have endeavored to expose the sex in general, without doing justice to the valuable part of it. Such levelling satires are of no use to the world, and for this reason I have often wondered how the French author above-mentioned, who was a man of exquisite judgement, and a lover of virtue, could think human nature a proper subject for satire in another of his celebrated pieces, which is called "The Satire upon Man." What vice or frailty can a diiscourse correct, which censures the whole species alike, and endeavors to show by some superficial strokes of wit, that brutes are the more excellent creatures of the two? A satire should expose nothing but what is corrigible, and make a due discrimination between those who are, and those who are not the proper objects of it.

Image Credit: http://www.engl.virginia.edu/~enec981/dictionary/25addisonK2.html