Society even resorted to the very un-English practice of the serenade. The fashion, if Steele is an accurate chronicler, had achieved especial notoriety in Nottingham, where young ladies complained of riotous lovers infesting the streets with violins and bass viols, from midnight to four in the morning. In other cities it was the custom for young men of influence to 'make love with the town music-even with the aid of the waits. Steele's friend, Mr Bannister, leader of the orchestra at Drury Lane, professed to have been offered £500 by a young gentleman to play through one winter under the window of a lady of fortune 'more cruel than ordinary'. Steele was at a loss to know why Englishmen should thus seek to emulate the ways of Italian castrati. The suitors seemed to have some notion of conquering their mistresses' hearts 'as people tame hawks and eagles, by keeping them awake, or breaking their sleep when they are fallen into it'. Steele was convinced that England did not have the requisite balmy night airs for this practice-'a man might as well serenade in Greenland as in our region'. Moreover, unlike Italians, Englishmen had so little natural aptitude for music that they seldom began to sing until they were drunk-which was the time they seemed most inclined to serenade.
A fellow scribe of Steele's foresaw a remarkable extension of facilities for courtship. Apparently there had been speculation about the possibility of human flight. This, according to 'Daedalus' in the Guardian (1713), would fill the world with 'innumerable immoralities'. He pictured a couple of lovers making a midnight assignation on top of the Monument, and 'the cupola of St Paul's cover'd with both sexes like the outside of a pigeon-house'. Everywhere gallants would be seen giving chase to their mistresses, like hawks after larks.
Quite early in the century, the new journalism came to the aid of courtship. Between them, Steele and Addison pioneered a form of writing with an appeal to women, who were unaccustomed to be addressed in the public prints other than patronizingly, flatteringly or insultingly. Occasionally the Tatler and the Spectator even gave urbane advice on problems of the heart. If there is a suspicion that Steele and Addison themselves propounded some of the problems they answered, who shall say that modern counsellors are above such devices?
Steele thinks that the pleasant part of a man's life is that which is passed in courtship. 'Love, Desire, Hope, all the pleasing motions of the soul rise in the pursuit,' he writes in the Spectator of 1711. He favours long engagements:
The passion should strike root and gather strength before marriage be grafted on it. A long course of hopes and expectations fixes the idea in our minds and habituates us to a fondness for the person beloved. Before marriage we cannot be too inquisitive and discerning in the faults of the person beloved, nor after it too dim-sighted and superficial. In the Spectator that same year Steele quotes from a letter supposedly received from 'Celimene' bemoaning that she is saddled with a young country kinswoman who has come up to town for her education. She is a very innocent maid, knowing 'no way to express herself but by her tongue, and that always to signify her meaning ... she means nothing by walking but to change her place'. How is this young woman to be taught the language of looks and glances, to move about with an irresistible grace as if to music?
Steele takes this letter as an excuse for censuring the upbringing of the young generation-'in our daughters we take care of their persons and neglect their minds; in our sons we are so intent upon adorning their minds that we wholly neglect their bodies. It is from this that you shall see a young lady celebrated and admired in all the assemblies about town, when her elder brother is afraid to come into a room.'
As soon as a girl leaves her nurse, says Steele, she is handed to a dancing master, 'and with a collar round her neck the pretty wild thing is taught a fantastical gravity of behaviour, and forced to a particular way of holding her head, heaving her breast and moving with her whole body; and all this under pain of never having an husband, if she steps, looks or moves awry. This gives the young lady wonderful workings of the imagination, what is to pass between her and this husband that she is every moment told of. ... Thus her fancy is engaged to turn all her endeavours to the ornament of her person . . . from this general folly of parents we owe our present numerous race of coquets.'
Steele advises a middle course, commending the example of Cleomira who dances with all the elegance of motion imaginable, but whose eyes are 'so chastised with the simplicity and innocence of her thoughts that she raises in her beholders admiration and goodwill but no loose hope and wild imagination'.
In his own wooing of Molly Scurlock ('dear Prue'), whom he met at the funeral of his first wife, Steele used rather more impetuousness than he recommended in others. When the lady said that she was too busy to see him, this overwhelming suitor sat downstairs in her house and wrote letters to her fall of irresistible blarney. He did not care whether his presence in her house caused scandal. When thrown out, he continued his correspondence from coffee-house and office, from his own home and other people's homes. Needless to say, Steele's suit succeeded rapidly; so rapidly that Molly Scurlock was forced to pretend to friends that the wooing had lasted longer than it did. It remains to be added that Steele, one wearisome summer weekend, plugged up an issue of the Spectator with some love letters he had written to Prue when courting her, passing these off as having been written by a gentleman of the Restoration.
One who, at a later day, sighed because he had not been born in the days of the Spectator was William Hazlitt. How enchanting, he thought, were the 'strange fancy dresses, the perverse disguises, the counterfeit shapes, the stiff stays and enormous hoops worn by women', all of which, he thought, discouraged the greedy eye and rash hand of licentiousness. (He wrote in an age when women wore mere wisps.) In courtship of the early eighteenth century, said Hazlitt, 'there was room for years of patient perseverance, for a thousand thoughts, fancies, conjectures, hopes, fears and wishes. There seemed no end to difficulties and delays: to overcome so many obstacles was the work of ages. . . . The transition from a mistress in masquerade to a wife in wedding sheets was worth venturing for; now it is nothing, and we hear no more of faithful courtships and romantic loves.'
However, a study of fashionable love-making in the days of the Spectator suggests that the obstacles were perhaps less baffling than Hazlitt imagined them. The rash hand of licentiousness, in the view of many, is encouraged rather than impeded by obstacles. In a vulgar phrase, 'All the fun's in the tumbling'. Hoops kept man at a respectful distance-in public-but they also served to set his fancies ranging in the mysterious rustling regions hidden from view. A high wind or an upturned coach could put an end to this speculation; and often, no doubt, the speculation was more rewarding than the revelation.
One class of suitor had no time for spun-out courtship, if Defoe's Roxana is to be accepted as a reliable witness. She had been parrying the advances of a prince, who found it necessary to explain that princes did not court like commoners:
They were sooner repulsed than other men, and ought to be sooner comply'd with, intimating, though very genteelly, that after a woman had positively refused him once, he could not, like other men, wait with importunities, and stratagems, and laying long sieges; but as such men as he stormed warmly, so, if repuls'd, they made no second attacks; and indeed it was but reasonable; for as it was below their rank, to be battering a woman's constancy, so they ran greater hazards in being exposed in their amours than other men did. Says Roxana: 'I took this for a satisfactory answer'. Some of her sisters may have thought her easily satisfied.
Steele and Addison assume that their readers are already well schooled in polite conduct. But Adam Petrie, whose Rules of Good Deportment and of Good Breeding was published in Edinburgh in 1720, prefers to start at the beginning. He counsels his readers not to spit in the fire, or to break wind 'even among inferiors'. He touches on an aspect of squiring ladies which has been neglected by his predecessors, and which continues to be shirked in etiquette books today: It is civil not to sit too long in a room with ladies and to leave them a little after they have come off a journey or when they are to take a journey; neither is it convenient to suffer them to ride too far and not to have access to be alone; for if there be no houses on the way, then you may cause them light at some place where they may conveniently retire from the company . . . though I am not for men showing them the reason for making them light, for this would put them to the blush. Some such expression may be used, as 'Let us allow the horses to breathe a little'. Petrie does not lightly abandon this subject. It appears that he once knew a modest lady who 'in riding with an inconsiderate person lost her life'. Elsewhere he cautions: 'If you pass by one easing Nature you should turn your face another way'.
No true gentleman, says Petrie, will rush abruptly into a room containing ladies, without giving them a chance to appear with advantage-'they do not love to be surprised'. Another example of his tactfulness is this: If a young man and a young woman be in a room and you be to remove from them, and if there is none with them, it is imprudent and uncivil to shut the door after you; for if a person of a narrow soul shall come and find them shut up in a room they may be ready to stain their reputation, which should be dear unto us and cautiously preserved. Modesty is all. Women who engage in 'tigging' and horseplay with men, says Petrie, may expect to suffer from 'paleness of face, heaviness of the eyes, squeamishness of the stomach and a tumour in the belly' ending with general disgrace and 'penury of bread'.
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