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Title: The salon and English letters : Chapters on the interrelations of literature and society in the age of Johnson
Author: Tinker, Chauncey Brewster
Language: English
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
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THE SALON AND ENGLISH LETTERS
[Illustration: (colophon)]
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS
ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO
MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO
[Illustration: THE CONVERSAZIONE
From Samuel Hoole’s _Modern Manners_ (1782)]
THE SALON
AND ENGLISH LETTERS
CHAPTERS ON THE INTERRELATIONS
OF LITERATURE AND SOCIETY
IN THE AGE OF JOHNSON
BY
CHAUNCEY BREWSTER TINKER
PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
IN YALE UNIVERSITY
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1915
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1915,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published April, 1915.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
TO
C. E. A.
SAPIENTIS PATRIS FILIO
SAPIENTIORI
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PART I. THE FRENCH BACKGROUND
CHAPTER I
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 3
CHAPTER II
ORIGIN AND CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SALON 16
CHAPTER III
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY SALON 30
CHAPTER IV
ENGLISH AUTHORS IN PARISIAN SALONS 42
PART II. THE ENGLISH SALON
CHAPTER V
THE EARLIER ENGLISH SALON 83
CHAPTER VI
CONVERSATION PARTIES AND LITERARY ASSEMBLIES 102
CHAPTER VII
THE BLUESTOCKING CLUB 123
CHAPTER VIII
THE LONDON SALON 134
CHAPTER IX
BLUESTOCKINGS AS AUTHORS 166
CHAPTER X
MRS. MONTAGU AS A PATRON OF THE ARTS 189
CHAPTER XI
RESULTS 209
PART III. THE SOCIAL SPIRIT IN ENGLISH LETTERS
CHAPTER XII
JOHNSON AND THE ART OF CONVERSATION 217
CHAPTER XIII
WALPOLE AND THE ART OF FAMILIAR CORRESPONDENCE 236
CHAPTER XIV
FANNY BURNEY AND THE ART OF THE DIARIST 254
CHAPTER XV
BOSWELL AND THE ART OF INTIMATE BIOGRAPHY 268
INDEX 285
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
The Conversazione _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
The Levee 102
Hannah More 157
Johnson pointing out Mrs. Montagu as a Patron of the Arts 199
Samuel Johnson 217
Boswell the Journalist 268
Boswell Haunted by the Ghost of Johnson 277
PART I
THE FRENCH BACKGROUND
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
It is one of the venerable commonplaces of criticism that ‘manners,’
as distinct from romance and the idealistic interpretation of
life, make the bulk of eighteenth century literature. Comment has
often begun and more often ended with this platitude. But that
large body of work vaguely termed ‘literature of manners’ can no
more be dismissed with a truism than can the life that it depicts,
but demands a critical method as varied as the matter which is
treated. In so far as this prevailing interest of the century
manifested itself in _belles lettres_, in novel, drama, satire, and
descriptive verse, it offers no unusual problem to the literary
historian; but side by side with such types we have forms no less
characteristic of the age, but much less susceptible of adequate
criticism: intimate biography, autobiography, memoirs, diaries,
and familiar correspondence. These must of necessity be rather
summarily passed over by the literary historian as not exclusively
belletristic in appeal. And below these, in turn, there are certain
expressions of the social spirit so anomalous that they can at most
detain the critic but a moment, and must often be dismissed with
no consideration at all. Among these, intangible and evanescent
by nature, yet of the first importance in bringing certain kinds
of literature to birth, are conversation, the salon, the authors’
club, and in general those forms of social activity which exist to
stimulate the production or diffuse the appreciation of literature.
These, which are in themselves no more literature than are painting
and politics, come at times so close to it that dividing lines are
blurred. A mere record of conversation, such as gives the pages of
Boswell’s _Johnson_ or Fanny Burney’s _Diary_ their unique value,
brings us to a borderland between society and letters where a
distinction between them is merely formal. What is a critic to do
with works which hardly sue for recognition as literature (though
the world has so acclaimed them), but avowedly exist to record the
delights of social intercourse? To treat them as ‘mere literature,’
neglecting the social life in which they sprang up and to which they
are a tribute, is, to say the least, inadequate.
It is with this borderland, this territory where literature and
society meet in mutual respect, and presumably to their mutual
advantage, that I propose to deal in this volume. I shall trace as
well as I can the attempt made in England between 1760 and 1790 to
emulate the literary world of Paris by bringing men of letters and
men of the world into closer relations, and by making the things of
the mind an avocation of the drawing-room; and thereafter I shall
endeavour to show the results of this movement as they appear in the
improved artistry of three or four types of writing.
So long as letters and society retained this intimate relation and
men and manners were deemed the all-sufficient study of poets, it
was natural that authors should gather in the metropolis. The city
was to them ‘the true scene for a man of letters’; ‘the fountain
of intelligence and pleasure,’ the place for ‘splendid society,’
and the place where ‘a man stored his mind better than anywhere
else.’[1] When the old ideal of letters was displaced by a wider
and perhaps nobler, the supremacy of the metropolis as a literary
centre fell with it; but in the Age of Johnson London was still the
land of promise, at once a workshop and a club, a discipline and
an opportunity. ‘A great city is, to be sure,’ said Johnson, ‘the
school for studying life.’ Johnson, Goldsmith, Burke, Fielding,
Smollett, Sterne, Sheridan, Beattie, Chatterton, Crabbe, Boswell, and
many another went up thither, as their predecessors for generations
had done, to seek their literary fortune or to enjoy their
new-established fame.
The authors’ clubs, hardly less popular than in the days of Anne,
indicate an even closer centralization. A theory of literature
squarely based on reason and the tradition of the classics produced
a solidarity of sentiment among men of letters which was of great
use in making their aims intelligible to society at large. Books
were not meant to be caviare to the general. Poets did not strive to
be nebulous. The ever growing democracy of readers honoured what it
felt that it understood. King, Church, women of society, women of no
society, painters, actors, and universities joined in paying respect
to a literature that had not yet shattered into the confusion of
individualism. The world of letters was, in a word, still a kingdom.
As in Paris, an alliance could, accordingly, be effected. The salon
was the natural outgrowth of the intelligent interest of the reading
world; it exhibited the same community of sentiment in readers that
we have noticed in writers, and writers accordingly honoured it. In
London, as in Paris, it became possible to find the men of light and
leading gathered in a few places of favourite resort, in drawing-room
or club. ‘I will venture to say,’ remarked Johnson[2] to a group of
friends, ‘there is more learning and science within the circumference
of ten miles from where we now sit than in all the rest of the
Kingdom;’ and once, when the boasting fit was on him, he asserted
that the company sitting with him round the table was superior to any
that could be got together even in Paris.
It was no mean ideal of society that was held by groups such as
these. Mere repartee, a display of rhetorical agility, was not its
principal aim. The desire to be sound mingled with the desire to
be clever, and produced that wisdom which the eighteenth century
loved to call wit. Wit was aphoristically pretentious to truth. It
was of course important to talk in the _mondaine_ manner, but the
_mondaine_ ideal was to talk sense. There was a general willingness
to give and to receive information in the ordinary social relations
of life. Never to ‘diffuse information,’ to have ‘nothing conclusive’
in one’s talk, was to fail. Johnson once contended that Goldsmith was
not ‘a social man’: ‘he never exchanged _mind_ with you.’[3] Burke’s
conversation, on the other hand, delighted him because it was the
ebullition of a full mind.[4] ‘The man who talks to unburthen his
mind is the man to delight you,’ said he.[5] Cheerful familiarity
was not the social ideal: true sociability was a communion of minds.
Madame du Deffand summed up her criticism of a dinner at Madame
Necker’s in the words, ‘I learned nothing there.’[6]
It was to an ideal thus frankly educational that the salon and the
club responded. The passion for such society was like that which
many serious souls to-day feel for the society of a university. To
breathe the air of it was to grow in the grace of wisdom. In such
an idealization of the social life, we may find the explanation of
many so-called ‘deficiencies’ of the age, its indifference to Nature
(whatever that may mean), its preference for city life, its common
sense, its dread of the romantic and the imaginary, and of all that
seems to repudiate the intellectual life and its social expression.
Such was the delight in society felt by Hannah More and Fanny Burney
in their younger days. Such was Boswell’s delight. The greatness
of the latter, so ridiculously aspersed, reposes entirely upon his
realization of the importance of the social instinct. Boswell was
not merely a social ‘climber.’ He was a man who had the sense to
see a short-cut to education. To call him toad and tuft-hunter may
be an ingenious display of one’s vituperative gifts, but evinces a
surprising ignorance of the fact that a man may educate himself by
living contact with great minds.
It would be a simple explanation of all this respect for the salon
and its discussions to observe that England was now enjoying an
age of free speech. It is even simpler to point out that there
was much discussion because there was much to discuss. There were
problems confronting the public which were no less important than
novel. This is all true, but somewhat lacking in subtlety. The
peculiar adaptability of these problems to conversation was due to
the fact that they were, in general, still problems of a remote
and idealistic kind. They did not yet demand instant solution, for
better or for worse. Exception must of course be made of questions
purely political, but the rest of them—the theory of equality and the
republican form of government, the development of machinery, the
education of the masses, humanitarianism, the problem of the dormant,
self-satisfied, aristocratic Church, romanticism, and the whole
swarm of theories popularized by Rousseau—had been stated and widely
discussed, but they had not yet shaken society to its foundations.
They were still largely theoretical. Men’s thoughts were engaged, and
their tongues were busy, but their hearts were not yet failing them
for fear.
We may cite as a significant example the position of the lower
classes. There had been as yet no serious disturbance of what Boswell
loved to call ‘the grand scheme of subordination.’ Now Boswell was
no fool. He was, in truth, singularly broad-minded; yet in such a
matter as this his notions hardly rose above a benevolent feudalism.
Despite his interest in Rousseau, despite his sympathy with Corsica
and with America, he could record with bland approval Johnson’s
denunciation[7] of a young lady who had married with ‘her inferior in
rank,’ and the Great Moralist’s wish that such dereliction ‘should be
punished, so as to deter others from the same perversion.’ Democracy
could be little more than a theory to Johnson when he asserted[8]
that ‘if he were a gentleman of landed property he would turn out all
his tenants who did not vote for the candidate whom he supported,’
contending that ‘the law does not mean that the privilege of voting
should be independent of old family interest.’ Again, when he
explained to Mrs. Macaulay ‘the absurdity of the levelling doctrine’
by requesting her footman to sit down and dine with them,[9] he
conceived of himself as smashing a delusion with a single blow. Such
‘levelling’ notions being, for the moment, doctrinaire, might no
doubt be put down by a sally of wit. With the fall of the Bastille
they took on a different aspect.
Nor was the case widely different with writers less passionately
conservative than Johnson. Horace Walpole had a dim perception
that the trend of affairs was destructive of the old order, but he
never suspected that the theories discussed in the salons were to
have immediate practical results. His attitude is well shown by his
account of certain Parisian _savants_ who talked scepticism in the
presence of their lacqueys. ‘The conversation,’ he writes, ‘was much
more unrestrained, even on the Old Testament, than I would suffer
at my own table in England, if a single footman was present.’[10]
Walpole was certainly no ardent defender of the orthodox faith, but
sceptic as he was, he was not ready to meet all the issues involved
in the spread of the doctrine. Religion, it seems, will still do very
well for menials.
Even Hume and Gibbon, the darlings of the Parisian salon, conceived
of the problems they themselves had helped to raise as largely
speculative. Gibbon, for example, plumes himself on having
vanquished the Abbé Mably in a discussion of the republican form of
government[11]—and this but a few years before the foundation of
the two great republics of modern times. The irony of his triumph
must, presently, have been clear to him, for on September 9, 1789,
he wrote to Sheffield: ‘What a scene is France! While the assembly
is voting abstract propositions, Paris is an independent republic.’
In the previous August he had expressed his amazement ‘at the French
Revolution.’ We may perhaps reserve a portion of our amazement for
the historian who had failed to realize that the theories with which
he had been long familiar in the salons would one day cease to be
mere matters of discussion.
This failure of English authors to come into full sympathy with
the French doctrines of the hour is the more remarkable because
Frenchmen had long regarded England as the home of reason and of
liberty.[12] Indeed France had turned to England for that ‘freedom
of thought’ denied to herself; but having adopted it, she had pushed
it to extremes of which her teachers, conservative at heart, could
never have conceived. D’Alembert, than whom the salons contained no
more splendid figure, acknowledged in his _Essay on Men of Letters_
that it was the works of English authors which had communicated to
Frenchmen their precious liberty of thought.[13] So common is the
praise of England that he now feels compelled to protest against the
further progress of Anglicism.[14] But in vain. The decades passed
by with no diminution of the respect for England. In 1763 Gibbon[15]
still found English opinions, fashions, and games popular in Paris,
every Englishman treated as patriot and philosopher, and the very
name of England ‘_clarum et venerabile gentibus_.’ In the next year
Voltaire, who had done so much by judicious praise and injudicious
blame to spread the knowledge of English literature and philosophy,
addressed to the _Gazette Littéraire_ a letter[16] containing a
defence of the current Anglomania. In this he laughed at those who
thought it a ‘crime’ to study, observe, and philosophize as do
the English. A year later, Saurin’s play, _l’Anglomanie_,[17] had
appeared, and though its success on the stage was not great, Walpole
thought it worth while to send Lady Hervey a copy of it as an
example of a reigning fad. The leading character, Éraste, who affects
a preference for Hogarth to all other painters, who quotes Locke and
Newton, and drinks tea for breakfast, sums up his views in these
verses:
Les précepteurs du monde à Londres out pris naissance.
C’est d’eux qu’il faut prendre leçon.
Aussi je meurs d’impatience
D’y voyager. De par Newton
Je le verrai, ce pays où l’on pense.
All this of course is farcical; but the author, a member of the
French Academy, had a serious purpose. He was attacking an attitude
which was expressed in Voltaire’s well-known eulogy,
Le soleil des Anglais, c’est le feu du génie.
Saurin, in his preface, announces his esteem for England and her
authors, but declares that the popularity of the ‘cult’ is due to
the jealous dislike by Frenchmen of their own authors—a conclusion
not quite obvious. In any case, the academician felt that he had a
duty to the nation. In 1772 he revised his comedy, and it was again
performed.
But Anglomania lived on. English authors were still graciously
received in the salons. Madame du Deffand dared to assert that
they were completely superior to the French in all matters of
reasoning.[18] The English language was increasingly studied,
and English novelists and philosophers continued popular. Madame
Necker records[19] an anecdote of a lady who went to England ‘pour
renouveler ses idées.’ The lady was perhaps fulfilling Montesquieu’s
famous advice, to travel in Germany, sojourn in Italy, and think in
England.
Anglomania was thus more than a passing fashion; it was but the
superficial evidence of a respect for English philosophy of life
which Frenchmen had taken more seriously than had the English
themselves. It happened, as it has happened more than once, that
English literature was more highly esteemed abroad than at home.
‘Nous avons augmenté,’ said Madame Necker to Gibbon,[20] ‘jusque chez
vous la célébrité de vos propres auteurs.’ English novels were read
in France for the new ideals of life which they were supposed to
embody, and much that in England was a mere pastime—_Clarissa_, for
example—became in France a philosophy of conduct. A philosopher like
Hume, and a philosophical historian like Gibbon, found that Paris
delighted to honour the prophets whom England was too careless to
stone.
The pupil had thus outrun his master, and had indeed become the
master. In the earlier decades of the century, Voltaire and
Montesquieu had gone to England to enjoy the privilege of thought: in
the later decades Englishmen visited Paris for a precisely similar
purpose. From the middle of the century until the outbreak of war in
1778, Englishmen could discover in the conversations of the salons
what a nation, always radical at heart, had made of the theories of
free thought, liberty, and equality before the law, which they had,
through Voltaire and Montesquieu, derived long since from England.
English authors were received with a cordiality and a deference which
had never been shown them in their own country. They found in Paris a
social system conducted in honour of authors and of the philosophies
which they were disseminating. It was the salon, the forcing-bed of
the new ideas.
CHAPTER II
ORIGIN AND CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SALON
The one unfailing characteristic of the salon, in all ages and in
all countries, is the dominant position which it gives to woman.
It is woman who creates the peculiar atmosphere and the peculiar
influence of salons; it is she, with her instinct for society and
for literature, who is most likely to succeed in the attempt to fuse
two ideals of life apparently opposed, the social and the literary.
The salon is not a mere drawing-room and not a lonely study, but
mediates between the promiscuous chatter of the one and the remote
silence of the other. The aims of the salon are well shown by the
ridicule of those enemies who accuse the hostess of attempting to
transform a school of pedants and hacks into a group of courtiers.
The social world is likely to laugh at the salon because it suggests
the lecture-hall, and scholars sneer at it because it pretends to the
distinction of a literary court.
The first salons were indeed courts—the courts of the Italian
Renaissance. We find in the Parisian salons of later centuries
the _disjecta membra_ of this earlier Italian society, whose true
relationship is understood only when we trace them back to this
remote original. In the light of that Italian dawn, all leaps into
a consistent scheme. Much that seems odd and unrelated in salon
life is brought into perspective: the authoritative position of the
scholar, the unique influence of woman, and the tendency to set up
‘Platonic’ relations between the sexes. Humanism, Platonism, and
gallantry were aspects of the Renaissance and of the Italian Court,
and in their lesser manifestations as learning, philosophism, and
‘Platonic love,’ they remain characteristic of salons. Again, the
courts of the fifteenth century brought into focus many movements:
they carried on the mediæval system of patronage; they adopted many
of the gallantries of the old ‘courts of love’; and they brought the
new humanism into vital contact with society, so that the expression
of serious thought was no less possible in conversation than in the
study or the lecture-hall. Each of these lives on in the salon.
The Renaissance court may be studied in any one of a numerous group.
We may find the ideal set forth in the group of artists and men
of letters who surrounded the youthful Beatrice d’Este, patroness
of Leonardo and many another; we may see it in the court of her
sister, Isabella, Marchioness of Mantua; we may see it in the coterie
of Caterina Cornaro, once Queen of Cyprus, and in her later days
mistress of a little court[21] at Asolo. We may study it at its
grandest in the somewhat earlier court of Lorenzo the Magnificent,
with its conscious imitation of the Greek symposium. The court which
held Politian, Pulci, Ficino the Platonist, Alberti, and, later,
Michelangelo, might well have boasted itself ‘the little academe’
of _Love’s Labour’s Lost_. But perhaps the most useful example is
the delightful court of Urbino, described by Castiglione in his
_Cortegiano_.
If it be objected that Castiglione’s description of court life is too
radiant to be quite true to fact, if it be a society fairer than any
whose existence can be demonstrated, I reply that it is so much the
better suited to our purpose. It is ideals that we would be at. We
are spared the attempt to reconstruct them for ourselves. There is
nothing to be gained by reminding ourselves that courts attracted the
parasite, the flatterer, and the opportunist; it is the finer aims
of the men of genius and of the noble women who patronized them that
will reward our attention. Castiglione knew these aims, and we cannot
do better than quote his words as they were given to Elizabethan
England in Hoby’s beautiful translation.[22] The first quotation
refers to Frederick, first Duke of Urbino:
This man emong his other deedes praisworthy, in the hard and sharpe
situation of Urbin buylt a Palaice, to the opinion of many men,
the fayrest that was to be founde in all Italy, and so fornished
it with everye necessary implement belonging thereto, that it
appeared not a palaice, but a Citye in fourme of a palaice, and
that not onlye with ordinarie matters, as Silver plate, hanginges
for chambers of verye riche cloth of golde, of silke and other
like, but also for sightlynesse: and to decke it out withall,
placed there a wonderous number of auncyent ymages of marble and
mettall, verye excellente peinctinges and instrumentes of musycke
of all sortes, and nothinge would he have there but what was moste
rare and excellent. To this with verye great charges he gathered
together a great number of most excellent and rare bookes, in
Greke, Latin and Hebrue, the which all he garnished wyth golde and
sylver, esteaming this to be the chieffest ornament of his great
palaice....
We turn now to the court of his son Guidobaldo, who carried on the
traditions of his father:
He sett hys delyte above all thynges to have hys house furnished
with most noble and valyaunte Gentylmen, wyth whom he lyved very
famylyarly, enjoying theyr conversation wherein the pleasure whyche
he gave unto other menne was no lesse, then that he receyved
of other, because he was verye wel seene in both tunges, and
together with a lovynge behavyour and plesauntnesse he had also
accompanied the knowleage of infinite thinges.... Because the Duke
used continuallye by reason of his infirmytye, soon after supper
to go to his rest, everye man ordinarelye, at that houre drewe
where the Dutchesse was, the Lady Elizabeth Gonzaga. Where also
continuallye was the Lady Emilia Pia, who for that she was endowed
with so livelye a wytt and judgement as you knowe, seemed the
maistresse and ringe leader of all the companye, and that everye
manne at her receyved understandinge and courage.[23] There was
then to be hearde pleasaunte communication and merye conceytes,
and in every mannes countenaunce a manne myght perceyve peyncted
a lovynge jocundenesse. So that thys house truelye myght well be
called the verye mansion place of Myrth and Joye. And I beleave
it was never so tasted in other place, what maner a thynge the
sweete conversation is that is occasioned of an amyable and lovynge
companye, as it was once there.... But such was the respect which
we bore to the Dutchesse wyll, that the selfe same libertye was a
verye great bridle. Neither was there anye that thought it not the
greatest pleasure he could have in the worlde, to please her, and
the greatest griefe to offende her. For this respecte were there
most honest condicions coupled with wonderous greate libertye, and
devises of pastimes and laughinge matters tempred in her sight....
The maner of all the Gentilmen in the house was immedyatelye
after supper to assemble together where the dutchesse was. Where
emonge other recreations, musicke, and dauncynge, whiche they used
contynuallye, sometyme they propounded feate questions, otherwhyle
they invented certayne wytty sportes and pastimes, at the devyse
sometyme of one sometyme of an other, in the whych under sundrye
covertes,[24] often tymes the standers bye opened subtylly theyr
imaginations unto whom they thought beste. At other tymes there
arrose other disputations of divers matters, or els jestinges with
prompt inventions. Manye times they fell into purposes,[25] as we
now a dayes terme them, where in thys kynde of talke and debating
of matters, there was wonderous great pleasure on all sydes:
because (as I have sayde) the house was replenyshed wyth most noble
wyttes.
Such conversational ‘pastimes’ were enjoyed almost every night:
And the order thereof was such, that assoone as they were assembled
where the Dutches was, every man satt him downe at his will, or
as it fell to his lot, in a circle together, and in sittinge were
devyded a man and a woman, as longe as there were women, for
alwayes (lightlye) the number of men was farr the greater. Then
were they governed as the Dutchesse thought best, whiche manye
times gave this charge unto the L. Emilia.
_Il Cortegiano_ is the tribute paid to this group and the
conversation which passed in it. The spirit of the book is not to
be shown by a few quotations, but a reading of it will reveal the
following facts: that men and women meet on a plane of equality, that
it is the presence of women (though fewer in number than the men),
that gives the peculiar tone of lightness and gallantry; that the
author looks to the court not only for reward, but for inspiration;
that the conversation at its noblest (as in Bembo’s discourse at the
end) passes over into poetry; that the conversation is of a classical
and philosophic cast, often Platonic, but that this high seriousness
does not exclude mirth and wit.[26] Now these aims are no other than
the aims of the salon.
This ideal, diffused over Europe, had a long and brilliant history.
We shall encounter it again in the courtly salons of Elizabethan
England, and even in the comedies of Shakespeare. The tradition
passed over into France and there became the formative influence
in the great type and parent of the Parisian salon, the Hôtel de
Rambouillet.
In tracing the Hôtel de Rambouillet back to the earlier Italian
court, two facts stand out as of first importance. In the first
place, that salon was established by a woman who was herself half
Italian, had passed many years in Italy, and knew the traditions
of the old nobility. In the second place, the Hôtel de Rambouillet
originated in protest against the crudities of the Gascon court at
Paris, and represented an attempt to realize a worthier society.
When, in the second decade of the seventeenth century, Cathérine
de Vivonne opened her famous house in the Rue Saint Thomas du
Louvre and initiated the reign of good taste in France, her salon
displayed almost immediately certain aspects which had distinguished
the Italian courts and which were to become, in varying degrees,
permanent features of the Parisian salon and of its London
counterpart. The Marquise de Rambouillet became the type and exemplar
of all the later hostesses. Even the English bluestockings were aware
that they were in the line of descent from her. In her poem _Bas
Bleu_,[27] Hannah More compares the English group with that which
met in the Hôtel de Rambouillet, and Wraxall[28] later took up the
comparison and developed the parallel between the drawing-rooms of
London and those of Paris. The Hôtel de Rambouillet, therefore, is
the type of the salon. It enables us to distinguish what is permanent
and common to all salons, from what is merely transitory. For the
sake of convenience, I shall make a fivefold grouping of these
features. It will of course be understood that this analysis does not
afford a complete characterization of the Hôtel de Rambouillet; for
that society had certain important aims—such as the attempt to purify
the language—which were not destined to remain permanent marks of the
succeeding salons, and are therefore passed over in silence. Nor must
it be assumed that the fivefold analysis describes each and every
later salon. A given salon may be entirely lacking in one of the
features—though never, I think, in a majority of them—without losing
its character; and in proportion as a given salon satisfies these
five conditions, we may say that it approaches the ideal.
(1) In the first place, then, the house, the very room, in which
the company gathers, is influential in forming its spirit and
establishing its reputation. We have just examined Castiglione’s
description of the magnificence of Urbino: something of that royal
splendour is demanded of the salon. It was Madame de Rambouillet’s
sense for architectural arrangement and decoration that contributed
to her social success. Indeed the name by which her salon is known
plainly implies it. As is well known, she began by breaking up the
great reception-hall with its vast, unsocial coldness into a series
of smaller rooms and alcoves, thus providing for the intimacies
of conversation as distinct from the hubbub and the crowd. Her
own favourite room, the _chambre bleu d’Arthénice_,[29] where a
privileged few—at most eighteen—sat by her couch, was the centre and
soul of the house. It was the perfumed temple of the Graces, where
the year was always at spring, the haunt of Flora, and the throne of
Athena herself. This room reproduced itself in countless ‘alcoves,’
‘blue rooms,’ and _ruelles_ throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. Madame de Boufflers was famous for her apartments hung
with rose-coloured damask, and Madame Geoffrin for her house, which
was crammed with rare china and bronzes, portraits by Boucher, and
easel-pictures by Van Loo.
(2) The salon must retain an aristocratic tone, but without
submitting to the unyielding formality of the aristocracy. It sets
up a standard of recognition based on talent,[30] and neither courts
nor rejects the nobility. It was even possible for the bourgeois
to obtain admission to the Hôtel de Rambouillet and to have a
career there. Vincent Voiture, known as ‘Chiquito,’ the son of a
wine-merchant, became the leading spirit in all the amusements. His
position reminds us now of the mediæval jester, now of Beau Nash, the
King of Bath.
In the eighteenth century the salons are proud to represent a
democracy of genius. Madame Geoffrin was the daughter of a _valet
de chambre_ and the wife of a manufacturer; Madame Necker was the
daughter of a Swiss parson; and Mlle. de Lespinasse, a foundling, who
had been ‘humble companion’ to Madame du Deffand, and who had not
means sufficient to entertain her guests at dinner. Wit, intellect,
and personality, rather than noble birth, became the key to social
success.
(3) The chief staple of entertainment offered by the salons is
conversation, literary or philosophical in character. Other
amusements, such as Castiglione describes at Urbino, are not
necessarily excluded, and, in France, dancing, excursions,
card-playing, and gaming were popular in various salons and at
various times. But conversation always reasserted itself in the end.
Discussion was stimulated by the reading of original poems, essays,
sermons, and plays. The criticism of these, especially of the plays,
was of no mean importance in forming the spirit of French literature.
In particular the salon gives birth to certain minor forms of
literature, epistles, epigrams, extempore verses of all kinds,
‘thoughts,’ maxims, _bons mots_, ‘portraits,’ and _éloges_;[31] but
of more importance than these is its unconscious formative influence
on such arts as letter-writing, biography, and all manner of
anecdotal writing.
(4) The friendships of the salon are of peculiar depth and warmth,
developing occasionally into passion, but always Platonic rather
than domestic in their expression. Thus the salon, in which woman
assumes the throne, and queens it over a coterie (chiefly men) is
perhaps the last phase of the Italian court with its gallantries and
lady-worship. It passed on to the French salon that note of sentiment
and Platonic love which is found in _Il Cortegiano_, and which
becomes characteristic of Sappho Scudéry and the later seventeenth
century. In the eighteenth century this sentimental friendship united
with the more practical system of patronage, and resulted in a type
of relationship which eludes definition, for, on the one hand, it is
at times so utilitarian as to savour of philanthropy, and, on the
other, it may develop into a _grande passion_, and compare itself
to Abelard and Héloïse. Examples of it are the various relations
existing between Madame Geoffrin and Marmontel, Madame du Deffand
and d’Alembert, Madame du Deffand and Horace Walpole, Madame de
Boufflers and David Hume, Mlle. de Lespinasse and d’Alembert, Mlle.
de Lespinasse and Guibert, Madame Necker and Edward Gibbon.
(5) The hostess of the salon is invariably the subject of ideal
descriptions, ‘tributes’ which recite her charm as a hostess, her
merits as a patron, and her general superiority to the Muses. From
Castiglione’s eulogy of Elizabeth Gonzaga, through the Hôtel de
Rambouillet (where Malherbe was a kind of poet laureate), down to
the death of Mlle. de Lespinasse, whose genius was celebrated by
d’Alembert in the _Tombeau de Mlle. de Lespinasse_, this is an almost
unfailing result of salon life.
Such are, then, the permanent marks by which we may detect that
interplay of the social and the literary life in what, for want of a
better term, we call the salon. There are two features of the life
manifested only at certain times which it is not proper to include,
though they are more generally attributed to the salons than any that
have been mentioned. They are transitory phases; but they must be
briefly considered, if only by way of avoiding false assumptions.
The women of the salons are usually thought of as _femmes savantes_,
or ‘learned ladies,’ who affect a learning which has no basis in
fact. Such female pedants were common figures in the salons of
a certain period. The depiction of them by Molière is no more
exaggerated than the purposes of comic art demand. It must be further
admitted that such women may appear now and again in the salons of
any period; we shall meet with a few in the pages of this volume. But
they are not _common_ in the best salons of the best periods. Neither
in the beginning, nor in the eighteenth century, were the hostesses
of the salon what we ordinarily mean by the phrase _femmes savantes_.
Of Madame de Rambouillet, for example, M. Vourciez writes:[32] ‘Ce
sont les aliments les plus solides qu’elle digérait sans prétention
à devenir une “femme savante,” car Balzac eût pu lui adresser à elle
aussi le compliment qu’il fit à Madame des Loges: “Vous savez une
infinité de choses rares, mais vous n’en faites pas la savante, et
ne les avez pas apprises pour tenir école.”’ As for the women of the
next century, they assisted their friends chiefly by qualities which
have little to do with book-learning, by superb intelligence, wit,
sympathy, and good taste. They made no pretence to erudition. Indeed
they rather piqued themselves on their ignorance of it. To mistake
Madame Geoffrin, who said she could not spell, and Madame du Deffand,
who was bored by a _savant_, for a woman like Armande or Bélise
is to have done with all distinctions at once. It is to confound
Prospero with Polonius.
It is no less true that the women of the salons were not permanently
_précieuses ridicules_. Preciosity had its day; it did its work
(which was by no means contemptible); and it was laughed out of
existence. There were no _précieuses_ in 1750. Indeed the caustic
penetration of Madame du Deffand,[33] the homely wit of Madame
Geoffrin, and the romantic ardour of Mlle. de Lespinasse are at equal
removes from the conceits and the mincing niceties of the earlier
salons. ‘Il n’y a que le premier pas qui coûte,’ said Madame du
Deffand of Saint Denis walking with his severed head in his hands;
‘Je suis une poule qui ai couvé des œufs de canard,’ said Madame
Geoffrin of herself and her daughter; ‘Presque personne n’a besoin
d’être aimé,’ said Mlle. de Lespinasse to her faithless lover. Is
this the language of preciosity?
CHAPTER III
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY SALON
A salon is not a mere literary club. It is something other than
a group of men and women gathered in a drawing-room to discuss
literature or meet a poet. It aims to exert a creative influence in
the literary world. It does not concern itself with literature as
a finished product to be studied, but with literature as a growing
thing that may be trained. Hence it gets behind the product to the
producer, and seeks to influence the characters and ideas out of
which books are formed. It is an informal academy. Its aim is private
in that it is directly concerned with improving the condition of
authors, and public in that it attempts to mould public opinion.
Thus it is, at bottom, a system of patronage. It offers to the author
that aid, advertisement, and protection which he had once sought from
a patron. Patronage of literature was, as we have seen, an essential
feature of the court life of the Renaissance. It had lived on through
the seventeenth century at courts and in noble houses. During its
rapid decline in the eighteenth century, many of its duties were
taken over by the salons. In the person of the hostess, the salon
made gifts of money, granted unofficial pensions, paid printers’
bills, and even gave authors a home. Walpole was amused at the number
of authors who were ‘planted’ in the homes of French ladies. Madame
Geoffrin in Paris, like Mrs. Montagu in London, was recognized as a
patron of all the arts, and both gave of their wealth to the support
of indigent or improvident authors.
But the salon bestowed a yet more valuable favour in its recognition
of literary merit. Like the patron, it vouched for new authors.
It gave its support to their new ideas. And in this subtler form
of patronage, in the discharge of the duties of a literary jury
or academy, it anticipated the modern press, for it had similar
influence and fell into similar errors. Like the modern critical
review, it was at once feared and courted by authors who affected
at times to despise its pronouncements but never ignored them. The
salon mediated between the author and the public. It aimed, like
a true critic, to correct both the conceit of the author and the
indifference of the world. It responded to a genuine critical demand
created by the disappearance of the outworn system of patronage and
by the rapid growth of a reading democracy. The salon sprang into
renewed activity during a period of transition. It served a peculiar
need during changing conditions, and passed away with the dawn of
a new century which had its own system of criticism by which to
dispense fame and to create opinion.
The growing spirit of independence in the author had already caused
grave dissatisfaction with the old order of things, as the increasing
tendency to enjoy the society of his fellows in clubs and taverns
had prepared the author for the new order of social patronage.
D’Alembert, in his _Essay on Men of Letters_, speaks of the old
system in terms of strong disgust. The rôle of courtier is the most
despicable that can be acted by a man of letters. Authors and peers
should meet on a plane of equality. ‘Les seuls grands Seigneurs dont
un homme de lettres doive désirer le commerce, sont ceux qu’il peut
traiter et regarder en toute sûreté comme ses égaux et ses amis.’[34]
Here is a man who will not lightly expose himself to feel the sting
of charity, for whom a new system not wanting in grace and true
appreciation must be devised. The _Essay_ was translated into English
in 1764. The original must have been written about the time when
Johnson was penning his immortal definition of _patron_, ‘a wretch
who supports with insolence and is paid with flattery.’
Was it possible for the reading world to render assistance to men
of this temper? Could a way be found to make grants of money or to
draw attention to worthy writings without an offensive display of
philanthropy? Was it not possible to assist an author, yet cause him
to feel that any favour was conferred by himself? The salon was the
answer. It summoned authors out of their seclusion and segregation,
and confidently bade them show the world that genius might express
itself elsewhere than in the study or the coffee-house. Let them
try an appeal to a ‘select public.’ Let them, by the charm of their
conversation in a congenial company, break down the barriers of
indifference and prejudice. It was a call to men of letters to treat
with the world. The drawing-room in which they were received, not as
a dependent or tool, but as chief guests doing honour to the company
by their presence, was a new field of arbitration between authors and
the world.
In the successful execution of any plan for the social recognition of
letters, woman must have a prominent place. If the drawing-room is
to replace the tavern as a favourite resort of authors, the presence
of woman is as truly implied in the one as her absence is from the
other. The shift from the coffee-house to the drawing-room was indeed
a plain tribute to woman, the new critic and the new patron. As she
was already displaying her power in the world of readers by bringing
a new tone of refinement into literature, she was exerting the same
power to draw the men of letters into her salon.[35]
It was the peculiar fortune of France to produce women to discharge
this social and literary duty whose personality is at once so
brilliant and so influential that it rises to the level of genius.
These women are not merely persons gifted with an instinct for
social leadership; they are, like Cleopatra and Elizabeth, types of
their sex and a revelation of its power. They are the very symbols
of the century, ‘the abstract and brief chronicles of the time.’ In
the amazing career of Madame de Tencin may be read the abandoned
profligacy with which the seventeenth century closed, and which, in
sheer disillusion, turned with the new century to decency and to
letters. In Madame Geoffrin we see the surpassing common sense of the
period, its force, its humour, its kindliness, and perhaps something
of its hardness. As the best of the bourgeois is typified in Madame
Geoffrin, the aristocracy of the _ancien régime_ is expressed in
Madame du Deffand. Its merciless clarity, its wit, which is wisdom in
masquerade, its hardness of heart and contempt of spiritual things,
and, one is tempted to say, even its blindness, are they not found
in her? And the desolation of her last years, with their appealing
cry for love, are they not, as Lanson has said,[36] the hunger of the
heart which turns at last to the gift of love and the sweetness of
tears? But it is Mlle. de Lespinasse who reveals romanticism in its
full blow. In the history of that movement the tornado of passions
which convulsed her spirit and at length destroyed her are no less
typical than the sorrows of Werther, or the pageant of Byron’s
bleeding heart.[37]
It was by force of personality and by their attitude towards life
that these women succeeded in influencing literary movements. It is
not by learning or authorship that they hold a place in the history
of French literature. Not one of them was known to her own circle as
an author or as ambitious to become one. Madame de Tencin was, to be
sure, a novelist, but she concealed the fact from all her friends
save Montesquieu and Fontenelle, allowed her works to be attributed
to others, and kept her secret as long as she lived. Madame du
Deffand and Mlle. de Lespinasse have attained fame as letter-writers,
but through no conscious effort on their part. Their dread of
authorship is easily explained. A successful hostess must avoid
giving the impression that she is forming a coterie in order to have
readers for her books. Madame du Bocage found her authorship of no
assistance in her career as hostess: she was laughed at as a _femme
savante_, and her guests were said to be invited for the purpose of
praising her poems.
As personality is of more consequence to the hostess than
authorship, so maturity of experience is of more value to her than
youth and beauty. None of these women, except Madame du Bocage
(‘forma Venus, arte Minerva’) pretended to the fascinations of youth.
Madame de Tencin was forty-six when her salon became famous; Madame
Geoffrin was fifty when she succeeded Madame de Tencin as the chief
hostess in Paris, and she was sixty-seven when, as ‘queen-mother,’
she made her triumphal visit to the King of Poland. Madame du Deffand
was sixty-eight when, in the eyes of Walpole, she eclipsed all the
other hostesses in Paris; when she was eighty, Edward Gibbon still
found in her salon, ‘the best company in Paris.’ Julie de Lespinasse,
the youngest of them all, died—and died of love—at forty-four. It
is not surprising that Walpole found in Paris the ‘fountain of
age.’[38] ‘One is never old here,’ he writes, ‘or never thought so’;
and elsewhere,[39] ‘The first step towards being in fashion is to
lose an eye or a tooth. Young people I conclude there are, but where
they exist I don’t guess: not that I complain; it is charming to
totter into vogue.’ Ten years later he finds no change:[40] ‘It is
so English to grow old! The French are Struldbrugs improved. After
ninety they have no more caducity or distempers, but set out on a new
career.’
Laurence Sterne goes into greater detail. Of the second period in
the life of a French woman of fashion, he says:[41] ‘When thirty-five
years and more have unpeopled her dominions of the slaves of love,
she repeoples it with the slaves of infidelity.’ Here of course is a
glance at the atheism of the _philosophes_. In morals, politics, and
philosophy, the Parisian salon is frankly on the radical side. It
not only welcomes new ideas, but goes in search of them. Radicalism
becomes its measure of success. The prevailing hostility to the
Church and the contempt for anything savouring of dogma caused those
who might hold orthodox or conservative views to conceal them,
lest they be taken as evidence of a cowardly spirit or a feeble
mind. Adherents of the Church, priests, Jesuits, the whole tribe of
_dévots_, and at last even the deists, were condemned as pharisees
and time-servers. Voltaire himself was too cautious. ‘Il est bigot,’
said a woman to Walpole,[42] ‘c’est un déiste.’ When Hume was
admitted to Madame Geoffrin’s, he found no deists there, for all had,
presumably, passed on to atheism. Madame Geoffrin herself retained an
odd sort of formal relation with the Church which amazed her friends
who whispered about it as though it were some scandalous _liaison_.
Thus the salons developed a looseness of morals and a so-called
freedom of thought which their exponents were fain to regard as a
splendid audacity. Such ideals are still dear to a certain class
of writers chiefly composed of minor poets. But the wits of the
eighteenth century promulgated their doctrines without the aid
of that slovenliness which is indispensable to our free-thinking
Bohemians. They adopted a manner approved of the world in order that
they might win the world. They avoided anything that might make
themselves or their speculations ridiculous, for they wished to
_recommend_ their theories to men, to challenge their intelligence,
and to capture their interest. There is an odd simile used by
Madame Necker[43] to account for Shakespeare’s fame in England,
which is of no use whatever as explaining Shakespeare, but of great
significance because of its obvious reference to the salons. She
attributes the renown of the poet to the acting of Garrick who, for
three hours daily, _captures the hearts_ as well as the ears of the
English people, and so has the same effect that is produced in Paris
by _conversation_. The aim of the salon is, obviously, to create
interest, to capture hearts. In the same letter, when urging Gibbon
to come to Paris and enjoy the fruits of his fame, she says, ‘C’est
là seulement ... qu’on fait passer ses sentiments dans l’âme des
autres.’ There is the express aim of the salon:—to bring ideas out of
the realm of the abstract down to the business and bosoms of men. In
such a process it is the function of the hostess to give unity and
solidity to the divergent views of her coterie, and frequently to be
the channel by which they reach the world.[44] Thus the salon became
a source for the dissemination of ideas and of a new and radical
philosophy.
But what of the influence of the salon upon the authors who composed
it? That it produced an effect upon them the least sympathetic
was obliged to acknowledge: ‘At worst,’ says Walpole,[45] ‘I have
filled my mind with a new set of ideas.’ There men corrected as well
as expanded their personal views. There they might ‘clarify their
notions by filtrating them through other minds.’[46] The salon gave
an opportunity for the development of ideas in a new medium—the
liveliness of conversation. At such time, when the formulation
of opinion is stimulated by contact with other minds, when all
barriers are down, all dread of critics forgotten, a man may give
free rein to his doctrines and borrow all the brilliancy that lives
in exaggeration.[47] The pomposity of the platform and the solemn
pedantry of the study disappear, and a man talks for the joy of
talking. He makes up in vivacity what he loses in dignity. When an
author deserted the salons, as did Rousseau, it frequently indicated
a state of self-absorption which was not always advantageous; and,
on the other hand, when an author made his submission to them, the
result was frequently evident in a note of urbanity and in a piquancy
of illustration which he could hardly have attained elsewhere.[48]
Thus the function of the salon was to preserve the sanity and clarity
of literature, to keep authors abreast of the times and in touch with
one another and with the world. But in this alliance of authors with
the world, in this exchange of solitude for society, of the study
for the drawing-room, there were dangers which threatened the very
life of literature; for it was an attempt to serve two masters. Far
from removing the petty faults of a literary life, it brought with
it a host of new ones—flattery, the overestimation of the works of
a clique, the attempt to direct public opinion by force, and above
all, the cultivation of the graces at the expense of the imagination.
There was actually a tendency towards the dangers of democracy—the
surrender to majority, the descent to a common level—but without a
saving reliance upon the elemental instincts of mankind. The whole
prophetic side of literature, the vision of the poet, the glory and
the folly of the ideal, priest and lyrist, Wordsworth and Shelley,
de Vigny and de Musset—these are all beyond the ken of salons. But
they had their office. It was their function to teach the observation
of life, to lend clearness and vivacity to style, and so to add a
charm to learning, to win the ignorant and to elevate the frivolous
by showing that dulness could be overcome with wit and pedantry with
grace.
CHAPTER IV
ENGLISH AUTHORS IN PARISIAN SALONS
The English visitor was a familiar figure in the Parisian salon. In
an age when travellers were studying manners rather than mountains,
and preferred the society of philosophers to the finest galleries in
Europe, no visit to Paris was complete without a conversation with
good Madame Geoffrin or an hour with the ‘blind sibyl,’ du Deffand
of the bitter tongue. A stream of Englishmen from Prior to Gibbon
poured through their drawing-rooms[49] and listened with interest or
with alarm to the _philosophes_ who were, to use Walpole’s words,[50]
busily pulling down God and the King. Sometimes a returning
traveller proved his acquaintance with this society by sacrificing
his veracity. Thus Goldsmith asserted[51] that he was present ‘in
a select company of wits of both sexes at Paris’ when Diderot,
Fontenelle, and Voltaire disputed about the merits of English taste
and learning. The interview, it has been repeatedly shown, could
hardly have taken place, inasmuch as during the months when Goldsmith
must have been in Paris, Voltaire was never once there. But the very
lie is eloquent, for it shows the kind of experience in Paris which
English authors sought and prized.
The cosmopolitan tone was contributed to the salon by the eighteenth
century. It begins with Madame de Tencin. This brilliant woman,
somewhat promiscuous in all her tastes, expanded the influence of
her drawing-room, and thereby that of later salons, by welcoming
distinguished men without respect of nationality; nor were foreigners
slow to improve the opportunity of meeting a woman who was no less
renowned for her social prestige than for the picturesque iniquity of
her past. Her salon was in truth the atonement which she offered the
world for the sins of her youth.
She had begun her career by running away from the convent where she
had taken the veil. She used her secularized charms to win lovers,
and used her lovers to advance her brother in the Church. She became
mistress of the Regent, who snubbed her because she wished to talk
business when his mind ran on love. The royal harlot then sank into a
cheap adventuress; she gave birth to a son, destined to become famous
as d’Alembert, and ‘exposed’ him on the steps of Saint Jean le Rond
in the hope of making an end of him. At length when a maddened lover
shot himself to death under her own roof, she was imprisoned in the
Bastille, where she languished for some months. And then, after
her release, as if to show that she had a head if not a heart, she
abandoned her career of profligacy as lightly as she had formerly
abandoned a lover or a child, and opened a drawing-room which, with
the death of Madame de Lambert in 1733, became the most brilliant
and influential in Paris. Here for twenty years she reigned over
such retainers as Montesquieu and Fontenelle. Her success is easier
to understand than her motives. Certain it is, however, as Professor
Brunel has suggested,[52] that she attracted the men of letters
because she gave them to understand that their respect was the one
thing in the world for which she cared.
Madame de Tencin had become intimate with Englishmen even before
the days of her fame. She was that ‘eloped nun who has supplanted
the nut-brown maid’[53] in the affections of Matthew Prior, during
his diplomatic service in Paris in the winter of 1712-13. She used
him to bring the needs of her brother (whom Prior did not consider
to be ‘worth hanging’[54]) before Lord Bolingbroke. He himself was
presently avowing her his Queen, and himself her faithful and devoted
subject ‘_dans tous ses états_.’[55] Leslie Stephen[56] considers
that Bolingbroke made use of Madame de Tencin in his intrigues with
the Regent; but however this may be, his intrigues with the Regent’s
mistress became common gossip, and were published abroad by the
ballad-singer in the streets.[57]
* * * * *
But Bolingbroke was not the only English peer who paid court to the
‘_nonne défroquée_.’ Lord Chesterfield was introduced to her by
Montesquieu, and, in 1741, passed some time in her salon, during
its later glory. Here he enjoyed the society of authors whom he was
always pleased to regard as superior to those of his own country
and whose works, particularly Montesquieu’s _Esprit des Lois_,
Fontenelle’s _Pluralité des Mondes_, and the productions of Crébillon
and Marivaux, he never tired of recommending to his son. Fontenelle,
the placid death’s-head who had never laughed and who could lead a
minuet at the age of ninety-seven, must have seemed to Chesterfield
the pattern of a man. And yet he could assert, a few years later,
that Fontenelle had sacrificed somewhat too much to the Graces.[58]
But what did he think of Madame? What did the great exemplar of the
_bel air_, himself a patron of letters, think of the life and aims
of the salon? It is not easy to say. He flattered Madame de Tencin
outrageously, according to his professed theories; he praised the
good taste of Frenchmen (of which Madame was at once ‘le soutien
et l’ornement’), and denounced the brusqueness of his countrymen
according to his wont. He boasted himself[59] the ‘ami, favori, et
enfant de la maison’ of Madame de Tencin. But when he had occasion
to describe the literary life of Paris to his son, he declared
that the salons were filled with gossips who talked nonsense and
_philosophes_ whose works were metaphysical fustian, _verba et voces
et praeterea nihil_.[60] It was an institution which young Stanhope
must visit, where he was to talk epigrams, false sentiments, and
philosophical nonsense, but to which he was to maintain a large
superiority. Yet, in spite of this show of indifference, I cannot but
feel that Chesterfield liked the salon. What else in heaven or earth
was there for such a man to like? What could have been more to his
taste than its courtly union of intrigue and elegance, of literature
and wit, of free thought and easy morals? The salon certainly liked
Chesterfield. ‘Let him come back to us,’ cried Montesquieu and the
rest of them when Madame de Tencin had read his letter to the circle,
and read it more than once. ‘He writes French better than we do,’
exclaimed Fontenelle, ‘qu’il se contente, s’il lui plaît, d’être le
premier homme de sa nation, d’avoir les lumières et la profondeur de
génie qui la caractérisent; et qu’il ne vienne point encore s’emparer
de nos grâces et de nos gentillesses.’[61] When Madame de Tencin
despatched this mass of flattery to Chesterfield, Fontenelle added
a note begging the English lord not to draw down upon himself too
much French jealousy.[62] Unless Chesterfield was, like Fontenelle,
incapable of all human emotions, he was pleased by that. The
Frenchmen had studied him well. They touched his vulnerable point,
and posterity will not easily be persuaded that it was in vain.
* * * * *
‘In future, then,’ said Fontenelle, after the death of Madame de
Tencin, ‘I shall go to Madame Geoffrin’s.’ The change must have
supplied the aged wit with many observations on the diversity of the
female character; for though ‘la Geoffrin’ had studied the methods
of her predecessor, there was no resemblance in character between the
two. There is no suggestion of Madame de Tencin’s subtlety in the
amiable bourgeoise who became a queen of society at fifty, but rather
a rich simplicity of nature that is very winning. Her faults as well
as her virtues are quite obvious. Her humour is for ever expressing
itself in homely maxims[63] which suggest the lore of peasants. She
made her way by the simplest means, a warm heart, abiding common
sense, and a persistent will. Her keen intelligence, the gift of
nature, not of books, enabled her to understand the philosophers
at least as well as they understood themselves, to advise—almost
lead—them, to be their ‘Mother,’ and to push them into the Academy.
It is, at first blush, amazing that a woman without education, who,
indeed, found grammar a mystery, could thus have become the empress
of the wits. But living as she did in an ‘age of reason’ when the
imagination was turning back to contemplate man in a ‘state of
nature,’ unspoiled by the arts of a luxurious civilization, such a
defect was not fatal. Shrewd, placid yet alert, simple and with
the sweep of vision that is given only to the simple, she looked
out fearlessly upon the society of her time, with all its elaborate
systems and new philosophies—and understood. As she was without fear,
so she was without contempt. She saw what was good in the new order
and encouraged it, but without becoming its slave. Like Johnson
(whom she would have understood), she contrived to ‘worship in the
age of Voltaire,’ but this was with no surrender of her interest in
Voltaire. She was intolerant of pretence. She adopted a manner of
treating her friends which, in its combination of brusqueness and
affection, is thoroughly parental. She scolds and pushes, punishes
and rewards. She decides disputes with a word. She spends with open
hand. Her great desire is to be of help to her children. D’Alembert
writes[64] of her, ‘“Vous croyez,” disait elle à un des hommes
qu’elle aimait le plus, “que c’est pour moi que je vois des grands
et des ministres? Détrompez-vous; je les vois pour vous et pour vos
semblables, qui pouvez en avoir besoin: si tous ceux que j’aime
étaient heureux et sages, ma porte serait tous les jours fermée a
neuf heures, excepté pour eux.”’ But she never forgot that, in her
own house, she alone was mistress. Her charity, which she conducted
on a heroic scale, implied a certain obedience in the recipients of
it; but both charity and obedience were only devices for promoting
their interests. ‘Elle ne respirait que pour faire le bien,’ said
d’Alembert.[65] He and the other writers for the Cyclopædia profited
by her charity, for without her patronage that great work could
hardly have been carried to publication.
In the salon of Madame Geoffrin and her free-thinking friends, David
Hume found, in 1763, a natural abiding-place. It had, indeed, a dual
attraction for him in the person of its hostess and the character of
her coterie. Madame Geoffrin must have found the Scotch philosopher
a man after her own heart. She understood the broad-featured, simple
man, whom she presently took to calling[66] her ‘coquin,’ her ‘gros
drôle.’ Like her, he enjoyed the society of rationalists. He writes
naïvely in his _Autobiography_: ‘Those who have not seen the strange
effects of modes, will never imagine the strange reception I met with
at Paris, from men and women of all ranks and stations. The more I
resiled from their excessive civilities, the more I was loaded with
them. There is, however, a real satisfaction in living at Paris from
the great number of sensible, knowing, and polite company with which
the city abounds above all places in the universe. I thought once
of settling there for life.’ But he kept his head under the pelting
flattery. He neither despised his social success nor exalted it as
the _summum bonum_. Like Madame Geoffrin, he made no apologies for
himself, and pretended to no social graces which he could not easily
acquire. His French was wretched. Walpole protested[67] that it was
‘almost as unintelligible as his English.’ He had no _bons mots_.
He did not even talk much. Grimm found[68] him heavy, and Madame du
Deffand dubbed him ‘the peasant.’[69]
But to more serious souls he was even as the Spirit of the Age.
He had voiced the new scepticism. He had given the death-blow to
miracles. Before his coming to Paris, all his better-known work had
been done, and the fame of it preceded him. Alexander Street wrote
from Paris to Sir William Johnstone, on December 16, 1762: ‘When you
have occasion to see our friend, David Hume, tell him that he is so
much worshipped here that he must be void of all passions, if he
does not immediately take post for Paris. In most houses where I am
acquainted here, one of the first questions is, “Do you know M. Hume
whom we all admire so much?” I dined yesterday at Helvétius’s, where
this same M. Hume interrupted our conversation very much.’[70]
His influence was, in truth, greater in France than in England; for
the temper of English literature never became openly rationalistic.
Deism itself was living a subterranean existence; for the authority
of such powerful men as Johnson and Burke ran directly counter
to it. But in France all sails were set, and men’s faces turned
towards ‘unpath’d waters, undreamed shores.’ To the ‘free’ thought
that was becoming ever freer and now drifting towards all manner of
negation, Hume came as a high priest, an acknowledged pontiff. He
was the man whom the King delighted to honour, whose praises were
lisped by the King’s children, who was approved by Voltaire, petted
by all the women and revered by all the men. In less than two years,
Walpole finds him[71] ‘the mode,’ ‘fashion itself’; he is ‘treated
with perfect veneration,’ and his works held to be the ‘standards
of writing.’ Hume himself writes to Fergusson[72] that he overheard
an elderly gentleman, ‘esteemed one of the cleverest and most
sensible’ of men, boasting that he had caught sight of Hume that day
at court.[73] At last they pay him the compliment (Madame Geoffrin
leading off, no doubt) of ‘bantering’ him and telling droll stories
of him. He begins to fear that the great ladies are taking him too
much from the society of d’Alembert, Buffon, Marmontel, Diderot, and
the rest.[74]
Among the distinguished women in Paris who wooed him were Mlle.
de Lespinasse, Madame du Bocage, who sent him her works, and the
Marquise de Boufflers, who made no secret of her fondness for the
British. This lady once cherished a ‘_petite flamme_’[75] for
Beauclerk, Johnson’s gay friend, and even crossed the path of the
Lexicographer himself; for it was she whom Johnson, like a squire
of dames, gallantly escorted to her coach, and afterwards honoured
with a letter. The sentimental homage which she paid to Hume incurred
the contempt of Madame du Deffand, who sneered at her worship of
false gods, and made her miserable by leading others to denounce her
idol.[76]
Madame de Boufflers played a prominent part in the great quarrel
between Hume and Rousseau, which involved many of the most prominent
persons mentioned in this chapter. The story, which has been
frequently told, may be briefly dismissed.[77] The union by which
the sentimentalist gave himself in charge to the rationalist, might
well have furnished a Hogarth with a subject for an allegorical group
representing Scotch solidity and Gallic perversity. Hume, through
Madame de Boufflers, had assured Rousseau that he could find in
England appreciation, friends, and a true home; and the ill-assorted
pair accordingly departed from Paris early in 1776. It was not long
before wild letters reached the salons.[78] The two philosophers were
hurling epithets at each other, _scélérat! traître!_
The most immediate cause of their rupture was a letter, written by
Walpole, to amuse Madame Geoffrin’s coterie. It purported to be by
the King of Prussia, and invited Rousseau to come to court and enjoy
his fill of persecution. A brief extract will show the character of
this sprightly epistle:
Si vous persistez à vous creuser l’esprit pour trouver de nouveaux
malheurs, choisissez-les tels que vous voudrez. Je suis roi, je
puis vous en procurer augré de vos souhaits: et ce qui sûrement ne
vous arrivera pas vis-à-vis de vos ennemis, je cesserai de vous
persécuter quand vous cesserez de mettre votre gloire à l’être.[79]
This letter, which had been touched up by Helvétius and the Duc de
Nivernois, circulated in the salons, and at last found its way to
England, where it was printed by various newspapers in April 1766.
The quarrel between Rousseau and Hume, which had been threatening for
some weeks, now burst in fury; for Rousseau believed that Hume was in
league with Walpole to disgrace him.
Every one now plunged into controversy and correspondence. Mlle. de
Lespinasse attempts to soothe feelings. D’Alembert outlines Hume’s
campaign. Baron d’Holbach condoles. Walpole explains. Madame de
Boufflers fears for the renown of philosophy. Madame du Deffand,
who hated everybody concerned, except Walpole, and whom d’Alembert
accused of having stirred up all the trouble, finally did as much as
any one to put an end to it.[80] Nothing having been accomplished,
and the vanity of all having been fully displayed, the matter
subsided, leaving a general conviction in the mind of each that all
the others had conducted themselves very foolishly.
Hume never returned to the salons, though Mlle. de Lespinasse
implored and Madame de Boufflers protested. It was to the latter that
he wrote the tranquil letter from his death-bed ‘without any anxiety
or regret’[81] which elicited the admiration even of Madame du
Deffand[82] and delighted the salons by showing that their favourite
could die like a philosopher.[83]
Hume’s acceptance of the salon and its ideals is in striking
contrast to the fussy dissatisfaction of Horace Walpole. ‘I was
expressing my aversion,’ he writes, ‘to disputes: Mr. Hume, who
very gratefully admires the tone of Paris, having never known any
other tone, said with great surprise, “Why, what do you like if you
hate both disputes and whisk?”’ Walpole’s reply is not recorded.
Certainly he did not like _les philosophes_ and their conversation
which he found ‘solemn, pedantic, and seldom animated but by a
dispute.’[84] He hated authors by profession. He hated political
talk (having practical knowledge and experience of politics). He
hated _savants_, free thinkers, and _beaux esprits_, with their
eternal dissertations on religion and government.[85] ‘I have never
yet,’ he wrote[86] to Montagu, ‘seen or heard anything serious that
was not ridiculous. Jesuits, Methodists, philosophers, politicians,
the hypocrite Rousseau, the scoffer Voltaire, the encyclopedistes,
the Humes, the Lytteltons, the Grenvilles, the atheist tyrant of
Russia, and the mountebank of history Mr. Pitt, all are to me but
impostors in their various ways.’ He is ‘sick of visions and systems
that shove one another aside and come over again like the figures
in a moving picture.’ Yet like all scoffers, he has nothing to set
up in the place of all this. He could not give his heart to the new
system, but he was equally incapable of being loyal to the old.
Dissatisfied with both, he laughed at both, and was nettled because
he could find none in Paris to laugh with him. Laughing was not
fashionable in the salons.[87] He despised the prevalent devotion to
cards. He was scornfully amused at the popularity of the English in
Paris—and even at his own popularity. ‘Vous n’observez,’ said Madame
du Deffand, ‘que pour vous moquer; vous ne tenez à rien, vous vous
passez de tout; enfin, enfin, rien ne vous est nécessaire.’[88] But
there was one thing necessary to Walpole, and it was the thing he
professed to despise—the salon. Without knowing the salons he could
not ridicule them. No satirist can be a hermit. So Walpole frequented
the salons, and vastly enjoyed, not the salons themselves, but his
own superiority to them. It was at Madame Geoffrin’s that his career
began. He brought a note of introduction from Lady Hervey, met Madame
Geoffrin, and discovered to his surprise—and the reader’s—that he
liked her. She had sense, ‘more common sense than he almost ever
met with.’[89] He notes her quickness in penetrating character, her
protection of artists, her services to them, and her ‘thousand little
arts and offices of friendship,’ of which latter she was presently
to give him a specimen. When he had an attack of gout, she took him
under her care. On October 13, 1765, he writes of her to Lady Hervey:
Madame Geoffrin came and sat two hours last night by my
bedside:[90] I could have sworn it had been my lady Hervey, she was
so good to me. It was with so much sense, information, instruction,
and correction! The manner of the latter charms me. I never saw
anybody in my days that catches one’s faults and vanities and
impositions so quick, that explains them to one so clearly, and
convinces one so easily. I never liked to be set right before! You
cannot imagine how I taste it! I make her both my confessor and
director, and begin to think I shall be a reasonable creature at
last, which I had never intended to be. The next time I see her,
I believe I shall say, ‘Oh! Common Sense,[91] sit down: I have
been thinking so and so; is it not absurd?’—for t’other sense and
wisdom, I never liked them; I shall now hate them for her sake. If
it was worth her while, I assure your Ladyship she might govern me
like a child.
The attention which he received was not without its effect, and at
last he was obliged to admit himself pleased.[92] He does not know
when he will return to England; and he dwells with delight on the
honours and distinctions he receives.
He became one of the most prominent men in Parisian society, and for
a time eclipsed the reputation of Hume himself. The latter had been
worshipped as a philosopher; Walpole reigned as a wit. The letter to
Rousseau, which has been described above, captivated the salons, and
probably even made them laugh. The _jeu d’esprit_, which had first
occurred to him at Madame Geoffrin’s, so pleased him that he cast it
into more elaborate form, displayed the forged letter in the salons,
and became famous at once. ‘The copies,’ he writes to Conway, ‘have
spread like wildfire; _et me voici à la mode_.’[93] It was long
before Walpole heard the last of his jest; for, as we have seen,
it involved him in the controversy between Hume and Rousseau, and
Walpole hated controversy as much as he loved wit. But for the moment
it served to draw the eyes of the French world upon him.
Meanwhile, he had become intimate with Madame Geoffrin’s great rival,
the blind Madame du Deffand, now in her sixty-ninth year, who rapidly
displaced Madame Geoffrin in his affections. By December 1765, he
was supping with her twice a week, and in January he wrote Gray his
famous description of her:[94]
Madame du Deffand was for a short time mistress of the Regent,
is now very old and stone-blind, but retains all her vivacity,
wit, memory, judgement, passions, and agreeableness. She goes to
operas, plays, suppers, and Versailles; gives suppers twice a week;
has everything new read to her; makes new songs and epigrams,
ay, admirably, and remembers every one that has been made these
fourscore years. She corresponds with Voltaire, dictates charming
letters to him, contradicts him, is no bigot to him or anybody, and
laughs both at the clergy and the philosophers. In a dispute, into
which she easily falls, she is very warm, and yet scarce ever in
the wrong: her judgement on every subject is as just as possible;
on every point of conduct as wrong as possible: for she is all love
and hatred, passionate for her friends to enthusiasm, still anxious
to be loved, I don’t mean by lovers, and a vehement enemy, but
openly. As she can have no amusement but conversation, the least
solitude and _ennui_ are insupportable to her, and put her into the
power of several worthless people, who eat her suppers when they
can eat nobody’s of higher rank; wink to one another, and laugh at
her; hate her because she has forty times more parts—and venture to
hate her because she is not rich.[95]
It was natural that Walpole should prefer her society to Madame
Geoffrin’s. Being Horace Walpole, it was inevitable that he should
come to regard Madame Geoffrin’s coterie with disdain, to complain
that it was made up of ‘pretended _beaux esprits_’ and _faux
savants_, and that they were ‘very impertinent and dogmatic.’[96]
Madame herself had offended him by calling him[97] ‘the new
Richelieu’ in reference to his numerous conquests. Walpole grew
suddenly afraid of the Geoffrin’s intimacy, and feared that he was
becoming an object of ridicule. But in Madame du Deffand he found
one of his own sort, a woman used to the society of the great but
with no illusions about it, a woman who ruled her circle by despising
almost every one who came into it, who had no faith in any one, and
least of all in the authors and diplomats who surrounded her, and
whose society she endured only because she found it less intolerable
than her dark solitude.
In a beautiful letter to her on her blindness, which had become
total about a dozen years before the period when we encounter her,
Montesquieu reminded[98] her that they were both ‘small rebel spirits
condemned to darkness.’ There is in truth something suggestive of
the powers of darkness in Madame du Deffand’s pride and perversity.
She was of a will never to submit or yield. Pride in the reputation
she had made, a passionate delight in conversation, and, above all,
the horror of her lonely hours of introspection determined her to
continue her salon in spite of all. She did not fail. But a blow
hardly less grievous had yet to fall. Mlle. de Lespinasse, on whose
assistance she had leaned, had caught the secret of her success, and
was forming a coterie of her own, an inner circle within Madame du
Deffand’s. When the blind woman learned of her assistant’s treachery,
she broke with her, and Mlle. de Lespinasse departed, carrying with
her d’Alembert, adored of Madame du Deffand, and his friends, the
flower of the flock.
Even then the dauntless old woman would not give up. The aged sibyl
in her ‘tonneau’[99] at the Convent Saint Joseph could still attract
the curious and the clever. Blind as she was, her ‘portraits’ of
character were better than Madame Geoffrin’s,—who excelled in
portraits,—and the clarity of her vision was surpassed only by the
crispness of her phrasing. At sixty-eight, she had an eager curiosity
about her own times[100] that was a stimulus to youth. To speak with
her was to witness the triumph of mind.
But her heart was as dust and ashes within her. About her she could
feel only duplicity and hatred;[101] she had no faith in man or in
God. She considered her friends as those who would not kill but
would look on while others killed.[102] The springs of happiness
and hope had gone dry. And always the spectre of Ennui steals
behind her, and casts its shadow over her withered soul. Literature
no longer interests or amuses; she finds philosophy poisoned by
affectation;[103] she is bored by all historians, and is glad when
she can lay down the first volume of Gibbon.[104] She hears Gluck’s
_Orphée_, and is bored. She hears _The Barber of Seville_, and is
bored.[105] She reads the _Iliad_, and is bored.[106] There is
nothing in her life that does not feel this blight.
And then, in the late evening of her days, a miracle occurred. The
dry branch budded and bloomed. In the person of Walpole, with his
chill though delicate cynicism (so like her own), romance burst into
her life, and she knew love and the pain of love. Her passion for
the Englishman twenty years her junior transcends all comparison.
It has in it the tenderness of age without its resignation, and
the insistence of youth without its joy. It wreaks itself in
protestations, reproaches, and demands which it knows must be futile.
In Madame du Deffand’s letters to Walpole, recently published in
their entirety,[107] there is a strong undercurrent which moves
relentlessly to tragedy—tragedy that is no less poignant because its
protagonist is an old woman and its theme the progress of a slow
despair.
To Walpole all this was a source of great uneasiness. Like most
superior folk, he feared the world. He feared that letters might
be intercepted, that Madame du Deffand might talk; that the story
might become public; that he might become an object of ridicule—and
ridicule was to him a hell. He urged upon Madame du Deffand the
necessity of reticence. He was crushingly persistent. The aged woman
did her best to smother her feelings, but she could not altogether
smother her resentment:
J’ai une véritable amitié pour vous, vous le savez, et quoique vous
vous en soyez souvent trouvé importuné, que vous ayez fait tout
votre possible et même tout ce qui est _inimaginable_ pour détruire
cette amitié, je suis persuadée que vous n’êtes point fâché qu’elle
subsiste.... Et comment est-il possible qu’un aussi bon homme que
vous veuille tourmenter une si faible créature que moi, de qui
vous ne pouvez jamais craindre aucun mal, ni qui puisse vous faire
encourir aucun ridicule ni aucun blâme?[108]
Walpole’s letters to Madame du Deffand are fortunately not preserved;
but one imagines that he was bored by this strain. To him Madame du
Deffand was an aristocratic French woman, a match for him in wit,
frankness, and cynicism, who could provide him with that social life
which, like her, he affected to despise but could not abandon. He had
admired her capacity for disillusion, and now she was the victim of
an illusion, and he was the object of it. The situation was unusual.
But though Walpole could not respond, he did not break with her, or
care to break. When, in 1775, he visited her, for the third time, she
showered him with so many engagements that he needed ‘the activity
of a squirrel and the strength of a Hercules’ to go through with
them.[109] He was pleased. He asserted that Madame du Deffand was a
star in the East well worth coming to adore.[110] With a literary
friendship that displayed itself in salons, in dedications of books,
and in temperate letters, he could be well content. At her death he
wrote of her with true affection, gratitude, and grief. But she had
longed in vain for the expression of these, and of more than these,
during the desolation of her latter months.
The effect upon Walpole of this acquaintance with Madame du Deffand
and her salon was to fix in him certain characteristics not always
attractive. She had been able to show him the salon in the one aspect
which could appeal to him; where persiflage had not yielded to the
pedantry of the new philosophy. In his association with her and
with the group whose inspiration she was, he acquired that amused
tolerance with which he viewed the attempts of the bluestockings in
England to rival the salons which he had known in France.
* * * * *
Among Madame du Deffand’s visitors was the man to whom she referred
as ‘the famous Mr. Burke.’ His visit to Paris was of less than a
month’s duration. Madame du Deffand met him on February 9, 1773;[111]
and he left France, apparently on the first day of March.[112] Burke
had not come to Paris to enjoy the fruits of his fame—though his
reputation in the salons as the author of the Junius letters[113]
would have given him a career—or to study the philosophical and
political principles of the day. He had placed his son Richard at
Auxerre to learn French; but before returning to England he glanced
at the French court and at the salons. His attitude towards the
latter was unique. ‘It was,’ says Morley,[114] ‘almost as though
the solemn hierophant of some mystic Egyptian temple should have
found himself amid the brilliant chatter of a band of reckless,
keen-tongued disputants of the garden or the porch at Athens.’ Yet
any seriousness of manner which he may have displayed exalted him
in the eyes of the philosophers. Madame du Deffand, though she
afterwards learned to despise his writing as verbose, diffuse,
obscure, and affected,[115] liked him at once. ‘Il me paraît avoir
infiniment d’esprit,’ she writes,[116] and again, ‘Il est très
aimable.’ She gave a supper for him, and exerted herself to assemble
the most distinguished and clever members of her circle.[117] She had
him invited to Madame de Luxembourg’s, where he heard La Harpe read
a new tragedy in verse, _Les Barmécides_.[118] He also talked with
Madame du Deffand of a new book, _Essai Générale de Tactique_[119] by
the Count de Guibert, dealing with the state of politics and military
science in Europe. This elaborate and enthusiastic treatise, which
contained an attack on idle sovereigns and corrupt courts, appealed
to Burke; and, at Madame du Deffand’s request, he carried a copy of
it to Walpole. Burke knew the same author’s tragedy, _Le Connétable
de Bourbon_,[120] a fact worth mention as indicating an acquaintance
with the salon of Mlle. de Lespinasse, whose lover the author was.
Burke must have heard Guibert read this play aloud, for it had not
yet been acted or published, and the reading may well have occurred
at Mlle. de Lespinasse’s. Again, it may have been in that salon that
Burke attacked the philosophy of Hume,[121] and defended Beattie
against the sneers of the free thinkers—a course that must have taxed
his abundant ingenuity as much as his defective French.
It would be interesting to know the conversation that passed between
Burke and Walpole after the former’s return to England. They met, and
it would seem that Burke expressed strong opinions on the growing
atheism of France, and told of his attempt to defend the Christian
system, for Walpole wrote[122] to the Countess of Upper Ossory: ‘Mr.
Burke is returned from Paris, where he was so much the mode that,
happening to dispute with the philosophers, it grew the fashion to
be Christians. St. Patrick himself did not make more converts.’ But
whatever effect Burke may have had upon the freethinkers of Paris,
there can be no doubt of their effect upon him. The amazing downrush
of principles, religious, philosophical, and political, which he
witnessed in France confirmed him in that natural conservatism, that
desire ‘never wholly or at once to depart from antiquity’ to which he
was becoming more and more passionately devoted as the great French
crisis drew on.
The spectacle of Burke converting the philosophers to Christianity
sinks into pale insignificance beside Yorick Sterne’s conversion of
Madame de Vence from the perils of deism—an incident familiar to
every reader of _The Sentimental Journey_. It was in the winter of
1762 that Sterne made his entry into the salons, and discovered those
guiding principles of compliment, flattery, and general philandering,
which enabled him to win all the _esprits_, and, incidentally, to put
an end to the deism of Madame de Vence. Seated on a sofa beside the
lady, whose waning beauty should have made her a deist five years
before, he revealed the dangers to which beauty, particularly in
deists, was exposed, and dwelt on the defense provided by religious
sentiments. ‘“We are not adamant,” said I, taking hold of her
hand—“and there is need of all restraints, till age in her own time
steals in and lays them on us—but, my dear lady,” said I, kissing her
hand—“’tis too—too soon——” I declare I had the credit all over Paris
of unperverting Madame de V——. She affirmed to Mons. D——[123] and
the Abbe M——[124] that in one half-hour I had said more for revealed
religion than all their Encyclopedia had said against it—I was lifted
directly into Madame de V——’s _Coterie_—and she put off the epocha of
deism for two years.’
Yorick learned, too, the importance of self-obliteration. ‘I had been
misrepresented to Madame de Q—— as an _esprit_—Madame de Q—— was an
_esprit_ herself: she burnt with impatience to see me, and hear me
talk. I had not taken my seat before I saw she did not care a sous
whether I had any wit or no—I was let in, to be convinced she had.—I
call heaven to witness I never once opened the door of my lips.’
Such anecdotes may not give us facts,[125] but they record something
quite as useful, Sterne’s impression of the salon, and are a reliable
indication of his general conduct there. The wits of Paris found
the most perfect resemblance between Sterne and his books. Garat
asserts[126] that between seeing the author and reading his works
there was almost no difference at all. There are peculiarly Shandian
touches in some of his letters to Garrick, as his mention[127] of the
Baron d’Holbach, ‘one of the most learned men over here, the great
protector of wits and the Sçavans who are no wits.’ Baron d’Holbach
was the ‘maître d’hôtel’ of philosophy, friend of Voltaire, Rousseau,
and Diderot, with a salon of his own, in which he presided over a
school of physicists who held a new theory of nature. Four years
later Walpole[128] eschewed this ‘pigeon-house’ of _savants_ and
their system of antediluvian deluges invented to prove the eternity
of matter. Sterne, who was more affable than Walpole, though no less
sharp-sighted, enjoyed himself there and became a friend of Diderot
(to whom he presented a collection of English books).
It is probable that Sterne made a pretty complete tour of the salons,
and there is good reason for assuming that at Madame Geoffrin’s[129]
he made the acquaintance of Mlle. de Lespinasse. This young woman,
who was about to become one of the most brilliant hostesses in
Paris,[130] was eagerly appreciative of the emotional aspect of
Sterne’s work. Compact of passion and nerves, a disciple of Rousseau,
a ‘daughter of the Sun,’[131] and a sort of female counterpart of
Byron, she ate her heart out, was consumed with hopeless love for
three men at once, and attempted suicide, quite in the familiar
manner of a later school. To love and pain, to heaven and hell, she
determined to devote herself.[132] Loathing the world where ‘fools
and automatons abound,’ she must construct the world of romance for
herself.
Shandyism won her by its frank display of emotion. There were aspects
of it which she could never have appreciated, its wayward humour
and insincerity, its sprightliness and its dirt; but the tears and
the tenderness she understood by instinct. The loves of Yorick and
Eliza, never very popular in England, appealed to her as after the
order of nature, and no doubt reminded her of her own relations with
d’Alembert.
After the appearance of the _Sentimental Journey_, Mlle. de
Lespinasse wrote two chapters[133] in imitation of that work which,
though reproducing only such features of Sterne’s manner as she
understood, are of great importance as showing the influence of
Sterne in the salons. In these the French sentimentalist has adopted
the Englishman’s manner in order to pay court to her benefactor,
Madame Geoffrin. The chapters record two examples[134] of the elder
woman’s charity. The first of these, the incident of the broken vase,
is attributed to Sterne himself. Yorick is represented as discovering
that a vase which he has recently purchased has a broken lid. The
workmen who have just delivered the treasure implore him to have
mercy upon their fellow who broke it, whose accident has so alarmed
him that he has not dared to appear. He is now fairly in the road to
ruin. Pleased with the sympathetic distress of the brother artisans,
Yorick inquires into the case, and is able, through La Fleur, to
relieve the poor fellow’s misery. He ministers to the needs of a wife
and four children, and rewards the kindly friends with a generous
_pourboire_.
The scene of the second chapter is Madame Geoffrin’s salon. Here
Sterne is represented as hearing that lady tell the story of
her milk-woman. The pathetic death of a cow (sole prop of the
milk-woman’s family) recalls the incidents of the dead ass, and of
Maria de Moulines and her goat in the _Sentimental Journey_; but
there are serious deficiencies. Sterne, like Mlle. de Lespinasse,
would have dwelt on the sentimental pleasure of presenting the
milk-woman with two consolatory cows, but he would not have missed
the humour in the fact that the cream afterwards delivered to
Madame Geoffrin was not fit to drink. Mlle. de Lespinasse shows her
appreciation of Sterne’s sentimentalism and her ignorance of his
Shandyism.
This imitation of Sterne seems to be the chief record in French of
Yorick’s impression on the salon. If it is a reliable view—and there
seems to be no good reason for rejecting it—it is clear that Sterne
preferred to appear in the drawing-room of Paris without his cap
and bells. He realized perhaps that the way to win the hearts of
French ladies was with his warm heart and his tearful eye, and not
by the sudden caprice of his humour. It was Sterne the emotional
epicure, the professed philanderer, and not Yorick the jester, who
was known to the salons; and in thus exploiting his sentimentalism,
he continued and emphasized one aspect of the work of Rousseau, and,
with Richardson, became one of the chief foreign influences exerted
upon the romantic movement in France.
* * * * *
But it was not till the time of Gibbon that any English author
duplicated the success of Hume in the Parisian salon, for none had
so nearly satisfied the conditions required of an _esprit fort_.
Gibbon was the destroyer of ancient superstitions, who had attacked
ecclesiastical tyranny with a new weapon. The scepticism out of which
Hume had made a philosophy became in Gibbon’s _Decline and Fall_ a
new historical method as deadly as it was disguised. For Gibbon, as
for Hume, the salon was a sort of Valhalla, at once a reward and an
arena, in which, surrounded by his peers, he was to continue his
slaughterous career. Success came at once. He was more popular than
Hume, for he did not have the social defects which had, after a time,
somewhat dimmed the lustre of Hume’s success. He had, for example,
no difficulty with the French language, a tongue which he had spoken
from his youth.[135] Madame du Deffand found him as French as her
closest friends,[136] and Madame Necker rebuked him for allowing
a Frenchman to translate his _History_ when he could have done it
better himself.[137] Moreover, though he was an uglier duckling
than Hume, his manners had a pomposity which did not encourage
familiarity. ‘Il ne tombe pas dans les mêmes ridicules,’ said Madame
du Deffand, who regarded it as no slight achievement to avoid
becoming a fool when surrounded by fools.[138]
Something of Gibbon’s success was due to a period of preparation, as
it were, an earlier career in the salons fourteen years before. He
had received his training in 1763 when, at the age of twenty-six,
he had come to Paris to meet the literary world, to membership in
which he felt himself entitled by his _Essai sur l’Étude de la
Littérature_, a work which had achieved the dignity of a second
edition. Lady Hervey had furnished him with an introduction to
Madame Geoffrin, and he found a place weekly at her famous Wednesday
dinners. He visited other salons, notably those of Madame du Bocage
and of the Baron d’Holbach, who had entertained Sterne the year
before. Helvétius treated him like a friend.[139] It was a sufficient
success for a young man. It was not to be expected that he should
leave an impress upon Parisian society at this time, nor did he; but
there is little doubt that that society contributed in some measure
to his lucidity of vision and to the prevailing spirit of disillusion
for which he was presently to be famous.
When he returned to Paris in 1777 he shone in no reflected light,
for the publication of the first volume of his _Decline and Fall_ in
the preceding year had already made him a European reputation. The
book was almost immediately translated into French. The spirit of the
work, and in particular the famous explanation of the development
of Christianity, appealed to the philosophers. The indignant
but somewhat ineffectual attacks of pious English folk upon the
rationalistic historian pleased them hardly less. Gibbon’s reception
was all that he could desire. ‘I was introduced,’ he tells us in
his _Memoirs_, ‘to the first names and characters of France, who
distinguished me by such marks of civility and kindness as gratitude
will not suffer me to forget and modesty will not allow me to
enumerate.’ According to his own account,[140] he shone in disputes,
and got his great victory over the Abbé Mably in the discussion
concerning the republican form of government. But in general, the
French were struck by his affability. Madame du Deffand could
find no other fault in him than his abiding desire to please, and
observed that _beaux esprits_ had the same fascination for him that
the weapons of Odysseus had for the disguised Achilles. At times he
seemed servile, and she was on the point of telling him to comfort
himself with the reflection that he deserved to be a Frenchman.[141]
But though he was much in the company of Madame du Deffand, that
‘agreeable young lady of eighty-two,’[142] to whom Walpole had given
him a letter of introduction; though he found the best company in
Paris in her salon, and made numerous visits with her (notably to
the Marquise de Boufflers’); though he constantly took supper with
her[143] when she happened to be supping at home, it was not with her
that he was most intimate during his triumphant months in Paris. His
name will ever be linked with that of Madame Necker. His relations
with her had begun nearly a quarter of a century before, and may be
read, in a somewhat ameliorated version, in his own _Memoirs_; the
lady’s story is more fully set forth by the Vicomte d’Haussonville
in _Le Salon de Madame Necker_. It will suffice to say here that,
after being jilted by Gibbon, the ambitious young Suisse had married
a man destined to be hardly less famous in his own time, had moved
to Paris, studied, as it were, under Madame Geoffrin, and at length
opened a salon of her own. Though less brilliantly gifted than other
hostesses, she was perhaps even more ambitious than they. There is
something modern about her passion for improvement. She was not
unwilling to be a _femme savante_. She disputed with the philosophers
and recorded philosophical platitudes, along with gossip and rules
of grammar, in her commonplace-book. It may have been the literary
ambition of this lady, it may have been her essential sweetness of
character, it may have been some form of feminine pride, that led
her to seek friendship with the man who had once refused her his
love. During her visit to London in 1776, Hume was constant in his
attentions to her and to her husband. In September, after her return
to France, she wrote to him,[144] urging him to come to her: ‘C’est
à Paris qu’il est agréable d’être un grand homme.’ When at length
he came, she would no doubt have been glad to ‘plant’ him in her
house, after the French custom; but Gibbon preferred his freedom:
‘The reception I have met with from them,’ he writes,[145] ‘very
far surpassed my most sanguine expectations. I do not indeed lodge
in their house (as it might excite the jealousy of the husband, and
procure me a letter de cachet), but I live very much with them, dine
and sup whenever they have company, which is almost every day, and
whenever I like it, for they are not in the least exigeans.’ Their
satisfaction was no less than Gibbon’s. His serious conversation
delighted the serious soul of Madame Necker[146] by its union of
interest in details with enthusiasm for great principles, and by the
sundry graces which adorned it.
Madame du Deffand always felt that Gibbon’s respect for the standards
of the _beaux esprits_ had corrupted his style. She heard in it the
declamatory tone of the salons; it had the glitter and the lust for
fame with which she was well acquainted.[147] She knew of course that
this could not have been the result of Gibbon’s later sojourn in
Paris, but she was aware that he had come under the influence of the
French salons during an earlier visit. Her hypothesis, which accounts
for something of the inflated rhetoric of Gibbon, is certainly
worthy of attention; and it may be noted, in support of her view,
that Madame Necker, who is a fair measure of what the _philosophes_
wanted, found in Gibbon’s style a ‘captivating magic.’[148]
When Gibbon left Paris there was universal regret. At the Neckers’
they talked of nothing but this bereavement[149] and the hope of
a return. He went back, in pudgy complacency, to his historical
studies. He had conversed and even disputed with the prophets of a
new era; but like the other rationalists, he seems to have had no
suspicion of the great change which was presently to make salons
impossible. His ignorance of the approaching storm is a significant
illustration of the fact that the discussions of the salon were
essentially academic, conducted in happy ignorance of the results
which were destined to succeed them.
PART II
THE ENGLISH SALON
CHAPTER V
THE EARLIER ENGLISH SALON
The first English salons, broadly so termed, appear in the age
of Elizabeth. A tradition of the social patronage of letters was
then established which had a short though brilliant history and
which might, under favourable conditions, have become of permanent
importance to the literature. It could not, however, survive the
period of the Civil Wars and the Commonwealth; and thus the earlier
English salon, despite its promising beginning, goes from less to
less until it disappears altogether about 1700. The later salon had
no connection with it; indeed the eighteenth century seems to have
been quite unaware of its existence. The earlier institution was
perhaps more national in character; it was certainly more vital,
and it will therefore be profitable to sketch its history, if only
for purposes of contrast. This earlier movement must be carefully
distinguished from the larger subject of woman’s place in English
literature, from her contribution to and her growing interest in
it; above all, it must be distinguished from the history of English
_femmes savantes_. Such a larger subject there is, but I have no
intention of treating it here. My purpose is merely to point out
those social and literary institutions set up by English women which
correspond in a general way with the salons as described in the
second and third chapters of this work.
The Elizabethan prototype of the salon is even closer to the
Renaissance courts than the French salons themselves. The greatest
of the Elizabethan patronesses, the Countess of Pembroke, was, even
in her own day, compared with Elizabeth Gonzaga,[150] and her house
at Wilton, which contemporaries refer to as a ‘college’ or ‘school,’
was like nothing so much as the little academe that we have seen to
be characteristic of Italy. Although the most distinguished female
writer of her age, the Countess of Pembroke was, and is, better
known for her coterie than for her writings. ‘She was,’ says Aubrey,
‘the greatest patronesse of wit and learning of any lady of her
time.’[151] Spenser hailed her (in true salon style) as Urania,
and Meres compared her to Octavia, Virgil’s patroness. Like her
brother, she was enthusiastic for the classical tradition, and used
her influence with Kyd and Daniel to keep Senecan tragedy alive. The
dedication to Daniel’s _Defence of Ryme_ implies that the book was
produced under her immediate inspiration. The author refers to Wilton
as his ‘best schoole,’ in the same tone in which Spenser acknowledges
himself ‘bounden’ to it ‘by many singular favours and great graces.’
Miss Young, the recent biographer of the Countess, who proclaims
her ‘in the very best sense of the word a bluestocking,’ marshals a
list of twenty works dedicated to her, and the list might be almost
indefinitely extended by adding to it the passages in Elizabethan
poetry written in her praise. To neglect the latter would be to pass
over some of the most typical utterances of Edmund Spenser.
Thus Elizabethan England saw the salon at its finest. With the ideal
of courtly society numerous translations of the Italian classics had
already made it familiar. There is evidence of the ideal everywhere
in Shakespeare’s romantic comedies. The preciosity of the court of
Navarre and the whole tone of _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, the badinage
of Benedick and Beatrice, the poetic dialogue of Lorenzo and Jessica
in praise of the night, and even the mingling of the courtly and
the pastoral in the life of Arden Forest—these are all near to the
spirit of the Renaissance court and the society with which we are
dealing. The company of gallant men and gracious women idealized
in Shakespeare’s comedies might well have served as the model of
the salon, had the seventeenth century fostered the development of
anything so courtly.
Hardly less distinguished is the group of men who surrounded Lucy,
Countess of Bedford. Her house at Twickenham Park, famous for its
Holbeins and its garden, she loved to fill with men of genius. Ben
Jonson, Chapman, Davies, Drayton, and Daniel were all proud to call
themselves her friend, and almost every one of them dedicated to her
some work of permanent value in English literature. Jonson addressed
to her a poetical epistle and three characteristic epigrams. His
language, though pompous, is probably sincere:
Lucy, you brightness of our sphere, who are
The Muses’ evening as their morning-star.[152]
The Countess was the recipient of more great verse than the entire
group of bluestockings. Daniel, who celebrated her in the _Vision
of the Twelve Goddesses_, has been called her poet laureate, and
there would be no reason for rejecting the title if it did not more
properly belong to John Donne. Not only did that poet write _Twicknam
Garden_ in her honour, and address her repeatedly in verse epistles
which praise her beauty, virtue, and learning in terms of the most
affectionate extravagance, but, says Mr. Gosse, owed to her the very
revival of interest in his art.[153] Donne’s letters seem to show
that he submitted poems to the judgment of the Countess; for she was
herself a poet, and is thought to have written one of the elegies
commonly attributed to Donne.[154] Certain it is that at her house
he enjoyed the very type of society which, a century later, made
the fame of salons. He always speaks of Lady Bedford with the same
gratitude and awe which may be found in Castiglione’s praise of the
Duchess of Urbino; he accepted the same sort of pecuniary assistance
from her that Frenchmen received from Madame Geoffrin. Nay, more, he
goes to her in her garden that he may, at eye and ear,
Receive such balmes as else cure everything.[155]
He writes to Sir Henry Goodyer:
For her delight (since she descends to them) I had reserved not
only all the verses I should make, but all the thoughts of women’s
worthiness.
He is concerned not to be lightly esteemed ‘in that Tribe and that
house’ where he has lived.[156]
In all respects, therefore, the Countess’s coterie would seem to
stand just half-way between court and salon—if it is necessary to
distinguish the two terms at all. If it is urged that we have no
evidence of the stimulus wrought by conversation in the group, it may
be answered that even this lack is apparent only and is due simply to
the meagreness of contemporary records.
Similarly slender is our knowledge of other women whom we ought
in all probability to associate with the two just discussed: Lady
Rutland, Lady Wroth, and the Countess of Huntington, women who felt a
keen interest in poets and in the welfare of poetry. As it is, the
death of Lady Bedford in 1627 must be taken as marking the end of the
Elizabethan system of feminine patronage.
* * * * *
With the accession of Charles I and the supremacy of French social
ideals in the person of Queen Henrietta Maria, a change comes over
the salon. A new side of it is developed, and an older side is
forgotten. What had been a court of patronage became a court of
love. The system of Platonic love, which is a characteristic mark of
salons at various periods, comes to the fore. It had existed in the
earlier salons, as Donne’s Petrarchan devotion to the Countess of
Bedford is sufficient to show; but the new order of things made it
the centre of all. This shift of emphasis was a loss to the salon,
for literature—or rather poetry—became a tool in the process of
courtship rather than an end in itself; and the mistress accepted
poetical conceits and extravagant lyrics as evidence of worship
from her ‘servants’ in love. Thus the whole system of courtly love
was introduced hot from France, and the subtleties and silliness of
the _précieuses galantes_ were seen in England.[157] The type of
the new salon mistress is the Countess Carlisle, a Percy by birth,
the favourite of Henrietta Maria, and the idol of the court. She
received poetical tributes of the conventional kind from half the
poets of the era, and the story of her gallantries—to give them no
harsher name—is a part of the history of England.
Intrigue is the natural result of gallantry such as this, and
intrigue lasted long after the original Platonic impetus was spent.
Intrigue naturally tends away from social life: Platonic emotions
make excellent subjects for discussion, but intrigue is impatient
of talk. Any one who will compare Cartwright’s _Panegyric to the
Countess of Carlisle_ with Suckling’s _Lady Carlisle Walking in
Hampton Court Garden_ may see how readily Platonic ecstasies sank
into the filth of the mire. The two poems measure the extremes of
courtly verse, and define its nature. It ranges, as Mr. Fletcher has
said, ‘all the way from exalted mysticism through mere gallantry, to
mocking cynicism.’ Although these moods all flourished in the foreign
salons of various periods, they never became in England the peculiar
attributes of salon life as distinct from mere social customs.
They passed on to the salons of the Restoration little more than a
general tradition of Platonic and pastoral mannerism and a handful of
classical pseudonyms useful to the conventionally amorous.
* * * * *
When with the Restoration the feminine influence on the current of
literature emerges once more, it is again changed in aspect—like
everything else. So far as the destinies of the English salon are
concerned, the Restoration marks no real advance. If there is not
an actual loss of ground, there is at least a change of direction.
Women now become aspirants to an independent literary reputation.
The groups which literary women formed about themselves never
quite suggest the atmosphere of the salon, for their aims seldom
give evidence of a desire to approach literature from the social
side.[158] It was no longer the ambition of woman to rule the world
of letters from above or from beyond as a sort of Muse by whose aid
and in whose honour all was to be done, but to enter that world
herself and there to claim equality with man. It was again only a
shift of emphasis, but it was sufficient to destroy the social aspect
of the salon. A salon is not a school of professionals.
It seems strange that the Parisian salon should not have been
imported bodily by the returning courtiers. A French salon was
for a time conducted at court, as we shall see; but it was not
brought there through English influence, and always remained a
foreign growth, not even adopting the English language. English
literary women, despite the presence of this model, seem to have
been incapable of creating anything more than a circle of friends,
cordially interested in their literary ambitions, but hardly
considering the coterie the highest social expression of the literary
life.
The nearest approach to salon life in this period is the coterie
formed by the ‘matchless Orinda,’ Mrs. Katherine Philips. This
amiable young woman, with a gift for versifying and a truly social
instinct, achieved no slight reputation in her own day. At Cardigan
Priory, her Welsh estate, she conducted something very like a salon.
‘She instituted,’ says Mr. Gosse,[159] ‘a Society of Friendship
to which male and female members were admitted, and in which
poetry, religion and the human heart were to form the subjects of
discussion.’ Here is the salon spirit and a reliance on conversation
as the truest inspiration to social life—a thing which we shall not
encounter again till the days of the bluestockings. Orinda adopted
the prevalent custom of giving literary names to her friends,
indulged in Platonic friendships of the most florid kind, praised her
female friends in verse, and despatched glowing sentiments to them in
letters:
I gasp for you with an impatience that is not to be imagined by any
soul wound up to a less concern in friendship than yours is, and
therefore I cannot hope to make others sensible of my vast desires
to enjoy you.[160]
Whatever interest Mrs. Philips’s works may possess must be shared
with this group, with ‘Rosania,’ ‘Lucasia,’ ‘Poliarchus,’ and the
rest, for to them a large proportion of her writing was directly
addressed. It is to be regretted that we are not more fully informed
regarding the relations of certain eminent men with the coterie. The
general interest felt by the Royalist poets in her career has been
taken to point to a personal connection with her, but it is doubtful
whether the relations of such men as Dryden, Cowley, and Denham with
her were anything more than formally courteous. To them she was a
new phenomenon in the literary world, a female author, a prodigy
that attracted attention but did not threaten rivalry—a woman and
therefore to be flattered, a poetess and therefore to be called a
tenth Muse. Cowley, who equates her with Pope Joan, is almost comic
in his praise:
But if Apollo should design
A woman laureat to make,
Without dispute he would Orinda take,
Though Sappho and the famous Nine
Stood by and did repine.[161]
But this is elegy, not burlesque.
With Jeremy Taylor, ‘Palæmon,’ the case is different. In 1657 he put
forth a duodecimo volume entitled _A Discourse of the Nature, Offices
and Measures of Friendship_, which, the title-page announces, was
‘written in answer to a Letter from the most ingenious and vertuous
M. K. P.’ Orinda had written to Taylor, with whom she must have been
already on terms of intimacy, to inquire ‘how far a dear and perfect
friendship is authorized by the principles of Christianity.’ The
answer is a wholly delightful essay which was widely popular in the
seventeenth century and deserves to be more generally known to-day.
Taylor praises Mrs. Philips as ‘not only greatly instructed by the
direct notices of things, but also by great experience in the matter
of which you now inquire.’ He concludes that it is not ill that
she should ‘entertain brave friendships and worthy societies’; but
takes occasion to warn her against the fantastic Platonism of the
salon:[162]
They that build castles in the aire, and look upon friendship, as
upon a fine Romance, a thing that pleases the fancy, but is good
for nothing else will doe well when they are asleep, or when they
come to Elysium; and for ought I know in the mean time may be as
much in love with _Mandana_ in the _Grand Cyrus_, as with the
_Countess of Exeter_; and by dreaming of perfect and abstracted
friendships, make them so immaterial that they perish in the
handling and become good for nothing.
In the postscript to Mrs. Philips, she is requested to forward the
essay to Dr. Wedderburn, if she ‘shall think it fit that these pass
further’ than her own ‘eye and closet.’ Such was Taylor’s trust in
Orinda; such his tribute to her.
It must be admitted that Orinda’s relations with the authors of her
time are little short of remarkable. Her name is written across
some of the most characteristic poetry of the age. When she was
but twenty, commendatory verses by her were prefixed to the Poems
of Vaughan the Silurist. Before the end of her short life—she
died in 1664, soon after her thirty-fourth birthday—she had even
attracted the notice of Dryden. Her contemporaries appear to have
been serious in their belief that she had made herself a permanent
place in English literature, and for many years after her death
kept her fame alive by publishing her plays, poems, and letters, in
which she was invariably described as ‘celebrated,’ ‘matchless,’
and ‘incomparable.’ Her coterie made but little impression on the
literature of its time; but that may well have been due to its short
career. Mrs. Philips possessed a refinement of taste and of character
by no means common among the literary ladies of the time, and a
noble though highly sentimental affection for her friends. These
are characteristics which, had she lived, she might have made of
practical advantage to the world of letters.
* * * * *
On a somewhat lower social plane the notorious Mrs. Aphra Behn
carried on the traditions of the matchless Orinda. Like her, Mrs.
Behn had her coterie which she celebrated in conventional lyrics.
In the poem entitled _Our Cabal_, the various members are described
under pastoral pseudonyms, Alexis, Damon, Amoret, and the like. It is
impossible to identify the persons referred to, but it is unlikely
that any of them attained to literary fame. Gallantry, coquetry,
and the whole paraphernalia of the amatory art formed the exclusive
business of the coterie. With the world of letters it had little to
do. Thus it touches the salon upon its least important side. But
Mrs. Behn, or ‘Astræa,’ as her friends rashly called her, developed
another side by emulating the practice of Mlle. Scudéry, and weaving
certain of her own adventures—for she had had many—into the body of
her novels. This practice of colouring the events of an interminable
romance with personal allusions and allegorical meanings was one of
the principal results of salon activity in Paris during the later
seventeenth century; but it is not characteristic of the salon at
its finest and was, so far as English literature was concerned, but
a fad which had no future at all. Moreover Mrs. Behn’s romances lack
what is best in the type, that courtliness which can alone redeem
such works from artificiality and dulness. It is true that Mrs. Behn
escapes dulness, but she does not achieve courtliness. Thus she
misses the very point at which such work may come under the influence
of fine society. As it is, far from serving the cause of literature
by attracting authors to the urbanities of life, her scandalous
novels brought both their author and her profession into disrepute.
Her unique achievement was to show that a woman could make her living
by her pen. Her career brought her inevitably into touch and even
into competition with male authors, and her easy manners enabled her
to associate on terms of pleasant familiarity with Dryden and Otway;
but all this is suggestive rather of the _camaraderie_ of the modern
literary world than of the atmosphere of salons.
* * * * *
Meanwhile Hortense, Duchess of Mazarin, and niece of the Cardinal
of that name, had set up in London a genuine French salon. It owes
its somewhat exotic fame entirely to the Chevalier de Saint Évremond
who wrote of its mistress in language of the most riotous hyperbole.
Some of the best-known pages of this amorous old wit were produced
in honour of the fair French refugee at the court of Charles II. He
wrote poems to her; he wrote a ‘portrait’ of her, in which her charms
are analysed in such detail as almost to indicate a state of dotage
in him; to satisfy a whim of hers he wrote a Funeral Oration for her
while she was yet alive that she might see her praises set forth in
the manner of Bossuet. He wrote a discourse on religion to embody the
thoughts which she had drawn out during a conversation in her salon.
In a letter to her, which accompanied the essay, he asserts that she
has given the lie to the old statement that truth must be banished
from ordinary conversation, for she can make truth so attractive
as to reconcile all minds to it and restore it to its proper place
in the world.[163] But all this is a mere speck in the avalanche of
flattery. Her conversation, he assures her elsewhere,[164] surpasses
Plutarch in gravity, Seneca in sententiousness, and Montaigne in
depth.
But the philosophic goddess and her withered prophet were not always
happy together. The Duchess was overfond of bassette, a game in which
Saint Évremond indulged chiefly to please her, lamenting the loss of
her conversation the while, and addressing poetical protests to her.
The passion for gaming, which threatened to become a profession or a
fury with her, is less revolting than the _amours_ in which the lady
(more beautiful than Helen or Cleopatra[165]) involved herself. The
fascination of the Merry Monarch and the death of a favourite lover
after a duel fought with an infatuated nephew, bring her love-affairs
out of the Platonic atmosphere, so essential to salons, into the
realm of ugly realism.
The salon Mazarin, which came to an end with the death of the Duchess
in 1699, thus tended to associate the literary hostess with vice as
well as with letters. As Mrs. Behn had degraded the name of woman in
the world of hack-writers, so the Duchess of Mazarin degraded it
in the drawing-room. Her salon represented a vicious and a foreign
institution, which, though it gained a foothold at Court, was quite
without influence upon English life and literature.
* * * * *
With the death of the Duchess of Mazarin we reach the end of the
seventeenth century and the end of anything like a salon in England
until the time of the bluestockings. The results of the feminist
movement at the close of that century[166] are seen in two distinct
yet definitely related facts. In the first place, a large number of
women were encouraged, by the success of Mrs. Behn, to attempt the
production of literature, and the female author and wit became a
current subject of satire. With all this we have here nothing to do.
Women like Catherine Trotter, Mary Pix, and Mrs. Manley, far from
promoting the social recognition of literature, tended to deflect the
influence of woman from the drawing-room to the noise and strife of
Grub Street. The satire that was poured out on them and their kind as
learned women must not be taken to point to the existence of anything
like a salon, strictly considered. Terms borrowed from French
literature were freely flung about; but references to _ruelles_
and _femmes savantes_ were so loosely used that they are not to be
thought of having the same significance when repeated by English
authors that they have in their own country.
In the second place, and largely as a result of the opinion in which
such female wits were held, we find a mass of tracts, consisting
of Defences of, Apologies for, and Serious Proposals to Women,
all working towards a vindication of the sex. Such vindications
frequently strike the reader as having been written to prove the very
charges which they exist to rebut. In any case, this flood of feeble
defences seems to show that woman had forgotten her high office as
inspirer and patron of letters, which she had hitherto always taken
for granted, and had decided to occupy herself with vague questions
of equality and natural capacity. We have moved far from the spacious
times of the Countess of Pembroke.
In the age of Anne, English women lost what was probably the best
chance they ever had to reëstablish the feminine patronage of letters
which distinguished the age of Elizabeth. The tone of urbanity which
characterized the literature of the early eighteenth century ought to
have given birth to salons. The presence of a Stuart queen upon the
throne and the supremacy of a school of authors by no means averse
from social pleasures, offered a unique opportunity to women to give
social expression to their interest in literature and to inspire and
assist authors. But the opportunity was lost. Feminine activity in
the literary world continued to be associated with notorious names,
with the scurrilous _New Atlantis_ of Mary Manley, and with the loose
career of Mrs. Centlivre. Women authors were already Bohemians.
‘In the female world,’ says Johnson in his _Life of Addison_, ‘any
acquaintance with books was distinguished only to be censured.’
This pronouncement of Johnson’s is of that large general nature which
is likely to give offence to specialists. A multitude of exceptions
to it will occur at once to any one. The Duchess of Queensbury, for
example, patronized Gay; Dean Swift was not uninfluenced by the
women who surrounded him; Pope addressed verse-epistles to Martha
Blount; later in the century, Young satirized the literary female,
and Richardson had his group of adoring ‘Daughters.’ But none of
these really changes the significance of Johnson’s summary. When
he referred to the censure visited upon literary women he may well
have been thinking of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whose acquaintance
with the authors of her time was wider than that ever possessed by
the bluestockings. But though the noble lady had genuine interest
in letters and very remarkable powers, she was wholly without that
courtly character which is indispensable to the hostess of a salon.
She repelled men as much by her insolent cleverness as by her
slovenly manners. Finally her long residence abroad withdrew her
completely from the literary circle which she knew so well.
It was the work of the middle decades of the eighteenth century
to remove the odium in which women’s interest in literature had
been held. The world of female readers became almost as large and
influential as that of the male, so that by 1778 Johnson could
remark, ‘All our ladies read now.’ The Bluestocking Club, which marks
the first definite reappearance of the salon in London, shows the
desire of woman to extend her function in the literary world so as
to include in it the office of patron, as well as that of author and
reader. But this new patronage was to be primarily social, and was to
express itself first in various social diversions, which preluded the
more formal salons, and to which we now proceed.
CHAPTER VI
CONVERSATION PARTIES AND LITERARY ASSEMBLIES
Not the least pleasant of the social gatherings for conversation was
the levee, or reception held on rising from bed. The custom was of
course adopted by people of fashion in imitation of the popular court
function, and it always retained something of the courtly atmosphere,
its popularity in fine society being due to the sense of importance
which it lent to the host or hostess. Madame de Tencin, for example,
thus held court from eight o’clock in the morning, queening it over
everybody, ‘from the lowest tools to the highest.’[167] Mascarille,
it will be remembered, boasts that he never rises from bed without
the company of half a dozen _beaux esprits_. Yet despite its
imitation of the court, there must have been about this kind of
reception a certain intimacy and ease that were lacking in the more
formal assemblies held later in the day.[168]
[Illustration: THE LEVEE
From an engraving of the fourth painting in Hogarth’s _Marriage à la
Mode_]
In England the levee had been known for perhaps a hundred
years;[169] but it first becomes of importance to the student of
literature about the middle of the century. A good general impression
of it may be obtained from the fourth plate of Hogarth’s _Marriage à
la Mode_, published in 1745. The hostess, half dressed, is seated at
her toilet-table, under the ministrations of her hair-dresser, and is
engaged in conversation with her lover, who is reclining on a sofa
near by. In the background is seen the bed, one curtain of which is
still drawn. A negro butler is passing chocolate to the guests who
are ranged in front of the bed, while an Italian tenor is regaling
them with solos to the accompaniment of a flute. This latter point
is significant in the satire, for it is evident that the hostess is
incapable of conducting a true conversazione, and has therefore had
recourse to providing her guests with other entertainment, while she
pursues her amorous intrigue.
A later and even more familiar representation of the levee is found
at the opening of the _School for Scandal_, where Lady Sneerwell is
‘discovered’ at her toilet. When this scene is correctly represented
on the stage the lady’s guests are shown as drinking chocolate
at her levee, and there characteristically displaying their
conversational gifts.
That the levee was at its best essentially a literary function is
shown by the encouragement it received from Samuel Johnson. The
account of his morning receptions is preserved for us by Dr. Maxwell,
whose description must be quoted in full:
About twelve o’clock I commonly visited him, and frequently found
him in bed, or declaiming over his tea, which he drank very
plentifully. He generally had a levee of morning visitors, chiefly
men of letters; Hawkesworth, Goldsmith, Murphy, Langton, Steevens,
Beauclerk, etc., etc., and sometimes learned ladies, particularly I
remember a French lady of wit and fashion doing him the honour of a
visit.[170] He seemed to be considered as a kind of public oracle,
whom everybody thought they had a right to visit and consult; and
doubtless they were well rewarded.[171]
When Johnson visited Boswell in Edinburgh after the tour of the
Hebrides ‘he had, from ten o’clock to one or two, a constant levee
of various persons, of different characters and descriptions;’ so
that poor Mrs. Boswell was obliged to ‘devote the greater part of the
morning to the endless task of pouring out tea.’[172]
This custom, thus sanctioned by fashion and by literary authority,
was adopted by all who pretended to wit. In 1760, Goldsmith sneers
at the philosophical beau who ‘receives company in his study, in all
the pensive formality of slippers, night-gown, and easy-chair.’[173]
Flavia, in the same author’s _Double Transformation_, after marrying
an Oxford Fellow, aspires to the reputation of a _femme savante_:
Proud to be seen she kept a bevy
Of powdered coxcombs at her levee.
By 1779 the function had become so popular that its name was
frequently extended to any formal entertainment where conversation
was the principal attraction, even when it was held in the
evening.[174]
The levee merged easily into the formal breakfast. This function
might occur at any hour from eight o’clock in the morning to three
in the afternoon.[175] It was in 1750 that Madame du Bocage recorded
her impressions of Mrs. Montagu’s breakfasts, generalizing upon the
custom of the nation in these words:
In the morning breakfasts which enchant as much by the exquisite
viands as by the richness of the plate in which they are served
up, agreeably bring together both the people of the country and
strangers [_i.e._, both natives and foreigners].[176]
The diaries and letters of Beattie, Mrs. Delany, Miss Burney, and
Miss More are strewn with references to this fashionable meal.
In the spring of 1774, Walpole professes himself frightened at
the inundation of them coming on.[177] A favourite diversion at
these matutinal parties, as at entertainments later in the day,
was the declamation of Thomas Sheridan (who would repeat Gray’s
_Elegy_, Dryden’s _Ode_, and ‘everything that everybody could say by
heart’[178]), the French readings of Tessier, the tragic recitations
of Tighe (who expected his auditors to swoon from emotion), and,
occasionally, bits of recitation or acting by Garrick. Sheridan gave
so many of these literary breakfasts that Mrs. Boscawen suspected
that he received money for them.[179] At times such functions were
more or less public, and were held in the Haymarket, at Vauxhall, or
at Bath, in the Assembly Rooms.
The receptions of the later afternoon and evening are of a less
definite character. Beattie describes a gathering at Mrs. Montagu’s
as ‘an assembly or conversation or rout.’[180] The entertainment was
of wide scope, as in Italian and French drawing-rooms, and might
include dancing, card-playing, and literary readings, as well as
conversation.[181] In this work we are concerned only with the
literary aspect of these parties; the origin and the more serious
results of the London salon are discussed elsewhere, so that the
rest of this chapter may be devoted to a consideration of the means
adopted for shining in conversation at these parties, and the attempt
to connect such assemblies directly with the production of poetry.
It is surely a misfortune that contemporary descriptions of
the conversazione should be generally satirical in tone; but
it is natural enough, for conversation, unsupported by other
entertainment, tends, in large groups, to pedantry on the one hand,
and to frivolousness on the other. English literature produced no
Molière to satirize the salons; but the conversazione did give both
character and title to one great comedy, the _School for Scandal_.
Although this play is not, like the _Critique de l’École des
Femmes_, an adequate criticism of the literary drawing-room, it does
nevertheless preserve prominent aspects of it, and we shall have
occasion to refer to it repeatedly in illustrating the nature of the
conversazione.[182] Another criticism of this entertainment is found
in a book now totally forgotten, entitled, _Modern Manners, or the
Country Cousins, in a series of Poetical Epistles_. This is the work
of the Rev. Samuel Hoole, son of the translator of Tasso and Ariosto,
and appeared in the year 1782. The poems describe the visit of a
north-English family to London, somewhat after the manner of Smollett
in _Humphry Clinker_, and of Anstey in the _New Bath Guide_. The
tenth epistle is an account of Lady Chattony’s conversazione.[183]
At that assembly old Mr. Ralph Rusty is served with lukewarm coffee
and tea and a minute bit of cake, which made him long for more. The
company splits up into groups, each with their backs turned on the
rest. The first party which he joins is (naturally) talking scandal:
‘My lovely Miss Wagtail,’ says pretty Beau Brisker,
‘I’ve seen your dear friend, sweet Miss Fatty Fanfrisker.’
‘—Dear creature!—she’s truly what all men adore so’—
‘—Faith not quite so charming but some I know more so’—
‘—You difficult thing! you’re as rude as a bear,
You think nobody handsome I vow and declare!
What fault can you find?—to be sure, her hair’s sandy,
And Scapegrace declares that her legs are quite “bandy.”’
His second visit is to a group engaged in musical gossip:
‘a nymph with a white varnished face
And a sallow thin man, almost covered with lace.’
He escapes from their gushing ecstasies only to fall on a political
discussion:
Next a party of critics and authors I joined,
And thought I had found out a set to my mind:
Cries a little black man, ‘I’m convinced, Dr. Guzzle,
’Tis a poor paltry book that was mentioned by Puzzle.
I’m told too that Ratsbane and Screachowl abuse it?—
Have you, my dear Doctor, had time to peruse it?’
‘O, yes, I have skimmed it—’tis terrible trash,
An _oleo_ of nonsense, an ill-savour’d _hash_.’
‘Sir, good Mr. Shuttlecock’s pamphlet, depend on’t,
Which now is just published, will soon make an end on’t’—
‘I heard,’ cries another, ‘at Cadell’s to-day,
That Johnson’s in town, and is writing away;
I was charmed with his Milton; what judgment and spirit!
Mr. Rattlesnake, sure you’ll allow this has merit?
You’ve read it, no doubt, Sir,’—‘Not I, Sir, indeed—
Read Johnson!—I’d sooner subscribe to the creed!—
His opinions, religious and civil, I hate—
Sir, he’d make us all slaves to the church and the state!’—
‘Gude Sir,’ cries a Scot, springing up from behind,
And presenting his snuff-box, ‘you’re quite o’ my mind;
’Tho’ the Doctor would fain give our poets the law,
O’ the spirit of verse he knows nothing at a’;
In spite of his critique, I canna’ perceive
What there is in your poem of Adam and Eve:
An Ossian you read, Milton canna’ ga doun
’Tis lik after a virgin a mess o’ the toun:
No, troth, here the Doctor does nothing but dream,
For he is too purblind to ken the subleeme’—
‘Hold, hold, my good friend—I must stand by old Milton,
While the sword that I wear has a blade or a hilt on;
That great politician, that torch of our nation,
Must never be mentioned without veneration:
Respecting the Doctor, you say very true,
I think him as scurvy a critic as you,
But consider him now in a worse point of view:
Pray is he not _pensioned_?—and does he not write, Sir,
To make us tame fools, and believe black is white, Sir?
All friends to our freedom that _creature_ must hate
Who pockets three hundred a year from the state.’
‘Gad troth, maister Rattlesnake, why do you mantion,
With so much asperity, Sir, that word _pansion_?
The Doctor deserves na sic thing—but what then
In troth, I weel know many axcellent men,
Who never have thought it a shame or disgrace
T’accept a wee pansion or snug pratty place;
But then they have a’ sat doun selent as deeth—
The Doctor still vents his pestiferous breeth
Against a’ Scotch tenets and Scotch reputation,
Tho’ he found a gude friend in a Laird of our nation.’
‘I see,’ cries another, ‘your anger he wakes,
Because he’s no friends to the _country of cakes_;
Nor am I surpriz’d, for the place of our birth
We all of us think is the best upon earth;
And therefore we ne’er can the writer approve,
Who slights the dear land we so partially love.’
‘You speak like a seer—ah! you ken, Sir, his Tour,
Our vary worst foe could have written no more;
In thot he insinuates, tho’ he canna’ see
Twa yards, that we’ve na sic a thing as a tree,
Tho’ just by the road there were saxteen or twanty,
And, if he’d gone more to the laft, he’d found planty;
Nay, troth, it’s a fact, Sir, that’s weel understood,
Au’ Scotland was antiently covered with wood.’
Mr. Rusty’s unhappy evening was concluded by listening to the tales
of a young lord just returned from his travels, a buck who wishes to
fight a duel with him because he laughs at incredible stories.
There is nothing very witty in this poem, as the quotations may show;
and the satires no doubt sank of their own weight; but in spite of
its dulness, the account would appear to be, in the main, a fair
picture of the conversazione. We may notice, in the first place,
that Lady Chattony has followed the best traditions of the salon in
reducing her refreshments to a minimum, depending for the success of
her reception entirely upon the conversation of her guests.[184] The
talk, again, is not confined to a large circle; but is broken up,
after Mrs. Vesey’s manner, into a series of small groups. We have
the usual references to gossip, scandal, and chatter about clothes,
politics, and the opera, with occasional approaches to Sheridan’s
method of satire, but with none of his cleverness.
It is inevitable that any satire on the conversazione should dwell
on the tendency to scandal and gossip. So inevitable is their
presence in the salons that it seems hardly necessary to point it
out; but it is essential to be at the true explanation of their
prevalence, which no satire is likely to point out. Scandal, and its
sister, Gossip, are the short cuts to cleverness, and cleverness is
the one indispensable thing to the frequenters of salons. This is
abundantly evident in the _School for Scandal_. It is wit for which
Lady Sneerwell’s guests are striving, and they will mar a character
that they may make a _mot_. ‘There is no possibility,’ says Lady
Sneerwell, ‘of being witty without a little ill-nature; the malice of
a good thing is the barb that makes it stick,’[185] and Lady Teazle
is in practical agreement with her; ‘I vow I bear no malice against
the people I abuse; when I say an ill-natured thing ’tis out of pure
good humour.’
Sheridan was not the only dramatist to satirize the salons and their
scandalous talk. His comedy was imitated by Thomas Holcroft in
_Seduction_,[186] a play whose popularity on the stage was equalled
by its popularity in print. The conversation descriptive of an
assembly at Lady Morden’s is in obvious imitation of the Scandal
School.
_Sir Frederic._ Sir Nathan Neaptide, the yellow admiral, came.
_Lord Morden._ An agreeable guest!
_Mrs. Modely._ Oh! rude as his own boatswain.
_Sir Frederic._ Would teach a startling blasphemy, rather than want
good conversation.
_Lady Morden._ He attempts satire.
_Lord Morden._ But utters abuse.
_Mrs. Modely._ That makes him so much respected.
_Lady Morden._ Yes; like a chimney-sweeper in a crowd, he makes
his way by being dirty....
_Sir Frederic._ The widow Twinkle, as usual, talked a vast deal
about reputation.
_Lady Morden._ One is apt to admire a thing one wants.
_Lord Morden._ She always takes infinite pains to place her
reputation, like broken china in a buffet, with the
best side outward.
_Lady Morden._ She may plaister, and cement, but will never bring
it to bear handling.
Other aspirants to conversational fame adopted the less questionable
habit of talking sentiments. Here again the _School for Scandal_
reveals the trick of the salons, for Joseph Surface has won himself
a place in the group by virtue of his philosophical and ethical
maxims. Sheridan’s brilliant satire of a reigning fad in literature
and society was anticipated by Goldsmith in _She Stoops to Conquer_,
in which, when Kate Hardcastle wishes to speak like a fine lady,
she at once begins to talk sentiments.[187] This habit of lending
a semblance of depth to one’s conversation by the introduction of
philosophical aphorisms is no doubt as old as the salon itself. At
its best, there is nothing contemptible in the sentiment, as the
long and brilliant history of the maxim in French literature may
prove. The reputation of Mme. de Sablé’s salon was largely made by
the maxim or _pensée_, and all the later salons afford examples of
its vitality. Madame Geoffrin was famous for it. ‘Madame Geoffrin,’
wrote Mme. Necker, ‘a mis toute sa raison en maximes,’[188] and
the same writer praises the work of English authors for their
successful production of this type, finding these authors otherwise
deficient in moral principles.[189] The maxim, ethical sentiment,
or philosophical truth sententiously expressed, did indeed attain
substantial existence in the essays of Samuel Johnson, who fancied
that mankind might come in time to ‘write all aphoristically;’ but
in English conversation it never found a thoroughly congenial soil.
‘Sentiments’ were popular, but, like much that was popular, they were
hollow too. The Dowager Countess Gower writes to Mrs. Delany that
the bluestockings are at Sunning Wells, where they ‘sport sentiments
from morn tell noon, from noon to dewy eve.’[190] The pages of
the _Wit’s Magazine_ teemed with collections of them: ‘Flattery,
like a cameleon, assumes the colours of the object it is nearest
to.’ The record of bluestocking maxims and sentiments preserved in
letters and diaries is amazing, but not because of its brilliance.
Mrs. Montagu wrote the following to Miss Burney, in reference to
the character of Mr. Vesey, ‘A frippery character, like a gaudy
flower, may please while it is in bloom; but it is the virtuous only
that, like the aromatics, preserve their sweet and reviving odour
when withered.’[191] This is exactly in the style of Julia, the
once-fashionable heroine of _The Rivals_, who, in respect of her
conversation, might be own sister to Joseph Surface: ‘When hearts
deserving of happiness would unite their fortunes, Virtue would
crown them with an unfading garland of modest hurtless flowers; but
ill-judging Passion will force the gaudier Rose into the wreath,
whose thorn offends them when its leaves are dropped.’
Closely akin to the neatly-turned sentiment is the epigram and this,
in all its forms, the salon, following Continental models, sought to
stimulate. One thinks immediately of the poetical epigrams of Sir
Benjamin Backbite, his impromptu verses on Lady Frizzle’s feather
catching fire, his rebuses, the charade which he made at Mrs.
Drowsie’s conversazione, and, above all, of that sprightly extempore
conceit on Lady Betty Curricle’s ponies:
Sure never were seen two such beautiful ponies;
Other horses are Clowns—and these macaronies;
Nay, to give ’em this title I’m sure isn’t wrong,
Their legs are so slim and their tails[192] are so long.
There was no more certain way of achieving a reputation for wit
than by the impromptu composition of these little verses. No lover
of Goldsmith will fail to remember Garrick’s epigram on the poet
who ‘wrote like an angel and talked like poor Poll.’ Less hackneyed
is the couplet which Dr. Young produced at the ‘World,’ a club of
gentlemen who were amusing themselves after dinner by scratching
verses, with their diamonds, upon the wine-glasses. Having no jewel
of his own, Young, when his turn came round, was obliged to borrow
Chesterfield’s, and then wrote:
Accept a miracle: instead of wit,
See two dull lines with Stanhope’s pencil writ.[193]
It is difficult to find a volume of eighteenth century verse that
does not bear witness to the popularity of the epigram. Every
miscellany teems with them. No collected edition of poems was
complete without a handful of them. They are recorded in every diary
and commonplace-book, and were exchanged by friends in the course
of familiar correspondence. High and low, the peer of wit and the
pretender to it, vied with one another in the production of them.
All alike seem to have reached a dead level of mediocrity. The
charade which Johnson made in honour of his friend Dr. Barnard[194]
is no better and no worse than scores of impromptu verses quoted in
Walpole’s _Letters_ or the _Asylum for Fugitive Pieces_.
Much of this, no doubt, seems trivial. But wherever the spirit of the
salon appears, evidence of its presence is seen in the production
and general esteem of such trifles: rebuses, anagrams, madrigals,
enigmas, charades, and _bouts rimés_. The explanation of it all goes
back, perhaps, to the Italian Renaissance, when, as Burckhardt has
shown, an epigram could lay the foundation of a scholar’s celebrity:
It was held the greatest of all triumphs when an epigram was
mistaken for a genuine copy from some old marble or when it was so
good that all Italy learned it by heart, as happened in the case of
some of Bembo’s.
The popularity of epigrams in fine English society is amusingly
illustrated by the entertainments provided by a certain Mrs.
(afterwards Lady) Miller at her villa near Bath. The character
and the results of her attempt to stimulate the production of
literature are typical, and, as they have left a considerable
record in print, it may be profitable to consider them somewhat at
length. She introduced what she was pleased to term the ‘little
Gallic institution’ of _bouts rimés_. Lists of riming words were
distributed among her guests, who composed verses suggested by
them, employing them in their given order. The resulting effusions
were then placed in a vase decorated with laurel branches and pink
ribbons, erected upon a ‘modern altar.’ ‘It is at present,’ writes
this ingenious lady, ‘the receptacle of all the contending poetical
morsels which every other Thursday (formerly Friday) are drawn out
of it indiscriminately, and read aloud by the gentlemen present,
each in his turn. Their particular merits are afterwards discussed
by them, and prizes assigned to three out of the whole that appear
to be the most deserving. Their authors are then, and not before,
called for, who seldom fail to be _announced_ either by themselves,
or, if absent, by their friends. Then the prize poems are read aloud
a second time to the company, each by its author, if present, if not,
by other Gentlemen, and wreaths of Myrtle presented publicly by the
Institutress[195] to each successful writer.’
When these verses were published they roused, if not the general
esteem which the Institutress plainly expected for them, the interest
of Miss Burney, the curiosity of Boswell, and the mirth of Walpole.
The latter wrote, in his most delightful mood, to the Countess of
Ailesbury:
You must know, Madam, that near Bath is erected a new Parnassus,
composed of three laurels, a myrtle-tree, a weeping-willow, and
a view of the Avon, which has been new christened Helicon. Ten
years ago there lived a Madam Riggs, an old rough humourist who
passed for a wit; her daughter, who passed for nothing, married to
a Captain Miller, full of good-natured officiousness. These good
folks were friends of Miss Rich, who carried me to dine with them
at Bath-Easton, now Pindus. They caught a little of what was then
called taste, built and planted, and begot children, till the whole
caravan were forced to go abroad to retrieve. Alas! Mrs. Miller is
returned a beauty, a genius, a Sappho, a tenth Muse, as romantic
as Mademoiselle Scudéri, and as sophisticated as Mrs. Vesey. The
Captain’s fingers are loaded with cameos, his tongue runs over
with _virtù_, and that both may contribute to the improvement of
their own country, they have introduced _bouts rimés_ as a new
discovery. They hold a Parnassus fair every Thursday, give out
rhymes and themes, and all the flux of quality at Bath contend for
the prizes. A Roman vase dressed with pink ribbons and myrtles
receives the poetry, which is drawn out every festival; six
judges of these Olympic games retire and select the brightest
compositions, which the respective successful acknowledge, kneel
to Mrs. Calliope Miller, kiss her fat hand, and are crowned by it
with myrtle, with—I don’t know what. You may think this is fiction
or exaggeration. Be dumb, unbelievers! The collection is printed,
published.—Yes, on my faith! There are _bouts rimés_ on a buttered
muffin, made by her Grace the Duchess of Northumberland; receipts
to make them by Corydon the venerable, _alias_ George Pitt; others
very pretty by Lord Palmerston; some by Lord Carlisle: many by
Mrs. Miller herself, that have no fault but wanting metre: and
immortality promised to her without end or measure.[196]
Mrs. Miller’s Institution appears, however, to have been an
unqualified social success. The first edition of the verses was
exhausted in ten days,[197] and a second was published in the
following year. Three similar volumes appeared at intervals,[198] and
the series was terminated only by the death of the Institutress.[199]
The publications received the compliment of an anonymous attack
entitled _Sappho_,[200] in which Mrs. Miller was satirically hailed
as ‘Mistress of the tuneful nine’; but a more deadly assault took the
form of a solemn congratulatory _Epistle to Mrs. Miller_,[201] in
which that lady is said to
Shine unmatched in old or modern time,
A friend of Genius, Pleasure, Taste and Rhime,
Which daily thrive beneath thy fostering hand
And pour the tide of learning o’er the land.
An examination of the volume published in 1775 hardly seems to bear
out these statements. The following production of the hostess herself
it is difficult to describe with accuracy, for the word verse hardly
seems appropriate to it:
From Castor and Pollux, those twins of renown,
Arose the great dance taught at Lacedæmon;
Then a son of Achilles, with a barbarous name,
Taught his soldiers to dance, those Cretans of fame.
Wise philosopher Socrates also would know,
From Aspasia the fair how to well point a toe.
Pompous nuptials and feasts—e’en the grave Funerals
Was danc’d at by princes, priests, people and all.
It is only fair to say that the verses in the volume do frequently
rise from this level to that of mediocrity. The following specimen
of _bouts rimés_ may serve to indicate the type and contents of the
volume:
Hard to my muse it is, I must confess,
In six fixed rhymes aught witty to express;
Why did I mix with Wits? who must detest
And crush my follies which their sense molest.
Thus the poor mole, who rises into light
Dies when he meets the sun’s refulgent might.
There are other things to be said in amelioration of the harsh
judgments one is inclined to pass upon Mrs. Miller. The later
volumes are certainly less bad than the first. The praise of
Mrs. Miller, which had formed the staple of the first volume, is
somewhat mitigated in the others, and the names of the contributors
occasionally emerge into the borderland of fame. Potter, William
Hayley, Anna Seward, and Christopher Anstey are worthy of respect,
and a poem by Garrick, though worthless, lends a certain distinction
to the second volume. Anstey’s poem, _An Election Ball_,[202] which
enjoyed something of the popularity of his _New Bath Guide_, was
written upon a subject given out by Mrs. Miller, ‘The ancient and
modern Dress and Manners of the English Nation compared’; and the
_Poetical Address_ which prefaced it is addressed to Mr. Miller. In
the former ‘Clio’ and the Tusculan ‘vause’ are celebrated, and in the
latter the ‘myrtle sprigs’ and ‘vocal swans of Bath.’ These poems
are still readable.
To Mrs. Miller must certainly be allowed the merit of having gathered
about herself a group of persons who would have made the reputation
of any London drawing-room. Her own inability to produce anything
that should have more than the external appearance of verse does
not seem to have repelled those of higher ability and finer taste.
For such a woman it was in the nature of an achievement that her
Institution lasted six years; and the four volumes of so-called
poetical contributions to it retain a certain melancholy interest as
showing the result of a deliberate attempt by the world of fashion to
stimulate the production of poetry.
CHAPTER VII
THE BLUESTOCKING CLUB
The list of bluestocking ladies given by Hannah More in her poem,
_Bas Bleu_, is as follows: ‘Vesey of verse the judge and friend,’
‘Boscawen sage,’ ‘bright Montagu,’ and Elizabeth Carter. To this
we should of course add the name of Miss More herself. The men
enumerated as members are Lord Lyttelton, Pultney, Earl of Bath,
and Horace Walpole. Exactly the same list is given by Forbes in his
_Life of Beattie_, save that he adds the name of Stillingfleet.
Miss More mentions certain famous men as former habitués of the
blue drawing-room, Garrick, Mason, Dr. Johnson, Burke (‘apostate
now from social wit’), and Sir William Pepys. These five, with the
exception of Pepys, are thought of rather as frequent visitors than
as recognized members.
We must not assume from the use of the word _club_ the existence
of a formally established society, like the great Literary Club,
with rules and election of members. The blues were drawn together
simply by the desire for mutual intercourse, and the group expanded
freely as fit associates appeared. No exact list of bluestockings
can therefore be made. Indeed, the list of ladies in Hannah
More’s _Sensibility_, described as participating in ‘the charm
of friendship and the feast of sense,’ is somewhat different from
the one already quoted: Mrs. Boscawen, Mrs. Carter, Mrs. Montagu,
Mrs. Chapone, Mrs. Walsingham, Mrs. Delany, and Mrs. Barbauld.
Fanny Burney, like Miss More herself, is thought of as a younger
member,[203] almost as a protégée of the club. Mrs. Thrale, with her
own coterie, was always more or less of an outsider, as was also
Mrs. Ord. Later, as we shall see, the name _bluestocking_ came to
be applied to women who had only the remotest connection with the
original group.
The origin of the little company which was to develop into the _Bas
Bleu_ is now difficult to discover. Miss More’s poem in praise of
it did not appear until 1786, many years after its fame was fully
established. The verses, begun in 1783, circulated for many months
in manuscript and frequently retouched, are the official handbook
of the society; but it is necessary to remember that the author did
not come into contact with the group during its earlier history,
and that her account of its origin is therefore not to be taken as
indubitable evidence. She divides the honour of having instituted the
bluestocking _conversazioni_ between Mrs. Montagu and Mrs. Boscawen.
Madame D’Arblay, on the other hand, assigns it exclusively to Mrs.
Vesey.[204] In any case, it is certain that Mrs. Montagu speedily
became the leading person in the club, for Lyttelton, apparently
as early as 1765,[205] refers to her as ‘la belle présidente.’ The
earliest meetings may well have occurred at her literary breakfasts,
which have been already described.[206] It is not unreasonable to
assume that the ‘club’ was already in existence during the later
fifties, for it was well known to Admiral Boscawen, who died in 1761.
A prominent member of it, mentioned by Miss More, was the Earl of
Bath, who died in 1764. But the Bas Bleu did not attain the meridian
of its fame till many years later.
From its very beginning the object of the club was to promote
literary conversation as the chief pleasure of social life. That such
conversation was a stiff and solemn business one hardly needs to be
told. Bluestocking letters alone are a sufficient proof of it. In the
_Bas Bleu_ we hear much of the false wit of the Hôtel de Rambouillet,
Where wit and point and equivoque
Distorted every word they spoke.
The English bluestockings will have none of this. They repudiate wit
that is French and wit that is tainted, and exalt common sense in its
stead. Hannah More declares that the solid basis of conversation is
learning; it is for conversation, she cries, that
The sage consumes his midnight toil;
And keeps his vigils to produce
Materials for thy future use.
Such praise of serious conversation enables us to guess at the
preparation which earnest souls made for the _conversazioni_ in
which they hoped to shine. To Lady Louisa Stuart the group at Mrs.
Montagu’s had about it a suspicion of acting before an audience.
‘If you had good luck,’ she says, ‘you might not only be greatly
amused at Mrs. Montagu’s, but carry away much that was well worth
remembering. But then, also, the circular form is not less convenient
to prosers and people who love to hear themselves talk, so you might,
on the contrary, come in for the most tiresome dissertations, the
dullest long stories, the flattest jokes anywhere to be found.’[207]
Lyttelton himself gave similar testimony. Fanny Burney’s words
seem to show that the bluestockings were occasionally bored with
themselves: ‘I respect and esteem them,’ she writes in April 1784,
‘but they require an exertion to which I am not always inclined.’
There is, moreover, the indirect evidence afforded by Boswell. The
greatest judge of conversation then living had been repeatedly in the
presence of the bluestockings; he never wearied of expressing his
admiration for them; he had watched them swarming about his master;
he had taken the trouble to investigate the origin of their society;
but he never thought it worth while to record their talk.
Much of the fame of the bluestockings was due to the name by which
they had come to be known. It caught the public attention quickly,
and has remained a useful addition to the English vocabulary. The
word _bluestocking_ presents an interesting but perhaps insoluble
problem in etymology, or rather in slang. Various explanations of
the term exist, but, though they are not irreconcilable, they are
not wholly satisfactory. It would seem as though a source ought
to be found in seventeenth century France or sixteenth century
Italy[208]; but none has yet come to light. Mills in his _History
of Chivalry_[209] (1825) traces the word back to the Society ‘de
la Calza,’ founded in Venice in the year 1400. The society lasted
till 1590, when, he continues, ‘the rejected title’—by which
presumably he means _calza turchina_, though he nowhere mentions
it—‘crossed the Alps, and found a congenial soil in the flippancy
and literary triflings of Parisian society.... It diverged from
France to England.’ No evidence for the remarkable migrations of
this title is adduced by Mills. The words _bas bleu_ are unknown
to French lexicographers save as a translation of the English
bluestocking;[210] so that Mills’s statements respecting the
peregrinations of the term seem to be the result of his own
imagination.[211]
On the other hand, when we turn to English literature, we find that
the term was used as early as the seventeenth century. The first
occurrence of it noted by Murray, in the _New English Dictionary_,
is in Bramston’s _Autobiography_ (1683), in reference to the Little
Parliament of 1653: ‘That Blew-stocking Parliament.’ It is here
plainly used as a sneer at the unostentatious dress of the Puritans,
who eschewed silk stockings. Reference to coarse or ugly stockings
had been a well-known form of abuse for years. Prince Hal makes use
of a similar term, ‘puke-stocking’—puke being a kind of bluish-black
woollen, not worn by courtiers—in sneering at the keeper of the
Boar’s Head tavern.[212] The word _bluestocking_, even after its
application to literary ladies, retained something of a derogatory
flavour; it was considered by some a term of reproach,[213] and was
bitterly resented.
Just when the term was first applied to literary ladies, it is
difficult to say;[214] the period of its great popularity was in
the decade of the 80’s. By that time it had caught the attention and
roused the curiosity of Boswell, who gives the following explanation
of it:
About this time [1781] it was much the fashion for several ladies
to have evening assemblies, where the fair sex might participate in
conversation with literary and ingenious men, animated by a desire
to please. These societies were denominated Blue-stocking Clubs,
the origin of which title being little known, it may be worth while
to relate it. One of the most eminent members of those societies,
when they first commenced, was Mr. Stillingfleet, whose dress
was remarkably grave, and in particular it was observed, that he
wore blue stockings. Such was the excellence of his conversation,
that his absence was felt as so great a loss that it used to be
said, ‘We can do nothing without the _blue stockings_’ and thus by
degrees the title was established.[215]
Forbes, in his _Life of Beattie_, throws new light on the matter:
Mr. Stillingfleet, being somewhat of an humourist in his habits and
manners, and a little negligent in his dress, literally wore grey
stockings, from which circumstance, Admiral Boscawen used, by way
of pleasantry, to call them the ‘Blue-Stocking Society,’ as if to
indicate that when these brilliant friends met, it was not for the
purpose of forming a dressed assembly. A foreigner of distinction,
hearing the expression, translated it literally, ‘Bas Bleu,’ by
which these meetings came to be afterwards distinguished.[216]
Madame D’Arblay, writing in 1832, asserted that it was Mrs. Vesey
who first encouraged Stillingfleet to appear in his homely dress;
‘“Pho, pho,” cried she ...“don’t mind dress! Come in your blue
stockings!”’[217] and there seems to be no good reason for rejecting
this additional detail. It is at least not inconsistent with the
facts already cited.
The ‘mistake’ made by the ‘foreigner of distinction’ is plainly
referred to in a letter from Mrs. Carter to Mrs. Montagu, in
reference to the title _Bas Bleu_: ‘Do not you remember last winter
that Madame de Montier (or some such name; she was, however, the
French Ambassadress) desired somebody to introduce Monsieur—son Mari
to the Bas bleu?’[218]
These explanations, which form a fairly consistent series, and
which commended themselves to the bluestockings, ought to be good
enough for the twentieth century. Some, however, insist on a
more picturesque interpretation, probably in protest against the
implication that the first bluestocking was a man. An explanation
first offered in 1861 by Mr. Hayward, in the second edition of his
_Autobiography of Mrs. Piozzi_, was given to him by a lady who said
she received it from Lady Crewe in the course of a conversation held
in 1816. It runs as follows:
Lady Crewe told me that her mother (Mrs. Greville), the Duchess
of Portland, and Mrs. Montagu were the first who began the
conversation parties in imitation of the noted one, _temp._ Madame
de Sévigné, at Rue St. Honoré. Madame de Polignac, one of the first
guests, came in blue silk stockings, then the newest fashion in
Paris. Mrs. Greville and all the lady members of Mrs. Montagu’s
_club_, adopted the _mode_. A foreign gentleman, after spending
an evening at Mrs. Montagu’s _soirée_, wrote to tell a friend of
the charming intellectual party who had one rule; ‘they wear blue
stockings as a distinction.’
It would hardly be necessary to notice this account at all, were
it not that it has been seriously presented in the _Dictionary of
National Biography_ as the correct explanation, has been cited by
an anonymous writer in the _Quarterly Review_ (January 1903), and
recently repeated with full approval.[219] It must be noticed,
in the first place, that Mr. Hayward himself does not accept the
story, inasmuch as he banishes it to a footnote, and retains the
traditional account in the body of his work. Again, the sole source
of his authority is the hearsay evidence of an anonymous lady
given a century after the fact. We are three stages away from the
original informant, without written evidence of any kind until 1816.
Moreover, the anecdote bears upon its face all the marks of a story
_ben trovato_. Those who can think of Mrs. Montagu and her friends
as genially displaying blue stockings as a sort of badge are, to say
the least, but ill acquainted with certain nice prejudices of our
literary ladies.
It is clear, however, that there was about this phrase that vague
yet eloquent connotation which is the peculiar property of slang
and in which the explanations given above are, with the exception
of the last, conspicuously deficient. In no other way can the
sudden popularity of the word be accounted for.[220] The tendency
to play with the phrase became evident at once: ‘When will you
_blue-stocking_ yourself and come amongst us?’ wrote Walpole to
Hannah More.[221] ‘You may put on your blue stockings,’ wrote Mrs.
Chapone to Miss Burney,[222] ‘if you have got any boots to walk
about in the mornings, I shall like you as well in them.’ The word
was of course presently reduced to _blue_,[223] partly, no doubt,
because of the associations of this colour with the salons ever
since the Rambouillet days. When Fanny Burney was asked what Johnson
called Mrs. Montagu, she replied, ‘“Queen,” to be sure! “Queen of
the Blues!”’[224] and at court she was amused at a gentleman who was
ashamed to be found ‘reading to _a blue_.’[225]
Two facts emerge clearly from these quotations. In the first place,
we derive from Mrs. Carter’s letter a definite date for the origin
of the phrase _bas bleu_, the winter of 1782-3. In the second place,
it is obvious that this French phrase and the anecdote connected
with it account in large measure for the popularity of the word
_bluestocking_. That word had, as we have seen, existed before;[226]
indeed the French lady who first used the words _bas bleu_ was but
trying to translate an English phrase already familiar to her;
but it was only when that phrase assumed a kind of international
significance by appearing in French form that the English public
generally took up the earlier word _bluestocking_. From 1782 onwards
the word becomes common. Moreover, it was at the same period that
public attention began to be directed to the Bluestocking Club, and
the date 1782 may conveniently be taken as marking its florescence.
CHAPTER VIII
THE LONDON SALON
The London salon corresponds well enough, in its external aspects,
with its Parisian prototype. If we apply the fivefold analysis given
in the second chapter of this work, we shall discover no essential
difference in method between the two institutions. Differences
in result there undoubtedly were, but the two were alike in aim.
The London salon, like the Parisian, for example, depended for
its influence partly on the beauty and interest of its material
surroundings. Mrs. Montagu fascinated her guests with Chinese rooms,
Athenian rooms, feather rooms, rooms decorated by Angelica Kauffmann,
and other gorgeous apartments in her house in Hill Street and in
her palace in Portman Square. Mrs. Vesey, less ambitious and more
intimate, entertained her friends in a ‘blue-room’ or ‘green-room,’
and often in her little dressing-room which Mrs. Carter called ‘the
unostentatious receptacle of liberal society’[227]—unostentatious, no
doubt, but bizarre and successfully bizarre like everything that Mrs.
Vesey touched.
Like the French hostesses, these women kept up in their assemblies
a tone that was at once aristocratic and literary; they made
conversation the chief entertainment of the drawing-room, and the
patronage of letters their most elegant aim. Each of them attached
to herself—perhaps it would be more proper to say, attached herself
to—some writer, who frequently repaid her friendship with tributes
in verse. These writers were, in general, women; and the friendships
of the London salon are usually, though not always, feminine. They
offer, therefore, as we shall see later, a notable contrast to
literary friendships in Parisian salons.
Various English women—Mrs. Cholmondeley, Mrs. Crewe, Lady Lucan,
Lady Hervey, Mrs. Greville, Mrs. Catherine Macaulay—had studied the
Parisian salon at first hand; but none of them were so familiar with
it, none so intimately acquainted with various Parisian hostesses,
as Mrs. Montagu. As early as 1750 Madame du Bocage visited her in
London and took breakfast at her house in Hill Street. The two ladies
paid elaborate court to each other. Montagu presented du Bocage
with compliments and an edition of Milton, and du Bocage (who was
a professed poet) replied with compliments and a string of riming
couplets, setting forth the merits of Montagu.[228]
Again, when Madame Necker was in England, many years later, Mrs.
Montagu saw much of her. The French lady, like every one, was pleased
with her amiability, and, again like every one, amused at the
stiffness of her conversation.[229] When, in 1775, Mrs. Montagu went
to Paris, her associations with the Neckers became fairly intimate.
She was presented to ‘all the _beaux esprits_,’ and was even taken
to see Madame Geoffrin, whose glory now was waning. On the sixth of
July 1776, she met Madame du Deffand at dinner, and found her gay
and lively. Madame du Deffand’s comments on the bluestocking, in
her letters to Walpole, are singularly indulgent, until corrected
by Walpole. She is polite, thinks Madame du Deffand, but not over
pedantic,[230] and ‘ennuyeuse, sans doute, mais bonne femme.’ Mrs.
Montagu hired a house at Chaillot, where she gave suppers for Madame
du Deffand and the rest. That she flattered them all, after the
most approved Parisian fashion, no one who has read her letter to
Madame du Deffand can doubt. It is one of the most skilful pieces of
compliment which she ever devised, and was sent with a gift of two
beautiful scent-boxes. Witness the following extract, and let the
reader remember that Madame du Deffand was blind.
Il ne me reste qu’une ressource; c’est de vous adresser comme
à une divinité et vous offrir simplement de l’encens; c’est le
culte le plus pur et le moins téméraire. Je vous prie, madame,
de me permettre de vous offrir deux cassolettes, où j’ai mis des
aromatiques.[231]
In spite of the success of her Parisian visit, it may be questioned
whether Mrs. Montagu was wholly satisfied with the spirit of the
salons she visited. She had gone to Paris with the avowed intention
of searching, among the provincial nobility, for ‘some who are
more in the _ton_ of Louis XIV’s court’[232] than the ladies of
Versailles. It was, as one might have suspected, the Rambouillet
tradition that attracted her, rather than the later salon with
its freer thought and freer manners, and its constant change of
favourites. She should have gone to Paris at least as early as the
days of Madame de Lambert.
But it is certain that Mrs. Montagu never succeeded in attaining
to the ease of the Parisian salon. Friends feared that she would
come back more artificial than ever. Mrs. Boscawen wished that she
might get by heart Mrs. Chapone’s chapter on Simplicity.[233] But
there was no such thing as simplicity in Mrs. Montagu’s nature: all
her instincts were for the elaborate, her methods in all things
complicated, her manner grand, not easy. Her assemblies became
even larger and more overpowering; the number of ‘the Great’ grew
constantly larger.
Her salon was inevitably the reflection of her own character. She
could be, as Mrs. Thrale witnessed, ‘brilliant in diamonds, solid in
judgment, critical in talk’;[234] she could be, as Johnson freely
admitted, ‘par pluribus ... variety in one.’[235] But there was a
certain stiffness in her character that inevitably communicated
itself to her assemblies. Mrs. Chapone, who had every reason to love
her, wrote to Pepys that he would always find in her good nature,
‘though not accompanied with remarkable softness.’[236] Fanny Burney
was from the first rather overwhelmed by her grand manner, and Mrs.
Delany found at one of her assemblies ‘a formal, formidable circle,’
where she had only ‘a _whisper_ with Mrs. Boscawen, another with
Lady Bute, and a _wink_ from the Duchess of Portland—_poor diet_ for
one who loves a plentiful meal of social friendship.’[237] Six years
later she was so dazzled by the brilliancy of one of Mrs. Montagu’s
assemblies that she fled incontinently.
Lady Louisa Stuart, who evidently did not like Mrs. Montagu, calls
attention to another defect. ‘There was a deplorable lack ... of that
art of kneading the mass well together, which I have known possessed
by women far her inferiors. As her company came in, a heterogeneous
medley, so they went out, each individual feeling himself single,
isolated, and (to borrow a French phrase) embarrassed with his own
person; which might be partly owing to the awkward position of the
furniture, the mal-arrangement of tables and chairs. Everything in
that house, as if under a spell, was sure to form itself into a
circle or semicircle.’[238] But all this is as nothing compared with
the testimony of Lord Lyttelton. Mrs. Montagu was destined to receive
the unkindest thrust from her own familiar friend. At some time in
the decade of the sixties, Lord Lyttelton wrote an elaborate letter
to a friend in criticism of the modern wits, whom he proclaimed ‘not
worth a beadsman’s rosary.’ The following passage[239] can refer only
to Mrs. Montagu:
No one can take more pains than Mrs. M—— to be surrounded with men
of wit; she bribes, she pensions, she flatters, gives excellent
dinners, is herself a very sensible woman, and of very pleasing
manners; not young, indeed, but that is out of the question;—and,
in spite of all these encouragements, which, one would think,
might make wits spring out of the ground, the conversations of her
house are too often critical and pedantic,—something between the
dullness and the pertness of learning. They are perfectly chaste,
and generally instructive; but a cool and quiet observer would
sometimes laugh to see how difficult a matter it is for _la belle
Présidente_ to give colour and life to her literary circles.
There was, moreover, evidently much of the _femme savante_ about Mrs.
Montagu. Walpole described her in his most merciless manner as a
‘piece of learned nonsense’; she and her friends, he continues, ‘vie
with one another till they are as unintelligible as the good folks at
Babel.’[240] This of course is not fair. When was Walpole ever fair?
But it certainly may be taken as evidence that Mrs. Montagu did not
hesitate to make a display of her knowledge. She had mastered the
art, no doubt, of wearing her learning gracefully, but never that
of gracefully dispensing with it. It cumbers her correspondence.
With Garrick she must discuss Plautus, Terence, and Molière, with
Elizabeth Carter the _Ethics_ of Aristotle, with Beattie the Greek
dramatists, Ossian, Homer, and the ‘wilder Oriental poets.’ But the
reader has throughout the feeling that the writer is making the
best of resources that are somewhat limited and undisciplined. Her
knowledge of the classics was at best amateurish.
But this deficiency—if such it be—was not fatal. The learning of
a professional scholar is by no means essential in the mistress of
a salon. It may, indeed, as I have already shown, prove a serious
obstacle to her success; for the means by which she diffuses her
influence are of a totally different sort. With more essential
things, high social rank, a large fortune, wit, interest in the
course of literature, and a faith in her own power to influence it
for good, Mrs. Montagu was richly endowed. Without her there would
have been no London salons; for all existed in more or less conscious
imitation of hers. She alone succeeded in becoming a patron of
letters. To say that she did not equal the great Frenchwomen in this
art is merely to say that she was not a genius. She had the power of
attracting people of real importance to her drawing-room, and even
those who ridiculed her social methods were obliged to admit that
they produced an effect. That effect it is difficult to estimate
with precision; for it is by no means identical with that which she
produced by her own writings or even by her patronage of writers. She
has the honour of having assisted in spreading the esteem in which
literature and men of letters were held at the close of the century,
as opposed to the anomaly of their position fifty years earlier.
Her achievement is not the less real because it cannot be exactly
calculated.
* * * * *
A far more lovable figure than Mrs. Montagu is her friendly rival,
Elizabeth Vesey. Though the daughter of a bishop, the wife of a
Member of Parliament, and mistress of as popular a drawing-room
as could be found in London, she was as free from vanity as from
pretensions to literary gifts. She never dreamed of shining as a
critical essayist; she scribbled no verses. She was a withered
old lady with the heart of a child, who amused everybody by her
enthusiasm and her naïve manners, which were always a bit slipshod.
She was so notoriously informal that her guests forgot their elegant
reserve, and became, like her, good-humoured and lively. She moves
about her crowded assemblies like a fairy crone, her parchment
skin seamed and shrivelled with age, her ear-trumpet dangling from
her neck, while she distributes her promiscuous company, pats her
guests on the arm, breaks up their cliques, and squares the social
circle.[241] She touched every one into good spirits with what
Elizabeth Carter called the wave of her fairy wand.[242] Everybody
adored her, men and women alike. To Martin Sherlock[243] she was
‘good Mrs. Vesey—indeed she is _all_ goodness’; and Horace Walpole
bursts into momentary enthusiasm,[244] ‘What English heart ever
excelled hers?’
If she found favour in the eyes of all London, it was not by any
charms of person, for at the time of her great fame, she had long
since lost every trace of beauty. In 1779, when Miss Burney first met
her, she was a very pattern of old age, with ‘the most wrinkled,
sallow, time-beaten face’ ever seen.[245] But her vivid imagination
never deserted her, and to the sophisticated people by whom she was
surrounded she seemed a sort of ethereal meddler in human affairs.
Her friends called her the Sylph.[246] Mrs. Carter could detect
nothing mortal in her save a love of London,[247] and felt about her
a suspicion of ‘coral groves and submarine palaces.’[248] If she
was ordered to take fresh-water baths, she must, like a child, make
a game of it all, play at being primitive, and rear in imagination
an ‘American hut’ on the banks of the Liffey.[249] She flitted
eagerly about England and Ireland, anxious to know everybody and
see everything.[250] Mrs. Carter found her like Bartholomew Cokes,
who wanted every plaything in the Fair.[251] Indeed, the world must
have seemed to Mrs. Vesey a vast toyshop with endless opportunities
for play, for she could amuse herself by planning a _fête
champêtre_,[252] or by inventing a new teapot, lacking, to be sure,
both spout and handle, but of ‘a beautiful Etruscan form.’[253] Her
guests never knew what to expect, for she might present them with
an atheist philosopher hot from the salons of Paris or set them to
cutting out Indian figures and flowers, to paste on her dressing-room
windows in imitation of painted glass.[254] Dowagers marvel at her,
and lament that oddities are become the fashion.[255]
Her parties were informal to the point of becoming promiscuous.
Her first aim was to get together every one of importance,[256]
literary, political, social, and ecclesiastical, to keep them broken
up into small groups, and to insist on uniting those of different
tastes and mood. She got Walpole side by side with Fanny Burney[257]
(whom he liked at once), and again side by side with Sir William
Jones (whom he did not).[258] She tried to present Dr. Johnson
to the Abbé Raynal, and drew from the Great Moralist an immortal
refusal.[259] She was apparently even ambitious to marry Elizabeth
Carter to Thomas Gray.[260] Yet withal she had the rare gift of
self-obliteration.[261] She gave herself no airs. She was by nature
absent-minded, and she affected to be more _distraite_ than she
actually was. When excitedly denouncing second marriages she could
quite overlook (or _seem_ to overlook) the fact that she herself had
been married twice. ‘Bless me, my dear! I had quite forgotten it.’
Such wit was but ill-understood in salons which had never before
witnessed the spectacle of a bluestocking laughing at herself. There
is an Irish whimsicality about her remarks. When ill, she could
declare that her only happy moment in fourteen days was in a fainting
fit, or again that she was in dread of losing seven or eight of her
senses.[262] ‘It’s a very disagreeable thing, I think,’ said she to
Mr. Cambridge, ‘when one has just made an acquaintance with anybody,
and likes them, to have them die,’[263] a sentiment that set Fanny
Burney to ‘grinning irresistibly,’ and filliping the macaroon crumbs
from her muff to hide her embarrassment. Mrs. Vesey somehow contrived
to make even her deafness a source of amusement. When Lady Spencer
brought her some silver ears to use instead of trumpets, she promptly
tried them on before her guests, and greeted George Cambridge with
one of them still clinging to her ear, but as she was moving away
from him spilled it unaware. Surely this bluestocking is a very
human sort.
Those who smiled at her naïveté forgot that it was a quality very
near to wisdom. Her conversation, and perhaps her letters,[264]
revealed that instinctive knowledge of the human heart which is the
peculiar possession of extreme innocence. ‘Few people,’ she said to
Mrs. Carter,[265] who quotes her words with approval—the _imprimatur_
of common sense—‘give themselves time to be friends’; and as if
she only half understood the century into which she had been born,
inquired ‘why the head is always so suspicious of the heart.’[266]
The wise Carter, whose knowledge was so much more sophisticated, can
but honour her for having the simplicity of a little child, though
she would like to whip her for having its imprudence.[267] But it
was this very simplicity of soul that enabled the good creature to
‘accommodate herself so fully to the awkward customs and manners
of mere actually existing men and women.’ Mrs. Carter finds it
‘very surprising,’[268] as does the student, and as did Montagu
and all the dowagers, no doubt; but Miss Burney, with her keen
observation, saw at once that her skill in selecting guests and her
‘address in rendering them easy with one another’ was an art that
implied ‘no mean understanding.’[269] She had sufficient skill to
persuade Horace Walpole, who professed to hate her ‘Babels,’ to come
and join the Cophthi,[270] and not to snub them one and all; she
had the skill to keep always on good terms with Mrs. Montagu; she
could attract the whole Literary Club on alternate Tuesdays, and
filled her drawing-room with the most difficult people in England
to manage.[271] Yet her methods were always of the simplest, her
collations modest though delicate, and her house, though interesting
because of its oddity, was hardly an attraction apart from its
mistress.
With all the new emotions of sentimentalism and romanticism, Mrs.
Vesey was in full sympathy, and she must have done something to
popularize these movements among the _beaux esprits_ of London. She
adored the _Sentimental Journey_. She and Mrs. Carter write each
other of the solemn awe of storms at sea, of ‘sublime and terrible’
Welsh ‘prospects,’[272] of dim-lit Gothic cloisters, and the sad note
of the owl at set of sun. She loved the poetry of Gray, and even
tempted the shy poet into her drawing-room.[273] She was obliged
to pass much of her time in Ireland, and on her journeys there and
back improved the opportunity of studying the wild scenery of Wales.
She writes to Mrs. Carter of her journey through Anglesey and over
Penmuenmaur. The story thrilled Mrs. Carter, for she wrote of it to
Mrs. Montagu:
In the midst of her passage through these wild regions, she and
Mrs. Hancock[274] were overtaken by a tempest which greatly
heightened the sublime and terrible of the scene; and you may
guess what a description such an adventure would furnish to an
imagination like hers.[275]
Mrs. Vesey, moreover, appears to have been alone among the blues in
aspiring to the easier standards of French manners and to the new
‘freedom of thought,’ though she never really abandoned herself to
them. She was one of the ladies who lent diversity to the amatory
career of Laurence Sterne; but the flirtation, though feverish
enough for a time, either escaped the notice of Mrs. Vesey’s precise
friends or was, by general consent, hushed up; for it expired at last
quite harmlessly and left only a handful of letters as proof of
its former vitality. Yorick and this earlier ‘Eliza’ met, it would
appear, in 1762, when Sterne was at the height of his fame, and
enjoying the pleasures of metropolitan life for a season. He heard
Mrs. Vesey sing; walked twenty paces beside her; felt the ‘harmonic
vibrations’ of a heart truly sentimental, and had no sooner left her
than he opened an amatory correspondence with her. He would give one
of his cassocks to explain the magic of her personality: ‘I believe
in my conscience, dear lady, if truth was known, _that you have no
inside at all_. That you are graceful, elegant, and desirable, etc.,
etc.—every common beholder who can stare at you, as a Dutch boor does
to the Queen of Sheba,—can easily find out—but that you are sensible,
gentle, and tender and from one end to the other of you full of the
sweetest tones and modulations require a deeper research—You are
a system of harmonic vibrations—the softest and best attuned of
all instruments.—Lord! I would give away my other cassock to touch
you.’[276] Tristram Shandy protests that his head is turned.
We may follow them to Ranelagh, where they saunter lackadaisically,
indifferent to the crowd and the fireworks, Mrs. Vesey uttering
‘gentle, amiable, elegant sentiments in a tone of voice that was
originally intended for a Cherub.’ But the exposure was apparently
too much for the tender frame of Yorick. In listening to Mrs.
Vesey’s voice, he lost his own, and now ‘colds, coughs, and catarrhs’
have so tied up his tongue that he can no longer whisper loud enough
to explain Vesey’s effect upon his heart. How often thereafter he
was able to becassock himself and sit in the warm blue drawing-room
listening to the music, we do not know. The romance did not last
long, certainly; and we hear nothing more of it after the autumn of
1767, when Mrs. Vesey invited Sterne to visit her in Ireland, an
invitation which his illness compelled him to decline.
Like the French ladies described by Sterne in the _Sentimental
Journey_, Mrs. Vesey turned, at a certain age, to agnosticism. Mrs.
Montagu had defied Voltaire, but Mrs. Vesey courted the Abbé Raynal.
He responded with great vivacity and was often in her drawing-room
during the year 1777. Mrs. Boscawen asserts[277] that she once heard
him talk for eight hours ‘successfully’ and without interruption:
‘One must have _heard and seen it to believe it_;’ and Mrs. Chapone
asserts that he talked steadily _from one at noon till one_ in the
morning.[278] This particular conversation, however, did not occur
at Mrs. Vesey’s. She would never have permitted any one thus to turn
conversation into a lecture.
Mrs. Vesey’s interest in French agnosticism caused her friends
grave concern. Twice Mrs. Carter denounced Voltaire when Mrs. Vesey
demanded a pronouncement on his works, and at last wrote that she
would as soon think of playing with toads and vipers, as of reading
such blasphemy and impiety.[279] She argued for the validity of
revealed religion, but without great effect, for Mrs. Vesey continued
to play with fire. She produced strange romantic thrills in herself
by reading the Abbé Raynal during a violent thunderstorm. Byron,
surely, could have understood this, but it was beyond the blues.
‘’Tis a dangerous amusement to a mind like yours, indeed to any
mind,’ wrote Mrs. Carter. But dangerous or not, it illustrates the
curiosity of Mrs. Vesey’s mind, and might furnish a historian of the
Romantic Movement with an apt anecdote.
Because of the unpretentiousness of her character, Mrs. Vesey has
always been ranked far below Mrs. Montagu, but it may be doubted
whether the estimate is quite fair. There were many who found her
assemblies more agreeable[280] than Mrs. Montagu’s more pretentious
parties, especially after that lady’s removal to Portman Square.
Unlike Mrs. Montagu, she made no attempt to produce literature
herself (and for this posterity should be grateful); but she appears
to have had an instinctive appreciation, not surpassed by the other,
of the true function of the salon. For it was the office of the
bluestockings neither to reform the whole of London society by giving
it a literary tone, nor to bring into existence a new school of
authors dominated by their ideals; but rather to keep in motion, by
means of social intercourse, the currents of thought, literary and
philosophical. A true _conversazione_ can create and vitalize a train
of ideas, and Mrs. Vesey, with her broad and genial interests, was
able to assemble the best representatives of the new ideas, and bring
them into contact with society. This, if there be any, is the true
office of the bluestocking, an office which Mrs. Vesey discharged
with skill and with charm.
* * * * *
About Mrs. Montagu and Mrs. Vesey there revolved other luminaries.
Certain of them—Elizabeth Carter, Hester Chapone, Hannah More,
and Fanny Burney—though they presided over no salon, achieved an
independent reputation as authors, and will therefore be considered
in later chapters. Others of them—as Miss Monckton (still remembered
for Reynolds’s sentimental portrait of her), Lady Lucan, Lady
Herries, Mrs. Greville, the admirable Mrs. Cholmondeley (niece
of Walpole and friend of Miss Burney), and the sensible Mrs.
Walsingham—have left, in general, little more than a name (and an
adjective) to posterity. Others, who are more often encountered,
demand a brief consideration.
There is, for example, the gracious figure of Mrs. Boscawen,[281]
wife of the Admiral, and one of the best-loved women in London.
Boswell’s compliment to her will be familiar to students of the _Life
of Johnson_: ‘If it be not presumptuous in me to praise her, I would
say that her manners are the most agreeable and her conversation
the best of any lady with whom I ever had the happiness to be
acquainted.’[282] Miss More described her parties in the words of
Madame de Sévigné as ‘all daffodil, all rose, all jonquil,’ and dwelt
on her power to make each of her guests feel that he had been the
immediate object of her attention.[283]
Her reputation was thus always rather social than literary.[284]
Her letters, indeed, were highly regarded by her friends, and
were sometimes preferred to Mrs. Montagu’s—a preference by no
means audacious. The repeated comparison with Madame de Sévigné is
certainly less happy. Mrs. Boscawen’s letters, as preserved in Mrs.
Delany’s _Autobiography_ and the _Memoirs of Hannah More_, have the
affectionate intimacy but not the kindling wit and sprightliness
which distinguish familiar correspondence at its best. It is
sufficient to say of these letters that they have successfully
preserved Mrs. Boscawen’s pleasant personality.
Mrs. Boscawen emulated Mrs. Montagu as a patron of rising young
authors by entering into warm personal relations with Hannah More.
They first became intimate when, on the twelfth night of _Percy_,
Mrs. Boscawen sent the successful dramatist a wreath of myrtle,
laurel, and bay. This stimulated the young lady to an exhibition of
that flattery for which she was already famous. In an _Ode to the
Hon. Mrs. Boscawen_, Apollo himself is made to rebuke Hannah for
wearing these floral honours, asserting that it is for Mrs. Boscawen
that
the faithful _myrtle blooms_,
For her the sage’s bay.
And even thou shalt claim a name
And challenge some renown;
Boscawen’s friendship is thy fame,
Her praise thy LAUREL CROWN.[285]
But the two ladies had only begun their career of compliment.
Somewhat later Miss More sent to her patron a bottle of ‘otto
of roses,’ having learned that that lady’s organs ‘partake the
refinement that graces her mind.’ This is not the first instance we
have encountered of the use of incense in the bluestocking ritual.
Mrs. Boscawen sometimes varied her flowery wreaths of praise with
gifts and practical suggestions. When she learns that Miss More has
been reading Homer and Tasso, she at once becomes ambitious for an
English epic from the pen of a woman. ‘Some spark,’ she thinks, from
these older geniuses, ‘will communicate to that train of poetic
fire, _qui vous appartient_, and the explosion will ascend in many a
brilliant star.’[286] The honourable lady demands and obtains an _Ode
on the Marquess of Worcester’s Birthday_, into which the author had
the sense to weave a compliment to Mrs. Boscawen and to ‘Glanvilla,’
her estate.[287] Meanwhile the patron is weeping her eyes red over
_Percy_, circulating copies of Miss More’s _Essays_, eliciting
praises from friends and _beaux esprits_—all duly forwarded—and
rebuking, very gently, the rising authoress for not proclaiming more
loudly the greatness of the sex: ‘where shall we find a champion if
you (armed at all points) desert us?’[288]
[Illustration: HANNAH MORE
From Finden’s engraving of the portrait by Opie (1786)]
Miss More’s chief tribute to Mrs. Boscawen, however, was her poem,
_Sensibility_, published in 1782, in the form of an epistle to that
lady. In rapturous verse Sensibility is hailed as the parent of
charity, charm, and many other bluestocking virtues; but, above all,
’tis this that ‘gives Boscawen half her power to please.’ As the poem
furnishes the most convenient statement of Mrs. Boscawen’s connection
with the group of ladies we are studying, a rather long extract from
it must be given:
Accept, BOSCAWEN! these unpolish’d lays,
Nor blame too much the verse you cannot praise.
For you far other bards have wak’d the string,
Far other bards for you were wont to sing.[289]
Yet on the gale their parting music steals,
Yet your charm’d ear the loved impression feels;
You heard the lyre of LITTLETON and YOUNG,
And this a Grace and that a Seraph strung....
Yes, still for you your gentle stars dispense
The charm of friendship and the feast of sense:
Yours is the bliss, and Heav’n no dearer sends,
To call the wisest, brightest, best your friends.
And while to these I raise the votive line,
O let me grateful own these friends are mine:
With CARTER trace the wit to Athens known,
Or view in MONTAGU that wit our own,
Or mark, well pleased CHAPONE’S instructive page
Intent to raise the morals of the age;
Or boast, in WALSINGHAM, the various power
To cheer the lonely, grace the letter’d hour.
Somewhat too much of this.
The story continues in the same strain till long after the
publication of Miss More’s _Florio_ in 1786. It is only necessary to
add that it is to Mrs. Boscawen that we owe the painting of Opie’s
delightful portrait of Miss More.[290] It does more to perpetuate
the charm of the bluestocking ladies than all their congratulatory
epistles—in prose or verse.
* * * * *
Mrs. Ord[291] has by modern writers frequently been associated
with Mrs. Montagu and Mrs. Vesey as originating the bluestocking
_conversazioni_.[292] Just why Mrs. Ord should have been chosen to
complete the triad of ladies it is difficult to say. She is not
mentioned in Miss More’s _Bas Bleu_, in Dr. Burney’s verses, or in
Boswell’s _Life of Johnson_. Her name occurs but once, and quite
casually, in Walpole’s _Letters_; and Johnson writes but once[293]
of having been present at her assembly. Even those who describe her
parties speak rather of her guests than of herself, and praise her
good nature without mentioning her conversation.[294] Her talk was,
it appears, considered heavy, so that Miss Burney herself was obliged
to admit that it lacked both mirth and instruction, and that she
loved Mrs. Ord for her friendliness but not for her brilliancy.
Nevertheless Mrs. Ord was one who early made the experiment
of banishing cards and dancing from her evening parties and
substituting undisturbed conversation as the staple of her
entertainment. Like Mrs. Vesey she abhorred formality, and made
her guests draw their chairs about a large table in the middle of
the room, remarking—and it is one of the few remarks of hers that
has been preserved—that a table was the ‘best friend to sociable
conversation.’[295] Here, apparently, she succeeded in getting the
unity without the hard formality of the dreaded circle.[296]
She had, moreover, a skill in the choice of her guests which usually
saved her from the charge of assembling crowds indiscriminately.[297]
Pepys and Dr. Burney unite in praising her ability to mix her
ingredients, and for this the latter pronounces her an excellent
cook. Miss More liked her assemblies because there she could have Sir
Joshua and Mr. Cambridge all to herself[298] or discuss the relative
merits of Pope and Dryden, sitting apart with Mrs. Montagu and Horace
Walpole.[299]
Perhaps Mrs. Ord wished to take the place of Mrs. Thrale as the
social patron of Fanny Burney. She it was who conducted Fanny to
her royal prison at Windsor,[300] who helped to keep her in touch
with her old friends,[301] who showered gifts upon her and carried
her to oratorios, and who, when the young woman was worn out by her
servitude, put the map of England into the hands of ‘her child,’
and bade her choose the journey she would take. This trip, which
was through south-west England, lasted many weeks, and it was
mid-September before the two finally drove out of Bath towards London
in Mrs. Ord’s coach-and-four.[302] Nor did the services of this
‘excellent and maternal’ creature stop with this, for the very next
year she carried Miss Burney to the ‘salubrious hills of Norbury,’
and there administered what the Diarist, in a flight of rhetoric
worthy of her latest years, called ‘the balsamic medicine of social
tenderness.’[303] But nothing came of this patronage in the way of
literature, so that Mrs. Ord’s kindness, though challenging our
admiration, adds little to the movement we are tracing.
* * * * *
Another woman closely associated with Miss Burney, and one who
profoundly influenced her life, was that venerable relic of the
former age, Mary Granville Delany, whom Burke called ‘not only
the woman of fashion of the present age, but ... the highest bred
woman in the world.’[304] ‘Swift’s Mrs. Delany,’ they loved to call
her, for she had known the great Dean in his latter days. Of the
relationship, such as it was, she never tired of talking, and in this
she was wise, for it was her chief claim to distinction in literary
circles. The woman who could display a sheaf of private letters from
Swift and to whom the _Spectator_ was ‘almost too modern to speak
of’[305] was of course worshipped by every bluestocking in London;
but she was never quite a blue herself. She did not wish to be.
Miss More, it is true, claims her as one of the circle in her poem
_Sensibility_:
DELANY too is ours; serenely bright,
Wisdom’s strong ray, and virtue’s milder light:
And she who blessed the friend and graced the lays
Of poignant Swift, still gilds my social days;
Long, long protract thy light, O star benign!
Whose setting beams with milder lustre shine.
But Mrs. Delany seldom allowed her lustre to shine upon the
salon, and was anything but mild in her opinion of Mrs. Montagu’s
assemblies. She was more interested in the Royal Family than in the
progress of literature, and despite her early associations, preferred
the society of rank to that of genius. She was graciously pleased
when Garrick received her friend the Duchess of Portland and herself
‘_very respectfully_,’ and showed himself ‘sensible of the honour’
done him.[306] She was vexed that Mason’s tepid tragedy, _Elfrida_,
should be ‘prostituted’ by a public performance, and ‘the charms of
virgins represented by the abandoned nymphs of Drury Lane.’ ‘Such a
poem,’ she continues, ‘would have been represented in days of yore
by the youthful part of the Royal family or those of the first rank.
Indeed, in _these_ our days (_save our own Royal Family_), it would
be difficult to find representatives suited to such virtuous and
refined characters.’[307] Such a person, who was for ever protesting
that she was in love with the King, the Queen, and the whole Royal
Family,[308] was in no position to mediate properly between authors
and ‘the Great.’ Her one conception of serving them was to render
them up, a living sacrifice, to the Royal Family, as Miss Burney
(who was dazzled by the friend of Swift and the friend of the Queen)
discovered to her cost. When Miss Burney hesitated to enter upon
her service as Dresser to Queen Charlotte—a post which her intimacy
with Mrs. Delany had brought her—it was Mrs. Delany who was ‘much
mortified’ that so flattering a proposal could cause a moment’s
hesitation.[309]
Mrs. Delany is a significant figure in the history of the salon by
virtue of the fascination which she exercised through her quondam
connection with a great man; but of genuine interest in the salon she
had little, and of influence upon the course of literature none at
all.
* * * * *
Alone among the literary ladies of the age, Mrs. Thrale has retained
the fascination which she exercised in her own time. The fame of the
other bluestockings has gone from less to less; but hers has remained
constant, if indeed it has not increased. This is of significance,
for it shows either that she was more modern than her sisters or
more universal. She might consistently have aspired to the title,
‘Queen of the Bluestockings,’ but she did not even care whether she
was reckoned one of them, contenting herself with outwitting them at
every point. It was she, for example, who captured the two authors
most coveted by the mistresses of the salons, Johnson and Miss
Burney, and ‘planted’ them in her house.[310] Her friendship with
the former, though it cannot be shown to have altered the course of
his works, gave birth to an admirable series of familiar letters,
which Hannah More found ‘true letters of friendship which are meant
to show kindness rather than wit.’[311] But more important than such
published results was the fame which Johnson lent to Mrs. Thrale by
his residence at her home. The nearest approach to the true salon
that we find in the eighteenth century in England is the dining-room
at Streatham; the spectacle of Johnson there reading aloud from the
proof-sheets of the _Lives of the Poets_ is in exact accord with the
best French traditions of the salon.
In many other respects Mrs. Thrale showed that she was capable of
fulfilling the more important functions of a literary hostess. It was
she who attempted to direct the genius of Fanny Burney towards the
theatre, prevailing upon her to write a comedy. It is true that the
resulting play, _The Witlings_, was not thought by Dr. Burney a fit
successor to _Evelina_, and was accordingly destroyed; but in the
absence of any proof to the contrary and in view of the influence
which Mrs. Thrale could bring to bear in the theatrical world through
Murphy and others, it is difficult to see why her advice to the young
writer was not sound. Sheridan, than whom there was no better judge,
gave similar counsel.
Finally, when, after her marriage and departure from England, as Mrs.
Piozzi, she printed her _Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson_, the
value of what she had to tell and her vivacity in telling it enabled
her to triumph over a slipshod style and an inaccurate method, and
to establish, once for all, her reputation in the literary world, a
reputation which the bluestockings were foolish enough to think she
had lost for ever.
There is no need here to discuss the anomalies of Mrs. Thrale’s
character. They have been dwelt on unnecessarily and fruitlessly.
She had no illusions about her friends, and least of all about her
own importance. She looked out on the world in which she moved,
shrewdly and, on the whole, sanely. She knew how to make people
happy and how to put the Great at their ease. ‘Mrs. Thrale,’ says
Mr. Seccombe, ‘moved among them serene, lively, “a pretty woman
still,” an exorciser of melancholy, the cheeriest of hostesses, quite
unconscious of erudition, gaily spontaneous, the queen of Streatham.
Her wayward naturalness made her seem a rose among hot-house flowers.
Her innate brightness enabled her, as has been said, to romp with
learning and to play blind man’s buff with the sages.’ In the
somewhat stifling atmosphere of salons such a personality is of the
very highest worth.
CHAPTER IX
BLUESTOCKINGS AS AUTHORS
Much mischief to the cause of criticism is wrought by the
specialists. Investigators in the underworld of forgotten books,
to which scholarly competition too frequently drives them, often
become so accustomed to the darkness about them that they mistake
a glimmer for the glorious light of the upper world, and hasten to
inform an inattentive public that the dim by-ways and dark corners
of the realm of dead authors are by no means lacking in brilliancy.
But such assertions serve rather to darken counsel than to illuminate
the world. Enthusiasm for a subject sometimes coexists with a state
of delusion about it. It ought to be possible to discover that a
forgotten book is readable without trying to convince the public
that an acquaintance with it is indispensable to all who pretend to
culture.
The works of the bluestockings have all long since sunk into this
oblivion. The benevolent reader of them has the feeling which Dante
experienced so strongly when he met in hell the souls who had once
been famous in a brighter world. These books seem to appeal to the
reader to reëstablish something of their former fame, even though
this, in its turn, prove to be but transitory. Who now reads
Montagu? To many the question itself will be unintelligible; or will
be taken to refer to another; yet in 1770 all the world was reading
her. It is hardly too much to say that as a critic she was esteemed
almost as highly as Johnson himself. She was known as the woman who
had dared to challenge comparison with Lucian, as the defender and
even as the ‘patroness’ of Shakespeare; she was an Eve in the world
of critics, an armed Athena who had set her foot on the head of the
serpent Voltaire.
Mrs. Montagu’s career as a writer began with the composition of three
dialogues which were added to Lord Lyttelton’s _Dialogues of the
Dead_ when they appeared in 1760. The works were anonymous; but the
news that they were by Mrs. Montagu was soon spread abroad. Many had
no doubt inferred her authorship already from the enthusiastic words
in which the noble lord spoke of her: ‘I shall think,’ he says, ‘the
Public owes me a great Obligation for having excited a Genius so
capable of uniting Delight with Instruction, and giving to Knowledge
and Virtue those Graces which the Wit of the Age has too often
employed all its skill to bestow upon Folly and Vice.’ The public did
not disappoint the peer. Five editions were called for before 1768.
Mrs. Montagu’s dialogues might easily be dismissed by saying that
they do not reach the level of Lyttelton’s. But if it be required to
detect grades of value in work so uniformly flat, we may say that the
dialogue between Mercury and a Modern Fine Lady is the best, as that
between Hercules and Cadmus is the worst. They are all well called
Dialogues of the Dead, for despite all their inflation, they never
once betray any semblance of vitality. Of characterization they are
wholly innocent, but not of profundity. Cadmus, for example, gives
utterance to this: ‘The genuine glory, the proper distinction of the
rational Species, arises from the perfection of the mental powers.
Courage is apt to be fierce, and Strength is often exerted in acts of
Oppression. But Wisdom is the Associate of Justice; It assists her to
form equal Laws, to pursue right measures, to correct power, protect
weakness, and to unite individuals in a common Interest and general
Welfare.’ It is amazing the amount of such platitudinizing which the
eighteenth century consumed with relish. It is one of the marvels of
that marvellous era. The style derived its popularity in part from
Johnson, who himself achieved a bare victory over its deadliness by
the vivacity of his intellect.
In the dialogue between Mercury and Mrs. Modish, the author was at
once less pretentious and in closer touch with her subject. Yet even
here her desire to give instruction triumphs over any temptation
to depict human nature. Mrs. Modish, the frivolous butterfly,
explains the phrase _bon ton_ quite as seriously as Mrs. Carter the
bluestocking would have done: ‘It is—I can never tell you what it is;
but I will try to tell you what it is not. In conversation it is not
Wit; in manners it is not Politeness; in behaviour it is not Address;
but it is a little like them all. It can only belong to people of
a certain rank, who live in a certain manner, with certain persons
who have not certain virtues and who have certain Vices, and who
inhabit a certain Part of the Town.’ This is perhaps the best thing
in the dialogues. One great advantage of these works remains to be
mentioned. They triumph over the form in which they are written, for
they never once remind us of Lucian.
But Mrs. Montagu had yet to achieve her unique distinction. It
was nine years later that she delighted the world by appearing
as the champion of Shakespeare, redressing his wrongs,[312] and
vindicating him from the charges of Voltaire. She published a work
somewhat largely entitled, _An Essay on the Writings and Genius of
Shakespeare, Compared with the Greek and French Dramatic Poets, with
some Remarks upon the Misrepresentations of Mons. de Voltaire_.
The attacks upon Shakespeare which Mrs. Montagu felt it incumbent
upon herself to answer need no discussion here;[313] it may suffice
to say that her defence was more widely read in England than the
‘misrepresentations’ which called it into being. It was regarded as
a standard piece of criticism, and its fame penetrated to France and
even to Italy.[314] It is impossible to give adequate illustrations
of the esteem in which the book was held.[315] It conferred upon
Mrs. Montagu the reputation of a critic, and gave her an enviable
position among English writers for the space of thirty years. In the
chorus of praise with which this feeble book was greeted there was
but one discordant voice. When Reynolds remarked that Mrs. Montagu’s
essay did her honour, Dr. Johnson retorted: ‘Yes, Sir, it does _her_
honour, but it would do nobody else honour. I have indeed, not read
it all. But when I take up the end of a web, and find it packthread,
I do not expect by looking further to find it embroidery. Sir, I will
venture to say, there is not one sentence of true criticism in her
book.’[316]
It is to this view that posterity—when it has had any views at all
on the subject—has inclined. Professor Huchon naturally deplores
it,[317] and builds up a judicious defence of the defence. But the
modern reader will probably agree with Mr. Lounsbury that ‘it is in
many ways one of the most exasperating of books.’ Mrs. Montagu’s
ignorance of the Elizabethan era was both profound and extensive.
Her conception of Shakespeare’s environment may be deduced from the
following quotation:
The songs sung by our bards at feasts and merry-makings were of a
very coarse kind: as the people were totally illiterate, and only
the better sort could read even their mother tongue, their taste
was formed on these compositions. As yet our stage had exhibited
only those palpable allegories by which rude unlettered moralists
instruct and please the gross and ignorant multitude.[318]
A woman who conceived of Shakespeare as living ‘in the dark shades of
Gothic barbarism,’[319] and who lamented his lack of ‘the admonitions
of delicate connoisseurs’[320] had in effect yielded all that the
most virulent critic could demand. Mrs. Montagu’s enthusiasms seem
very pallid after her alarming concessions. She considers Falstaff
humorous and Macbeth tragic, and is, in general and as usual,
platitudinous. But her continuous apologies and concessions really
form the staple of her work. ‘She found,’ says Lounsbury, ‘the speech
of Brutus to the people in _Julius Cæsar_, quaint and affected. She
exhibited her utter incapacity to comprehend the rhetorical skill of
Antony by declaring that the repetition of the epithet “honorable”
in his speech was perhaps too frequent. The character of Pistol in
the second part of _Henry IV_ was too much for her to understand.
Following previous critics she found many bombast speeches in the
tragedy of _Macbeth_. Like her predecessors she unfortunately forgot
to particularize them; lapse of time has now made it difficult to
discover them.’
One of the features of Mrs. Montagu’s _Essay_ was a series of
comparisons between the Shakespearian drama and the ancient Greek.
Here she was indeed on dangerous ground, for she could not read the
language of Æschylus. This, however, did not discourage her from
expressing herself very decidedly on the characteristics of his art.
She pronounces the supernatural element in _The Persians_ unfitted
to the piece, and finds ‘something of a comic and satirical turn’
in the ghost of Darius.[321] She asserts that the Eumenides of the
Oresteian trilogy ‘seem both acting out of their sphere and below
their character’;[322] but admits that the whole story ‘might be
allegorical.’ Such indeed she considered very nearly all of Æschylus
to be; for she had a peculiar notion that his materials were derived
at second-hand ‘from the hieroglyphic land of Egypt,’ and, though in
the grosser times of Greece literally understood by the vulgar, were
in more philosophic ages ‘again transmuted into allegory.’[323] But
it is idle longer to stir this forgotten dust.
* * * * *
A woman truly learned in the classics, whose abiding common sense
protected her from the ridicule freely poured out upon bluestockings,
was Miss (or, by courtesy, Mrs.) Elizabeth Carter, the spinster of
Deal. To Mrs. Montagu (patron of letters) she was an indulgent
preceptress, a very Pierian source of learning, and much that passed
as erudition in the ‘female Mæcenas’ was in reality derived at
second-hand from Mrs. Carter. Mrs. Montagu was never unwilling to
sit at the feet of the woman whose reading ranged from Aristotle to
Petrarch and from Diodorus Siculus to the _Sorrows of Werther_,[324]
who would correspond with her respecting the Newtonian mechanics or
the Stoic philosophers.
Mrs. Carter’s reputation was made by a translation of the extant
works of Epictetus, an elegant quarto put forth in 1758, provided
with an introduction and ample notes. The style of the translation
is, in a very high degree, chaste and pleasing, and nowhere suggests
the line-by-line method of the laborious translator. The introductory
essay is an admirable exposition of the Stoic philosophy. The
following specimen may show that Mrs. Carter was capable not only of
a spirited style, but of genuine critical treatment of her subject:
About the generality of mankind, the Stoics do not appear to have
given themselves any kind of trouble. They seemed to consider
all (except the few who were students in the intricacies of a
philosophic system) as very little superior to Beasts: and, with
great tranquillity, left them to follow the devices of their own
ungoverned appetites and passions.
With regard to the value of the book as a translation of Epictetus,
it is perhaps sufficient to point out that it was, in its own time, a
standard commentary, that it passed into a second edition in 1759,
and that it is the basis upon which a subsequent translator has been
content to build.[325] It has, moreover, renewed its youth in the
recent reprints of popular libraries of the classics.[326]
Mrs. Carter has, therefore, transferred to modern times something of
her scholarly fame. Yet she was not a pedant, and never gave herself
the airs of a _femme savante_. Johnson (who wrote a Greek epigram
in her honour that she might be celebrated in ‘as many different
languages as Lewis le Grand’[327]) used to say that she could ‘make
a pudding as well as translate Epictetus from the Greek, and work
a handkerchief as well as compose a poem.’[328] He paid her the
compliment of receiving two of her essays for the pages of _The
Rambler_,[329] and these, though dull, are not more unreadable than
the rest of that periodical.
Of her collected poems there were four editions during her own life.
But it must be frankly admitted that her reputation as an independent
author, though respectable in her own day,[330] has since suffered
total extinction. Yet the student may discover in her poems here and
there a point of antiquarian interest. For our purpose the volume is
significant as containing lyrics to Mrs. Vesey and Mrs. Montagu. Both
poems, though addressed to living ladies, contrive to belong to the
Churchyard School and to prolong faint echoes of Gray. Two of the
stanzas addressed to Mrs. Vesey are plainly intended to counteract
that lady’s rationalism, and may be quoted here as a specimen of Mrs.
Carter’s poetic powers:
Not for themselves the toiling Artists build;
Not for himself contrives the studious Sage:
To distant Views by mystic Force compelled,
All give the _present_ to the _future_ age....
Yet check that impious Thought, my gentle Friend,
Which bounds our Prospects by our fleeting Breath,
Which hopeless sees unfinished Life descend,
And ever bars the Prison Gates of Death.[331]
Over the whole volume is cast the shadow of the now-fashionable
melancholy, and much is made of the midnight moon, the evening dew,
the ‘Gothic pile,’ and the ivy bower of the bird of night. These
are worth mention as showing that Mrs. Carter’s interests were not
bounded by the school of Pope. Her tastes, like Mrs. Vesey’s,
grew increasingly romantic, and though she detested _Werther_[332]
and never doubted that Rousseau was mad,[333] she was always an
affectionate believer in Ossian.[334] She felt the new passion for
landscape. In thought she accompanies Mrs. Vesey to the cliffs
of Snowden,[335] and regrets that Mrs. Montagu cannot ascend the
heights of windy Morven.[336] At Eastry she dreams herself back to
the worship of Woden.[337] Her interest in Gothic architecture is
intense, and she writes about the demolition of old buildings like
a disciple of Ruskin: ‘It seems to me that when a fair inheritance
is transmitted to a family they ought to feel a certain degree of
tenderness to the abode of the ancestors from whom it is derived,
which ought at least to sink quietly by the silent depredations of
time, and not be torn down by the rude hand of human violence.’[338]
This interest in romance enabled her to understand the Celtic
imaginings of Mrs. Vesey as her learning and her knowledge of
philosophy gave her a control over Mrs. Montagu. Her friendship
with the two ladies was unruffled throughout, and she received an
annuity of £100 from the latter without any sacrifice of dignity.
She never lost her head about anything—least of all about herself.
She was a scholar and had a scholar’s love of the classics, yet she
was broad enough to know when the age was widening its horizon. In
an age of prudes, she dared to like _Tom Jones_. In an age of wits,
she appreciated wit, yet had the sense to see that it is a ‘squint
of the understanding which is mighty apt to set things in a wrong
place.’[339] She understood and approved what was best in the salons,
but could be happy without any pretensions to a career in them.
Thus her life was passed serenely without social rivalries, without
the attempt or desire to follow her ostentatious friends afar, and
while escaping the criticism so freely visited upon them, she had
the honour of contributing by her quiet, serious, and almost unseen
influence to whatever of solid worth they were to achieve.
* * * * *
Intimately associated with Miss Carter was ‘the admirable Mrs.
Chapone,’ who, when Miss Mulso, had been one of Richardson’s
‘Daughters.’ Her two chief works, _Letters on the Improvement of
the Mind_ and _Miscellanies in Prose and Verse_, were the result of
bluestocking patronage, and were dedicated to Mrs. Montagu and Mrs.
Carter respectively. The former, having seen Mrs. Chapone’s letters
to a favourite niece, recommended their publication, and assisted in
preparing them for the press by correcting them with her ‘elegant
pen.’[340] The preparation of the second volume was undertaken at the
instigation of Mrs. Carter and with the approval of Mrs. Montagu;
though Mrs. Delany claims the honour of having first put the plan
into the author’s head.[341]
Mrs. Chapone’s _Letters_ were supposed to have had an enormous
influence on the conduct of young women. According to Hannah More,
in _Sensibility_, Chapone ‘forms the rising age.’ In Samuel Hoole’s
_Aurelia_, the heroine has a vision of an ideal woman:
On the plain toilet, with no trophies gay,
CHAPONE’S instructive volume open lay.
But one is inclined to suspect that this volume belongs to that
large class of admonitory works less popular with the young than
with their parents and preceptors. The book was put into the hands
of every young girl from the Princess Royal downwards. Mrs. Delany
considered it next to the Bible as an entertaining and edifying
work for youthful females. She advises that not more than six lines
of it be read at one sitting, in order that it may be the more
deeply impressed on the attention, and thinks that the historical
and geographical parts of it should be got by heart. She hopes her
grand-niece will read it once a year, until she has a daughter to
read it to her.[342] Mrs. Chapone herself smiled at the popularity
of the book, and considered its success to be due principally to the
patronage of Mrs. Montagu, and in part to the ‘world’s being so fond
of being educated.’[343] It is probable that it was generally used
as an antidote to the _Letters_ of Chesterfield which appeared about
the same time, and had a very different reception.
Mrs. Chapone’s _Letters_ consist almost entirely of advice; if
she ever wanders from this it is to give instruction. She treats
in turn of religion, the Bible, the affections, the temper,
economy, politeness, geography, and history. It is all admirable,
incontrovertible, wholesome, and heavy. It is like oatmeal—an
old-fashioned food which should be consumed in quantities by the
young, but for which they perversely seem to have no appetite. It
will be remembered that when Lydia Languish received an untimely
visit from Mrs. Malaprop, she wished to be found reading Mrs.
Chapone; though her interests were more seriously engaged by works
less uplifting. Of literary quality in these _Letters_ one can hardly
speak, for it is difficult to diffuse literary quality through two
hundred pages of solid advice.
The contents of Mrs. Chapone’s second volume are hardly different.
There are essays (‘Affectation and Simplicity’; ‘Conversation’), but
they are in the same hortatory strain as the _Letters_. There are
poems—fortunately few—several of which are addressed to Elizabeth
Carter. They are, in general, like that lady’s poems, save that they
reveal the influence of Collins rather than of Gray.
The most interesting things Mrs. Chapone wrote were her familiar
letters.[344] They contain many interesting remarks on Richardson,
and Johnson, both of whom were personally known to the author. They
have an independence, an ease, and a vivacity that are quite lacking
in the more solemn productions. The reader of them may find it in his
heart to regret that Mrs. Chapone was so filled with a sense of the
earnestness of life and of the importance of piety. A long indulgence
in frivolity might have saved her.
* * * * *
Miss Hannah More had larger ambitions and more varied talents than
the other bluestocking authors. She wrote poems lyrical, occasional,
and narrative; she wrote dramas tragic, classical, and sacred;
and she wrote essays and critiques of conduct. In all her earlier
work she was assisted and inspired by the bluestockings. She was
their chosen poet. She represented them in print as Mrs. Montagu
represented them in the salon. She celebrated them all in verse, and
dedicated in turn to Mrs. Boscawen, Mrs. Montagu, and Mrs. Vesey. It
is with this earlier period of her career that we are exclusively
concerned; the voluminous works which the lady produced after her
separation from the bluestockings form no proper part of our inquiry.
Miss More’s relations with the bluestockings began in 1774, soon
after her arrival in London. The exact date of her first visit to
the metropolis is uncertain. Her biographer, Roberts, who seldom
gives himself any concern with dates, says that this took place in
‘1773 or 4’; but inasmuch as Miss More dedicated her _Inflexible
Captive_ to Mrs. Boscawen as early as March 1, 1774, the former date
would appear the more probable. Her introduction to the _literati_
was due to Garrick, whose interest in Miss More had been roused by
her description of his acting in _Lear_.[345] By 1775 Hannah More
was a recognized member of the circle that surrounded Mrs. Montagu.
Her poems, _Bas Bleu_ and _Sensibility_, which have been noticed
elsewhere in this book, were composed directly in their honour; but
works of a more public appeal created no less enthusiasm among these
ladies. Thus her ballad, _Sir Eldred of the Bower_, which appeared in
1775, was greeted by Mrs. Montagu in her most extravagant manner. She
admired ‘the spirit and fire of the gothic character’ in the tale;
the simplicity of the plot, the depiction of ancient manners (save
the mark!), the primitive sentiments, and the characterization—all
these challenged the critical approval of Mrs. Montagu. The tale
of _The Bleeding Rock_, in the same volume, she esteemed no less
highly. ‘Your Rock,’ she wrote, ‘will stand unimpaired by ages as
eminent as any in the Grecian Parnassus.’[346] Such was the measure
of bluestocking praise. But the poems had a sanction more important
than this. They were read by a larger circle, Reynolds, Garrick,
and Johnson; they became the ‘theme of conversation in all polite
circles.’ Johnson could repeat all the best stanzas by heart.[347]
He read both poems with the author, made some alterations in _Sir
Eldred_, and even—as was his custom with poems submitted to his
judgment—added certain lines to it.[348]
The poems belong to the Gothic school, and may well have been
suggested by Percy’s _Reliques_; Johnson’s interest in them would be
hard to understand were they not the production of a woman whom he
playfully termed ‘the most powerful versificatrix’ in the language.
But the bluestockings loved romance[349] and the primitive world to
which they thought it introduced them. The fact that this world, as
conceived by Hannah More, has no remote similarity to our own made it
only the more conformable to bluestocking standards of the antique.
In reading this lady’s poems and plays one is constantly reminded of
those still-popular engravings of the eighteenth century, in which
distressed virgins, in carefully studied poses, cast their melting
eyes up to heaven. They live in bowers; refer to themselves in the
third person, as the ‘sad Elwina’ and ‘the distressed Julia’; and
when disappointed in love, or (to speak in their own idiom) when
their flame is not reciprocated, immediately go mad, and after a
painful scene before the footlights complete their career by sudden
death. Their lovers are of sterner stuff. They seek wars in distant
climes, disappear for long periods of time, and are reckoned dead,
only to reappear just as some domestic tragedy is reaching its
climax; they are for ever drawing their swords—frequently to plunge
them into their own bosoms. Miss More made full use of the poetic
license which governs this pasteboard world. Her characters are
burdened with no human motives, and it is idle to seek for related
cause and effect in their conduct. But morality flourishes. Thus in
_Sir Eldred_ we learn the dangers of jealousy:
The deadliest wounds with which we bleed
Our crimes alone inflict;
Man’s _mercies_ from God’s hand proceed,
His _miseries_ from his _own_.
But as the hero never once in the course of the poem acted like a
human being, the force of the moral is somewhat impaired.
In 1777 Miss More essayed a higher flight. She had written dramas
in her school-teaching days,[350] and now, with the assistance of
Garrick, produced a romantic tragedy, entitled _Percy_. Its title,
if not its contents, indicates the influence of Home’s _Douglas_.
The situation in this play, venerable in romance, deals with two
rival houses, those of Percy and Douglas, a heroine forced into an
unwilling marriage with the rival of her lover, who has been killed
in the Crusades. The distressed heroine and the returned lover (who
had not really been killed) meet in a garden-bower:[351]
_Percy._ Am I awake? Is that Elwina’s voice?
_Elwina._ Percy, thou most adored—and most deceived!
If ever fortitude sustained thy soul,
When vulgar minds have sunk beneath the stroke,
Let thy imperial spirit now support thee.—
If thou canst be so wondrous merciful,
Do not, O do not curse me!—but thou wilt,
Thou must—for I have done a dreadful deed,
A deed of wild despair, a deed of horror.
I am, I am—
_Percy._ Speak, say, what art thou?
_Elwina._ Married.
_Percy._ Oh!
It is unnecessary to follow the course of the tragedy; for the
reader’s own imagination will suggest it.
The play was a success in every way. It ran for twenty-one nights.
No tragedy for years had been so successful. Mrs. Barry was at
her finest in the mad-scene at the end. The author made nearly
six hundred pounds.[352] The play was translated into German, and
acted with success in Vienna. The bluestockings were triumphant.
Mrs. Montagu appeared repeatedly in her box at Covent Garden. Mrs.
Boscawen, who could carry Duchesses to the theatre with her, sent
the author a wreath of bay.[353] Mrs. Delany invited her to dinner.
Garrick, who had written the prologue, introduced her to Home, thus
presenting ‘Percy to the Douglas.’[354]
In _Percy_ Miss More reached the summit of her early achievement, and
the book is still sought by collectors. Readers, if in an indulgent
mood, will perhaps agree with Walpole, who found the play better
than he expected, and, though devoid of nature, not lacking in
good situations.[355] Severer folk will side with Mrs. Thrale, who
considered it foolish, and thought Fanny Burney ought to be whipped
if she did not write a better.[356] The truth probably lies between
the two opinions. To the eighteenth century the piece certainly
seemed to have merit. At any rate, it was popular enough to be
revived in order that Mrs. Siddons might appear as Elwina. Had it
survived to the mid-nineteenth century it might have proved useful as
a libretto for Bellini or Donizetti. In the coloratura woes of the
modern _diva_, the distressed Elwina would have found her perfect
interpretation.
Garrick was so pleased with the success of _Percy_ that he urged Miss
More to write another tragedy. The result was _The Fatal Falsehood_,
a romantic tragedy of the same sort. It was acted late in the spring
of 1779, some months after the death of Garrick, and, though it did
not duplicate the success of the earlier play, was enthusiastically
received. With its production Miss More’s connection with the London
stage came to an end.[357]
_The Fatal Falsehood_ sinks far below the level of _Percy_. It
probably suffered from the lack of Garrick’s revising hand; though it
is doubtful if even his genius could have introduced any semblance
of reality into a series of situations so preposterous. Miss More is
usually content to depend upon accident as the source of her dramatic
effects; but in _The Fatal Falsehood_ she attempted to depict in
Bertrand a villain as subtle as Iago. Although he analyzes himself
and his motives in a series of soliloquies, he remains a tangle of
absurdities, and all the action of the piece, which flows from him,
must be similarly described.
Miss More’s dramas, as well as her poems and essays, were intended
to serve the cause of virtue, about which all bluestockings were
seriously concerned. Even the plays are filled with a sort of
portable morality in the shape of maxims:
The treacherous path that leads to guilty deeds
Is, to make vice familiar to the mind.
Miss More never escaped from the office of preceptress; the forming
spirit of all her work is that of the Young Ladies’ Academy.
In the same year which saw the production of _Percy_, she put forth
a volume entitled _Essays on Several Subjects, principally intended
for Young Ladies_. The book is of the same sort as Mrs. Chapone’s
_Letters_: it warns young women to be modest, to avoid envy, and
guard against the ‘obliquities of fraud’ in lovers. Allowing for its
hopelessly narrow view of life, it may be granted that the advice is
sound enough. But the bluestockings never realize that good advice is
the cheapest commodity in the world.
_Florio_, a tale somewhat inappropriately dedicated to Walpole, is
a sort of parable in verse, designed to enforce such lessons as
are conveyed in the _Essays_. The hero, once a slave to frivolous
society, is converted by reading Johnson’s _Idler_ and inspecting the
beauties of Nature under the direction of his mistress.
With _Florio_ we reach a period in Miss More’s literary career and
the end of what may be called the bluestocking influence on her work.
Her pietism, which had amused Garrick, was now becoming chronic.
She declined to go and see Mrs. Siddons as Elwina, because it is
wrong to attend the theatre. She deplored the singing, dancing, and
feasting in which London indulged after King George’s recovery of
his sanity.[358] She even objected to the phrase _merry Christmas_,
as being bacchanalian rather than Christian.[359] Walpole, who was
naturally distressed by all this, made a charming attack on Miss
More’s Low Church faith in the Ten Commandments, and pointed out to
her that she was guilty of the Puritanical heresy.[360] The truth
is that Miss More’s sense of responsibility to society at large was
weighing on her mind. In 1788 she published a serious call to a more
solemn view of life in her _Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners
of the Great to General Society_, and definitely embarked upon her
career as preceptress in public morality. Meanwhile she was drawing
steadily away from her fashionable friends. At last she came to think
any association with them almost wicked. On March 12, 1794, she wrote
in her diary:
Dined with friends at Mrs. ——. What dost thou here, Elijah? Felt
too much pleased at the pleasure expressed by so many accomplished
friends on seeing me again. Keep me from contagion![361]
Whatever may have been the influence of the bluestockings upon
others, there can be no doubt that for Hannah More it had been an
excellent corrective. It had at least prevented her from comparing
herself to Elijah.
CHAPTER X
MRS. MONTAGU AS A PATRON OF THE ARTS
Above all things Mrs. Montagu longed to send her reputation down
to posterity as an acknowledged patron of letters. She wished to
attach to herself, after the manner of the French literary ladies,
some poet, essayist, or scholar, whose work she might inspire and
supervise, and whose reward was to be the association of her name
with his. Hannah More, recognizing this ambition, calls her ‘the
female Mæcenas of Hill Street,’[362] and Dr. Burney asserts that she
‘makes each rising art her care.’[363] The poet for whom she had
been waiting appeared in the summer of 1766, in the person of James
Beattie, a young professor of moral philosophy at Aberdeen, who was,
at the time, unknown in England.
Beattie was by nature shy, nervous, self-conscious, and uncertain of
his powers—a type familiar in the academic world. He was for ever
finding his poems unworthy of him, suppressing them, altering and
correcting them, and threatening never to complete them. For such
a person a patron might do much. Mrs. Montagu at once expressed
herself to Dr. Gregory (a common friend resident in Aberdeen) as
highly pleased with Beattie’s poetry. But it was not until she saw
the first canto of the _Minstrel_, early in 1771, that her judgment
was fully convinced. She now set to work with as much industry as
charity to advance her chosen poet in the world of letters. She sent
a copy of the new poem to Lord Chatham,[364] recommended it to the
attention of Percy (the inspiration of whose essay on the minstrels
had been acknowledged by Beattie in his preface), and encouraged
her _protégé_ by quoting to him the praises of Lord Lyttelton. She
offered suggestions respecting the advertisement of the poem, and
wrote to a bookseller of her acquaintance that he must recommend the
poem ‘to all people of taste.’ Such were the powers of the female
patron in this new age.
Mrs. Montagu also interested herself in another work of Beattie’s,
a book now quite forgotten but then just entering upon a brilliant
career of popularity. This was no other than an _Essay on Truth_,
which had been published in 1770, and had almost immediately passed
into a second edition. Mrs. Montagu very flatteringly describes the
vain efforts of the English public to come at this volume. She has
herself recommended it ‘to many of our Bishops and others; but all
have complained this whole winter that the booksellers deny having
either the first or second edition. I dare say many hundreds would
have been sold if people could have got them.’[365] It is quite
obvious that the academic young poet needs the practical assistance
of the bluestocking, friend of ‘Bishops and others.’ He therefore
came up to London in the autumn of this year, and then first made the
acquaintance of the woman whom he ever after gratefully acknowledged
as his patron. And thus the Defender of Truth and the Defender of
Shakespeare met together—to their mutual advantage. Mrs. Montagu’s
mind was already teeming with projects for the advancement of her
favourite. In the spring of the next year, upon hearing that Adam
Ferguson of Edinburgh University was to go abroad, she conceived the
plan of having Beattie transferred to his chair, and succeeded in
interesting the Archbishop of York in the matter, only to learn that
the professor had every intention of returning to his work after his
temporary absence.[366] Nevertheless she was the means of introducing
Beattie to the Archbishop and to his brother, Lord Kinnoul,[367]
who became warm friends of the new poet. In the following year she
instructed Beattie in the best means of bringing his case to the
attention of the King,[368] assuring him that if the government did
nothing for him, she would herself ‘claim the honour of rendering
his situation in life more comfortable.’[369] But the government
did not disappoint her. Beattie was presented to the King at his
levee, received the incense of his praise, and, later, a pension
of two hundred pounds, and a degree of Doctor of Laws from Oxford.
Mrs. Montagu shared in the general praise. ‘Do you not honour Mrs.
Montagu,’ wrote Hester Chapone to Mrs. Delany, ‘for the pains she has
taken to introduce this _excellent champion of Christianity_ into the
notice of the great world and to obtain for him some other regard
than that of barren fame?’[370]
Her efforts on his behalf had but begun. Abandoning a plan that
he should enter the Church of England—partly no doubt because
of Beattie’s own lukewarmness—she thinks he may perhaps do more
service to religion as a layman than as a priest,[371] and she
now urges the publication, by subscription, of a quarto volume of
_Essays_. In this way, she thought, eight hundred or a thousand
pounds might be gained.[372] Patron and _protégé_ together drew up
a form of ‘subscription-paper,’ and, since Beattie shrank from any
advertisement in newspapers, Mrs. Montagu agreed, with the assistance
of a few friends, to circulate the document herself.[373] She did her
work well. In the list of subscribers to the book[374] she contrived
to include not only every prominent bluestocking, but Reynolds,
Garrick, Johnson, a host of peers, her friends the Bishops, the two
Archbishops, and the libraries of Oxford. She was the recognized
sponsor of the volume, and when the publication of it was delayed,
it was part of her office to circulate an explanatory card of
Beattie’s.[375] When it finally appeared she was delighted with it
in its every aspect, but professed to find it rather insolent in a
native of Aberdeen to outdo the English in style.[376]
Meanwhile the second canto of the _Minstrel_ had been sent to her for
criticism, and was, if we are to believe Beattie, published at her
request.[377] Four years later a volume of select poems was submitted
to her with the request that she suppress those of which she did not
approve; and when at last Beattie put forth the _Minstrel_ in its
final form, he requested permission to dedicate the first canto to
her by putting her name into the last stanza in a space which had
been left blank from the first:
Here pause, my gothic lyre, a little while,
The leisure hour is all that thou canst claim.
But on this verse if Montagu should smile,
New strains ere long shall animate thy frame.
And her applause to me is more than fame;
And still with truth accords her taste refined.
At lucre or renown let others aim,
I only wish to please the gentle mind
Whom Nature’s charms inspire and love of human kind.
The sweetness of this languidly conventional note must have been
somewhat spoiled for Mrs. Montagu by the fact that the lines were
written before Beattie knew her, and were, if we may trust the poet’s
biographer, originally intended for another.[378] But there can be
no doubt of Beattie’s gratitude. He honoured his patroness by naming
a son Montagu, and continued to visit her in London or in Sandelford
and to submit his works to her for her approval,[379] that form of
flattery which she coveted most of all. They honoured each other for
many years with a reasonable regularity of correspondence which,
however, does more credit to their earnestness than to their wit.
The relations of Beattie and Mrs. Montagu continued serene throughout
their lives. Each was grateful to the other and never failed to make
a public display of that gratitude. Mrs. Montagu bestowed her favours
without offence, and Beattie received them without any pretence of
hesitation. Each was happier for having known the other. And if the
relation of author and patron must needs exist, theirs is a specimen
of what the relation may be at its best.
* * * * *
The relations of Robert Potter, the translator of Æschylus, with Mrs.
Montagu are of the same general nature as those of Beattie. It was
with trembling gratitude that he accepted and incredible flattery
that he repaid the favours which the lady bestowed upon him. Her
attention had, it would appear, been caught by the publication of the
Greek tragedian in English,—the publication of translations being
always a welcome event for bluestockings—and she at once suggested to
the translator the propriety of adding explanatory notes. He adopted
the suggestion, and, when publishing his Notes in the following year
(1778), improved the opportunity to dedicate not only these but the
original volume to his new-found patron. In a prefatory letter to her
he outdid Beattie in the use of superlatives. The notes are written,
he proclaims, only because Mrs. Montagu has asked for them, and with
him a hint from that lady is a command; though he is incapable of
understanding why so accomplished a person should ask for notes,
since she needs them ‘as little as any person alive.’ The approbation
of Mrs. Montagu, he concludes, is ‘the highest honour any writer can
receive.’
Loyalty was one of Mrs. Montagu’s qualities. None of her _protégés_
ever had occasion to complain that she lost interest or declined
support. Her career as a patron of the arts is sullied by no
quarrels; she was the subject of no anonymous libels from the
offended recipients of her charity. She continued her favours to
Potter, urging him to proceed with his translation of Euripides,[380]
and appearing prominently among the subscribers to that volume. She
received him at her assemblies, and, according to a somewhat doubtful
anecdote, presented him to Dr. Johnson.[381] Johnson, who considered
Potter’s work ‘verbiage’ (doubtless because it was in blank verse),
snubbed the scholar and mumbled to the bluestocking, ‘Well, well!’
and ‘Well, Madam, and what then?’
This ungracious reception may have helped Mrs. Montagu in inciting
Potter to attack Johnson’s _Lives of the Poets_, some years later;
but, according to Walpole, the chief aim was ‘to revenge the attack
on Lord Lyttelton.’ There is, I believe, no existing evidence for
this gossip, apart from the pamphlet itself; but there seems to be
no good reason for rejecting it. In this paper, which, it must be
said, is a sufficiently dignified and worthy pamphlet as pamphlets
go, Potter quotes Mrs. Montagu’s _Essay on Shakspeare_ by way of
demolishing Johnson’s criticism of _The Bard_, and the lady and
Bishop Hurd are proclaimed ‘the two best Critics of this or any other
age.’[382] Of this piece of nonsense Walpole has written the last
word:
Were I Johnson, I had rather be criticized than flattered so
fulsomely. There is nothing more foolish than the hyperboles of
contemporaries on one another, who, like the nominal Dukes of
Aquitaine and Normandy at a coronation, have place given to them
above all peers, and the next day shrink to simple knights.[383]
It is a pity that Potter could not have known that the utility of
his translations, which have been reprinted again and again, would
outlive the fame of his patron.
* * * * *
A classicist of much more importance than Potter did not disdain
to court Mrs. Montagu. It was in June 1788, that William Cowper
published in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ his pleasant verses _On Mrs.
Montagu’s Feather Hangings_. He had himself not seen the room, but
knew it from the descriptions of his cousin, Lady Hesketh, who was
an aspirant to Mrs. Montagu’s ‘academy.’[384] The poet’s purpose in
the presentation of this poetical tribute seems to have been missed
by his editors; but it is clear that he was yielding to the pressure
of Lady Hesketh and attempting to bring himself and his forthcoming
translation of Homer to the attention of the bluestocking. The first
move was a failure. Mrs. Montagu, it would seem, took no notice of
the lines in the magazine, though they were set forth as ‘by the
author of _The Task_,’ already a poem of national fame. In August,
Cowper writes to Lady Hesketh:
To me, my dear, it seemeth that we shall never by any management
make a deep impression on Mrs. Montagu. Persons who have been so
long accustomed to praise become proof against it.[385]
[Illustration:
Mrs. Montagu Johnson
JOHNSON POINTING OUT MRS. MONTAGU AS A PATRON OF THE ARTS
Reproduced from Barry’s fresco in the Royal Society of Arts, by kind
permission of the Society]
It was necessary to adopt a new plan. Two years later Lady Hesketh
decided to approach Mrs. Montagu herself, and requested Cowper
to permit her to show a portion of the manuscript to that lady.
The poet, who had long since admired the _Essay on Shakspeare_
and who had acquired the most exaggerated notions of the lady’s
learning,[386] chose the first two books of the _Iliad_ to present as
a sample intending to ‘carry her by a _coup de main_,’ and employing
‘Achilles, Agamemnon, and the two armies of Greece and Troy,’ in his
charge upon the bluestocking. To these the sixteenth book of the
_Odyssey_ was added by Lady Hesketh. ‘It was very kind in thee,’
he writes,[387] ‘to sacrifice to this Minerva on my account.’ But
Minerva, who was now seventy, was probably glad to escape from the
affair with a concealment of her ignorance of Homer. She wrote an
enthusiastic, and, be it added, modest letter to Lady Hesketh about
the new translation, and put her name on the subscribers’ list.
Cowper read the letter and expressed his pride in what was said; and
there the matter ended.
* * * * *
The precise nature and extent of the assistance which Mrs. Montagu
rendered to James Barry, the painter, it is now impossible to
determine. Certain it is that she consented to be painted by him (in
hideous profile) for that hodge-podge of fresco with which Barry
covered the walls of the Royal Society of Arts. She is there depicted
in her capacity as a patron of the arts.[388]
‘Towards the centre of the picture,’ writes Barry, ‘is seen that
distinguished example of female excellence, Mrs. Montagu, who
long honoured the Society with her name and subscription.... Mrs.
Montagu appears here recommending the ingenuity and industry of a
young female whose work she is producing.... Between these ladies
[the Duchesses of Devonshire and Portland] the late Dr. Samuel
Johnson seems pointing out this example of Mrs. Montagu to their
Graces’ attention and imitation.’[389]
The juxtaposition of Johnson and Mrs. Montagu, the Great Dictator and
the female Mæcenas, must have caused inextinguishable mirth among the
spectators who knew of their great quarrel. Mrs. Montagu’s resentment
at Johnson’s treatment of Lyttelton in the _Lives of the Poets_ has
been much discussed; but the story must be repeated once more for the
sake of the light which it throws upon Mrs. Montagu’s ambitions to
control the destinies of literature.
Mrs. Montagu and Lord Lyttelton had been close friends for many years
preceding the death of the latter. They had laboured together on the
_Dialogues of the Dead_ (to the scandal, Walpole delighted to relate,
of the lady’s postilion[390]); and thus Mrs. Montagu’s literary fame
was, in a way, bound up with the peer’s. When, eight years after
the death of Lyttelton, Johnson’s account of him appeared, it was
found to contain remarks which did not please the friends of the
late nobleman. Far from being satisfied that he should have been
deemed worthy of inclusion even in so inclusive a list as Johnson’s,
they decided to take offence because a certain amount of blame was
mingled with a certain amount of praise. Johnson had, for example,
criticised ‘poor Lyttelton’ for thanking the Critical Reviewers for
their commendatory notice of the _Dialogues of the Dead_; he spoke of
Lyttelton’s poems as having ‘nothing to be despised and little to be
admired,’ and of his songs, in particular, as ‘sometimes spritely and
sometimes insipid.’ Here surely is as much praise as posterity would
care to give to Lyttelton; but it was not sufficient for the women
who owed some part of their reputation to the fact that they had been
intimate with a peer. According to Walpole, it was Mrs. Vesey who
began the attack, but it was certainly Mrs. Montagu who conducted the
campaign. The reader of Fanny Burney’s _Diary_ is familiar with the
details of this feud; the reader of Walpole will find four references
to it in the letters written at the opening of 1781.
‘She told me,’ writes the latter, ‘as a mark of her high
displeasure, that she would never ask him to dinner again. I took
her side, and fomented the quarrel, and wished I could have made
Dagon and Ashtaroth scold in Coptic.’[391]
Nothing came of this literary feud save a scene at Streatham between
Johnson and Pepys which frightened Fanny Burney, and Potter’s attack
on the _Lives_ which has been mentioned already; and Mr. Dobson
remarks that modern readers ‘will perhaps wonder what the dispute was
about.’[392] But it is significant as showing the influence which
Mrs. Montagu thought she exerted in the world of letters, and the
means which she adopted to make her influence felt.
Johnson’s behaviour during this quarrel must, I think, have been due
to something other than wounded vanity. It was, I am convinced, due
to this very patronage of literature which the bluestockings, with
Mrs. Montagu at their head, were attempting to set up. There can be
no more annoying spectacle than that of a person to whom wealth and
social talents have given a certain minor position in the literary
world, and who, mistaking gifts for genius, attempts to exalt
that position to one of authority. This is what Mrs. Montagu was
trying to do. She had, without a shadow of doubt, achieved a certain
influence. She had bestowed pensions and gifts upon deserving authors
and scholars. She had placed her name on a hundred subscription
lists. She had contributed to the success of Hannah More’s tragedy,
_Percy_, by appearing, more than once, in a box at the theatre where
it was being performed. Elizabeth Carter and Hester Chapone (who
dedicated her _Letters_ to Mrs. Montagu) were examples of the worthy
writer whom she assisted in one way or another by her unostentatious
charity. Laurence Sterne was content, as early as 1761, to make her
a sort of literary executor,[393] ‘not because she is our cousin—but
because I am sure she has a good heart.’ But when, through the
influence of flattery, she mistook her kind heart and her pleasant
interest in literature for the critical authority of a scholar and
arbiter, an authority which can belong to but one or two in any age,
she brought down upon herself, not unnaturally, the wrath of Johnson
and the scorn of Walpole. By November 1776, she had reached the point
where she could write thus to Garrick:
‘I must say I felt for Shakspeare the anxiety one does for a dead
friend, who can no longer speak for himself.’[394]
In 1778 she could seriously offer Fanny Burney, already renowned
as the author of _Evelina_, the gift of her ‘influence,’ adding,
‘We shall all be glad to assist in spreading the fame of Miss
Burney.’[395]
She had the desire to direct and to manage which is characteristic of
the experienced woman of fashion, who knows the value of her personal
charm, rather than of the true literary critic, who is usually a
person too wise to attempt to direct the stream of literature. But
Mrs. Montagu was not content to let that stream flow as it would.
She must bring comedies to the attention of Garrick[396] and suggest
subjects to Hannah More[397] and Mrs. Carter;[398] she must guide
Potter and encourage Beattie. In the pride of her power she even
attempted the delicate task of influencing the elections to the
Literary Club; and it would appear that, escaping the detection of
Johnson, she succeeded in her aim, for her candidate, who was no
other than Mr. Vesey, was chosen. But when she aspired to reverse the
estimate of the greatest living critic and substitute the indulgent
opinion of a personal friend, it is not surprising that Johnson
should somewhat sharply have reminded her and her coterie of what
their opinion was really worth. Few to-day will be found to regret
that the lady’s view did not prevail.
At one point Mrs. Montagu’s relations with her _protégés_ come
dangerously near to farce comedy. Like all the bluestockings, she
was one of the believers in the genius of Ann Yearsley, the poetical
milk-woman of Bristol, who was regarded for a time as a female
Chatterton. It was part of the work of bluestockings to discover
genius. They had discovered Hannah More; they had discovered Beattie
and Mrs. Chapone; if they had not discovered Fanny Burney they had
at least ferreted her out of the obscurity in which she wished to
remain. But none of their literary finds seemed to them so bright
with promise as the marvellous woman who sold milk from door to door
in the unpoetical town of Bristol. It was Miss More who found her,
and who, with Mrs. Montagu, advertised her with an ardour which
does more credit to the quickness of their sympathies than to the
quickness of their wits.
In 1783 Miss More discovered that Ann Yearsley, the milk-woman who
called daily at her house in Bristol for kitchen-refuse with which
to feed her pig, was accustomed to employ her leisure moments in
the composition of verses. She at once took the woman in charge,
taught her spelling, and the simplest rules of rhetoric, and after
a lapse of some months felt that her pupil had made such progress
that she might safely submit her verses to bluestocking judgment.
The enthusiasm with which Mrs. Montagu and her friends received them
is significant at once of their eagerness to assist the development
of poetry and of their unfitness for the task. Mrs. Montagu had
not believed in Woodhouse, the poetical shoemaker, but a female
Chatterton had more appeal. She wrote to Miss More,
‘Let me come to the wondrous story of the milk-woman. Indeed she
is one of the nature’s miracles. What force of imagination! what
harmony of numbers! In Pagan times one could have supposed Apollo
had fallen in love with her rosy cheek, snatched her to the top of
Mt. Parnassus, given her a glass of his best helicon, and ordered
the nine muses to attend her call.’
This hypothesis being unsuitable to a Christian age, Mrs. Montagu
suggests that the Scriptures, the Psalms, and the Book of Job in
particular, may have taught the artless numbers to flow; whereupon
she herself indulges in a flight:
Avaunt! grammarians; stand away! logicians; far, far away all
heathen ethics and mythology, geometry and algebra, and make room
for the Bible and Milton when a poet is to be made. The proud
philosopher ends far short of what has been revealed to the simple
in our religion. Wonder not, therefore, if our humble dame rises
above Pindar or steps beyond Æschylus.[399]
Mrs. Montagu joyfully promises her support.
The rest of the blues were hardly less enthusiastic. Old Mrs. Delany
circulated the milk-woman’s ‘proposals’ to print;[400] Mrs. Boscawen
sent in a ‘handsome list of subscribers’; the Duchess of Beaufort
requested a visit from Mrs. Yearsley; the Duchess of Portland sent
a twenty-pound bank-note. Walpole gave her money and the works of
Hannah More.[401] The Duchess of Devonshire presented her with an
edition of the English poets. All social London and half of literary
London put its name on the list of subscribers. When, in 1785, the
volume appeared, it was prefaced by a letter from Hannah More to
Mrs. Montagu, telling Mrs. Yearsley’s story, and recommending her to
the good attentions of Mrs. Montagu, whose delight ‘in protecting
real genius’ is well known. Mrs. Montagu’s name was, indeed, writ
large in the volume. In the address, _To Stella_ (Stella being the
milk-woman’s name for Hannah More), Mrs. Montagu is referred to as
That bright fair who decks a Shakespeare’s urn
With deathless glories.
Similar adulation is diffused through some seventy lines of a blank
verse poem, _On Mrs. Montagu_. A passage from this will serve as well
as anything to illustrate ‘Lactilla’s’ powers:
Lo! where she, mounting, spurns the stedfast earth,
And, sailing on the cloud of science, bears
The banner of Perfection.—
Ask Gallia’s mimic sons how strong her powers,
Whom, flush’d with plunder from her Shakespeare’s page,
She swift detects amid their dark retreats;
(Horrid as Cacus in their thievish dens)
Regains the trophies, bears in triumph back
The pilfer’d glories to a wond’ring world.
So Stella boasts, from her the tale I learned;
With pride she told it, I with rapture heard.
Mrs. Yearsley was not loath to address the great in verse. Mr.
Raikes of Manchester, the founder of Sunday Schools, the Duchess
of Portland, and the Author of _The Castle of Otranto_ (genially
referred to as ‘the Honourable H—e W—e’) were all commemorated. Their
influential patronage and sad Lactilla’s melancholy tale made the
volume immediately successful, and it passed into a fourth edition in
1786.
Lactilla might, however, have been happier had she been less
successful. There had come to her, after the publication of her
book, the not inconsiderable sum of three hundred and fifty pounds,
which Hannah More held in trust for her. One is not surprised to
learn that Miss More was cautious in paying out this money to Mrs.
Yearsley, nor that this caution impressed the owner of the money as
mere niggardliness. A sharp quarrel ensued which was fully set forth
by both women, by Hannah More in her letters to Mrs. Montagu and by
the poetess in the preface to her next volume of verses. It cost the
poor milk-woman all her fine friends and the fine reputation which
they had blown up for her. She sank gradually from view, and when she
died, in 1806, was probably as obscure as when she was ‘discovered’
some twenty years before. Had she been of a philosophical
temperament, she might perhaps have extracted some comfort from the
cynical reflection that her fall had been well-nigh as humiliating
to her discoverers and patrons as to herself. Walpole continued for
months to chuckle over the collapse of her reputation, asserting
that, if wise, she would now put gin in her milk and kill herself by
way of attaining to an immortality like Chatterton’s;[402] but the
bluestockings were glad to forget the poor creature and the mischief
they had done her, and the pathos of her latter state moved them only
to passionate descriptions of her ingratitude.
CHAPTER XI
RESULTS
The London salon did not pass away without leaving behind it serious
criticisms by serious people who knew it well. Thus Wraxall, writing
of Mrs. Montagu’s later assemblies, asserts that the charm departed
with the death of Johnson, ‘who formed the nucleus round which all
the subordinate members revolved.’[403] Miss More, in reference to
the same subject, says: ‘The old little parties are not to be had in
the usual style of comfort. Everything is great and vast and late
and magnificent and dull.’[404] At a period much earlier than this,
Gibbon made an interesting comparison between French and English
society which is worthy of consideration in any attempt to judge the
London salon. Writing at Paris, in May 1763, he says: ‘Là [_i.e._
in London] on croit vous faire plaisir en vous recevant. Ici on
croit s’en faire à soi-même’;[405] and elsewhere, ‘In two months I
am acquainted with more (and more agreeable) people, than I knew in
London in two years. Indeed the way of life is quite different.
Much less play, more conversation, and instead of our immense routs,
agreeable societies where you know and are known by almost every body
you meet.’[406]
There may perhaps be something worth considering in the suggestion
that the Gallic temperament lends itself more readily than the Saxon
to the life and atmosphere of salons. I have already pointed out that
one characteristic of that life, by which, indeed, its vitality is
to be tested, is the peculiar nature of the friendships between the
hostess and her author-guest. In London such relations are found,
but they seem tame, cool, and unequal. Passion is unknown in them.
It is inevitable that the salon, if not the literature that springs
from it, should suffer from this lack; and this contention cannot
be dismissed by insisting that authors are better off without such
questionable friendships. For better or for worse, these made for the
production of literature, and one cannot think of the great Parisian
salons as existing without them.
But we must go farther. The great English authors in general not only
declined to form such intimate associations in the salons, but looked
on literary assemblies with something approaching contempt, if indeed
they paid any attention whatever to them. The attitude of Johnson is
hardly to be thought of as an exception to this statement. After his
death he was loudly claimed as a member of the innermost bluestocking
circle, and he was so considered by more than one contemporary. Miss
More, for example, in her _Bas Bleu_ described Johnson as generally
participating in the assemblies of the bluestockings. This assertion
might be quite misleading, if we did not have Boswell’s _Life_ to
correct the impression. The amount of time which Johnson spent in
such assemblies is almost negligible. One smiles to think what a
tornado would have burst from him, had it been hinted to him that his
literary activity was in any way vitalized by women. The attitude of
other authors is even clearer. Burke was admittedly a renegade from
the salons.[407] Goldsmith does not appear to have had dignity or
authority enough to interest the bluestockings very much. Sheridan,
who might easily have shone in salons, was pre-occupied with dramatic
and political affairs. Sterne, Walpole, and Gibbon knew the Parisian
salon too well to have any illusions about its London offspring.
Approaching the matter from the other side, it must be obvious that
the salon could not win great distinction from those persons who were
content to accept its favours and submit to its influence. Beattie
and Hannah More, the translator of Epictetus and the translator of
Sophocles, and even the author of the excellent _Cecilia_—these were
but feeble luminaries for an institution, which, if it is to win
recognition at all, must shine with a splendour that is piercing.
Even when all this has been taken into account, the real question
is still to ask. Why did not English authors more generally seek
the inspiration and assistance of this institution? The salon was
not without a certain power: it was generous; it had influence
with publishers and with booksellers; it could bring authors into
pleasant and profitable contact with one another. But despite all
this, the bluestockings never became, like their French models, true
disseminators of ideas; they were never the devotees of new and
daring philosophies and of radical transitions. They were always
on the side of law and order, and of a conservative tradition.
They stood for the classicism of English literature. Now no temper
could have been more unfortunate than this at the moment when the
bluestockings sought to exert their influence. The things which
they represented were already passing away, and with the things
that were coming to birth they felt no profound sympathy. They did,
it is true, show a certain interest in romanticism, and Mrs. Vesey
scandalized her sisters by getting interested in agnosticism; but the
true significance of these things they never guessed. None of them
glimpsed that dawn in which to be alive was bliss. They were apart
from the whole current of European literature. At the moment when
poets were hearkening to the voices of new gods, the bluestockings
were prolonging faint echoes of conservatism; at the moment when
poetry was deserting the metropolis and schools of literature were
shattering into individualism, they cast their influence on the side
of a yet closer centralization. English literature was about to find
its true exponents in two men who were about as far removed from
the influence of salons as can well be imagined, the shy recluse of
Olney, and the passionate poet of the Lowlands.
Thus the salon, judged by classical models, must be said to have
failed. It was born out of its due time. Had the position of woman
in the English literary world permitted it to flower fifty years
earlier, there might have been a different story to tell. As it
is, we must be content to study it as an interesting attempt to
domesticate a foreign institution and as a revelation of certain
significant features in English literary life. Conceived in its
strictest sense, it is difficult to claim for the salon more than
this.
But there is a freer sense in which the whole movement may be
conceived. We may turn our eyes from the bluestockings and their
somewhat tiresome assemblies to consider the broader manifestations
of the social instinct. The age which we are studying is unique in
English literature as having struck out or brought to perfection
types of literature which exist solely to record and celebrate the
social life. That body of work is perhaps its most significant,
and certainly its most characteristic, contribution to English
literature. It is no idle speculation that sees in it the working of
the same spirit which tried to express itself in the salon. Full
expression was reserved for this spirit in simpler forms of social
life, and out of these rose a body of literature worthy to represent
it. To this truer manifestation of the social spirit in letters we
now address our attention.
PART III
THE SOCIAL SPIRIT IN ENGLISH LETTERS
[Illustration: SAMUEL JOHNSON
From a photograph, preserved in the British Museum, of an undescribed
painting, formerly attributed to Gainsborough]
CHAPTER XII
JOHNSON AND THE ART OF CONVERSATION
Chapters like this usually begin with a lament. The age of
conversation, it is proper to begin, is gone, gone with the
harpsichord and the minuet and the long, leisurely evenings when the
bluestockings discussed literature and the theory of equality. The
rush of modern life, one continues, has killed conversation, even
as the penny post has killed the art of letter-writing. In all this
there is much false sentiment and false implication. It is foolish
to assume the existence of a time when talk was universally clever
and wise. There were dullards even in 1780. Cards and dancing, then
as now, were sought as a relief from thinking, and serious talkers
were not seldom voted a nuisance. No doubt they often were. The
bluestockings, as we have seen, sometimes bored even themselves. The
reputation of the age for conversation depended upon a few.
It is difficult to recover a sufficient body of this conversation
upon which to base an opinion. It is a much easier thing to read
about than to get at. Plenty of essays on conversation have been
preserved—no manual for young ladies was without one—but the talk
itself is not so easy to find. We have Chesterfield’s advice to his
son on how to shine in conversation, but the record of Chesterfield’s
own discourse is little better than a collection of puns and bits
of repartee, mere flotsam and jetsam. Cowper wrote a long and
rather dreary poem on colloquial happiness, but where is Cowper’s
conversation? Fielding, too, wrote an essay on the subject, but it
is a rather priggish affair (for Fielding), and the perusal of it
only fills us with regret that we must take this poor substitute for
the brilliant chatter that went on about the punch-bowl. The scraps
of talk casually embedded in works on other subjects, the anecdotes,
jests, and _bons mots_ have lost with time much of their flavour
and significance, and give us no adequate notion of the distinctive
opinions held by their authors, no grounds for large general
conclusions about them, and no conception of the general strain of
their talk. There is no steady light from these flashes of eloquence
and wit. At most they make us regret what we have lost. Thus there
is every reason to suppose that the conversation of Richard Brinsley
Sheridan was a model of brilliance; but the collection of his sayings
recorded by Moore is quite lacking in the grace of reality. These
good things are without a foil; they need arrangement; they are mere
ornaments adorning nothing, a little heap of unset gems.
To all this there is but one exception, the grand exception of
Boswell’s record of Johnson. Perhaps the chief distinction of
that record is that it gives us not only the high lights in the
conversation, not only its exciting moments, but its very _longueurs_
(as Horace Walpole objected), its ineptitude, its occasional
inconclusiveness. There is, therefore, something by which the wit
of it all is set off. It has the ring of vitality. It is to the
everlasting credit of Boswell that he let us see the worst of
Johnson’s talk, that, in the words of Hannah More, he ‘mitigated none
of his asperities,’ but gave us the heaviness as well as the wit and
the rudeness as well as the depth. We hear the voice of Johnson, not
a mere quotation of his words.
But in spite of the obvious faults of Johnson’s talk, it is difficult
to speak of it without a continuous and perhaps offensive use of
superlatives. Age could not wither Johnson. Instead of impairing
his memory, time enriched it. The pomposity of his written work
never impedes his quickness of wit in conversation. He was, to be
sure, fond of parading that pomposity of style for the amazement and
amusement of his hearers, and it is scarcely true to say that he used
one style in writing and another in talking. It would be nearer the
truth to say that, as he grew older, he tended to introduce more of
the ease of his talk into his written work. Sentence after sentence
from the _Lives of the Poets_ might be cited to show the almost
colloquial ease of his later manner, and significant parallels might
be drawn. Yet it is certain that conversation gave more scope to
that aptness of homely illustration which was his most entertaining
gift. Posterity is right in preferring Johnson’s conversation to
his writings, for while it lacks nothing in the stream of thought
and finish of style that distinguish his writings, it is distinctly
superior in mother wit.
In the heat of conversation Johnson had a stimulus which he never
felt in writing, the joy of personal contention. He admittedly
regarded conversation as a contest, and was frankly contemptuous of
the type of man who, like Addison or Goldsmith, was always at his
best when he was arguing alone. Of two men talking, Johnson asserted,
one must always rise superior to the other. For himself he had too
much pride to be contentedly submerged by the conversation of others.
Rather than be worsted, he would strike below the belt, or, in the
words of Boswell, ‘toss and gore several persons.’ He had a rough and
ready way of escaping from difficulties. When Mrs. Frances Brooke
requested him to look over her new tragedy, complaining that she
herself had no time to revise it, since she had ‘so many irons in
the fire,’ the sage replied, ‘Why, then, Madam, the best thing I can
advise you to do is to put your tragedy along with your irons.’ ‘If
your company does not drive a man out of his house, nothing will,’
he said to Boswell because the Scotsman had ventured to defend the
Americans. When he got the floor—and by the use of such methods
he got it very often—he was not inclined to abandon it, and the
conversation became a monologue. Goldsmith, who so often had the
right in dispute and was, indeed, one of the wittiest opponents
Johnson ever had, complained that he was ‘for making a monarchy of
what should be a republic.’ Even Boswell admitted that in Johnson’s
company men did not so much interchange conversation as listen to
what was said. But, whatever lofty notions of conversation we may
cherish, it may be questioned whether it can ever be a republic. If
the flow of talk is to get anywhere, if it is to reach a conclusion,
it must be confined within a rather narrow channel or it is certain
to dissipate itself. Johnson hated spattering talk. He censured
Goldsmith because he was always ‘coming on without knowing how he was
to get off,’ and asserted that he could not talk well because he had
made up his mind about nothing. ‘Goldsmith,’ said he, ‘had no settled
notions upon any subject; so he talked always at random.’ It was not
so with Johnson. He saw his conclusions and drove straight towards
them, scattering his opponents or knocking them on the head if they
impeded him.
But it would be a mistake to infer that Johnson was a sort of
conversational head-hunter, or the ourang-outang of the drawing-room
whom Macaulay depicts, alternately howling and growling and rending
his associates in pieces before our eyes. If we have any respect for
the consistent testimony of his contemporaries, we shall come to
realize that he talked somewhat unwillingly. He had to be drawn out.
‘He was like the ghosts,’ said Tyers. Nothing annoyed him more than
to be shown off. At the famous Wilkes dinner, to which he had been
taken simply that he might contend with a worthy opponent, he was so
angry when he realized what had happened that he took up a book, ‘sat
down upon a window seat and read, or at least kept his eye upon it
intently for some time,’ exactly as upon the very different occasion
of his first meeting with Fanny Burney.
Because of this lack of pliability in Johnson, Boswell deserves far
more credit than he has ever received for his success in making him
talk. Boswell, though not a profound thinker, was of a mind curious
and alert. He is entirely misjudged by those readers—if, indeed, they
are ever readers—who join Macaulay in thinking him a fool. Boswell
said foolish things, to be sure, and asked the foolishest questions,
as what proportion of their wages housemaids might properly spend on
their attire, how hogs were slaughtered in the Tahiti Islands, and
what Dr. Johnson would do if he were shut up in a tower alone with a
new-born baby; but under the silliest of them there is always a keen
experimentalist, an amused observer tickling a giant with a straw.
Boswell introduced a valuable amount of friction into Johnson’s life,
arranged that he should meet men whose views were wholly opposed
to his own, carried him off to dine with Whigs, got him to call on
Lord Monboddo (who held the most offensive opinions about primitive
man), introduced him to General Paoli, and to Beattie and Sir Adam
Fergusson (of the infamous race of Scots), and dragged him across all
Scotland to Mull and Icomkill. No one else so mastered the art of
managing Johnson as this same wily Scot. Mrs. Thrale could not do it.
Neither Goldsmith nor Dr. Taylor could do it. Topham Beauclerk might
perhaps have done it, had he thought it worth while. Fanny Burney
had the subtle combination of grace and ability which appealed to
Johnson, but was lacking in force. When she attempted to show Johnson
to her ‘Daddy Crisp,’ or to engage him in conversation with Mr. and
Mrs. Greville, her failure was conspicuous. The great man’s placid
self-absorption gave a deeper offence than any tirade could have done.
Johnson had at times so serene a manner that, in an affable moment,
he declared to Boswell that ‘that is the happiest conversation where
there is no competition, no vanity, but a calm, quiet interchange
of sentiments.’ Such is the general strain of his conversation
at Streatham, as recorded by Miss Burney.[408] Here we detect a
playfulness, even a frivolity, of manner which is a pleasant contrast
to the more professional tone with which Boswell has familiarized
us. There is in it no hint of dress parade. It is a very human
conversation, containing most of the faults that disgrace our own.
Johnson gossips. He talks of the weather; he talks of his friends
behind their back—what true comrade ever failed to do that?—and will
even indulge in a bit of scandal. He talks of Sheridan’s marriage
with the beautiful prima donna, Elizabeth Linley, and of Goldsmith’s
fracas with his Welsh publisher, Evans; and censures or defends
Garrick or Foote as the mood impels. There are even moments when
he emulates Goldsmith and makes himself a laughing-stock for the
delectation of his friends.
‘Our roasting,’ he once remarked, when describing the state of his
kitchen, ‘is not magnificent, for we have no jack.... Small joints,
I believe, they manage with a string, and larger are done at the
tavern. I have some thoughts (with profound gravity) of buying a
jack, because I think a jack is some credit to a house’
‘Well,’ remarked Mr. Thrale, ‘but you’ll have a spit, too?’
‘No, sir, no; that would be superfluous; for we shall never use it;
and if a jack is seen, a spit will be presumed!’
This feature of the Johnsonian manner, which might almost be compared
with Goldsmith’s fondness for the rôle of fool, has been generally
overlooked. One may doubt whether even Boswell was more than dimly
aware of it. Yet there can be little doubt that Johnson enjoyed
assuming and playing a part. He was certainly not a bear, but he
enjoyed playing the bear, and hugged his victims to death that the
world might laugh. It was his peculiar misfortune to play the rôle
too well, as it was Goldsmith’s misfortune to play the fool too
well. Again, Johnson was assuredly not at heart a pompous man;
yet he could in a moment assume pomposity and drop into the rôle
of Gargantua. But he sometimes created such consternation in the
part that the world did not dare to laugh. Thus, in the trite old
illustration of his remark about Buckingham’s _Rehearsal_, he revised
the crisp sentence, ‘It has not wit enough to keep it sweet,’ into
the crazy pomposity of, ‘It has not vitality enough to preserve it
from putrefaction.’ It is amazing that Macaulay and the world of
readers after him could delude themselves into thinking that Johnson
was seriously attempting to improve this sentence. It was, on the
contrary, a pose worthy of Laurence Sterne. It was a favourite device
of a true humourist putting forth a caricature of himself. Instances
of it could be multiplied indefinitely. Remarking on the morality
of the _Beggars’ Opera_, for example, he said, ‘It may have some
influence for evil by making the character of a rogue familiar, and
in some degree pleasing’; then with the familiar shift of style,
‘There is in it such a _labefactation_ of all principles as to be
injurious to morality.’ Gibbon and Cambridge, who were present, could
regard this stylistic somersault as an attempt at critical dignity,
and even Boswell felt that he must smother his mirth. Fanny Burney,
had she been there, would, I imagine, have smiled confidently in
Johnson’s face, for she appreciated this aspect of his talk better
than others. It is to her that we owe Johnson’s delicious criticism
of his pensioners, and, in particular of the mysterious Miss Poll
Carmichael: ‘I could make nothing of her; she was wiggle-waggle, and
I could never persuade her to be categorical.’
But however dull the eighteenth century may have been in apprehending
this type of humour, it did full justice to the more serious side
of Johnson’s conversation. It was chiefly impressed, as every age
must be, with the scope and versatility of the man’s mind. It is of
course the merest platitude to remark that Johnson’s conversation is
characterized by breadth of interest and accuracy of information;
yet, like many platitudes, it is essential to an examination of
the subject. It is most significant of the man and of the age in
which he lived—so far removed from the narrowness of our own age
of specialization—simply to turn the pages of Boswell’s _Life_ and
note the number of topics upon which Johnson talked with that easy
mastery which distinguishes the scholar and philosopher from the
promiscuously well-informed man of the world. Take, for example,
the topics touched upon in a dozen consecutive pages of the book,
chosen at random; evidence for supernatural appearances, the Roman
Church, the thirty-nine articles of the Church of England, the Royal
Marriage Bill, the respect due to old families, the art of mimicry,
the word _civilisation_ (‘shop’ was evidently not an excluded topic),
vitriol, the question, Was there one original language? the relation
of Erse to Irish, the rights of schoolmasters, in the infliction of
punishment, the Lord Chancellors, the Scotch accent, the future
state of the soul, prayers for the dead, the poet Gray, Akenside,
Elwal the heretic, the question, Is marriage natural to man? (it
seems that it is not), the philosophy of beauty, swearing, the
philosophy of biography, the proper use of riches, the philosophy
of philanthropy. Here surely is a sufficiently varied list. But no
mere enumeration can give any notion of the novelty of Johnson’s
thinking. His remarks are no echo, no quotation. They are the
natural up-welling of an original mind, showing us that Johnson was
a philosopher; but they also reveal a fund of accurate detail and an
ability to quote chapter and verse, showing us that Johnson was a
scholar. These two offices may be quickly illustrated from the topics
enumerated above. When Boswell introduced the subject of the future
state of the soul, he made the highly conventional observation that
‘one of the most pleasing thoughts is that we shall see our friends
again.’ Whereupon Johnson replied:
Yes, Sir; but you must consider, that when we are become purely
rational, many of our friendships will be cut off. Many friendships
are formed by a community of sensual pleasures: all these will
be cut off. We form many friendships with bad men, because they
have agreeable qualities, and they can be useful to us; but, after
death, they can no longer be of use to us. We form many friendships
by mistake, imagining people to be different from what they
really are. After death, we shall see every one in a true light.
Then, Sir, they talk of our meeting our relations: but then all
relationship is dissolved; and we shall have no regard for one
person more than another, but for their real value. However, we
shall either have the satisfaction of meeting our friends, or be
satisfied without meeting them.
There is Johnson the philosopher. Five minutes later, Boswell was
saying, ‘I have been told that in the Liturgy of the Episcopal Church
of Scotland, there was a form of prayer for the dead,’ to which
Johnson replied, ‘Sir, it is not in the liturgy which Laud framed for
the Episcopal Church of Scotland; if there is a liturgy older than
that, I should be glad to see it.’ There is Johnson the scholar.
It would be rash to assert that Johnson was always on safe ground,
and ludicrous to assert that he was always right. He enjoyed a random
shot at the truth as well as any other man whose chief interest is
in the vitality of his thinking rather than in the literalness of
his conclusions; but it was a diversion which he seldom permitted to
others, and a tendency in himself which was generally restrained by
the specialists about him. Here we have a truly formative element in
the social life of the time.
But no man of the eighteenth century could hold his hearers simply by
the display of a wealth of information. Brilliancy of manner was as
indispensable as breadth of mind. ‘Weight without lustre is lead,’
wrote Lord Chesterfield. No good talker was without a superficial
attraction. Garrick was noted for the histrionic quality, Beauclerk
for acidity, and Goldsmith for Irish humour. Johnson’s conversation,
from the inner fire of it, was for ever sparkling into wit and
epigram. Yet he never made the mistake of serving his friends with
nothing but epigrams, which is very like serving one’s guests with
nothing but _hors d’œuvres_. Epigram stimulates the appetite, but
does not satisfy it, and will not do for a steady diet. It is with
Johnson, however, something more than a mannerism. It was the form
that lent itself best to the expression of his critical faculty.
An examination of Johnson’s literary criticism will reveal the
fact that his method is prevailingly sententious and summary. He
was impatient of a long and slow development of thought, nor did
he ‘wind into’ a subject, like Burke. In reading the _Lives of the
Poets_, we do not feel that matters are gradually illuminated, but
that they are revealed by sudden flashes. If his criticism offends,
it is usually because it is a final pronouncement and is too summary
to be adequate. When he attempts an orderly criticism of details,
the method, though more elaborate, is usually less satisfying. He
is at his best when he is most crisp and dogmatic: ‘If Pope be not
a poet, where is poetry to be found?’ ‘Dryden is read with frequent
astonishment, and Pope with perpetual delight.’ ‘His page,’ he says
of Addison, ‘is always luminous, but never blazes in unexpected
splendour.’ The value of Johnson’s criticism consists in such
sentences as these, not in longer passages of sustained comment like
the analysis of Gray’s _Bard_.
Now whatever charm or power there is in such a method is found also
in Johnson’s conversation. There is the same pointed style, the same
finality of tone, and often the same irritating quality: ‘No man,’
said he of Goldsmith, ‘was more foolish when he had not a pen in
his hand, or more wise when he had.’ ‘That man [Lyttelton] sat down
to write a book to tell the world what the world had all his life
been telling him.’ ‘All theory is against the freedom of the will;
all experience for it.’ ‘In republics there is not a respect for
authority, but a fear of power.’ Many profess to dislike such an
epigrammatic style as this; but I incline to think that those who
protest most loudly against such _dicta_ are those who are least
capable of thinking them out. At any rate, if they accomplished no
more, such statements gave something to attack, and the desire to
demolish is of the very soul of conversation.
Those who are offended by such a conversational method might attack
it more effectively by pointing out that it was often employed to
startle rather than to instruct. Johnson felt the normal human
desire to shock people, and indulged to the full his transitory
moods. ‘Rousseau,’ he would exclaim, ‘is a very bad man. I should
like to have him work in the plantations!’ ‘I am willing to love
all mankind, _except an American_.’ In a fit of petulance he even
quoted with approval the ridiculous remark, ‘For anything I can see,
foreigners are fools.’ There is no deliberation in such words; it is,
in truth, hardly fair to quote them. At any rate, they are entirely
misleading when taken out of their setting; for it is the charm of
conversation that it is not deliberate, and that a talker may dare
to have a prejudice as well as an opinion. A good talker will ‘paint
a man highly’ for the mere love of painting. Voltaire and all free
talkers with him are guilty of the same excesses. Madame Necker tells
us that in listening to Voltaire it was necessary to distinguish
the statements that were truly characteristic of the man from those
which were dictated by the passing mood and were no more than the
_vérité du moment_. It is the peculiar office of conversation thus
to give the whole man, with all his faults upon his head, all his
lapses from sense and self-consciousness, all his irrationalities
and inconsistencies: it is these things that show that he is human.
It was Johnson himself who remarked that in conversation ‘you never
get a system.’ Let us be grateful that it is so. A ‘unified’ person,
a man whose mind is governed by a system, cannot converse; he can
only lecture. His thoughts flow like a canal, not like a river. He is
really the most limited of men, for he must live within his system as
he lives within his income. It is the glory of Johnson’s conversation
that you cannot make a system out of it. For a system you must go to
the _Rambler_ or _The Vanity of Human Wishes_.
But this is not to say that Johnson had no conversational principles
or that he uttered thoughts merely because they were novel. His
‘stream of mind’—to use one of his own phrases—was free, but it was
not therefore without a very definite trend. Like a stream again, he
drew constantly upon his sources, certain general conclusions about
life, which really control his conversation. He himself declared that
general principles were not to be had from a man’s talk, but from
books. Certainly this dictum does not apply to his own talk, for
general principles are obvious enough in it. It is quite evident that
we are listening to a man who has made up his mind about life and
about what is worth while. If, unlike Goldsmith, he talked well in
public, it was because, like Imlac, he had thought well in private.
It is his constant custom to bring the casual topic immediately into
the realm of general principles, and thus the talk about a particular
subject becomes a philosophy of it. Boswell realized this, and
introduced topic after topic in order to get it cleared up once for
all. ‘I _wished to have it settled_,’ he says, ‘whether duelling was
contrary to the laws of Christianity.’ He always felt that Johnson
could have settled the whole matter of necessity and freewill, if
only he had been willing to talk about it. Of a lady talking with
Johnson of the resurrection body, he naïvely remarks, ‘She seemed
desirous of knowing more, but he left the question in obscurity.’
Such is his confidence in his master’s method.
It is always profitable to delve through Johnson’s talk to the
philosophy that underlies it; but not unfrequently he spares us the
trouble by enunciating the principle himself. Thus when the subject
of gaming arose, he pronounced as follows:
Sir, I do not call a gamester a dishonest man; but I call him an
unsocial man, an unprofitable man. Gaming is a mode of transferring
property without producing any intermediate good. Trade gives
employment to numbers, and so produces intermediate good.
Whether this doctrine be economically sound I do not know; but it is
plainly a _doctrine_. He delighted in such formulation of principles.
Thus when Hume’s statement that all who are happy are equally happy
was quoted to him, he replied with a definition of happiness:
Sir, that all who are happy are equally happy is not true. A
peasant and a philosopher may be equally _satisfied_, but not
equally _happy_. Happiness consists in a multiplicity of agreeable
consciousness. A peasant has not capacity for having equal
happiness with a philosopher.
In like manner, he deduced principles of æsthetics from a teacup, and
demolished the theory of equality by inviting the footman to sit down
and dine.
But Johnson’s conversation is more than a _reductio ad principia_,
as it is more than epigram and more than information. Philosophic
in method, it was creative in effect. It fertilized other minds,
and attained to new life long after it was uttered and forgotten.
Johnson cannot be measured by one who reads only his writings, but
he can be measured by one who reads only his conversation. Thus his
work is linked with that of men who have accomplished more by the
spoken word than by the written thought, so that, on the one hand,
it has its place in the history of table-talk, like that of Selden
and Coleridge, and, on the other, typifies the relation of society
and letters at its best. By the dynamic force of his conversation
Johnson developed men, he woke in them powers of which they did not
know themselves to be possessed, and raised them to higher levels
of attainment than his own. Men listened to him with rage or with
wonder, as the Hebrews to a prophet and the Romans to a Sibyl, and
they scoffed or recorded according to their mood. Of much of this
Johnson was, fortunately, unconscious. He regarded his books as his
chief influence upon the world. ‘Now, Sir,’ said he, ‘the good I can
do by my conversation bears the same relation to the good I can do
by my writings that the practice of a physician retired to a small
country town, does to his practice in a great city.’ But Boswell
saw more clearly. ‘To me,’ he said, ‘his conversation seemed more
remarkable than even his writings.’ When, in 1776, Boswell returned
to Johnson’s side, he felt at once the electric force. ‘I felt myself
elevated as if brought into another state of being,’ he wrote; and
said to Mrs. Thrale, ‘I am quite restored by him, by transfusion
of _mind_.’ The cynical will of course dismiss this as a spasm of
hero-worship; but it is more than that. No one will be inclined to
accuse Edmund Burke of worshipping Johnson, yet he remarked: ‘To the
conversation of this truly great man I am proud to acknowledge that
I owe the best part of my education.’ Orme the historian remarked
that in conversation Johnson gave one either ‘new thoughts or a
new colouring.’ Testimony of an even more striking character may
be quoted from Reynolds. Speaking of his own _Discourses on Art_,
Reynolds said:
Whatever merit they have must be imputed, in a great measure, to
the education which I may be said to have had under Dr. Johnson. I
do not mean to say, though it would certainly be to the credit of
these Discourses if I could say it with truth, that he contributed
even a single sentiment to them: but he qualified my mind to think
justly.... The observations which he made on poetry, on life, and
on everything about us, I applied to our art.
Those who heard the conversation of Johnson may be said to have
witnessed literature in the making. At any rate, Johnson’s talk
became literature by the simple fact of being recorded. It is the
best example that can be given of the fusion of the literary life
with the social, and brought to bear the same kind of influence
which the salons were trying to exert. It was destined to give
Johnson his distinctive place in the literature. It was regarded, and
properly, by Boswell as constituting the peculiar value of his _Life
of Johnson_, and as it was the chief inspiration, so it remains the
chief attraction of that remarkable book.
CHAPTER XIII
WALPOLE AND THE ART OF FAMILIAR CORRESPONDENCE
The golden age of English letter-writing arrived without a period
of long and painful preparation. With the more rudimentary
correspondence of the seventeenth century, the new art had but the
slightest relations, appearing in full bloom almost as soon as it
appeared at all. There was of course much in England to encourage
it. It is significant, for example, that the era of letter-writing
was coincident with the production of large numbers of novels in
letter-form, which made the art the vehicle of a new realism, and
thus helped to spread the popularity of both types at once. Again,
the era was also that of the development of the salons and of the art
of conversation, a coincidence which is duplicated in the literary
history of France.[409] Letter-writing, considered as a familiar
art—and we have no concern with its other aspects—is but written
conversation, a sort of _tête-à-tête_, with the talking, for the
moment, all one side. It is dominated by a smiling intimacy, and it
is this note which one feels to be a new thing in the correspondence
of the eighteenth century, a note which is heard but seldom in the
letters of an earlier period. The models of the new style were, in
fact, not English. When Chesterfield was choosing exemplars for his
son, he took no account of English letter-writers; he cites Cicero
and Cardinal d’Ossat as models for serious correspondence, and then
adds: ‘For gay and amusing letters, for _enjouement_ and _badinage_,
there are none that equal Comte Bussy’s and Madame Sévigné’s. They
are so natural that they seem to be the extempore conversation of two
people of wit rather than letters. I would advise you to let that
book be one of your itinerant library.’[410] The regard for Madame
de Sévigné was well-nigh universal. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who
probably found her too womanly, is almost alone in her dislike.
Thomas Gray has been said to imitate her.[411] Fanny Burney, who had
read her from the days of her youth, considered her ‘almost all that
can be wished to form female perfection,’ felt attached to her as
though she were alive and in the same room, and longed to run into
her arms.[412] Mrs. Boscawen created an almost national sensation
by circulating a rumour of the discovery in France of five hundred
new letters of Madame de Sévigné. All the blues were in a flutter
over it. Mrs. Montagu wrote to Hannah More that the truth of the
matter would be evident at once upon publication, since Madame de
Sévigné’s style was ‘of all things the most inimitable.’[413] Miss
More yielded to none in her admiration, and in one of her happiest
phrases compares her to a ‘master sketching for his own amusement.’
But all this admiration is as nothing compared with the worship which
Walpole gave the French writer. ‘My dear Madame de Sévigné,’ he calls
her, ‘that divine woman,’ ‘my saint,’ and ‘Notre Dame de Livry.’
He collected relics of her with a fervour fairly religious, and
enshrined them under her portrait. The cult became a jest among his
friends. Madame du Deffand sent him a snuff-box, with the likeness
of Madame de Sévigné painted upon it, and wrote a letter as from the
lady herself to accompany the gift:
Des champs Elisées.
(Point de succession de tems; point de date.)
Je connois votre folle passion pour moi; votre enthousiasme pour
mes lettres, votre vénération pour les lieux que j’ai habités: J’ai
appris le culte que vous m’y avez rendu: j’en suis si pénétrée que
j’ai sollicité et obtenu la permission de mes Souverains de vous
venir trouver pour ne vous quitter jamais. J’abandonne sans regret
ces lieux fortunés; je vous préfère à tous ses habitans: jouissez
du plaisir de me voir; ne vous plaignez point que ce ne soit
qu’en peinture; c’est la seule existence que puissent avoir les
ombres....[414]
When people bored Walpole with talk of Shakespeare and Swift, he
would set his thoughts upon Madame de Sévigné[415] as a monk takes
refuge in holy meditation. ‘If she could have talked nonsense,’
he cries, ‘I should, like any other bigot, believe she was
inspired.’[416]
Worshipping her thus, it is not surprising that he should have been,
even in his own day, compared to her.[417] He affected to regard
such praise as blasphemy; but, though he was in all probability
secretly pleased, he was too great an artist in his own way not to
realize that there was a difference between him and the goddess
of his idolatry. It is typical of this difference that one thinks
instinctively of Walpole as the ‘prince of letter-writers’ and of
Madame de Sévigné as a friend. Walpole was too strongly individualist
to be quite the ‘perfect medium’ that we find in the marquise. We
are conscious of his cleverness, his prejudices, his distortions,
his rank and snobbishness. We think of Walpole as often as we think
of Walpole’s news. His art is not, however, the less perfect, but
only different in method. He does not, like Madame de Sévigné, simply
transmit the light, but stains and fractures it so that it glows with
a confusion of colours and flashing rays. Walpole could never have
attained to the pearl-like perfection of Madame de Sévigné. If we
must needs deal in parallels, we shall find a much closer one between
Madame de Sévigné and William Cowper. The recluse of Olney, like
the Lady of Livry, had caught the secret of the unpremeditated art.
Walpole—like the prince that he is—is almost never free from a sense
of his rank.
I am tempted to say that this self-consciousness of Walpole is an art
in itself. He enjoys displaying various sides of himself, plays with
his prejudices, exaggerates all his enthusiasms and all his dislikes,
affects to be old and look back over a vista of years, jests about
his gout and the infallible bootikins, pretends to believe that the
country is going to the dogs, and takes refuge at Strawberry Hill
among his cats and his cameos. There are moments when he is as full
of humours as Charles Lamb. Throughout three thousand letters his
sprightliness, that subtle union of wit and grace, is hardly once
at fault; everything seems to contribute to it. Does he cross the
Channel in rough weather? He is drowned without being shipwrecked.
He has a ‘lap full of waves,’ is ‘washed from head to foot in the
boat at ten o’clock at night,’ and plunged into the sea up to his
knees. ‘_Qu’avois-je à faire dans cette galère?_ In truth, it is a
little late to be seeking adventures.’[418] Condemned to a state
of eternal emaciation, none shall outdo him in the description of
his leanness: he is ‘emaciated, wan, wrinkled,’ a ‘poor skeleton,’
a ‘thinner Don Quixote.’ Nor is he surpassed (even by Macaulay) in
his account of the ‘tinsel glories’ of Strawberry Hill. He would
certainly have been the first to call himself a snob, had he known
the word, or had it occurred to him to invent it. Meanwhile he made
no pretence of concealing his boredom with most things in heaven and
earth: to three-quarters of the world he displayed only a polished
indifference; most of the rest of it he openly despised, but it was
that he might have the more attention for the few whom he found worth
while. His career in the Parisian salons, which has been already
described, his repudiation of the _philosophes_ and the complete
absorption of his interest in Madame du Deffand, are really typical
of the man and of his entire career. If to be loyal through life to a
few friends, to expend one’s genius in giving them delight—‘spreading
one’s leaf gold over them and making them shine’—is to be a snob,
then Walpole richly deserves the name.
There is no lack of naturalness in Walpole’s relations with his
friends. He always ‘lets himself go,’ to a degree, indeed, that is
surprising when one recalls that he knew all along that his letters
would one day be printed. Like Johnson,[419] he feared the press,
which, he says, ‘exceeds even the day of Judgement, for it brings
to light everybody’s faults, and a good deal more.’[420] He was in
nervous dread that his letters to Madame du Deffand would get into
print, and made the poor lady wretched by harping upon his fear; on
the other hand, he himself collected and prepared certain of his
letters for print; and yet, in spite of all this, there is nothing
of restraint in his style or of caution in his words. He never sues
for the good opinion of posterity by adopting a judicial tone, but is
always delightfully himself. He knew that his letters to Sir Horace
Mann, which extend through forty-five years with hardly a break,
would one day be an invaluable record of public events,[421] and was
concerned that it should be kept intact; yet for all that he is never
betrayed into the manner of the archivist. So strong, indeed, is
Walpole’s individualism, so wayward his humour, that it is sometimes
rash to use his letters as documentary evidence.
There is, perhaps, no species of literature more exposed to
misinterpretation than the familiar letter. It may almost be stated
as a general law of the species that in proportion as a letter is
suited for print and for public reading, it is a poor thing. A
letter is, by its very nature, not addressed to an audience, but
to an individual; and as certainly as it becomes general in its
appeal, it loses that intimacy of tone which is its peculiar charm.
What is duller than an ‘open letter’? What is more chilling than a
postscript which invites you, when you have read a letter, to pass
it on to John and to Mary? Not there shall you find anything of
that conversation apart which constitutes the joy of writing as of
reading letters. The letter which is intelligible to everybody is
already impersonal and almost professional in tone, and you may
print it with impunity; but a letter which is addressed to a friend
will, in proportion to its intimacy, teem with allusions, oddities
of phrase, and obscure references which make full sense only to
the recipient, and you will print it at your peril. Lockhart, who
declined to ‘Boswellize’ Scott, has given full expression to this
fact, contending that if conversation is not to be misunderstood, ‘it
is a necessary pre-requisite that we should be completely familiar
with all the interlocutors, and understand thoroughly all their
minutest relations, and points of common knowledge.... In proportion
as a man is witty and humorous, there will always be about him and
his a widening maze and wilderness of cues and catchwords, which the
uninitiated will, if they are bold enough to try interpretation,
construe, ever and anon, egregiously amiss—not seldom into arrant
falsity.’ Now all this is at least as true of letter-writing[422] as
of conversation. It is, one might argue, never safe to attempt to
understand a familiar letter until you know all about the author of
it, and almost as much about the recipient; for the letter is but the
resultant of the first force working upon the second.
It is obvious, therefore, that no good letter should ever be printed.
A published letter courts all manner of misconstruction, and exacts
premature payment for those idle words whereof we are one day to
give account. Few men would willingly yield up the intimacies of
their private correspondence to the cruelty of public scrutiny and
criticism; it is disturbing to think how much of our published
correspondence would perish if the wish of the writer could effect it.
And yet it is this very unsuitability for print, it is this baffling
intimacy, the covert allusions, the obscure language of friendship,
that attract us to published correspondence. The pleasure in reading
it is the fun of seeing, once in your life, what was never intended
for your eye. Every printed letter seems to reproach us in its
revelation of a trust betrayed. There is thus something almost
unholy in the joy of reading published letters. It is never quite a
respectable thing to be doing. There is something of the eavesdropper
in it; it savours of intrusion and at times even of listening at
keyholes. One must be a kind of busybody to find out what it all
means. Sprightly letters are often as obscure as an overheard
conversation: witness the following extract from a letter of Walpole
to Thomas Gray:
George Selwyn says I may, if I please, write Historic Doubts on the
present Duke of G. too. Indeed they would be doubts, for I know
nothing certainly.
There is wit here and more than one sly allusion; but it is only by
prying rather deeply into old scandals that you discover the full
meaning of the passage. Familiar correspondence soon comes to need
a wealth of annotation. Walpole speaks of certain letters of Gray
to him as not ‘printable yet,’ on the ground that they are ‘too
obscure without many notes.’[423] But all the editorial art in the
world will not restore the quondam lustre. ‘If one’s tongue,’ Walpole
writes to George Montagu, ‘don’t move in the steps of the day, it is
only an object of ridicule, like Mrs. Hobart in her cottillon.’ The
brilliancy of this passage is bound up with the precarious fame of
Mrs. Hobart, nay, with the yet more precarious fame of her dancing.
Its elusiveness is an indication of the unfathomable quality in
letters.
Walpole was himself an insatiable reader of letters, and understood
and analyzed his ruling passion:
Fools! yes, I think all the world is turned fool, or was born so;
_cette tête à perruque_, that wig-block the Chancellor, what do
you think he has done? Burnt all his father’s correspondence with
Pope, Swift, Arbuthnot &c.—why do you think? because several of
the letters were indiscreet. To be sure he thought they would go
and publish themselves, if not burnt, but indeed I suspect the
indiscretion was that there were some truths which it was not
proper to preserve, considering _considerandis_. That is just what
I should like to have seen. There was otherwise so much discretion,
and so little of anything else except hypocrisy in all the letters
of those men that have appeared, that I should not so much regret
what discreet folly has now burnt. Apropos, did I ever tell you a
most admirable _bon mot_ of Mr. Bentley? He was talking to me of an
old devout Lady St. John, who burnt a whole trunk of letters of the
famous Lord Rochester, ‘for which,’ said Mr. Bentley, ‘her soul is
now burning in heaven.’ The oddness, confusion and wit of the idea
struck me of all things.[424]
‘That is just what I should like to have seen’—there is the passion
of the letter-monger. It was all very indiscreet, no doubt, but ‘that
is just what I should like to have seen.’ The indiscretion is the
best proof that the correspondence was intimate, that it was not a
mere series of messages nor a volume of essays. To burn it was an
eminently safe thing to do with it—and eminently deplorable.
A good letter-writer, a Walpole, a Lamb, is hardly more concerned
with the cause of edification than with the cause of discretion.
His concern is with the news. He moves genially along the lower
levels of life, content to ramble rather than to soar, and forgets
high philosophies and abstract truths. What he offers his friend is
companionship, not education. The news of yesterday is frequently a
harder thing to get at than the learning of the ages, and all the
wisdom of the east will not make a good letter.
This ideal of familiar correspondence was fully stated in the
eighteenth century. It would be possible to construct a whole
philosophy of the subject by marshalling a series of quotations from
eighteenth century letters. Even the bluestockings appreciated the
artlessness of letters. Hannah More never wrote wiser sentences than
these:
If I want wisdom, sentiment or information, I can find them much
better in books than in letters. What I want in a letter is a
picture of my friend’s mind, and the common sense of his life. I
want to know what he is saying and doing: I want him to turn out
the inside of his heart to me, without disguise, without appearing
better than he is, without writing for a character. I have the same
feeling in writing to him. My letter is therefore worth nothing to
an indifferent person, but it is of value to my friend who cares
for me.[425]
Madame du Deffand, no unworthy successor of Madame de Sévigné, would
have subscribed to all this. She, too, thought that physics and
metaphysics had no place in correspondence, and detested the letters
of Abelard and Héloïse because they lacked the note of intimacy and
were filled with fustian, ‘_faux_, _exagéré_, _dégoûtant_.’ She begs
Walpole to fill his letters with trifles, to send news of his dogs,
Vachette and Rosette, to describe his curios, and to omit politics.
‘J’aime tous les détails domestiques.... Dans les lettres de Madame
de Sévigné c’est un des articles qui me plaît le plus.’[426] Here was
a correspondent worthy of Walpole’s quill.
It was long the custom to sneer at Walpole for his gossip. Lord
Macaulay did not fail to ridicule him for it in language as
unmeasured as that of scandal itself; but Macaulay’s manner is now
giving way to apologies and vindications hardly less damaging.
Walpole was indubitably and incorrigibly a gossip—why should we
avoid the word? He did not avoid it. He was, on the contrary, the
first to make the charge. As early as 1749 he calls his letters to
Horace Mann ‘gossiping gazettes’; yet these are perhaps as little
open to the charge as any letters that he wrote. The same charge was
brought against Walpole’s idol, Madame de Sévigné. Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu could find in her letters nothing but gossip—‘sometimes the
tittle-tattle of a fine lady; sometimes that of an old nurse, always
tittle-tattle.’[427] A similar charge may be brought against Cowper,
Lamb, Jane Carlyle, and all favourite letter-writers. It is always
ready to hand for those who prefer disquisitions to news. As for
Walpole’s letters, they might almost be conceived as a delightful
defence of the vice.
Now gossip is of course a very dreadful business; but its most
hardened opponents can scarcely deny that it has at times been the
staple of some very fine literature indeed. What is Pepys but gossip?
What would Boswell be without his gossip? Even work that professes
to attack gossip is often interesting chiefly for its illustration
of what it denounces. Look at the career of Lady Teazle. As long as
she retains her place in the Scandal School, she is human, almost
lovable, and wholly delightful; but as soon as she is reformed, she
becomes quite insignificant. Her entrance in the fifth act is the
dullest moment in the play, and her demeanour is wholly unconvincing
and perhaps untruthful. One cannot think of her apart from her
glittering geysers of scandal; when she gives up gossip she is as
dull as Maria, and we are glad that the play is over. If there is a
more depressing spectacle than a bird that has lost its wings, it is
a wit that has bridled the tongue.
Gossip, in its milder stages, may even denote a serene interest
in the little affairs of life, which is truly admirable. Cowper’s
letters, which Lady Mary would no doubt have found quite as filled
with tittle-tattle as Madame de Sévigné’s, are in the truest sense of
the term the treasure of the humble. The finest things in them are,
like the finest things in _The Task_, the description of domestic
trifles. The most delightful letter Cowper ever wrote describes a
runaway rabbit. Cowper’s eminence as a letter-writer is an invaluable
illustration of the fact that a man may be a master of this art
though his life contains nothing of excitement or romance. The great
explorers and adventurers have seldom been good letter-writers.
Macaulay laughed at Walpole because he made a serious business
of trifles; but it is in this very fact that half the delight of
Walpole’s letters consists. Neither Walpole nor Cowper could have
written the letters he did without that love; the one lends as much
interest to crossing the Channel as to crossing the Alps, and the
other amuses us as much with the loss of a rabbit as with the finding
of a continent. Like Biron in conversation,
His eye begets occasion for his wit;
For every object that the one doth catch,
The other turns to a mirth-moving jest,
Which his fair tongue, conceit’s expositor,
Delivers in such apt and gracious words,
That aged ears play truant at his tales,
And younger hearings are quite ravished;
So sweet and voluble is his discourse.
The display of such a wit as this is all the more delightful in a
letter because of the very intimacy of the thing. It is not done
to amuse a company, but to delight a friend. Every true letter is
a gift. If it rises to the plane of literature, it is literature
created in honour of an individual, and is his to cherish or destroy.
It is thus the most personal and private of all literary types, since
it is the only one that can be held to be the peculiar and exclusive
property of an individual. A lover of letters is as jealous as he is
insatiable. Like Madame du Deffand with the letters of Walpole, he is
always looking about for somebody with whom to share his pleasures,
and is for ever discovering that no one is worthy of the honour;[428]
and, like her, his passion is such that he would give the two
letters that he has for the one which he is awaiting. The secret of
such a jealous sense of ownership as this lies in the fact that every
intimate letter is really suffused with two personalities, one of
which is that of the recipient.
Such intimate correspondence as this was not without an effect upon
English literature. The idealization of intimacy which made it
possible spread the love of simplicity and of a more familiar tone.
The type was, oddly enough, at one with the new romanticism in this
demand for the natural. The style in which it was expressed is fifty
years ahead of its time, and already prophesies the more familiar
tone of such men as Lamb and Hazlitt. The following passage from
Walpole is typical:
Every summer one lives in a state of mutiny and murmur, and I have
found the reason. It is because we will affect to have a summer,
and we have no title to any such thing. Our poets learned their
trade of the Romans, and so adopted the terms of their masters.
They talk of shady groves, purling streams, and cooling breezes,
and we get sore throats and agues with attempting to realize these
visions. Master Damon writes a song and invites Miss Chloe to enjoy
the cool of the evening, and the deuce a bit have we of any such
thing as a cool evening. Zephyr is a north-east wind that makes
Damon button up to the chin, and pinches Chloe’s nose till it is
red and blue; and then they cry, ‘This is a bad summer’—as if we
ever had any other. The best sun we have is made of Newcastle
coal, and I am determined never to reckon upon any other. We ruin
ourselves with inviting over foreign trees, and make our houses
clamber up hills to look at prospects. How our ancestors would
laugh at us, who knew there was no being comfortable unless you
had a high hill before your nose and a thick warm wood at your
back![429]
If the style of nineteenth century prose marks an improvement over
that of the eighteenth century in respect of sprightliness, then
surely such a passage as this must be held to indicate the progress
towards it.
It is amazing how wide-spread was the knowledge of this craft. There
are scores of letter-writers at the end of the century who may be
read with pleasure. Even Mrs. Montagu could descend from the heights
long enough to write in this pleasant tone to Mrs. Garrick and Miss
More:
Most engaged and engaging ladies, will you drink tea with me on
Thursday with a very small party? I think it an age, not a golden
age, since I saw you last.[430]
With the presence of such letter-writers as Cowper, Johnson, Lady
Mary Wortley Montagu, and Horace Walpole, not to mention countless
minor names, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the familiar
letter was the chosen medium of the age, as the periodic essay was of
the earlier period and as the drama was of the Elizabethan age. It
will always remain the best general record of the social life of the
century; but its value is more particular than this. You may read the
boisterous life of the age in its novels, you may find its solidity
in Johnson and its superficiality in Chesterfield; you may see its
rags in Hogarth or its grace in Reynolds; but for its simplicity, its
affectionate intimacies, and its smiling ease, you must turn to its
letters.
CHAPTER XIV
FANNY BURNEY AND THE ART OF THE DIARIST
The Diary of Fanny Burney cannot, like the conversation of Johnson
and the correspondence of Walpole, be cited as perhaps the finest
specimen of its kind. Of the arts we are discussing, the diarist’s
is the most difficult to define or characterize; for at one extreme,
it may shrink into the dulness of a calendar, and at the other,
it may record the agonies of a soul’s attempt to be honest with
its God or with itself. Kinds so distinct as Pepys’s _Diary_ and
the _Confessions_ of Rousseau seem to defy all attempts at common
definition. The Diary of Miss Burney, unlike these works, has no
psychological problems; but exists for the simple and engaging
purpose of recording events of interest. In the beginning she
resolved never to mix with her record, her ‘religious sentiments,
opinions, hopes, fears, beliefs, or aspirations;[431] but to reserve
her Diary for worldly dross.’ If not among the greatest diaries of
the world, it is among the most normal; and it is not impossible to
define it roughly. Diaries of this kind may be described as a sort of
letter to oneself.
Miss Burney’s Diary was, however, written to be read by others than
herself. It was addressed to her sisters, to whom sections of it
were despatched from time to time. It partakes, therefore, in large
measure of the nature of private correspondence, and much that has
been said of that type applies obviously to this. But there are
important differences. The greatness of the Diary certainly does
not consist in the delightful treatment of domestic and personal
trifles. Nor does Miss Burney paint highly for the mere love of
painting, as the conversationalist and the letter-writer often do.
She is not communicating herself, but the important life with which
she is in touch. She does not so much wish that the reader should
see her, as that he should see with her eyes—and her artistic vision
was remarkably shrewd and keen. The Diary is thus a panorama rather
than a portrait. We read diaries either to get at the personality
of the writer or at the events described. The character of Fanny
Burney, combining sweetness, shyness, wisdom, and pride, presents no
particular problems, and is not of commanding interest. What she saw
and what she heard, the people who loved her, who attached her to
them, and who, not unfrequently, preyed upon her—these constitute the
interest of the book; it is these and the art with which they are set
before us that make the Diary what it is.
The thought that is for ever borne in upon the reader is that Miss
Burney was a very lucky woman. Suffering as she did from shyness
and an inflamed sense of propriety, it might easily have been her
lot to lead a life as secluded as that of her friend, Mr. Crisp of
Chessington; yet in fact Johnson himself did not commonly associate
with more people whom one would like to have known. The young lady’s
unassuming manner was of actual value in increasing her circle of
desirable acquaintance, when once she was famous. When once she was
famous, I repeat, for most of her interesting friends and experiences
came to her as the result of her celebrity and of the bluestocking
patronage which ensued upon it. It was Mrs. Thrale who drew Fanny
Burney into the great world which she was to adorn and to record;
but the interest of Mrs. Thrale went out rather to the author of
_Evelina_, than to the mouse-like young lady of St. Martin Street.
Seldom has so timid an entry into the literary world been accorded
a reception so flattering. The young woman who had disposed of her
novel under cover of night and anonymity, as though it had been
so much stolen goods, was presently to find that she had every
bluestocking in London at her feet, and that the King of Letters was
proclaiming her the equal of Fielding. One speculates what would have
become of her if she had begun her career with _The Wanderer_ instead
of _Evelina_. She had the luck to write her best novel—some will say
her only good novel—first; and from that happy beginning sprang all
the rest of her good fortune.
It is to be remembered by those who study Miss Burney’s career that
the appearance of _Evelina_, in 1778, marks a definite period in the
history of woman’s contribution to English literature. Johnson’s
estimate of the book was of course ludicrously wrong, and it is
well to assume that his chivalry (for once) got the better of his
judgment; yet it is impossible to deny the superlative significance
of the book. It was the greatest creative work that had yet been
produced by an Englishwoman. It is still read with delight by people
who never heard of Aphra Behn’s _Oroonoko_, Miss Fielding’s _Peter
Simple_, or Charlotte Lennox’s _Female Quixote_. The bluestockings
were right in feeling that the author had forced a new estimate
of the sex. The respect for her work was universal: extravagant
things—impossibilities—were expected of her.
It was now that Miss Burney’s modesty (so carefully nurtured) was
felt to be but an added grace. The most vicious satirist could
discover in ‘little Burney’ nothing of the arrogance of a _femme
savante_. She gave the impression of hating her talents and the fame
which had been thrust upon her. Her unassuming demeanour and her
youthful sweetness (for she was still girlish at twenty-six) made
her the delight of every drawing-room she would consent to enter,
and not unfrequently brought down upon her admiration and social
attentions which she would have been happier without. At last, in an
unhappy hour, they brought her to the attention of Queen Charlotte.
But for the moment, all was sweetness and triumph and popularity.
Her position among the bluestockings is noticeable; she was beloved
of them all. She was loyal to Mrs. Thrale without sacrificing the
regard of Mrs. Montagu or in any way offending her beloved Mrs. Ord.
She almost reconciled stiff old Mrs. Delany and the dear Duchess of
Portland to literary eminence in a woman. Outside this circle she
was no less esteemed. Johnson loved her as a daughter, and professed
himself glad to ‘send his name down to posterity’ linked with hers.
Burke, who read _Evelina_ repeatedly, distinguished her by a special
greeting when she appeared at the trial of Warren Hastings, as,
indeed, did the prisoner himself. Wyndham delighted to converse with
her by the hour. Walpole received her at Strawberry Hill, and was
no less pleased with her unpretentious manner than with the fact
that Mrs. Montagu now had a superior. Had Miss Burney cared to open
a salon, she might have reigned over these men like a more rational
Lespinasse. The more her fortune is dwelt upon, the more obvious
it becomes. As a child she had had David Garrick for a grown-up
playmate; as a young woman she had the privilege of welcoming Sarah
Siddons to the court; later in life, she conversed on terms of
intimacy with Madame de Stael. She had passed the day in Reynolds’s
studio, and had looked at the stars through the glass of Herschel.
She was visited at Windsor by Boswell, proof-sheets in hand; and
Sheridan, at the height of his reputation, repeatedly invited her to
write a comedy. She described her acquaintance to Queen Charlotte
as being ‘not only very numerous, but very mixed, taking in not only
most stations in life, but also most parties.’[432] We may marvel at
the fact that the shy Fanny Burney became a novelist; but she could
hardly help becoming a diarist.
Even the great misfortune of her life really contributed to her
greatness. Her life at Court, which half killed her, a life which she
repeatedly calls ‘monastic’ and describes as ‘dead and tame’—strong
words from one who thought she adored the Queen—enabled her to depict
a kind of life which, dull as it was, can never lack significance.
If for no more important reason, her account of it will always be
read as one of the great dramas of disillusion. It furnished Macaulay
with material for one of his most brilliant extravaganzas. Like
him, we read the third and fourth volume of the Diary, which detail
that life, with feelings of rage at the royal gaolers and at the
Hanoverian ideals of conduct that they almost succeeded in imposing
upon her. The Queen’s obvious delight in checking Miss Burney’s
literary activity and in stiffening her sense of propriety (which
needed no stiffening) makes it difficult to control the judgment;
and yet, upon reflection, it will be seen that the reader’s rage is
but a tribute to one of the most effective pieces of realism in the
language. It is true that it is often dull, but so is realism. It is
true that Miss Burney’s adulation of the Royal Family is at times
painfully fulsome; but even this only heightens the description of
that life which, despite all adulation, she found unendurable. The
story of her captivity is no less thrilling than that of Pamela in
the clutches of Mrs. Jewkes.
As a delineation of an ogress, Mrs. Schwellenberg is at once more
horrible and more lifelike than Mrs. Jewkes; beside her, all the
‘weatherbeaten old she-dragons’ of eighteenth century fiction and
drama pale into insignificance. Miss Burney has often been praised
for creating the character of Madame Duval, but that lady is a mere
commonplace when compared with the spiteful old crone who had no
interest above piquet and who divided the slight remnant of affection
of which her withered nature was capable between her royal owner
and her tame frogs. Her ambitions for Fanny Burney, the idol of the
blues, was that she should learn piquet, give up writing, and become
like unto herself, a spaniel of the backstairs. Few characters in
literature are at once so comic and so loathsome.
It might be assumed that the depiction of Mrs. Schwellenberg were
the result of mere dislike, if Miss Burney had not, at the same
moment, been proving by her portrayal of Queen Charlotte that her
vision was never more keen and her judgment of character never more
unbiassed. She had no intention whatever of analyzing her mistress.
As a lover of royal families, she was far more prone to idealize her;
but for all that she had a genius for truthfulness, and could not
help mirroring the royal nature with a fatal accuracy. It is the
revelation of such royalty as can conceive no happiness apart from
its own presence, of a queenly etiquette in which a native sweetness
is lost in acquired selfishness. For subtlety and moderation this
characterization is unsurpassed in its own century, and not often
equalled in the century that followed it, for all its psychology and
realism.
The triumph of Miss Burney’s realism over her personal inclination
may be illustrated by setting side by side two sentences drawn from
the same entry in the Diary for December 1790: ‘Her Majesty was very
kind during this time, and the Princesses interested themselves about
me with a sweetness very grateful to me.’ This is the expression of
what is proper from the Keeper of the Robes; but on the next page it
shrivels away before her sense of actuality: ‘Though I was frequently
so ill in her presence that I could scarcely stand, I saw she
concluded me, while life remained, inevitably hers.’
These court-episodes in the Diary of Miss Burney are of special use
in showing her powers of characterization. The earlier sections of
the book deal with people no less interesting, but so familiar to
us from other sources that Miss Burney’s skill in depicting them is
not so readily perceived. No particular surprise mingles with our
pleasure as we read of Johnson and of Mrs. Thrale, of Reynolds and
of Mrs. Montagu, because the author’s art seems but to reflect, at
most to amplify, what we have seen elsewhere. It is when she has
occasion to make us acquainted with persons whom we have not met
elsewhere, with ‘Mr. Turbulent’ and Mrs. Schwellenberg, that we begin
to perceive the extent of her powers. Her five years’ imprisonment in
no way impairs her observation of human nature. The sudden apparition
of James Boswell upon the scene is as captivating a piece of writing
as anything in the whole Diary; the contrast between his cheerful
officiousness and the blundering officiousness of Mr. Turbulent is a
sufficient proof of the fact that Miss Burney has retained all her
old skill in characterization. Nor has the sense for a boisterous
scene departed from the author of _Evelina_. The quiet little
lady with prim demeanour still had a love of broad comedy, as the
following pages may show. The scene is Mrs. Schwellenberg’s table,
the occasion a dinner of the royal attendants in honour of the King’s
birthday, the chief actor the Duke of Clarence (afterwards William
IV), the Royal Sailor, who is shown, to use Miss Burney’s words—and
they are significant of her conscious art—‘in genuine colours.’
Champagne being now brought for the Duke, he ordered it all round.
When it came to me, I whispered to Westerhaults [the footman] to
carry it on: the Duke slapped his hand violently on the table, and
called out, ‘Oh ——, you shall drink it!’
There was no resisting this. We all stood up, and the Duke
sonorously gave the Royal toast.
‘And now,’ cried he, making us all sit down again, ‘where are my
rascals of servants? I sha’n’t be in time for the ball; besides,
I’ve got a —— tailor waiting to fix on my epaulette! Here, you, go
and see for my servants! d’ye hear? Scamper off!’
Off ran William.
‘Come, let’s have the King’s health again. De Luc, drink it. Here,
Champagne to De Luc!’
I wish you could have seen Mr. De Luc’s mixed simper—half pleased,
half alarmed. However, the wine came and he drank it, the Duke
taking a bumper for himself at the same time.
‘Poor Stanhope!’ cried he: ‘Stanhope shall have a glass too! Here,
Champagne! What are you all about? Why don’t you give Champagne to
poor Stanhope?’
Mr. Stanhope, with great pleasure, complied, and the Duke again
accompanied him.
‘Come hither, do you hear?’ cried the Duke to the servants, and on
the approach, slow and submissive, of Mrs. Stainforth’s man, he hit
him a violent slap on the back, calling out ‘Hang you! Why don’t
you see for my rascals?’
Away flew the man, and then he called out to Westerhaults,
‘Hark’ee! bring another glass of Champagne to Mr. De Luc!’
Mr. De Luc knows these Royal youths too well to venture at so vain
an experiment as disputing with them; so he only shrugged his
shoulders and drank the wine. The Duke did the same.
‘And now, poor Stanhope,’ cried the Duke, ‘give another to poor
Stanhope, d’ye hear?’
‘Is not your Royal Highness afraid,’ cried Mr. Stanhope, displaying
the full circle of his borrowed teeth, ‘I shall be apt to be rather
up in the world, as the folks say, if I tope on at this rate?’
‘Not at all! you can’t get drunk in a better cause. I’d get drunk
myself if it was not for the ball. Here, Champagne! another glass
for the philosopher! I keep sober for Mary.’...
He then said it was necessary to drink the Queen’s health.
The gentlemen here made no demur, though Mr. De Luc arched his
eyebrows in expressive fear of consequences.
‘A bumper,’ cried the Duke, ‘to the Queen’s gentleman-usher.’
They all stood up and drank the Queen’s health.
‘Here are three of us,’ cried the Duke, ‘all belonging to the
Queen: the Queen’s philosopher, the Queen’s gentleman-usher, and
the Queen’s son; but, thank Heaven, I’m nearest!’
‘Sir,’ cried Mr. Stanhope, a little affronted, ‘I am not now the
Queen’s gentleman-usher; I am the Queen’s equerry, sir.’
‘A glass more of Champagne here! What are you all so slow for?
Where are all my rascals gone? They’ve put me in one passion
already this morning. Come, a glass of Champagne for the Queen’s
gentleman-usher!’ laughing heartily.
‘No, sir,’ repeated Mr. Stanhope, ‘I am equerry now!’
‘And another glass to the Queen’s philosopher!’
Neither gentleman objected; but Mrs. Schwellenberg, who had sat
laughing and happy all this time, now grew alarmed, and said, ‘Your
Royal Highness, I am afraid for the ball!’
‘Hold your potato-jaw, my dear,’ cried the Duke, patting her; but
recollecting himself, he took her hand and pretty abruptly kissed
it, and then, flinging it hastily away, laughed aloud, and called
out, ‘There! that will make amends for anything, so now I may
say what I will. So here! a glass of Champagne for the Queen’s
philosopher and the Queen’s gentleman-usher! Hang me if it will not
do them a monstrous deal of good!’
Here news was brought that the equipage was in order. He started
up, calling out, ‘Now, then, for my —— tailor.’[433]
Scenes as vivid, though not so uproarious, might be cited in every
chapter of the work; to quote them all would be to print half the
Diary. The selection here given is sufficient to show why Miss
Burney’s writing is invariably referred to as dramatic. The Diary
is, in parts, so like a novel as to prompt the query whether it
is at all reliable as a record of facts. Did not the author’s
imagination play freely over the events? Did she not select, arrange,
and colour according to the demands of art rather than of history?
Are the conversations not improved? Is not the diarist a novelist
still? Questions of this large kind can hardly be answered save in
a large, impressionistic way. The Diary is, in general, a truthful
document and a reliable account of the life which it records. A
mere glance at the book will reveal the fact that Miss Burney had
little of Boswell’s passion for literalness, for accurate dates,
and for written evidence. But Boswell was unique in his generation,
and Boswell was a lawyer. Miss Burney was writing to amuse her
sisters, not to inform the public; but there are passages which
show that she was endowed with a remarkably accurate memory. She
once has occasion[434] to quote a letter from memory; a comparison
of it with the original, which happens to be in existence, reveals
no evidence of misinterpretation, and shows the copy to be, in
fact, very nearly a literal reproduction of the original. We are to
remember that Miss Burney had been in the habit of keeping a diary,
recording conversations which had interested her, ever since the age
of fifteen; and that this had strengthened her memory as well as her
powers of observation. It was to a similar practice that Boswell owed
his ability to record conversation with accuracy; and he himself
asserted that the ability grew with practice. There is no reason
for supposing that the results in one case were radically different
from those in the other. Certain it is that Miss Burney’s record of
Johnson’s conversation is in no way inconsistent with Boswell’s. To
say that in describing life at Streatham or at the Court she used her
skill in selection and that she employed the judgment of a novelist
in beginning and ending a conversation effectively is merely to
repeat that the Diary is a work of art. Judgment in the choice of
facts to set down need not indicate a misinterpretation of them.
There is but one quality in Miss Burney which shakes the reader’s
confidence in her judgment of character. There is a tendency to
emotionalism in her which the irreverent will term gush. She was
touched with the sentimentality of her times. The tear of sensibility
is ever trembling in her eyes. Her affection for Mrs. Thrale, Mrs.
Locke, Mrs. Delany, and most other ladies, for ‘dear Daddy Crisp,’
for ‘dear Sir Joshua,’ is so effusive as to make all terms of
endearment seem tawdry.
Hardly less distressing than this mawkishness is the lady’s
self-consciousness, which she mistook for the virtue of modesty.
The flattery which brought the blush of shame to her cheek and kept
her on the verge of swooning, the flattery which made her shrink
into corners or retire in confusion from the scene, the praise which
was too gross for her ears, all this is written down _in extenso_
and with something unpleasantly like gusto. It flows through the
Diary like an apocalyptic river of honey. Macaulay reminds us, quite
properly, that all this was ‘for the eyes of two or three persons
who had loved her from infancy, who had loved her in obscurity, and
to whom her fame gave the purest and most exquisite delight.’ This
is true, no doubt; but might not father and sisters have achieved
delight without this surfeit of sweetness, ‘whereof a little more
than a little is by much too much’? It is all very human, of course,
and it would be chivalrous to forget it. But all the chivalry in the
world cannot hide the fact that it is a serious blot on the art of
the Diary, a blot that we cannot but wish away from so splendid a
work.
CHAPTER XV
BOSWELL AND THE ART OF INTIMATE BIOGRAPHY
It is the privilege of few men in any age to raise an art to such
perfection that it becomes in effect a new thing. The development
of intimate biography is still largely the work of one man. After a
hundred years of memorabilia, personal reminiscences, and interviews,
Boswell is still as indubitably the greatest of biographers as when
he referred to his book as the ‘first in the world,’ or when, fifty
years later, Macaulay applied to him the language of the race-course,
and pronounced, ‘Eclipse is first, and the rest nowhere.’ Later
biographers do not eclipse him, nor do earlier ones explain him. A
comparison of his work with what went before serves only to reveal
his utter uniqueness. If an earlier biographer suggests a point of
comparison in his realistic record of conversation, the slightness
of his work gives no conception of the whole life he is writing; if
another seems like Boswell in refusing to write a mere eulogy, he
seems chill and judicial where Boswell is warm with pulsing life.
Other lives give us admirable things: table-talk, a portrait, a
eulogy, a handful of anecdotes, a list of dates from ‘pedigree to
funeral,’ or a volume of letters; but Boswell gives us all these
and more. He aspires to be as complete as life itself. Boswell knew
and delighted in other biographies; but was hardly influenced by
them. He knew Plutarch, Xenophon, and Valerius Maximus, among the
ancients, and Jonson’s _Timber_, Selden’s _Table-Talk_, and Spence’s
_Anecdotes_, among modern _ana_; but is like none of these. He
surpasses them all in intimacy, variety, and what, for want of a
better name, may be called his sustained quality. To read Boswell
after these men is like passing to a Flemish painting from a study in
black and white.
[Illustration: BOSWELL THE JOURNALIST
From a series of caricatures of the _Journal_ by Rowlandson and
Collings]
In so far as he can be said to have learned his art from any man,
his master was Johnson himself. The first sentence in the _Life_
proclaims Johnson’s superiority to all men in writing the lives of
others. Biography was often discussed by the two men together, and
Boswell was also well acquainted with Johnson’s published remarks on
the subject. Johnson enunciated, with fair consistency, the theory
of intimate biography, but he never fully realized it in any work of
his. Thus he was wont to assert that autobiography was superior to
biography, for the simple reason that a man might more readily reveal
the facts concerning himself. If a man’s life is to be written by
another than himself, it should be by one who has ‘eat and drunk and
lived in social intercourse with him.’ The material of biography, he
asserts, at various times, to be ‘trifles,’ the ‘delicate features
of the mind,’ the ‘minute peculiarities of conduct,’ ‘domestic
privacies,’ and ‘the minute details of daily life.’ He approved of
much anecdote in biography, used such incidents with a free hand in
his own work, and encouraged Boswell to record them. He did not,
however, anywhere fully embody his theories. It was, in truth,
impossible for him to do so in the _Lives of the Poets_, for, with
the exception of Savage, he had been on terms of real intimacy with
none of these men. Had he written the life of Goldsmith, as he once
thought of doing, he might, if his indolence had not prevented him,
have produced such a book as would illustrate his own theories. Yet,
in spite of this lack of intimacy in the _Lives of the Poets_, he
was attacked for making them too familiar. Potter, Mrs. Montagu’s
_protégé_, denounced his introduction of trifles into serious
biography, considering it beneath the dignity of that art to mention
that Pope wore three pairs of stockings to increase the size of
his legs, and that he loved to feast on potted lampreys which he
heated in a silver saucepan. ‘We know,’ writes the critic, ‘that the
greatest men are subject to the infirmities of human nature equally
with the meanest; why then are these infirmities recorded?’
This sentence may be taken to summarize the general conception of
biography before Boswell. The death of a man seems to have been
regarded as an opportunity for rationalizing his views and perfecting
his character. The duty of a biographer was to forget all vices
and to idealize all virtues, with the laudable purpose of setting
before the public a notable pattern of conduct. ‘He that writes the
life of another,’ wrote Johnson in the _Idler_, ‘endeavours to hide
the man that he may produce a hero.’ Even Johnson never felt quite
sure how far it was proper to describe a man’s vices in writing his
biography. Boswell notes the inconsistency of his views. When the
subject of the poet Parnell’s drinking arose, Johnson remarked,
‘More ill may be done by the example, than good by telling the
whole truth’; but at another time he said, ‘If a man is to write _A
Panegyric_, he may keep vices out of sight; but if he professes to
write _A Life_, he must represent it really as it was.... It would
produce an instructive caution to avoid drinking, when it was seen
that even the learning and genius of Parnell could be debased by
it.’[435] In practice it is clear that Johnson preferred to err on
the side of frankness. Potter was shocked because he revealed the
avidity of Addison by repeating the now-hackneyed story of how Steele
was forced to pay a debt of £100. If biography is regarded as the
handmaid of morality, and eulogy is preferred to actuality, such
details are of course worse than useless. Beattie dwells on ‘the
due distinction between what deserves to be known and what ought to
be forgotten.’[436] Miss Burney considered that the publication of
letters verbatim was the ‘greatest injury’ to a man’s memory. Horace
Walpole, who deplored the whole policy of expurgation, nevertheless
gives Mason, the biographer of Gray, the conventional advice. He
avows that the publication of the life of Gray is an opportunity to
establish that poet’s character ‘unimpeached.’ He was shocked at the
section of the biography which Mason had submitted to his criticism,
because it was honest and frank. ‘What can provoke you to be so
imprudent?... You know my idea was that your work should consecrate
his name.’[437] Once such a theory of consecration is adopted, the
author of a life is driven relentlessly towards panegyric; for, not
daring to trust the public to interpret facts, he must suppress
everything that is not admirable, lest the mention of even the
slightest fault be taken to point to the existence of thousands that
are passed over in silence. When once you have taken to varnishing,
you must varnish thoroughly, for any cracks or bare spots which
reveal the material beneath ruin your whole effect.
To a public with these lofty notions of propriety Boswell, genially
sacrificing what little was left to him of his reputation, addressed,
in 1785, his _Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel
Johnson_ ... ‘containing ... A series of his Conversation, Literary
Anecdotes and Opinions of Men and Books.’ It was a jumble of gossip
such as readers had hitherto seen only in the twopenny pamphlets
of the scandal-mongers of Grub Street; but was set forth with an
abundance of detail which captured the most frivolous and an air
of authenticity which convinced the most sceptical. It depicted a
great man who had been in his grave but a few months. It was written
with veneration, but wholly without awe, as though a valet had
collaborated with the Recording Angel. It flouted all restraints, and
passed the most distant limits of decency. Nothing like it had ever
been heard of. Even in our own day, to a world whose nerves have been
jaded by a thousand _exposés_, such a book would come as a surprise,
but to the world of 1786 it was a revelation of new possibilities
in literature, as alarming as they were entertaining. With all the
frankness of Pepys the author combines the conscious skill of one
who has mastered the art of anecdote and the joy of a conceited man
who realizes that he is about to attain fame by one of the by-paths
of literature. It was difficult, in 1785, to say whether Johnson’s
theory of familiar biography had been realized or travestied in this
book. It was obvious that he had been hoist with his own petard. The
world was informed with the most scrupulous accuracy of how he said
his prayers and how he was persuaded to wear a woollen night-cap.
His idlest word was recorded as though in a dictograph. ‘I have
often thought that if I kept a seraglio, the ladies should all wear
linen gowns,—or cotton; I mean stuffs made of vegetable substances.
I would have no silk; you cannot tell when it is clean, ...’ and so
forth. At times the book is hardly quotable. Once when about to get
into a dirty bed, during their travels in the Hebrides, Boswell
remarks: ‘We had much hesitation, whether to undress, or lye down
with our clothes on. I said at last, “I’ll plunge in! There will
be less harbour for vermin about me when I’m stripped”—Dr. Johnson
said, he was like one hesitating to go into the cold bath. At last
he resolved too.’ The first sensation of the reader of such amazing
stuff as this is that Boswell was engaged in a deliberate attempt to
degrade a great man. He was accused by a writer in the _Gentleman’s
Magazine_[438] of having ‘exposed and cut up’ his hero ‘in the most
shameful and cruel manner.’ That Boswell had a kind of mischievous
delight in what he was doing, no one need take the trouble to tell
us; but that he was a sort of skilful blackmailer is now unthinkable.
He felt that he was doing the world a service in showing that a great
man was human; and time has proved that he was right. ‘There is
something noble,’ Johnson had remarked to him, ‘in publishing truth,
though it condemns one’s self.’ Boswell paid this price. He made
Johnson permanently familiar by making himself almost permanently
notorious. Witness the following extract:
Dr. Johnson went to bed soon. When one bowl of punch was finished,
I rose, and was near the door, in my way up stairs to bed; but
Corrichatachin said, it was the first time Col had been in his
house, and he should have his bowl—and would not I join in drinking
it? The heartiness of my honest landlord, and the desire of doing
social honour to our very obliging conductor, induced me to sit
down again. Col’s bowl was finished; and by that time we were well
warmed. A third bowl was soon made, and that too was finished.
We were cordial, and merry to a high degree; but of what passed
I have no recollection, with any accuracy. I remember calling
_Corrichatachin_ by the familiar appellation of _Corri_, which his
friends do. A fourth bowl was made, by which time Col, and young
M’Kinnon, Corrichatachin’s son, slipped away to bed. I continued a
little with Corri and Knockow; but at last I left them. It was near
five in the morning when I got to bed.
Sunday, September 26.
I awaked at noon, with a severe head-ach. I was much vexed that I
should have been guilty of such a riot, and afraid of a reproof
from Dr. Johnson. I thought it very inconsistent with that
conduct which I ought to maintain, while the companion of the
Rambler. About one he came into my room, and accosted me, ‘What,
drunk yet?’ His tone of voice was not that of severe upbraiding;
so I was relieved a little. ‘Sir, (said I,) they kept me up.’
He answered, ‘No, you kept them up, you drunken dog:’—This he
said with good-humoured _English_ pleasantry. Soon afterwards,
Corrichatachin, Col, and other friends assembled round my bed.
Corri had a brandy-bottle and glass with him, and insisted I should
take a dram. ‘Ay, said Dr. Johnson, fill him drunk again. Do it in
the morning, that we may laugh at him all day. It is a poor thing
for a fellow to get drunk at night, and sculk to bed, and let his
friends have no sport.’ Finding him thus jocular, I became quite
easy; and when I offered to get up, he very good naturedly said,
‘You need be in no such hurry now.’ I took my host’s advice, and
drank some brandy, which I found an effectual cure for my head-ach.
When I rose, I went into Dr. Johnson’s room, and taking up Mrs.
M’Kinnon’s Prayer-book, I opened it at the twentieth Sunday after
Trinity, in the epistle for which I read, ‘And be not drunk with
wine, wherein there is excess.’ Some would have taken this as a
divine interposition.
Such writing as this at once divided the reading public into
hostile camps. There were many who considered the book delightful;
others considered it a new kind of libel. It became the subject of
a long controversy in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_. In the December
following its appearance, Boswell was accused of ‘betraying private
conversations even of the most trivial kind.’ In May, the tastes of a
‘gossiping age’ were denounced as well. By December 1786, the sale of
the book having gone triumphantly forward, Boswell was reminded that
his popularity was due solely to the general interest in Johnson; the
sale of his work was compared to the consumption of potatoes in a
time of famine; and the public was instructed that such works require
for their composition nothing but an ear and a memory.
In the spring of the same year, soon after the appearance of Mrs.
Piozzi’s _Anecdotes_, Walpole wrote to Mann:
She and Boswell and their hero are the joke of the public.
A Dr. Wolcot, _soi-disant_ Peter Pindar, has published a
burlesque eclogue,[439] in which Boswell and the signora are
the interlocutors, and all the absurdest passages in the works
of both are ridiculed. The print-shops teem with satiric prints
on them: one, in which Boswell, as a monkey, is riding on
Johnson, the bear,[440] has this witty inscription, ‘My friend
_delineavit_.’—But enough of these mountebanks![441]
Other caricatures represented the ghost of Johnson haunting Boswell
while he pieced together his _Journal_ from various rags of
reminiscence, and the bust of Johnson frowning down upon Boswell and
Mrs. Piozzi as they wrote. Rowlandson and Collings later made the
_Tour_ the subject of a series of sixteen caricatures.
[Illustration: BOSWELL HAUNTED BY THE GHOST OF JOHNSON
From a contemporary caricature]
In 1786, moreover, a pamphlet appeared entitled, _A Poetical Epistle
from the Ghost of Dr. Johnson to his Friends_, in which Boswell was
satirized together with Strahan, Courtenay, and Mrs. Piozzi. The
verses were elaborately annotated with quotations from the _Journal_,
and Boswell was addressed by the manes of Johnson in these words:
How oft I mark’d thee, like a watchful cat,
List’ning to catch up all my silly chat;
How oft that chat I still more silly made,
To see it in thy commonplace conveyed.
This was the invariable charge against the book. It was a mass of
small talk collected by a man with a retentive memory, ‘not to do
honour to his [Johnson’s] memory, by judiciously selecting the best
and most striking of his sentences, but with a design to show his own
assiduity in exhibiting the Doctor in the most glaring colours of
inconsistency.’[442]
There was a secondary charge against the book. It was conceived as a
libel on living people.[443] Various persons—the Duchess of Hamilton,
Sir Alexander MacDonald, and many of those who had entertained the
travellers in the Hebrides—discovered in the book remarks about
themselves that were anything but palatable. A reference to Mrs.
Thrale created the greatest excitement. Johnson’s remark that she
could not get through Mrs. Montagu’s _Essay on Shakespeare_ was there
for all the world to read. She protested in her _Anecdotes_; but
Boswell reminded her, in the pages of the _Gentleman’s Magazine_,
that she had read his _Journal_ in manuscript, without complaining of
this, and that he was but quoting Johnson’s own words regarding her.
So ended one controversy. It was not the only one.
But perhaps the chief excitement rose from the advertisement at the
end of the volume, in which Boswell announced that he had but begun
his memoirs of Johnson. He proposed presently to ‘erect a literary
monument worthy of so great an author,’ and stated that he had been
collecting biographical material for more than twenty years. The
promise, for those who had known Johnson, was not gratifying. If
Boswell had upset the literary world with an account of three months
in Johnson’s life, what would he do in recounting seventy-five years
of it? Everybody who had known Johnson held his breath for fear. Many
urged the new biographer to be cautious. Fanny Burney refused to
assist him in his work of showing the pleasanter side of Johnson’s
character, and wrote in her Diary,[444] ‘I feel sorry to be named
or remembered by that biographical, anecdotical memorandummer till
his book of poor Dr. Johnson’s life is finished and published.’ Sir
William Forbes, who was distressed because Boswell had quoted his
approval of the _Journal_, took the liberty of ‘strongly enjoining
him’ to be more careful about personalities in the later work.[445]
He had perhaps never heard Boswell’s famous reply to Hannah More,
who had urged him to ‘mitigate some of Johnson’s asperities’ when
he published the _Journal_. ‘He said roughly,’ she writes, ‘“He
would not cut off his claws, nor make a tiger a cat to please
anybody.”’[446] This remark has been hackneyed in every work on
Boswell, but it can never be quoted too often, for it is Boswell’s
reply to the world. There is nothing more to be said.
I have dwelt on the reception of Boswell’s _Journal of a Tour to
the Hebrides_ because it is the most effective way of showing the
novelty and the magnitude of his achievement. If the author had
been any other than James Boswell, critics would long ere this have
expatiated on the splendid courage of his undertaking; but he enjoyed
and esteemed his own work too highly to elicit such praise. Whatever
were Boswell’s superficial faults, whatever the resentments that he
caused, it is impossible to withhold our admiration from the simple
confidence in the letter of the truth that characterized his Scotch
soul. His would be the simplicity of childhood if it were not the
simplicity of genius. The Lord Bishop of Chester complained[447]
that Boswell recorded facts simply because they were facts. Such was
indeed the case.
When, in 1791, the _Life_ appeared, many of the old charges were
repeated and some of the old satires revived; but it is not important
to consider them in detail, for the note of admiration, which had
been heard now and again in the beginning, when the _Journal_ was
published, soon became dominant. The other lives and memoirs of
Johnson, with which Boswell’s former work had often been compared,
now served only for purposes of contrast; they were useful in
illustrating the greatness of the new work.
What are the characteristics which tended to give the _Life_ its
place in the history of biography? They are of the simplest kind.
Boswell had, as this entire chapter has been designed to show, a
passion for completeness. It is hardly necessary to labour this
point. Boswell himself writes near the opening of his book: ‘I will
venture to say that he will be seen in this work more completely than
any man who has yet lived.’ In this sentence Boswell wrote his own
panegyric, as in his reply to Miss More he had pronounced his own
defence. Like everything that he did, the panegyric is not without
the ludicrous touch, for he adds: ‘Had his other friends been as
diligent and ardent as I was, he might have been almost entirely
preserved.’ He might, indeed; for why should anything be lost, while
there is a note-book—and a Boswell? Boswell, I repeat, aspired to the
completeness of life itself.
Nor is it greatly necessary to dwell on Boswell’s fidelity to fact.
It has been often dwelt upon, and, through the labours of Dr.
Birkbeck Hill, is now generally admitted; though by one who liked
neither Boswell nor Hill the matter has recently been once more
called in question.[448] It would seem that a work which in its own
day was both praised and denounced for its scrupulous accuracy might
have been accepted without question. It is scarcely reasonable to
demand a more lifelike biographer than Boswell. His own times readily
granted that he had given the true Johnson; that was both the praise
and the blame. Pepys, who knew Johnson and had no illusions about
him, wrote to Hannah More:
The Journal is a most faithful picture of him, so faithful that I
think anybody who has got a clear idea of his person and manner may
know as much of him from that book as by having been acquainted
with him (in the usual way) for three years.[449]
This was written before the _Life_ appeared. Respecting the later
work we have the testimony of Burke to its value as a monument to
Johnson’s conversation.[450] Even more than this may be said. We have
the nearest possible thing to Johnson’s own approval. He had himself
read the _Journal_ in manuscript, and pronounced it a ‘very exact
picture of a portion of his life.’ It is difficult to demand more
than this. In the same work Boswell writes:
He read this day a good deal of my _Journal_, written in a small
book with which he had supplied me, and was pleased, for he said,
‘I wish thy books were twice as big.’ He helped me fill up blanks
which I had left in first writing it, when I was not quite sure
of what he had said, and he corrected any mistakes that I had
made.[451]
In his accurate reproduction of life, Boswell surpasses all the
realists and attains to something of the inexhaustibility of nature
itself. Delightful as is his book for mere reading, it can never
be fully appreciated till it has been used as a work of reference;
for such it was intended to be. The work exhibits, according to the
title-page, ‘a view of literature and literary men in Great Britain
for near half a century.’ Boswell aspired to be not only stenographer
but historian. And to the life that he loved he was both.
We reach at last the core of Boswell’s being, his pagan joy in life,
that greediness of social pleasure which explains all his faults and
suggests all his greatness. He loved social life as other men have
loved a noble woman or a noble cause. He solemnly dedicated his life
to it and his genius to the recording of it. Only when his work is
viewed in the large does one see its grandeur. Like Ulysses, he might
have said, when his great work was done, ‘Much have I seen and known,
cities of men and manners ... myself not least but honoured of them
all.’
I incline to think that this social avidity is the ruling passion
not only of Boswell but of all the life that we have been studying,
of the salons, the conversationists, the diarists, and the
letter-writers. That life at its best blends two kinds of pleasure
that seem ordinarily incompatible, those of society and solitude,
of association and reflection. In the ‘exchange of mind’ which is
its ideal, its disciples find a joy that excels the more passive
pleasures of reading, by bringing them directly into the creation of
its characteristic product, conversation, and to this it adds the
pleasure of seeing the immediate effect of one’s words. Conversation
such as this may be said to represent the active, social, and more
human side of the intellectual life, while meditation stands for
its contemplative and eremitical side. The two are often mutually
exclusive. Philosopher and poet belong to the latter class, because
the meditative temper naturally shuns social distractions; but
diarists, letter-writers, and biographers owe their very existence to
this social instinct, and write to exalt it. They cannot bear that
the delights which they have experienced should pass away without
leaving a memorial. They are determined not only to pluck the passing
hour, but to do what they can to preserve the blossom even as it
droops in their hand. A withered flower is better than none at all;
at worst, it is a pathetic reminder of what has been. The memorialist
is one whose face is ever towards the past and the glories that have
been, the _noctes cæncæque deum_. It is in honour of them that his
work is done. His office is to record life, not to transfigure it.
He cannot aspire to be among those who have seen visions and pointed
others towards them; the joy of poetic creation and the passion of
adventurous thought are not for him; but it is his to know men and
the cheerful ways of men, and to unite us with the heroic minds of
old, not in the lonely glory of their visions, but in their more
familiar hours and their more human joys.
INDEX
Addison, Joseph, conversation of, 220;
_Spectator_, quoted, 103 _n._
Alembert, Jean d’, birth, 43;
quoted, 11, 32, 49;
referred to, 11, 27, 52, 55.
Anglomania, in Paris, 12 ff.
_Anglomanie_, Saurin’s comedy, 12-13.
Anstey, Christopher, 121.
Arblay, Mme. d’, _see_ Burney, Fanny.
Aurelia, Hoole’s poem, 178.
Barbauld, Letitia, 124.
_Barmécides, Les_, La Harpe’s tragedy, 67.
Barry, James, portrait of Johnson, 199;
of Mrs. Montagu, 199;
relations with Mrs. Montagu, 199.
_Bas Bleu_, Hannah More’s poem, 23, 123-24, 125.
Bath, Earl of, 123, 125.
Beattie, James, character, 189;
_Essay on Truth_, 190;
_Essays_, 192;
_Minstrel, The_, 190 ff.;
—— dedicated to Mrs. Montagu, 193;
presented to George III, 192;
relations with Mrs. Montagu, 189-95.
Beauclerk, Topham, 53, 104.
Beaufort, Duchess of, 153 _n._, 205.
Bedford, Countess of, 85.
Behn, Aphra, 94-96, 257.
biography, art of, 268 ff.;
theory of, before Boswell, 270 ff.
Blount, Martha, 100.
‘blue,’ _i.e._, bluestocking, origin and use of the word, 132-33.
bluestocking, etymology, 127-28;
translated into French, 127, 130, 133.
Bluestocking Club, 123 ff.;
members of, listed, 123-24;
origin of, 129 ff.
bluestockings, as authors, 166 ff.;
as hostesses, 134 ff.;
as patrons of the arts, 189 ff.;
descent from the Marquise de Rambouillet, 22.
Bocage, Mme. du, 35, 52, 75;
poem to Mrs. Montagu, 135 _n._;
visits Mrs. Montagu, 105, 135.
Bolingbroke, Lord, relations with Mme. de Tencin, 45.
Boscawen, Admiral, 125, 129.
Boscawen, Mrs. Frances, 153-58;
assemblies, 153;
Boswell’s opinion of, 153;
interest in Mrs. Yearsley, 205;
letters, 154;
patron of letters, 154;
relations with Hannah More, 154-56, 181, 184 ff.;
—— with Pye, 156 _n._;
—— with Young, 156 _n._;
reports the discovery of new letters by Mme. de Sévigné, 237.
Boswell, James, announces the _Life of Johnson_, 278-79;
biography, knowledge of, 269;
——, theory of, derived from Johnson, 269 ff.;
caricatures of, 277;
character, 8, 110;
influence on Johnson, 222-23;
_Life of Johnson_, completeness of, 281;
——, reception of, 280;
truthfulness of, 281;
love of social life, 282;
quoted, 5;
references to bluestockings, 126;
refuses to idealize Johnson, 279;
_Tour to the Hebrides_, Johnson reads, 282;
——, reception of, 272 ff.;
——, reviewed in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_, 274;
——, selection from, 274-76;
treatment of his contemporaries, 278.
Boufflers, Mme. de, 53;
relations with Gibbon, 77;
—— with Hume, 27;
—— with Johnson, 53, 104.
_bouts rimés_, 117, 119, 120.
breakfasts, literary, 105 ff.
Buffon, Georges de, 52.
Burke, Edmund, 123, 139 _n._;
indebtedness to Johnson’s conversation, 234;
quoted, 5;
visits Parisian salons, 66-68.
Burney, Dr. Charles, 159, 189.
Burney, Fanny, character, 255, 257;
_Diary_, art of, 254 ff.;
——, dramatic quality in, 265;
——, selection from, 262-64;
——, truthfulness of, 265;
_Evelina_, reception of, 257;
friends, 258;
love of boisterous scenes, 262;
luck, 256;
relations with Mrs. Ord, 159-60;
relations with Mrs. Thrale, 163;
self-consciousness, 267;
sensibility, 266;
sojourn at Court, as Dresser to the Queen, 257, 259 ff.
Cardigan Priory, salon at, 91.
card-playing, in salons, 106.
Carlisle, Countess of, 88.
Carter, Elizabeth, 172-77;
catholicity of taste, 176-77;
Johnson’s opinion of, 174;
learning, 157, 173;
_Poems_, 174;
relations with Gray, 144;
—— with Mrs. Montagu, 173;
romanticism, 175;
translation of Epictetus, 173-74.
Cartwright, William, 89.
Castiglione, Baldassare, his _Cortegiano_ cited, 18 ff.
Centlivre, Susannah, 100.
Chapman, George, 85-86.
Chapone, Mrs. Hester, 177-80;
_Essays_, 138, 157;
familiar letters, 180;
_Letters_, 177 ff., 202;
poems, 179;
quoted, 132;
referred to, 124, 179;
relations with Mrs. Carter, 178;
—— with Mrs. Montagu, 178;
—— with Richardson, 177, 180.
Charles II, relations of, with the Duchess of Mazarin, 97.
Charlotte, Queen, 259, 261.
Chesterfield, Lord, opinion of the salon, 46;
relations with Mme. de Tencin, 45 ff.
Cholmondeley, Mrs. Mary, 135, 153.
Church, of England, 9;
of Rome, hatred of, in salons, 37.
circle, seating of guests in, 111, 126, 139, 159.
Clarence, Duke of, 262 ff.
Clubs, literary, 5-7.
Colman, George, 102 _n._
conversation, chief amusement in salons, 25, 135;
Goldsmith’s, 220, 221;
ideal of, 7, 20, 25, 223;
Johnson’s, 217 ff.;
—— Boswell’s influence on, 222, 227.
_conversazione_, nature and office of, 102 ff., 108 ff., 152.
‘Cophthi,’ Walpole’s name for bluestockings, 147.
Cornaro, Caterina, 17.
cosmopolitanism, of salons, 43, 144, 147 _n._
court of love, 17.
courts, Renaissance, as predecessors of the salon, 16 ff., 84.
Cowley, Abraham, verses to Mrs. Phillips, 92.
Cowper, William, correspondence, charm of, 249-50;
—— compared with Mme. de Sévigné, 239-40;
relations with Mrs. Montagu, 197-99;
translation of Homer, submitted to Mrs. Montagu, 198.
Crewe, Lady, 131, 135.
Daniel, Samuel, 84, 85, 86.
Davies, Sir John, 85.
_Decameron_, Boccaccio’s, 18 _n._
declamation, fashionable entertainment in salons, 106.
Deffand, Mme. du, blindness, 61;
career and salon, 59-64;
described by Walpole, 59-60;
ennui, 60, 63;
letter to Walpole in manner of Mme. de Sévigné, 238;
opinion of Burke, 67;
—— of Gibbon, 77;
—— of Hume, 51;
—— of Walpole, 57;
quoted, 7, 13, 62 _n._, 64, 75, 238;
relations with Mlle. de Lespinasse, 61;
—— with Montesquieu, 60 _n._;
—— with Walpole, 27, 63-65;
type of her century, 34;
wit, 29.
Delany, Mrs. Mary, 160-63;
friendship with Swift, 161;
interest in Mrs. Yearsley, 205;
relations with Miss Burney, 162;
verses, Miss More’s to, 161.
democracy, in salons, 25;
theory of, 9.
Denham, Sir John, 92.
diary, as a literary type, 254 ff.
Diderot, Denis, 52.
Donne, John, relations with the Countess of Bedford, 86-87.
Drayton, Michael, 85.
Dryden, John, 92, 96.
England, French attitude to, 11 ff.
_Englishman in Paris_, Foote’s comedy, 42 _n._
epigram, Garrick’s on Goldsmith, 116;
Johnson’s on Barnard, 116;
popularity of, in salons, 26, 115-117, 229;
Young’s on Chesterfield, 116.
Este, Beatrice d’, 17.
feminism, in seventeenth century, 98-99.
_femmes savantes_, 28, 35, 78, 83, 98 _n._, 105.
Ferguson, Adam, 191.
Fielding, Sarah, 257.
Fontenelle, Bernard de, 45.
Foote, Samuel, quoted, 42 _n._
Frederick, Duke of Urbino, 18 ff.
friendship, in salons, 26 ff., 210.
Garrick, David, 123, 139 _n._;
declamation, 106;
verses, 121.
Gay, John, 100.
Geoffrin, Mme., career and salon, 47-50;
charity, 73;
described by Walpole, 58;
maxims, 113;
praised by Mlle. de Lespinasse, 73 ff.;
referred to, 25;
relations with Marmontel, 27;
—— with Walpole, 58 ff.;
type of her century, 34, 36;
wit, 29, 48 _n._
Gibbon, Edward, career in salons, 74-80, 211;
_Decline and Fall_, popularity of, in salons, 76;
influence of salon upon, 79;
Mme. du Deffand’s opinion of, 74-75, 77;
Mme. Necker’s opinion of, 75;
quoted, 11;
relations with Mme. Necker, 77-79;
Walpole’s opinion of, 76 _n._
Goldsmith, Oliver, account of Parisian salon, 42;
not a frequenter of the London salon, 211;
quoted, 32, 103 _n._, 105, 113;
visits Mrs. Vesey, 147 _n._
Gonzaga, Elizabeth, of Urbino, 17 ff.; 27, 84.
gossip, 223, 245, 248-49;
_see also_ scandal.
government, theories of, 11.
Gray, Thomas, 144;
at Mrs. Vesey’s, 147.
Greville, Lady, 153.
Guibert, Comte de, 67.
Henrietta Maria, Queen, 88.
Herries, Lady, 153.
Hervey, Lady, 135.
Hesketh, Lady, 197-98.
Hogarth, William, depiction of the levee, 103.
Holbach, Baron d’, his salon, 70, 75.
Holcroft, Thomas, quoted, 112, 170 _n._
Hoole, Rev. Samuel, quoted, 108 ff., 178.
Hume, Alexander, career in Parisian salons, 50-55;
death, 55;
influence of the salon on, 55;
quarrel with Rousseau, 53 ff.;
quoted, 5.
Huntington, Countess of, 87.
intrigue, flourishes in salons, 89, 95.
Isabella, of Mantua, 17.
Italy, courts of, _see_ courts.
Johnson, Samuel, conversation, 231 ff.;
correspondence, 252;
described by Hoole, 109-10;
dogmatism, 230;
levee, 104;
manner in conversation, 224;
quarrel with Mrs. Montagu, 199-202;
quoted, 5, 6, 7, 9, 100, 101, 231 ff.;
salons, visits, 210-11;
serenity, 223;
style in conversation and in writing compared, 229;
versatility, 226.
Jonson, Ben, 85.
Kauffmann, Angelica, 134.
Kyd, Thomas, 84.
Lambert, Mme. de, 44.
landscape, love of, among bluestockings, 148, 176.
laughter, unpopular in salons, 57.
Lely, Sir Peter, 97 _n._
Lennox, Charlotte, 257.
Lespinasse, Julie de, career and salon, 71 ff.;
relations with Burke, 68;
—— with d’Alembert, 25;
—— with Sterne, 71-72;
_Sentimental Journey_, imitates, 72 ff.;
type of romanticism, 34.
letter-writing, 236 ff.
levee, 102-05.
London, a literary centre, 5, 6.
Lorenzo the Magnificent, 18.
Lucan, Lady, 135, 153.
Lyttelton, Lord, _Dialogues of the Dead_, 167;
Johnson’s life of, 196 ff.;
poetry, 157;
praises Beattie, 190;
relations with Mrs. Montagu, 139-140, 157.
Macaulay, Mrs. Catherine, 10, 135.
Macaulay, Lord, 225, 259, 267, 268.
Manley, Mrs. Mary, 98, 100.
Mann, Sir Horace, Walpole’s letters to, 242 _n._
manners, literature of, 3.
Marmontel, Jean, 52.
Mascarille, 102.
Mathias, T. J., 170.
maxims, _see_ sentiments.
Mazarin, Cardinal, 96.
Mazarin, Duchess of, 96-98.
men of letters, state of, in eighteenth century, 32.
Miller, Lady, career and salon, 117-122;
poems, 120.
Molière, J. B. P., comedies referred to, 26 _n._, 28, 29, 102, 107.
Monckton, Miss, 153.
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 100-01, 237, 252.
Montagu, Mrs. Elizabeth, achievements, 141;
assemblies, 138;
breakfasts, 105;
conceit, 202-03;
_Dialogues of the Dead_, 167-69, 200;
_Essays on Shakespeare_, 169-72, 278;
‘female Mæcenas,’ 189;
‘femme savante,’ a, 140, 171-72;
influence in literary world, 202;
learning, 140, 198;
loyalty, 195;
patron of the arts, 189-208;
quarrel with Johnson, 196, 199-202;
‘Queen of the Blues,’ 133;
relations with Barry, 199;
—— with Beattie, 189-95;
—— with Cowper, 197-99;
—— with Lyttelton, 167, 200;
—— with Mme. du Deffand, 136-37;
—— with Mrs. Yearsley, 204 ff.;
—— with Potter, 195;
—— with Sterne, 202;
salon, originates in London, 124.
More, Hannah, 180-88;
_Bas Bleu_, 23, 123-25;
_Bleeding Rock_, 181;
description of an assembly, 106 _n._;
_Essays_, 156, 187;
_Fatal Falsehood_, 185-86;
_Florio_, 157, 187;
_Inflexible Captive_, 181;
influence of bluestockings on, 180, 188;
_Ode on the Marquess of Worcester_, 155;
_Ode to Mrs. Boscawen_, 154 ff.;
_Percy_, 154, 183-85;
piety, 186-88;
relations with Garrick, 181;
—— with Mrs. Boscawen, 181 ff.;
—— with Mrs. Yearsley, 204 ff.;
—— with Walpole, 187;
romanticism, 182;
_Sensibility_, 156;
_Sir Eldred_, 181-83;
‘Stella,’ 206;
_Thoughts on the Manners of the Great_, 188.
Necker, Mme., career and salon, 77-80;
quoted, 7, 14, 38, 63 _n._;
relations with Gibbon, 77 ff.;
—— with Hume, 27;
—— with Mrs. Montagu, 136.
Newcastle, Duchess of, 90 _n._
Opie, John, portrait of Miss More, 157.
Ord, Mrs. Anne, relations with Miss Burney, 159-60;
salon, 124, 158-159.
‘Orinda,’ _see_ Phillips, Mrs. Katherine.
Ossian, 176.
Otway, Thomas, 96.
Paoli, General, 147 _n._
Paris, attraction for Englishmen, 15, 36, 38.
patronage, 30, 84, 189 ff.
Pembroke, Countess of, 84.
Pepys, Sir William, 123.
Percy, Bishop, _Reliques_, 182.
Phillips, Mrs. Katherine, 91-94.
Piozzi, Mme., _see_ Thrale, Mrs. Hester.
Pix, Mary, 98.
Platonic love, 88, 91, 93.
Polignac, Mme. de, 131.
Portland, Duchess of, 131, 162, 205, 207.
Potter, Robert, attacks Johnson’s _Lives_, 196, 270;
meets Johnson, 196;
relations with Mrs. Montagu, 195-97.
_précieuses galantes_, 88.
_précieuses ridicules_, 29.
Prior, Matthew, relations with Mme. de Tencin, 44 ff.
pseudonyms, classical, 89, 91, 95, 206.
Pye, Henry, poem to Mrs. Boscawen, 156 _n._
Queensbury, Duchess of, 100.
Rambouillet, Hôtel de, 22 ff.;
Marquise de, 22 ff., 102 _n._
Raynal, Abbé, 144, 150-51.
Restoration, influence of, on the salon, 89-90.
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, indebtedness to Johnson’s conversation, 235.
Richardson, Samuel, his Daughters, 100;
fame in France, 14.
Rousseau, J. J., 9, 40, 54, 59, 176.
Rowe, Nicholas, relations with Mrs. Phillips, 92 _n._
_ruelle_, 102 _n._
Rutland, Lady, 87.
Saint Évremond, Charles de, 96-98.
salon, characteristics, 24 ff.;
conservatism, 210 ff.;
conversation in, 25, 125;
cosmopolitanism of, 43;
decline of, 209;
democratic tone, 25;
failure of, in England, 213;
first English, 83;
ideal of, 152;
influence on authors, 39;
literary academy, a, 31;
origin of, 16 ff.;
original works read aloud, 26, 67, 72 _n._;
patronage, 30, 84, 189 ff.;
radicalism of, 37;
room, 24;
woman’s place in, 16, 33 ff.
scandal, prevalence of, in salons, 111.
scepticism, in salons, 10, 37, 42, 52, 150.
Schwellenberg, Mrs., 260, 264.
Scudéry, Mlle. de, 26, 95.
sentiments, popular in salons, 113-15.
Sévigné, Mme. de, influence of, in England, 237 ff.
Seward, Anna, 121.
Shakespeare, William, Mrs. Montagu’s Essay on, 169-72;
salon spirit in his comedies, 22, 85.
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, _Rivals_, 115;
_School for Scandal_, quoted, 103, 104, 107, 112, 115.
Sheridan, Thomas, 106.
Spenser, Edmund, 84.
Sterne, Laurence, describes salons, 37;
influence of salons upon, 74;
relations with Mrs. Montagu, 202;
—— with Mrs. Vesey, 148 ff.;
_Sentimental Journey_, quoted, 37, 69;
imitated by Mlle. de Lespinasse, 72 ff.
Stillingfleet, Benjamin, 123, 128-30.
Stuart, Lady Louisa, 126, 139.
Suckling, Sir John, 89.
Swift, Jonathan, 100.
Taylor, Jeremy, relations with Mrs. Phillips, 92-94.
Tencin, Mme. de, career and salon, 43-47, 102;
type of her century, 34.
Tessier, Le, 106.
Thrale, Hester, _Anecdotes of Johnson_, 164;
——, reception of, 276;
character, 165;
not properly a bluestocking, 124;
relations with Johnson, 163-64;
—— with Miss Burney, 163-64.
Tighe, Edward, 106.
Trotter, Catherine, 98.
Twickenham Park, salon at, 85.
Vaughan, Henry, 94.
Vesey, Agmondesham, 115, 203.
Vesey, Mrs. Elizabeth, agnosticism, 150;
bluestocking, use of the word, 130;
entertains the Literary Club, 33 _n._, 147;
relations with Sterne, 148 ff.;
romanticism, 147, 151;
salon, 141-52;
——, one of the originators, in London, 124.
Vivonne, Cathérine de, _see_ Rambouillet, Marquise de.
Voiture, Vincent, 25.
Voltaire, François, denounced by bluestockings, 109, 151;
opinion of, in salons, 37;
opinion, his, of the English, 12.
Walpole, Horace, correspondence, art of, 236 ff.;
gossip, love of, 249-50;
influence of salons on, 39, 65-66;
interest in Mrs. Yearsley, 206;
letter to Rousseau, 54, 59;
opinion of Gibbon, 76 _n._;
—— of Hume, 51;
—— of the salon, 56 ff.;
popularity in Paris, 59;
quoted, 10, 36, 39, 42, 44 _n._, 52, 58, 62 _n._, 66 _n._, 68, 76
_n._, 132, 236 ff.;
relations with Mme. du Deffand, 63-65;
—— with Mme. Geoffrin, 57;
salons, career in, 56-66;
uses the word bluestocking, 132.
Walsingham, Mrs., 124, 153, 157.
Woodhouse, the poetical shoemaker, 205.
Wroth, Lady, 87.
Yearsley, Mrs. Ann, the poetical milk-woman, career and poems, 204-08.
Young, Edward, 100, 156 _n._, 157.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Hume, Boswell, Burke, and Johnson are quoted in turn. The first
reference is to Edinburgh, the rest to London.
[2] Boswell’s _Life_, Hill’s edition, 2. 75.
[3] Boswell’s _Life_ 3. 253.
[4] _Ib._, 4. 167.
[5] _Ib._, 3. 247.
[6] _Lettres à Walpole_ 3. 338; 28 May 1777.
[7] Boswell’s _Life_ 2. 328-29.
[8] _Ib._, 2. 340.
[9] Boswell’s _Life_ 1. 447.
[10] _Letters_ 6. 301.
[11] In his _Memoirs_.
[12] See Churton Collins’ _Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau in
England_, London 1908.
[13] _Essai sur la Société des Gens de Lettres et des Grands, sur la
Réputation, sur les Mécènes, et sur les Récompenses Littéraires._ In
his _Mélanges de Littérature et de Philosophie_ (1753) 2. 119.
[14] _Ib._ 2. 121. Cf. Helvétius to Hume (_Letters to Hume_; 28 June
1767). ‘L’attraction de la terre Britannique agit puissament sur moi.’
[15] See his _Memoirs_.
[16] _Œuvres_ (1819-25) 43. 320; 14 November 1764. The whole passage
is worth quoting: ‘Mille gens, messieurs, s’élèvent et déclament
contre l’anglomanie: j’ignore ce qu’ils entendent par ce mot. S’ils
veulent parler de la fureur de travestir en modes ridicules quelques
usages utiles, de transformer un deshabillé commode en un vêtement
malpropre, de saisir, jusqu’à des jeux nationaux, pour y mettre des
grimaces à la place de la gravité, ils pourraient avoir raison; mais
si, par hasard, ces déclamateurs prétendaient nous faire un crime du
désir d’étudier, d’observer, de philosopher, comme les Anglais, ils
auraient certainement bien tort: car, en supposant que ce désir soit
déraisonable, ou même dangereux, il faudrait avoir beaucoup d’humeur
pour nous l’attribuer et ne pas convenir que nous sommes à cet égard
à l’abri de tout reproche.’
[17] Its first published title was _L’Orphéline Léguée_. See also
Walpole’s _Letters_ 6. 360.
[18] _Correspondance_, ed. Lescure, 1. 497; 14 August 1768.
[19] _Mélanges_ 2. 240.
[20] Gibbon’s _Miscellaneous Works_ 2. 178.
[21] The ideal of a group of ladies and gentlemen who seek in
literature the pleasantest of entertainment is of course encountered
in Italian literature long before this time. The singular vitality of
the scheme adopted by Boccaccio for the framework of the _Decameron_
is proved by the numerous imitations of it. The Petrarchists, as well
as Boccaccio, found favour in the eyes of the court-ladies.
[22] _The Book of the Courtier_, from the Italian of Count Baldassare
Castiglione, done into English by Sir Thomas Hoby. Edited by
Professor Raleigh. London, 1900. See pp. 29 ff.
[23] Spirit.
[24] Figures, allegories.
[25] ‘Arguments,’ discussions, such as the one that follows on the
nature of the true courtier.
[26] The following anecdote of a warrior who affirmed that the
entertainments of the Court were beneath him, may be cited as
a specimen: ‘The Gentlewoman demaundyng him, What is then your
profession? He aunswered with a frowning looke: To fight. Then saide
the Gentlewoman: Seing you are not nowe at the warre nor in place to
fight, I woulde thinke it beste for you to bee well besmered and set
up in an armorie with other implementes of warre till time wer that
you should be occupied, least you waxe more rustier than you are.’ p.
49.
[27] See below, p. 124.
[28] _Historical Memoirs_ 1. 14. Chesterfield, who knew the salons
at first hand, writes to his son, 24 December 1750, ‘Le bon goût
commença seulement à se faire jour, sous le règne, je ne dis pas de
Louis Treize, mais du Cardinal de Richelieu, et fut encore épuré
sous celui de Louis Quatorze.... Vers la fin du règne du Cardinal de
Richelieu, et au commencement de celui de Louis Quatorze, l’Hôtel de
Rambouillet était le Temple du Goût, mais d’un goût pas encore tout à
fait épuré.’ _Letters_, ed. Bradshaw, 1. 382.
[29] ‘Arthénice’ is an anagram of her name, Cathérine. It is said to
have been discovered by Malherbe.
[30] This, too, is Italian. Cf. Burckhardt, _Renaissance in Italy_,
tr. Middlemore, p. 359: ‘Social intercourse in its highest and most
perfect form now ignored all distinctions of caste, and was based
simply on the existence of an educated class.’
[31] Thus Mascarille in _Les Précieuses Ridicules_: ‘Vous verrez
courir de ma façon, dans les belles ruelles de Paris, deux cents
chansons, autant de sonnets, quatre cents épigrammes, et plus de
mille madrigaux, sans compter les énigmes et les portraits.’
[32] Petit de Julleville, _Histoire de la Langue et de la Littérature
Française_ 4. 105.
[33] She sneered at _précieuses_. _Lettres à Walpole_ 1. 417.
[34] _Essai sur les Gens de Lettres, etc._, _op. cit._ 2. 136. Cf.
Goldsmith, _Citizen of the World_, 84: ‘A writer of real merit now
may ... talk even to princes with all the conscious superiority of
wisdom.’
[35] ‘Collé regrettera toujours les cafés littéraires et ne se
consolera pas de les voir déserter pour les salons.’ Petit de
Julleville, _Histoire de la Littérature Française_, 6. 388. It was
a significant moment in the history of the Literary Club in London
when, about 1780, it fell into the habit of dining at Mrs. Vesey’s
before its more exclusive sessions at the tavern.
[36] ‘Comme son siècle, Madame du Deffand, dans son extrême
viellesse, retrouva le don d’aimer et la douceur des larmes.’ Lanson,
_Choix de Lettres_, quoted by Mrs. Toynbee in _Lettres à Walpole_ 1.
lx.
[37] ‘Elle symbolise l’évolution qui, à l’époque où elle vécut, s’est
opérée dans l’âme de ses contemporains, lorsque de raisonneur le
siècle s’est fait passionné, de libertin sentimental.’ Ségur, _Julie
de Lespinasse_, p. 15.
[38] _Letters_ 6. 393.
[39] _Ib._ 6. 367; 2 December 1765.
[40] _Ib._ 9. 252; [? September] 1775.
[41] _Sentimental Journey._
[42] _Letters_ 6. 352; 19 November 1765. Cf. Madame du Deffand to
Walpole (_Letters_ 1. 385; 30 January 1768): ‘Vous n’aimez pas les
impiétés, vous êtes, ce me semble, un peu dévot.’
[43] Letter to Gibbon, 30 September 1776; in Gibbon’s _Miscellaneous
Works_ 2. 178.
[44] This function is admirably expressed by Professor Brunel in
his account of Madame de Tencin (Petit de Julleville, _Histoire de
la Littérature Française_ 6. 403) ‘[Elle les ramenait] sans cesse
au ton léger qui convient, même en un sujet grave. Tel est bien le
rôle d’une femme au milieu de ces têtes pensantes. Elle se tient
audessus et au dehors du débat, qu’elle envisage au seul point de vue
d’agrément, et dont elle règle la marche, toujours souriante, sans le
laisser languir ni s’aigrir.’
[45] _Letters_ 6. 414; 3 February 1766.
[46] Boswell’s _Life of Johnson_ 3. 47.
[47] Madame Necker speaks of the ‘art perfectionné de l’exagération,’
in the letter to Gibbon cited above.
[48] Thus Marmontel: ‘Leurs entretiens étaient une école pour moi
non moins utile qu’agréable et, autant qu’il m’était possible, je
profitais de leurs leçons.’
[49] English visitors in Paris are satirized in two comedies by
Samuel Foote, _The Englishman in Paris_ (1753) and _The Englishman
returned from Paris_ (1757). In the former the leading character,
Buck, is offered an introduction to ‘Madame de Rambouillet’; in the
latter he comes home completely Frenchified.
[50] _Letters_ 6. 332; 19 October 1765.
[51] _Memoirs of M. de Voltaire._ During Goldsmith’s sojourn on the
Continent, Diderot and Fontenelle were still visitors at Madame
Geoffrin’s.
[52] In Petit de Julleville’s _Histoire de la Littérature Française_,
_op. cit._, 6. 404, Walpole, who must have had her character from
Madame du Deffand, tells Mason that she was ‘a most horrid woman’
who ‘had great parts and so little principle that she was supposed
to have murdered and robbed one of her lovers, a scrape out of
which Lord Harrington and another of them saved her. She had levees
from eight in the morning till night, from the lowest tools to the
highest.’ _Letters_ 10. 28; 13 March 1777.
[53] _Works_ of Bolingbroke 7. 169; letter to Hanmer, December 1712
(?).
[54] _Ib._, 7. 87; 17 October 1712. Prior to Bolingbroke.
[55] _Lettres Historiques de Bolingbroke_ (Paris 1808), 2. 431; 3
June 1715.
[56] _Dictionary of National Biography_, ‘Saint John.’
[57] See the ribald verses commencing, ‘Tencin, vous avez de
l’esprit,’ printed in _Lettres de Bolingbroke_, _op. cit._, 2. 433 n.
The second stanza begins, ‘Bolingbroke, es-tu possédé?’
[58] _Letters_, edited by Bradshaw, 1. 383; 24 December 1750.
[59] See his letter to Madame de Tencin, introducing Mrs. Cleland, in
_Letters_, as above, 2. 771; 20 August 1742.
[60] _Letters_, _op. cit._, 1. 383.
[61] See Professor P. M. Masson’s excellent monograph, _Madame de
Tencin_ (Paris 1909), pp. 278-80. The appendix contains Madame de
Tencin’s letters.
[62] Cf. Montesquieu, _Lettres_; 12 March 1750 (in _Œuvres_, Paris
1879): ‘Dîtes à milord Chesterfield que rien ne me flatte tant que
son approbation,’ and the rest.
[63] Madame Necker, who had studied Madame Geoffrin’s methods,
remarks (_Nouveaux Mélanges_ 1. 100): ‘Le piquant de l’esprit de
Madame Geoffrin consistait toujours à rendre des idées ingénieuses
par des images triviales, et pour ainsi dire, de ménage; son esprit
était toujours enté sur un ton bourgeois.’ The following may serve
as specimens (cf. above, p. 29): ‘Madame —— a frappé à la porte de
toutes les vertus sans entrer chez aucune.’ ‘Quand nos amis sont
borgnes, il faut les regarder de profil.’
[64] Letter in _Éloges de Madame Geoffrin_, ed. M. Morellet, p. 110.
[65] _Éloges_, _op. cit._, p. 105.
[66] _Letters to Hume_, pp. 288-89.
[67] _Letters_ 6. 298; 20 September 1765.
[68] _Correspondance Littéraire_, Paris 1829, 5. 4: ‘Il est lourd, il
n’a ni chaleur, ni grâce, ni agrément dans l’esprit.’
[69] _Lettres à Walpole_ 1, _passim_.
[70] Burton’s _Life of Hume_ 2. 168 _n._
[71] _Letters_ 6, _passim_. Cf. Grimm, _op. cit._, 5. 3-4.
[72] Burton’s _Hume_ 2. 173; 9 November 1673.
[73] An Englishman in Paris wrote to the Earl Marshall of Scotland,
‘L’on regarde le bonheur de l’y voir comme un des plus doux fruits de
la paix.’ _Letters to Hume_, p. 63; 4 January 1764.
[74] Burton’s _Hume_ 2. 181.
[75] Du Deffand’s _Lettres à Walpole_ 3. 591.
[76] _Lettres à Walpole_ 1. 232; 5 March 1767, _et passim_.
[77] See Burton’s _Life of Hume_; _Letters addressed to Hume_ (1849);
_Private Correspondence of Hume_ (1820); _Letters_, ed. T. Murray
(1841); and _Exposé succinct de la Contestation ... entre M. Hume et
M. Rousseau_ (1766). The simplest narratives for the general reader
are in Ségur’s _Julie de Lespinasse_, chapter 7, and in Collins’s
_Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau in England_, pp. 182 ff.
[78] See Garat, _Mémoires Historiques_ 2. 158.
[79] See _Letters_ 6. 396; 12 January 1766, for the complete letter.
A second letter, in the character of Émile, is printed in Madame du
Deffand’s _Lettres à Walpole_ 1. 3 _n._ Madame du Deffand persuaded
Walpole not to let it become public.
[80] See above, p. 54 _n._, and volume one of her _Lettres à
Walpole_, _passim_.
[81] Burton’s _Life of Hume_ 2. 513.
[82] _Lettres à Walpole_ 3. 253.
[83] In October (?) 1776, Mrs. Montagu wrote to Beattie: ‘As I passed
a good deal of my time with the Litterati at Paris, you may imagine
I heard much of the manner of Mr. Hume’s taking leave of the world.
“Les Philosophes” (as they call themselves) were pleased that he
supported the infidel character with so much constancy.’ M. Forbes’s
_Beattie and his Friends_ 130.
[84] _Letters_ 6. 309; 3 October 1765.
[85] _Ib._, 6. 332.
[86] _Ib._, 6. 358.
[87] See _Letters_ 6. 332: ‘Good folks, they have no time to
laugh.’ ‘M. de Fontenelle,’ asked Madame Geoffrin one day, ‘Vous
n’avez jamais ri?’ ‘Non,’ he replied, ‘je n’ai jamais fait ah, ah,
ah.’ Necker, _Nouveaux Mélanges_ 1. 165. Chesterfield’s hatred of
laughter, that ‘shocking distortion of the face,’ is well-known; he
boasted that he had never been seen to laugh.
[88] _Lettres à Walpole_ 1. 577; 24 May 1769.
[89] _Letters_ 6. 404; 25 January 1766.
[90] Ten years later Madame du Deffand gave him a more startling
illustration of French motherliness. See _Letters_ 9. 236.
[91] Cf. Professor Brunel in Petit de Julleville’s _Histoire_ 6. 410:
‘C’est en effet la “raison” qu’on reconnaît à Madame Geoffrin pour
mérite éminent.’
[92] _Letters_ 6. 395; 11 January 1766.
[93] _Ib._, 6. 396.
[94] _Ib._, 6. 404; 25 January 1766.
[95] Montesquieu wrote her (15 June 1751): ‘Je sens qu’il n’y a pas
de lectures qui puissent remplacer un quart d’heure de ces soupers
qui faisaient mes délices.’ _Œuvres_ (1879), 7. 377.
[96] _Letters_ 9. 59; 28 September 1774.
[97] _Ib._, 6. 356; Walpole had met this Duke in Paris.
[98] Montesquieu, _Œuvres_ (1879), 7. 400; 13 September 1752. ‘Ce qui
doît nous consoler, c’est que ceux qui voient clair ne sont pour celà
lumineux.’
[99] This description of herself ‘dans le coin d’un couvent’ she sent
to Madame de Boufflers:
Dans son tonneau
On voit une vieille sibylle
Dans son tonneau.
Qui n’a sur les os que la peau,
Qui jamais ne jeûna Vigile,
Qui rarement lit l’Évangile
Dans son tonneau.
—From G. Maugras, _La Marquise de Boufflers_, p. 101.
[100] ‘Madame du Deffand ... is delicious; that is, as often as I
can get her fifty years back, but she is as eager about what happens
every day as I am about the last century.’ Walpole, _Letters_ 6. 367;
2 December 1765.
[101] D’Alembert called her ‘The Viper,’ and told Hume that she hated
everybody, especially great men. _Letters to Hume_, p. 201.
[102] ‘Ceux par qui on n’a pas craindre d’être assassiné, mais qui
laisseraient faire les assassins.’ Montesquieu, _Œuvres_ (1879) 7.
379.
[103] Necker, _Nouveaux Mélanges_ 1. 79: ‘Madame du Défan [sic]
accusait tous les penseurs d’affectation.’
[104] _Lettres à Walpole_ 3. 319, _et passim_.
[105] _Ib._ 3. 77.
[106] _Ib._ 2. 373; cf. 3. 203. ‘Toute espèce de lecture m’ennuie.’
[107] Edited by Mrs. Paget Toynbee, London, 1912. There are 838
letters.
[108] _Lettres à Walpole_ 1. 167; 14 November 1766.
[109] _Letters_ 9. 249; 8 September 1775.
[110] ‘If possible she is more worth visiting than ever; and so far
am I from being ashamed of coming hither at my age, that I look on
myself as wiser than one of the Magi, when I travel to adore this
star in the East. The star and I went to the Opera last night, and
when we came from Madame de la Vallière’s, at one in the morning, it
wanted to drive about the town, because it was too early to _set_....
You nurse a little girl of four years old, and I rake with an old
woman of fourscore!’ _Letters_ 9. 256; to Selwyn, 16 September 1775.
[111] _Lettres à Walpole_ 2. 476.
[112] _Ib._ 2. 484.
[113] _Ib._ 2. 479; ‘Il y a des gens ici qui l’appellent _Junius_.’
[114] J. Morley, _Burke_, p. 67.
[115] _Lettres à Walpole_ 3. 589, in criticism of his _Speech on the
Independence of Parliament_, 11 February 1780.
[116] _Ib._ 2. 479; 481.
[117] ‘Je lui donne une compagnie que j’ai tâché de lui assortir;
un M. du Buc, qui est aussi un grand esprit, le Comte de Broglio,
l’Évêque de Mirepoix, Madame de Cambis, les Caraman, etc.’ _Lettres à
Walpole_ 2. 479; 24 February 1773.
[118] Printed in 1778.
[119] By J. A. H. de Guibert, Paris 1773.
[120] See _Lettres à Walpole_ 2. 488. He had spoken of it to Walpole,
and evidently preferred it to La Harpe’s tragedy—which did not please
Madame du Deffand. The tragedy, which was widely known from the
author’s reading of it in the salons, was acted in 1775.
[121] See Bisset, _Life of Burke_ (1798), p. 158. Morley thinks it
was in Mlle. de Lespinasse’s salon that Burke met Diderot.
[122] _Letters_ 8. 252; 11 March 1773.
[123] Diderot.
[124] Morellet.
[125] Professor Cross, however, considers them fairly reliable. _Life
of Sterne_, p. 287.
[126] D. Garat, _Mémoires Historiques sur le XVIII^e Siècle_ 2. 136.
[127] 31 January 1762.
[128] _Letters_ 6. 370; 2 December 1765.
[129] Cf. Cross, _Life of Sterne_, p. 282.
[130] The rise of Julie de Lespinasse (1732-1776) to a position
of first importance in Parisian society is a thrilling story. See
Ségur, _Julie de Lespinasse_. The account of her break with Madame
du Deffand whose ‘companion’ she had been, is referred to above, p.
61. Walpole (_Letters_ 9. 59) calls her ‘a pretended bel esprit,’ and
begs Conway not to allow himself to be taken to her salon, frequented
by Englishmen, lest he offend Madame du Deffand.
[131] Necker, _Mélanges_ 2. 287.
[132] _Letters_ to the Count de Guibert (1809) 2. 233.
[133] See _Lettres de Mlle. de Lespinasse ... suivies de deux
chapitres dans le genre du Voyage sentimental de Sterne, par le même
Auteur_. Paris 1809; 3. 261.
[134] The authenticity of these stories is vouched for by the first
editor of Mlle. de Lespinasse’s _Letters_ (1809), _op. cit._ 1. xiv,
and by the author of the ‘Portrait’ in _Éloges de Madame Geoffrin_
(1812), p. 47. Mlle. de Lespinasse read the chapters aloud in Madame
Geoffrin’s salon.
[135] His father had sent him to Lausanne at the age of sixteen. His
first literary venture, his _Essai sur l’Étude de la Littérature_,
was in French.
[136] _Lettres à Walpole_ 3. 342; 8 June 1777.
[137] Gibbon, _Miscellaneous Works_ 2. 247; 21 April 1781.
[138] _Lettres à Walpole_, 3. 367; 21 September 1777.
[139] _Private Letters_, ed. Prothero, 1. 29; 12 February 1763. Cf.
_Memoirs_, ed. Hill, p. 153.
[140] Walpole’s account of him in dispute is less flattering. ‘He
coloured; all his round features squeezed themselves into sharp
angles; he screwed up his button-mouth and [rapped] his snuff-box....
I well knew his vanity, even about his ridiculous face and person,
but thought he had too much sense to avow it so palpably.’ _Letters_
11. 376; 27 January 1781. Gibbon avoided disputes with Johnson, and
Boswell (_Life_ 2. 348) assumed that he feared ‘a competition of
abilities.’
[141] _Lettres à Walpole_ 3. 343, 351, and 376.
[142] _Private Lettres_ 1. 312; 16 June 1777.
[143] _Lettres à Walpole_ 3. 336.
[144] Gibbon’s _Miscellaneous Works_ 2. 178; 30 September 1776.
[145] _Miscellaneous Works_ 1. 312; 16 June 1777.
[146] She wrote him in January 1777: ‘Votre entretien, Monsieur,
a toujours été un grand plaisir de ma vie, car vous réunissez
l’intérêt pour les petites choses, l’enthousiasme pour les grandes,
l’abondance des idées, à l’attention pour celles des autres, et
une légère causticité, âme de la conversation, à l’indulgence du
moment, la sûreté du caractère et le courage de l’amitié.’ Gibbon,
_Miscellaneous Works_ 2. 193. Madame du Deffand applied to Gibbon’s
conversation a phrase of Fontenelle’s, ‘forte de choses.’ _Lettres à
Walpole_ 3. 338; 27 May 1777.
[147] ‘C’est le ton de nos beaux esprits: il n’y a que des ornements,
de la parure, du clinquant, et point du fond ... il a, si je ne me
trompe, une grande ambition de célébrité; il brigue à force ouverte
la faveur de tous nos beaux esprits.’ _Lettres à Walpole_ 3. 357; 10
August 1777.
[148] Gibbon’s _Miscellaneous Works_ 2. 247; 21 April 1781.
[149] Gibbon’s _Miscellaneous Works_ 2. 214; 12 November 1777.
[150] Nicholas Breton’s _Pilgrimage to Paradise_, quoted by Miss
Young.
[151] These and the like illustrations are drawn from Miss Frances
Young’s _Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke_, London 1912.
[152] Epigram 94.
[153] _Life and Letters of John Donne_ 1. 212. Her ‘refining’
influence on Donne’s mind and judgment is particularly noted in his
second _Letter to the Countess of Bedford_.
[154] Professor Grierson attributes to her the poem beginning,
‘Death, be not proud, thy hand gave not this blow.’
See his edition of Donne’s poems, 2. cxliv.
[155] _Twicknam Garden._
[156] Gosse 2. 79; 1651.
[157] This subject is pleasantly discussed by Professor Fletcher
in his _Religion of Beauty in Woman_, ‘Précieuses at the Court
of Charles I,’ but his discussion shows how inimical was the new
movement to anything like a true patronage of letters.
[158] Thus there is no suggestion of the salon about such a figure as
the Duchess of Newcastle.
[159] _Seventeenth Century Studies_, p. 208.
[160] To ‘Berenice,’ in _Familiar Letters_, London 1697; 1. 147; 30
December 1658.
[161] _On the Death of Mrs. Katherine Philips._ In his _Ode on
Orinda’s Poems_ the lady’s descent is traced from Boadicea. Rowe,
in his _Epistle to Daphnis_, declares that she soared as high as
Corneille ‘and equalled all his fame.’ Dryden compares her with Mrs.
Killigrew. Cowley may perhaps have owed more than the rest to her.
The following reference to him in her letters seems to show that she
had been of real service to him: ‘I am very glad of Mr. Cowley’s
success, and will concern myself so much as to thank your ladyship
for your endeavour in it.’ (To Berenice, _Familiar Letters_ 1. 143;
25 June [1758?].)
[162] _Discourse_, p. 38.
[163] _Works_ of Saint Évremond, English translation, 2d edition,
London 1728; 2. 247.
[164] _Ib._ 2. 299.
[165] Her beauty was celebrated by Waller in _The Triple Combat_.
Lely painted her portrait.
[166] See Dr. Upham’s ‘English Femmes Savantes at the End of the
Seventeenth Century,’ in the _Journal of English and Germanic
Philology_, April 1913. This is a fairly exhaustive treatment of the
subject, and reveals a development of ‘feminism’ in England parallel
in some respects with that in France. As the movement, however,
reveals no attempt to centre literary activity in salons, the article
must be regarded as treating a different aspect of the general
subject from the one here dealt with.
[167] So Madame du Deffand told Walpole. Walpole’s _Letters_ 10. 28.
[168] Guests were not necessarily received in the sleeping-room.
The adjoining dressing-room was often utilized for the purpose. See
Colman’s _Man of Business_ (1774), opening of Act 2. The levee should
be compared with Mme. de Rambouillet’s more intimate receptions,
where a seat near the bedside, in the _ruelle_ or lane between bed
and wall, was the place of honour, as being nearest to the hostess
while she reclined in state.
Morning informality became so popular in Paris that ladies and
gentlemen of quality appeared at lectures, ‘même en robe de chambre’
(Roberts’ _Memoirs of Hannah More_ 2. 17). Cf. Goldsmith (_Citizen of
the World_, Letter 77), ‘the modern manner of some of our nobility
receiving company in their morning gowns.’
[169] As early as the days of the _Spectator_, Addison deplored the
custom, introduced by travelled ladies, of ‘receiving gentlemen in
their bed-rooms.’
[170] Probably, as Hill notes, Mme. de Boufflers; cf. above, p. 53.
[171] Boswell’s _Life_ 2. 118; cf. 3. 207.
[172] Boswell’s _Life_ 5. 395; here the word levee is probably
loosely employed for a morning conversazione.
[173] _Citizen of the World_, Letter 104.
[174] Cf. Boswell’s _Life of Johnson_ 2. 318.
[175] _Diary of Mme. D’Arblay_ 5. 80-81.
[176] _Letters_ (1770) 1. 7; 8 April 1750.
[177] _Letters_ 8. 437.
[178] Roberts’ _Memoirs of More_ 1. 395.
[179] _Correspondence of Mrs. Delany_ 6. 229; 7 September 1784.
[180] Diary for 10 May 1773; M. Forbes’ _Life of Beattie_, p. 75.
[181] Hannah More’s piquant description of an assembly is worth
quoting in full:
‘On Monday I was at a very great assembly at the Bishop of Saint
Asaph’s. Conceive to yourself one hundred and fifty or two hundred
people met together, dressed in the extremity of the fashion; painted
as red as bacchanals; poisoning the air with perfumes; treading on
each other’s gowns; making the crowd they blame; not one in ten able
to get a chair; protesting they are engaged to ten other places; and
lamenting the fatigue they are not obliged to endure; ten or a dozen
card-tables, crammed with dowagers of quality, grave ecclesiastics,
and yellow admirals; and you have an idea of an assembly.’ Roberts’
_Memoirs of More_ 1. 242; cf. _ib._ 1. 311.
[182] Other contemporary descriptions of the salon will be
found elsewhere in this volume. Still others—in general more
fragmentary—may be consulted in Frances Brooke’s _Excursion_ 1. 142,
Roberts’ _Memoirs of More_ 2. 22-23; 1. 92-93; 174; 317.
[183] Horace Walpole’s experiences in the English salons at Turin and
Florence may be consulted in the first volume of his _Letters_. ‘Only
figure the coalition of prudery, debauchery, sentiment, history,
Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and metaphysics; all, except the
second, understood by halves, by quarters, or not at all’ 1. 82; 31
July 1740.
[184] This was an important matter with some of the bluestockings, as
the following quotation from Hannah More may show: ‘I never knew a
great party turn out so pleasantly as the other night at the Pepys’s.
There was all the pride of London—every wit and every wit-ess ... but
the spirit of the evening was kept up on the strength of a little
lemonade till past eleven, without cards, scandal, or politics.’
Roberts’ _Memoirs of More_ 1. 208.
Johnson’s opposition to anything of the sort is shown by his remark
on ‘an evening society for conversation’: ‘There is nothing served
about there, neither tea, nor coffee, nor lemonade, nor anything
whatever, and depend upon it, Sir, a man does not love to go to a
place from whence he comes out exactly as he went in.’ Boswell’s
_Life_ 4. 90.
He urged Mrs. Thrale to provide her guests with ‘a profusion of the
best sweetmeats.’
[185] How true this is to the spirit of conversation is shown by
a somewhat scandalous discussion of Miss Hannah More which passed
between Mrs. Cholmondeley and Miss Burney: Mrs. Cholmondeley: ‘I
don’t like her at all; that is, I detest her! She does nothing but
flatter and fawn; and then she thinks ill of nobody. Don’t you hate a
person who thinks ill of nobody?’ _Diary of Mme. D’Arblay_ 1. 188.
[186] 1787. Act 3, scene 2.
[187] See her first conversation with Marlow, Act II. She herself
calls it sentimental, in reference to these platitudes.
[188] _Mélanges_ 3. 243.
[189] _Ib._ 266.
[190] _Correspondence of Mrs. Delany_ 4. 236; 30 August 1769.
[191] _Diary of Mme. D’Arblay_ 2. 351.
[192] The tails of macaronis’ wigs were notoriously long.
[193] Spence’s _Anecdotes_ 378.
[194] Boswell’s _Life_ 4. 195. A specimen of what this sort of thing
may be is seen in this epigram of Marmontel’s, upon picking up a
lady’s pen:
Églé, cette plume est de celles
Qu’à vos pieds déposa l’Amour,
Quand ce Dieu, fixé sans retour,
Vous laissa lui couper les ailes.
Necker, _Nouveaux Mélanges_ 1. 30.
[195] ‘Institutress’ is Mrs. Miller’s unpretending designation of
herself. The quotation is from the preface to a volume entitled,
_Poetical Amusements at a Villa near Bath_, Bath 1775.
[196] Walpole’s _Letters_ 9. 134; 15 January 1775.
[197] See the preface to the volume for 1777.
[198] 1776; 1777; 1781.
[199] In 1781; a fifth volume had been announced for 1782.
[200] London 1777.
[201] Bath 1776.
[202] Bath 1776.
[203] She calls herself a bluestocking in 1780. _Diary_ 1. 403.
[204] _Memoirs of Dr. Burney_ 2. 262.
[205] See below, p. 140.
[206] See above, p. 105.
[207] Cf. the whole passage. Home’s _Lady Louisa Stuart_, pp. 159-60.
[208] An Italian equivalent for bluestocking is unknown to Tomaseo
and Bellini. In a pamphlet, entitled _Pursuits of Literature_,
printed in 1797, T. J. Mathias gives the term _calza azzurra_ as
though from Ariosto, quoting,
Fortunata la Calza azzurra e d’ oro
Si grate a Febo e al santo Aonio coro.
The first line quoted, however, is not by Ariosto at all, but by
Mathias himself. Cf. _Orlando Furioso_, ed. Papini, canto 46, st. 3.
[209] 1. 379 ff.
[210] Larousse, _Grande Encyclopédie_.
[211] Mills’s explanation of the word was adopted (without
acknowledgment) by Dr. Brewer in his _Dictionary of Phrase and
Fable_, and has therefore had considerable currency. It has been
recently repeated, notably in the _Quarterly Review_ for January
1903, in an article entitled ‘The Queen of the Bluestockings,’ by an
anonymous writer, and in Mrs. Gaussen’s _A Later Pepys_.
[212] _King Henry IV, Part I_, Act 2, scene iv.
[213] Home’s _Lady Louisa Stuart_, p. 156; cf. the _Diary of Madame
D’Arblay_ 4. 65.
[214] The following quotation from Mrs. Montagu’s _Letters_ (4.
117) has been cited (notably in the _New English Dictionary_ and
in Hill’s edition of Boswell’s _Life of Johnson_) as showing that
the term _bluestocking_ was in use as early as March 8, 1757, on
which day Mrs. Montagu writes: ‘I assure you our philosopher (Mr.
Stillingfleet) is so much a man of pleasure, he has left off his
old friends and his blue stockings, and is at operas and other gay
assemblies every night.’ Personally I do not think that this can
be regarded as an occurrence of the word _bluestocking_ at all. I
incline to think that Mrs. Montagu means no more than she literally
says, that Mr. Stillingfleet has left off the homely garb for which
he was noted. But, in any case, it is interesting as a reference to
the fame of his stockings, and tends to support Boswell’s explanation
of the term.
[215] _Life_ 4. 108.
[216] 1. 210 _n._; cf. a similar account by Pennington (who
remembered the salons) in his _Letters of Mrs. Carter to Mrs.
Montagu_.
[217] _Memoirs of Dr. Burney_ 2. 262-63. No explanation of the term
_bluestocking_ is given in the _Diary_.
[218] _Letters of Mrs. Carter to Mrs. Montagu_ 3. 202; 22
September 1783. The occurrence is referred to by Hannah More in
the ‘Advertisement’ prefixed to _Bas Bleu_ (1786). The story was
apparently reported to the blues by Lady Dartrey. See Pepys’s letter
to Hannah More, in _A Later Pepys_ 2. 235; 13 August 1783.
[219] Gaussen’s _A Later Pepys_ 1. 42.
[220] Those who care to study the playful development of the word may
consult the sprightly article, ‘Bas bleu,’ in the earlier edition of
Larousse’s _Dictionary_.
[221] _Letters_ 13. 217; 13 November 1784.
[222] _Diary of Madame D’Arblay_ 5. 50; 27 December 1791.
[223] Much earlier certainly than the date (1790) given in the
_New English Dictionary_, ‘In the evening we had a very strong
reinforcement of blues,’ wrote Hannah More in March 1783 (Roberts’
_Memoirs of More_ 1. 275); ‘There was everything delectable in the
blue way,’ writes the same author in 1784 in reference to Mrs. Ord’s
_conversazione_ (_Ib._ 1. 317).
[224] _Diary of Madame D’Arblay_ 2. 236; 9 December 1783.
[225] _Ib._ 4. 66; 1 August 1788.
[226] Cf. Fanny Burney, ‘He had no small reverence for us
blue-stockings.’ _Diary_ 1. 403; June 1780.
[227] _A Series of Letters_ 4. 218.
[228]
Montaigu, tes dons précieux
M’assurent de ta bienveillance,
Les miens, peu dignes de tes yeux,
Te prouvent mon obéissance.
Ainsi partout on voit les Dieux
Recevoir des chants ennuyeux
Pour les biens que leur main dispense.
Tes bienfaits me sont plus flatteurs
Que les trésors de la fortune,
Toujours aveugle en ses faveurs,
Elle prodigue les honneurs
À ceux dont la voix l’importune;
Mais tes regards doux et perçants
Du vrai mérite ont la balance;
Je juge aussi par tes présents
Qu’ils out souvent de l’indulgence.
Du Bocage, _Lettres sur l’Angleterre_,
p. 50; 25 May 1750.
[229] Gibbon’s _Miscellaneous Works_ 2. 179; 30 September 1776.
[230] _Lettres à Walpole_ 3. 243, 256.
[231] _Ib._ 3. 383.
[232] Forbes’s _Life of Beattie_ 1. 389; 3 September 1775.
[233] _Correspondence of Mrs. Delany_ 5. 165.
[234] _Diary of Madame D’Arblay_ 1. 460.
[235] _Letters_ 2. 149; 1 May 1780.
[236] _A Later Pepys_ 1. 404.
[237] _Correspondence of Mrs. Delany_ 4. 204-205.
[238] Home’s _Lady Louisa Stuart_, p. 158.
[239] The letter is undated, but, as it refers to the death of Lord
Bath, it must be later than 1764. Burke is strangely criticised
for ‘an intemperate vivacity of genius’; the common charge is made
against Garrick that he is himself only on the stage, ‘and an actor
everywhere else.’ Johnson is not mentioned. The palm is given to Lord
Chatham among living wits. Lyttelton’s _Letters_ (1780), pp. 122 ff.
[240] _Letters_ 11. 366 and 368; 9 and 14 January 1781.
[241] Roberts, _Memoirs of More_ 1. 298.
[242] Carter, _Series of Letters_ 4. 141.
[243] _Letters on Several Subjects_ 2. 166.
[244] _Letters_ 14. 5.
[245] _Diary_ 1. 253.
[246] She was so called by Mrs. Delany as early as 1751.
(_Correspondence_ 3. 21), who adds, ‘The spirits of the air protect
her.’
[247] _Letters to Mrs. Montagu_ 1. 242.
[248] _Ib._ 1. 330.
[249] _Ib._ 1. 311.
[250] Mrs. Carter writes her (_Series of Letters_ 4. 27), ‘I
prevented you from carrying me to every place you had ever heard of
in England or Wales.’
[251] _Letters to Mrs. Montagu_ 1. 335, 2. 355; cf. 2. 109.
[252] _Series of Letters_ 4. 120.
[253] _Ib._ 4. 137.
[254] _Correspondence of Mrs. Delany_ 3. 40.
[255] _Ib._ 5. 523.
[256] Hannah More writes: ‘Tuesday I was at Mrs. Vesey’s assembly
which was too full to be very pleasant. She dearly loves company; and
as she is connected with almost everything that is great in the good
sense of the word, she is always sure to have too much.’ Roberts’s
_Memoirs_ 1. 278; 29 March 1783.
[257] _Diary of Madame D’Arblay_ 2. 214; 19 June 1783.
[258] _Letters_ 11. 170.
[259] ‘Madam, I have read his book, and I have nothing to say to
him.’ _Series of Letters_ 3. 228 _note_; _Johnsonian Miscellanies_ 2.
12 _note_.
[260] _Series of Letters_ 3. 255; 21 May 1765.
[261] ‘She seemed rather desirous to assemble persons of celebrity
and talents under her roof or at her table than assumed or pretended
to form one of the number herself.’ Wraxall’s _Historical Memoirs_ 1.
103. ‘Without attempting to shine herself she had the happy secret
of bringing forward talents of every kind, and of diffusing over
the society the gentleness of her own character.’ Forbes’s _Life of
Beattie_ 1. 209 _n._
[262] _Letters of Mrs. Carter to Mrs. Montagu_ 1. 271 and _A Series
of Letters_ 3. 292.
[263] _Diary of Madame D’Arblay_ 2. 234.
[264] Her letters, with the exception of a lively but rather
incoherent note to Hannah More, have not been published. Lord
Lyttelton wrote to Garrick: ‘You will be charmed (as I am) with
the lively colouring and fine touches in the epistolary style of
our sylph, joined to the most perfect ease. Mrs. Montagu’s letters
are superior to her in nothing but force and compass of thought.’
Garrick, _Correspondence_ 1. 440; 12 October 1771.
[265] _Series of Letters_ 4. 6.
[266] _Ib._ 4. 83.
[267] _Ib._ 4. 354.
[268] _Letters to Mrs. Montagu_ 1. 335.
[269] _Diary_ 1. 253-54.
[270] _Letters_ 9. 152; 24 January 1775: ‘The Cophthi were an
Egyptian race, of whom nobody knows anything but the learned; and
thence I gave Mrs. Montagu’s academies the name of Coptic.’
[271] Johnson, Walpole, Goldsmith, Burke, Reynolds, Boswell, Garrick,
Sterne, General Potemkin, General Paoli, General Oglethorpe, half
a dozen bishops, and all the blues were at various times among her
guests. Of one of her entertainments, Hannah More wrote: ‘She had
collected her party from the Baltic to the Po, for there was a
Russian nobleman, an Italian virtuoso, and General Paoli.’ Roberts’s
_Memoirs of More_ 1. 212.
[272] _Series of Letters_ 3. 323.
[273] _Ib._ 3. 255.
[274] Her prosaic sister-in-law, whom friends called ‘Body,’ as they
called Vesey ‘Mind.’
[275] _Letters to Mrs. Montagu_ 1. 358.
[276] See Melville’s _Life and Letters of Sterne_ 2. 67 ff.
[277] _Life of Mrs. Delany_ 5. 307. Gibbon wrote of Raynal (_Letters_
2. 75; 30 September 1783): ‘His conversation which might be very
agreeable, is intolerably loud, peremptory, and insolent; and you
could imagine that he alone was the Monarch and legislator of the
World.’ Walpole, who met him at Baron d’Holbach’s, was so bored by
his questions that he pretended to be deaf. ‘After dinner he found I
was not, and never forgave me.’ Three years later, however, he dined
with Walpole at Strawberry Hill: ‘The Abbé Raynal not only looked at
nothing himself, but kept talking to the Ambassador the whole time,
and would not let him see anything neither. There never was such an
impertinent and tiresome old gossip. He said to one of the Frenchmen,
we ought to come abroad to make us love our own country. This was
before Mr. Churchill, who replied very properly, “Yes we had some
Esquimaux here lately, and they liked nothing because they could get
no train-oil for breakfast.”’ _Letters_ 9. 92; 12 November 1774, and
10. 62; 15 June 1777.
[278] _Posthumous Works_ 1. 174. ‘In the hour and half I was in his
company, he uttered as much as would have made him an agreeable
companion for a week, had he allotted time for answers.’
[279] _Series of Letters_ 4. 113; cf. 3. 228 and 4. 108. It would
appear that Mrs. Montagu feared that Mrs. Vesey was about to adopt
certain of Rousseau’s ‘absurdities.’ Cf. _Letters of Mrs. Carter to
Mrs. Montagu_ 3. 241; 24 June 1785.
[280] Hartley writes to W. W. Pepys (20 August 1800), ‘Mrs. Vesey’s
... was indeed the most agreeable house for conversation.’ Gaussen’s
_A Later Pepys_ 2. 154.
[281] Frances Glanville Boscawen (1719?-1805) was the wife of the
Hon. Edward Boscawen, Admiral (d. 1761), and mother of Viscount
Falmouth and the Duchess of Beaufort.
[282] 3. 331.
[283] Roberts’s _Memoirs of More_ 1. 182; 93.
[284] She did, however, give some assistance to Johnson in the _Lives
of the Poets_. ‘I have claims,’ she writes to Miss More (Roberts’s
_Memoirs of More_ 1. 191), ‘upon Dr. Johnson, but as he never knows
me when he meets me, they are all stifled in the cradle; for he must
know who I am before he can remember that I got him Mr. Spence’s
manuscripts.’ These papers were of great use to Johnson, as he
himself remarks (_Lives_ 1. xxvii, ed. Hill). Boswell regrets (_Life_
4. 63) that Johnson did not make a more handsome acknowledgment; but
Boswell seems to have been unaware of Mrs. Boscawen’s connection with
the whole transaction. Mrs. Boscawen cannot be serious in what she
writes of Johnson’s ignorance of her. A conversation with Johnson, in
which she took part, is described in the _Life_ (4. 98).
[285] Roberts’s _Memoirs of More_ 1. 129.
[286] _Ib._ 1. 179.
[287] _Ib._ 1. 192.
[288] Roberts’s _Memoirs of More_ 1. 190.
[289] Mrs. Boscawen was the subject of more than one literary tribute
before this. Young’s dreary ode, _Resignation_, was addressed to her,
on the death of Admiral Boscawen; Mrs. Montagu had taken the widow to
the ancient poet for consolation. In this poem she is bidden to ‘go
forth a moral Amazon, armed with undaunted thought.’ Perhaps the last
of these poetical tributes was a sonnet (from which a selection is
here printed for the first time), by Pye when poet laureate. Writing
of her villa at Richmond, once the home of Thomson, the poet Pye says:
Still Fancy’s Train your verdant Paths shall trace,
Tho’ closed her fav’rite Votary’s dulcet lay;
Each wonted Haunt their footsteps still shall grace,
Still Genius thro’ your green Retreats shall stray;
For, from the Scene BOSCAWEN loves to grace,
Th’ Attendant Muse shall ne’er be long away.
Brit. Mus. Add. MS. 27578.
[290] Mrs. Boscawen chose Opie to paint the portrait, though the
subject, she writes (Roberts’s _Memoirs of More_ 2. 35), ‘is worthy
of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s superior skill; but I can command Opie, and
make him alter, or even refaire if we do not like it.’ In her reply,
Miss More stated that nothing could overcome her natural repugnance
to having her portrait taken, but Mrs. Boscawen’s wishes which are
to her ‘such indisputable commands.’ The portrait, which was hung in
Mrs. Boscawen’s dining-room, became so popular that both Walpole and
Mrs. Walsingham wished copies of it.
[291] Anne Dillingham Ord (d. 1808) was the widow of William Ord (d.
1766), who had been High Sheriff of Northumberland in 1747. She is
often spoken of as ‘Mrs. Ord of Queen Anne Street.’
[292] Notably Doran, _Lady of the Last Century_, p. 264, and the _New
English Dictionary_, under ‘Bluestocking.’
[293] _Letters_ 2. 146; cf. 149.
[294] Hannah More and Fanny Burney, _e.g._ Rev. Montagu Pennington
(Carter’s _Letters to Montagu_ 3. 199 _n._) speaks of her as one
‘of whom too much good can hardly be said, and of whom the editor
believes it would be impossible to say any ill.’
[295] _Early Diary of Frances Burney_ 2. 138.
[296] See p. 139.
[297] Not invariably, however, for Hannah More once found such a
crowd that she thought herself well off to be ‘wedged in with Mr.
Smelt, Langton, Ramsay, and Johnson.’ Roberts’s _Memoirs_ 1. 174;
1780.
[298] _Ib._ 1. 274; 7 March 1783.
[299] _Ib._ 1. 317; 1784.
[300] _Diary of Madame D’Arblay_ 2. 378.
[301] She once mustered the whole tribe of blues that Fanny might
show her old friends that a sojourn at Court had not made her forget
them. On this occasion the gathering was exceptionally brilliant, and
included Mrs. Montagu, Mrs. Carter, Mrs. Boscawen, Mrs. Chapone, Mrs.
Garrick, Reynolds, Langton, and Horace Walpole. At this assembly Miss
Burney says that she shall be ‘proud to show everybody the just first
place she [Mrs. Ord] holds with me, among all that set.’ _Diary of
Madame D’Arblay_ 3. 357 (3 January 1788).
[302] _Diary of Madame D’Arblay_ 5. 33; 1791.
[303] _Ib._ 5. 68.
[304] _Correspondence of Mrs. Delany_ 5. 12 _n._
[305] Roberts’s _Memoirs of More_ 1. 285 and 1. 92.
[306] _Correspondence of Mrs. Delany_ 4. 283; 1770.
[307] _Ib._ 4. 489; 30 December 1772.
[308] _Ib._ 5. 374.
[309] _Diary of Madame D’Arblay_ 2. 364.
[310] A newspaper announced that ‘Miss Burney, the sprightly writer
of the elegant novel _Evelina_, is now domesticated with Mrs. Thrale,
in the same manner that Miss More is with Mrs. Garrick, and Mrs.
Carter with Mrs. Montagu.’ _Diary of Madame D’Arblay_ 1. 492; May
1781.
[311] Roberts’s _Memoirs of More_ 2. 100.
[312] The phrase is from _Bas Bleu_.
[313] See Lounsbury’s _Shakespeare and Voltaire_, New York, 1902.
[314] See Walpole’s _Letters_ 11. 67.
[315] See Lounsbury, _op. cit._
[316] _Life_ 2. 88. As late as 1787, she was thus described in the
Epilogue to Thomas Holcroft’s play, _Seduction_:
Say, shall not we, with conscious pride proclaim
A female critic raised—ev’n Shakespear’s Fame!
Towards the end of the century the fame of the book declined. Mrs.
Montagu was anonymously attacked by Mathias in his _Pursuits of
Literature_ (1794). In speaking of commentators on Shakespeare he
says (p. 37):
Nor can I pass LYCISCA MONTAGU,
Her yelp though feeble, and her sandals _blue_.
[317] _Mrs. Montagu and her Friends_, chapter 2.
[318] _Essay_, p. 19.
[319] _Ib._ p. 18.
[320] _Ib._ p. 150.
[321] _Essay_, p. 161.
[322] _Ib._ p. 153.
[323] _Ib._ p. 156.
[324] _Letters to Mrs. Montagu_ 3. 251 and 224.
[325] Higginson.
[326] ‘The Temple Classics’ and ‘Everyman’s Library.’
[327] _Life_ 1. 123.
[328] _Johnsonian Miscellanies_ 2. 11.
[329] Numbers 44 and 100. They were reprinted in the editions of her
collected poems.
[330] Young praised her in his poem _Resignation_ (Part 2). Like Eve,
Mrs. Carter and Mrs. Montagu have ‘caused a fall—A fall of fame in
man.’ He institutes a comparison with Addison. But Lord Lyttelton
is even bolder: Carter’s singing reminds him at times of the angels
singing over Bethlehem and at times of Sappho,
‘Greece shall no more
Of Lesbian Sappho boast.... For the sacred head
Of Britain’s poetess the Virtues twine
A nobler wreath.’
—_On reading Miss Carter’s Poems in Manuscript._ Mr. Smelt told
Fanny Burney that he considered Mrs. Carter’s _Ode_ the best in the
language. _Diary_ 4. 222.
[331] _Poems on Several Subjects_, 3d edition, 1776, p. 94, ‘To Mrs.
Vesey.’
[332] _Letters to Mrs. Montagu_ 3. 224.
[333] _Ib._ 3. 180.
[334] _Ib._ 2. 292.
[335] _Series of Letters_ 3. 288.
[336] _Letters to Mrs. Montagu_ 1. 313.
[337] _Ib._ 3. 276.
[338] _Ib._ 3. 110.
[339] _Series of Letters_ 4. 112.
[340] Dedication to the _Letters_.
[341] _Correspondence of Mrs. Delany_ 5. 93; 14 January 1775.
[342] _Ib._ 5. 55, 309.
[343] _Posthumous Works of Mrs. Chapone_ 1. 163.
[344] Her letters to Pepys, printed by Mrs. Gaussen, in _A Later
Pepys_, are not so interesting. There is a charming note to Fanny
Burney in the _Diary_ 5. 50.
[345] Roberts’s _Memoirs of Hannah More_ 1. 47.
[346] _Ib._ 1. 60.
[347] Roberts’s _Memoirs of More_ 1. 63.
[348] _Ib._ 1. 64.
[349] See above, pp. 147 ff.; 175.
[350] Notably the _Inflexible Captive_, based on the story of Regulus.
[351] Act III.
[352] Roberts’s _Memoirs of More_ 1. 140.
[353] _Ib._ See above, p. 155.
[354] Roberts 1. 130.
[355] _Letters_ 10. 166-67; 11 December 1777.
[356] _Diary of Madame D’Arblay_ 1. 148 (1778).
[357] The ‘sacred’ dramas, _Moses in the Bulrushes_, _David and
Goliath_, _Belshazzar_, and _Daniel_, escaped the contamination of
the stage.
[358] Roberts 2. 153.
[359] _Ib._ 1. 191.
[360] Roberts 2. 111.
[361] _Ib._ 2. 415.
[362] Roberts’s _Memoirs of More_ 1. 62.
[363] See ‘_Advice to the Herald_.’
[364] Forbes’s _Life of Beattie_ 1. 195; letter to Gregory, 13 March
1771.
[365] _Ib._
[366] M. Forbes’s _Beattie and his Friends_, p. 66.
[367] _Ib._ p. 68.
[368] Forbes’s _Life of Beattie_ 1. 255; May 1773.
[369] _Ib._ 1. 260. Extract from Beattie’s Diary; 21 May 1773.
[370] _Correspondence of Mrs. Delany_ 4. 516; 13 June 1773.
[371] M. Forbes, _op. cit._ 78. In this matter Johnson’s view
happened to coincide with hers (_ib._ p. 90).
[372] _Ib._ p. 75.
[373] _Ib._ pp. 95-6.
[374] _Essays_, Edinburgh 1776.
[375] M. Forbes, p. 120.
[376] Beattie, always nervous about his Scotticisms, was flutteringly
pleased, and some time later repaid her with this astounding piece of
flattery: ‘My models of English are Addison and those who write like
Addison, particularly yourself, Madam, and Lord Lyttelton. We may be
allowed to imitate what we cannot hope to equal.’ Forbes’s _Life_ 2.
115; 30 January 1783.
[377] Forbes’s _Life_ 2. 132 and M. Forbes, _op. cit._ p. 110.
[378] Arbuthnot. Forbes’s _Life_ 1. 203 and _n._
[379] He wrote that he had ‘been making some progress in a little
work of which you saw a sketch at Sandelford, and which you did me
the honour to read and approve of. It was your approbation and that
of the Bishop of Chester and Sir William Forbes that determined me to
revise, correct, and enlarge it, with a view to publication.’ Forbes
2. 164.
[380] See Forbes’s _Beattie_ 2. 41.
[381] _Literary Anecdotes of E. H. Barker_, London 1852.
[382] _Inquiry into some Passages in Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the
Poets, particularly his Observations on Lyric Poetry and the Odes of
Gray._ London 1783.
[383] _Letters_ 13. 5.
[384] Cowper’s _Letters_, edited by Thomas Wright, 3. 267.
[385] Cowper’s _Letters_, edited by Thomas Wright, 3. 306; 21 August
1788; cf. 3. 266; 267; 277.
[386] In March he wrote to Mrs. Throckmorton, ‘The two first books
of my _Iliad_ have been submitted to the inspection and scrutiny of
a great critic of your sex, at the instance of my cousin, as you may
suppose. The lady is mistress of more tongues than a few (it is to be
hoped she is single) and particularly she is mistress of the Greek.’
_Letters_ 3. 444; 21 March 1790. The book was published in July 1791.
[387] _Letters_ 3. 439; 8 March 1790.
[388] See the accompanying illustration.
[389] Barry’s _Series of Engravings in the ... Society of Arts_,
London 1808.
[390] Walpole’s _Letters_ 4. 319; 8 November 1759.
[391] _Ib._ 11. 410; 3 March 1781.
[392] In his edition of the _Diary of Madame D’Arblay_.
[393] See Melville’s _Life of Sterne_ 1. 289 ff. and Climenson’s
_Letters of Mrs. Montagu_ 2. 270 ff.
[394] _Correspondence of David Garrick_ 2. 189; 3 November 1776.
[395] _Diary_ 1. 126.
[396] _Correspondence of David Garrick_ 1. 388 ff.
[397] _A Later Pepys_ 2. 283.
[398] _Posthumous Works of Mrs. Chapone_ 1. 151.
[399] Roberts’s _Memoirs of More_ 1. 363; 1784.
[400] _Correspondence of Mrs. Delany_ 6. 209; 22 January 1784.
[401] _Letters_ 13. 214; 13 November 1784.
[402] _Letters_ 13. 432; 22 December 1786.
[403] Wraxall’s _Historical Memoirs_ 1. 115.
[404] Roberts’s _Memoirs of More_ 2. 225; April 1790.
[405] Gibbon’s _Miscellaneous Works_ 1. 163; journal for May 1763.
[406] _Private Letters of Gibbon_ 1. 31; 25 March 1763.
[407] See above, p. 123. As early as 1769, Mrs. Carter had long
regretted that he had left ‘the tranquil pleasures of select society
for the turbulent schemes of ambition.’ _Letters to Mrs. Montagu_ 2.
23.
[408] Miss Burney was well aware of the difference here noted. In
talking with Wyndham of Johnson’s life at Streatham, she gave ‘a
little history of his way of life there,—his good humour, his sport,
his kindness, his sociability, and all the many excellent qualities
that, in the world at large, were by so many means obscured.’ _Diary_
3. 477.
[409] ‘Cette littérature devait briller des le dix-septième siècle,
puisque dès lors se forme et se propage en France l’esprit de
société.... Avant cet âge, en France du moins, les salons n’existent
pas.’ P. de Julleville’s _Histoire de la Littérature Française_ 5.
600.
[410] _Letters_, ed. Bradshaw, 1. 55.
[411] _Memoirs of Sir James Mackintosh_ 2. 172.
[412] _Diary of Madame D’Arblay_ 2. 266.
[413] Roberts’s _Memoirs of More_ 2. 26; cf. Walpole’s _Letters_ 14.
65 _et passim_.
[414] _Letters_ 7. 9-10.
[415] _Ib._ 5. 87.
[416] _Ib._ 6. 356.
[417] Madame Necker asserted that he was ‘as like Madame de Sévigné
as two peas.’ _Letters_ 10. 80. Horace Mann had noticed the
similarity many years before. _Ib._ 2. 410.
[418] _Letters_ 7. 137; 13 October 1767.
[419] Boswell’s _Life_ 4. 102.
[420] _Letters_ 8. 427; 23 February 1774.
[421] These letters he prepared for the press after they had been
returned to him by Mann. In August 1784 he wrote: ‘I have been
counting how many letters I have written to you since I landed in
England in 1741: they amount—astonishing!—to above eight hundred; and
we have not met in three-and-forty years! A correspondence of near
half a century is, I suppose, not to be paralleled in the annals of
the post office!’ _Letters_ 13. 182.
[422] In sending to Mason the letters which Gray had written to him,
Walpole wrote: ‘I need not say that there are several things you will
find it necessary to omit.... It is much better to give them [the
public] nothing, than what they do not comprehend and which they
consequently misunderstand, because they will think they comprehend,
and which, therefore, must mistake. I do not know whether it is not
best that good writings should appear very late, for they who by
being nearest in time are nearest to understanding them, are also
nearest to misapprehending.’ _Letters_ 8. 202; 19 September 1772.
[423] _Letters_ 8. 376; 8 December 1773.
[424] _Letters_ 9. 308; 21 December 1775.
[425] Roberts’s _Memoirs of More_ 1. 51; cf. 1. 235.
[426] _Lettres à Walpole_ 1. 591; 4 July 1769.
[427] _Letters_, ed. Thomas, 2. 257; 20 July 1754.
[428] ‘J’aurais bien du plaisir de pouvoir lire vos lettres avec
quelqu’un qui en sentirait le mérite et avec qui j’en pourrais rire.’
_Lettres à Walpole_ 1. 9; 21 April 1766.
[429] _Letters_ 7. 195; 15 June 1768.
[430] Roberts’s _Memoirs of More_ 1. 253; 1782.
[431] 4. 288.
[432] _Diary_ 3. 181.
[433] _Diary_ 4. 471 ff.; 4 June 1791.
[434] _Diary_, 19 November 1783.
[435] _Life_ 3. 155.
[436] Forbes’s _Life of Beattie_ 2. 175; 15 November 1785.
[437] _Letters_ 8. 443; 17 April 1774.
[438] May 1786.
[439] _Bozzy and Piozzi_, or the British Biographers, A Town Eclogue,
1786.
[440] This caricature is too unseemly to admit of reproduction here.
[441] _Letters_ 13. 379; 30 April 1786.
[442] _Remarks on the Journal of a Tour ..._ in a Letter to James
Boswell, Esq. By ‘Verax.’ 1785.
[443] Cf. Walpole’s remarks about the _Life_, _Letters_ 14. 438; 26
May 1791.
[444] _Diary_ 3. 219; 26 February 1787.
[445] _Life of Beattie_ 2. 182; 9 January 1786.
[446] Roberts’s _Memoirs of More_ 1. 403; 1785.
[447] Forbes’s _Life of Beattie_ 2. 178.
[448] It has been reserved for Mr. Percy Fitzgerald to revive the old
charges against Boswell and to discover new ones, which he has set
forth with a virulence that would be inexcusable in any one who had
not a preposterous theory to defend.
[449] _A Later Pepys_ 2. 260; 24 October 1785.
[450] _Journal_, p. 307.
[451] _Ib._ p. 383.
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and index, forms our first exhaustive study of English dramatic
literature for the years between 1642 and 1780. The plan of the work
is historical, with a grouping of plays and authors chiefly according
to the types of drama successively in vogue. A brief sketch of the
relations existing between Elizabethan and Restoration drama reveals
at the outset Professor Nettleton’s interest in the English elements
of our drama as distinct from various foreign influences.
“The reader will find in Professor Nettleton a safe guide and a sound
critic.”—_London Spectator._
“Good working text by an authority. Invaluable to students, as it
covers a period which has been so far only partly treated.”—_A. L. A.
Booklist._
“A practical handbook for those who wish to gain by the least
possible expenditure of time and attention a clear idea of English
drama.”—_Providence Journal._
“The book is excellent.”—_The Dial._
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York
The Life and Times of Laurence Sterne
BY WILBUR L. CROSS
_Illustrated, cloth, 8vo, $2.50_
“Something more than a mere record of Laurence Sterne is embodied
within the covers of Professor Cross’s volume. It forms a significant
series of pictures of its time, and it sets before us the character
of many famous men of a famous period in English literature.”—_Boston
Transcript._
“Indispensable to all thorough students of English
literature.”—_Boston Globe._
“An admirable biography of the distinguished English novelist,
humorist, and clergyman, ... replete with information gleaned from
widely different sources and written in a style that holds the
reader’s interest throughout.”—_Baltimore Sun._
“One feels that it will remain standard and indispensable. It has
already supplanted all previous Lives of Sterne, and all future
estimates must reckon with this book. It was years a-making, and it
will take many years to make it obsolete.”—_The Bookman._
“An excellent biography, accurate in content, unusually full in
detail, well constructed, clear and pleasing in style.”—_Chicago
Record-Herald._
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York
A History of the Eighteenth Century Literature (1660-1780)
BY EDMUND GOSSE, M.A.
Clark Lecturer in English Literature at Trinity College, Cambridge.
_Cloth, 12mo. $1.00_
_Contents_:—Poetry after the Restoration; Drama after the
Restoration; Prose after the Restoration; Pope; Swift and the Deists;
Defoe and the Essayists; The Dawn of Naturalism in Poetry; The
Novelists; Johnson and the Philosophers; The Poets of the Decadence;
The Prose of the Decadence; Conclusion. Bibliography, Index.
OSWALD CRAWFORD, in London Academy:
“Mr. Gosse’s book is one for the student because of its fulness, its
trustworthiness, and its thorough soundness of criticism.”
The Age of Johnson (1744-1798)
BY T. SECCOMBE
_Cloth, 16mo, $1.00_
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been
corrected after careful comparison with other occurrences within
the text and consultation of external sources.
Some hyphens in words have been silently removed, some added,
when a predominant preference was found in the original book.
Except for those changes noted below, all misspellings in the text,
and inconsistent or archaic usage, have been retained.
Pg 14: ‘A philospher like’ replaced by ‘A philosopher like’.
Pg 92: ‘elegy, nor burlesque’ replaced by ‘elegy, not burlesque’.
Pg 153: ‘the inmediate object’ replaced by ‘the immediate object’.
Pg 169: ‘Genius of Shakespear’ replaced by ‘Genius of Shakespeare’.
Pg 173: ‘of geniune critical’ replaced by ‘of genuine critical’.
Pg 209: ‘and more agreable’ replaced by ‘and more agreeable’.
Pg 210: ‘agreable societies’ replaced by ‘agreeable societies’.
Pg 217: ‘then to get’ replaced by ‘than to get’.
Pg 222: ‘upon a widow seat’ replaced by ‘upon a window seat’.
Pg 264: ‘Schwellenburg, who’ replaced by ‘Schwellenberg, who’.
Pg 288: ‘Mrs. Catharine’ replaced by ‘Mrs. Catherine’.
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The salon and English letters : Chapters on the interrelations of literature and society in the age of Johnson" ***
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