TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Footnote anchors are denoted by [number], and the footnotes have been placed at the [end of the book].

Some minor changes to the text are noted at the [end of the book.] These are indicated by a dashed blue underline.

THE SALON AND ENGLISH LETTERS

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS
ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited
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MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
TORONTO

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

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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]

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,