TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
A superscript is denoted by ^x or ^{xx}, for example XVIII^e.
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.
THE SALON AND ENGLISH LETTERS
[Illustration: (colophon)]
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS
ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO
MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO
[Illustration: THE CONVERSAZIONE
From Samuel Hoole’s _Modern Manners_ (1782)]
THE SALON
AND ENGLISH LETTERS
CHAPTERS ON THE INTERRELATIONS
OF LITERATURE AND SOCIETY
IN THE AGE OF JOHNSON
BY
CHAUNCEY BREWSTER TINKER
PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
IN YALE UNIVERSITY
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1915
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1915,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published April, 1915.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
TO
C. E. A.
SAPIENTIS PATRIS FILIO
SAPIENTIORI
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PART I. THE FRENCH BACKGROUND
CHAPTER I
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 3
CHAPTER II
ORIGIN AND CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SALON 16
CHAPTER III
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY SALON 30
CHAPTER IV
ENGLISH AUTHORS IN PARISIAN SALONS 42
PART II. THE ENGLISH SALON
CHAPTER V
THE EARLIER ENGLISH SALON 83
CHAPTER VI
CONVERSATION PARTIES AND LITERARY ASSEMBLIES 102
CHAPTER VII
THE BLUESTOCKING CLUB 123
CHAPTER VIII
THE LONDON SALON 134
CHAPTER IX
BLUESTOCKINGS AS AUTHORS 166
CHAPTER X
MRS. MONTAGU AS A PATRON OF THE ARTS 189
CHAPTER XI
RESULTS 209
PART III. THE SOCIAL SPIRIT IN ENGLISH LETTERS
CHAPTER XII
JOHNSON AND THE ART OF CONVERSATION 217
CHAPTER XIII
WALPOLE AND THE ART OF FAMILIAR CORRESPONDENCE 236
CHAPTER XIV
FANNY BURNEY AND THE ART OF THE DIARIST 254
CHAPTER XV
BOSWELL AND THE ART OF INTIMATE BIOGRAPHY 268
INDEX 285
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
The Conversazione _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
The Levee 102
Hannah More 157
Johnson pointing out Mrs. Montagu as a Patron of the Arts 199
Samuel Johnson 217
Boswell the Journalist 268
Boswell Haunted by the Ghost of Johnson 277
PART I
THE FRENCH BACKGROUND
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
It is one of the venerable commonplaces of criticism that ‘manners,’
as distinct from romance and the idealistic interpretation of
life, make the bulk of eighteenth century literature. Comment has
often begun and more often ended with this platitude. But that
large body of work vaguely termed ‘literature of manners’ can no
more be dismissed with a truism than can the life that it depicts,
but demands a critical method as varied as the matter which is
treated. In so far as this prevailing interest of the century
manifested itself in _belles lettres_, in novel, drama, satire, and
descriptive verse, it offers no unusual problem to the literary
historian; but side by side with such types we have forms no less
characteristic of the age, but much less susceptible of adequate
criticism: intimate biography, autobiography, memoirs, diaries,
and familiar correspondence. These must of necessity be rather
summarily passed over by the literary historian as not exclusively
belletristic in appeal. And below these, in turn, there are certain
expressions of the social spirit so anomalous that they can at most
detain the critic but a moment, and must often be dismissed with
no consideration at all. Among these, intangible and evanescent
by nature, yet of the first importance in bringing certain kinds
of literature to birth, are conversation, the salon, the authors’
club, and in general those forms of social activity which exist to
stimulate the production or diffuse the appreciation of literature.
These, which are in themselves no more literature than are painting
and politics, come at times so close to it that dividing lines are
blurred. A mere record of conversation, such as gives the pages of
Boswell’s _Johnson_ or Fanny Burney’s _Diary_ their unique value,
brings us to a borderland between society and letters where a
distinction between them is merely formal. What is a critic to do
with works which hardly sue for recognition as literature (though
the world has so acclaimed them), but avowedly exist to record the
delights of social intercourse? To treat them as ‘mere literature,’
neglecting the social life in which they sprang up and to which they
are a tribute, is, to say the least, inadequate.
It is with this borderland, this territory where literature and
society meet in mutual respect, and presumably to their mutual
advantage, that I propose to deal in this volume. I shall trace as
well as I can the attempt made in England between 1760 and 1790 to
emulate the literary world of Paris by bringing men of letters and
men of the world into closer relations, and by making the things of
the mind an avocation of the drawing-room; and thereafter I shall
endeavour to show the results of this movement as they appear in the
improved artistry of three or four types of writing.
So long as letters and society retained this intimate relation and
men and manners were deemed the all-sufficient study of poets, it
was natural that authors should gather in the metropolis. The city
was to them ‘the true scene for a man of letters’; ‘the fountain
of intelligence and pleasure,’ the place for ‘splendid society,’
and the place where ‘a man stored his mind better than anywhere
else.’[1] When the old ideal of letters was displaced by a wider
and perhaps nobler, the supremacy of the metropolis as a literary
centre fell with it; but in the Age of Johnson London was still the
land of promise, at once a workshop and a club, a discipline and
an opportunity. ‘A great city is, to be sure,’ said Johnson, ‘the
school for studying life.’ Johnson, Goldsmith, Burke, Fielding,
Smollett, Sterne, Sheridan, Beattie, Chatterton, Crabbe, Boswell, and
many another went up thither, as their predecessors for generations
had done, to seek their literary fortune or to enjoy their
new-established fame.
The authors’ clubs, hardly less popular than in the days of Anne,
indicate an even closer centralization. A theory of literature
squarely based on reason and the tradition of the classics produced
a solidarity of sentiment among men of letters which was of great
use in making their aims intelligible to society at large. Books
were not meant to be caviare to the general. Poets did not strive to
be nebulous. The ever growing democracy of readers honoured what it
felt that it understood. King, Church, women of society, women of no
society, painters, actors, and universities joined in paying respect
to a literature that had not yet shattered into the confusion of
individualism. The world of letters was, in a word, still a kingdom.
As in Paris, an alliance could, accordingly, be effected. The salon
was the natural outgrowth of the intelligent interest of the reading
world; it exhibited the same community of sentiment in readers that
we have noticed in writers, and writers accordingly honoured it. In
London, as in Paris, it became possible to find the men of light and
leading gathered in a few places of favourite resort, in drawing-room
or club. ‘I will venture to say,’ remarked Johnson[2] to a group of
friends, ‘there is more learning and science within the circumference
of ten miles from where we now sit than in all the rest of the
Kingdom;’ and once, when the boasting fit was on him, he asserted
that the company sitting with him round the table was superior to any
that could be got together even in Paris.
It was no mean ideal of society that was held by groups such as
these. Mere repartee, a display of rhetorical agility, was not its
principal aim. The desire to be sound mingled with the desire to
be clever, and produced that wisdom which the eighteenth century
loved to call wit. Wit was aphoristically pretentious to truth. It
was of course important to talk in the _mondaine_ manner, but the
_mondaine_ ideal was to talk sense. There was a general willingness
to give and to receive information in the ordinary social relations
of life. Never to ‘diffuse information,’ to have ‘nothing conclusive’
in one’s talk, was to fail. Johnson once contended that Goldsmith was
not ‘a social man’: ‘he never exchanged _mind_ with you.’[3] Burke’s
conversation, on the other hand, delighted him because it was the
ebullition of a full mind.[4] ‘The man who talks to unburthen his
mind is the man to delight you,’ said he.[5] Cheerful familiarity
was not the social ideal: true sociability was a communion of minds.
Madame du Deffand summed up her criticism of a dinner at Madame
Necker’s in the words, ‘I learned nothing there.’[6]
It was to an ideal thus frankly educational that the salon and the
club responded. The passion for such society was like that which
many serious souls to-day feel for the society of a university. To
breathe the air of it was to grow in the grace of wisdom. In such
an idealization of the social life, we may find the explanation of
many so-called ‘deficiencies’ of the age, its indifference to Nature
(whatever that may mean), its preference for city life, its common
sense, its dread of the romantic and the imaginary, and of all that
seems to repudiate the intellectual life and its social expression.
Such was the delight in society felt by Hannah More and Fanny Burney
in their younger days. Such was Boswell’s delight. The greatness
of the latter, so ridiculously aspersed, reposes entirely upon his
realization of the importance of the social instinct. Boswell was
not merely a social ‘climber.’ He was a man who had the sense to
see a short-cut to education. To call him toad and tuft-hunter may
be an ingenious display of one’s vituperative gifts, but evinces a
surprising ignorance of the fact that a man may educate himself by
living contact with great minds.
It would be a simple explanation of all this respect for the salon
and its discussions to observe that England was now enjoying an
age of free speech. It is even simpler to point out that there
was much discussion because there was much to discuss. There were
problems confronting the public which were no less important than
novel. This is all true, but somewhat lacking in subtlety. The
peculiar adaptability of these problems to conversation was due to
the fact that they were, in general, still problems of a remote
and idealistic kind. They did not yet demand instant solution, for
better or for worse. Exception must of course be made of questions
purely political, but the rest of them—the theory of equality and the
republican form of government, the development of machinery, the
education of the masses, humanitarianism, the problem of the dormant,
self-satisfied, aristocratic Church, romanticism, and the whole
swarm of theories popularized by Rousseau—had been stated and widely
discussed, but they had not yet shaken society to its foundations.
They were still largely theoretical. Men’s thoughts were engaged, and
their tongues were busy, but their hearts were not yet failing them
for fear.
We may cite as a significant example the position of the lower
classes. There had been as yet no serious disturbance of what Boswell
loved to call ‘the grand scheme of subordination.’ Now Boswell was
no fool. He was, in truth, singularly broad-minded; yet in such a
matter as this his notions hardly rose above a benevolent feudalism.
Despite his interest in Rousseau, despite his sympathy with Corsica
and with America, he could record with bland approval Johnson’s
denunciation[7] of a young lady who had married with ‘her inferior in
rank,’ and the Great Moralist’s wish that such dereliction ‘should be
punished, so as to deter others from the same perversion.’ Democracy
could be little more than a theory to Johnson when he asserted[8]
that ‘if he were a gentleman of landed property he would turn out all
his tenants who did not vote for the candidate whom he supported,’
contending that ‘the law does not mean that the privilege of voting
should be independent of old family interest.’ Again, when he
explained to Mrs. Macaulay ‘the absurdity of the levelling doctrine’
by requesting her footman to sit down and dine with them,[9] he
conceived of himself as smashing a delusion with a single blow. Such
‘levelling’ notions being, for the moment, doctrinaire, might no
doubt be put down by a sally of wit. With the fall of the Bastille
they took on a different aspect.
Nor was the case widely different with writers less passionately
conservative than Johnson. Horace Walpole had a dim perception
that the trend of affairs was destructive of the old order, but he
never suspected that the theories discussed in the salons were to
have immediate practical results. His attitude is well shown by his
account of certain Parisian _savants_ who talked scepticism in the
presence of their lacqueys. ‘The conversation,’ he writes, ‘was much
more unrestrained, even on the Old Testament, than I would suffer
at my own table in England, if a single footman was present.’[10]
Walpole was certainly no ardent defender of the orthodox faith, but
sceptic as he was, he was not ready to meet all the issues involved
in the spread of the doctrine. Religion, it seems, will still do very
well for menials.
Even Hume and Gibbon, the darlings of the Parisian salon, conceived
of the problems they themselves had helped to raise as largely
speculative. Gibbon, for example, plumes himself on having
vanquished the Abbé Mably in a discussion of the republican form of
government[11]—and this but a few years before the foundation of
the two great republics of modern times. The irony of his triumph
must, presently, have been clear to him, for on September 9, 1789,
he wrote to Sheffield: ‘What a scene is France! While the assembly
is voting abstract propositions, Paris is an independent republic.’
In the previous August he had expressed his amazement ‘at the French
Revolution.’ We may perhaps reserve a portion of our amazement for
the historian who had failed to realize that the theories with which
he had been long familiar in the salons would one day cease to be
mere matters of discussion.
This failure of English authors to come into full sympathy with
the French doctrines of the hour is the more remarkable because
Frenchmen had long regarded England as the home of reason and of
liberty.[12] Indeed France had turned to England for that ‘freedom
of thought’ denied to herself; but having adopted it, she had pushed
it to extremes of which her teachers, conservative at heart, could
never have conceived. D’Alembert, than whom the salons contained no
more splendid figure, acknowledged in his _Essay on Men of Letters_
that it was the works of English authors which had communicated to
Frenchmen their precious liberty of thought.[13] So common is the
praise of England that he now feels compelled to protest against the
further progress of Anglicism.[14] But in vain. The decades passed
by with no diminution of the respect for England. In 1763 Gibbon[15]
still found English opinions, fashions, and games popular in Paris,
every Englishman treated as patriot and philosopher, and the very
name of England ‘_clarum et venerabile gentibus_.’ In the next year
Voltaire, who had done so much by judicious praise and injudicious
blame to spread the knowledge of English literature and philosophy,
addressed to the _Gazette Littéraire_ a letter[16] containing a
defence of the current Anglomania. In this he laughed at those who
thought it a ‘crime’ to study, observe, and philosophize as do
the English. A year later, Saurin’s play, _l’Anglomanie_,[17] had
appeared, and though its success on the stage was not great, Walpole
thought it worth while to send Lady Hervey a copy of it as an
example of a reigning fad. The leading character, Éraste, who affects
a preference for Hogarth to all other painters, who quotes Locke and
Newton, and drinks tea for breakfast, sums up his views in these
verses:
Les précepteurs du monde à Londres out pris naissance.
C’est d’eux qu’il faut prendre leçon.
Aussi je meurs d’impatience
D’y voyager. De par Newton
Je le verrai, ce pays où l’on pense.
All this of course is farcical; but the author, a member of the
French Academy, had a serious purpose. He was attacking an attitude
which was expressed in Voltaire’s well-known eulogy,
Le soleil des Anglais, c’est le feu du génie.
Saurin, in his preface, announces his esteem for England and her
authors, but declares that the popularity of the ‘cult’ is due to
the jealous dislike by Frenchmen of their own authors—a conclusion
not quite obvious. In any case, the academician felt that he had a
duty to the nation. In 1772 he revised his comedy, and it was again
performed.
But Anglomania lived on. English authors were still graciously
received in the salons. Madame du Deffand dared to assert that
they were completely superior to the French in all matters of
reasoning.[18] The English language was increasingly studied,
and English novelists and philosophers continued popular. Madame
Necker records[19] an anecdote of a lady who went to England ‘pour
renouveler ses idées.’ The lady was perhaps fulfilling Montesquieu’s
famous advice, to travel in Germany, sojourn in Italy, and think in
England.
Anglomania was thus more than a passing fashion; it was but the
superficial evidence of a respect for English philosophy of life
which Frenchmen had taken more seriously than had the English
themselves. It happened, as it has happened more than once, that
English literature was more highly esteemed abroad than at home.
‘Nous avons augmenté,’ said Madame Necker to Gibbon,[20] ‘jusque chez
vous la célébrité de vos propres auteurs.’ English novels were read
in France for the new ideals of life which they were supposed to
embody, and much that in England was a mere pastime—_Clarissa_, for
example—became in France a philosophy of conduct. A philosopher like
Hume, and a philosophical historian like Gibbon, found that Paris
delighted to honour the prophets whom England was too careless to
stone.
The pupil had thus outrun his master, and had indeed become the
master. In the earlier decades of the century, Voltaire and
Montesquieu had gone to England to enjoy the privilege of thought: in
the later decades Englishmen visited Paris for a precisely similar
purpose. From the middle of the century until the outbreak of war in
1778, Englishmen could discover in the conversations of the salons
what a nation, always radical at heart, had made of the theories of
free thought, liberty, and equality before the law, which they had,
through Voltaire and Montesquieu, derived long since from England.
English authors were received with a cordiality and a deference which
had never been shown them in their own country. They found in Paris a
social system conducted in honour of authors and of the philosophies
which they were disseminating. It was the salon, the forcing-bed of
the new ideas.
CHAPTER II
ORIGIN AND CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SALON
The one unfailing characteristic of the salon, in all ages and in
all countries, is the dominant position which it gives to woman.
It is woman who creates the peculiar atmosphere and the peculiar
influence of salons; it is she, with her instinct for society and
for literature, who is most likely to succeed in the attempt to fuse
two ideals of life apparently opposed, the social and the literary.
The salon is not a mere drawing-room and not a lonely study, but
mediates between the promiscuous chatter of the one and the remote
silence of the other. The aims of the salon are well shown by the
ridicule of those enemies who accuse the hostess of attempting to
transform a school of pedants and hacks into a group of courtiers.
The social world is likely to laugh at the salon because it suggests
the lecture-hall, and scholars sneer at it because it pretends to the
distinction of a literary court.
The first salons were indeed courts—the courts of the Italian
Renaissance. We find in the Parisian salons of later centuries
the _disjecta membra_ of this earlier Italian society, whose true
relationship is understood only when we trace them back to this
remote original. In the light of that Italian dawn, all leaps into
a consistent scheme. Much that seems odd and unrelated in salon
life is brought into perspective: the authoritative position of the
scholar, the unique influence of woman, and the tendency to set up
‘Platonic’ relations between the sexes. Humanism, Platonism, and
gallantry were aspects of the Renaissance and of the Italian Court,
and in their lesser manifestations as learning, philosophism, and
‘Platonic love,’ they remain characteristic of salons. Again, the
courts of the fifteenth century brought into focus many movements:
they carried on the mediæval system of patronage; they adopted many
of the gallantries of the old ‘courts of love’; and they brought the
new humanism into vital contact with society, so that the expression
of serious thought was no less possible in conversation than in the
study or the lecture-hall. Each of these lives on in the salon.
The Renaissance court may be studied in any one of a numerous group.
We may find the ideal set forth in the group of artists and men
of letters who surrounded the youthful Beatrice d’Este, patroness
of Leonardo and many another; we may see it in the court of her
sister, Isabella, Marchioness of Mantua; we may see it in the coterie
of Caterina Cornaro, once Queen of Cyprus, and in her later days
mistress of a little court[21] at Asolo. We may study it at its
grandest in the somewhat earlier court of Lorenzo the Magnificent,
with its conscious imitation of the Greek symposium. The court which
held Politian, Pulci, Ficino the Platonist, Alberti, and, later,
Michelangelo, might well have boasted itself ‘the little academe’
of _Love’s Labour’s Lost_. But perhaps the most useful example is
the delightful court of Urbino, described by Castiglione in his
_Cortegiano_.
If it be objected that Castiglione’s description of court life is too
radiant to be quite true to fact, if it be a society fairer than any
whose existence can be demonstrated, I reply that it is so much the
better suited to our purpose. It is ideals that we would be at. We
are spared the attempt to reconstruct them for ourselves. There is
nothing to be gained by reminding ourselves that courts attracted the
parasite, the flatterer, and the opportunist; it is the finer aims
of the men of genius and of the noble women who patronized them that
will reward our attention. Castiglione knew these aims, and we cannot
do better than quote his words as they were given to Elizabethan
England in Hoby’s beautiful translation.[22] The first quotation
refers to Frederick, first Duke of Urbino:
This man emong his other deedes praisworthy, in the hard and sharpe
situation of Urbin buylt a Palaice, to the opinion of many men,
the fayrest that was to be founde in all Italy, and so fornished
it with everye necessary implement belonging thereto, that it
appeared not a palaice, but a Citye in fourme of a palaice, and
that not onlye with ordinarie matters, as Silver plate, hanginges
for chambers of verye riche cloth of golde, of silke and other
like, but also for sightlynesse: and to decke it out withall,
placed there a wonderous number of auncyent ymages of marble and
mettall, verye excellente peinctinges and instrumentes of musycke
of all sortes, and nothinge would he have there but what was moste
rare and excellent. To this with verye great charges he gathered
together a great number of most excellent and rare bookes, in
Greke, Latin and Hebrue, the which all he garnished wyth golde and
sylver, esteaming this to be the chieffest ornament of his great
palaice....
We turn now to the court of his son Guidobaldo, who carried on the
traditions of his father:
He sett hys delyte above all thynges to have hys house furnished
with most noble and valyaunte Gentylmen, wyth whom he lyved very
famylyarly, enjoying theyr conversation wherein the pleasure whyche
he gave unto other menne was no lesse, then that he receyved
of other, because he was verye wel seene in both tunges, and
together with a lovynge behavyour and plesauntnesse he had also
accompanied the knowleage of infinite thinges.... Because the Duke
used continuallye by reason of his infirmytye, soon after supper
to go to his rest, everye man ordinarelye, at that houre drewe
where the Dutchesse was, the Lady Elizabeth Gonzaga. Where also
continuallye was the Lady Emilia Pia, who for that she was endowed
with so livelye a wytt and judgement as you knowe, seemed the
maistresse and ringe leader of all the companye, and that everye
manne at her receyved understandinge and courage.[23] There was
then to be hearde pleasaunte communication and merye conceytes,
and in every mannes countenaunce a manne myght perceyve peyncted
a lovynge jocundenesse. So that thys house truelye myght well be
called the verye mansion place of Myrth and Joye. And I beleave
it was never so tasted in other place, what maner a thynge the
sweete conversation is that is occasioned of an amyable and lovynge
companye, as it was once there.... But such was the respect which
we bore to the Dutchesse wyll, that the selfe same libertye was a
verye great bridle. Neither was there anye that thought it not the
greatest pleasure he could have in the worlde, to please her, and
the greatest griefe to offende her. For this respecte were there
most honest condicions coupled with wonderous greate libertye, and
devises of pastimes and laughinge matters tempred in her sight....
The maner of all the Gentilmen in the house was immedyatelye
after supper to assemble together where the dutchesse was. Where
emonge other recreations, musicke, and dauncynge, whiche they used
contynuallye, sometyme they propounded feate questions, otherwhyle
they invented certayne wytty sportes and pastimes, at the devyse
sometyme of one sometyme of an other, in the whych under sundrye
covertes,[24] often tymes the standers bye opened subtylly theyr
imaginations unto whom they thought beste. At other tymes there
arrose other disputations of divers matters, or els jestinges with
prompt inventions. Manye times they fell into purposes,[25] as we
now a dayes terme them, where in thys kynde of talke and debating
of matters, there was wonderous great pleasure on all sydes:
because (as I have sayde) the house was replenyshed wyth most noble
wyttes.
Such conversational ‘pastimes’ were enjoyed almost every night:
And the order thereof was such, that assoone as they were assembled
where the Dutches was, every man satt him downe at his will, or
as it fell to his lot, in a circle together, and in sittinge were
devyded a man and a woman, as longe as there were women, for
alwayes (lightlye) the number of men was farr the greater. Then
were they governed as the Dutchesse thought best, whiche manye
times gave this charge unto the L. Emilia.
_Il Cortegiano_ is the tribute paid to this group and the
conversation which passed in it. The spirit of the book is not to
be shown by a few quotations, but a reading of it will reveal the
following facts: that men and women meet on a plane of equality, that
it is the presence of women (though fewer in number than the men),
that gives the peculiar tone of lightness and gallantry; that the
author looks to the court not only for reward, but for inspiration;
that the conversation at its noblest (as in Bembo’s discourse at the
end) passes over into poetry; that the conversation is of a classical
and philosophic cast, often Platonic, but that this high seriousness
does not exclude mirth and wit.[26] Now these aims are no other than
the aims of the salon.
This ideal, diffused over Europe, had a long and brilliant history.
We shall encounter it again in the courtly salons of Elizabethan
England, and even in the comedies of Shakespeare. The tradition
passed over into France and there became the formative influence
in the great type and parent of the Parisian salon, the Hôtel de
Rambouillet.
In tracing the Hôtel de Rambouillet back to the earlier Italian
court, two facts stand out as of first importance. In the first
place, that salon was established by a woman who was herself half
Italian, had passed many years in Italy, and knew the traditions
of the old nobility. In the second place, the Hôtel de Rambouillet
originated in protest against the crudities of the Gascon court at
Paris, and represented an attempt to realize a worthier society.
When, in the second decade of the seventeenth century, Cathérine
de Vivonne opened her famous house in the Rue Saint Thomas du
Louvre and initiated the reign of good taste in France, her salon
displayed almost immediately certain aspects which had distinguished
the Italian courts and which were to become, in varying degrees,
permanent features of the Parisian salon and of its London
counterpart. The Marquise de Rambouillet became the type and exemplar
of all the later hostesses. Even the English bluestockings were aware
that they were in the line of descent from her. In her poem _Bas
Bleu_,[27] Hannah More compares the English group with that which
met in the Hôtel de Rambouillet, and Wraxall[28] later took up the
comparison and developed the parallel between the drawing-rooms of
London and those of Paris. The Hôtel de Rambouillet, therefore, is
the type of the salon. It enables us to distinguish what is permanent
and common to all salons, from what is merely transitory. For the
sake of convenience, I shall make a fivefold grouping of these
features. It will of course be understood that this analysis does not
afford a complete characterization of the Hôtel de Rambouillet; for
that society had certain important aims—such as the attempt to purify
the language—which were not destined to remain permanent marks of the
succeeding salons, and are therefore passed over in silence. Nor must
it be assumed that the fivefold analysis describes each and every
later salon. A given salon may be entirely lacking in one of the
features—though never, I think, in a majority of them—without losing
its character; and in proportion as a given salon satisfies these
five conditions, we may say that it approaches the ideal.
(1) In the first place, then, the house, the very room, in which
the company gathers, is influential in forming its spirit and
establishing its reputation. We have just examined Castiglione’s
description of the magnificence of Urbino: something of that royal
splendour is demanded of the salon. It was Madame de Rambouillet’s
sense for architectural arrangement and decoration that contributed
to her social success. Indeed the name by which her salon is known
plainly implies it. As is well known, she began by breaking up the
great reception-hall with its vast, unsocial coldness into a series
of smaller rooms and alcoves, thus providing for the intimacies
of conversation as distinct from the hubbub and the crowd. Her
own favourite room, the _chambre bleu d’Arthénice_,[29] where a
privileged few—at most eighteen—sat by her couch, was the centre and
soul of the house. It was the perfumed temple of the Graces, where
the year was always at spring, the haunt of Flora, and the throne of
Athena herself. This room reproduced itself in countless ‘alcoves,’
‘blue rooms,’ and _ruelles_ throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. Madame de Boufflers was famous for her apartments hung
with rose-coloured damask, and Madame Geoffrin for her house, which
was crammed with rare china and bronzes, portraits by Boucher, and
easel-pictures by Van Loo.
(2) The salon must retain an aristocratic tone, but without
submitting to the unyielding formality of the aristocracy. It sets
up a standard of recognition based on talent,[30] and neither courts
nor rejects the nobility. It was even possible for the bourgeois
to obtain admission to the Hôtel de Rambouillet and to have a
career there. Vincent Voiture, known as ‘Chiquito,’ the son of a
wine-merchant, became the leading spirit in all the amusements. His
position reminds us now of the mediæval jester, now of Beau Nash, the
King of Bath.
In the eighteenth century the salons are proud to represent a
democracy of genius. Madame Geoffrin was the daughter of a _valet
de chambre_ and the wife of a manufacturer; Madame Necker was the
daughter of a Swiss parson; and Mlle. de Lespinasse, a foundling, who
had been ‘humble companion’ to Madame du Deffand, and who had not
means sufficient to entertain her guests at dinner. Wit, intellect,
and personality, rather than noble birth, became the key to social
success.
(3) The chief staple of entertainment offered by the salons is
conversation, literary or philosophical in character. Other
amusements, such as Castiglione describes at Urbino, are not
necessarily excluded, and, in France, dancing, excursions,
card-playing, and gaming were popular in various salons and at
various times. But conversation always reasserted itself in the end.
Discussion was stimulated by the reading of original poems, essays,
sermons, and plays. The criticism of these, especially of the plays,
was of no mean importance in forming the spirit of French literature.
In particular the salon gives birth to certain minor forms of
literature, epistles, epigrams, extempore verses of all kinds,
‘thoughts,’ maxims, _bons mots_, ‘portraits,’ and _éloges_;[31] but
of more importance than these is its unconscious formative influence
on such arts as letter-writing, biography, and all manner of
anecdotal writing.
(4) The friendships of the salon are of peculiar depth and warmth,
developing occasionally into passion, but always Platonic rather
than domestic in their expression. Thus the salon, in which woman
assumes the throne, and queens it over a coterie (chiefly men) is
perhaps the last phase of the Italian court with its gallantries and
lady-worship. It passed on to the French salon that note of sentiment
and Platonic love which is found in _Il Cortegiano_, and which
becomes characteristic of Sappho Scudéry and the later seventeenth
century. In the eighteenth century this sentimental friendship united
with the more practical system of patronage, and resulted in a type
of relationship which eludes definition, for, on the one hand, it is
at times so utilitarian as to savour of philanthropy, and, on the
other, it may develop into a _grande passion_, and compare itself
to Abelard and Héloïse. Examples of it are the various relations
existing between Madame Geoffrin and Marmontel, Madame du Deffand
and d’Alembert, Madame du Deffand and Horace Walpole, Madame de
Boufflers and David Hume, Mlle. de Lespinasse and d’Alembert, Mlle.
de Lespinasse and Guibert, Madame Necker and Edward Gibbon.
(5) The hostess of the salon is invariably the subject of ideal
descriptions, ‘tributes’ which recite her charm as a hostess, her
merits as a patron, and her general superiority to the Muses. From
Castiglione’s eulogy of Elizabeth Gonzaga, through the Hôtel de
Rambouillet (where Malherbe was a kind of poet laureate), down to
the death of Mlle. de Lespinasse, whose genius was celebrated by
d’Alembert in the _Tombeau de Mlle. de Lespinasse_, this is an almost
unfailing result of salon life.
Such are, then, the permanent marks by which we may detect that
interplay of the social and the literary life in what, for want of a
better term, we call the salon. There are two features of the life
manifested only at certain times which it is not proper to include,
though they are more generally attributed to the salons than any that
have been mentioned. They are transitory phases; but they must be
briefly considered, if only by way of avoiding false assumptions.
The women of the salons are usually thought of as _femmes savantes_,
or ‘learned ladies,’ who affect a learning which has no basis in
fact. Such female pedants were common figures in the salons of
a certain period. The depiction of them by Molière is no more
exaggerated than the purposes of comic art demand. It must be further
admitted that such women may appear now and again in the salons of
any period; we shall meet with a few in the pages of this volume. But
they are not _common_ in the best salons of the best periods. Neither
in the beginning, nor in the eighteenth century, were the hostesses
of the salon what we ordinarily mean by the phrase _femmes savantes_.
Of Madame de Rambouillet, for example, M. Vourciez writes:[32] ‘Ce
sont les aliments les plus solides qu’elle digérait sans prétention
à devenir une “femme savante,” car Balzac eût pu lui adresser à elle
aussi le compliment qu’il fit à Madame des Loges: “Vous savez une
infinité de choses rares, mais vous n’en faites pas la savante, et
ne les avez pas apprises pour tenir école.”’ As for the women of the
next century, they assisted their friends chiefly by qualities which
have little to do with book-learning, by superb intelligence, wit,
sympathy, and good taste. They made no pretence to erudition. Indeed
they rather piqued themselves on their ignorance of it. To mistake
Madame Geoffrin, who said she could not spell, and Madame du Deffand,
who was bored by a _savant_, for a woman like Armande or Bélise
is to have done with all distinctions at once. It is to confound
Prospero with Polonius.
It is no less true that the women of the salons were not permanently
_précieuses ridicules_. Preciosity had its day; it did its work
(which was by no means contemptible); and it was laughed out of
existence. There were no _précieuses_ in 1750. Indeed the caustic
penetration of Madame du Deffand,[33] the homely wit of Madame
Geoffrin, and the romantic ardour of Mlle. de Lespinasse are at equal
removes from the conceits and the mincing niceties of the earlier
salons. ‘Il n’y a que le premier pas qui coûte,’ said Madame du
Deffand of Saint Denis walking with his severed head in his hands;
‘Je suis une poule qui ai couvé des œufs de canard,’ said Madame
Geoffrin of herself and her daughter; ‘Presque personne n’a besoin
d’être aimé,’ said Mlle. de Lespinasse to her faithless lover. Is
this the language of preciosity?
CHAPTER III
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY SALON
A salon is not a mere literary club. It is something other than
a group of men and women gathered in a drawing-room to discuss
literature or meet a poet. It aims to exert a creative influence in
the literary world. It does not concern itself with literature as
a finished product to be studied, but with literature as a growing
thing that may be trained. Hence it gets behind the product to the
producer, and seeks to influence the characters and ideas out of
which books are formed. It is an informal academy. Its aim is private
in that it is directly concerned with improving the condition of
authors, and public in that it attempts to mould public opinion.
Thus it is, at bottom, a system of patronage. It offers to the author
that aid, advertisement, and protection which he had once sought from
a patron. Patronage of literature was, as we have seen, an essential
feature of the court life of the Renaissance. It had lived on through
the seventeenth century at courts and in noble houses. During its
rapid decline in the eighteenth century, many of its duties were
taken over by the salons. In the person of the hostess, the salon
made gifts of money, granted unofficial pensions, paid printers’
bills, and even gave authors a home. Walpole was amused at the number
of authors who were ‘planted’ in the homes of French ladies. Madame
Geoffrin in Paris, like Mrs. Montagu in London, was recognized as a
patron of all the arts, and both gave of their wealth to the support
of indigent or improvident authors.
But the salon bestowed a yet more valuable favour in its recognition
of literary merit. Like the patron, it vouched for new authors.
It gave its support to their new ideas. And in this subtler form
of patronage, in the discharge of the duties of a literary jury
or academy, it anticipated the modern press, for it had similar
influence and fell into similar errors. Like the modern critical
review, it was at once feared and courted by authors who affected
at times to despise its pronouncements but never ignored them. The
salon mediated between the author and the public. It aimed, like
a true critic, to correct both the conceit of the author and the
indifference of the world. It responded to a genuine critical demand
created by the disappearance of the outworn system of patronage and
by the rapid growth of a reading democracy. The salon sprang into
renewed activity during a period of transition. It served a peculiar
need during changing conditions, and passed away with the dawn of
a new century which had its own system of criticism by which to
dispense fame and to create opinion.
The growing spirit of independence in the author had already caused
grave dissatisfaction with the old order of things, as the increasing
tendency to enjoy the society of his fellows in clubs and taverns
had prepared the author for the new order of social patronage.
D’Alembert, in his _Essay on Men of Letters_, speaks of the old
system in terms of strong disgust. The rôle of courtier is the most
despicable that can be acted by a man of letters. Authors and peers
should meet on a plane of equality. ‘Les seuls grands Seigneurs dont
un homme de lettres doive désirer le commerce, sont ceux qu’il peut
traiter et regarder en toute sûreté comme ses égaux et ses amis.’[34]
Here is a man who will not lightly expose himself to feel the sting
of charity, for whom a new system not wanting in grace and true
appreciation must be devised. The _Essay_ was translated into English
in 1764. The original must have been written about the time when
Johnson was penning his immortal definition of _patron_, ‘a wretch
who supports with insolence and is paid with flattery.’
Was it possible for the reading world to render assistance to men
of this temper? Could a way be found to make grants of money or to
draw attention to worthy writings without an offensive display of
philanthropy? Was it not possible to assist an author, yet cause him
to feel that any favour was conferred by himself? The salon was the
answer. It summoned authors out of their seclusion and segregation,
and confidently bade them show the world that genius might express
itself elsewhere than in the study or the coffee-house. Let them
try an appeal to a ‘select public.’ Let them, by the charm of their
conversation in a congenial company, break down the barriers of
indifference and prejudice. It was a call to men of letters to treat
with the world. The drawing-room in which they were received, not as
a dependent or tool, but as chief guests doing honour to the company
by their presence, was a new field of arbitration between authors and
the world.
In the successful execution of any plan for the social recognition of
letters, woman must have a prominent place. If the drawing-room is
to replace the tavern as a favourite resort of authors, the presence
of woman is as truly implied in the one as her absence is from the
other. The shift from the coffee-house to the drawing-room was indeed
a plain tribute to woman, the new critic and the new patron. As she
was already displaying her power in the world of readers by bringing
a new tone of refinement into literature, she was exerting the same
power to draw the men of letters into her salon.[35]
It was the peculiar fortune of France to produce women to discharge
this social and literary duty whose personality is at once so
brilliant and so influential that it rises to the level of genius.
These women are not merely persons gifted with an instinct for
social leadership; they are, like Cleopatra and Elizabeth, types of
their sex and a revelation of its power. They are the very symbols
of the century, ‘the abstract and brief chronicles of the time.’ In
the amazing career of Madame de Tencin may be read the abandoned
profligacy with which the seventeenth century closed, and which, in
sheer disillusion, turned with the new century to decency and to
letters. In Madame Geoffrin we see the surpassing common sense of the
period, its force, its humour, its kindliness, and perhaps something
of its hardness. As the best of the bourgeois is typified in Madame
Geoffrin, the aristocracy of the _ancien régime_ is expressed in
Madame du Deffand. Its merciless clarity, its wit, which is wisdom in
masquerade, its hardness of heart and contempt of spiritual things,
and, one is tempted to say, even its blindness, are they not found
in her? And the desolation of her last years, with their appealing
cry for love, are they not, as Lanson has said,[36] the hunger of the
heart which turns at last to the gift of love and the sweetness of
tears? But it is Mlle. de Lespinasse who reveals romanticism in its
full blow. In the history of that movement the tornado of passions
which convulsed her spirit and at length destroyed her are no less
typical than the sorrows of Werther, or the pageant of Byron’s
bleeding heart.[37]
It was by force of personality and by their attitude towards life
that these women succeeded in influencing literary movements. It is
not by learning or authorship that they hold a place in the history
of French literature. Not one of them was known to her own circle as
an author or as ambitious to become one. Madame de Tencin was, to be
sure, a novelist, but she concealed the fact from all her friends
save Montesquieu and Fontenelle, allowed her works to be attributed
to others, and kept her secret as long as she lived. Madame du
Deffand and Mlle. de Lespinasse have attained fame as letter-writers,
but through no conscious effort on their part. Their dread of
authorship is easily explained. A successful hostess must avoid
giving the impression that she is forming a coterie in order to have
readers for her books. Madame du Bocage found her authorship of no
assistance in her career as hostess: she was laughed at as a _femme
savante_, and her guests were said to be invited for the purpose of
praising her poems.
As personality is of more consequence to the hostess than
authorship, so maturity of experience is of more value to her than
youth and beauty. None of these women, except Madame du Bocage
(‘forma Venus, arte Minerva’) pretended to the fascinations of youth.
Madame de Tencin was forty-six when her salon became famous; Madame
Geoffrin was fifty when she succeeded Madame de Tencin as the chief
hostess in Paris, and she was sixty-seven when, as ‘queen-mother,’
she made her triumphal visit to the King of Poland. Madame du Deffand
was sixty-eight when, in the eyes of Walpole, she eclipsed all the
other hostesses in Paris; when she was eighty, Edward Gibbon still
found in her salon, ‘the best company in Paris.’ Julie de Lespinasse,
the youngest of them all, died—and died of love—at forty-four. It
is not surprising that Walpole found in Paris the ‘fountain of
age.’[38] ‘One is never old here,’ he writes, ‘or never thought so’;
and elsewhere,[39] ‘The first step towards being in fashion is to
lose an eye or a tooth. Young people I conclude there are, but where
they exist I don’t guess: not that I complain; it is charming to
totter into vogue.’ Ten years later he finds no change:[40] ‘It is
so English to grow old! The French are Struldbrugs improved. After
ninety they have no more caducity or distempers, but set out on a new
career.’
Laurence Sterne goes into greater detail. Of the second period in
the life of a French woman of fashion, he says:[41] ‘When thirty-five
years and more have unpeopled her dominions of the slaves of love,
she repeoples it with the slaves of infidelity.’ Here of course is a
glance at the atheism of the _philosophes_. In morals, politics, and
philosophy, the Parisian salon is frankly on the radical side. It
not only welcomes new ideas, but goes in search of them. Radicalism
becomes its measure of success. The prevailing hostility to the
Church and the contempt for anything savouring of dogma caused those
who might hold orthodox or conservative views to conceal them,
lest they be taken as evidence of a cowardly spirit or a feeble
mind. Adherents of the Church, priests, Jesuits, the whole tribe of
_dévots_, and at last even the deists, were condemned as pharisees
and time-servers. Voltaire himself was too cautious. ‘Il est bigot,’
said a woman to Walpole,[42] ‘c’est un déiste.’ When Hume was
admitted to Madame Geoffrin’s, he found no deists there, for all had,
presumably, passed on to atheism. Madame Geoffrin herself retained an
odd sort of formal relation with the Church which amazed her friends
who whispered about it as though it were some scandalous _liaison_.
Thus the salons developed a looseness of morals and a so-called
freedom of thought which their exponents were fain to regard as a
splendid audacity. Such ideals are still dear to a certain class
of writers chiefly composed of minor poets. But the wits of the
eighteenth century promulgated their doctrines without the aid
of that slovenliness which is indispensable to our free-thinking
Bohemians. They adopted a manner approved of the world in order that
they might win the world. They avoided anything that might make
themselves or their speculations ridiculous, for they wished to
_recommend_ their theories to men, to challenge their intelligence,
and to capture their interest. There is an odd simile used by
Madame Necker[43] to account for Shakespeare’s fame in England,
which is of no use whatever as explaining Shakespeare, but of great
significance because of its obvious reference to the salons. She
attributes the renown of the poet to the acting of Garrick who, for
three hours daily, _captures the hearts_ as well as the ears of the
English people, and so has the same effect that is produced in Paris
by _conversation_. The aim of the salon is, obviously, to create
interest, to capture hearts. In the same letter, when urging Gibbon
to come to Paris and enjoy the fruits of his fame, she says, ‘C’est
là seulement ... qu’on fait passer ses sentiments dans l’âme des
autres.’ There is the express aim of the salon:—to bring ideas out of
the realm of the abstract down to the business and bosoms of men. In
such a process it is the function of the hostess to give unity and
solidity to the divergent views of her coterie, and frequently to be
the channel by which they reach the world.[44] Thus the salon became
a source for the dissemination of ideas and of a new and radical
philosophy.
But what of the influence of the salon upon the authors who composed
it? That it produced an effect upon them the least sympathetic
was obliged to acknowledge: ‘At worst,’ says Walpole,[45] ‘I have
filled my mind with a new set of ideas.’ There men corrected as well
as expanded their personal views. There they might ‘clarify their
notions by filtrating them through other minds.’[46] The salon gave
an opportunity for the development of ideas in a new medium—the
liveliness of conversation. At such time, when the formulation
of opinion is stimulated by contact with other minds, when all
barriers are down, all dread of critics forgotten, a man may give
free rein to his doctrines and borrow all the brilliancy that lives
in exaggeration.[47] The pomposity of the platform and the solemn
pedantry of the study disappear, and a man talks for the joy of
talking. He makes up in vivacity what he loses in dignity. When an
author deserted the salons, as did Rousseau, it frequently indicated
a state of self-absorption which was not always advantageous; and,
on the other hand, when an author made his submission to them, the
result was frequently evident in a note of urbanity and in a piquancy
of illustration which he could hardly have attained elsewhere.[48]
Thus the function of the salon was to preserve the sanity and clarity
of literature, to keep authors abreast of the times and in touch with
one another and with the world. But in this alliance of authors with
the world, in this exchange of solitude for society, of the study
for the drawing-room, there were dangers which threatened the very
life of literature; for it was an attempt to serve two masters. Far
from removing the petty faults of a literary life, it brought with
it a host of new ones—flattery, the overestimation of the works of
a clique, the attempt to direct public opinion by force, and above
all, the cultivation of the graces at the expense of the imagination.
There was actually a tendency towards the dangers of democracy—the
surrender to majority, the descent to a common level—but without a
saving reliance upon the elemental instincts of mankind. The whole
prophetic side of literature, the vision of the poet, the glory and
the folly of the ideal, priest and lyrist, Wordsworth and Shelley,
de Vigny and de Musset—these are all beyond the ken of salons. But
they had their office. It was their function to teach the observation
of life, to lend clearness and vivacity to style, and so to add a
charm to learning, to win the ignorant and to elevate the frivolous
by showing that dulness could be overcome with wit and pedantry with
grace.
CHAPTER IV
ENGLISH AUTHORS IN PARISIAN SALONS
The English visitor was a familiar figure in the Parisian salon. In
an age when travellers were studying manners rather than mountains,
and preferred the society of philosophers to the finest galleries in
Europe, no visit to Paris was complete without a conversation with
good Madame Geoffrin or an hour with the ‘blind sibyl,’ du Deffand
of the bitter tongue. A stream of Englishmen from Prior to Gibbon
poured through their drawing-rooms[49] and listened with interest or
with alarm to the _philosophes_ who were, to use Walpole’s words,[50]
busily pulling down God and the King. Sometimes a returning
traveller proved his acquaintance with this society by sacrificing
his veracity. Thus Goldsmith asserted[51] that he was present ‘in
a select company of wits of both sexes at Paris’ when Diderot,
Fontenelle, and Voltaire disputed about the merits of English taste
and learning. The interview, it has been repeatedly shown, could
hardly have taken place, inasmuch as during the months when Goldsmith
must have been in Paris, Voltaire was never once there. But the very
lie is eloquent, for it shows the kind of experience in Paris which
English authors sought and prized.
The cosmopolitan tone was contributed to the salon by the eighteenth
century. It begins with Madame de Tencin. This brilliant woman,
somewhat promiscuous in all her tastes, expanded the influence of
her drawing-room, and thereby that of later salons, by welcoming
distinguished men without respect of nationality; nor were foreigners
slow to improve the opportunity of meeting a woman who was no less
renowned for her social prestige than for the picturesque iniquity of
her past. Her salon was in truth the atonement which she offered the
world for the sins of her youth.
She had begun her career by running away from the convent where she
had taken the veil. She used her secularized charms to win lovers,
and used her lovers to advance her brother in the Church. She became
mistress of the Regent, who snubbed her because she wished to talk
business when his mind ran on love. The royal harlot then sank into a
cheap adventuress; she gave birth to a son, destined to become famous
as d’Alembert, and ‘exposed’ him on the steps of Saint Jean le Rond
in the hope of making an end of him. At length when a maddened lover
shot himself to death under her own roof, she was imprisoned in the
Bastille, where she languished for some months. And then, after
her release, as if to show that she had a head if not a heart, she
abandoned her career of profligacy as lightly as she had formerly
abandoned a lover or a child, and opened a drawing-room which, with
the death of Madame de Lambert in 1733, became the most brilliant
and influential in Paris. Here for twenty years she reigned over
such retainers as Montesquieu and Fontenelle. Her success is easier
to understand than her motives. Certain it is, however, as Professor
Brunel has suggested,[52] that she attracted the men of letters
because she gave them to understand that their respect was the one
thing in the world for which she cared.
Madame de Tencin had become intimate with Englishmen even before
the days of her fame. She was that ‘eloped nun who has supplanted
the nut-brown maid’[53] in the affections of Matthew Prior, during
his diplomatic service in Paris in the winter of 1712-13. She used
him to bring the needs of her brother (whom Prior did not consider
to be ‘worth hanging’[54]) before Lord Bolingbroke. He himself was
presently avowing her his Queen, and himself her faithful and devoted
subject ‘_dans tous ses états_.’[55] Leslie Stephen[56] considers
that Bolingbroke made use of Madame de Tencin in his intrigues with
the Regent; but however this may be, his intrigues with the Regent’s
mistress became common gossip, and were published abroad by the
ballad-singer in the streets.[57]
* * * * *
But Bolingbroke was not the only English peer who paid court to the
‘_nonne défroquée_.’ Lord Chesterfield was introduced to her by
Montesquieu, and, in 1741, passed some time in her salon, during
its later glory. Here he enjoyed the society of authors whom he was
always pleased to regard as superior to those of his own country
and whose works, particularly Montesquieu’s _Esprit des Lois_,
Fontenelle’s _Pluralité des Mondes_, and the productions of Crébillon
and Marivaux, he never tired of recommending to his son. Fontenelle,
the placid death’s-head who had never laughed and who could lead a
minuet at the age of ninety-seven, must have seemed to Chesterfield
the pattern of a man. And yet he could assert, a few years later,
that Fontenelle had sacrificed somewhat too much to the Graces.[58]
But what did he think of Madame? What did the great exemplar of the
_bel air_, himself a patron of letters, think of the life and aims
of the salon? It is not easy to say. He flattered Madame de Tencin
outrageously, according to his professed theories; he praised the
good taste of Frenchmen (of which Madame was at once ‘le soutien
et l’ornement’), and denounced the brusqueness of his countrymen
according to his wont. He boasted himself[59] the ‘ami, favori, et
enfant de la maison’ of Madame de Tencin. But when he had occasion
to describe the literary life of Paris to his son, he declared
that the salons were filled with gossips who talked nonsense and
_philosophes_ whose works were metaphysical fustian, _verba et voces
et praeterea nihil_.[60] It was an institution which young Stanhope
must visit, where he was to talk epigrams, false sentiments, and
philosophical nonsense, but to which he was to maintain a large
superiority. Yet, in spite of this show of indifference, I cannot but
feel that Chesterfield liked the salon. What else in heaven or earth
was there for such a man to like? What could have been more to his
taste than its courtly union of intrigue and elegance, of literature
and wit, of free thought and easy morals? The salon certainly liked
Chesterfield. ‘Let him come back to us,’ cried Montesquieu and the
rest of them when Madame de Tencin had read his letter to the circle,
and read it more than once. ‘He writes French better than we do,’
exclaimed Fontenelle, ‘qu’il se contente, s’il lui plaît, d’être le
premier homme de sa nation, d’avoir les lumières et la profondeur de
génie qui la caractérisent; et qu’il ne vienne point encore s’emparer
de nos grâces et de nos gentillesses.’[61] When Madame de Tencin
despatched this mass of flattery to Chesterfield, Fontenelle added
a note begging the English lord not to draw down upon himself too
much French jealousy.[62] Unless Chesterfield was, like Fontenelle,
incapable of all human emotions, he was pleased by that. The
Frenchmen had studied him well. They touched his vulnerable point,
and posterity will not easily be persuaded that it was in vain.
* * * * *
‘In future, then,’ said Fontenelle, after the death of Madame de
Tencin, ‘I shall go to Madame Geoffrin’s.’ The change must have
supplied the aged wit with many observations on the diversity of the
female character; for though ‘la Geoffrin’ had studied the methods
of her predecessor, there was no resemblance in character between the
two. There is no suggestion of Madame de Tencin’s subtlety in the
amiable bourgeoise who became a queen of society at fifty, but rather
a rich simplicity of nature that is very winning. Her faults as well
as her virtues are quite obvious. Her humour is for ever expressing
itself in homely maxims[63] which suggest the lore of peasants. She
made her way by the simplest means, a warm heart, abiding common
sense, and a persistent will. Her keen intelligence, the gift of
nature, not of books, enabled her to understand the philosophers
at least as well as they understood themselves, to advise—almost
lead—them, to be their ‘Mother,’ and to push them into the Academy.
It is, at first blush, amazing that a woman without education, who,
indeed, found grammar a mystery, could thus have become the empress
of the wits. But living as she did in an ‘age of reason’ when the
imagination was turning back to contemplate man in a ‘state of
nature,’ unspoiled by the arts of a luxurious civilization, such a
defect was not fatal. Shrewd, placid yet alert, simple and with
the sweep of vision that is given only to the simple, she looked
out fearlessly upon the society of her time, with all its elaborate
systems and new philosophies—and understood. As she was without fear,
so she was without contempt. She saw what was good in the new order
and encouraged it, but without becoming its slave. Like Johnson
(whom she would have understood), she contrived to ‘worship in the
age of Voltaire,’ but this was with no surrender of her interest in
Voltaire. She was intolerant of pretence. She adopted a manner of
treating her friends which, in its combination of brusqueness and
affection, is thoroughly parental. She scolds and pushes, punishes
and rewards. She decides disputes with a word. She spends with open
hand. Her great desire is to be of help to her children. D’Alembert
writes[64] of her, ‘“Vous croyez,” disait elle à un des hommes
qu’elle aimait le plus, “que c’est pour moi que je vois des grands
et des ministres? Détrompez-vous; je les vois pour vous et pour vos
semblables, qui pouvez en avoir besoin: si tous ceux que j’aime
étaient heureux et sages, ma porte serait tous les jours fermée a
neuf heures, excepté pour eux.”’ But she never forgot that, in her
own house, she alone was mistress. Her charity, which she conducted
on a heroic scale, implied a certain obedience in the recipients of
it; but both charity and obedience were only devices for promoting
their interests. ‘Elle ne respirait que pour faire le bien,’ said
d’Alembert.[65] He and the other writers for the Cyclopædia profited
by her charity, for without her patronage that great work could
hardly have been carried to publication.
In the salon of Madame Geoffrin and her free-thinking friends, David
Hume found, in 1763, a natural abiding-place. It had, indeed, a dual
attraction for him in the person of its hostess and the character of
her coterie. Madame Geoffrin must have found the Scotch philosopher
a man after her own heart. She understood the broad-featured, simple
man, whom she presently took to calling[66] her ‘coquin,’ her ‘gros
drôle.’ Like her, he enjoyed the society of rationalists. He writes
naïvely in his _Autobiography_: ‘Those who have not seen the strange
effects of modes, will never imagine the strange reception I met with
at Paris, from men and women of all ranks and stations. The more I
resiled from their excessive civilities, the more I was loaded with
them. There is, however, a real satisfaction in living at Paris from
the great number of sensible, knowing, and polite company with which
the city abounds above all places in the universe. I thought once
of settling there for life.’ But he kept his head under the pelting
flattery. He neither despised his social success nor exalted it as
the _summum bonum_. Like Madame Geoffrin, he made no apologies for
himself, and pretended to no social graces which he could not easily
acquire. His French was wretched. Walpole protested[67] that it was
‘almost as unintelligible as his English.’ He had no _bons mots_.
He did not even talk much. Grimm found[68] him heavy, and Madame du
Deffand dubbed him ‘the peasant.’[69]
But to more serious souls he was even as the Spirit of the Age.
He had voiced the new scepticism. He had given the death-blow to
miracles. Before his coming to Paris, all his better-known work had
been done, and the fame of it preceded him. Alexander Street wrote
from Paris to Sir William Johnstone, on December 16, 1762: ‘When you
have occasion to see our friend, David Hume, tell him that he is so
much worshipped here that he must be void of all passions, if he
does not immediately take post for Paris. In most houses where I am
acquainted here, one of the first questions is, “Do you know M. Hume
whom we all admire so much?” I dined yesterday at Helvétius’s, where
this same M. Hume interrupted our conversation very much.’[70]
His influence was, in truth, greater in France than in England; for
the temper of English literature never became openly rationalistic.
Deism itself was living a subterranean existence; for the authority
of such powerful men as Johnson and Burke ran directly counter
to it. But in France all sails were set, and men’s faces turned
towards ‘unpath’d waters, undreamed shores.’ To the ‘free’ thought
that was becoming ever freer and now drifting towards all manner of
negation, Hume came as a high priest, an acknowledged pontiff. He
was the man whom the King delighted to honour, whose praises were
lisped by the King’s children, who was approved by Voltaire, petted
by all the women and revered by all the men. In less than two years,
Walpole finds him[71] ‘the mode,’ ‘fashion itself’; he is ‘treated
with perfect veneration,’ and his works held to be the ‘standards
of writing.’ Hume himself writes to Fergusson[72] that he overheard
an elderly gentleman, ‘esteemed one of the cleverest and most
sensible’ of men, boasting that he had caught sight of Hume that day
at court.[73] At last they pay him the compliment (Madame Geoffrin
leading off, no doubt) of ‘bantering’ him and telling droll stories
of him. He begins to fear that the great ladies are taking him too
much from the society of d’Alembert, Buffon, Marmontel, Diderot, and
the rest.[74]
Among the distinguished women in Paris who wooed him were Mlle.
de Lespinasse, Madame du Bocage, who sent him her works, and the
Marquise de Boufflers, who made no secret of her fondness for the
British. This lady once cherished a ‘_petite flamme_’[75] for
Beauclerk, Johnson’s gay friend, and even crossed the path of the
Lexicographer himself; for it was she whom Johnson, like a squire
of dames, gallantly escorted to her coach, and afterwards honoured
with a letter. The sentimental homage which she paid to Hume incurred
the contempt of Madame du Deffand, who sneered at her worship of
false gods, and made her miserable by leading others to denounce her
idol.[76]
Madame de Boufflers played a prominent part in the great quarrel
between Hume and Rousseau, which involved many of the most prominent
persons mentioned in this chapter. The story, which has been
frequently told, may be briefly dismissed.[77] The union by which
the sentimentalist gave himself in charge to the rationalist, might
well have furnished a Hogarth with a subject for an allegorical group
representing Scotch solidity and Gallic perversity. Hume, through
Madame de Boufflers, had assured Rousseau that he could find in
England appreciation, friends, and a true home; and the ill-assorted
pair accordingly departed from Paris early in 1776. It was not long
before wild letters reached the salons.[78] The two philosophers were
hurling epithets at each other, _scélérat! traître!_
The most immediate cause of their rupture was a letter, written by
Walpole, to amuse Madame Geoffrin’s coterie. It purported to be by
the King of Prussia, and invited Rousseau to come to court and enjoy
his fill of persecution. A brief extract will show the character of
this sprightly epistle:
Si vous persistez à vous creuser l’esprit pour trouver de nouveaux
malheurs, choisissez-les tels que vous voudrez. Je suis roi, je
puis vous en procurer augré de vos souhaits: et ce qui sûrement ne
vous arrivera pas vis-à-vis de vos ennemis, je cesserai de vous
persécuter quand vous cesserez de mettre votre gloire à l’être.[79]
This letter, which had been touched up by Helvétius and the Duc de
Nivernois, circulated in the salons, and at last found its way to
England, where it was printed by various newspapers in April 1766.
The quarrel between Rousseau and Hume, which had been threatening for
some weeks, now burst in fury; for Rousseau believed that Hume was in
league with Walpole to disgrace him.
Every one now plunged into controversy and correspondence. Mlle. de
Lespinasse attempts to soothe feelings. D’Alembert outlines Hume’s
campaign. Baron d’Holbach condoles. Walpole explains. Madame de
Boufflers fears for the renown of philosophy. Madame du Deffand,
who hated everybody concerned, except Walpole, and whom d’Alembert
accused of having stirred up all the trouble, finally did as much as
any one to put an end to it.[80] Nothing having been accomplished,
and the vanity of all having been fully displayed, the matter
subsided, leaving a general conviction in the mind of each that all
the others had conducted themselves very foolishly.
Hume never returned to the salons, though Mlle. de Lespinasse
implored and Madame de Boufflers protested. It was to the latter that
he wrote the tranquil letter from his death-bed ‘without any anxiety
or regret’[81] which elicited the admiration even of Madame du
Deffand[82] and delighted the salons by showing that their favourite
could die like a philosopher.[83]
Hume’s acceptance of the salon and its ideals is in striking
contrast to the fussy dissatisfaction of Horace Walpole. ‘I was
expressing my aversion,’ he writes, ‘to disputes: Mr. Hume, who
very gratefully admires the tone of Paris, having never known any
other tone, said with great surprise, “Why, what do you like if you
hate both disputes and whisk?”’ Walpole’s reply is not recorded.
Certainly he did not like _les philosophes_ and their conversation
which he found ‘solemn, pedantic, and seldom animated but by a
dispute.’[84] He hated authors by profession. He hated political
talk (having practical knowledge and experience of politics). He
hated _savants_, free thinkers, and _beaux esprits_, with their
eternal dissertations on religion and government.[85] ‘I have never
yet,’ he wrote[86] to Montagu, ‘seen or heard anything serious that
was not ridiculous. Jesuits, Methodists, philosophers, politicians,
the hypocrite Rousseau, the scoffer Voltaire, the encyclopedistes,
the Humes, the Lytteltons, the Grenvilles, the atheist tyrant of
Russia, and the mountebank of history Mr. Pitt, all are to me but
impostors in their various ways.’ He is ‘sick of visions and systems
that shove one another aside and come over again like the figures
in a moving picture.’ Yet like all scoffers, he has nothing to set
up in the place of all this. He could not give his heart to the new
system, but he was equally incapable of being loyal to the old.
Dissatisfied with both, he laughed at both, and was nettled because
he could find none in Paris to laugh with him. Laughing was not
fashionable in the salons.[87] He despised the prevalent devotion to
cards. He was scornfully amused at the popularity of the English in
Paris—and even at his own popularity. ‘Vous n’observez,’ said Madame
du Deffand, ‘que pour vous moquer; vous ne tenez à rien, vous vous
passez de tout; enfin, enfin, rien ne vous est nécessaire.’[88] But
there was one thing necessary to Walpole, and it was the thing he
professed to despise—the salon. Without knowing the salons he could
not ridicule them. No satirist can be a hermit. So Walpole frequented
the salons, and vastly enjoyed, not the salons themselves, but his
own superiority to them. It was at Madame Geoffrin’s that his career
began. He brought a note of introduction from Lady Hervey, met Madame
Geoffrin, and discovered to his surprise—and the reader’s—that he
liked her. She had sense, ‘more common sense than he almost ever
met with.’[89] He notes her quickness in penetrating character, her
protection of artists, her services to them, and her ‘thousand little
arts and offices of friendship,’ of which latter she was presently
to give him a specimen. When he had an attack of gout, she took him
under her care. On October 13, 1765, he writes of her to Lady Hervey:
Madame Geoffrin came and sat two hours last night by my
bedside:[90] I could have sworn it had been my lady Hervey, she was
so good to me. It was with so much sense, information, instruction,
and correction! The manner of the latter charms me. I never saw
anybody in my days that catches one’s faults and vanities and
impositions so quick, that explains them to one so clearly, and
convinces one so easily. I never liked to be set right before! You
cannot imagine how I taste it! I make her both my confessor and
director, and begin to think I shall be a reasonable creature at
last, which I had never intended to be. The next time I see her,
I believe I shall say, ‘Oh! Common Sense,[91] sit down: I have
been thinking so and so; is it not absurd?’—for t’other sense and
wisdom, I never liked them; I shall now hate them for her sake. If
it was worth her while, I assure your Ladyship she might govern me
like a child.
The attention which he received was not without its effect, and at
last he was obliged to admit himself pleased.[92] He does not know
when he will return to England; and he dwells with delight on the
honours and distinctions he receives.
He became one of the most prominent men in Parisian society, and for
a time eclipsed the reputation of Hume himself. The latter had been
worshipped as a philosopher; Walpole reigned as a wit. The letter to
Rousseau, which has been described above, captivated the salons, and
probably even made them laugh. The _jeu d’esprit_, which had first
occurred to him at Madame Geoffrin’s, so pleased him that he cast it
into more elaborate form, displayed the forged letter in the salons,
and became famous at once. ‘The copies,’ he writes to Conway, ‘have
spread like wildfire; _et me voici à la mode_.’[93] It was long
before Walpole heard the last of his jest; for, as we have seen,
it involved him in the controversy between Hume and Rousseau, and
Walpole hated controversy as much as he loved wit. But for the moment
it served to draw the eyes of the French world upon him.
Meanwhile, he had become intimate with Madame Geoffrin’s great rival,
the blind Madame du Deffand, now in her sixty-ninth year, who rapidly
displaced Madame Geoffrin in his affections. By December 1765, he
was supping with her twice a week, and in January he wrote Gray his
famous description of her:[94]
Madame du Deffand was for a short time mistress of the Regent,
is now very old and stone-blind, but retains all her vivacity,
wit, memory, judgement, passions, and agreeableness. She goes to
operas, plays, suppers, and Versailles; gives suppers twice a week;
has everything new read to her; makes new songs and epigrams,
ay, admirably, and remembers every one that has been made these
fourscore years. She corresponds with Voltaire, dictates charming
letters to him, contradicts him, is no bigot to him or anybody, and
laughs both at the clergy and the philosophers. In a dispute, into
which she easily falls, she is very warm, and yet scarce ever in
the wrong: her judgement on every subject is as just as possible;
on every point of conduct as wrong as possible: for she is all love
and hatred, passionate for her friends to enthusiasm, still anxious
to be loved, I don’t mean by lovers, and a vehement enemy, but
openly. As she can have no amusement but conversation, the least
solitude and _ennui_ are insupportable to her, and put her into the
power of several worthless people, who eat her suppers when they
can eat nobody’s of higher rank; wink to one another, and laugh at
her; hate her because she has forty times more parts—and venture to
hate her because she is not rich.[95]
It was natural that Walpole should prefer her society to Madame
Geoffrin’s. Being Horace Walpole, it was inevitable that he should
come to regard Madame Geoffrin’s coterie with disdain, to complain
that it was made up of ‘pretended _beaux esprits_’ and _faux
savants_, and that they were ‘very impertinent and dogmatic.’[96]
Madame herself had offended him by calling him[97] ‘the new
Richelieu’ in reference to his numerous conquests. Walpole grew
suddenly afraid of the Geoffrin’s intimacy, and feared that he was
becoming an object of ridicule. But in Madame du Deffand he found
one of his own sort, a woman used to the society of the great but
with no illusions about it, a woman who ruled her circle by despising
almost every one who came into it, who had no faith in any one, and
least of all in the authors and diplomats who surrounded her, and
whose society she endured only because she found it less intolerable
than her dark solitude.
In a beautiful letter to her on her blindness, which had become
total about a dozen years before the period when we encounter her,
Montesquieu reminded[98] her that they were both ‘small rebel spirits
condemned to darkness.’ There is in truth something suggestive of
the powers of darkness in Madame du Deffand’s pride and perversity.
She was of a will never to submit or yield. Pride in the reputation
she had made, a passionate delight in conversation, and, above all,
the horror of her lonely hours of introspection determined her to
continue her salon in spite of all. She did not fail. But a blow
hardly less grievous had yet to fall. Mlle. de Lespinasse, on whose
assistance she had leaned, had caught the secret of her success, and
was forming a coterie of her own, an inner circle within Madame du
Deffand’s. When the blind woman learned of her assistant’s treachery,
she broke with her, and Mlle. de Lespinasse departed, carrying with
her d’Alembert, adored of Madame du Deffand, and his friends, the
flower of the flock.
Even then the dauntless old woman would not give up. The aged sibyl
in her ‘tonneau’[99] at the Convent Saint Joseph could still attract
the curious and the clever. Blind as she was, her ‘portraits’ of
character were better than Madame Geoffrin’s,—who excelled in
portraits,—and the clarity of her vision was surpassed only by the
crispness of her phrasing. At sixty-eight, she had an eager curiosity
about her own times[100] that was a stimulus to youth. To speak with
her was to witness the triumph of mind.
But her heart was as dust and ashes within her. About her she could
feel only duplicity and hatred;[101] she had no faith in man or in
God. She considered her friends as those who would not kill but
would look on while others killed.[102] The springs of happiness
and hope had gone dry. And always the spectre of Ennui steals
behind her, and casts its shadow over her withered soul. Literature
no longer interests or amuses; she finds philosophy poisoned by
affectation;[103] she is bored by all historians, and is glad when
she can lay down the first volume of Gibbon.[104] She hears Gluck’s
_Orphée_, and is bored. She hears _The Barber of Seville_, and is
bored.[105] She reads the _Iliad_, and is bored.[106] There is
nothing in her life that does not feel this blight.
And then, in the late evening of her days, a miracle occurred. The
dry branch budded and bloomed. In the person of Walpole, with his
chill though delicate cynicism (so like her own), romance burst into
her life, and she knew love and the pain of love. Her passion for
the Englishman twenty years her junior transcends all comparison.
It has in it the tenderness of age without its resignation, and
the insistence of youth without its joy. It wreaks itself in
protestations, reproaches, and demands which it knows must be futile.
In Madame du Deffand’s letters to Walpole, recently published in
their entirety,[107] there is a strong undercurrent which moves
relentlessly to tragedy—tragedy that is no less poignant because its
protagonist is an old woman and its theme the progress of a slow
despair.
To Walpole all this was a source of great uneasiness. Like most
superior folk, he feared the world. He feared that letters might
be intercepted, that Madame du Deffand might talk; that the story
might become public; that he might become an object of ridicule—and
ridicule was to him a hell. He urged upon Madame du Deffand the
necessity of reticence. He was crushingly persistent. The aged woman
did her best to smother her feelings, but she could not altogether
smother her resentment:
J’ai une véritable amitié pour vous, vous le savez, et quoique vous
vous en soyez souvent trouvé importuné, que vous ayez fait tout
votre possible et même tout ce qui est _inimaginable_ pour détruire
cette amitié, je suis persuadée que vous n’êtes point fâché qu’elle
subsiste.... Et comment est-il possible qu’un aussi bon homme que
vous veuille tourmenter une si faible créature que moi, de qui
vous ne pouvez jamais craindre aucun mal, ni qui puisse vous faire
encourir aucun ridicule ni aucun blâme?[108]
Walpole’s letters to Madame du Deffand are fortunately not preserved;
but one imagines that he was bored by this strain. To him Madame du
Deffand was an aristocratic French woman, a match for him in wit,
frankness, and cynicism, who could provide him with that social life
which, like her, he affected to despise but could not abandon. He had
admired her capacity for disillusion, and now she was the victim of
an illusion, and he was the object of it. The situation was unusual.
But though Walpole could not respond, he did not break with her, or
care to break. When, in 1775, he visited her, for the third time, she
showered him with so many engagements that he needed ‘the activity
of a squirrel and the strength of a Hercules’ to go through with
them.[109] He was pleased. He asserted that Madame du Deffand was a
star in the East well worth coming to adore.[110] With a literary
friendship that displayed itself in salons, in dedications of books,
and in temperate letters, he could be well content. At her death he
wrote of her with true affection, gratitude, and grief. But she had
longed in vain for the expression of these, and of more than these,
during the desolation of her latter months.
The effect upon Walpole of this acquaintance with Madame du Deffand
and her salon was to fix in him certain characteristics not always
attractive. She had been able to show him the salon in the one aspect
which could appeal to him; where persiflage had not yielded to the
pedantry of the new philosophy. In his association with her and
with the group whose inspiration she was, he acquired that amused
tolerance with which he viewed the attempts of the bluestockings in
England to rival the salons which he had known in France.
* * * * *
Among Madame du Deffand’s visitors was the man to whom she referred
as ‘the famous Mr. Burke.’ His visit to Paris was of less than a
month’s duration. Madame du Deffand met him on February 9, 1773;[111]
and he left France, apparently on the first day of March.[112] Burke
had not come to Paris to enjoy the fruits of his fame—though his
reputation in the salons as the author of the Junius letters[113]
would have given him a career—or to study the philosophical and
political principles of the day. He had placed his son Richard at
Auxerre to learn French; but before returning to England he glanced
at the French court and at the salons. His attitude towards the
latter was unique. ‘It was,’ says Morley,[114] ‘almost as though
the solemn hierophant of some mystic Egyptian temple should have
found himself amid the brilliant chatter of a band of reckless,
keen-tongued disputants of the garden or the porch at Athens.’ Yet
any seriousness of manner which he may have displayed exalted him
in the eyes of the philosophers. Madame du Deffand, though she
afterwards learned to despise his writing as verbose, diffuse,
obscure, and affected,[115] liked him at once. ‘Il me paraît avoir
infiniment d’esprit,’ she writes,[116] and again, ‘Il est très
aimable.’ She gave a supper for him, and exerted herself to assemble
the most distinguished and clever members of her circle.[117] She had
him invited to Madame de Luxembourg’s, where he heard La Harpe read
a new tragedy in verse, _Les Barmécides_.[118] He also talked with
Madame du Deffand of a new book, _Essai Générale de Tactique_[119] by
the Count de Guibert, dealing with the state of politics and military
science in Europe. This elaborate and enthusiastic treatise, which
contained an attack on idle sovereigns and corrupt courts, appealed
to Burke; and, at Madame du Deffand’s request, he carried a copy of
it to Walpole. Burke knew the same author’s tragedy, _Le Connétable
de Bourbon_,[120] a fact worth mention as indicating an acquaintance
with the salon of Mlle. de Lespinasse, whose lover the author was.
Burke must have heard Guibert read this play aloud, for it had not
yet been acted or published, and the reading may well have occurred
at Mlle. de Lespinasse’s. Again, it may have been in that salon that
Burke attacked the philosophy of Hume,[121] and defended Beattie
against the sneers of the free thinkers—a course that must have taxed
his abundant ingenuity as much as his defective French.
It would be interesting to know the conversation that passed between
Burke and Walpole after the former’s return to England. They met, and
it would seem that Burke expressed strong opinions on the growing
atheism of France, and told of his attempt to defend the Christian
system, for Walpole wrote[122] to the Countess of Upper Ossory: ‘Mr.
Burke is returned from Paris, where he was so much the mode that,
happening to dispute with the philosophers, it grew the fashion to
be Christians. St. Patrick himself did not make more converts.’ But
whatever effect Burke may have had upon the freethinkers of Paris,
there can be no doubt of their effect upon him. The amazing downrush
of principles, religious, philosophical, and political, which he
witnessed in France confirmed him in that natural conservatism, that
desire ‘never wholly or at once to depart from antiquity’ to which he
was becoming more and more passionately devoted as the great French
crisis drew on.
The spectacle of Burke converting the philosophers to Christianity
sinks into pale insignificance beside Yorick Sterne’s conversion of
Madame de Vence from the perils of deism—an incident familiar to
every reader of _The Sentimental Journey_. It was in the winter of
1762 that Sterne made his entry into the salons, and discovered those
guiding principles of compliment, flattery, and general philandering,
which enabled him to win all the _esprits_, and, incidentally, to put
an end to the deism of Madame de Vence. Seated on a sofa beside the
lady, whose waning beauty should have made her a deist five years
before, he revealed the dangers to which beauty, particularly in
deists, was exposed, and dwelt on the defense provided by religious
sentiments. ‘“We are not adamant,” said I, taking hold of her
hand—“and there is need of all restraints, till age in her own time
steals in and lays them on us—but, my dear lady,” said I, kissing her
hand—“’tis too—too soon——” I declare I had the credit all over Paris
of unperverting Madame de V——. She affirmed to Mons. D——[123] and
the Abbe M——[124] that in one half-hour I had said more for revealed
religion than all their Encyclopedia had said against it—I was lifted
directly into Madame de V——’s _Coterie_—and she put off the epocha of
deism for two years.’
Yorick learned, too, the importance of self-obliteration. ‘I had been
misrepresented to Madame de Q—— as an _esprit_—Madame de Q—— was an
_esprit_ herself: she burnt with impatience to see me, and hear me
talk. I had not taken my seat before I saw she did not care a sous
whether I had any wit or no—I was let in, to be convinced she had.—I
call heaven to witness I never once opened the door of my lips.’
Such anecdotes may not give us facts,[125] but they record something
quite as useful, Sterne’s impression of the salon, and are a reliable
indication of his general conduct there. The wits of Paris found
the most perfect resemblance between Sterne and his books. Garat
asserts[126] that between seeing the author and reading his works
there was almost no difference at all. There are peculiarly Shandian
touches in some of his letters to Garrick, as his mention[127] of the
Baron d’Holbach, ‘one of the most learned men over here, the great
protector of wits and the Sçavans who are no wits.’ Baron d’Holbach
was the ‘maître d’hôtel’ of philosophy, friend of Voltaire, Rousseau,
and Diderot, with a salon of his own, in which he presided over a
school of physicists who held a new theory of nature. Four years
later Walpole[128] eschewed this ‘pigeon-house’ of _savants_ and
their system of antediluvian deluges invented to prove the eternity
of matter. Sterne, who was more affable than Walpole, though no less
sharp-sighted, enjoyed himself there and became a friend of Diderot
(to whom he presented a collection of English books).
It is probable that Sterne made a pretty complete tour of the salons,
and there is good reason for assuming that at Madame Geoffrin’s[129]
he made the acquaintance of Mlle. de Lespinasse. This young woman,
who was about to become one of the most brilliant hostesses in
Paris,[130] was eagerly appreciative of the emotional aspect of
Sterne’s work. Compact of passion and nerves, a disciple of Rousseau,
a ‘daughter of the Sun,’[131] and a sort of female counterpart of
Byron, she ate her heart out, was consumed with hopeless love for
three men at once, and attempted suicide, quite in the familiar
manner of a later school. To love and pain, to heaven and hell, she
determined to devote herself.[132] Loathing the world where ‘fools
and automatons abound,’ she must construct the world of romance for
herself.
Shandyism won her by its frank display of emotion. There were aspects
of it which she could never have appreciated, its wayward humour
and insincerity, its sprightliness and its dirt; but the tears and
the tenderness she understood by instinct. The loves of Yorick and
Eliza, never very popular in England, appealed to her as after the
order of nature, and no doubt reminded her of her own relations with
d’Alembert.
After the appearance of the _Sentimental Journey_, Mlle. de
Lespinasse wrote two chapters[133] in imitation of that work which,
though reproducing only such features of Sterne’s manner as she
understood, are of great importance as showing the influence of
Sterne in the salons. In these the French sentimentalist has adopted
the Englishman’s manner in order to pay court to her benefactor,
Madame Geoffrin. The chapters record two examples[134] of the elder
woman’s charity. The first of these, the incident of the broken vase,
is attributed to Sterne himself. Yorick is represented as discovering
that a vase which he has recently purchased has a broken lid. The
workmen who have just delivered the treasure implore him to have
mercy upon their fellow who broke it, whose accident has so alarmed
him that he has not dared to appear. He is now fairly in the road to
ruin. Pleased with the sympathetic distress of the brother artisans,
Yorick inquires into the case, and is able, through La Fleur, to
relieve the poor fellow’s misery. He ministers to the needs of a wife
and four children, and rewards the kindly friends with a generous
_pourboire_.
The scene of the second chapter is Madame Geoffrin’s salon. Here
Sterne is represented as hearing that lady tell the story of
her milk-woman. The pathetic death of a cow (sole prop of the
milk-woman’s family) recalls the incidents of the dead ass, and of
Maria de Moulines and her goat in the _Sentimental Journey_; but
there are serious deficiencies. Sterne, like Mlle. de Lespinasse,
would have dwelt on the sentimental pleasure of presenting the
milk-woman with two consolatory cows, but he would not have missed
the humour in the fact that the cream afterwards delivered to
Madame Geoffrin was not fit to drink. Mlle. de Lespinasse shows her
appreciation of Sterne’s sentimentalism and her ignorance of his
Shandyism.
This imitation of Sterne seems to be the chief record in French of
Yorick’s impression on the salon. If it is a reliable view—and there
seems to be no good reason for rejecting it—it is clear that Sterne
preferred to appear in the drawing-room of Paris without his cap
and bells. He realized perhaps that the way to win the hearts of
French ladies was with his warm heart and his tearful eye, and not
by the sudden caprice of his humour. It was Sterne the emotional
epicure, the professed philanderer, and not Yorick the jester, who
was known to the salons; and in thus exploiting his sentimentalism,
he continued and emphasized one aspect of the work of Rousseau, and,
with Richardson, became one of the chief foreign influences exerted
upon the romantic movement in France.
* * * * *
But it was not till the time of Gibbon that any English author
duplicated the success of Hume in the Parisian salon, for none had
so nearly satisfied the conditions required of an _esprit fort_.
Gibbon was the destroyer of ancient superstitions, who had attacked
ecclesiastical tyranny with a new weapon. The scepticism out of which
Hume had made a philosophy became in Gibbon’s _Decline and Fall_ a
new historical method as deadly as it was disguised. For Gibbon, as
for Hume, the salon was a sort of Valhalla, at once a reward and an
arena, in which, surrounded by his peers, he was to continue his
slaughterous career. Success came at once. He was more popular than
Hume, for he did not have the social defects which had, after a time,
somewhat dimmed the lustre of Hume’s success. He had, for example,
no difficulty with the French language, a tongue which he had spoken
from his youth.[135] Madame du Deffand found him as French as her
closest friends,[136] and Madame Necker rebuked him for allowing
a Frenchman to translate his _History_ when he could have done it
better himself.[137] Moreover, though he was an uglier duckling
than Hume, his manners had a pomposity which did not encourage
familiarity. ‘Il ne tombe pas dans les mêmes ridicules,’ said Madame
du Deffand, who regarded it as no slight achievement to avoid
becoming a fool when surrounded by fools.[138]
Something of Gibbon’s success was due to a period of preparation, as
it were, an earlier career in the salons fourteen years before. He
had received his training in 1763 when, at the age of twenty-six,
he had come to Paris to meet the literary world, to membership in
which he felt himself entitled by his _Essai sur l’Étude de la
Littérature_, a work which had achieved the dignity of a second
edition. Lady Hervey had furnished him with an introduction to
Madame Geoffrin, and he found a place weekly at her famous Wednesday
dinners. He visited other salons, notably those of Madame du Bocage
and of the Baron d’Holbach, who had entertained Sterne the year
before. Helvétius treated him like a friend.[139] It was a sufficient
success for a young man. It was not to be expected that he should
leave an impress upon Parisian society at this time, nor did he; but
there is little doubt that that society contributed in some measure
to his lucidity of vision and to the prevailing spirit of disillusion
for which he was presently to be famous.
When he returned to Paris in 1777 he shone in no reflected light,
for the publication of the first volume of his _Decline and Fall_ in
the preceding year had already made him a European reputation. The
book was almost immediately translated into French. The spirit of the
work, and in particular the famous explanation of the development
of Christianity, appealed to the philosophers. The indignant
but somewhat ineffectual attacks of pious English folk upon the
rationalistic historian pleased them hardly less. Gibbon’s reception
was all that he could desire. ‘I was introduced,’ he tells us in
his _Memoirs_, ‘to the first names and characters of France, who
distinguished me by such marks of civility and kindness as gratitude
will not suffer me to forget and modesty will not allow me to
enumerate.’ According to his own account,[140] he shone in disputes,
and got his great victory over the Abbé Mably in the discussion
concerning the republican form of government. But in general, the
French were struck by his affability. Madame du Deffand could
find no other fault in him than his abiding desire to please, and
observed that _beaux esprits_ had the same fascination for him that
the weapons of Odysseus had for the disguised Achilles. At times he
seemed servile, and she was on the point of telling him to comfort
himself with the reflection that he deserved to be a Frenchman.[141]
But though he was much in the company of Madame du Deffand, that
‘agreeable young lady of eighty-two,’[142] to whom Walpole had given
him a letter of introduction; though he found the best company in
Paris in her salon, and made numerous visits with her (notably to
the Marquise de Boufflers’); though he constantly took supper with
her[143] when she happened to be supping at home, it was not with her
that he was most intimate during his triumphant months in Paris. His
name will ever be linked with that of Madame Necker. His relations
with her had begun nearly a quarter of a century before, and may be
read, in a somewhat ameliorated version, in his own _Memoirs_; the
lady’s story is more fully set forth by the Vicomte d’Haussonville
in _Le Salon de Madame Necker_. It will suffice to say here that,
after being jilted by Gibbon, the ambitious young Suisse had married
a man destined to be hardly less famous in his own time, had moved
to Paris, studied, as it were, under Madame Geoffrin, and at length
opened a salon of her own. Though less brilliantly gifted than other
hostesses, she was perhaps even more ambitious than they. There is
something modern about her passion for improvement. She was not
unwilling to be a _femme savante_. She disputed with the philosophers
and recorded philosophical platitudes, along with gossip and rules
of grammar, in her commonplace-book. It may have been the literary
ambition of this lady, it may have been her essential sweetness of
character, it may have been some form of feminine pride, that led
her to seek friendship with the man who had once refused her his
love. During her visit to London in 1776, Hume was constant in his
attentions to her and to her husband. In September, after her return
to France, she wrote to him,[144] urging him to come to her: ‘C’est
à Paris qu’il est agréable d’être un grand homme.’ When at length
he came, she would no doubt have been glad to ‘plant’ him in her
house, after the French custom; but Gibbon preferred his freedom:
‘The reception I have met with from them,’ he writes,[145] ‘very
far surpassed my most sanguine expectations. I do not indeed lodge
in their house (as it might excite the jealousy of the husband, and
procure me a letter de cachet), but I live very much with them, dine
and sup whenever they have company, which is almost every day, and
whenever I like it, for they are not in the least exigeans.’ Their
satisfaction was no less than Gibbon’s. His serious conversation
delighted the serious soul of Madame Necker[146] by its union of
interest in details with enthusiasm for great principles, and by the
sundry graces which adorned it.
Madame du Deffand always felt that Gibbon’s respect for the standards
of the _beaux esprits_ had corrupted his style. She heard in it the
declamatory tone of the salons; it had the glitter and the lust for
fame with which she was well acquainted.[147] She knew of course that
this could not have been the result of Gibbon’s later sojourn in
Paris, but she was aware that he had come under the influence of the
French salons during an earlier visit. Her hypothesis, which accounts
for something of the inflated rhetoric of Gibbon, is certainly
worthy of attention; and it may be noted, in support of her view,
that Madame Necker, who is a fair measure of what the _philosophes_
wanted, found in Gibbon’s style a ‘captivating magic.’[148]
When Gibbon left Paris there was universal regret. At the Neckers’
they talked of nothing but this bereavement[149] and the hope of
a return. He went back, in pudgy complacency, to his historical
studies. He had conversed and even disputed with the prophets of a
new era; but like the other rationalists, he seems to have had no
suspicion of the great change which was presently to make salons
impossible. His ignorance of the approaching storm is a significant
illustration of the fact that the discussions of the salon were
essentially academic, conducted in happy ignorance of the results
which were destined to succeed them.
PART II
THE ENGLISH SALON