THE EARLIER ENGLISH SALON
The first English salons, broadly so termed, appear in the age
of Elizabeth. A tradition of the social patronage of letters was
then established which had a short though brilliant history and
which might, under favourable conditions, have become of permanent
importance to the literature. It could not, however, survive the
period of the Civil Wars and the Commonwealth; and thus the earlier
English salon, despite its promising beginning, goes from less to
less until it disappears altogether about 1700. The later salon had
no connection with it; indeed the eighteenth century seems to have
been quite unaware of its existence. The earlier institution was
perhaps more national in character; it was certainly more vital,
and it will therefore be profitable to sketch its history, if only
for purposes of contrast. This earlier movement must be carefully
distinguished from the larger subject of woman’s place in English
literature, from her contribution to and her growing interest in
it; above all, it must be distinguished from the history of English
_femmes savantes_. Such a larger subject there is, but I have no
intention of treating it here. My purpose is merely to point out
those social and literary institutions set up by English women which
correspond in a general way with the salons as described in the
second and third chapters of this work.
The Elizabethan prototype of the salon is even closer to the
Renaissance courts than the French salons themselves. The greatest
of the Elizabethan patronesses, the Countess of Pembroke, was, even
in her own day, compared with Elizabeth Gonzaga,[150] and her house
at Wilton, which contemporaries refer to as a ‘college’ or ‘school,’
was like nothing so much as the little academe that we have seen to
be characteristic of Italy. Although the most distinguished female
writer of her age, the Countess of Pembroke was, and is, better
known for her coterie than for her writings. ‘She was,’ says Aubrey,
‘the greatest patronesse of wit and learning of any lady of her
time.’[151] Spenser hailed her (in true salon style) as Urania,
and Meres compared her to Octavia, Virgil’s patroness. Like her
brother, she was enthusiastic for the classical tradition, and used
her influence with Kyd and Daniel to keep Senecan tragedy alive. The
dedication to Daniel’s _Defence of Ryme_ implies that the book was
produced under her immediate inspiration. The author refers to Wilton
as his ‘best schoole,’ in the same tone in which Spenser acknowledges
himself ‘bounden’ to it ‘by many singular favours and great graces.’
Miss Young, the recent biographer of the Countess, who proclaims
her ‘in the very best sense of the word a bluestocking,’ marshals a
list of twenty works dedicated to her, and the list might be almost
indefinitely extended by adding to it the passages in Elizabethan
poetry written in her praise. To neglect the latter would be to pass
over some of the most typical utterances of Edmund Spenser.
Thus Elizabethan England saw the salon at its finest. With the ideal
of courtly society numerous translations of the Italian classics had
already made it familiar. There is evidence of the ideal everywhere
in Shakespeare’s romantic comedies. The preciosity of the court of
Navarre and the whole tone of _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, the badinage
of Benedick and Beatrice, the poetic dialogue of Lorenzo and Jessica
in praise of the night, and even the mingling of the courtly and
the pastoral in the life of Arden Forest—these are all near to the
spirit of the Renaissance court and the society with which we are
dealing. The company of gallant men and gracious women idealized
in Shakespeare’s comedies might well have served as the model of
the salon, had the seventeenth century fostered the development of
anything so courtly.
Hardly less distinguished is the group of men who surrounded Lucy,
Countess of Bedford. Her house at Twickenham Park, famous for its
Holbeins and its garden, she loved to fill with men of genius. Ben
Jonson, Chapman, Davies, Drayton, and Daniel were all proud to call
themselves her friend, and almost every one of them dedicated to her
some work of permanent value in English literature. Jonson addressed
to her a poetical epistle and three characteristic epigrams. His
language, though pompous, is probably sincere:
Lucy, you brightness of our sphere, who are
The Muses’ evening as their morning-star.[152]
The Countess was the recipient of more great verse than the entire
group of bluestockings. Daniel, who celebrated her in the _Vision
of the Twelve Goddesses_, has been called her poet laureate, and
there would be no reason for rejecting the title if it did not more
properly belong to John Donne. Not only did that poet write _Twicknam
Garden_ in her honour, and address her repeatedly in verse epistles
which praise her beauty, virtue, and learning in terms of the most
affectionate extravagance, but, says Mr. Gosse, owed to her the very
revival of interest in his art.[153] Donne’s letters seem to show
that he submitted poems to the judgment of the Countess; for she was
herself a poet, and is thought to have written one of the elegies
commonly attributed to Donne.[154] Certain it is that at her house
he enjoyed the very type of society which, a century later, made
the fame of salons. He always speaks of Lady Bedford with the same
gratitude and awe which may be found in Castiglione’s praise of the
Duchess of Urbino; he accepted the same sort of pecuniary assistance
from her that Frenchmen received from Madame Geoffrin. Nay, more, he
goes to her in her garden that he may, at eye and ear,
Receive such balmes as else cure everything.[155]
He writes to Sir Henry Goodyer:
For her delight (since she descends to them) I had reserved not
only all the verses I should make, but all the thoughts of women’s
worthiness.
He is concerned not to be lightly esteemed ‘in that Tribe and that
house’ where he has lived.[156]
In all respects, therefore, the Countess’s coterie would seem to
stand just half-way between court and salon—if it is necessary to
distinguish the two terms at all. If it is urged that we have no
evidence of the stimulus wrought by conversation in the group, it may
be answered that even this lack is apparent only and is due simply to
the meagreness of contemporary records.
Similarly slender is our knowledge of other women whom we ought
in all probability to associate with the two just discussed: Lady
Rutland, Lady Wroth, and the Countess of Huntington, women who felt a
keen interest in poets and in the welfare of poetry. As it is, the
death of Lady Bedford in 1627 must be taken as marking the end of the
Elizabethan system of feminine patronage.
* * * * *
With the accession of Charles I and the supremacy of French social
ideals in the person of Queen Henrietta Maria, a change comes over
the salon. A new side of it is developed, and an older side is
forgotten. What had been a court of patronage became a court of
love. The system of Platonic love, which is a characteristic mark of
salons at various periods, comes to the fore. It had existed in the
earlier salons, as Donne’s Petrarchan devotion to the Countess of
Bedford is sufficient to show; but the new order of things made it
the centre of all. This shift of emphasis was a loss to the salon,
for literature—or rather poetry—became a tool in the process of
courtship rather than an end in itself; and the mistress accepted
poetical conceits and extravagant lyrics as evidence of worship
from her ‘servants’ in love. Thus the whole system of courtly love
was introduced hot from France, and the subtleties and silliness of
the _précieuses galantes_ were seen in England.[157] The type of
the new salon mistress is the Countess Carlisle, a Percy by birth,
the favourite of Henrietta Maria, and the idol of the court. She
received poetical tributes of the conventional kind from half the
poets of the era, and the story of her gallantries—to give them no
harsher name—is a part of the history of England.
Intrigue is the natural result of gallantry such as this, and
intrigue lasted long after the original Platonic impetus was spent.
Intrigue naturally tends away from social life: Platonic emotions
make excellent subjects for discussion, but intrigue is impatient
of talk. Any one who will compare Cartwright’s _Panegyric to the
Countess of Carlisle_ with Suckling’s _Lady Carlisle Walking in
Hampton Court Garden_ may see how readily Platonic ecstasies sank
into the filth of the mire. The two poems measure the extremes of
courtly verse, and define its nature. It ranges, as Mr. Fletcher has
said, ‘all the way from exalted mysticism through mere gallantry, to
mocking cynicism.’ Although these moods all flourished in the foreign
salons of various periods, they never became in England the peculiar
attributes of salon life as distinct from mere social customs.
They passed on to the salons of the Restoration little more than a
general tradition of Platonic and pastoral mannerism and a handful of
classical pseudonyms useful to the conventionally amorous.
* * * * *
When with the Restoration the feminine influence on the current of
literature emerges once more, it is again changed in aspect—like
everything else. So far as the destinies of the English salon are
concerned, the Restoration marks no real advance. If there is not
an actual loss of ground, there is at least a change of direction.
Women now become aspirants to an independent literary reputation.
The groups which literary women formed about themselves never
quite suggest the atmosphere of the salon, for their aims seldom
give evidence of a desire to approach literature from the social
side.[158] It was no longer the ambition of woman to rule the world
of letters from above or from beyond as a sort of Muse by whose aid
and in whose honour all was to be done, but to enter that world
herself and there to claim equality with man. It was again only a
shift of emphasis, but it was sufficient to destroy the social aspect
of the salon. A salon is not a school of professionals.
It seems strange that the Parisian salon should not have been
imported bodily by the returning courtiers. A French salon was
for a time conducted at court, as we shall see; but it was not
brought there through English influence, and always remained a
foreign growth, not even adopting the English language. English
literary women, despite the presence of this model, seem to have
been incapable of creating anything more than a circle of friends,
cordially interested in their literary ambitions, but hardly
considering the coterie the highest social expression of the literary
life.
The nearest approach to salon life in this period is the coterie
formed by the ‘matchless Orinda,’ Mrs. Katherine Philips. This
amiable young woman, with a gift for versifying and a truly social
instinct, achieved no slight reputation in her own day. At Cardigan
Priory, her Welsh estate, she conducted something very like a salon.
‘She instituted,’ says Mr. Gosse,[159] ‘a Society of Friendship
to which male and female members were admitted, and in which
poetry, religion and the human heart were to form the subjects of
discussion.’ Here is the salon spirit and a reliance on conversation
as the truest inspiration to social life—a thing which we shall not
encounter again till the days of the bluestockings. Orinda adopted
the prevalent custom of giving literary names to her friends,
indulged in Platonic friendships of the most florid kind, praised her
female friends in verse, and despatched glowing sentiments to them in
letters:
I gasp for you with an impatience that is not to be imagined by any
soul wound up to a less concern in friendship than yours is, and
therefore I cannot hope to make others sensible of my vast desires
to enjoy you.[160]
Whatever interest Mrs. Philips’s works may possess must be shared
with this group, with ‘Rosania,’ ‘Lucasia,’ ‘Poliarchus,’ and the
rest, for to them a large proportion of her writing was directly
addressed. It is to be regretted that we are not more fully informed
regarding the relations of certain eminent men with the coterie. The
general interest felt by the Royalist poets in her career has been
taken to point to a personal connection with her, but it is doubtful
whether the relations of such men as Dryden, Cowley, and Denham with
her were anything more than formally courteous. To them she was a
new phenomenon in the literary world, a female author, a prodigy
that attracted attention but did not threaten rivalry—a woman and
therefore to be flattered, a poetess and therefore to be called a
tenth Muse. Cowley, who equates her with Pope Joan, is almost comic
in his praise:
But if Apollo should design
A woman laureat to make,
Without dispute he would Orinda take,
Though Sappho and the famous Nine
Stood by and did repine.[161]
But this is elegy, not burlesque.
With Jeremy Taylor, ‘Palæmon,’ the case is different. In 1657 he put
forth a duodecimo volume entitled _A Discourse of the Nature, Offices
and Measures of Friendship_, which, the title-page announces, was
‘written in answer to a Letter from the most ingenious and vertuous
M. K. P.’ Orinda had written to Taylor, with whom she must have been
already on terms of intimacy, to inquire ‘how far a dear and perfect
friendship is authorized by the principles of Christianity.’ The
answer is a wholly delightful essay which was widely popular in the
seventeenth century and deserves to be more generally known to-day.
Taylor praises Mrs. Philips as ‘not only greatly instructed by the
direct notices of things, but also by great experience in the matter
of which you now inquire.’ He concludes that it is not ill that
she should ‘entertain brave friendships and worthy societies’; but
takes occasion to warn her against the fantastic Platonism of the
salon:[162]
They that build castles in the aire, and look upon friendship, as
upon a fine Romance, a thing that pleases the fancy, but is good
for nothing else will doe well when they are asleep, or when they
come to Elysium; and for ought I know in the mean time may be as
much in love with _Mandana_ in the _Grand Cyrus_, as with the
_Countess of Exeter_; and by dreaming of perfect and abstracted
friendships, make them so immaterial that they perish in the
handling and become good for nothing.
In the postscript to Mrs. Philips, she is requested to forward the
essay to Dr. Wedderburn, if she ‘shall think it fit that these pass
further’ than her own ‘eye and closet.’ Such was Taylor’s trust in
Orinda; such his tribute to her.
It must be admitted that Orinda’s relations with the authors of her
time are little short of remarkable. Her name is written across
some of the most characteristic poetry of the age. When she was
but twenty, commendatory verses by her were prefixed to the Poems
of Vaughan the Silurist. Before the end of her short life—she
died in 1664, soon after her thirty-fourth birthday—she had even
attracted the notice of Dryden. Her contemporaries appear to have
been serious in their belief that she had made herself a permanent
place in English literature, and for many years after her death
kept her fame alive by publishing her plays, poems, and letters, in
which she was invariably described as ‘celebrated,’ ‘matchless,’
and ‘incomparable.’ Her coterie made but little impression on the
literature of its time; but that may well have been due to its short
career. Mrs. Philips possessed a refinement of taste and of character
by no means common among the literary ladies of the time, and a
noble though highly sentimental affection for her friends. These
are characteristics which, had she lived, she might have made of
practical advantage to the world of letters.
* * * * *
On a somewhat lower social plane the notorious Mrs. Aphra Behn
carried on the traditions of the matchless Orinda. Like her, Mrs.
Behn had her coterie which she celebrated in conventional lyrics.
In the poem entitled _Our Cabal_, the various members are described
under pastoral pseudonyms, Alexis, Damon, Amoret, and the like. It is
impossible to identify the persons referred to, but it is unlikely
that any of them attained to literary fame. Gallantry, coquetry,
and the whole paraphernalia of the amatory art formed the exclusive
business of the coterie. With the world of letters it had little to
do. Thus it touches the salon upon its least important side. But
Mrs. Behn, or ‘Astræa,’ as her friends rashly called her, developed
another side by emulating the practice of Mlle. Scudéry, and weaving
certain of her own adventures—for she had had many—into the body of
her novels. This practice of colouring the events of an interminable
romance with personal allusions and allegorical meanings was one of
the principal results of salon activity in Paris during the later
seventeenth century; but it is not characteristic of the salon at
its finest and was, so far as English literature was concerned, but
a fad which had no future at all. Moreover Mrs. Behn’s romances lack
what is best in the type, that courtliness which can alone redeem
such works from artificiality and dulness. It is true that Mrs. Behn
escapes dulness, but she does not achieve courtliness. Thus she
misses the very point at which such work may come under the influence
of fine society. As it is, far from serving the cause of literature
by attracting authors to the urbanities of life, her scandalous
novels brought both their author and her profession into disrepute.
Her unique achievement was to show that a woman could make her living
by her pen. Her career brought her inevitably into touch and even
into competition with male authors, and her easy manners enabled her
to associate on terms of pleasant familiarity with Dryden and Otway;
but all this is suggestive rather of the _camaraderie_ of the modern
literary world than of the atmosphere of salons.
* * * * *
Meanwhile Hortense, Duchess of Mazarin, and niece of the Cardinal
of that name, had set up in London a genuine French salon. It owes
its somewhat exotic fame entirely to the Chevalier de Saint Évremond
who wrote of its mistress in language of the most riotous hyperbole.
Some of the best-known pages of this amorous old wit were produced
in honour of the fair French refugee at the court of Charles II. He
wrote poems to her; he wrote a ‘portrait’ of her, in which her charms
are analysed in such detail as almost to indicate a state of dotage
in him; to satisfy a whim of hers he wrote a Funeral Oration for her
while she was yet alive that she might see her praises set forth in
the manner of Bossuet. He wrote a discourse on religion to embody the
thoughts which she had drawn out during a conversation in her salon.
In a letter to her, which accompanied the essay, he asserts that she
has given the lie to the old statement that truth must be banished
from ordinary conversation, for she can make truth so attractive
as to reconcile all minds to it and restore it to its proper place
in the world.[163] But all this is a mere speck in the avalanche of
flattery. Her conversation, he assures her elsewhere,[164] surpasses
Plutarch in gravity, Seneca in sententiousness, and Montaigne in
depth.
But the philosophic goddess and her withered prophet were not always
happy together. The Duchess was overfond of bassette, a game in which
Saint Évremond indulged chiefly to please her, lamenting the loss of
her conversation the while, and addressing poetical protests to her.
The passion for gaming, which threatened to become a profession or a
fury with her, is less revolting than the _amours_ in which the lady
(more beautiful than Helen or Cleopatra[165]) involved herself. The
fascination of the Merry Monarch and the death of a favourite lover
after a duel fought with an infatuated nephew, bring her love-affairs
out of the Platonic atmosphere, so essential to salons, into the
realm of ugly realism.
The salon Mazarin, which came to an end with the death of the Duchess
in 1699, thus tended to associate the literary hostess with vice as
well as with letters. As Mrs. Behn had degraded the name of woman in
the world of hack-writers, so the Duchess of Mazarin degraded it
in the drawing-room. Her salon represented a vicious and a foreign
institution, which, though it gained a foothold at Court, was quite
without influence upon English life and literature.
* * * * *
With the death of the Duchess of Mazarin we reach the end of the
seventeenth century and the end of anything like a salon in England
until the time of the bluestockings. The results of the feminist
movement at the close of that century[166] are seen in two distinct
yet definitely related facts. In the first place, a large number of
women were encouraged, by the success of Mrs. Behn, to attempt the
production of literature, and the female author and wit became a
current subject of satire. With all this we have here nothing to do.
Women like Catherine Trotter, Mary Pix, and Mrs. Manley, far from
promoting the social recognition of literature, tended to deflect the
influence of woman from the drawing-room to the noise and strife of
Grub Street. The satire that was poured out on them and their kind as
learned women must not be taken to point to the existence of anything
like a salon, strictly considered. Terms borrowed from French
literature were freely flung about; but references to _ruelles_
and _femmes savantes_ were so loosely used that they are not to be
thought of having the same significance when repeated by English
authors that they have in their own country.
In the second place, and largely as a result of the opinion in which
such female wits were held, we find a mass of tracts, consisting
of Defences of, Apologies for, and Serious Proposals to Women,
all working towards a vindication of the sex. Such vindications
frequently strike the reader as having been written to prove the very
charges which they exist to rebut. In any case, this flood of feeble
defences seems to show that woman had forgotten her high office as
inspirer and patron of letters, which she had hitherto always taken
for granted, and had decided to occupy herself with vague questions
of equality and natural capacity. We have moved far from the spacious
times of the Countess of Pembroke.
In the age of Anne, English women lost what was probably the best
chance they ever had to reëstablish the feminine patronage of letters
which distinguished the age of Elizabeth. The tone of urbanity which
characterized the literature of the early eighteenth century ought to
have given birth to salons. The presence of a Stuart queen upon the
throne and the supremacy of a school of authors by no means averse
from social pleasures, offered a unique opportunity to women to give
social expression to their interest in literature and to inspire and
assist authors. But the opportunity was lost. Feminine activity in
the literary world continued to be associated with notorious names,
with the scurrilous _New Atlantis_ of Mary Manley, and with the loose
career of Mrs. Centlivre. Women authors were already Bohemians.
‘In the female world,’ says Johnson in his _Life of Addison_, ‘any
acquaintance with books was distinguished only to be censured.’
This pronouncement of Johnson’s is of that large general nature which
is likely to give offence to specialists. A multitude of exceptions
to it will occur at once to any one. The Duchess of Queensbury, for
example, patronized Gay; Dean Swift was not uninfluenced by the
women who surrounded him; Pope addressed verse-epistles to Martha
Blount; later in the century, Young satirized the literary female,
and Richardson had his group of adoring ‘Daughters.’ But none of
these really changes the significance of Johnson’s summary. When
he referred to the censure visited upon literary women he may well
have been thinking of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whose acquaintance
with the authors of her time was wider than that ever possessed by
the bluestockings. But though the noble lady had genuine interest
in letters and very remarkable powers, she was wholly without that
courtly character which is indispensable to the hostess of a salon.
She repelled men as much by her insolent cleverness as by her
slovenly manners. Finally her long residence abroad withdrew her
completely from the literary circle which she knew so well.
It was the work of the middle decades of the eighteenth century
to remove the odium in which women’s interest in literature had
been held. The world of female readers became almost as large and
influential as that of the male, so that by 1778 Johnson could
remark, ‘All our ladies read now.’ The Bluestocking Club, which marks
the first definite reappearance of the salon in London, shows the
desire of woman to extend her function in the literary world so as
to include in it the office of patron, as well as that of author and
reader. But this new patronage was to be primarily social, and was to
express itself first in various social diversions, which preluded the
more formal salons, and to which we now proceed.