THE LONDON SALON
The London salon corresponds well enough, in its external aspects,
with its Parisian prototype. If we apply the fivefold analysis given
in the second chapter of this work, we shall discover no essential
difference in method between the two institutions. Differences
in result there undoubtedly were, but the two were alike in aim.
The London salon, like the Parisian, for example, depended for
its influence partly on the beauty and interest of its material
surroundings. Mrs. Montagu fascinated her guests with Chinese rooms,
Athenian rooms, feather rooms, rooms decorated by Angelica Kauffmann,
and other gorgeous apartments in her house in Hill Street and in
her palace in Portman Square. Mrs. Vesey, less ambitious and more
intimate, entertained her friends in a ‘blue-room’ or ‘green-room,’
and often in her little dressing-room which Mrs. Carter called ‘the
unostentatious receptacle of liberal society’[227]—unostentatious, no
doubt, but bizarre and successfully bizarre like everything that Mrs.
Vesey touched.
Like the French hostesses, these women kept up in their assemblies
a tone that was at once aristocratic and literary; they made
conversation the chief entertainment of the drawing-room, and the
patronage of letters their most elegant aim. Each of them attached
to herself—perhaps it would be more proper to say, attached herself
to—some writer, who frequently repaid her friendship with tributes
in verse. These writers were, in general, women; and the friendships
of the London salon are usually, though not always, feminine. They
offer, therefore, as we shall see later, a notable contrast to
literary friendships in Parisian salons.
Various English women—Mrs. Cholmondeley, Mrs. Crewe, Lady Lucan,
Lady Hervey, Mrs. Greville, Mrs. Catherine Macaulay—had studied the
Parisian salon at first hand; but none of them were so familiar with
it, none so intimately acquainted with various Parisian hostesses,
as Mrs. Montagu. As early as 1750 Madame du Bocage visited her in
London and took breakfast at her house in Hill Street. The two ladies
paid elaborate court to each other. Montagu presented du Bocage
with compliments and an edition of Milton, and du Bocage (who was
a professed poet) replied with compliments and a string of riming
couplets, setting forth the merits of Montagu.[228]
Again, when Madame Necker was in England, many years later, Mrs.
Montagu saw much of her. The French lady, like every one, was pleased
with her amiability, and, again like every one, amused at the
stiffness of her conversation.[229] When, in 1775, Mrs. Montagu went
to Paris, her associations with the Neckers became fairly intimate.
She was presented to ‘all the _beaux esprits_,’ and was even taken
to see Madame Geoffrin, whose glory now was waning. On the sixth of
July 1776, she met Madame du Deffand at dinner, and found her gay
and lively. Madame du Deffand’s comments on the bluestocking, in
her letters to Walpole, are singularly indulgent, until corrected
by Walpole. She is polite, thinks Madame du Deffand, but not over
pedantic,[230] and ‘ennuyeuse, sans doute, mais bonne femme.’ Mrs.
Montagu hired a house at Chaillot, where she gave suppers for Madame
du Deffand and the rest. That she flattered them all, after the
most approved Parisian fashion, no one who has read her letter to
Madame du Deffand can doubt. It is one of the most skilful pieces of
compliment which she ever devised, and was sent with a gift of two
beautiful scent-boxes. Witness the following extract, and let the
reader remember that Madame du Deffand was blind.
Il ne me reste qu’une ressource; c’est de vous adresser comme
à une divinité et vous offrir simplement de l’encens; c’est le
culte le plus pur et le moins téméraire. Je vous prie, madame,
de me permettre de vous offrir deux cassolettes, où j’ai mis des
aromatiques.[231]
In spite of the success of her Parisian visit, it may be questioned
whether Mrs. Montagu was wholly satisfied with the spirit of the
salons she visited. She had gone to Paris with the avowed intention
of searching, among the provincial nobility, for ‘some who are
more in the _ton_ of Louis XIV’s court’[232] than the ladies of
Versailles. It was, as one might have suspected, the Rambouillet
tradition that attracted her, rather than the later salon with
its freer thought and freer manners, and its constant change of
favourites. She should have gone to Paris at least as early as the
days of Madame de Lambert.
But it is certain that Mrs. Montagu never succeeded in attaining
to the ease of the Parisian salon. Friends feared that she would
come back more artificial than ever. Mrs. Boscawen wished that she
might get by heart Mrs. Chapone’s chapter on Simplicity.[233] But
there was no such thing as simplicity in Mrs. Montagu’s nature: all
her instincts were for the elaborate, her methods in all things
complicated, her manner grand, not easy. Her assemblies became
even larger and more overpowering; the number of ‘the Great’ grew
constantly larger.
Her salon was inevitably the reflection of her own character. She
could be, as Mrs. Thrale witnessed, ‘brilliant in diamonds, solid in
judgment, critical in talk’;[234] she could be, as Johnson freely
admitted, ‘par pluribus ... variety in one.’[235] But there was a
certain stiffness in her character that inevitably communicated
itself to her assemblies. Mrs. Chapone, who had every reason to love
her, wrote to Pepys that he would always find in her good nature,
‘though not accompanied with remarkable softness.’[236] Fanny Burney
was from the first rather overwhelmed by her grand manner, and Mrs.
Delany found at one of her assemblies ‘a formal, formidable circle,’
where she had only ‘a _whisper_ with Mrs. Boscawen, another with
Lady Bute, and a _wink_ from the Duchess of Portland—_poor diet_ for
one who loves a plentiful meal of social friendship.’[237] Six years
later she was so dazzled by the brilliancy of one of Mrs. Montagu’s
assemblies that she fled incontinently.
Lady Louisa Stuart, who evidently did not like Mrs. Montagu, calls
attention to another defect. ‘There was a deplorable lack ... of that
art of kneading the mass well together, which I have known possessed
by women far her inferiors. As her company came in, a heterogeneous
medley, so they went out, each individual feeling himself single,
isolated, and (to borrow a French phrase) embarrassed with his own
person; which might be partly owing to the awkward position of the
furniture, the mal-arrangement of tables and chairs. Everything in
that house, as if under a spell, was sure to form itself into a
circle or semicircle.’[238] But all this is as nothing compared with
the testimony of Lord Lyttelton. Mrs. Montagu was destined to receive
the unkindest thrust from her own familiar friend. At some time in
the decade of the sixties, Lord Lyttelton wrote an elaborate letter
to a friend in criticism of the modern wits, whom he proclaimed ‘not
worth a beadsman’s rosary.’ The following passage[239] can refer only
to Mrs. Montagu:
No one can take more pains than Mrs. M—— to be surrounded with men
of wit; she bribes, she pensions, she flatters, gives excellent
dinners, is herself a very sensible woman, and of very pleasing
manners; not young, indeed, but that is out of the question;—and,
in spite of all these encouragements, which, one would think,
might make wits spring out of the ground, the conversations of her
house are too often critical and pedantic,—something between the
dullness and the pertness of learning. They are perfectly chaste,
and generally instructive; but a cool and quiet observer would
sometimes laugh to see how difficult a matter it is for _la belle
Présidente_ to give colour and life to her literary circles.
There was, moreover, evidently much of the _femme savante_ about Mrs.
Montagu. Walpole described her in his most merciless manner as a
‘piece of learned nonsense’; she and her friends, he continues, ‘vie
with one another till they are as unintelligible as the good folks at
Babel.’[240] This of course is not fair. When was Walpole ever fair?
But it certainly may be taken as evidence that Mrs. Montagu did not
hesitate to make a display of her knowledge. She had mastered the
art, no doubt, of wearing her learning gracefully, but never that
of gracefully dispensing with it. It cumbers her correspondence.
With Garrick she must discuss Plautus, Terence, and Molière, with
Elizabeth Carter the _Ethics_ of Aristotle, with Beattie the Greek
dramatists, Ossian, Homer, and the ‘wilder Oriental poets.’ But the
reader has throughout the feeling that the writer is making the
best of resources that are somewhat limited and undisciplined. Her
knowledge of the classics was at best amateurish.
But this deficiency—if such it be—was not fatal. The learning of
a professional scholar is by no means essential in the mistress of
a salon. It may, indeed, as I have already shown, prove a serious
obstacle to her success; for the means by which she diffuses her
influence are of a totally different sort. With more essential
things, high social rank, a large fortune, wit, interest in the
course of literature, and a faith in her own power to influence it
for good, Mrs. Montagu was richly endowed. Without her there would
have been no London salons; for all existed in more or less conscious
imitation of hers. She alone succeeded in becoming a patron of
letters. To say that she did not equal the great Frenchwomen in this
art is merely to say that she was not a genius. She had the power of
attracting people of real importance to her drawing-room, and even
those who ridiculed her social methods were obliged to admit that
they produced an effect. That effect it is difficult to estimate
with precision; for it is by no means identical with that which she
produced by her own writings or even by her patronage of writers. She
has the honour of having assisted in spreading the esteem in which
literature and men of letters were held at the close of the century,
as opposed to the anomaly of their position fifty years earlier.
Her achievement is not the less real because it cannot be exactly
calculated.
* * * * *
A far more lovable figure than Mrs. Montagu is her friendly rival,
Elizabeth Vesey. Though the daughter of a bishop, the wife of a
Member of Parliament, and mistress of as popular a drawing-room
as could be found in London, she was as free from vanity as from
pretensions to literary gifts. She never dreamed of shining as a
critical essayist; she scribbled no verses. She was a withered
old lady with the heart of a child, who amused everybody by her
enthusiasm and her naïve manners, which were always a bit slipshod.
She was so notoriously informal that her guests forgot their elegant
reserve, and became, like her, good-humoured and lively. She moves
about her crowded assemblies like a fairy crone, her parchment
skin seamed and shrivelled with age, her ear-trumpet dangling from
her neck, while she distributes her promiscuous company, pats her
guests on the arm, breaks up their cliques, and squares the social
circle.[241] She touched every one into good spirits with what
Elizabeth Carter called the wave of her fairy wand.[242] Everybody
adored her, men and women alike. To Martin Sherlock[243] she was
‘good Mrs. Vesey—indeed she is _all_ goodness’; and Horace Walpole
bursts into momentary enthusiasm,[244] ‘What English heart ever
excelled hers?’
If she found favour in the eyes of all London, it was not by any
charms of person, for at the time of her great fame, she had long
since lost every trace of beauty. In 1779, when Miss Burney first met
her, she was a very pattern of old age, with ‘the most wrinkled,
sallow, time-beaten face’ ever seen.[245] But her vivid imagination
never deserted her, and to the sophisticated people by whom she was
surrounded she seemed a sort of ethereal meddler in human affairs.
Her friends called her the Sylph.[246] Mrs. Carter could detect
nothing mortal in her save a love of London,[247] and felt about her
a suspicion of ‘coral groves and submarine palaces.’[248] If she
was ordered to take fresh-water baths, she must, like a child, make
a game of it all, play at being primitive, and rear in imagination
an ‘American hut’ on the banks of the Liffey.[249] She flitted
eagerly about England and Ireland, anxious to know everybody and
see everything.[250] Mrs. Carter found her like Bartholomew Cokes,
who wanted every plaything in the Fair.[251] Indeed, the world must
have seemed to Mrs. Vesey a vast toyshop with endless opportunities
for play, for she could amuse herself by planning a _fête
champêtre_,[252] or by inventing a new teapot, lacking, to be sure,
both spout and handle, but of ‘a beautiful Etruscan form.’[253] Her
guests never knew what to expect, for she might present them with
an atheist philosopher hot from the salons of Paris or set them to
cutting out Indian figures and flowers, to paste on her dressing-room
windows in imitation of painted glass.[254] Dowagers marvel at her,
and lament that oddities are become the fashion.[255]
Her parties were informal to the point of becoming promiscuous.
Her first aim was to get together every one of importance,[256]
literary, political, social, and ecclesiastical, to keep them broken
up into small groups, and to insist on uniting those of different
tastes and mood. She got Walpole side by side with Fanny Burney[257]
(whom he liked at once), and again side by side with Sir William
Jones (whom he did not).[258] She tried to present Dr. Johnson
to the Abbé Raynal, and drew from the Great Moralist an immortal
refusal.[259] She was apparently even ambitious to marry Elizabeth
Carter to Thomas Gray.[260] Yet withal she had the rare gift of
self-obliteration.[261] She gave herself no airs. She was by nature
absent-minded, and she affected to be more _distraite_ than she
actually was. When excitedly denouncing second marriages she could
quite overlook (or _seem_ to overlook) the fact that she herself had
been married twice. ‘Bless me, my dear! I had quite forgotten it.’
Such wit was but ill-understood in salons which had never before
witnessed the spectacle of a bluestocking laughing at herself. There
is an Irish whimsicality about her remarks. When ill, she could
declare that her only happy moment in fourteen days was in a fainting
fit, or again that she was in dread of losing seven or eight of her
senses.[262] ‘It’s a very disagreeable thing, I think,’ said she to
Mr. Cambridge, ‘when one has just made an acquaintance with anybody,
and likes them, to have them die,’[263] a sentiment that set Fanny
Burney to ‘grinning irresistibly,’ and filliping the macaroon crumbs
from her muff to hide her embarrassment. Mrs. Vesey somehow contrived
to make even her deafness a source of amusement. When Lady Spencer
brought her some silver ears to use instead of trumpets, she promptly
tried them on before her guests, and greeted George Cambridge with
one of them still clinging to her ear, but as she was moving away
from him spilled it unaware. Surely this bluestocking is a very
human sort.
Those who smiled at her naïveté forgot that it was a quality very
near to wisdom. Her conversation, and perhaps her letters,[264]
revealed that instinctive knowledge of the human heart which is the
peculiar possession of extreme innocence. ‘Few people,’ she said to
Mrs. Carter,[265] who quotes her words with approval—the _imprimatur_
of common sense—‘give themselves time to be friends’; and as if
she only half understood the century into which she had been born,
inquired ‘why the head is always so suspicious of the heart.’[266]
The wise Carter, whose knowledge was so much more sophisticated, can
but honour her for having the simplicity of a little child, though
she would like to whip her for having its imprudence.[267] But it
was this very simplicity of soul that enabled the good creature to
‘accommodate herself so fully to the awkward customs and manners
of mere actually existing men and women.’ Mrs. Carter finds it
‘very surprising,’[268] as does the student, and as did Montagu
and all the dowagers, no doubt; but Miss Burney, with her keen
observation, saw at once that her skill in selecting guests and her
‘address in rendering them easy with one another’ was an art that
implied ‘no mean understanding.’[269] She had sufficient skill to
persuade Horace Walpole, who professed to hate her ‘Babels,’ to come
and join the Cophthi,[270] and not to snub them one and all; she
had the skill to keep always on good terms with Mrs. Montagu; she
could attract the whole Literary Club on alternate Tuesdays, and
filled her drawing-room with the most difficult people in England
to manage.[271] Yet her methods were always of the simplest, her
collations modest though delicate, and her house, though interesting
because of its oddity, was hardly an attraction apart from its
mistress.
With all the new emotions of sentimentalism and romanticism, Mrs.
Vesey was in full sympathy, and she must have done something to
popularize these movements among the _beaux esprits_ of London. She
adored the _Sentimental Journey_. She and Mrs. Carter write each
other of the solemn awe of storms at sea, of ‘sublime and terrible’
Welsh ‘prospects,’[272] of dim-lit Gothic cloisters, and the sad note
of the owl at set of sun. She loved the poetry of Gray, and even
tempted the shy poet into her drawing-room.[273] She was obliged
to pass much of her time in Ireland, and on her journeys there and
back improved the opportunity of studying the wild scenery of Wales.
She writes to Mrs. Carter of her journey through Anglesey and over
Penmuenmaur. The story thrilled Mrs. Carter, for she wrote of it to
Mrs. Montagu:
In the midst of her passage through these wild regions, she and
Mrs. Hancock[274] were overtaken by a tempest which greatly
heightened the sublime and terrible of the scene; and you may
guess what a description such an adventure would furnish to an
imagination like hers.[275]
Mrs. Vesey, moreover, appears to have been alone among the blues in
aspiring to the easier standards of French manners and to the new
‘freedom of thought,’ though she never really abandoned herself to
them. She was one of the ladies who lent diversity to the amatory
career of Laurence Sterne; but the flirtation, though feverish
enough for a time, either escaped the notice of Mrs. Vesey’s precise
friends or was, by general consent, hushed up; for it expired at last
quite harmlessly and left only a handful of letters as proof of
its former vitality. Yorick and this earlier ‘Eliza’ met, it would
appear, in 1762, when Sterne was at the height of his fame, and
enjoying the pleasures of metropolitan life for a season. He heard
Mrs. Vesey sing; walked twenty paces beside her; felt the ‘harmonic
vibrations’ of a heart truly sentimental, and had no sooner left her
than he opened an amatory correspondence with her. He would give one
of his cassocks to explain the magic of her personality: ‘I believe
in my conscience, dear lady, if truth was known, _that you have no
inside at all_. That you are graceful, elegant, and desirable, etc.,
etc.—every common beholder who can stare at you, as a Dutch boor does
to the Queen of Sheba,—can easily find out—but that you are sensible,
gentle, and tender and from one end to the other of you full of the
sweetest tones and modulations require a deeper research—You are
a system of harmonic vibrations—the softest and best attuned of
all instruments.—Lord! I would give away my other cassock to touch
you.’[276] Tristram Shandy protests that his head is turned.
We may follow them to Ranelagh, where they saunter lackadaisically,
indifferent to the crowd and the fireworks, Mrs. Vesey uttering
‘gentle, amiable, elegant sentiments in a tone of voice that was
originally intended for a Cherub.’ But the exposure was apparently
too much for the tender frame of Yorick. In listening to Mrs.
Vesey’s voice, he lost his own, and now ‘colds, coughs, and catarrhs’
have so tied up his tongue that he can no longer whisper loud enough
to explain Vesey’s effect upon his heart. How often thereafter he
was able to becassock himself and sit in the warm blue drawing-room
listening to the music, we do not know. The romance did not last
long, certainly; and we hear nothing more of it after the autumn of
1767, when Mrs. Vesey invited Sterne to visit her in Ireland, an
invitation which his illness compelled him to decline.
Like the French ladies described by Sterne in the _Sentimental
Journey_, Mrs. Vesey turned, at a certain age, to agnosticism. Mrs.
Montagu had defied Voltaire, but Mrs. Vesey courted the Abbé Raynal.
He responded with great vivacity and was often in her drawing-room
during the year 1777. Mrs. Boscawen asserts[277] that she once heard
him talk for eight hours ‘successfully’ and without interruption:
‘One must have _heard and seen it to believe it_;’ and Mrs. Chapone
asserts that he talked steadily _from one at noon till one_ in the
morning.[278] This particular conversation, however, did not occur
at Mrs. Vesey’s. She would never have permitted any one thus to turn
conversation into a lecture.
Mrs. Vesey’s interest in French agnosticism caused her friends
grave concern. Twice Mrs. Carter denounced Voltaire when Mrs. Vesey
demanded a pronouncement on his works, and at last wrote that she
would as soon think of playing with toads and vipers, as of reading
such blasphemy and impiety.[279] She argued for the validity of
revealed religion, but without great effect, for Mrs. Vesey continued
to play with fire. She produced strange romantic thrills in herself
by reading the Abbé Raynal during a violent thunderstorm. Byron,
surely, could have understood this, but it was beyond the blues.
‘’Tis a dangerous amusement to a mind like yours, indeed to any
mind,’ wrote Mrs. Carter. But dangerous or not, it illustrates the
curiosity of Mrs. Vesey’s mind, and might furnish a historian of the
Romantic Movement with an apt anecdote.
Because of the unpretentiousness of her character, Mrs. Vesey has
always been ranked far below Mrs. Montagu, but it may be doubted
whether the estimate is quite fair. There were many who found her
assemblies more agreeable[280] than Mrs. Montagu’s more pretentious
parties, especially after that lady’s removal to Portman Square.
Unlike Mrs. Montagu, she made no attempt to produce literature
herself (and for this posterity should be grateful); but she appears
to have had an instinctive appreciation, not surpassed by the other,
of the true function of the salon. For it was the office of the
bluestockings neither to reform the whole of London society by giving
it a literary tone, nor to bring into existence a new school of
authors dominated by their ideals; but rather to keep in motion, by
means of social intercourse, the currents of thought, literary and
philosophical. A true _conversazione_ can create and vitalize a train
of ideas, and Mrs. Vesey, with her broad and genial interests, was
able to assemble the best representatives of the new ideas, and bring
them into contact with society. This, if there be any, is the true
office of the bluestocking, an office which Mrs. Vesey discharged
with skill and with charm.
* * * * *
About Mrs. Montagu and Mrs. Vesey there revolved other luminaries.
Certain of them—Elizabeth Carter, Hester Chapone, Hannah More,
and Fanny Burney—though they presided over no salon, achieved an
independent reputation as authors, and will therefore be considered
in later chapters. Others of them—as Miss Monckton (still remembered
for Reynolds’s sentimental portrait of her), Lady Lucan, Lady
Herries, Mrs. Greville, the admirable Mrs. Cholmondeley (niece
of Walpole and friend of Miss Burney), and the sensible Mrs.
Walsingham—have left, in general, little more than a name (and an
adjective) to posterity. Others, who are more often encountered,
demand a brief consideration.
There is, for example, the gracious figure of Mrs. Boscawen,[281]
wife of the Admiral, and one of the best-loved women in London.
Boswell’s compliment to her will be familiar to students of the _Life
of Johnson_: ‘If it be not presumptuous in me to praise her, I would
say that her manners are the most agreeable and her conversation
the best of any lady with whom I ever had the happiness to be
acquainted.’[282] Miss More described her parties in the words of
Madame de Sévigné as ‘all daffodil, all rose, all jonquil,’ and dwelt
on her power to make each of her guests feel that he had been the
immediate object of her attention.[283]
Her reputation was thus always rather social than literary.[284]
Her letters, indeed, were highly regarded by her friends, and
were sometimes preferred to Mrs. Montagu’s—a preference by no
means audacious. The repeated comparison with Madame de Sévigné is
certainly less happy. Mrs. Boscawen’s letters, as preserved in Mrs.
Delany’s _Autobiography_ and the _Memoirs of Hannah More_, have the
affectionate intimacy but not the kindling wit and sprightliness
which distinguish familiar correspondence at its best. It is
sufficient to say of these letters that they have successfully
preserved Mrs. Boscawen’s pleasant personality.
Mrs. Boscawen emulated Mrs. Montagu as a patron of rising young
authors by entering into warm personal relations with Hannah More.
They first became intimate when, on the twelfth night of _Percy_,
Mrs. Boscawen sent the successful dramatist a wreath of myrtle,
laurel, and bay. This stimulated the young lady to an exhibition of
that flattery for which she was already famous. In an _Ode to the
Hon. Mrs. Boscawen_, Apollo himself is made to rebuke Hannah for
wearing these floral honours, asserting that it is for Mrs. Boscawen
that
the faithful _myrtle blooms_,
For her the sage’s bay.
And even thou shalt claim a name
And challenge some renown;
Boscawen’s friendship is thy fame,
Her praise thy LAUREL CROWN.[285]
But the two ladies had only begun their career of compliment.
Somewhat later Miss More sent to her patron a bottle of ‘otto
of roses,’ having learned that that lady’s organs ‘partake the
refinement that graces her mind.’ This is not the first instance we
have encountered of the use of incense in the bluestocking ritual.
Mrs. Boscawen sometimes varied her flowery wreaths of praise with
gifts and practical suggestions. When she learns that Miss More has
been reading Homer and Tasso, she at once becomes ambitious for an
English epic from the pen of a woman. ‘Some spark,’ she thinks, from
these older geniuses, ‘will communicate to that train of poetic
fire, _qui vous appartient_, and the explosion will ascend in many a
brilliant star.’[286] The honourable lady demands and obtains an _Ode
on the Marquess of Worcester’s Birthday_, into which the author had
the sense to weave a compliment to Mrs. Boscawen and to ‘Glanvilla,’
her estate.[287] Meanwhile the patron is weeping her eyes red over
_Percy_, circulating copies of Miss More’s _Essays_, eliciting
praises from friends and _beaux esprits_—all duly forwarded—and
rebuking, very gently, the rising authoress for not proclaiming more
loudly the greatness of the sex: ‘where shall we find a champion if
you (armed at all points) desert us?’[288]
[Illustration: HANNAH MORE
From Finden’s engraving of the portrait by Opie (1786)]
Miss More’s chief tribute to Mrs. Boscawen, however, was her poem,
_Sensibility_, published in 1782, in the form of an epistle to that
lady. In rapturous verse Sensibility is hailed as the parent of
charity, charm, and many other bluestocking virtues; but, above all,
’tis this that ‘gives Boscawen half her power to please.’ As the poem
furnishes the most convenient statement of Mrs. Boscawen’s connection
with the group of ladies we are studying, a rather long extract from
it must be given:
Accept, BOSCAWEN! these unpolish’d lays,
Nor blame too much the verse you cannot praise.
For you far other bards have wak’d the string,
Far other bards for you were wont to sing.[289]
Yet on the gale their parting music steals,
Yet your charm’d ear the loved impression feels;
You heard the lyre of LITTLETON and YOUNG,
And this a Grace and that a Seraph strung....
Yes, still for you your gentle stars dispense
The charm of friendship and the feast of sense:
Yours is the bliss, and Heav’n no dearer sends,
To call the wisest, brightest, best your friends.
And while to these I raise the votive line,
O let me grateful own these friends are mine:
With CARTER trace the wit to Athens known,
Or view in MONTAGU that wit our own,
Or mark, well pleased CHAPONE’S instructive page
Intent to raise the morals of the age;
Or boast, in WALSINGHAM, the various power
To cheer the lonely, grace the letter’d hour.
Somewhat too much of this.
The story continues in the same strain till long after the
publication of Miss More’s _Florio_ in 1786. It is only necessary to
add that it is to Mrs. Boscawen that we owe the painting of Opie’s
delightful portrait of Miss More.[290] It does more to perpetuate
the charm of the bluestocking ladies than all their congratulatory
epistles—in prose or verse.
* * * * *
Mrs. Ord[291] has by modern writers frequently been associated
with Mrs. Montagu and Mrs. Vesey as originating the bluestocking
_conversazioni_.[292] Just why Mrs. Ord should have been chosen to
complete the triad of ladies it is difficult to say. She is not
mentioned in Miss More’s _Bas Bleu_, in Dr. Burney’s verses, or in
Boswell’s _Life of Johnson_. Her name occurs but once, and quite
casually, in Walpole’s _Letters_; and Johnson writes but once[293]
of having been present at her assembly. Even those who describe her
parties speak rather of her guests than of herself, and praise her
good nature without mentioning her conversation.[294] Her talk was,
it appears, considered heavy, so that Miss Burney herself was obliged
to admit that it lacked both mirth and instruction, and that she
loved Mrs. Ord for her friendliness but not for her brilliancy.
Nevertheless Mrs. Ord was one who early made the experiment
of banishing cards and dancing from her evening parties and
substituting undisturbed conversation as the staple of her
entertainment. Like Mrs. Vesey she abhorred formality, and made
her guests draw their chairs about a large table in the middle of
the room, remarking—and it is one of the few remarks of hers that
has been preserved—that a table was the ‘best friend to sociable
conversation.’[295] Here, apparently, she succeeded in getting the
unity without the hard formality of the dreaded circle.[296]
She had, moreover, a skill in the choice of her guests which usually
saved her from the charge of assembling crowds indiscriminately.[297]
Pepys and Dr. Burney unite in praising her ability to mix her
ingredients, and for this the latter pronounces her an excellent
cook. Miss More liked her assemblies because there she could have Sir
Joshua and Mr. Cambridge all to herself[298] or discuss the relative
merits of Pope and Dryden, sitting apart with Mrs. Montagu and Horace
Walpole.[299]
Perhaps Mrs. Ord wished to take the place of Mrs. Thrale as the
social patron of Fanny Burney. She it was who conducted Fanny to
her royal prison at Windsor,[300] who helped to keep her in touch
with her old friends,[301] who showered gifts upon her and carried
her to oratorios, and who, when the young woman was worn out by her
servitude, put the map of England into the hands of ‘her child,’
and bade her choose the journey she would take. This trip, which
was through south-west England, lasted many weeks, and it was
mid-September before the two finally drove out of Bath towards London
in Mrs. Ord’s coach-and-four.[302] Nor did the services of this
‘excellent and maternal’ creature stop with this, for the very next
year she carried Miss Burney to the ‘salubrious hills of Norbury,’
and there administered what the Diarist, in a flight of rhetoric
worthy of her latest years, called ‘the balsamic medicine of social
tenderness.’[303] But nothing came of this patronage in the way of
literature, so that Mrs. Ord’s kindness, though challenging our
admiration, adds little to the movement we are tracing.
* * * * *
Another woman closely associated with Miss Burney, and one who
profoundly influenced her life, was that venerable relic of the
former age, Mary Granville Delany, whom Burke called ‘not only
the woman of fashion of the present age, but ... the highest bred
woman in the world.’[304] ‘Swift’s Mrs. Delany,’ they loved to call
her, for she had known the great Dean in his latter days. Of the
relationship, such as it was, she never tired of talking, and in this
she was wise, for it was her chief claim to distinction in literary
circles. The woman who could display a sheaf of private letters from
Swift and to whom the _Spectator_ was ‘almost too modern to speak
of’[305] was of course worshipped by every bluestocking in London;
but she was never quite a blue herself. She did not wish to be.
Miss More, it is true, claims her as one of the circle in her poem
_Sensibility_:
DELANY too is ours; serenely bright,
Wisdom’s strong ray, and virtue’s milder light:
And she who blessed the friend and graced the lays
Of poignant Swift, still gilds my social days;
Long, long protract thy light, O star benign!
Whose setting beams with milder lustre shine.
But Mrs. Delany seldom allowed her lustre to shine upon the
salon, and was anything but mild in her opinion of Mrs. Montagu’s
assemblies. She was more interested in the Royal Family than in the
progress of literature, and despite her early associations, preferred
the society of rank to that of genius. She was graciously pleased
when Garrick received her friend the Duchess of Portland and herself
‘_very respectfully_,’ and showed himself ‘sensible of the honour’
done him.[306] She was vexed that Mason’s tepid tragedy, _Elfrida_,
should be ‘prostituted’ by a public performance, and ‘the charms of
virgins represented by the abandoned nymphs of Drury Lane.’ ‘Such a
poem,’ she continues, ‘would have been represented in days of yore
by the youthful part of the Royal family or those of the first rank.
Indeed, in _these_ our days (_save our own Royal Family_), it would
be difficult to find representatives suited to such virtuous and
refined characters.’[307] Such a person, who was for ever protesting
that she was in love with the King, the Queen, and the whole Royal
Family,[308] was in no position to mediate properly between authors
and ‘the Great.’ Her one conception of serving them was to render
them up, a living sacrifice, to the Royal Family, as Miss Burney
(who was dazzled by the friend of Swift and the friend of the Queen)
discovered to her cost. When Miss Burney hesitated to enter upon
her service as Dresser to Queen Charlotte—a post which her intimacy
with Mrs. Delany had brought her—it was Mrs. Delany who was ‘much
mortified’ that so flattering a proposal could cause a moment’s
hesitation.[309]
Mrs. Delany is a significant figure in the history of the salon by
virtue of the fascination which she exercised through her quondam
connection with a great man; but of genuine interest in the salon she
had little, and of influence upon the course of literature none at
all.
* * * * *
Alone among the literary ladies of the age, Mrs. Thrale has retained
the fascination which she exercised in her own time. The fame of the
other bluestockings has gone from less to less; but hers has remained
constant, if indeed it has not increased. This is of significance,
for it shows either that she was more modern than her sisters or
more universal. She might consistently have aspired to the title,
‘Queen of the Bluestockings,’ but she did not even care whether she
was reckoned one of them, contenting herself with outwitting them at
every point. It was she, for example, who captured the two authors
most coveted by the mistresses of the salons, Johnson and Miss
Burney, and ‘planted’ them in her house.[310] Her friendship with
the former, though it cannot be shown to have altered the course of
his works, gave birth to an admirable series of familiar letters,
which Hannah More found ‘true letters of friendship which are meant
to show kindness rather than wit.’[311] But more important than such
published results was the fame which Johnson lent to Mrs. Thrale by
his residence at her home. The nearest approach to the true salon
that we find in the eighteenth century in England is the dining-room
at Streatham; the spectacle of Johnson there reading aloud from the
proof-sheets of the _Lives of the Poets_ is in exact accord with the
best French traditions of the salon.
In many other respects Mrs. Thrale showed that she was capable of
fulfilling the more important functions of a literary hostess. It was
she who attempted to direct the genius of Fanny Burney towards the
theatre, prevailing upon her to write a comedy. It is true that the
resulting play, _The Witlings_, was not thought by Dr. Burney a fit
successor to _Evelina_, and was accordingly destroyed; but in the
absence of any proof to the contrary and in view of the influence
which Mrs. Thrale could bring to bear in the theatrical world through
Murphy and others, it is difficult to see why her advice to the young
writer was not sound. Sheridan, than whom there was no better judge,
gave similar counsel.
Finally, when, after her marriage and departure from England, as Mrs.
Piozzi, she printed her _Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson_, the
value of what she had to tell and her vivacity in telling it enabled
her to triumph over a slipshod style and an inaccurate method, and
to establish, once for all, her reputation in the literary world, a
reputation which the bluestockings were foolish enough to think she
had lost for ever.
There is no need here to discuss the anomalies of Mrs. Thrale’s
character. They have been dwelt on unnecessarily and fruitlessly.
She had no illusions about her friends, and least of all about her
own importance. She looked out on the world in which she moved,
shrewdly and, on the whole, sanely. She knew how to make people
happy and how to put the Great at their ease. ‘Mrs. Thrale,’ says
Mr. Seccombe, ‘moved among them serene, lively, “a pretty woman
still,” an exorciser of melancholy, the cheeriest of hostesses, quite
unconscious of erudition, gaily spontaneous, the queen of Streatham.
Her wayward naturalness made her seem a rose among hot-house flowers.
Her innate brightness enabled her, as has been said, to romp with
learning and to play blind man’s buff with the sages.’ In the
somewhat stifling atmosphere of salons such a personality is of the
very highest worth.