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Title: The salon and English letters
Chapters on the interrelations of literature and society in the
age of Johnson

Author: Chauncey Brewster Tinker

Release date: October 20, 2023 [eBook #71916]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: The Macmillan Company, 1915

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/71916

Credits: MWS, John Campbell and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SALON
AND ENGLISH LETTERS ***
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Footnote anchors are denoted by [number], and the footnotes have been placed at the end
of the book.
Some minor changes to the text are noted at the end of the book.

THE SALON AND ENGLISH LETTERS

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

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
I ntroduction

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
O rigin and C haracteristics of the S alon

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
T he E ighteenth C entury S alon

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
E nglish A uthors in P arisian S alons

The English visitor was a familiar figure in the Parisian salon. In an age
when travellers were studying manners rather than mountains, and preferred
the society of philosophers to the finest galleries in Europe, no visit to Paris
was complete without a conversation with good Madame Geoffrin or an
hour with the ‘blind sibyl,’ du Deffand of the bitter tongue. A stream of
Englishmen from Prior to Gibbon poured through their drawing-rooms[49]
and listened with interest or with alarm to the philosophes who were, to use
Walpole’s words,[50] busily pulling down God and the King. Sometimes a
returning traveller proved his acquaintance with this society by sacrificing
his veracity. Thus Goldsmith asserted[51] that he was present ‘in a select
company of wits of both sexes at Paris’ when Diderot, Fontenelle, and
Voltaire disputed about the merits of English taste and learning. The
interview, it has been repeatedly shown, could hardly have taken place,
inasmuch as during the months when Goldsmith must have been in Paris,
Voltaire was never once there. But the very lie is eloquent, for it shows the
kind of experience in Paris which English authors sought and prized.
The cosmopolitan tone was contributed to the salon by the eighteenth
century. It begins with Madame de Tencin. This brilliant woman, somewhat
promiscuous in all her tastes, expanded the influence of her drawing-room,
and thereby that of later salons, by welcoming distinguished men without
respect of nationality; nor were foreigners slow to improve the opportunity
of meeting a woman who was no less renowned for her social prestige than
for the picturesque iniquity of her past. Her salon was in truth the
atonement which she offered the world for the sins of her youth.

She had begun her career by running away from the convent where she
had taken the veil. She used her secularized charms to win lovers, and used
her lovers to advance her brother in the Church. She became mistress of the
Regent, who snubbed her because she wished to talk business when his
mind ran on love. The royal harlot then sank into a cheap adventuress; she
gave birth to a son, destined to become famous as d’Alembert, and
‘exposed’ him on the steps of Saint Jean le Rond in the hope of making an
end of him. At length when a maddened lover shot himself to death under
her own roof, she was imprisoned in the Bastille, where she languished for
some months. And then, after her release, as if to show that she had a head
if not a heart, she abandoned her career of profligacy as lightly as she had
formerly abandoned a lover or a child, and opened a drawing-room which,
with the death of Madame de Lambert in 1733, became the most brilliant
and influential in Paris. Here for twenty years she reigned over such
retainers as Montesquieu and Fontenelle. Her success is easier to
understand than her motives. Certain it is, however, as Professor Brunel has
suggested,[52] that she attracted the men of letters because she gave them to
understand that their respect was the one thing in the world for which she
cared.
Madame de Tencin had become intimate with Englishmen even before
the days of her fame. She was that ‘eloped nun who has supplanted the nut-
brown maid’[53] in the affections of Matthew Prior, during his diplomatic
service in Paris in the winter of 1712-13. She used him to bring the needs of
her brother (whom Prior did not consider to be ‘worth hanging’[54]) before
Lord Bolingbroke. He himself was presently avowing her his Queen, and
himself her faithful and devoted subject ‘dans tous ses états.’[55] Leslie
Stephen[56] considers that Bolingbroke made use of Madame de Tencin in
his intrigues with the Regent; but however this may be, his intrigues with
the Regent’s mistress became common gossip, and were published abroad
by the ballad-singer in the streets.[57]

But Bolingbroke was not the only English peer who paid court to the
‘nonne défroquée.’ Lord Chesterfield was introduced to her by
Montesquieu, and, in 1741, passed some time in her salon, during its later
glory. Here he enjoyed the society of authors whom he was always pleased
to regard as superior to those of his own country and whose works,
particularly Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois, Fontenelle’s Pluralité des
Mondes, and the productions of Crébillon and Marivaux, he never tired of
recommending to his son. Fontenelle, the placid death’s-head who had
never laughed and who could lead a minuet at the age of ninety-seven, must
have seemed to Chesterfield the pattern of a man. And yet he could assert, a
few years later, that Fontenelle had sacrificed somewhat too much to the
Graces.[58]
But what did he think of Madame? What did the great exemplar of the
bel air, himself a patron of letters, think of the life and aims of the salon? It
is not easy to say. He flattered Madame de Tencin outrageously, according
to his professed theories; he praised the good taste of Frenchmen (of which
Madame was at once ‘le soutien et l’ornement’), and denounced the
brusqueness of his countrymen according to his wont. He boasted
himself[59] the ‘ami, favori, et enfant de la maison’ of Madame de Tencin.
But when he had occasion to describe the literary life of Paris to his son, he
declared that the salons were filled with gossips who talked nonsense and
philosophes whose works were metaphysical fustian, verba et voces et
praeterea nihil.[60] It was an institution which young Stanhope must visit,
where he was to talk epigrams, false sentiments, and philosophical
nonsense, but to which he was to maintain a large superiority. Yet, in spite
of this show of indifference, I cannot but feel that Chesterfield liked the
salon. What else in heaven or earth was there for such a man to like? What
could have been more to his taste than its courtly union of intrigue and
elegance, of literature and wit, of free thought and easy morals? The salon
certainly liked Chesterfield. ‘Let him come back to us,’ cried Montesquieu

and the rest of them when Madame de Tencin had read his letter to the
circle, and read it more than once. ‘He writes French better than we do,’
exclaimed Fontenelle, ‘qu’il se contente, s’il lui plaît, d’être le premier
homme de sa nation, d’avoir les lumières et la profondeur de génie qui la
caractérisent; et qu’il ne vienne point encore s’emparer de nos grâces et de
nos gentillesses.’[61] When Madame de Tencin despatched this mass of
flattery to Chesterfield, Fontenelle added a note begging the English lord
not to draw down upon himself too much French jealousy.[62] Unless
Chesterfield was, like Fontenelle, incapable of all human emotions, he was
pleased by that. The Frenchmen had studied him well. They touched his
vulnerable point, and posterity will not easily be persuaded that it was in
vain.

‘In future, then,’ said Fontenelle, after the death of Madame de Tencin, ‘I
shall go to Madame Geoffrin’s.’ The change must have supplied the aged
wit with many observations on the diversity of the female character; for
though ‘la Geoffrin’ had studied the methods of her predecessor, there was
no resemblance in character between the two. There is no suggestion of
Madame de Tencin’s subtlety in the amiable bourgeoise who became a
queen of society at fifty, but rather a rich simplicity of nature that is very
winning. Her faults as well as her virtues are quite obvious. Her humour is
for ever expressing itself in homely maxims[63] which suggest the lore of
peasants. She made her way by the simplest means, a warm heart, abiding
common sense, and a persistent will. Her keen intelligence, the gift of
nature, not of books, enabled her to understand the philosophers at least as
well as they understood themselves, to advise—almost lead—them, to be
their ‘Mother,’ and to push them into the Academy. It is, at first blush,
amazing that a woman without education, who, indeed, found grammar a
mystery, could thus have become the empress of the wits. But living as she
did in an ‘age of reason’ when the imagination was turning back to

contemplate man in a ‘state of nature,’ unspoiled by the arts of a luxurious
civilization, such a defect was not fatal. Shrewd, placid yet alert, simple and
with the sweep of vision that is given only to the simple, she looked out
fearlessly upon the society of her time, with all its elaborate systems and
new philosophies—and understood. As she was without fear, so she was
without contempt. She saw what was good in the new order and encouraged
it, but without becoming its slave. Like Johnson (whom she would have
understood), she contrived to ‘worship in the age of Voltaire,’ but this was
with no surrender of her interest in Voltaire. She was intolerant of pretence.
She adopted a manner of treating her friends which, in its combination of
brusqueness and affection, is thoroughly parental. She scolds and pushes,
punishes and rewards. She decides disputes with a word. She spends with
open hand. Her great desire is to be of help to her children. D’Alembert
writes[64] of her, ‘“Vous croyez,” disait elle à un des hommes qu’elle aimait
le plus, “que c’est pour moi que je vois des grands et des ministres?
Détrompez-vous; je les vois pour vous et pour vos semblables, qui pouvez
en avoir besoin: si tous ceux que j’aime étaient heureux et sages, ma porte
serait tous les jours fermée a neuf heures, excepté pour eux.”’ But she never
forgot that, in her own house, she alone was mistress. Her charity, which
she conducted on a heroic scale, implied a certain obedience in the
recipients of it; but both charity and obedience were only devices for
promoting their interests. ‘Elle ne respirait que pour faire le bien,’ said
d’Alembert.[65] He and the other writers for the Cyclopædia profited by her
charity, for without her patronage that great work could hardly have been
carried to publication.
In the salon of Madame Geoffrin and her free-thinking friends, David
Hume found, in 1763, a natural abiding-place. It had, indeed, a dual
attraction for him in the person of its hostess and the character of her
coterie. Madame Geoffrin must have found the Scotch philosopher a man
after her own heart. She understood the broad-featured, simple man, whom

she presently took to calling[66] her ‘coquin,’ her ‘gros drôle.’ Like her, he
enjoyed the society of rationalists. He writes naïvely in his Autobiography:
‘Those who have not seen the strange effects of modes, will never imagine
the strange reception I met with at Paris, from men and women of all ranks
and stations. The more I resiled from their excessive civilities, the more I
was loaded with them. There is, however, a real satisfaction in living at
Paris from the great number of sensible, knowing, and polite company with
which the city abounds above all places in the universe. I thought once of
settling there for life.’ But he kept his head under the pelting flattery. He
neither despised his social success nor exalted it as the summum bonum.
Like Madame Geoffrin, he made no apologies for himself, and pretended to
no social graces which he could not easily acquire. His French was
wretched. Walpole protested[67] that it was ‘almost as unintelligible as his
English.’ He had no bons mots. He did not even talk much. Grimm found[68]
him heavy, and Madame du Deffand dubbed him ‘the peasant.’[69]
But to more serious souls he was even as the Spirit of the Age. He had
voiced the new scepticism. He had given the death-blow to miracles. Before
his coming to Paris, all his better-known work had been done, and the fame
of it preceded him. Alexander Street wrote from Paris to Sir William
Johnstone, on December 16, 1762: ‘When you have occasion to see our
friend, David Hume, tell him that he is so much worshipped here that he
must be void of all passions, if he does not immediately take post for Paris.
In most houses where I am acquainted here, one of the first questions is,
“Do you know M. Hume whom we all admire so much?” I dined yesterday
at Helvétius’s, where this same M. Hume interrupted our conversation very
much.’[70]
His influence was, in truth, greater in France than in England; for the
temper of English literature never became openly rationalistic. Deism itself
was living a subterranean existence; for the authority of such powerful men
as Johnson and Burke ran directly counter to it. But in France all sails were

set, and men’s faces turned towards ‘unpath’d waters, undreamed shores.’
To the ‘free’ thought that was becoming ever freer and now drifting towards
all manner of negation, Hume came as a high priest, an acknowledged
pontiff. He was the man whom the King delighted to honour, whose praises
were lisped by the King’s children, who was approved by Voltaire, petted
by all the women and revered by all the men. In less than two years,
Walpole finds him[71] ‘the mode,’ ‘fashion itself’; he is ‘treated with perfect
veneration,’ and his works held to be the ‘standards of writing.’ Hume
himself writes to Fergusson[72] that he overheard an elderly gentleman,
‘esteemed one of the cleverest and most sensible’ of men, boasting that he
had caught sight of Hume that day at court.[73] At last they pay him the
compliment (Madame Geoffrin leading off, no doubt) of ‘bantering’ him
and telling droll stories of him. He begins to fear that the great ladies are
taking him too much from the society of d’Alembert, Buffon, Marmontel,
Diderot, and the rest.[74]
Among the distinguished women in Paris who wooed him were Mlle. de
Lespinasse, Madame du Bocage, who sent him her works, and the Marquise
de Boufflers, who made no secret of her fondness for the British. This lady
once cherished a ‘petite flamme’[75] for Beauclerk, Johnson’s gay friend,
and even crossed the path of the Lexicographer himself; for it was she
whom Johnson, like a squire of dames, gallantly escorted to her coach, and
afterwards honoured with a letter. The sentimental homage which she paid
to Hume incurred the contempt of Madame du Deffand, who sneered at her
worship of false gods, and made her miserable by leading others to
denounce her idol.[76]
Madame de Boufflers played a prominent part in the great quarrel
between Hume and Rousseau, which involved many of the most prominent
persons mentioned in this chapter. The story, which has been frequently
told, may be briefly dismissed.[77] The union by which the sentimentalist

gave himself in charge to the rationalist, might well have furnished a
Hogarth with a subject for an allegorical group representing Scotch solidity
and Gallic perversity. Hume, through Madame de Boufflers, had assured
Rousseau that he could find in England appreciation, friends, and a true
home; and the ill-assorted pair accordingly departed from Paris early in
1776. It was not long before wild letters reached the salons.[78] The two
philosophers were hurling epithets at each other, scélérat! traître!
The most immediate cause of their rupture was a letter, written by
Walpole, to amuse Madame Geoffrin’s coterie. It purported to be by the
King of Prussia, and invited Rousseau to come to court and enjoy his fill of
persecution. A brief extract will show the character of this sprightly epistle:

Si vous persistez à vous creuser l’esprit pour trouver de nouveaux
malheurs, choisissez-les tels que vous voudrez. Je suis roi, je puis vous
en procurer augré de vos souhaits: et ce qui sûrement ne vous arrivera
pas vis-à-vis de vos ennemis, je cesserai de vous persécuter quand vous
cesserez de mettre votre gloire à l’être.[79]

This letter, which had been touched up by Helvétius and the Duc de
Nivernois, circulated in the salons, and at last found its way to England,
where it was printed by various newspapers in April 1766. The quarrel
between Rousseau and Hume, which had been threatening for some weeks,
now burst in fury; for Rousseau believed that Hume was in league with
Walpole to disgrace him.
Every one now plunged into controversy and correspondence. Mlle. de
Lespinasse attempts to soothe feelings. D’Alembert outlines Hume’s
campaign. Baron d’Holbach condoles. Walpole explains. Madame de
Boufflers fears for the renown of philosophy. Madame du Deffand, who
hated everybody concerned, except Walpole, and whom d’Alembert
accused of having stirred up all the trouble, finally did as much as any one
to put an end to it.[80] Nothing having been accomplished, and the vanity of

all having been fully displayed, the matter subsided, leaving a general
conviction in the mind of each that all the others had conducted themselves
very foolishly.
Hume never returned to the salons, though Mlle. de Lespinasse implored
and Madame de Boufflers protested. It was to the latter that he wrote the
tranquil letter from his death-bed ‘without any anxiety or regret’[81] which
elicited the admiration even of Madame du Deffand[82] and delighted the
salons by showing that their favourite could die like a philosopher.[83]
Hume’s acceptance of the salon and its ideals is in striking contrast to the
fussy dissatisfaction of Horace Walpole. ‘I was expressing my aversion,’ he
writes, ‘to disputes: Mr. Hume, who very gratefully admires the tone of
Paris, having never known any other tone, said with great surprise, “Why,
what do you like if you hate both disputes and whisk?”’ Walpole’s reply is
not recorded. Certainly he did not like les philosophes and their
conversation which he found ‘solemn, pedantic, and seldom animated but
by a dispute.’[84] He hated authors by profession. He hated political talk
(having practical knowledge and experience of politics). He hated savants,
free thinkers, and beaux esprits, with their eternal dissertations on religion
and government.[85] ‘I have never yet,’ he wrote[86] to Montagu, ‘seen or
heard anything serious that was not ridiculous. Jesuits, Methodists,
philosophers, politicians, the hypocrite Rousseau, the scoffer Voltaire, the
encyclopedistes, the Humes, the Lytteltons, the Grenvilles, the atheist tyrant
of Russia, and the mountebank of history Mr. Pitt, all are to me but
impostors in their various ways.’ He is ‘sick of visions and systems that
shove one another aside and come over again like the figures in a moving
picture.’ Yet like all scoffers, he has nothing to set up in the place of all this.
He could not give his heart to the new system, but he was equally incapable
of being loyal to the old. Dissatisfied with both, he laughed at both, and was
nettled because he could find none in Paris to laugh with him. Laughing

was not fashionable in the salons.[87] He despised the prevalent devotion to
cards. He was scornfully amused at the popularity of the English in Paris—
and even at his own popularity. ‘Vous n’observez,’ said Madame du
Deffand, ‘que pour vous moquer; vous ne tenez à rien, vous vous passez de
tout; enfin, enfin, rien ne vous est nécessaire.’[88] But there was one thing
necessary to Walpole, and it was the thing he professed to despise—the
salon. Without knowing the salons he could not ridicule them. No satirist
can be a hermit. So Walpole frequented the salons, and vastly enjoyed, not
the salons themselves, but his own superiority to them. It was at Madame
Geoffrin’s that his career began. He brought a note of introduction from
Lady Hervey, met Madame Geoffrin, and discovered to his surprise—and
the reader’s—that he liked her. She had sense, ‘more common sense than he
almost ever met with.’[89] He notes her quickness in penetrating character,
her protection of artists, her services to them, and her ‘thousand little arts
and offices of friendship,’ of which latter she was presently to give him a
specimen. When he had an attack of gout, she took him under her care. On
October 13, 1765, he writes of her to Lady Hervey:

Madame Geoffrin came and sat two hours last night by my bedside:
[90]
I could have sworn it had been my lady Hervey, she was so good to
me. It was with so much sense, information, instruction, and
correction! The manner of the latter charms me. I never saw anybody
in my days that catches one’s faults and vanities and impositions so
quick, that explains them to one so clearly, and convinces one so easily.
I never liked to be set right before! You cannot imagine how I taste it! I
make her both my confessor and director, and begin to think I shall be a
reasonable creature at last, which I had never intended to be. The next
time I see her, I believe I shall say, ‘Oh! Common Sense,[91] sit down: I
have been thinking so and so; is it not absurd?’—for t’other sense and
wisdom, I never liked them; I shall now hate them for her sake. If it

was worth her while, I assure your Ladyship she might govern me like
a child.

The attention which he received was not without its effect, and at last he
was obliged to admit himself pleased.[92] He does not know when he will
return to England; and he dwells with delight on the honours and
distinctions he receives.
He became one of the most prominent men in Parisian society, and for a
time eclipsed the reputation of Hume himself. The latter had been
worshipped as a philosopher; Walpole reigned as a wit. The letter to
Rousseau, which has been described above, captivated the salons, and
probably even made them laugh. The jeu d’esprit, which had first occurred
to him at Madame Geoffrin’s, so pleased him that he cast it into more
elaborate form, displayed the forged letter in the salons, and became famous
at once. ‘The copies,’ he writes to Conway, ‘have spread like wildfire; et me
voici à la mode.’[93] It was long before Walpole heard the last of his jest;
for, as we have seen, it involved him in the controversy between Hume and
Rousseau, and Walpole hated controversy as much as he loved wit. But for
the moment it served to draw the eyes of the French world upon him.
Meanwhile, he had become intimate with Madame Geoffrin’s great rival,
the blind Madame du Deffand, now in her sixty-ninth year, who rapidly
displaced Madame Geoffrin in his affections. By December 1765, he was
supping with her twice a week, and in January he wrote Gray his famous
description of her:[94]

Madame du Deffand was for a short time mistress of the Regent, is
now very old and stone-blind, but retains all her vivacity, wit, memory,
judgement, passions, and agreeableness. She goes to operas, plays,
suppers, and Versailles; gives suppers twice a week; has everything
new read to her; makes new songs and epigrams, ay, admirably, and
remembers every one that has been made these fourscore years. She

corresponds with Voltaire, dictates charming letters to him, contradicts
him, is no bigot to him or anybody, and laughs both at the clergy and
the philosophers. In a dispute, into which she easily falls, she is very
warm, and yet scarce ever in the wrong: her judgement on every
subject is as just as possible; on every point of conduct as wrong as
possible: for she is all love and hatred, passionate for her friends to
enthusiasm, still anxious to be loved, I don’t mean by lovers, and a
vehement enemy, but openly. As she can have no amusement but
conversation, the least solitude and ennui are insupportable to her, and
put her into the power of several worthless people, who eat her suppers
when they can eat nobody’s of higher rank; wink to one another, and
laugh at her; hate her because she has forty times more parts—and
venture to hate her because she is not rich.[95]

It was natural that Walpole should prefer her society to Madame
Geoffrin’s. Being Horace Walpole, it was inevitable that he should come to
regard Madame Geoffrin’s coterie with disdain, to complain that it was
made up of ‘pretended beaux esprits’ and faux savants, and that they were
‘very impertinent and dogmatic.’[96] Madame herself had offended him by
calling him[97] ‘the new Richelieu’ in reference to his numerous conquests.
Walpole grew suddenly afraid of the Geoffrin’s intimacy, and feared that he
was becoming an object of ridicule. But in Madame du Deffand he found
one of his own sort, a woman used to the society of the great but with no
illusions about it, a woman who ruled her circle by despising almost every
one who came into it, who had no faith in any one, and least of all in the
authors and diplomats who surrounded her, and whose society she endured
only because she found it less intolerable than her dark solitude.
In a beautiful letter to her on her blindness, which had become total about
a dozen years before the period when we encounter her, Montesquieu
reminded[98] her that they were both ‘small rebel spirits condemned to
darkness.’ There is in truth something suggestive of the powers of darkness

in Madame du Deffand’s pride and perversity. She was of a will never to
submit or yield. Pride in the reputation she had made, a passionate delight
in conversation, and, above all, the horror of her lonely hours of
introspection determined her to continue her salon in spite of all. She did
not fail. But a blow hardly less grievous had yet to fall. Mlle. de Lespinasse,
on whose assistance she had leaned, had caught the secret of her success,
and was forming a coterie of her own, an inner circle within Madame du
Deffand’s. When the blind woman learned of her assistant’s treachery, she
broke with her, and Mlle. de Lespinasse departed, carrying with her
d’Alembert, adored of Madame du Deffand, and his friends, the flower of
the flock.
Even then the dauntless old woman would not give up. The aged sibyl in
her ‘tonneau’[99] at the Convent Saint Joseph could still attract the curious
and the clever. Blind as she was, her ‘portraits’ of character were better than
Madame Geoffrin’s,—who excelled in portraits,—and the clarity of her
vision was surpassed only by the crispness of her phrasing. At sixty-eight,
she had an eager curiosity about her own times[100] that was a stimulus to
youth. To speak with her was to witness the triumph of mind.
But her heart was as dust and ashes within her. About her she could feel
only duplicity and hatred;[101] she had no faith in man or in God. She
considered her friends as those who would not kill but would look on while
others killed.[102] The springs of happiness and hope had gone dry. And
always the spectre of Ennui steals behind her, and casts its shadow over her
withered soul. Literature no longer interests or amuses; she finds
philosophy poisoned by affectation;[103] she is bored by all historians, and is
glad when she can lay down the first volume of Gibbon.[104] She hears
Gluck’s Orphée, and is bored. She hears The Barber of Seville, and is bored.
[105]
She reads the Iliad, and is bored.[106] There is nothing in her life that
does not feel this blight.

And then, in the late evening of her days, a miracle occurred. The dry
branch budded and bloomed. In the person of Walpole, with his chill though
delicate cynicism (so like her own), romance burst into her life, and she
knew love and the pain of love. Her passion for the Englishman twenty
years her junior transcends all comparison. It has in it the tenderness of age
without its resignation, and the insistence of youth without its joy. It wreaks
itself in protestations, reproaches, and demands which it knows must be
futile. In Madame du Deffand’s letters to Walpole, recently published in
their entirety,[107] there is a strong undercurrent which moves relentlessly to
tragedy—tragedy that is no less poignant because its protagonist is an old
woman and its theme the progress of a slow despair.
To Walpole all this was a source of great uneasiness. Like most superior
folk, he feared the world. He feared that letters might be intercepted, that
Madame du Deffand might talk; that the story might become public; that he
might become an object of ridicule—and ridicule was to him a hell. He
urged upon Madame du Deffand the necessity of reticence. He was
crushingly persistent. The aged woman did her best to smother her feelings,
but she could not altogether smother her resentment:

J’ai une véritable amitié pour vous, vous le savez, et quoique vous
vous en soyez souvent trouvé importuné, que vous ayez fait tout votre
possible et même tout ce qui est inimaginable pour détruire cette
amitié, je suis persuadée que vous n’êtes point fâché qu’elle subsiste....
Et comment est-il possible qu’un aussi bon homme que vous veuille
tourmenter une si faible créature que moi, de qui vous ne pouvez
jamais craindre aucun mal, ni qui puisse vous faire encourir aucun
ridicule ni aucun blâme?[108]

Walpole’s letters to Madame du Deffand are fortunately not preserved;
but one imagines that he was bored by this strain. To him Madame du
Deffand was an aristocratic French woman, a match for him in wit,

frankness, and cynicism, who could provide him with that social life which,
like her, he affected to despise but could not abandon. He had admired her
capacity for disillusion, and now she was the victim of an illusion, and he
was the object of it. The situation was unusual.
But though Walpole could not respond, he did not break with her, or care
to break. When, in 1775, he visited her, for the third time, she showered him
with so many engagements that he needed ‘the activity of a squirrel and the
strength of a Hercules’ to go through with them.[109] He was pleased. He
asserted that Madame du Deffand was a star in the East well worth coming
to adore.[110] With a literary friendship that displayed itself in salons, in
dedications of books, and in temperate letters, he could be well content. At
her death he wrote of her with true affection, gratitude, and grief. But she
had longed in vain for the expression of these, and of more than these,
during the desolation of her latter months.
The effect upon Walpole of this acquaintance with Madame du Deffand
and her salon was to fix in him certain characteristics not always attractive.
She had been able to show him the salon in the one aspect which could
appeal to him; where persiflage had not yielded to the pedantry of the new
philosophy. In his association with her and with the group whose inspiration
she was, he acquired that amused tolerance with which he viewed the
attempts of the bluestockings in England to rival the salons which he had
known in France.

Among Madame du Deffand’s visitors was the man to whom she referred
as ‘the famous Mr. Burke.’ His visit to Paris was of less than a month’s
duration. Madame du Deffand met him on February 9, 1773;[111] and he left
France, apparently on the first day of March.[112] Burke had not come to
Paris to enjoy the fruits of his fame—though his reputation in the salons as
the author of the Junius letters[113] would have given him a career—or to

study the philosophical and political principles of the day. He had placed his
son Richard at Auxerre to learn French; but before returning to England he
glanced at the French court and at the salons. His attitude towards the latter
was unique. ‘It was,’ says Morley,[114] ‘almost as though the solemn
hierophant of some mystic Egyptian temple should have found himself
amid the brilliant chatter of a band of reckless, keen-tongued disputants of
the garden or the porch at Athens.’ Yet any seriousness of manner which he
may have displayed exalted him in the eyes of the philosophers. Madame
du Deffand, though she afterwards learned to despise his writing as verbose,
diffuse, obscure, and affected,[115] liked him at once. ‘Il me paraît avoir
infiniment d’esprit,’ she writes,[116] and again, ‘Il est très aimable.’ She gave
a supper for him, and exerted herself to assemble the most distinguished
and clever members of her circle.[117] She had him invited to Madame de
Luxembourg’s, where he heard La Harpe read a new tragedy in verse, Les
Barmécides.[118] He also talked with Madame du Deffand of a new book,
Essai Générale de Tactique[119] by the Count de Guibert, dealing with the
state of politics and military science in Europe. This elaborate and
enthusiastic treatise, which contained an attack on idle sovereigns and
corrupt courts, appealed to Burke; and, at Madame du Deffand’s request, he
carried a copy of it to Walpole. Burke knew the same author’s tragedy, Le
Connétable de Bourbon,[120] a fact worth mention as indicating an
acquaintance with the salon of Mlle. de Lespinasse, whose lover the author
was. Burke must have heard Guibert read this play aloud, for it had not yet
been acted or published, and the reading may well have occurred at Mlle. de
Lespinasse’s. Again, it may have been in that salon that Burke attacked the
philosophy of Hume,[121] and defended Beattie against the sneers of the free
thinkers—a course that must have taxed his abundant ingenuity as much as
his defective French.

It would be interesting to know the conversation that passed between
Burke and Walpole after the former’s return to England. They met, and it
would seem that Burke expressed strong opinions on the growing atheism
of France, and told of his attempt to defend the Christian system, for
Walpole wrote[122] to the Countess of Upper Ossory: ‘Mr. Burke is returned
from Paris, where he was so much the mode that, happening to dispute with
the philosophers, it grew the fashion to be Christians. St. Patrick himself did
not make more converts.’ But whatever effect Burke may have had upon the
freethinkers of Paris, there can be no doubt of their effect upon him. The
amazing downrush of principles, religious, philosophical, and political,
which he witnessed in France confirmed him in that natural conservatism,
that desire ‘never wholly or at once to depart from antiquity’ to which he
was becoming more and more passionately devoted as the great French
crisis drew on.
The spectacle of Burke converting the philosophers to Christianity sinks
into pale insignificance beside Yorick Sterne’s conversion of Madame de
Vence from the perils of deism—an incident familiar to every reader of The
Sentimental Journey. It was in the winter of 1762 that Sterne made his entry
into the salons, and discovered those guiding principles of compliment,
flattery, and general philandering, which enabled him to win all the esprits,
and, incidentally, to put an end to the deism of Madame de Vence. Seated
on a sofa beside the lady, whose waning beauty should have made her a
deist five years before, he revealed the dangers to which beauty, particularly
in deists, was exposed, and dwelt on the defense provided by religious
sentiments. ‘“We are not adamant,” said I, taking hold of her hand—“and
there is need of all restraints, till age in her own time steals in and lays them
on us—but, my dear lady,” said I, kissing her hand—“’tis too—too soon
——” I declare I had the credit all over Paris of unperverting Madame de V
——. She affirmed to Mons. D——[123] and the Abbe M——[124] that in
one half-hour I had said more for revealed religion than all their

Encyclopedia had said against it—I was lifted directly into Madame de V
——’s Coterie—and she put off the epocha of deism for two years.’
Yorick learned, too, the importance of self-obliteration. ‘I had been
misrepresented to Madame de Q—— as an esprit—Madame de Q—— was
an esprit herself: she burnt with impatience to see me, and hear me talk. I
had not taken my seat before I saw she did not care a sous whether I had
any wit or no—I was let in, to be convinced she had.—I call heaven to
witness I never once opened the door of my lips.’

Such anecdotes may not give us facts,[125] but they record something
quite as useful, Sterne’s impression of the salon, and are a reliable
indication of his general conduct there. The wits of Paris found the most
perfect resemblance between Sterne and his books. Garat asserts[126] that
between seeing the author and reading his works there was almost no
difference at all. There are peculiarly Shandian touches in some of his
letters to Garrick, as his mention[127] of the Baron d’Holbach, ‘one of the
most learned men over here, the great protector of wits and the Sçavans
who are no wits.’ Baron d’Holbach was the ‘maître d’hôtel’ of philosophy,
friend of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot, with a salon of his own, in which
he presided over a school of physicists who held a new theory of nature.
Four years later Walpole[128] eschewed this ‘pigeon-house’ of savants and
their system of antediluvian deluges invented to prove the eternity of
matter. Sterne, who was more affable than Walpole, though no less sharp-
sighted, enjoyed himself there and became a friend of Diderot (to whom he
presented a collection of English books).
It is probable that Sterne made a pretty complete tour of the salons, and
there is good reason for assuming that at Madame Geoffrin’s[129] he made
the acquaintance of Mlle. de Lespinasse. This young woman, who was
about to become one of the most brilliant hostesses in Paris,[130] was
eagerly appreciative of the emotional aspect of Sterne’s work. Compact of

passion and nerves, a disciple of Rousseau, a ‘daughter of the Sun,’[131] and
a sort of female counterpart of Byron, she ate her heart out, was consumed
with hopeless love for three men at once, and attempted suicide, quite in the
familiar manner of a later school. To love and pain, to heaven and hell, she
determined to devote herself.[132] Loathing the world where ‘fools and
automatons abound,’ she must construct the world of romance for herself.
Shandyism won her by its frank display of emotion. There were aspects
of it which she could never have appreciated, its wayward humour and
insincerity, its sprightliness and its dirt; but the tears and the tenderness she
understood by instinct. The loves of Yorick and Eliza, never very popular in
England, appealed to her as after the order of nature, and no doubt reminded
her of her own relations with d’Alembert.
After the appearance of the Sentimental Journey, Mlle. de Lespinasse
wrote two chapters[133] in imitation of that work which, though reproducing
only such features of Sterne’s manner as she understood, are of great
importance as showing the influence of Sterne in the salons. In these the
French sentimentalist has adopted the Englishman’s manner in order to pay
court to her benefactor, Madame Geoffrin. The chapters record two
examples[134] of the elder woman’s charity. The first of these, the incident
of the broken vase, is attributed to Sterne himself. Yorick is represented as
discovering that a vase which he has recently purchased has a broken lid.
The workmen who have just delivered the treasure implore him to have
mercy upon their fellow who broke it, whose accident has so alarmed him
that he has not dared to appear. He is now fairly in the road to ruin. Pleased
with the sympathetic distress of the brother artisans, Yorick inquires into the
case, and is able, through La Fleur, to relieve the poor fellow’s misery. He
ministers to the needs of a wife and four children, and rewards the kindly
friends with a generous pourboire.

The scene of the second chapter is Madame Geoffrin’s salon. Here Sterne
is represented as hearing that lady tell the story of her milk-woman. The
pathetic death of a cow (sole prop of the milk-woman’s family) recalls the
incidents of the dead ass, and of Maria de Moulines and her goat in the
Sentimental Journey; but there are serious deficiencies. Sterne, like Mlle. de
Lespinasse, would have dwelt on the sentimental pleasure of presenting the
milk-woman with two consolatory cows, but he would not have missed the
humour in the fact that the cream afterwards delivered to Madame Geoffrin
was not fit to drink. Mlle. de Lespinasse shows her appreciation of Sterne’s
sentimentalism and her ignorance of his Shandyism.
This imitation of Sterne seems to be the chief record in French of
Yorick’s impression on the salon. If it is a reliable view—and there seems to
be no good reason for rejecting it—it is clear that Sterne preferred to appear
in the drawing-room of Paris without his cap and bells. He realized perhaps
that the way to win the hearts of French ladies was with his warm heart and
his tearful eye, and not by the sudden caprice of his humour. It was Sterne
the emotional epicure, the professed philanderer, and not Yorick the jester,
who was known to the salons; and in thus exploiting his sentimentalism, he
continued and emphasized one aspect of the work of Rousseau, and, with
Richardson, became one of the chief foreign influences exerted upon the
romantic movement in France.

But it was not till the time of Gibbon that any English author duplicated
the success of Hume in the Parisian salon, for none had so nearly satisfied
the conditions required of an esprit fort. Gibbon was the destroyer of
ancient superstitions, who had attacked ecclesiastical tyranny with a new
weapon. The scepticism out of which Hume had made a philosophy became
in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall a new historical method as deadly as it was
disguised. For Gibbon, as for Hume, the salon was a sort of Valhalla, at
once a reward and an arena, in which, surrounded by his peers, he was to

continue his slaughterous career. Success came at once. He was more
popular than Hume, for he did not have the social defects which had, after a
time, somewhat dimmed the lustre of Hume’s success. He had, for example,
no difficulty with the French language, a tongue which he had spoken from
his youth.[135] Madame du Deffand found him as French as her closest
friends,[136] and Madame Necker rebuked him for allowing a Frenchman to
translate his History when he could have done it better himself.[137]
Moreover, though he was an uglier duckling than Hume, his manners had a
pomposity which did not encourage familiarity. ‘Il ne tombe pas dans les
mêmes ridicules,’ said Madame du Deffand, who regarded it as no slight
achievement to avoid becoming a fool when surrounded by fools.[138]
Something of Gibbon’s success was due to a period of preparation, as it
were, an earlier career in the salons fourteen years before. He had received
his training in 1763 when, at the age of twenty-six, he had come to Paris to
meet the literary world, to membership in which he felt himself entitled by
his Essai sur l’Étude de la Littérature, a work which had achieved the
dignity of a second edition. Lady Hervey had furnished him with an
introduction to Madame Geoffrin, and he found a place weekly at her
famous Wednesday dinners. He visited other salons, notably those of
Madame du Bocage and of the Baron d’Holbach, who had entertained
Sterne the year before. Helvétius treated him like a friend.[139] It was a
sufficient success for a young man. It was not to be expected that he should
leave an impress upon Parisian society at this time, nor did he; but there is
little doubt that that society contributed in some measure to his lucidity of
vision and to the prevailing spirit of disillusion for which he was presently
to be famous.
When he returned to Paris in 1777 he shone in no reflected light, for the
publication of the first volume of his Decline and Fall in the preceding year
had already made him a European reputation. The book was almost
immediately translated into French. The spirit of the work, and in particular

the famous explanation of the development of Christianity, appealed to the
philosophers. The indignant but somewhat ineffectual attacks of pious
English folk upon the rationalistic historian pleased them hardly less.
Gibbon’s reception was all that he could desire. ‘I was introduced,’ he tells
us in his Memoirs, ‘to the first names and characters of France, who
distinguished me by such marks of civility and kindness as gratitude will
not suffer me to forget and modesty will not allow me to enumerate.’
According to his own account,[140] he shone in disputes, and got his great
victory over the Abbé Mably in the discussion concerning the republican
form of government. But in general, the French were struck by his
affability. Madame du Deffand could find no other fault in him than his
abiding desire to please, and observed that beaux esprits had the same
fascination for him that the weapons of Odysseus had for the disguised
Achilles. At times he seemed servile, and she was on the point of telling
him to comfort himself with the reflection that he deserved to be a
Frenchman.[141]
But though he was much in the company of Madame du Deffand, that
‘agreeable young lady of eighty-two,’[142] to whom Walpole had given him
a letter of introduction; though he found the best company in Paris in her
salon, and made numerous visits with her (notably to the Marquise de
Boufflers’); though he constantly took supper with her[143] when she
happened to be supping at home, it was not with her that he was most
intimate during his triumphant months in Paris. His name will ever be
linked with that of Madame Necker. His relations with her had begun nearly
a quarter of a century before, and may be read, in a somewhat ameliorated
version, in his own Memoirs; the lady’s story is more fully set forth by the
Vicomte d’Haussonville in Le Salon de Madame Necker. It will suffice to
say here that, after being jilted by Gibbon, the ambitious young Suisse had
married a man destined to be hardly less famous in his own time, had
moved to Paris, studied, as it were, under Madame Geoffrin, and at length

opened a salon of her own. Though less brilliantly gifted than other
hostesses, she was perhaps even more ambitious than they. There is
something modern about her passion for improvement. She was not
unwilling to be a femme savante. She disputed with the philosophers and
recorded philosophical platitudes, along with gossip and rules of grammar,
in her commonplace-book. It may have been the literary ambition of this
lady, it may have been her essential sweetness of character, it may have
been some form of feminine pride, that led her to seek friendship with the
man who had once refused her his love. During her visit to London in 1776,
Hume was constant in his attentions to her and to her husband. In
September, after her return to France, she wrote to him,[144] urging him to
come to her: ‘C’est à Paris qu’il est agréable d’être un grand homme.’ When
at length he came, she would no doubt have been glad to ‘plant’ him in her
house, after the French custom; but Gibbon preferred his freedom: ‘The
reception I have met with from them,’ he writes,[145] ‘very far surpassed my
most sanguine expectations. I do not indeed lodge in their house (as it might
excite the jealousy of the husband, and procure me a letter de cachet), but I
live very much with them, dine and sup whenever they have company,
which is almost every day, and whenever I like it, for they are not in the
least exigeans.’ Their satisfaction was no less than Gibbon’s. His serious
conversation delighted the serious soul of Madame Necker[146] by its union
of interest in details with enthusiasm for great principles, and by the sundry
graces which adorned it.
Madame du Deffand always felt that Gibbon’s respect for the standards
of the beaux esprits had corrupted his style. She heard in it the declamatory
tone of the salons; it had the glitter and the lust for fame with which she
was well acquainted.[147] She knew of course that this could not have been
the result of Gibbon’s later sojourn in Paris, but she was aware that he had
come under the influence of the French salons during an earlier visit. Her
hypothesis, which accounts for something of the inflated rhetoric of

Gibbon, is certainly worthy of attention; and it may be noted, in support of
her view, that Madame Necker, who is a fair measure of what the
philosophes wanted, found in Gibbon’s style a ‘captivating magic.’[148]
When Gibbon left Paris there was universal regret. At the Neckers’ they
talked of nothing but this bereavement[149] and the hope of a return. He
went back, in pudgy complacency, to his historical studies. He had
conversed and even disputed with the prophets of a new era; but like the
other rationalists, he seems to have had no suspicion of the great change
which was presently to make salons impossible. His ignorance of the
approaching storm is a significant illustration of the fact that the discussions
of the salon were essentially academic, conducted in happy ignorance of the
results which were destined to succeed them.

PART II
THE ENGLISH SALON

CHAPTER V
T he E arlier E nglish S alon

The first English salons, broadly so termed, appear in the age of
Elizabeth. A tradition of the social patronage of letters was then established
which had a short though brilliant history and which might, under
favourable conditions, have become of permanent importance to the
literature. It could not, however, survive the period of the Civil Wars and
the Commonwealth; and thus the earlier English salon, despite its promising
beginning, goes from less to less until it disappears altogether about 1700.
The later salon had no connection with it; indeed the eighteenth century
seems to have been quite unaware of its existence. The earlier institution
was perhaps more national in character; it was certainly more vital, and it
will therefore be profitable to sketch its history, if only for purposes of
contrast. This earlier movement must be carefully distinguished from the
larger subject of woman’s place in English literature, from her contribution
to and her growing interest in it; above all, it must be distinguished from the
history of English femmes savantes. Such a larger subject there is, but I
have no intention of treating it here. My purpose is merely to point out
those social and literary institutions set up by English women which
correspond in a general way with the salons as described in the second and
third chapters of this work.
The Elizabethan prototype of the salon is even closer to the Renaissance
courts than the French salons themselves. The greatest of the Elizabethan
patronesses, the Countess of Pembroke, was, even in her own day,
compared with Elizabeth Gonzaga,[150] and her house at Wilton, which

contemporaries refer to as a ‘college’ or ‘school,’ was like nothing so much
as the little academe that we have seen to be characteristic of Italy.
Although the most distinguished female writer of her age, the Countess of
Pembroke was, and is, better known for her coterie than for her writings.
‘She was,’ says Aubrey, ‘the greatest patronesse of wit and learning of any
lady of her time.’[151] Spenser hailed her (in true salon style) as Urania, and
Meres compared her to Octavia, Virgil’s patroness. Like her brother, she
was enthusiastic for the classical tradition, and used her influence with Kyd
and Daniel to keep Senecan tragedy alive. The dedication to Daniel’s
Defence of Ryme implies that the book was produced under her immediate
inspiration. The author refers to Wilton as his ‘best schoole,’ in the same
tone in which Spenser acknowledges himself ‘bounden’ to it ‘by many
singular favours and great graces.’ Miss Young, the recent biographer of the
Countess, who proclaims her ‘in the very best sense of the word a
bluestocking,’ marshals a list of twenty works dedicated to her, and the list
might be almost indefinitely extended by adding to it the passages in
Elizabethan poetry written in her praise. To neglect the latter would be to
pass over some of the most typical utterances of Edmund Spenser.
Thus Elizabethan England saw the salon at its finest. With the ideal of
courtly society numerous translations of the Italian classics had already
made it familiar. There is evidence of the ideal everywhere in Shakespeare’s
romantic comedies. The preciosity of the court of Navarre and the whole
tone of Love’s Labour’s Lost, the badinage of Benedick and Beatrice, the
poetic dialogue of Lorenzo and Jessica in praise of the night, and even the
mingling of the courtly and the pastoral in the life of Arden Forest—these
are all near to the spirit of the Renaissance court and the society with which
we are dealing. The company of gallant men and gracious women idealized
in Shakespeare’s comedies might well have served as the model of the
salon, had the seventeenth century fostered the development of anything so
courtly.

Hardly less distinguished is the group of men who surrounded Lucy,
Countess of Bedford. Her house at Twickenham Park, famous for its
Holbeins and its garden, she loved to fill with men of genius. Ben Jonson,
Chapman, Davies, Drayton, and Daniel were all proud to call themselves
her friend, and almost every one of them dedicated to her some work of
permanent value in English literature. Jonson addressed to her a poetical
epistle and three characteristic epigrams. His language, though pompous, is
probably sincere:
Lucy, you brightness of our sphere, who are
The Muses’ evening as their morning-star.[152]

The Countess was the recipient of more great verse than the entire group of
bluestockings. Daniel, who celebrated her in the Vision of the Twelve
Goddesses, has been called her poet laureate, and there would be no reason
for rejecting the title if it did not more properly belong to John Donne. Not
only did that poet write Twicknam Garden in her honour, and address her
repeatedly in verse epistles which praise her beauty, virtue, and learning in
terms of the most affectionate extravagance, but, says Mr. Gosse, owed to
her the very revival of interest in his art.[153] Donne’s letters seem to show
that he submitted poems to the judgment of the Countess; for she was
herself a poet, and is thought to have written one of the elegies commonly
attributed to Donne.[154] Certain it is that at her house he enjoyed the very
type of society which, a century later, made the fame of salons. He always
speaks of Lady Bedford with the same gratitude and awe which may be
found in Castiglione’s praise of the Duchess of Urbino; he accepted the
same sort of pecuniary assistance from her that Frenchmen received from
Madame Geoffrin. Nay, more, he goes to her in her garden that he may, at
eye and ear,
Receive such balmes as else cure everything.[155]

He writes to Sir Henry Goodyer:

For her delight (since she descends to them) I had reserved not only
all the verses I should make, but all the thoughts of women’s
worthiness.

He is concerned not to be lightly esteemed ‘in that Tribe and that house’
where he has lived.[156]
In all respects, therefore, the Countess’s coterie would seem to stand just
half-way between court and salon—if it is necessary to distinguish the two
terms at all. If it is urged that we have no evidence of the stimulus wrought
by conversation in the group, it may be answered that even this lack is
apparent only and is due simply to the meagreness of contemporary records.
Similarly slender is our knowledge of other women whom we ought in
all probability to associate with the two just discussed: Lady Rutland, Lady
Wroth, and the Countess of Huntington, women who felt a keen interest in
poets and in the welfare of poetry. As it is, the death of Lady Bedford in
1627 must be taken as marking the end of the Elizabethan system of
feminine patronage.

With the accession of Charles I and the supremacy of French social ideals
in the person of Queen Henrietta Maria, a change comes over the salon. A
new side of it is developed, and an older side is forgotten. What had been a
court of patronage became a court of love. The system of Platonic love,
which is a characteristic mark of salons at various periods, comes to the
fore. It had existed in the earlier salons, as Donne’s Petrarchan devotion to
the Countess of Bedford is sufficient to show; but the new order of things
made it the centre of all. This shift of emphasis was a loss to the salon, for
literature—or rather poetry—became a tool in the process of courtship
rather than an end in itself; and the mistress accepted poetical conceits and
extravagant lyrics as evidence of worship from her ‘servants’ in love. Thus
the whole system of courtly love was introduced hot from France, and the

subtleties and silliness of the précieuses galantes were seen in England.[157]
The type of the new salon mistress is the Countess Carlisle, a Percy by
birth, the favourite of Henrietta Maria, and the idol of the court. She
received poetical tributes of the conventional kind from half the poets of the
era, and the story of her gallantries—to give them no harsher name—is a
part of the history of England.
Intrigue is the natural result of gallantry such as this, and intrigue lasted
long after the original Platonic impetus was spent. Intrigue naturally tends
away from social life: Platonic emotions make excellent subjects for
discussion, but intrigue is impatient of talk. Any one who will compare
Cartwright’s Panegyric to the Countess of Carlisle with Suckling’s Lady
Carlisle Walking in Hampton Court Garden may see how readily Platonic
ecstasies sank into the filth of the mire. The two poems measure the
extremes of courtly verse, and define its nature. It ranges, as Mr. Fletcher
has said, ‘all the way from exalted mysticism through mere gallantry, to
mocking cynicism.’ Although these moods all flourished in the foreign
salons of various periods, they never became in England the peculiar
attributes of salon life as distinct from mere social customs. They passed on
to the salons of the Restoration little more than a general tradition of
Platonic and pastoral mannerism and a handful of classical pseudonyms
useful to the conventionally amorous.

When with the Restoration the feminine influence on the current of
literature emerges once more, it is again changed in aspect—like everything
else. So far as the destinies of the English salon are concerned, the
Restoration marks no real advance. If there is not an actual loss of ground,
there is at least a change of direction. Women now become aspirants to an
independent literary reputation. The groups which literary women formed
about themselves never quite suggest the atmosphere of the salon, for their
aims seldom give evidence of a desire to approach literature from the social

side.[158] It was no longer the ambition of woman to rule the world of letters
from above or from beyond as a sort of Muse by whose aid and in whose
honour all was to be done, but to enter that world herself and there to claim
equality with man. It was again only a shift of emphasis, but it was
sufficient to destroy the social aspect of the salon. A salon is not a school of
professionals.
It seems strange that the Parisian salon should not have been imported
bodily by the returning courtiers. A French salon was for a time conducted
at court, as we shall see; but it was not brought there through English
influence, and always remained a foreign growth, not even adopting the
English language. English literary women, despite the presence of this
model, seem to have been incapable of creating anything more than a circle
of friends, cordially interested in their literary ambitions, but hardly
considering the coterie the highest social expression of the literary life.
The nearest approach to salon life in this period is the coterie formed by
the ‘matchless Orinda,’ Mrs. Katherine Philips. This amiable young woman,
with a gift for versifying and a truly social instinct, achieved no slight
reputation in her own day. At Cardigan Priory, her Welsh estate, she
conducted something very like a salon. ‘She instituted,’ says Mr. Gosse,[159]
‘a Society of Friendship to which male and female members were admitted,
and in which poetry, religion and the human heart were to form the subjects
of discussion.’ Here is the salon spirit and a reliance on conversation as the
truest inspiration to social life—a thing which we shall not encounter again
till the days of the bluestockings. Orinda adopted the prevalent custom of
giving literary names to her friends, indulged in Platonic friendships of the
most florid kind, praised her female friends in verse, and despatched
glowing sentiments to them in letters:

I gasp for you with an impatience that is not to be imagined by any
soul wound up to a less concern in friendship than yours is, and

therefore I cannot hope to make others sensible of my vast desires to
enjoy you.[160]

Whatever interest Mrs. Philips’s works may possess must be shared with
this group, with ‘Rosania,’ ‘Lucasia,’ ‘Poliarchus,’ and the rest, for to them
a large proportion of her writing was directly addressed. It is to be regretted
that we are not more fully informed regarding the relations of certain
eminent men with the coterie. The general interest felt by the Royalist poets
in her career has been taken to point to a personal connection with her, but
it is doubtful whether the relations of such men as Dryden, Cowley, and
Denham with her were anything more than formally courteous. To them she
was a new phenomenon in the literary world, a female author, a prodigy that
attracted attention but did not threaten rivalry—a woman and therefore to
be flattered, a poetess and therefore to be called a tenth Muse. Cowley, who
equates her with Pope Joan, is almost comic in his praise:
But if Apollo should design
A woman laureat to make,
Without dispute he would Orinda take,
Though Sappho and the famous Nine
Stood by and did repine.[161]

But this is elegy, not burlesque.
With Jeremy Taylor, ‘Palæmon,’ the case is different. In 1657 he put forth
a duodecimo volume entitled A Discourse of the Nature, Offices and
Measures of Friendship, which, the title-page announces, was ‘written in
answer to a Letter from the most ingenious and vertuous M. K. P.’ Orinda
had written to Taylor, with whom she must have been already on terms of
intimacy, to inquire ‘how far a dear and perfect friendship is authorized by
the principles of Christianity.’ The answer is a wholly delightful essay
which was widely popular in the seventeenth century and deserves to be
more generally known to-day. Taylor praises Mrs. Philips as ‘not only
greatly instructed by the direct notices of things, but also by great
experience in the matter of which you now inquire.’ He concludes that it is

not ill that she should ‘entertain brave friendships and worthy societies’; but
takes occasion to warn her against the fantastic Platonism of the salon:[162]

They that build castles in the aire, and look upon friendship, as upon
a fine Romance, a thing that pleases the fancy, but is good for nothing
else will doe well when they are asleep, or when they come to Elysium;
and for ought I know in the mean time may be as much in love with
Mandana in the Grand Cyrus, as with the Countess of Exeter; and by
dreaming of perfect and abstracted friendships, make them so
immaterial that they perish in the handling and become good for
nothing.

In the postscript to Mrs. Philips, she is requested to forward the essay to
Dr. Wedderburn, if she ‘shall think it fit that these pass further’ than her
own ‘eye and closet.’ Such was Taylor’s trust in Orinda; such his tribute to
her.
It must be admitted that Orinda’s relations with the authors of her time
are little short of remarkable. Her name is written across some of the most
characteristic poetry of the age. When she was but twenty, commendatory
verses by her were prefixed to the Poems of Vaughan the Silurist. Before
the end of her short life—she died in 1664, soon after her thirty-fourth
birthday—she had even attracted the notice of Dryden. Her contemporaries
appear to have been serious in their belief that she had made herself a
permanent place in English literature, and for many years after her death
kept her fame alive by publishing her plays, poems, and letters, in which
she was invariably described as ‘celebrated,’ ‘matchless,’ and
‘incomparable.’ Her coterie made but little impression on the literature of its
time; but that may well have been due to its short career. Mrs. Philips
possessed a refinement of taste and of character by no means common
among the literary ladies of the time, and a noble though highly sentimental

affection for her friends. These are characteristics which, had she lived, she
might have made of practical advantage to the world of letters.

On a somewhat lower social plane the notorious Mrs. Aphra Behn carried
on the traditions of the matchless Orinda. Like her, Mrs. Behn had her
coterie which she celebrated in conventional lyrics. In the poem entitled
Our Cabal, the various members are described under pastoral pseudonyms,
Alexis, Damon, Amoret, and the like. It is impossible to identify the persons
referred to, but it is unlikely that any of them attained to literary fame.
Gallantry, coquetry, and the whole paraphernalia of the amatory art formed
the exclusive business of the coterie. With the world of letters it had little to
do. Thus it touches the salon upon its least important side. But Mrs. Behn,
or ‘Astræa,’ as her friends rashly called her, developed another side by
emulating the practice of Mlle. Scudéry, and weaving certain of her own
adventures—for she had had many—into the body of her novels. This
practice of colouring the events of an interminable romance with personal
allusions and allegorical meanings was one of the principal results of salon
activity in Paris during the later seventeenth century; but it is not
characteristic of the salon at its finest and was, so far as English literature
was concerned, but a fad which had no future at all. Moreover Mrs. Behn’s
romances lack what is best in the type, that courtliness which can alone
redeem such works from artificiality and dulness. It is true that Mrs. Behn
escapes dulness, but she does not achieve courtliness. Thus she misses the
very point at which such work may come under the influence of fine
society. As it is, far from serving the cause of literature by attracting authors
to the urbanities of life, her scandalous novels brought both their author and
her profession into disrepute. Her unique achievement was to show that a
woman could make her living by her pen. Her career brought her inevitably
into touch and even into competition with male authors, and her easy
manners enabled her to associate on terms of pleasant familiarity with

Dryden and Otway; but all this is suggestive rather of the camaraderie of
the modern literary world than of the atmosphere of salons.

Meanwhile Hortense, Duchess of Mazarin, and niece of the Cardinal of
that name, had set up in London a genuine French salon. It owes its
somewhat exotic fame entirely to the Chevalier de Saint Évremond who
wrote of its mistress in language of the most riotous hyperbole. Some of the
best-known pages of this amorous old wit were produced in honour of the
fair French refugee at the court of Charles II. He wrote poems to her; he
wrote a ‘portrait’ of her, in which her charms are analysed in such detail as
almost to indicate a state of dotage in him; to satisfy a whim of hers he
wrote a Funeral Oration for her while she was yet alive that she might see
her praises set forth in the manner of Bossuet. He wrote a discourse on
religion to embody the thoughts which she had drawn out during a
conversation in her salon. In a letter to her, which accompanied the essay,
he asserts that she has given the lie to the old statement that truth must be
banished from ordinary conversation, for she can make truth so attractive as
to reconcile all minds to it and restore it to its proper place in the world.[163]
But all this is a mere speck in the avalanche of flattery. Her conversation, he
assures her elsewhere,[164] surpasses Plutarch in gravity, Seneca in
sententiousness, and Montaigne in depth.
But the philosophic goddess and her withered prophet were not always
happy together. The Duchess was overfond of bassette, a game in which
Saint Évremond indulged chiefly to please her, lamenting the loss of her
conversation the while, and addressing poetical protests to her. The passion
for gaming, which threatened to become a profession or a fury with her, is
less revolting than the amours in which the lady (more beautiful than Helen
or Cleopatra[165]) involved herself. The fascination of the Merry Monarch
and the death of a favourite lover after a duel fought with an infatuated

nephew, bring her love-affairs out of the Platonic atmosphere, so essential
to salons, into the realm of ugly realism.
The salon Mazarin, which came to an end with the death of the Duchess
in 1699, thus tended to associate the literary hostess with vice as well as
with letters. As Mrs. Behn had degraded the name of woman in the world of
hack-writers, so the Duchess of Mazarin degraded it in the drawing-room.
Her salon represented a vicious and a foreign institution, which, though it
gained a foothold at Court, was quite without influence upon English life
and literature.

With the death of the Duchess of Mazarin we reach the end of the
seventeenth century and the end of anything like a salon in England until
the time of the bluestockings. The results of the feminist movement at the
close of that century[166] are seen in two distinct yet definitely related facts.
In the first place, a large number of women were encouraged, by the
success of Mrs. Behn, to attempt the production of literature, and the female
author and wit became a current subject of satire. With all this we have here
nothing to do. Women like Catherine Trotter, Mary Pix, and Mrs. Manley,
far from promoting the social recognition of literature, tended to deflect the
influence of woman from the drawing-room to the noise and strife of Grub
Street. The satire that was poured out on them and their kind as learned
women must not be taken to point to the existence of anything like a salon,
strictly considered. Terms borrowed from French literature were freely
flung about; but references to ruelles and femmes savantes were so loosely
used that they are not to be thought of having the same significance when
repeated by English authors that they have in their own country.
In the second place, and largely as a result of the opinion in which such
female wits were held, we find a mass of tracts, consisting of Defences of,
Apologies for, and Serious Proposals to Women, all working towards a

vindication of the sex. Such vindications frequently strike the reader as
having been written to prove the very charges which they exist to rebut. In
any case, this flood of feeble defences seems to show that woman had
forgotten her high office as inspirer and patron of letters, which she had
hitherto always taken for granted, and had decided to occupy herself with
vague questions of equality and natural capacity. We have moved far from
the spacious times of the Countess of Pembroke.
In the age of Anne, English women lost what was probably the best
chance they ever had to reëstablish the feminine patronage of letters which
distinguished the age of Elizabeth. The tone of urbanity which characterized
the literature of the early eighteenth century ought to have given birth to
salons. The presence of a Stuart queen upon the throne and the supremacy
of a school of authors by no means averse from social pleasures, offered a
unique opportunity to women to give social expression to their interest in
literature and to inspire and assist authors. But the opportunity was lost.
Feminine activity in the literary world continued to be associated with
notorious names, with the scurrilous New Atlantis of Mary Manley, and
with the loose career of Mrs. Centlivre. Women authors were already
Bohemians. ‘In the female world,’ says Johnson in his Life of Addison, ‘any
acquaintance with books was distinguished only to be censured.’
This pronouncement of Johnson’s is of that large general nature which is
likely to give offence to specialists. A multitude of exceptions to it will
occur at once to any one. The Duchess of Queensbury, for example,
patronized Gay; Dean Swift was not uninfluenced by the women who
surrounded him; Pope addressed verse-epistles to Martha Blount; later in
the century, Young satirized the literary female, and Richardson had his
group of adoring ‘Daughters.’ But none of these really changes the
significance of Johnson’s summary. When he referred to the censure visited
upon literary women he may well have been thinking of Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu, whose acquaintance with the authors of her time was
wider than that ever possessed by the bluestockings. But though the noble

lady had genuine interest in letters and very remarkable powers, she was
wholly without that courtly character which is indispensable to the hostess
of a salon. She repelled men as much by her insolent cleverness as by her
slovenly manners. Finally her long residence abroad withdrew her
completely from the literary circle which she knew so well.
It was the work of the middle decades of the eighteenth century to
remove the odium in which women’s interest in literature had been held.
The world of female readers became almost as large and influential as that
of the male, so that by 1778 Johnson could remark, ‘All our ladies read
now.’ The Bluestocking Club, which marks the first definite reappearance
of the salon in London, shows the desire of woman to extend her function in
the literary world so as to include in it the office of patron, as well as that of
author and reader. But this new patronage was to be primarily social, and
was to express itself first in various social diversions, which preluded the
more formal salons, and to which we now proceed.

CHAPTER VI
C onversation P arties and L iterary A ssemblies

Not the least pleasant of the social gatherings for conversation was the
levee, or reception held on rising from bed. The custom was of course
adopted by people of fashion in imitation of the popular court function, and
it always retained something of the courtly atmosphere, its popularity in
fine society being due to the sense of importance which it lent to the host or
hostess. Madame de Tencin, for example, thus held court from eight o’clock
in the morning, queening it over everybody, ‘from the lowest tools to the
highest.’[167] Mascarille, it will be remembered, boasts that he never rises
from bed without the company of half a dozen beaux esprits. Yet despite its
imitation of the court, there must have been about this kind of reception a
certain intimacy and ease that were lacking in the more formal assemblies
held later in the day.[168]

The Levee
From an engraving of the fourth painting in Hogarth’s Marriage à la Mode

In England the levee had been known for perhaps a hundred years;[169]
but it first becomes of importance to the student of literature about the
middle of the century. A good general impression of it may be obtained
from the fourth plate of Hogarth’s Marriage à la Mode, published in 1745.
The hostess, half dressed, is seated at her toilet-table, under the
ministrations of her hair-dresser, and is engaged in conversation with her
lover, who is reclining on a sofa near by. In the background is seen the bed,
one curtain of which is still drawn. A negro butler is passing chocolate to
the guests who are ranged in front of the bed, while an Italian tenor is
regaling them with solos to the accompaniment of a flute. This latter point

is significant in the satire, for it is evident that the hostess is incapable of
conducting a true conversazione, and has therefore had recourse to
providing her guests with other entertainment, while she pursues her
amorous intrigue.
A later and even more familiar representation of the levee is found at the
opening of the School for Scandal, where Lady Sneerwell is ‘discovered’ at
her toilet. When this scene is correctly represented on the stage the lady’s
guests are shown as drinking chocolate at her levee, and there
characteristically displaying their conversational gifts.
That the levee was at its best essentially a literary function is shown by
the encouragement it received from Samuel Johnson. The account of his
morning receptions is preserved for us by Dr. Maxwell, whose description
must be quoted in full:

About twelve o’clock I commonly visited him, and frequently found
him in bed, or declaiming over his tea, which he drank very plentifully.
He generally had a levee of morning visitors, chiefly men of letters;
Hawkesworth, Goldsmith, Murphy, Langton, Steevens, Beauclerk, etc.,
etc., and sometimes learned ladies, particularly I remember a French
lady of wit and fashion doing him the honour of a visit.[170] He seemed
to be considered as a kind of public oracle, whom everybody thought
they had a right to visit and consult; and doubtless they were well
rewarded.[171]

When Johnson visited Boswell in Edinburgh after the tour of the
Hebrides ‘he had, from ten o’clock to one or two, a constant levee of
various persons, of different characters and descriptions;’ so that poor Mrs.
Boswell was obliged to ‘devote the greater part of the morning to the
endless task of pouring out tea.’[172]

This custom, thus sanctioned by fashion and by literary authority, was
adopted by all who pretended to wit. In 1760, Goldsmith sneers at the
philosophical beau who ‘receives company in his study, in all the pensive
formality of slippers, night-gown, and easy-chair.’[173] Flavia, in the same
author’s Double Transformation, after marrying an Oxford Fellow, aspires
to the reputation of a femme savante:
Proud to be seen she kept a bevy
Of powdered coxcombs at her levee.

By 1779 the function had become so popular that its name was frequently
extended to any formal entertainment where conversation was the principal
attraction, even when it was held in the evening.[174]
The levee merged easily into the formal breakfast. This function might
occur at any hour from eight o’clock in the morning to three in the
afternoon.[175] It was in 1750 that Madame du Bocage recorded her
impressions of Mrs. Montagu’s breakfasts, generalizing upon the custom of
the nation in these words:

In the morning breakfasts which enchant as much by the exquisite
viands as by the richness of the plate in which they are served up,
agreeably bring together both the people of the country and strangers
[i.e., both natives and foreigners].[176]

The diaries and letters of Beattie, Mrs. Delany, Miss Burney, and Miss
More are strewn with references to this fashionable meal. In the spring of
1774, Walpole professes himself frightened at the inundation of them
coming on.[177] A favourite diversion at these matutinal parties, as at
entertainments later in the day, was the declamation of Thomas Sheridan
(who would repeat Gray’s Elegy, Dryden’s Ode, and ‘everything that
everybody could say by heart’[178]), the French readings of Tessier, the
tragic recitations of Tighe (who expected his auditors to swoon from

emotion), and, occasionally, bits of recitation or acting by Garrick. Sheridan
gave so many of these literary breakfasts that Mrs. Boscawen suspected that
he received money for them.[179] At times such functions were more or less
public, and were held in the Haymarket, at Vauxhall, or at Bath, in the
Assembly Rooms.
The receptions of the later afternoon and evening are of a less definite
character. Beattie describes a gathering at Mrs. Montagu’s as ‘an assembly
or conversation or rout.’[180] The entertainment was of wide scope, as in
Italian and French drawing-rooms, and might include dancing, card-
playing, and literary readings, as well as conversation.[181] In this work we
are concerned only with the literary aspect of these parties; the origin and
the more serious results of the London salon are discussed elsewhere, so
that the rest of this chapter may be devoted to a consideration of the means
adopted for shining in conversation at these parties, and the attempt to
connect such assemblies directly with the production of poetry.
It is surely a misfortune that contemporary descriptions of the
conversazione should be generally satirical in tone; but it is natural enough,
for conversation, unsupported by other entertainment, tends, in large
groups, to pedantry on the one hand, and to frivolousness on the other.
English literature produced no Molière to satirize the salons; but the
conversazione did give both character and title to one great comedy, the
School for Scandal. Although this play is not, like the Critique de l’École
des Femmes, an adequate criticism of the literary drawing-room, it does
nevertheless preserve prominent aspects of it, and we shall have occasion to
refer to it repeatedly in illustrating the nature of the conversazione.[182]
Another criticism of this entertainment is found in a book now totally
forgotten, entitled, Modern Manners, or the Country Cousins, in a series of
Poetical Epistles. This is the work of the Rev. Samuel Hoole, son of the
translator of Tasso and Ariosto, and appeared in the year 1782. The poems
describe the visit of a north-English family to London, somewhat after the

manner of Smollett in Humphry Clinker, and of Anstey in the New Bath
Guide. The tenth epistle is an account of Lady Chattony’s conversazione.
[183]
At that assembly old Mr. Ralph Rusty is served with lukewarm coffee
and tea and a minute bit of cake, which made him long for more. The
company splits up into groups, each with their backs turned on the rest. The
first party which he joins is (naturally) talking scandal:
‘My lovely Miss Wagtail,’ says pretty Beau Brisker,
‘I’ve seen your dear friend, sweet Miss Fatty Fanfrisker.’
‘—Dear creature!—she’s truly what all men adore so’—
‘—Faith not quite so charming but some I know more so’—
‘—You difficult thing! you’re as rude as a bear,
You think nobody handsome I vow and declare!
What fault can you find?—to be sure, her hair’s sandy,
And Scapegrace declares that her legs are quite “bandy.”’

His second visit is to a group engaged in musical gossip:
‘a nymph with a white varnished face
And a sallow thin man, almost covered with lace.’

He escapes from their gushing ecstasies only to fall on a political
discussion:
Next a party of critics and authors I joined,
And thought I had found out a set to my mind:
Cries a little black man, ‘I’m convinced, Dr. Guzzle,
’Tis a poor paltry book that was mentioned by Puzzle.
I’m told too that Ratsbane and Screachowl abuse it?—
Have you, my dear Doctor, had time to peruse it?’
‘O, yes, I have skimmed it—’tis terrible trash,
An oleo of nonsense, an ill-savour’d hash.’
‘Sir, good Mr. Shuttlecock’s pamphlet, depend on’t,
Which now is just published, will soon make an end on’t’—
‘I heard,’ cries another, ‘at Cadell’s to-day,
That Johnson’s in town, and is writing away;
I was charmed with his Milton; what judgment and spirit!
Mr. Rattlesnake, sure you’ll allow this has merit?
You’ve read it, no doubt, Sir,’—‘Not I, Sir, indeed—
Read Johnson!—I’d sooner subscribe to the creed!—
His opinions, religious and civil, I hate—
Sir, he’d make us all slaves to the church and the state!’—
‘Gude Sir,’ cries a Scot, springing up from behind,
And presenting his snuff-box, ‘you’re quite o’ my mind;
’Tho’ the Doctor would fain give our poets the law,
O’ the spirit of verse he knows nothing at a’;
In spite of his critique, I canna’ perceive

What there is in your poem of Adam and Eve:
An Ossian you read, Milton canna’ ga doun
’Tis lik after a virgin a mess o’ the toun:
No, troth, here the Doctor does nothing but dream,
For he is too purblind to ken the subleeme’—
‘Hold, hold, my good friend—I must stand by old Milton,
While the sword that I wear has a blade or a hilt on;
That great politician, that torch of our nation,
Must never be mentioned without veneration:
Respecting the Doctor, you say very true,
I think him as scurvy a critic as you,
But consider him now in a worse point of view:
Pray is he not pensioned?—and does he not write, Sir,
To make us tame fools, and believe black is white, Sir?
All friends to our freedom that creature must hate
Who pockets three hundred a year from the state.’
‘Gad troth, maister Rattlesnake, why do you mantion,
With so much asperity, Sir, that word pansion?
The Doctor deserves na sic thing—but what then
In troth, I weel know many axcellent men,
Who never have thought it a shame or disgrace
T’accept a wee pansion or snug pratty place;
But then they have a’ sat doun selent as deeth—
The Doctor still vents his pestiferous breeth
Against a’ Scotch tenets and Scotch reputation,
Tho’ he found a gude friend in a Laird of our nation.’

‘I see,’ cries another, ‘your anger he wakes,
Because he’s no friends to the country of cakes;
Nor am I surpriz’d, for the place of our birth
We all of us think is the best upon earth;
And therefore we ne’er can the writer approve,
Who slights the dear land we so partially love.’

‘You speak like a seer—ah! you ken, Sir, his Tour,
Our vary worst foe could have written no more;
In thot he insinuates, tho’ he canna’ see
Twa yards, that we’ve na sic a thing as a tree,
Tho’ just by the road there were saxteen or twanty,
And, if he’d gone more to the laft, he’d found planty;
Nay, troth, it’s a fact, Sir, that’s weel understood,
Au’ Scotland was antiently covered with wood.’

Mr. Rusty’s unhappy evening was concluded by listening to the tales of a
young lord just returned from his travels, a buck who wishes to fight a duel
with him because he laughs at incredible stories.

There is nothing very witty in this poem, as the quotations may show;
and the satires no doubt sank of their own weight; but in spite of its dulness,
the account would appear to be, in the main, a fair picture of the
conversazione. We may notice, in the first place, that Lady Chattony has
followed the best traditions of the salon in reducing her refreshments to a
minimum, depending for the success of her reception entirely upon the
conversation of her guests.[184] The talk, again, is not confined to a large
circle; but is broken up, after Mrs. Vesey’s manner, into a series of small
groups. We have the usual references to gossip, scandal, and chatter about
clothes, politics, and the opera, with occasional approaches to Sheridan’s
method of satire, but with none of his cleverness.
It is inevitable that any satire on the conversazione should dwell on the
tendency to scandal and gossip. So inevitable is their presence in the salons
that it seems hardly necessary to point it out; but it is essential to be at the
true explanation of their prevalence, which no satire is likely to point out.
Scandal, and its sister, Gossip, are the short cuts to cleverness, and
cleverness is the one indispensable thing to the frequenters of salons. This is
abundantly evident in the School for Scandal. It is wit for which Lady
Sneerwell’s guests are striving, and they will mar a character that they may
make a mot. ‘There is no possibility,’ says Lady Sneerwell, ‘of being witty
without a little ill-nature; the malice of a good thing is the barb that makes it
stick,’[185] and Lady Teazle is in practical agreement with her; ‘I vow I bear
no malice against the people I abuse; when I say an ill-natured thing ’tis out
of pure good humour.’
Sheridan was not the only dramatist to satirize the salons and their
scandalous talk. His comedy was imitated by Thomas Holcroft in
Seduction,[186] a play whose popularity on the stage was equalled by its
popularity in print. The conversation descriptive of an assembly at Lady
Morden’s is in obvious imitation of the Scandal School.

Sir Frederic. Sir Nathan Neaptide, the yellow admiral, came.
Lord Morden. An agreeable guest!
Mrs. Modely. Oh! rude as his own boatswain.
Sir Frederic. Would teach a startling blasphemy, rather than want
good conversation.
Lady Morden. He attempts satire.
Lord Morden. But utters abuse.
Mrs. Modely. That makes him so much respected.
Lady Morden. Yes; like a chimney-sweeper in a crowd, he makes his
way by being dirty....
Sir Frederic. The widow Twinkle, as usual, talked a vast deal about
reputation.
Lady Morden. One is apt to admire a thing one wants.
Lord Morden. She always takes infinite pains to place her reputation,
like broken china in a buffet, with the best side
outward.
Lady Morden. She may plaister, and cement, but will never bring it to
bear handling.

Other aspirants to conversational fame adopted the less questionable
habit of talking sentiments. Here again the School for Scandal reveals the
trick of the salons, for Joseph Surface has won himself a place in the group
by virtue of his philosophical and ethical maxims. Sheridan’s brilliant satire
of a reigning fad in literature and society was anticipated by Goldsmith in
She Stoops to Conquer, in which, when Kate Hardcastle wishes to speak
like a fine lady, she at once begins to talk sentiments.[187] This habit of
lending a semblance of depth to one’s conversation by the introduction of

philosophical aphorisms is no doubt as old as the salon itself. At its best,
there is nothing contemptible in the sentiment, as the long and brilliant
history of the maxim in French literature may prove. The reputation of
Mme. de Sablé’s salon was largely made by the maxim or pensée, and all
the later salons afford examples of its vitality. Madame Geoffrin was
famous for it. ‘Madame Geoffrin,’ wrote Mme. Necker, ‘a mis toute sa
raison en maximes,’[188] and the same writer praises the work of English
authors for their successful production of this type, finding these authors
otherwise deficient in moral principles.[189] The maxim, ethical sentiment,
or philosophical truth sententiously expressed, did indeed attain substantial
existence in the essays of Samuel Johnson, who fancied that mankind might
come in time to ‘write all aphoristically;’ but in English conversation it
never found a thoroughly congenial soil. ‘Sentiments’ were popular, but,
like much that was popular, they were hollow too. The Dowager Countess
Gower writes to Mrs. Delany that the bluestockings are at Sunning Wells,
where they ‘sport sentiments from morn tell noon, from noon to dewy
eve.’[190] The pages of the Wit’s Magazine teemed with collections of them:
‘Flattery, like a cameleon, assumes the colours of the object it is nearest to.’
The record of bluestocking maxims and sentiments preserved in letters and
diaries is amazing, but not because of its brilliance. Mrs. Montagu wrote the
following to Miss Burney, in reference to the character of Mr. Vesey, ‘A
frippery character, like a gaudy flower, may please while it is in bloom; but
it is the virtuous only that, like the aromatics, preserve their sweet and
reviving odour when withered.’[191] This is exactly in the style of Julia, the
once-fashionable heroine of The Rivals, who, in respect of her conversation,
might be own sister to Joseph Surface: ‘When hearts deserving of happiness
would unite their fortunes, Virtue would crown them with an unfading
garland of modest hurtless flowers; but ill-judging Passion will force the
gaudier Rose into the wreath, whose thorn offends them when its leaves are
dropped.’

Closely akin to the neatly-turned sentiment is the epigram and this, in all
its forms, the salon, following Continental models, sought to stimulate. One
thinks immediately of the poetical epigrams of Sir Benjamin Backbite, his
impromptu verses on Lady Frizzle’s feather catching fire, his rebuses, the
charade which he made at Mrs. Drowsie’s conversazione, and, above all, of
that sprightly extempore conceit on Lady Betty Curricle’s ponies:
Sure never were seen two such beautiful ponies;
Other horses are Clowns—and these macaronies;
Nay, to give ’em this title I’m sure isn’t wrong,
Their legs are so slim and their tails[192] are so long.

There was no more certain way of achieving a reputation for wit than by the
impromptu composition of these little verses. No lover of Goldsmith will
fail to remember Garrick’s epigram on the poet who ‘wrote like an angel
and talked like poor Poll.’ Less hackneyed is the couplet which Dr. Young
produced at the ‘World,’ a club of gentlemen who were amusing themselves
after dinner by scratching verses, with their diamonds, upon the wine-
glasses. Having no jewel of his own, Young, when his turn came round, was
obliged to borrow Chesterfield’s, and then wrote:
Accept a miracle: instead of wit,
See two dull lines with Stanhope’s pencil writ.[193]

It is difficult to find a volume of eighteenth century verse that does not bear
witness to the popularity of the epigram. Every miscellany teems with them.
No collected edition of poems was complete without a handful of them.
They are recorded in every diary and commonplace-book, and were
exchanged by friends in the course of familiar correspondence. High and
low, the peer of wit and the pretender to it, vied with one another in the
production of them. All alike seem to have reached a dead level of
mediocrity. The charade which Johnson made in honour of his friend Dr.
Barnard[194] is no better and no worse than scores of impromptu verses
quoted in Walpole’s Letters or the Asylum for Fugitive Pieces.

Much of this, no doubt, seems trivial. But wherever the spirit of the salon
appears, evidence of its presence is seen in the production and general
esteem of such trifles: rebuses, anagrams, madrigals, enigmas, charades,
and bouts rimés. The explanation of it all goes back, perhaps, to the Italian
Renaissance, when, as Burckhardt has shown, an epigram could lay the
foundation of a scholar’s celebrity:

It was held the greatest of all triumphs when an epigram was
mistaken for a genuine copy from some old marble or when it was so
good that all Italy learned it by heart, as happened in the case of some
of Bembo’s.

The popularity of epigrams in fine English society is amusingly
illustrated by the entertainments provided by a certain Mrs. (afterwards
Lady) Miller at her villa near Bath. The character and the results of her
attempt to stimulate the production of literature are typical, and, as they
have left a considerable record in print, it may be profitable to consider
them somewhat at length. She introduced what she was pleased to term the
‘little Gallic institution’ of bouts rimés. Lists of riming words were
distributed among her guests, who composed verses suggested by them,
employing them in their given order. The resulting effusions were then
placed in a vase decorated with laurel branches and pink ribbons, erected
upon a ‘modern altar.’ ‘It is at present,’ writes this ingenious lady, ‘the
receptacle of all the contending poetical morsels which every other
Thursday (formerly Friday) are drawn out of it indiscriminately, and read
aloud by the gentlemen present, each in his turn. Their particular merits are
afterwards discussed by them, and prizes assigned to three out of the whole
that appear to be the most deserving. Their authors are then, and not before,
called for, who seldom fail to be announced either by themselves, or, if
absent, by their friends. Then the prize poems are read aloud a second time
to the company, each by its author, if present, if not, by other Gentlemen,

and wreaths of Myrtle presented publicly by the Institutress[195] to each
successful writer.’
When these verses were published they roused, if not the general esteem
which the Institutress plainly expected for them, the interest of Miss
Burney, the curiosity of Boswell, and the mirth of Walpole. The latter wrote,
in his most delightful mood, to the Countess of Ailesbury:

You must know, Madam, that near Bath is erected a new Parnassus,
composed of three laurels, a myrtle-tree, a weeping-willow, and a view
of the Avon, which has been new christened Helicon. Ten years ago
there lived a Madam Riggs, an old rough humourist who passed for a
wit; her daughter, who passed for nothing, married to a Captain Miller,
full of good-natured officiousness. These good folks were friends of
Miss Rich, who carried me to dine with them at Bath-Easton, now
Pindus. They caught a little of what was then called taste, built and
planted, and begot children, till the whole caravan were forced to go
abroad to retrieve. Alas! Mrs. Miller is returned a beauty, a genius, a
Sappho, a tenth Muse, as romantic as Mademoiselle Scudéri, and as
sophisticated as Mrs. Vesey. The Captain’s fingers are loaded with
cameos, his tongue runs over with virtù, and that both may contribute
to the improvement of their own country, they have introduced bouts
rimés as a new discovery. They hold a Parnassus fair every Thursday,
give out rhymes and themes, and all the flux of quality at Bath contend
for the prizes. A Roman vase dressed with pink ribbons and myrtles
receives the poetry, which is drawn out every festival; six judges of
these Olympic games retire and select the brightest compositions,
which the respective successful acknowledge, kneel to Mrs. Calliope
Miller, kiss her fat hand, and are crowned by it with myrtle, with—I
don’t know what. You may think this is fiction or exaggeration. Be
dumb, unbelievers! The collection is printed, published.—Yes, on my
faith! There are bouts rimés on a buttered muffin, made by her Grace

the Duchess of Northumberland; receipts to make them by Corydon the
venerable, alias George Pitt; others very pretty by Lord Palmerston;
some by Lord Carlisle: many by Mrs. Miller herself, that have no fault
but wanting metre: and immortality promised to her without end or
measure.[196]

Mrs. Miller’s Institution appears, however, to have been an unqualified
social success. The first edition of the verses was exhausted in ten days,[197]
and a second was published in the following year. Three similar volumes
appeared at intervals,[198] and the series was terminated only by the death of
the Institutress.[199] The publications received the compliment of an
anonymous attack entitled Sappho,[200] in which Mrs. Miller was satirically
hailed as ‘Mistress of the tuneful nine’; but a more deadly assault took the
form of a solemn congratulatory Epistle to Mrs. Miller,[201] in which that
lady is said to
Shine unmatched in old or modern time,
A friend of Genius, Pleasure, Taste and Rhime,
Which daily thrive beneath thy fostering hand
And pour the tide of learning o’er the land.

An examination of the volume published in 1775 hardly seems to bear out
these statements. The following production of the hostess herself it is
difficult to describe with accuracy, for the word verse hardly seems
appropriate to it:
From Castor and Pollux, those twins of renown,
Arose the great dance taught at Lacedæmon;
Then a son of Achilles, with a barbarous name,
Taught his soldiers to dance, those Cretans of fame.
Wise philosopher Socrates also would know,
From Aspasia the fair how to well point a toe.
Pompous nuptials and feasts—e’en the grave Funerals
Was danc’d at by princes, priests, people and all.

It is only fair to say that the verses in the volume do frequently rise from
this level to that of mediocrity. The following specimen of bouts rimés may

serve to indicate the type and contents of the volume:
Hard to my muse it is, I must confess,
In six fixed rhymes aught witty to express;
Why did I mix with Wits? who must detest
And crush my follies which their sense molest.
Thus the poor mole, who rises into light
Dies when he meets the sun’s refulgent might.

There are other things to be said in amelioration of the harsh judgments
one is inclined to pass upon Mrs. Miller. The later volumes are certainly
less bad than the first. The praise of Mrs. Miller, which had formed the
staple of the first volume, is somewhat mitigated in the others, and the
names of the contributors occasionally emerge into the borderland of fame.
Potter, William Hayley, Anna Seward, and Christopher Anstey are worthy
of respect, and a poem by Garrick, though worthless, lends a certain
distinction to the second volume. Anstey’s poem, An Election Ball,[202]
which enjoyed something of the popularity of his New Bath Guide, was
written upon a subject given out by Mrs. Miller, ‘The ancient and modern
Dress and Manners of the English Nation compared’; and the Poetical
Address which prefaced it is addressed to Mr. Miller. In the former ‘Clio’
and the Tusculan ‘vause’ are celebrated, and in the latter the ‘myrtle sprigs’
and ‘vocal swans of Bath.’ These poems are still readable.
To Mrs. Miller must certainly be allowed the merit of having gathered
about herself a group of persons who would have made the reputation of
any London drawing-room. Her own inability to produce anything that
should have more than the external appearance of verse does not seem to
have repelled those of higher ability and finer taste. For such a woman it
was in the nature of an achievement that her Institution lasted six years; and
the four volumes of so-called poetical contributions to it retain a certain
melancholy interest as showing the result of a deliberate attempt by the
world of fashion to stimulate the production of poetry.

CHAPTER VII
T he B luestocking C lub

The list of bluestocking ladies given by Hannah More in her poem, Bas
Bleu, is as follows: ‘Vesey of verse the judge and friend,’ ‘Boscawen sage,’
‘bright Montagu,’ and Elizabeth Carter. To this we should of course add the
name of Miss More herself. The men enumerated as members are Lord
Lyttelton, Pultney, Earl of Bath, and Horace Walpole. Exactly the same list
is given by Forbes in his Life of Beattie, save that he adds the name of
Stillingfleet. Miss More mentions certain famous men as former habitués of
the blue drawing-room, Garrick, Mason, Dr. Johnson, Burke (‘apostate now
from social wit’), and Sir William Pepys. These five, with the exception of
Pepys, are thought of rather as frequent visitors than as recognized
members.
We must not assume from the use of the word club the existence of a
formally established society, like the great Literary Club, with rules and
election of members. The blues were drawn together simply by the desire
for mutual intercourse, and the group expanded freely as fit associates
appeared. No exact list of bluestockings can therefore be made. Indeed, the
list of ladies in Hannah More’s Sensibility, described as participating in ‘the
charm of friendship and the feast of sense,’ is somewhat different from the
one already quoted: Mrs. Boscawen, Mrs. Carter, Mrs. Montagu, Mrs.
Chapone, Mrs. Walsingham, Mrs. Delany, and Mrs. Barbauld. Fanny
Burney, like Miss More herself, is thought of as a younger member,[203]
almost as a protégée of the club. Mrs. Thrale, with her own coterie, was
always more or less of an outsider, as was also Mrs. Ord. Later, as we shall
see, the name bluestocking came to be applied to women who had only the
remotest connection with the original group.

The origin of the little company which was to develop into the Bas Bleu
is now difficult to discover. Miss More’s poem in praise of it did not appear
until 1786, many years after its fame was fully established. The verses,
begun in 1783, circulated for many months in manuscript and frequently
retouched, are the official handbook of the society; but it is necessary to
remember that the author did not come into contact with the group during
its earlier history, and that her account of its origin is therefore not to be
taken as indubitable evidence. She divides the honour of having instituted
the bluestocking conversazioni between Mrs. Montagu and Mrs. Boscawen.
Madame D’Arblay, on the other hand, assigns it exclusively to Mrs. Vesey.
[204]
In any case, it is certain that Mrs. Montagu speedily became the
leading person in the club, for Lyttelton, apparently as early as 1765,[205]
refers to her as ‘la belle présidente.’ The earliest meetings may well have
occurred at her literary breakfasts, which have been already described.[206]
It is not unreasonable to assume that the ‘club’ was already in existence
during the later fifties, for it was well known to Admiral Boscawen, who
died in 1761. A prominent member of it, mentioned by Miss More, was the
Earl of Bath, who died in 1764. But the Bas Bleu did not attain the meridian
of its fame till many years later.
From its very beginning the object of the club was to promote literary
conversation as the chief pleasure of social life. That such conversation was
a stiff and solemn business one hardly needs to be told. Bluestocking letters
alone are a sufficient proof of it. In the Bas Bleu we hear much of the false
wit of the Hôtel de Rambouillet,
Where wit and point and equivoque
Distorted every word they spoke.

The English bluestockings will have none of this. They repudiate wit that is
French and wit that is tainted, and exalt common sense in its stead. Hannah
More declares that the solid basis of conversation is learning; it is for
conversation, she cries, that

The sage consumes his midnight toil;
And keeps his vigils to produce
Materials for thy future use.

Such praise of serious conversation enables us to guess at the preparation
which earnest souls made for the conversazioni in which they hoped to
shine. To Lady Louisa Stuart the group at Mrs. Montagu’s had about it a
suspicion of acting before an audience. ‘If you had good luck,’ she says,
‘you might not only be greatly amused at Mrs. Montagu’s, but carry away
much that was well worth remembering. But then, also, the circular form is
not less convenient to prosers and people who love to hear themselves talk,
so you might, on the contrary, come in for the most tiresome dissertations,
the dullest long stories, the flattest jokes anywhere to be found.’[207]
Lyttelton himself gave similar testimony. Fanny Burney’s words seem to
show that the bluestockings were occasionally bored with themselves: ‘I
respect and esteem them,’ she writes in April 1784, ‘but they require an
exertion to which I am not always inclined.’ There is, moreover, the indirect
evidence afforded by Boswell. The greatest judge of conversation then
living had been repeatedly in the presence of the bluestockings; he never
wearied of expressing his admiration for them; he had watched them
swarming about his master; he had taken the trouble to investigate the
origin of their society; but he never thought it worth while to record their
talk.
Much of the fame of the bluestockings was due to the name by which
they had come to be known. It caught the public attention quickly, and has
remained a useful addition to the English vocabulary. The word
bluestocking presents an interesting but perhaps insoluble problem in
etymology, or rather in slang. Various explanations of the term exist, but,
though they are not irreconcilable, they are not wholly satisfactory. It would
seem as though a source ought to be found in seventeenth century France or
sixteenth century Italy[208]; but none has yet come to light. Mills in his
History of Chivalry[209] (1825) traces the word back to the Society ‘de la

Calza,’ founded in Venice in the year 1400. The society lasted till 1590,
when, he continues, ‘the rejected title’—by which presumably he means
calza turchina, though he nowhere mentions it—‘crossed the Alps, and
found a congenial soil in the flippancy and literary triflings of Parisian
society.... It diverged from France to England.’ No evidence for the
remarkable migrations of this title is adduced by Mills. The words bas bleu
are unknown to French lexicographers save as a translation of the English
bluestocking;[210] so that Mills’s statements respecting the peregrinations of
the term seem to be the result of his own imagination.[211]
On the other hand, when we turn to English literature, we find that the
term was used as early as the seventeenth century. The first occurrence of it
noted by Murray, in the New English Dictionary, is in Bramston’s
Autobiography (1683), in reference to the Little Parliament of 1653: ‘That
Blew-stocking Parliament.’ It is here plainly used as a sneer at the
unostentatious dress of the Puritans, who eschewed silk stockings.
Reference to coarse or ugly stockings had been a well-known form of abuse
for years. Prince Hal makes use of a similar term, ‘puke-stocking’—puke
being a kind of bluish-black woollen, not worn by courtiers—in sneering at
the keeper of the Boar’s Head tavern.[212] The word bluestocking, even after
its application to literary ladies, retained something of a derogatory flavour;
it was considered by some a term of reproach,[213] and was bitterly resented.
Just when the term was first applied to literary ladies, it is difficult to say;
[214]
the period of its great popularity was in the decade of the 80’s. By that
time it had caught the attention and roused the curiosity of Boswell, who
gives the following explanation of it:

About this time [1781] it was much the fashion for several ladies to
have evening assemblies, where the fair sex might participate in
conversation with literary and ingenious men, animated by a desire to
please. These societies were denominated Blue-stocking Clubs, the

origin of which title being little known, it may be worth while to relate
it. One of the most eminent members of those societies, when they first
commenced, was Mr. Stillingfleet, whose dress was remarkably grave,
and in particular it was observed, that he wore blue stockings. Such
was the excellence of his conversation, that his absence was felt as so
great a loss that it used to be said, ‘We can do nothing without the blue
stockings’ and thus by degrees the title was established.[215]

Forbes, in his Life of Beattie, throws new light on the matter:

Mr. Stillingfleet, being somewhat of an humourist in his habits and
manners, and a little negligent in his dress, literally wore grey
stockings, from which circumstance, Admiral Boscawen used, by way
of pleasantry, to call them the ‘Blue-Stocking Society,’ as if to indicate
that when these brilliant friends met, it was not for the purpose of
forming a dressed assembly. A foreigner of distinction, hearing the
expression, translated it literally, ‘Bas Bleu,’ by which these meetings
came to be afterwards distinguished.[216]

Madame D’Arblay, writing in 1832, asserted that it was Mrs. Vesey who
first encouraged Stillingfleet to appear in his homely dress; ‘“Pho, pho,”
cried she ...“don’t mind dress! Come in your blue stockings!”’[217] and there
seems to be no good reason for rejecting this additional detail. It is at least
not inconsistent with the facts already cited.
The ‘mistake’ made by the ‘foreigner of distinction’ is plainly referred to
in a letter from Mrs. Carter to Mrs. Montagu, in reference to the title Bas
Bleu: ‘Do not you remember last winter that Madame de Montier (or some
such name; she was, however, the French Ambassadress) desired somebody
to introduce Monsieur—son Mari to the Bas bleu?’[218]
These explanations, which form a fairly consistent series, and which
commended themselves to the bluestockings, ought to be good enough for

the twentieth century. Some, however, insist on a more picturesque
interpretation, probably in protest against the implication that the first
bluestocking was a man. An explanation first offered in 1861 by Mr.
Hayward, in the second edition of his Autobiography of Mrs. Piozzi, was
given to him by a lady who said she received it from Lady Crewe in the
course of a conversation held in 1816. It runs as follows:

Lady Crewe told me that her mother (Mrs. Greville), the Duchess of
Portland, and Mrs. Montagu were the first who began the conversation
parties in imitation of the noted one, temp. Madame de Sévigné, at Rue
St. Honoré. Madame de Polignac, one of the first guests, came in blue
silk stockings, then the newest fashion in Paris. Mrs. Greville and all
the lady members of Mrs. Montagu’s club, adopted the mode. A foreign
gentleman, after spending an evening at Mrs. Montagu’s soirée, wrote
to tell a friend of the charming intellectual party who had one rule;
‘they wear blue stockings as a distinction.’

It would hardly be necessary to notice this account at all, were it not that
it has been seriously presented in the Dictionary of National Biography as
the correct explanation, has been cited by an anonymous writer in the
Quarterly Review (January 1903), and recently repeated with full approval.
[219]
It must be noticed, in the first place, that Mr. Hayward himself does not
accept the story, inasmuch as he banishes it to a footnote, and retains the
traditional account in the body of his work. Again, the sole source of his
authority is the hearsay evidence of an anonymous lady given a century
after the fact. We are three stages away from the original informant, without
written evidence of any kind until 1816. Moreover, the anecdote bears upon
its face all the marks of a story ben trovato. Those who can think of Mrs.
Montagu and her friends as genially displaying blue stockings as a sort of
badge are, to say the least, but ill acquainted with certain nice prejudices of
our literary ladies.

It is clear, however, that there was about this phrase that vague yet
eloquent connotation which is the peculiar property of slang and in which
the explanations given above are, with the exception of the last,
conspicuously deficient. In no other way can the sudden popularity of the
word be accounted for.[220] The tendency to play with the phrase became
evident at once: ‘When will you blue-stocking yourself and come amongst
us?’ wrote Walpole to Hannah More.[221] ‘You may put on your blue
stockings,’ wrote Mrs. Chapone to Miss Burney,[222] ‘if you have got any
boots to walk about in the mornings, I shall like you as well in them.’ The
word was of course presently reduced to blue,[223] partly, no doubt, because
of the associations of this colour with the salons ever since the Rambouillet
days. When Fanny Burney was asked what Johnson called Mrs. Montagu,
she replied, ‘“Queen,” to be sure! “Queen of the Blues!”’[224] and at court
she was amused at a gentleman who was ashamed to be found ‘reading to a
blue.’[225]
Two facts emerge clearly from these quotations. In the first place, we
derive from Mrs. Carter’s letter a definite date for the origin of the phrase
bas bleu, the winter of 1782-3. In the second place, it is obvious that this
French phrase and the anecdote connected with it account in large measure
for the popularity of the word bluestocking. That word had, as we have
seen, existed before;[226] indeed the French lady who first used the words
bas bleu was but trying to translate an English phrase already familiar to
her; but it was only when that phrase assumed a kind of international
significance by appearing in French form that the English public generally
took up the earlier word bluestocking. From 1782 onwards the word
becomes common. Moreover, it was at the same period that public attention
began to be directed to the Bluestocking Club, and the date 1782 may
conveniently be taken as marking its florescence.

CHAPTER VIII
T he L ondon S alon

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]

Hannah More
From Finden’s engraving of the portrait by Opie (1786)

Miss More’s chief tribute to Mrs. Boscawen, however, was her poem,
Sensibility, published in 1782, in the form of an epistle to that lady. In
rapturous verse Sensibility is hailed as the parent of charity, charm, and
many other bluestocking virtues; but, above all, ’tis this that ‘gives
Boscawen half her power to please.’ As the poem furnishes the most
convenient statement of Mrs. Boscawen’s connection with the group of
ladies we are studying, a rather long extract from it must be given:
Accept, Boscawen! these unpolish’d lays,
Nor blame too much the verse you cannot praise.
For you far other bards have wak’d the string,

Far other bards for you were wont to sing.[289]
Yet on the gale their parting music steals,
Yet your charm’d ear the loved impression feels;
You heard the lyre of Littleton and Young,
And this a Grace and that a Seraph strung....
Yes, still for you your gentle stars dispense
The charm of friendship and the feast of sense:
Yours is the bliss, and Heav’n no dearer sends,
To call the wisest, brightest, best your friends.
And while to these I raise the votive line,
O let me grateful own these friends are mine:
With Carter trace the wit to Athens known,
Or view in Montagu that wit our own,
Or mark, well pleased Chapone’s instructive page
Intent to raise the morals of the age;
Or boast, in Walsingham, the various power
To cheer the lonely, grace the letter’d hour.

Somewhat too much of this.
The story continues in the same strain till long after the publication of
Miss More’s Florio in 1786. It is only necessary to add that it is to Mrs.
Boscawen that we owe the painting of Opie’s delightful portrait of Miss
More.[290] It does more to perpetuate the charm of the bluestocking ladies
than all their congratulatory epistles—in prose or verse.

Mrs. Ord[291] has by modern writers frequently been associated with Mrs.
Montagu and Mrs. Vesey as originating the bluestocking conversazioni.[292]
Just why Mrs. Ord should have been chosen to complete the triad of ladies
it is difficult to say. She is not mentioned in Miss More’s Bas Bleu, in Dr.
Burney’s verses, or in Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Her name occurs but once,
and quite casually, in Walpole’s Letters; and Johnson writes but once[293] of
having been present at her assembly. Even those who describe her parties
speak rather of her guests than of herself, and praise her good nature
without mentioning her conversation.[294] Her talk was, it appears,
considered heavy, so that Miss Burney herself was obliged to admit that it

lacked both mirth and instruction, and that she loved Mrs. Ord for her
friendliness but not for her brilliancy.
Nevertheless Mrs. Ord was one who early made the experiment of
banishing cards and dancing from her evening parties and substituting
undisturbed conversation as the staple of her entertainment. Like Mrs.
Vesey she abhorred formality, and made her guests draw their chairs about a
large table in the middle of the room, remarking—and it is one of the few
remarks of hers that has been preserved—that a table was the ‘best friend to
sociable conversation.’[295] Here, apparently, she succeeded in getting the
unity without the hard formality of the dreaded circle.[296]
She had, moreover, a skill in the choice of her guests which usually saved
her from the charge of assembling crowds indiscriminately.[297] Pepys and
Dr. Burney unite in praising her ability to mix her ingredients, and for this
the latter pronounces her an excellent cook. Miss More liked her assemblies
because there she could have Sir Joshua and Mr. Cambridge all to
herself[298] or discuss the relative merits of Pope and Dryden, sitting apart
with Mrs. Montagu and Horace Walpole.[299]
Perhaps Mrs. Ord wished to take the place of Mrs. Thrale as the social
patron of Fanny Burney. She it was who conducted Fanny to her royal
prison at Windsor,[300] who helped to keep her in touch with her old friends,
[301]
who showered gifts upon her and carried her to oratorios, and who,
when the young woman was worn out by her servitude, put the map of
England into the hands of ‘her child,’ and bade her choose the journey she
would take. This trip, which was through south-west England, lasted many
weeks, and it was mid-September before the two finally drove out of Bath
towards London in Mrs. Ord’s coach-and-four.[302] Nor did the services of
this ‘excellent and maternal’ creature stop with this, for the very next year
she carried Miss Burney to the ‘salubrious hills of Norbury,’ and there

administered what the Diarist, in a flight of rhetoric worthy of her latest
years, called ‘the balsamic medicine of social tenderness.’[303] But nothing
came of this patronage in the way of literature, so that Mrs. Ord’s kindness,
though challenging our admiration, adds little to the movement we are
tracing.

Another woman closely associated with Miss Burney, and one who
profoundly influenced her life, was that venerable relic of the former age,
Mary Granville Delany, whom Burke called ‘not only the woman of fashion
of the present age, but ... the highest bred woman in the world.’[304] ‘Swift’s
Mrs. Delany,’ they loved to call her, for she had known the great Dean in his
latter days. Of the relationship, such as it was, she never tired of talking,
and in this she was wise, for it was her chief claim to distinction in literary
circles. The woman who could display a sheaf of private letters from Swift
and to whom the Spectator was ‘almost too modern to speak of’[305] was of
course worshipped by every bluestocking in London; but she was never
quite a blue herself. She did not wish to be. Miss More, it is true, claims her
as one of the circle in her poem Sensibility:
Delany too is ours; serenely bright,
Wisdom’s strong ray, and virtue’s milder light:
And she who blessed the friend and graced the lays
Of poignant Swift, still gilds my social days;
Long, long protract thy light, O star benign!
Whose setting beams with milder lustre shine.

But Mrs. Delany seldom allowed her lustre to shine upon the salon, and was
anything but mild in her opinion of Mrs. Montagu’s assemblies. She was
more interested in the Royal Family than in the progress of literature, and
despite her early associations, preferred the society of rank to that of genius.
She was graciously pleased when Garrick received her friend the Duchess
of Portland and herself ‘very respectfully,’ and showed himself ‘sensible of
the honour’ done him.[306] She was vexed that Mason’s tepid tragedy,

Elfrida, should be ‘prostituted’ by a public performance, and ‘the charms of
virgins represented by the abandoned nymphs of Drury Lane.’ ‘Such a
poem,’ she continues, ‘would have been represented in days of yore by the
youthful part of the Royal family or those of the first rank. Indeed, in these
our days (save our own Royal Family), it would be difficult to find
representatives suited to such virtuous and refined characters.’[307] Such a
person, who was for ever protesting that she was in love with the King, the
Queen, and the whole Royal Family,[308] was in no position to mediate
properly between authors and ‘the Great.’ Her one conception of serving
them was to render them up, a living sacrifice, to the Royal Family, as Miss
Burney (who was dazzled by the friend of Swift and the friend of the
Queen) discovered to her cost. When Miss Burney hesitated to enter upon
her service as Dresser to Queen Charlotte—a post which her intimacy with
Mrs. Delany had brought her—it was Mrs. Delany who was ‘much
mortified’ that so flattering a proposal could cause a moment’s hesitation.
[309]

Mrs. Delany is a significant figure in the history of the salon by virtue of
the fascination which she exercised through her quondam connection with a
great man; but of genuine interest in the salon she had little, and of
influence upon the course of literature none at all.

Alone among the literary ladies of the age, Mrs. Thrale has retained the
fascination which she exercised in her own time. The fame of the other
bluestockings has gone from less to less; but hers has remained constant, if
indeed it has not increased. This is of significance, for it shows either that
she was more modern than her sisters or more universal. She might
consistently have aspired to the title, ‘Queen of the Bluestockings,’ but she
did not even care whether she was reckoned one of them, contenting herself
with outwitting them at every point. It was she, for example, who captured

the two authors most coveted by the mistresses of the salons, Johnson and
Miss Burney, and ‘planted’ them in her house.[310] Her friendship with the
former, though it cannot be shown to have altered the course of his works,
gave birth to an admirable series of familiar letters, which Hannah More
found ‘true letters of friendship which are meant to show kindness rather
than wit.’[311] But more important than such published results was the fame
which Johnson lent to Mrs. Thrale by his residence at her home. The nearest
approach to the true salon that we find in the eighteenth century in England
is the dining-room at Streatham; the spectacle of Johnson there reading
aloud from the proof-sheets of the Lives of the Poets is in exact accord with
the best French traditions of the salon.
In many other respects Mrs. Thrale showed that she was capable of
fulfilling the more important functions of a literary hostess. It was she who
attempted to direct the genius of Fanny Burney towards the theatre,
prevailing upon her to write a comedy. It is true that the resulting play, The
Witlings, was not thought by Dr. Burney a fit successor to Evelina, and was
accordingly destroyed; but in the absence of any proof to the contrary and
in view of the influence which Mrs. Thrale could bring to bear in the
theatrical world through Murphy and others, it is difficult to see why her
advice to the young writer was not sound. Sheridan, than whom there was
no better judge, gave similar counsel.
Finally, when, after her marriage and departure from England, as Mrs.
Piozzi, she printed her Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, the value of
what she had to tell and her vivacity in telling it enabled her to triumph over
a slipshod style and an inaccurate method, and to establish, once for all, her
reputation in the literary world, a reputation which the bluestockings were
foolish enough to think she had lost for ever.
There is no need here to discuss the anomalies of Mrs. Thrale’s character.
They have been dwelt on unnecessarily and fruitlessly. She had no illusions
about her friends, and least of all about her own importance. She looked out

on the world in which she moved, shrewdly and, on the whole, sanely. She
knew how to make people happy and how to put the Great at their ease.
‘Mrs. Thrale,’ says Mr. Seccombe, ‘moved among them serene, lively, “a
pretty woman still,” an exorciser of melancholy, the cheeriest of hostesses,
quite unconscious of erudition, gaily spontaneous, the queen of Streatham.
Her wayward naturalness made her seem a rose among hot-house flowers.
Her innate brightness enabled her, as has been said, to romp with learning
and to play blind man’s buff with the sages.’ In the somewhat stifling
atmosphere of salons such a personality is of the very highest worth.

CHAPTER IX
B luestockings as A uthors

Much mischief to the cause of criticism is wrought by the specialists.
Investigators in the underworld of forgotten books, to which scholarly
competition too frequently drives them, often become so accustomed to the
darkness about them that they mistake a glimmer for the glorious light of
the upper world, and hasten to inform an inattentive public that the dim by-
ways and dark corners of the realm of dead authors are by no means lacking
in brilliancy. But such assertions serve rather to darken counsel than to
illuminate the world. Enthusiasm for a subject sometimes coexists with a
state of delusion about it. It ought to be possible to discover that a forgotten
book is readable without trying to convince the public that an acquaintance
with it is indispensable to all who pretend to culture.
The works of the bluestockings have all long since sunk into this
oblivion. The benevolent reader of them has the feeling which Dante
experienced so strongly when he met in hell the souls who had once been
famous in a brighter world. These books seem to appeal to the reader to
reëstablish something of their former fame, even though this, in its turn,
prove to be but transitory. Who now reads Montagu? To many the question
itself will be unintelligible; or will be taken to refer to another; yet in 1770
all the world was reading her. It is hardly too much to say that as a critic she
was esteemed almost as highly as Johnson himself. She was known as the
woman who had dared to challenge comparison with Lucian, as the
defender and even as the ‘patroness’ of Shakespeare; she was an Eve in the
world of critics, an armed Athena who had set her foot on the head of the
serpent Voltaire.

Mrs. Montagu’s career as a writer began with the composition of three
dialogues which were added to Lord Lyttelton’s Dialogues of the Dead
when they appeared in 1760. The works were anonymous; but the news that
they were by Mrs. Montagu was soon spread abroad. Many had no doubt
inferred her authorship already from the enthusiastic words in which the
noble lord spoke of her: ‘I shall think,’ he says, ‘the Public owes me a great
Obligation for having excited a Genius so capable of uniting Delight with
Instruction, and giving to Knowledge and Virtue those Graces which the
Wit of the Age has too often employed all its skill to bestow upon Folly and
Vice.’ The public did not disappoint the peer. Five editions were called for
before 1768.
Mrs. Montagu’s dialogues might easily be dismissed by saying that they
do not reach the level of Lyttelton’s. But if it be required to detect grades of
value in work so uniformly flat, we may say that the dialogue between
Mercury and a Modern Fine Lady is the best, as that between Hercules and
Cadmus is the worst. They are all well called Dialogues of the Dead, for
despite all their inflation, they never once betray any semblance of vitality.
Of characterization they are wholly innocent, but not of profundity.
Cadmus, for example, gives utterance to this: ‘The genuine glory, the
proper distinction of the rational Species, arises from the perfection of the
mental powers. Courage is apt to be fierce, and Strength is often exerted in
acts of Oppression. But Wisdom is the Associate of Justice; It assists her to
form equal Laws, to pursue right measures, to correct power, protect
weakness, and to unite individuals in a common Interest and general
Welfare.’ It is amazing the amount of such platitudinizing which the
eighteenth century consumed with relish. It is one of the marvels of that
marvellous era. The style derived its popularity in part from Johnson, who
himself achieved a bare victory over its deadliness by the vivacity of his
intellect.
In the dialogue between Mercury and Mrs. Modish, the author was at
once less pretentious and in closer touch with her subject. Yet even here her

desire to give instruction triumphs over any temptation to depict human
nature. Mrs. Modish, the frivolous butterfly, explains the phrase bon ton
quite as seriously as Mrs. Carter the bluestocking would have done: ‘It is—I
can never tell you what it is; but I will try to tell you what it is not. In
conversation it is not Wit; in manners it is not Politeness; in behaviour it is
not Address; but it is a little like them all. It can only belong to people of a
certain rank, who live in a certain manner, with certain persons who have
not certain virtues and who have certain Vices, and who inhabit a certain
Part of the Town.’ This is perhaps the best thing in the dialogues. One great
advantage of these works remains to be mentioned. They triumph over the
form in which they are written, for they never once remind us of Lucian.
But Mrs. Montagu had yet to achieve her unique distinction. It was nine
years later that she delighted the world by appearing as the champion of
Shakespeare, redressing his wrongs,[312] and vindicating him from the
charges of Voltaire. She published a work somewhat largely entitled, An
Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare, Compared with the
Greek and French Dramatic Poets, with some Remarks upon the
Misrepresentations of Mons. de Voltaire. The attacks upon Shakespeare
which Mrs. Montagu felt it incumbent upon herself to answer need no
discussion here;[313] it may suffice to say that her defence was more widely
read in England than the ‘misrepresentations’ which called it into being. It
was regarded as a standard piece of criticism, and its fame penetrated to
France and even to Italy.[314] It is impossible to give adequate illustrations
of the esteem in which the book was held.[315] It conferred upon Mrs.
Montagu the reputation of a critic, and gave her an enviable position among
English writers for the space of thirty years. In the chorus of praise with
which this feeble book was greeted there was but one discordant voice.
When Reynolds remarked that Mrs. Montagu’s essay did her honour, Dr.
Johnson retorted: ‘Yes, Sir, it does her honour, but it would do nobody else
honour. I have indeed, not read it all. But when I take up the end of a web,

and find it packthread, I do not expect by looking further to find it
embroidery. Sir, I will venture to say, there is not one sentence of true
criticism in her book.’[316]
It is to this view that posterity—when it has had any views at all on the
subject—has inclined. Professor Huchon naturally deplores it,[317] and
builds up a judicious defence of the defence. But the modern reader will
probably agree with Mr. Lounsbury that ‘it is in many ways one of the most
exasperating of books.’ Mrs. Montagu’s ignorance of the Elizabethan era
was both profound and extensive. Her conception of Shakespeare’s
environment may be deduced from the following quotation:

The songs sung by our bards at feasts and merry-makings were of a
very coarse kind: as the people were totally illiterate, and only the
better sort could read even their mother tongue, their taste was formed
on these compositions. As yet our stage had exhibited only those
palpable allegories by which rude unlettered moralists instruct and
please the gross and ignorant multitude.[318]

A woman who conceived of Shakespeare as living ‘in the dark shades of
Gothic barbarism,’[319] and who lamented his lack of ‘the admonitions of
delicate connoisseurs’[320] had in effect yielded all that the most virulent
critic could demand. Mrs. Montagu’s enthusiasms seem very pallid after her
alarming concessions. She considers Falstaff humorous and Macbeth tragic,
and is, in general and as usual, platitudinous. But her continuous apologies
and concessions really form the staple of her work. ‘She found,’ says
Lounsbury, ‘the speech of Brutus to the people in Julius Cæsar, quaint and
affected. She exhibited her utter incapacity to comprehend the rhetorical
skill of Antony by declaring that the repetition of the epithet “honorable” in
his speech was perhaps too frequent. The character of Pistol in the second
part of Henry IV was too much for her to understand. Following previous
critics she found many bombast speeches in the tragedy of Macbeth. Like

her predecessors she unfortunately forgot to particularize them; lapse of
time has now made it difficult to discover them.’
One of the features of Mrs. Montagu’s Essay was a series of comparisons
between the Shakespearian drama and the ancient Greek. Here she was
indeed on dangerous ground, for she could not read the language of
Æschylus. This, however, did not discourage her from expressing herself
very decidedly on the characteristics of his art. She pronounces the
supernatural element in The Persians unfitted to the piece, and finds
‘something of a comic and satirical turn’ in the ghost of Darius.[321] She
asserts that the Eumenides of the Oresteian trilogy ‘seem both acting out of
their sphere and below their character’;[322] but admits that the whole story
‘might be allegorical.’ Such indeed she considered very nearly all of
Æschylus to be; for she had a peculiar notion that his materials were
derived at second-hand ‘from the hieroglyphic land of Egypt,’ and, though
in the grosser times of Greece literally understood by the vulgar, were in
more philosophic ages ‘again transmuted into allegory.’[323] But it is idle
longer to stir this forgotten dust.

A woman truly learned in the classics, whose abiding common sense
protected her from the ridicule freely poured out upon bluestockings, was
Miss (or, by courtesy, Mrs.) Elizabeth Carter, the spinster of Deal. To Mrs.
Montagu (patron of letters) she was an indulgent preceptress, a very Pierian
source of learning, and much that passed as erudition in the ‘female
Mæcenas’ was in reality derived at second-hand from Mrs. Carter. Mrs.
Montagu was never unwilling to sit at the feet of the woman whose reading
ranged from Aristotle to Petrarch and from Diodorus Siculus to the Sorrows
of Werther,[324] who would correspond with her respecting the Newtonian
mechanics or the Stoic philosophers.

Mrs. Carter’s reputation was made by a translation of the extant works of
Epictetus, an elegant quarto put forth in 1758, provided with an introduction
and ample notes. The style of the translation is, in a very high degree,
chaste and pleasing, and nowhere suggests the line-by-line method of the
laborious translator. The introductory essay is an admirable exposition of
the Stoic philosophy. The following specimen may show that Mrs. Carter
was capable not only of a spirited style, but of genuine critical treatment of
her subject:

About the generality of mankind, the Stoics do not appear to have
given themselves any kind of trouble. They seemed to consider all
(except the few who were students in the intricacies of a philosophic
system) as very little superior to Beasts: and, with great tranquillity, left
them to follow the devices of their own ungoverned appetites and
passions.

With regard to the value of the book as a translation of Epictetus, it is
perhaps sufficient to point out that it was, in its own time, a standard
commentary, that it passed into a second edition in 1759, and that it is the
basis upon which a subsequent translator has been content to build.[325] It
has, moreover, renewed its youth in the recent reprints of popular libraries
of the classics.[326]
Mrs. Carter has, therefore, transferred to modern times something of her
scholarly fame. Yet she was not a pedant, and never gave herself the airs of
a femme savante. Johnson (who wrote a Greek epigram in her honour that
she might be celebrated in ‘as many different languages as Lewis le
Grand’[327]) used to say that she could ‘make a pudding as well as translate
Epictetus from the Greek, and work a handkerchief as well as compose a
poem.’[328] He paid her the compliment of receiving two of her essays for
the pages of The Rambler,[329] and these, though dull, are not more
unreadable than the rest of that periodical.

Of her collected poems there were four editions during her own life. But
it must be frankly admitted that her reputation as an independent author,
though respectable in her own day,[330] has since suffered total extinction.
Yet the student may discover in her poems here and there a point of
antiquarian interest. For our purpose the volume is significant as containing
lyrics to Mrs. Vesey and Mrs. Montagu. Both poems, though addressed to
living ladies, contrive to belong to the Churchyard School and to prolong
faint echoes of Gray. Two of the stanzas addressed to Mrs. Vesey are plainly
intended to counteract that lady’s rationalism, and may be quoted here as a
specimen of Mrs. Carter’s poetic powers:
Not for themselves the toiling Artists build;
Not for himself contrives the studious Sage:
To distant Views by mystic Force compelled,
All give the present to the future age....

Yet check that impious Thought, my gentle Friend,
Which bounds our Prospects by our fleeting Breath,
Which hopeless sees unfinished Life descend,
And ever bars the Prison Gates of Death.[331]

Over the whole volume is cast the shadow of the now-fashionable
melancholy, and much is made of the midnight moon, the evening dew, the
‘Gothic pile,’ and the ivy bower of the bird of night. These are worth
mention as showing that Mrs. Carter’s interests were not bounded by the
school of Pope. Her tastes, like Mrs. Vesey’s, grew increasingly romantic,
and though she detested Werther[332] and never doubted that Rousseau was
mad,[333] she was always an affectionate believer in Ossian.[334] She felt the
new passion for landscape. In thought she accompanies Mrs. Vesey to the
cliffs of Snowden,[335] and regrets that Mrs. Montagu cannot ascend the
heights of windy Morven.[336] At Eastry she dreams herself back to the
worship of Woden.[337] Her interest in Gothic architecture is intense, and
she writes about the demolition of old buildings like a disciple of Ruskin:
‘It seems to me that when a fair inheritance is transmitted to a family they

ought to feel a certain degree of tenderness to the abode of the ancestors
from whom it is derived, which ought at least to sink quietly by the silent
depredations of time, and not be torn down by the rude hand of human
violence.’[338]
This interest in romance enabled her to understand the Celtic imaginings
of Mrs. Vesey as her learning and her knowledge of philosophy gave her a
control over Mrs. Montagu. Her friendship with the two ladies was
unruffled throughout, and she received an annuity of £100 from the latter
without any sacrifice of dignity. She never lost her head about anything—
least of all about herself. She was a scholar and had a scholar’s love of the
classics, yet she was broad enough to know when the age was widening its
horizon. In an age of prudes, she dared to like Tom Jones. In an age of wits,
she appreciated wit, yet had the sense to see that it is a ‘squint of the
understanding which is mighty apt to set things in a wrong place.’[339] She
understood and approved what was best in the salons, but could be happy
without any pretensions to a career in them.
Thus her life was passed serenely without social rivalries, without the
attempt or desire to follow her ostentatious friends afar, and while escaping
the criticism so freely visited upon them, she had the honour of contributing
by her quiet, serious, and almost unseen influence to whatever of solid
worth they were to achieve.

Intimately associated with Miss Carter was ‘the admirable Mrs.
Chapone,’ who, when Miss Mulso, had been one of Richardson’s
‘Daughters.’ Her two chief works, Letters on the Improvement of the Mind
and Miscellanies in Prose and Verse, were the result of bluestocking
patronage, and were dedicated to Mrs. Montagu and Mrs. Carter
respectively. The former, having seen Mrs. Chapone’s letters to a favourite
niece, recommended their publication, and assisted in preparing them for

the press by correcting them with her ‘elegant pen.’[340] The preparation of
the second volume was undertaken at the instigation of Mrs. Carter and
with the approval of Mrs. Montagu; though Mrs. Delany claims the honour
of having first put the plan into the author’s head.[341]
Mrs. Chapone’s Letters were supposed to have had an enormous
influence on the conduct of young women. According to Hannah More, in
Sensibility, Chapone ‘forms the rising age.’ In Samuel Hoole’s Aurelia, the
heroine has a vision of an ideal woman:
On the plain toilet, with no trophies gay,
Chapone’s instructive volume open lay.

But one is inclined to suspect that this volume belongs to that large class of
admonitory works less popular with the young than with their parents and
preceptors. The book was put into the hands of every young girl from the
Princess Royal downwards. Mrs. Delany considered it next to the Bible as
an entertaining and edifying work for youthful females. She advises that not
more than six lines of it be read at one sitting, in order that it may be the
more deeply impressed on the attention, and thinks that the historical and
geographical parts of it should be got by heart. She hopes her grand-niece
will read it once a year, until she has a daughter to read it to her.[342] Mrs.
Chapone herself smiled at the popularity of the book, and considered its
success to be due principally to the patronage of Mrs. Montagu, and in part
to the ‘world’s being so fond of being educated.’[343] It is probable that it
was generally used as an antidote to the Letters of Chesterfield which
appeared about the same time, and had a very different reception.
Mrs. Chapone’s Letters consist almost entirely of advice; if she ever
wanders from this it is to give instruction. She treats in turn of religion, the
Bible, the affections, the temper, economy, politeness, geography, and
history. It is all admirable, incontrovertible, wholesome, and heavy. It is like
oatmeal—an old-fashioned food which should be consumed in quantities by
the young, but for which they perversely seem to have no appetite. It will be

remembered that when Lydia Languish received an untimely visit from
Mrs. Malaprop, she wished to be found reading Mrs. Chapone; though her
interests were more seriously engaged by works less uplifting. Of literary
quality in these Letters one can hardly speak, for it is difficult to diffuse
literary quality through two hundred pages of solid advice.
The contents of Mrs. Chapone’s second volume are hardly different.
There are essays (‘Affectation and Simplicity’; ‘Conversation’), but they
are in the same hortatory strain as the Letters. There are poems—fortunately
few—several of which are addressed to Elizabeth Carter. They are, in
general, like that lady’s poems, save that they reveal the influence of
Collins rather than of Gray.
The most interesting things Mrs. Chapone wrote were her familiar letters.
[344]
They contain many interesting remarks on Richardson, and Johnson,
both of whom were personally known to the author. They have an
independence, an ease, and a vivacity that are quite lacking in the more
solemn productions. The reader of them may find it in his heart to regret
that Mrs. Chapone was so filled with a sense of the earnestness of life and
of the importance of piety. A long indulgence in frivolity might have saved
her.

Miss Hannah More had larger ambitions and more varied talents than the
other bluestocking authors. She wrote poems lyrical, occasional, and
narrative; she wrote dramas tragic, classical, and sacred; and she wrote
essays and critiques of conduct. In all her earlier work she was assisted and
inspired by the bluestockings. She was their chosen poet. She represented
them in print as Mrs. Montagu represented them in the salon. She
celebrated them all in verse, and dedicated in turn to Mrs. Boscawen, Mrs.
Montagu, and Mrs. Vesey. It is with this earlier period of her career that we
are exclusively concerned; the voluminous works which the lady produced

after her separation from the bluestockings form no proper part of our
inquiry.
Miss More’s relations with the bluestockings began in 1774, soon after
her arrival in London. The exact date of her first visit to the metropolis is
uncertain. Her biographer, Roberts, who seldom gives himself any concern
with dates, says that this took place in ‘1773 or 4’; but inasmuch as Miss
More dedicated her Inflexible Captive to Mrs. Boscawen as early as March
1, 1774, the former date would appear the more probable. Her introduction
to the literati was due to Garrick, whose interest in Miss More had been
roused by her description of his acting in Lear.[345] By 1775 Hannah More
was a recognized member of the circle that surrounded Mrs. Montagu. Her
poems, Bas Bleu and Sensibility, which have been noticed elsewhere in this
book, were composed directly in their honour; but works of a more public
appeal created no less enthusiasm among these ladies. Thus her ballad, Sir
Eldred of the Bower, which appeared in 1775, was greeted by Mrs.
Montagu in her most extravagant manner. She admired ‘the spirit and fire of
the gothic character’ in the tale; the simplicity of the plot, the depiction of
ancient manners (save the mark!), the primitive sentiments, and the
characterization—all these challenged the critical approval of Mrs.
Montagu. The tale of The Bleeding Rock, in the same volume, she esteemed
no less highly. ‘Your Rock,’ she wrote, ‘will stand unimpaired by ages as
eminent as any in the Grecian Parnassus.’[346] Such was the measure of
bluestocking praise. But the poems had a sanction more important than this.
They were read by a larger circle, Reynolds, Garrick, and Johnson; they
became the ‘theme of conversation in all polite circles.’ Johnson could
repeat all the best stanzas by heart.[347] He read both poems with the author,
made some alterations in Sir Eldred, and even—as was his custom with
poems submitted to his judgment—added certain lines to it.[348]
The poems belong to the Gothic school, and may well have been
suggested by Percy’s Reliques; Johnson’s interest in them would be hard to

understand were they not the production of a woman whom he playfully
termed ‘the most powerful versificatrix’ in the language. But the
bluestockings loved romance[349] and the primitive world to which they
thought it introduced them. The fact that this world, as conceived by
Hannah More, has no remote similarity to our own made it only the more
conformable to bluestocking standards of the antique. In reading this lady’s
poems and plays one is constantly reminded of those still-popular
engravings of the eighteenth century, in which distressed virgins, in
carefully studied poses, cast their melting eyes up to heaven. They live in
bowers; refer to themselves in the third person, as the ‘sad Elwina’ and ‘the
distressed Julia’; and when disappointed in love, or (to speak in their own
idiom) when their flame is not reciprocated, immediately go mad, and after
a painful scene before the footlights complete their career by sudden death.
Their lovers are of sterner stuff. They seek wars in distant climes, disappear
for long periods of time, and are reckoned dead, only to reappear just as
some domestic tragedy is reaching its climax; they are for ever drawing
their swords—frequently to plunge them into their own bosoms. Miss More
made full use of the poetic license which governs this pasteboard world.
Her characters are burdened with no human motives, and it is idle to seek
for related cause and effect in their conduct. But morality flourishes. Thus
in Sir Eldred we learn the dangers of jealousy:
The deadliest wounds with which we bleed
Our crimes alone inflict;
Man’s mercies from God’s hand proceed,
His miseries from his own.

But as the hero never once in the course of the poem acted like a human
being, the force of the moral is somewhat impaired.
In 1777 Miss More essayed a higher flight. She had written dramas in her
school-teaching days,[350] and now, with the assistance of Garrick, produced
a romantic tragedy, entitled Percy. Its title, if not its contents, indicates the
influence of Home’s Douglas. The situation in this play, venerable in

romance, deals with two rival houses, those of Percy and Douglas, a heroine
forced into an unwilling marriage with the rival of her lover, who has been
killed in the Crusades. The distressed heroine and the returned lover (who
had not really been killed) meet in a garden-bower:[351]

Percy. Am I awake? Is that Elwina’s voice?
Elwina. Percy, thou most adored—and most deceived!
If ever fortitude sustained thy soul,
When vulgar minds have sunk beneath the stroke,
Let thy imperial spirit now support thee.—
If thou canst be so wondrous merciful,
Do not, O do not curse me!—but thou wilt,
Thou must—for I have done a dreadful deed,
A deed of wild despair, a deed of horror.
I am, I am—
Percy. Speak, say, what art thou?
Elwina. Married.
Percy. Oh!

It is unnecessary to follow the course of the tragedy; for the reader’s own
imagination will suggest it.
The play was a success in every way. It ran for twenty-one nights. No
tragedy for years had been so successful. Mrs. Barry was at her finest in the
mad-scene at the end. The author made nearly six hundred pounds.[352] The
play was translated into German, and acted with success in Vienna. The
bluestockings were triumphant. Mrs. Montagu appeared repeatedly in her
box at Covent Garden. Mrs. Boscawen, who could carry Duchesses to the
theatre with her, sent the author a wreath of bay.[353] Mrs. Delany invited
her to dinner. Garrick, who had written the prologue, introduced her to
Home, thus presenting ‘Percy to the Douglas.’[354]

In Percy Miss More reached the summit of her early achievement, and
the book is still sought by collectors. Readers, if in an indulgent mood, will
perhaps agree with Walpole, who found the play better than he expected,
and, though devoid of nature, not lacking in good situations.[355] Severer
folk will side with Mrs. Thrale, who considered it foolish, and thought
Fanny Burney ought to be whipped if she did not write a better.[356] The
truth probably lies between the two opinions. To the eighteenth century the
piece certainly seemed to have merit. At any rate, it was popular enough to
be revived in order that Mrs. Siddons might appear as Elwina. Had it
survived to the mid-nineteenth century it might have proved useful as a
libretto for Bellini or Donizetti. In the coloratura woes of the modern diva,
the distressed Elwina would have found her perfect interpretation.
Garrick was so pleased with the success of Percy that he urged Miss
More to write another tragedy. The result was The Fatal Falsehood, a
romantic tragedy of the same sort. It was acted late in the spring of 1779,
some months after the death of Garrick, and, though it did not duplicate the
success of the earlier play, was enthusiastically received. With its
production Miss More’s connection with the London stage came to an end.
[357]

The Fatal Falsehood sinks far below the level of Percy. It probably
suffered from the lack of Garrick’s revising hand; though it is doubtful if
even his genius could have introduced any semblance of reality into a series
of situations so preposterous. Miss More is usually content to depend upon
accident as the source of her dramatic effects; but in The Fatal Falsehood
she attempted to depict in Bertrand a villain as subtle as Iago. Although he
analyzes himself and his motives in a series of soliloquies, he remains a
tangle of absurdities, and all the action of the piece, which flows from him,
must be similarly described.
Miss More’s dramas, as well as her poems and essays, were intended to
serve the cause of virtue, about which all bluestockings were seriously

concerned. Even the plays are filled with a sort of portable morality in the
shape of maxims:
The treacherous path that leads to guilty deeds
Is, to make vice familiar to the mind.

Miss More never escaped from the office of preceptress; the forming spirit
of all her work is that of the Young Ladies’ Academy.
In the same year which saw the production of Percy, she put forth a
volume entitled Essays on Several Subjects, principally intended for Young
Ladies. The book is of the same sort as Mrs. Chapone’s Letters: it warns
young women to be modest, to avoid envy, and guard against the
‘obliquities of fraud’ in lovers. Allowing for its hopelessly narrow view of
life, it may be granted that the advice is sound enough. But the
bluestockings never realize that good advice is the cheapest commodity in
the world.
Florio, a tale somewhat inappropriately dedicated to Walpole, is a sort of
parable in verse, designed to enforce such lessons as are conveyed in the
Essays. The hero, once a slave to frivolous society, is converted by reading
Johnson’s Idler and inspecting the beauties of Nature under the direction of
his mistress.
With Florio we reach a period in Miss More’s literary career and the end
of what may be called the bluestocking influence on her work. Her pietism,
which had amused Garrick, was now becoming chronic. She declined to go
and see Mrs. Siddons as Elwina, because it is wrong to attend the theatre.
She deplored the singing, dancing, and feasting in which London indulged
after King George’s recovery of his sanity.[358] She even objected to the
phrase merry Christmas, as being bacchanalian rather than Christian.[359]
Walpole, who was naturally distressed by all this, made a charming attack
on Miss More’s Low Church faith in the Ten Commandments, and pointed
out to her that she was guilty of the Puritanical heresy.[360] The truth is that

Miss More’s sense of responsibility to society at large was weighing on her
mind. In 1788 she published a serious call to a more solemn view of life in
her Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners of the Great to General
Society, and definitely embarked upon her career as preceptress in public
morality. Meanwhile she was drawing steadily away from her fashionable
friends. At last she came to think any association with them almost wicked.
On March 12, 1794, she wrote in her diary:

Dined with friends at Mrs. ——. What dost thou here, Elijah? Felt
too much pleased at the pleasure expressed by so many accomplished
friends on seeing me again. Keep me from contagion![361]

Whatever may have been the influence of the bluestockings upon others,
there can be no doubt that for Hannah More it had been an excellent
corrective. It had at least prevented her from comparing herself to Elijah.

CHAPTER X
M rs . M ontagu as a P atron of the A rts

Above all things Mrs. Montagu longed to send her reputation down to
posterity as an acknowledged patron of letters. She wished to attach to
herself, after the manner of the French literary ladies, some poet, essayist,
or scholar, whose work she might inspire and supervise, and whose reward
was to be the association of her name with his. Hannah More, recognizing
this ambition, calls her ‘the female Mæcenas of Hill Street,’[362] and Dr.
Burney asserts that she ‘makes each rising art her care.’[363] The poet for
whom she had been waiting appeared in the summer of 1766, in the person
of James Beattie, a young professor of moral philosophy at Aberdeen, who
was, at the time, unknown in England.
Beattie was by nature shy, nervous, self-conscious, and uncertain of his
powers—a type familiar in the academic world. He was for ever finding his
poems unworthy of him, suppressing them, altering and correcting them,
and threatening never to complete them. For such a person a patron might
do much. Mrs. Montagu at once expressed herself to Dr. Gregory (a
common friend resident in Aberdeen) as highly pleased with Beattie’s
poetry. But it was not until she saw the first canto of the Minstrel, early in
1771, that her judgment was fully convinced. She now set to work with as
much industry as charity to advance her chosen poet in the world of letters.
She sent a copy of the new poem to Lord Chatham,[364] recommended it to
the attention of Percy (the inspiration of whose essay on the minstrels had
been acknowledged by Beattie in his preface), and encouraged her protégé
by quoting to him the praises of Lord Lyttelton. She offered suggestions
respecting the advertisement of the poem, and wrote to a bookseller of her

acquaintance that he must recommend the poem ‘to all people of taste.’
Such were the powers of the female patron in this new age.
Mrs. Montagu also interested herself in another work of Beattie’s, a book
now quite forgotten but then just entering upon a brilliant career of
popularity. This was no other than an Essay on Truth, which had been
published in 1770, and had almost immediately passed into a second
edition. Mrs. Montagu very flatteringly describes the vain efforts of the
English public to come at this volume. She has herself recommended it ‘to
many of our Bishops and others; but all have complained this whole winter
that the booksellers deny having either the first or second edition. I dare say
many hundreds would have been sold if people could have got them.’[365] It
is quite obvious that the academic young poet needs the practical assistance
of the bluestocking, friend of ‘Bishops and others.’ He therefore came up to
London in the autumn of this year, and then first made the acquaintance of
the woman whom he ever after gratefully acknowledged as his patron. And
thus the Defender of Truth and the Defender of Shakespeare met together—
to their mutual advantage. Mrs. Montagu’s mind was already teeming with
projects for the advancement of her favourite. In the spring of the next year,
upon hearing that Adam Ferguson of Edinburgh University was to go
abroad, she conceived the plan of having Beattie transferred to his chair,
and succeeded in interesting the Archbishop of York in the matter, only to
learn that the professor had every intention of returning to his work after his
temporary absence.[366] Nevertheless she was the means of introducing
Beattie to the Archbishop and to his brother, Lord Kinnoul,[367] who
became warm friends of the new poet. In the following year she instructed
Beattie in the best means of bringing his case to the attention of the King,
[368]
assuring him that if the government did nothing for him, she would
herself ‘claim the honour of rendering his situation in life more
comfortable.’[369] But the government did not disappoint her. Beattie was
presented to the King at his levee, received the incense of his praise, and,

later, a pension of two hundred pounds, and a degree of Doctor of Laws
from Oxford. Mrs. Montagu shared in the general praise. ‘Do you not
honour Mrs. Montagu,’ wrote Hester Chapone to Mrs. Delany, ‘for the
pains she has taken to introduce this excellent champion of Christianity into
the notice of the great world and to obtain for him some other regard than
that of barren fame?’[370]
Her efforts on his behalf had but begun. Abandoning a plan that he
should enter the Church of England—partly no doubt because of Beattie’s
own lukewarmness—she thinks he may perhaps do more service to religion
as a layman than as a priest,[371] and she now urges the publication, by
subscription, of a quarto volume of Essays. In this way, she thought, eight
hundred or a thousand pounds might be gained.[372] Patron and protégé
together drew up a form of ‘subscription-paper,’ and, since Beattie shrank
from any advertisement in newspapers, Mrs. Montagu agreed, with the
assistance of a few friends, to circulate the document herself.[373] She did
her work well. In the list of subscribers to the book[374] she contrived to
include not only every prominent bluestocking, but Reynolds, Garrick,
Johnson, a host of peers, her friends the Bishops, the two Archbishops, and
the libraries of Oxford. She was the recognized sponsor of the volume, and
when the publication of it was delayed, it was part of her office to circulate
an explanatory card of Beattie’s.[375] When it finally appeared she was
delighted with it in its every aspect, but professed to find it rather insolent
in a native of Aberdeen to outdo the English in style.[376]
Meanwhile the second canto of the Minstrel had been sent to her for
criticism, and was, if we are to believe Beattie, published at her request.[377]
Four years later a volume of select poems was submitted to her with the
request that she suppress those of which she did not approve; and when at
last Beattie put forth the Minstrel in its final form, he requested permission

to dedicate the first canto to her by putting her name into the last stanza in a
space which had been left blank from the first:
Here pause, my gothic lyre, a little while,
The leisure hour is all that thou canst claim.
But on this verse if Montagu should smile,
New strains ere long shall animate thy frame.
And her applause to me is more than fame;
And still with truth accords her taste refined.
At lucre or renown let others aim,
I only wish to please the gentle mind
Whom Nature’s charms inspire and love of human kind.

The sweetness of this languidly conventional note must have been
somewhat spoiled for Mrs. Montagu by the fact that the lines were written
before Beattie knew her, and were, if we may trust the poet’s biographer,
originally intended for another.[378] But there can be no doubt of Beattie’s
gratitude. He honoured his patroness by naming a son Montagu, and
continued to visit her in London or in Sandelford and to submit his works to
her for her approval,[379] that form of flattery which she coveted most of all.
They honoured each other for many years with a reasonable regularity of
correspondence which, however, does more credit to their earnestness than
to their wit.
The relations of Beattie and Mrs. Montagu continued serene throughout
their lives. Each was grateful to the other and never failed to make a public
display of that gratitude. Mrs. Montagu bestowed her favours without
offence, and Beattie received them without any pretence of hesitation. Each
was happier for having known the other. And if the relation of author and
patron must needs exist, theirs is a specimen of what the relation may be at
its best.

The relations of Robert Potter, the translator of Æschylus, with Mrs.
Montagu are of the same general nature as those of Beattie. It was with
trembling gratitude that he accepted and incredible flattery that he repaid

the favours which the lady bestowed upon him. Her attention had, it would
appear, been caught by the publication of the Greek tragedian in English,—
the publication of translations being always a welcome event for
bluestockings—and she at once suggested to the translator the propriety of
adding explanatory notes. He adopted the suggestion, and, when publishing
his Notes in the following year (1778), improved the opportunity to
dedicate not only these but the original volume to his new-found patron. In
a prefatory letter to her he outdid Beattie in the use of superlatives. The
notes are written, he proclaims, only because Mrs. Montagu has asked for
them, and with him a hint from that lady is a command; though he is
incapable of understanding why so accomplished a person should ask for
notes, since she needs them ‘as little as any person alive.’ The approbation
of Mrs. Montagu, he concludes, is ‘the highest honour any writer can
receive.’
Loyalty was one of Mrs. Montagu’s qualities. None of her protégés ever
had occasion to complain that she lost interest or declined support. Her
career as a patron of the arts is sullied by no quarrels; she was the subject of
no anonymous libels from the offended recipients of her charity. She
continued her favours to Potter, urging him to proceed with his translation
of Euripides,[380] and appearing prominently among the subscribers to that
volume. She received him at her assemblies, and, according to a somewhat
doubtful anecdote, presented him to Dr. Johnson.[381] Johnson, who
considered Potter’s work ‘verbiage’ (doubtless because it was in blank
verse), snubbed the scholar and mumbled to the bluestocking, ‘Well, well!’
and ‘Well, Madam, and what then?’
This ungracious reception may have helped Mrs. Montagu in inciting
Potter to attack Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, some years later; but,
according to Walpole, the chief aim was ‘to revenge the attack on Lord
Lyttelton.’ There is, I believe, no existing evidence for this gossip, apart
from the pamphlet itself; but there seems to be no good reason for rejecting

it. In this paper, which, it must be said, is a sufficiently dignified and
worthy pamphlet as pamphlets go, Potter quotes Mrs. Montagu’s Essay on
Shakspeare by way of demolishing Johnson’s criticism of The Bard, and the
lady and Bishop Hurd are proclaimed ‘the two best Critics of this or any
other age.’[382] Of this piece of nonsense Walpole has written the last word:

Were I Johnson, I had rather be criticized than flattered so fulsomely.
There is nothing more foolish than the hyperboles of contemporaries
on one another, who, like the nominal Dukes of Aquitaine and
Normandy at a coronation, have place given to them above all peers,
and the next day shrink to simple knights.[383]

It is a pity that Potter could not have known that the utility of his
translations, which have been reprinted again and again, would outlive the
fame of his patron.

A classicist of much more importance than Potter did not disdain to court
Mrs. Montagu. It was in June 1788, that William Cowper published in the
Gentleman’s Magazine his pleasant verses On Mrs. Montagu’s Feather
Hangings. He had himself not seen the room, but knew it from the
descriptions of his cousin, Lady Hesketh, who was an aspirant to Mrs.
Montagu’s ‘academy.’[384] The poet’s purpose in the presentation of this
poetical tribute seems to have been missed by his editors; but it is clear that
he was yielding to the pressure of Lady Hesketh and attempting to bring
himself and his forthcoming translation of Homer to the attention of the
bluestocking. The first move was a failure. Mrs. Montagu, it would seem,
took no notice of the lines in the magazine, though they were set forth as
‘by the author of The Task,’ already a poem of national fame. In August,
Cowper writes to Lady Hesketh:

To me, my dear, it seemeth that we shall never by any management
make a deep impression on Mrs. Montagu. Persons who have been so
long accustomed to praise become proof against it.[385]

Mrs. Montagu Johnson

Johnson Pointing out Mrs. Montagu as a Patron of the Arts
Reproduced from Barry’s fresco in the Royal Society of Arts, by kind permission of the Society

It was necessary to adopt a new plan. Two years later Lady Hesketh decided
to approach Mrs. Montagu herself, and requested Cowper to permit her to
show a portion of the manuscript to that lady. The poet, who had long since
admired the Essay on Shakspeare and who had acquired the most
exaggerated notions of the lady’s learning,[386] chose the first two books of

the Iliad to present as a sample intending to ‘carry her by a coup de main,’
and employing ‘Achilles, Agamemnon, and the two armies of Greece and
Troy,’ in his charge upon the bluestocking. To these the sixteenth book of
the Odyssey was added by Lady Hesketh. ‘It was very kind in thee,’ he
writes,[387] ‘to sacrifice to this Minerva on my account.’ But Minerva, who
was now seventy, was probably glad to escape from the affair with a
concealment of her ignorance of Homer. She wrote an enthusiastic, and, be
it added, modest letter to Lady Hesketh about the new translation, and put
her name on the subscribers’ list. Cowper read the letter and expressed his
pride in what was said; and there the matter ended.

The precise nature and extent of the assistance which Mrs. Montagu
rendered to James Barry, the painter, it is now impossible to determine.
Certain it is that she consented to be painted by him (in hideous profile) for
that hodge-podge of fresco with which Barry covered the walls of the Royal
Society of Arts. She is there depicted in her capacity as a patron of the arts.
[388]

‘Towards the centre of the picture,’ writes Barry, ‘is seen that
distinguished example of female excellence, Mrs. Montagu, who long
honoured the Society with her name and subscription.... Mrs. Montagu
appears here recommending the ingenuity and industry of a young
female whose work she is producing.... Between these ladies [the
Duchesses of Devonshire and Portland] the late Dr. Samuel Johnson
seems pointing out this example of Mrs. Montagu to their Graces’
attention and imitation.’[389]

The juxtaposition of Johnson and Mrs. Montagu, the Great Dictator and the
female Mæcenas, must have caused inextinguishable mirth among the
spectators who knew of their great quarrel. Mrs. Montagu’s resentment at

Johnson’s treatment of Lyttelton in the Lives of the Poets has been much
discussed; but the story must be repeated once more for the sake of the light
which it throws upon Mrs. Montagu’s ambitions to control the destinies of
literature.
Mrs. Montagu and Lord Lyttelton had been close friends for many years
preceding the death of the latter. They had laboured together on the
Dialogues of the Dead (to the scandal, Walpole delighted to relate, of the
lady’s postilion[390]); and thus Mrs. Montagu’s literary fame was, in a way,
bound up with the peer’s. When, eight years after the death of Lyttelton,
Johnson’s account of him appeared, it was found to contain remarks which
did not please the friends of the late nobleman. Far from being satisfied that
he should have been deemed worthy of inclusion even in so inclusive a list
as Johnson’s, they decided to take offence because a certain amount of
blame was mingled with a certain amount of praise. Johnson had, for
example, criticised ‘poor Lyttelton’ for thanking the Critical Reviewers for
their commendatory notice of the Dialogues of the Dead; he spoke of
Lyttelton’s poems as having ‘nothing to be despised and little to be
admired,’ and of his songs, in particular, as ‘sometimes spritely and
sometimes insipid.’ Here surely is as much praise as posterity would care to
give to Lyttelton; but it was not sufficient for the women who owed some
part of their reputation to the fact that they had been intimate with a peer.
According to Walpole, it was Mrs. Vesey who began the attack, but it was
certainly Mrs. Montagu who conducted the campaign. The reader of Fanny
Burney’s Diary is familiar with the details of this feud; the reader of
Walpole will find four references to it in the letters written at the opening of
1781.

‘She told me,’ writes the latter, ‘as a mark of her high displeasure,
that she would never ask him to dinner again. I took her side, and
fomented the quarrel, and wished I could have made Dagon and
Ashtaroth scold in Coptic.’[391]

Nothing came of this literary feud save a scene at Streatham between
Johnson and Pepys which frightened Fanny Burney, and Potter’s attack on
the Lives which has been mentioned already; and Mr. Dobson remarks that
modern readers ‘will perhaps wonder what the dispute was about.’[392] But
it is significant as showing the influence which Mrs. Montagu thought she
exerted in the world of letters, and the means which she adopted to make
her influence felt.
Johnson’s behaviour during this quarrel must, I think, have been due to
something other than wounded vanity. It was, I am convinced, due to this
very patronage of literature which the bluestockings, with Mrs. Montagu at
their head, were attempting to set up. There can be no more annoying
spectacle than that of a person to whom wealth and social talents have given
a certain minor position in the literary world, and who, mistaking gifts for
genius, attempts to exalt that position to one of authority. This is what Mrs.
Montagu was trying to do. She had, without a shadow of doubt, achieved a
certain influence. She had bestowed pensions and gifts upon deserving
authors and scholars. She had placed her name on a hundred subscription
lists. She had contributed to the success of Hannah More’s tragedy, Percy,
by appearing, more than once, in a box at the theatre where it was being
performed. Elizabeth Carter and Hester Chapone (who dedicated her Letters
to Mrs. Montagu) were examples of the worthy writer whom she assisted in
one way or another by her unostentatious charity. Laurence Sterne was
content, as early as 1761, to make her a sort of literary executor,[393] ‘not
because she is our cousin—but because I am sure she has a good heart.’ But
when, through the influence of flattery, she mistook her kind heart and her
pleasant interest in literature for the critical authority of a scholar and
arbiter, an authority which can belong to but one or two in any age, she
brought down upon herself, not unnaturally, the wrath of Johnson and the
scorn of Walpole. By November 1776, she had reached the point where she
could write thus to Garrick:

‘I must say I felt for Shakspeare the anxiety one does for a dead
friend, who can no longer speak for himself.’[394]

In 1778 she could seriously offer Fanny Burney, already renowned as the
author of Evelina, the gift of her ‘influence,’ adding, ‘We shall all be glad to
assist in spreading the fame of Miss Burney.’[395]
She had the desire to direct and to manage which is characteristic of the
experienced woman of fashion, who knows the value of her personal charm,
rather than of the true literary critic, who is usually a person too wise to
attempt to direct the stream of literature. But Mrs. Montagu was not content
to let that stream flow as it would. She must bring comedies to the attention
of Garrick[396] and suggest subjects to Hannah More[397] and Mrs. Carter;
[398]
she must guide Potter and encourage Beattie. In the pride of her power
she even attempted the delicate task of influencing the elections to the
Literary Club; and it would appear that, escaping the detection of Johnson,
she succeeded in her aim, for her candidate, who was no other than Mr.
Vesey, was chosen. But when she aspired to reverse the estimate of the
greatest living critic and substitute the indulgent opinion of a personal
friend, it is not surprising that Johnson should somewhat sharply have
reminded her and her coterie of what their opinion was really worth. Few
to-day will be found to regret that the lady’s view did not prevail.
At one point Mrs. Montagu’s relations with her protégés come
dangerously near to farce comedy. Like all the bluestockings, she was one
of the believers in the genius of Ann Yearsley, the poetical milk-woman of
Bristol, who was regarded for a time as a female Chatterton. It was part of
the work of bluestockings to discover genius. They had discovered Hannah
More; they had discovered Beattie and Mrs. Chapone; if they had not
discovered Fanny Burney they had at least ferreted her out of the obscurity
in which she wished to remain. But none of their literary finds seemed to
them so bright with promise as the marvellous woman who sold milk from

door to door in the unpoetical town of Bristol. It was Miss More who found
her, and who, with Mrs. Montagu, advertised her with an ardour which does
more credit to the quickness of their sympathies than to the quickness of
their wits.
In 1783 Miss More discovered that Ann Yearsley, the milk-woman who
called daily at her house in Bristol for kitchen-refuse with which to feed her
pig, was accustomed to employ her leisure moments in the composition of
verses. She at once took the woman in charge, taught her spelling, and the
simplest rules of rhetoric, and after a lapse of some months felt that her
pupil had made such progress that she might safely submit her verses to
bluestocking judgment. The enthusiasm with which Mrs. Montagu and her
friends received them is significant at once of their eagerness to assist the
development of poetry and of their unfitness for the task. Mrs. Montagu had
not believed in Woodhouse, the poetical shoemaker, but a female Chatterton
had more appeal. She wrote to Miss More,

‘Let me come to the wondrous story of the milk-woman. Indeed she
is one of the nature’s miracles. What force of imagination! what
harmony of numbers! In Pagan times one could have supposed Apollo
had fallen in love with her rosy cheek, snatched her to the top of Mt.
Parnassus, given her a glass of his best helicon, and ordered the nine
muses to attend her call.’

This hypothesis being unsuitable to a Christian age, Mrs. Montagu suggests
that the Scriptures, the Psalms, and the Book of Job in particular, may have
taught the artless numbers to flow; whereupon she herself indulges in a
flight:

Avaunt! grammarians; stand away! logicians; far, far away all
heathen ethics and mythology, geometry and algebra, and make room
for the Bible and Milton when a poet is to be made. The proud
philosopher ends far short of what has been revealed to the simple in

our religion. Wonder not, therefore, if our humble dame rises above
Pindar or steps beyond Æschylus.[399]

Mrs. Montagu joyfully promises her support.
The rest of the blues were hardly less enthusiastic. Old Mrs. Delany
circulated the milk-woman’s ‘proposals’ to print;[400] Mrs. Boscawen sent
in a ‘handsome list of subscribers’; the Duchess of Beaufort requested a
visit from Mrs. Yearsley; the Duchess of Portland sent a twenty-pound
bank-note. Walpole gave her money and the works of Hannah More.[401]
The Duchess of Devonshire presented her with an edition of the English
poets. All social London and half of literary London put its name on the list
of subscribers. When, in 1785, the volume appeared, it was prefaced by a
letter from Hannah More to Mrs. Montagu, telling Mrs. Yearsley’s story,
and recommending her to the good attentions of Mrs. Montagu, whose
delight ‘in protecting real genius’ is well known. Mrs. Montagu’s name was,
indeed, writ large in the volume. In the address, To Stella (Stella being the
milk-woman’s name for Hannah More), Mrs. Montagu is referred to as
That bright fair who decks a Shakespeare’s urn
With deathless glories.

Similar adulation is diffused through some seventy lines of a blank verse
poem, On Mrs. Montagu. A passage from this will serve as well as anything
to illustrate ‘Lactilla’s’ powers:
Lo! where she, mounting, spurns the stedfast earth,
And, sailing on the cloud of science, bears
The banner of Perfection.—
Ask Gallia’s mimic sons how strong her powers,
Whom, flush’d with plunder from her Shakespeare’s page,
She swift detects amid their dark retreats;
(Horrid as Cacus in their thievish dens)
Regains the trophies, bears in triumph back
The pilfer’d glories to a wond’ring world.
So Stella boasts, from her the tale I learned;
With pride she told it, I with rapture heard.

Mrs. Yearsley was not loath to address the great in verse. Mr. Raikes of
Manchester, the founder of Sunday Schools, the Duchess of Portland, and
the Author of The Castle of Otranto (genially referred to as ‘the Honourable
H—e W—e’) were all commemorated. Their influential patronage and sad
Lactilla’s melancholy tale made the volume immediately successful, and it
passed into a fourth edition in 1786.
Lactilla might, however, have been happier had she been less successful.
There had come to her, after the publication of her book, the not
inconsiderable sum of three hundred and fifty pounds, which Hannah More
held in trust for her. One is not surprised to learn that Miss More was
cautious in paying out this money to Mrs. Yearsley, nor that this caution
impressed the owner of the money as mere niggardliness. A sharp quarrel
ensued which was fully set forth by both women, by Hannah More in her
letters to Mrs. Montagu and by the poetess in the preface to her next volume
of verses. It cost the poor milk-woman all her fine friends and the fine
reputation which they had blown up for her. She sank gradually from view,
and when she died, in 1806, was probably as obscure as when she was
‘discovered’ some twenty years before. Had she been of a philosophical
temperament, she might perhaps have extracted some comfort from the
cynical reflection that her fall had been well-nigh as humiliating to her
discoverers and patrons as to herself. Walpole continued for months to
chuckle over the collapse of her reputation, asserting that, if wise, she
would now put gin in her milk and kill herself by way of attaining to an
immortality like Chatterton’s;[402] but the bluestockings were glad to forget
the poor creature and the mischief they had done her, and the pathos of her
latter state moved them only to passionate descriptions of her ingratitude.

CHAPTER XI
R esults

The London salon did not pass away without leaving behind it serious
criticisms by serious people who knew it well. Thus Wraxall, writing of
Mrs. Montagu’s later assemblies, asserts that the charm departed with the
death of Johnson, ‘who formed the nucleus round which all the subordinate
members revolved.’[403] Miss More, in reference to the same subject, says:
‘The old little parties are not to be had in the usual style of comfort.
Everything is great and vast and late and magnificent and dull.’[404] At a
period much earlier than this, Gibbon made an interesting comparison
between French and English society which is worthy of consideration in
any attempt to judge the London salon. Writing at Paris, in May 1763, he
says: ‘Là [i.e. in London] on croit vous faire plaisir en vous recevant. Ici on
croit s’en faire à soi-même’;[405] and elsewhere, ‘In two months I am
acquainted with more ( and more agreeable) people, than I knew in London
in two years. Indeed the way of life is quite different. Much less play, more
conversation, and instead of our immense routs, agreeable societies where
you know and are known by almost every body you meet.’[406]
There may perhaps be something worth considering in the suggestion
that the Gallic temperament lends itself more readily than the Saxon to the
life and atmosphere of salons. I have already pointed out that one
characteristic of that life, by which, indeed, its vitality is to be tested, is the
peculiar nature of the friendships between the hostess and her author-guest.
In London such relations are found, but they seem tame, cool, and unequal.
Passion is unknown in them. It is inevitable that the salon, if not the
literature that springs from it, should suffer from this lack; and this

contention cannot be dismissed by insisting that authors are better off
without such questionable friendships. For better or for worse, these made
for the production of literature, and one cannot think of the great Parisian
salons as existing without them.
But we must go farther. The great English authors in general not only
declined to form such intimate associations in the salons, but looked on
literary assemblies with something approaching contempt, if indeed they
paid any attention whatever to them. The attitude of Johnson is hardly to be
thought of as an exception to this statement. After his death he was loudly
claimed as a member of the innermost bluestocking circle, and he was so
considered by more than one contemporary. Miss More, for example, in her
Bas Bleu described Johnson as generally participating in the assemblies of
the bluestockings. This assertion might be quite misleading, if we did not
have Boswell’s Life to correct the impression. The amount of time which
Johnson spent in such assemblies is almost negligible. One smiles to think
what a tornado would have burst from him, had it been hinted to him that
his literary activity was in any way vitalized by women. The attitude of
other authors is even clearer. Burke was admittedly a renegade from the
salons.[407] Goldsmith does not appear to have had dignity or authority
enough to interest the bluestockings very much. Sheridan, who might easily
have shone in salons, was pre-occupied with dramatic and political affairs.
Sterne, Walpole, and Gibbon knew the Parisian salon too well to have any
illusions about its London offspring. Approaching the matter from the other
side, it must be obvious that the salon could not win great distinction from
those persons who were content to accept its favours and submit to its
influence. Beattie and Hannah More, the translator of Epictetus and the
translator of Sophocles, and even the author of the excellent Cecilia—these
were but feeble luminaries for an institution, which, if it is to win
recognition at all, must shine with a splendour that is piercing.

Even when all this has been taken into account, the real question is still to
ask. Why did not English authors more generally seek the inspiration and
assistance of this institution? The salon was not without a certain power: it
was generous; it had influence with publishers and with booksellers; it
could bring authors into pleasant and profitable contact with one another.
But despite all this, the bluestockings never became, like their French
models, true disseminators of ideas; they were never the devotees of new
and daring philosophies and of radical transitions. They were always on the
side of law and order, and of a conservative tradition. They stood for the
classicism of English literature. Now no temper could have been more
unfortunate than this at the moment when the bluestockings sought to exert
their influence. The things which they represented were already passing
away, and with the things that were coming to birth they felt no profound
sympathy. They did, it is true, show a certain interest in romanticism, and
Mrs. Vesey scandalized her sisters by getting interested in agnosticism; but
the true significance of these things they never guessed. None of them
glimpsed that dawn in which to be alive was bliss. They were apart from the
whole current of European literature. At the moment when poets were
hearkening to the voices of new gods, the bluestockings were prolonging
faint echoes of conservatism; at the moment when poetry was deserting the
metropolis and schools of literature were shattering into individualism, they
cast their influence on the side of a yet closer centralization. English
literature was about to find its true exponents in two men who were about
as far removed from the influence of salons as can well be imagined, the
shy recluse of Olney, and the passionate poet of the Lowlands.
Thus the salon, judged by classical models, must be said to have failed. It
was born out of its due time. Had the position of woman in the English
literary world permitted it to flower fifty years earlier, there might have
been a different story to tell. As it is, we must be content to study it as an
interesting attempt to domesticate a foreign institution and as a revelation of

certain significant features in English literary life. Conceived in its strictest
sense, it is difficult to claim for the salon more than this.
But there is a freer sense in which the whole movement may be
conceived. We may turn our eyes from the bluestockings and their
somewhat tiresome assemblies to consider the broader manifestations of the
social instinct. The age which we are studying is unique in English
literature as having struck out or brought to perfection types of literature
which exist solely to record and celebrate the social life. That body of work
is perhaps its most significant, and certainly its most characteristic,
contribution to English literature. It is no idle speculation that sees in it the
working of the same spirit which tried to express itself in the salon. Full
expression was reserved for this spirit in simpler forms of social life, and
out of these rose a body of literature worthy to represent it. To this truer
manifestation of the social spirit in letters we now address our attention.

PART III
THE SOCIAL SPIRIT IN ENGLISH LETTERS

Samuel Johnson
From a photograph, preserved in the British Museum, of an
undescribed painting, formerly attributed to Gainsborough

CHAPTER XII
J ohnson and the A rt of C onversation

Chapters like this usually begin with a lament. The age of conversation, it
is proper to begin, is gone, gone with the harpsichord and the minuet and
the long, leisurely evenings when the bluestockings discussed literature and
the theory of equality. The rush of modern life, one continues, has killed
conversation, even as the penny post has killed the art of letter-writing. In
all this there is much false sentiment and false implication. It is foolish to
assume the existence of a time when talk was universally clever and wise.
There were dullards even in 1780. Cards and dancing, then as now, were
sought as a relief from thinking, and serious talkers were not seldom voted
a nuisance. No doubt they often were. The bluestockings, as we have seen,
sometimes bored even themselves. The reputation of the age for
conversation depended upon a few.
It is difficult to recover a sufficient body of this conversation upon which
to base an opinion. It is a much easier thing to read about than to get at.
Plenty of essays on conversation have been preserved—no manual for
young ladies was without one—but the talk itself is not so easy to find. We
have Chesterfield’s advice to his son on how to shine in conversation, but
the record of Chesterfield’s own discourse is little better than a collection of
puns and bits of repartee, mere flotsam and jetsam. Cowper wrote a long
and rather dreary poem on colloquial happiness, but where is Cowper’s
conversation? Fielding, too, wrote an essay on the subject, but it is a rather
priggish affair (for Fielding), and the perusal of it only fills us with regret
that we must take this poor substitute for the brilliant chatter that went on

about the punch-bowl. The scraps of talk casually embedded in works on
other subjects, the anecdotes, jests, and bons mots have lost with time much
of their flavour and significance, and give us no adequate notion of the
distinctive opinions held by their authors, no grounds for large general
conclusions about them, and no conception of the general strain of their
talk. There is no steady light from these flashes of eloquence and wit. At
most they make us regret what we have lost. Thus there is every reason to
suppose that the conversation of Richard Brinsley Sheridan was a model of
brilliance; but the collection of his sayings recorded by Moore is quite
lacking in the grace of reality. These good things are without a foil; they
need arrangement; they are mere ornaments adorning nothing, a little heap
of unset gems.
To all this there is but one exception, the grand exception of Boswell’s
record of Johnson. Perhaps the chief distinction of that record is that it gives
us not only the high lights in the conversation, not only its exciting
moments, but its very longueurs (as Horace Walpole objected), its
ineptitude, its occasional inconclusiveness. There is, therefore, something
by which the wit of it all is set off. It has the ring of vitality. It is to the
everlasting credit of Boswell that he let us see the worst of Johnson’s talk,
that, in the words of Hannah More, he ‘mitigated none of his asperities,’ but
gave us the heaviness as well as the wit and the rudeness as well as the
depth. We hear the voice of Johnson, not a mere quotation of his words.
But in spite of the obvious faults of Johnson’s talk, it is difficult to speak
of it without a continuous and perhaps offensive use of superlatives. Age
could not wither Johnson. Instead of impairing his memory, time enriched
it. The pomposity of his written work never impedes his quickness of wit in
conversation. He was, to be sure, fond of parading that pomposity of style
for the amazement and amusement of his hearers, and it is scarcely true to
say that he used one style in writing and another in talking. It would be
nearer the truth to say that, as he grew older, he tended to introduce more of
the ease of his talk into his written work. Sentence after sentence from the

Lives of the Poets might be cited to show the almost colloquial ease of his
later manner, and significant parallels might be drawn. Yet it is certain that
conversation gave more scope to that aptness of homely illustration which
was his most entertaining gift. Posterity is right in preferring Johnson’s
conversation to his writings, for while it lacks nothing in the stream of
thought and finish of style that distinguish his writings, it is distinctly
superior in mother wit.
In the heat of conversation Johnson had a stimulus which he never felt in
writing, the joy of personal contention. He admittedly regarded
conversation as a contest, and was frankly contemptuous of the type of man
who, like Addison or Goldsmith, was always at his best when he was
arguing alone. Of two men talking, Johnson asserted, one must always rise
superior to the other. For himself he had too much pride to be contentedly
submerged by the conversation of others. Rather than be worsted, he would
strike below the belt, or, in the words of Boswell, ‘toss and gore several
persons.’ He had a rough and ready way of escaping from difficulties. When
Mrs. Frances Brooke requested him to look over her new tragedy,
complaining that she herself had no time to revise it, since she had ‘so many
irons in the fire,’ the sage replied, ‘Why, then, Madam, the best thing I can
advise you to do is to put your tragedy along with your irons.’ ‘If your
company does not drive a man out of his house, nothing will,’ he said to
Boswell because the Scotsman had ventured to defend the Americans.
When he got the floor—and by the use of such methods he got it very often
—he was not inclined to abandon it, and the conversation became a
monologue. Goldsmith, who so often had the right in dispute and was,
indeed, one of the wittiest opponents Johnson ever had, complained that he
was ‘for making a monarchy of what should be a republic.’ Even Boswell
admitted that in Johnson’s company men did not so much interchange
conversation as listen to what was said. But, whatever lofty notions of
conversation we may cherish, it may be questioned whether it can ever be a
republic. If the flow of talk is to get anywhere, if it is to reach a conclusion,

it must be confined within a rather narrow channel or it is certain to
dissipate itself. Johnson hated spattering talk. He censured Goldsmith
because he was always ‘coming on without knowing how he was to get off,’
and asserted that he could not talk well because he had made up his mind
about nothing. ‘Goldsmith,’ said he, ‘had no settled notions upon any
subject; so he talked always at random.’ It was not so with Johnson. He saw
his conclusions and drove straight towards them, scattering his opponents or
knocking them on the head if they impeded him.
But it would be a mistake to infer that Johnson was a sort of
conversational head-hunter, or the ourang-outang of the drawing-room
whom Macaulay depicts, alternately howling and growling and rending his
associates in pieces before our eyes. If we have any respect for the
consistent testimony of his contemporaries, we shall come to realize that he
talked somewhat unwillingly. He had to be drawn out. ‘He was like the
ghosts,’ said Tyers. Nothing annoyed him more than to be shown off. At the
famous Wilkes dinner, to which he had been taken simply that he might
contend with a worthy opponent, he was so angry when he realized what
had happened that he took up a book, ‘sat down upon a window seat and
read, or at least kept his eye upon it intently for some time,’ exactly as upon
the very different occasion of his first meeting with Fanny Burney.
Because of this lack of pliability in Johnson, Boswell deserves far more
credit than he has ever received for his success in making him talk.
Boswell, though not a profound thinker, was of a mind curious and alert. He
is entirely misjudged by those readers—if, indeed, they are ever readers—
who join Macaulay in thinking him a fool. Boswell said foolish things, to be
sure, and asked the foolishest questions, as what proportion of their wages
housemaids might properly spend on their attire, how hogs were
slaughtered in the Tahiti Islands, and what Dr. Johnson would do if he were
shut up in a tower alone with a new-born baby; but under the silliest of
them there is always a keen experimentalist, an amused observer tickling a
giant with a straw. Boswell introduced a valuable amount of friction into

Johnson’s life, arranged that he should meet men whose views were wholly
opposed to his own, carried him off to dine with Whigs, got him to call on
Lord Monboddo (who held the most offensive opinions about primitive
man), introduced him to General Paoli, and to Beattie and Sir Adam
Fergusson (of the infamous race of Scots), and dragged him across all
Scotland to Mull and Icomkill. No one else so mastered the art of managing
Johnson as this same wily Scot. Mrs. Thrale could not do it. Neither
Goldsmith nor Dr. Taylor could do it. Topham Beauclerk might perhaps
have done it, had he thought it worth while. Fanny Burney had the subtle
combination of grace and ability which appealed to Johnson, but was
lacking in force. When she attempted to show Johnson to her ‘Daddy
Crisp,’ or to engage him in conversation with Mr. and Mrs. Greville, her
failure was conspicuous. The great man’s placid self-absorption gave a
deeper offence than any tirade could have done.
Johnson had at times so serene a manner that, in an affable moment, he
declared to Boswell that ‘that is the happiest conversation where there is no
competition, no vanity, but a calm, quiet interchange of sentiments.’ Such is
the general strain of his conversation at Streatham, as recorded by Miss
Burney.[408] Here we detect a playfulness, even a frivolity, of manner which
is a pleasant contrast to the more professional tone with which Boswell has
familiarized us. There is in it no hint of dress parade. It is a very human
conversation, containing most of the faults that disgrace our own. Johnson
gossips. He talks of the weather; he talks of his friends behind their back—
what true comrade ever failed to do that?—and will even indulge in a bit of
scandal. He talks of Sheridan’s marriage with the beautiful prima donna,
Elizabeth Linley, and of Goldsmith’s fracas with his Welsh publisher,
Evans; and censures or defends Garrick or Foote as the mood impels. There
are even moments when he emulates Goldsmith and makes himself a
laughing-stock for the delectation of his friends.

‘Our roasting,’ he once remarked, when describing the state of his
kitchen, ‘is not magnificent, for we have no jack.... Small joints, I
believe, they manage with a string, and larger are done at the tavern. I
have some thoughts (with profound gravity) of buying a jack, because I
think a jack is some credit to a house’
‘Well,’ remarked Mr. Thrale, ‘but you’ll have a spit, too?’
‘No, sir, no; that would be superfluous; for we shall never use it; and
if a jack is seen, a spit will be presumed!’

This feature of the Johnsonian manner, which might almost be compared
with Goldsmith’s fondness for the rôle of fool, has been generally
overlooked. One may doubt whether even Boswell was more than dimly
aware of it. Yet there can be little doubt that Johnson enjoyed assuming and
playing a part. He was certainly not a bear, but he enjoyed playing the bear,
and hugged his victims to death that the world might laugh. It was his
peculiar misfortune to play the rôle too well, as it was Goldsmith’s
misfortune to play the fool too well. Again, Johnson was assuredly not at
heart a pompous man; yet he could in a moment assume pomposity and
drop into the rôle of Gargantua. But he sometimes created such
consternation in the part that the world did not dare to laugh. Thus, in the
trite old illustration of his remark about Buckingham’s Rehearsal, he
revised the crisp sentence, ‘It has not wit enough to keep it sweet,’ into the
crazy pomposity of, ‘It has not vitality enough to preserve it from
putrefaction.’ It is amazing that Macaulay and the world of readers after
him could delude themselves into thinking that Johnson was seriously
attempting to improve this sentence. It was, on the contrary, a pose worthy
of Laurence Sterne. It was a favourite device of a true humourist putting
forth a caricature of himself. Instances of it could be multiplied indefinitely.
Remarking on the morality of the Beggars’ Opera, for example, he said, ‘It
may have some influence for evil by making the character of a rogue
familiar, and in some degree pleasing’; then with the familiar shift of style,

‘There is in it such a labefactation of all principles as to be injurious to
morality.’ Gibbon and Cambridge, who were present, could regard this
stylistic somersault as an attempt at critical dignity, and even Boswell felt
that he must smother his mirth. Fanny Burney, had she been there, would, I
imagine, have smiled confidently in Johnson’s face, for she appreciated this
aspect of his talk better than others. It is to her that we owe Johnson’s
delicious criticism of his pensioners, and, in particular of the mysterious
Miss Poll Carmichael: ‘I could make nothing of her; she was wiggle-
waggle, and I could never persuade her to be categorical.’
But however dull the eighteenth century may have been in apprehending
this type of humour, it did full justice to the more serious side of Johnson’s
conversation. It was chiefly impressed, as every age must be, with the scope
and versatility of the man’s mind. It is of course the merest platitude to
remark that Johnson’s conversation is characterized by breadth of interest
and accuracy of information; yet, like many platitudes, it is essential to an
examination of the subject. It is most significant of the man and of the age
in which he lived—so far removed from the narrowness of our own age of
specialization—simply to turn the pages of Boswell’s Life and note the
number of topics upon which Johnson talked with that easy mastery which
distinguishes the scholar and philosopher from the promiscuously well-
informed man of the world. Take, for example, the topics touched upon in a
dozen consecutive pages of the book, chosen at random; evidence for
supernatural appearances, the Roman Church, the thirty-nine articles of the
Church of England, the Royal Marriage Bill, the respect due to old families,
the art of mimicry, the word civilisation (‘shop’ was evidently not an
excluded topic), vitriol, the question, Was there one original language? the
relation of Erse to Irish, the rights of schoolmasters, in the infliction of
punishment, the Lord Chancellors, the Scotch accent, the future state of the
soul, prayers for the dead, the poet Gray, Akenside, Elwal the heretic, the
question, Is marriage natural to man? (it seems that it is not), the philosophy
of beauty, swearing, the philosophy of biography, the proper use of riches,

the philosophy of philanthropy. Here surely is a sufficiently varied list. But
no mere enumeration can give any notion of the novelty of Johnson’s
thinking. His remarks are no echo, no quotation. They are the natural up-
welling of an original mind, showing us that Johnson was a philosopher; but
they also reveal a fund of accurate detail and an ability to quote chapter and
verse, showing us that Johnson was a scholar. These two offices may be
quickly illustrated from the topics enumerated above. When Boswell
introduced the subject of the future state of the soul, he made the highly
conventional observation that ‘one of the most pleasing thoughts is that we
shall see our friends again.’ Whereupon Johnson replied:

Yes, Sir; but you must consider, that when we are become purely
rational, many of our friendships will be cut off. Many friendships are
formed by a community of sensual pleasures: all these will be cut off.
We form many friendships with bad men, because they have agreeable
qualities, and they can be useful to us; but, after death, they can no
longer be of use to us. We form many friendships by mistake,
imagining people to be different from what they really are. After death,
we shall see every one in a true light. Then, Sir, they talk of our
meeting our relations: but then all relationship is dissolved; and we
shall have no regard for one person more than another, but for their real
value. However, we shall either have the satisfaction of meeting our
friends, or be satisfied without meeting them.

There is Johnson the philosopher. Five minutes later, Boswell was saying, ‘I
have been told that in the Liturgy of the Episcopal Church of Scotland,
there was a form of prayer for the dead,’ to which Johnson replied, ‘Sir, it is
not in the liturgy which Laud framed for the Episcopal Church of Scotland;
if there is a liturgy older than that, I should be glad to see it.’ There is
Johnson the scholar.
It would be rash to assert that Johnson was always on safe ground, and
ludicrous to assert that he was always right. He enjoyed a random shot at

the truth as well as any other man whose chief interest is in the vitality of
his thinking rather than in the literalness of his conclusions; but it was a
diversion which he seldom permitted to others, and a tendency in himself
which was generally restrained by the specialists about him. Here we have a
truly formative element in the social life of the time.
But no man of the eighteenth century could hold his hearers simply by
the display of a wealth of information. Brilliancy of manner was as
indispensable as breadth of mind. ‘Weight without lustre is lead,’ wrote
Lord Chesterfield. No good talker was without a superficial attraction.
Garrick was noted for the histrionic quality, Beauclerk for acidity, and
Goldsmith for Irish humour. Johnson’s conversation, from the inner fire of
it, was for ever sparkling into wit and epigram. Yet he never made the
mistake of serving his friends with nothing but epigrams, which is very like
serving one’s guests with nothing but hors d’œuvres. Epigram stimulates
the appetite, but does not satisfy it, and will not do for a steady diet. It is
with Johnson, however, something more than a mannerism. It was the form
that lent itself best to the expression of his critical faculty. An examination
of Johnson’s literary criticism will reveal the fact that his method is
prevailingly sententious and summary. He was impatient of a long and slow
development of thought, nor did he ‘wind into’ a subject, like Burke. In
reading the Lives of the Poets, we do not feel that matters are gradually
illuminated, but that they are revealed by sudden flashes. If his criticism
offends, it is usually because it is a final pronouncement and is too
summary to be adequate. When he attempts an orderly criticism of details,
the method, though more elaborate, is usually less satisfying. He is at his
best when he is most crisp and dogmatic: ‘If Pope be not a poet, where is
poetry to be found?’ ‘Dryden is read with frequent astonishment, and Pope
with perpetual delight.’ ‘His page,’ he says of Addison, ‘is always luminous,
but never blazes in unexpected splendour.’ The value of Johnson’s criticism
consists in such sentences as these, not in longer passages of sustained
comment like the analysis of Gray’s Bard.

Now whatever charm or power there is in such a method is found also in
Johnson’s conversation. There is the same pointed style, the same finality of
tone, and often the same irritating quality: ‘No man,’ said he of Goldsmith,
‘was more foolish when he had not a pen in his hand, or more wise when he
had.’ ‘That man [Lyttelton] sat down to write a book to tell the world what
the world had all his life been telling him.’ ‘All theory is against the
freedom of the will; all experience for it.’ ‘In republics there is not a respect
for authority, but a fear of power.’ Many profess to dislike such an
epigrammatic style as this; but I incline to think that those who protest most
loudly against such dicta are those who are least capable of thinking them
out. At any rate, if they accomplished no more, such statements gave
something to attack, and the desire to demolish is of the very soul of
conversation.
Those who are offended by such a conversational method might attack it
more effectively by pointing out that it was often employed to startle rather
than to instruct. Johnson felt the normal human desire to shock people, and
indulged to the full his transitory moods. ‘Rousseau,’ he would exclaim, ‘is
a very bad man. I should like to have him work in the plantations!’ ‘I am
willing to love all mankind, except an American.’ In a fit of petulance he
even quoted with approval the ridiculous remark, ‘For anything I can see,
foreigners are fools.’ There is no deliberation in such words; it is, in truth,
hardly fair to quote them. At any rate, they are entirely misleading when
taken out of their setting; for it is the charm of conversation that it is not
deliberate, and that a talker may dare to have a prejudice as well as an
opinion. A good talker will ‘paint a man highly’ for the mere love of
painting. Voltaire and all free talkers with him are guilty of the same
excesses. Madame Necker tells us that in listening to Voltaire it was
necessary to distinguish the statements that were truly characteristic of the
man from those which were dictated by the passing mood and were no more
than the vérité du moment. It is the peculiar office of conversation thus to
give the whole man, with all his faults upon his head, all his lapses from

sense and self-consciousness, all his irrationalities and inconsistencies: it is
these things that show that he is human. It was Johnson himself who
remarked that in conversation ‘you never get a system.’ Let us be grateful
that it is so. A ‘unified’ person, a man whose mind is governed by a system,
cannot converse; he can only lecture. His thoughts flow like a canal, not
like a river. He is really the most limited of men, for he must live within his
system as he lives within his income. It is the glory of Johnson’s
conversation that you cannot make a system out of it. For a system you
must go to the Rambler or The Vanity of Human Wishes.
But this is not to say that Johnson had no conversational principles or that
he uttered thoughts merely because they were novel. His ‘stream of
mind’—to use one of his own phrases—was free, but it was not therefore
without a very definite trend. Like a stream again, he drew constantly upon
his sources, certain general conclusions about life, which really control his
conversation. He himself declared that general principles were not to be had
from a man’s talk, but from books. Certainly this dictum does not apply to
his own talk, for general principles are obvious enough in it. It is quite
evident that we are listening to a man who has made up his mind about life
and about what is worth while. If, unlike Goldsmith, he talked well in
public, it was because, like Imlac, he had thought well in private. It is his
constant custom to bring the casual topic immediately into the realm of
general principles, and thus the talk about a particular subject becomes a
philosophy of it. Boswell realized this, and introduced topic after topic in
order to get it cleared up once for all. ‘I wished to have it settled,’ he says,
‘whether duelling was contrary to the laws of Christianity.’ He always felt
that Johnson could have settled the whole matter of necessity and freewill,
if only he had been willing to talk about it. Of a lady talking with Johnson
of the resurrection body, he naïvely remarks, ‘She seemed desirous of
knowing more, but he left the question in obscurity.’ Such is his confidence
in his master’s method.

It is always profitable to delve through Johnson’s talk to the philosophy
that underlies it; but not unfrequently he spares us the trouble by
enunciating the principle himself. Thus when the subject of gaming arose,
he pronounced as follows:

Sir, I do not call a gamester a dishonest man; but I call him an
unsocial man, an unprofitable man. Gaming is a mode of transferring
property without producing any intermediate good. Trade gives
employment to numbers, and so produces intermediate good.

Whether this doctrine be economically sound I do not know; but it is plainly
a doctrine. He delighted in such formulation of principles. Thus when
Hume’s statement that all who are happy are equally happy was quoted to
him, he replied with a definition of happiness:

Sir, that all who are happy are equally happy is not true. A peasant
and a philosopher may be equally satisfied, but not equally happy.
Happiness consists in a multiplicity of agreeable consciousness. A
peasant has not capacity for having equal happiness with a philosopher.

In like manner, he deduced principles of æsthetics from a teacup, and
demolished the theory of equality by inviting the footman to sit down and
dine.
But Johnson’s conversation is more than a reductio ad principia, as it is
more than epigram and more than information. Philosophic in method, it
was creative in effect. It fertilized other minds, and attained to new life long
after it was uttered and forgotten. Johnson cannot be measured by one who
reads only his writings, but he can be measured by one who reads only his
conversation. Thus his work is linked with that of men who have
accomplished more by the spoken word than by the written thought, so that,
on the one hand, it has its place in the history of table-talk, like that of
Selden and Coleridge, and, on the other, typifies the relation of society and

letters at its best. By the dynamic force of his conversation Johnson
developed men, he woke in them powers of which they did not know
themselves to be possessed, and raised them to higher levels of attainment
than his own. Men listened to him with rage or with wonder, as the
Hebrews to a prophet and the Romans to a Sibyl, and they scoffed or
recorded according to their mood. Of much of this Johnson was,
fortunately, unconscious. He regarded his books as his chief influence upon
the world. ‘Now, Sir,’ said he, ‘the good I can do by my conversation bears
the same relation to the good I can do by my writings that the practice of a
physician retired to a small country town, does to his practice in a great
city.’ But Boswell saw more clearly. ‘To me,’ he said, ‘his conversation
seemed more remarkable than even his writings.’ When, in 1776, Boswell
returned to Johnson’s side, he felt at once the electric force. ‘I felt myself
elevated as if brought into another state of being,’ he wrote; and said to Mrs.
Thrale, ‘I am quite restored by him, by transfusion of mind.’ The cynical
will of course dismiss this as a spasm of hero-worship; but it is more than
that. No one will be inclined to accuse Edmund Burke of worshipping
Johnson, yet he remarked: ‘To the conversation of this truly great man I am
proud to acknowledge that I owe the best part of my education.’ Orme the
historian remarked that in conversation Johnson gave one either ‘new
thoughts or a new colouring.’ Testimony of an even more striking character
may be quoted from Reynolds. Speaking of his own Discourses on Art,
Reynolds said:

Whatever merit they have must be imputed, in a great measure, to
the education which I may be said to have had under Dr. Johnson. I do
not mean to say, though it would certainly be to the credit of these
Discourses if I could say it with truth, that he contributed even a single
sentiment to them: but he qualified my mind to think justly.... The
observations which he made on poetry, on life, and on everything about
us, I applied to our art.

Those who heard the conversation of Johnson may be said to have
witnessed literature in the making. At any rate, Johnson’s talk became
literature by the simple fact of being recorded. It is the best example that
can be given of the fusion of the literary life with the social, and brought to
bear the same kind of influence which the salons were trying to exert. It was
destined to give Johnson his distinctive place in the literature. It was
regarded, and properly, by Boswell as constituting the peculiar value of his
Life of Johnson, and as it was the chief inspiration, so it remains the chief
attraction of that remarkable book.

CHAPTER XIII
W alpole and the A rt of F amiliar C orrespondence

The golden age of English letter-writing arrived without a period of long
and painful preparation. With the more rudimentary correspondence of the
seventeenth century, the new art had but the slightest relations, appearing in
full bloom almost as soon as it appeared at all. There was of course much in
England to encourage it. It is significant, for example, that the era of letter-
writing was coincident with the production of large numbers of novels in
letter-form, which made the art the vehicle of a new realism, and thus
helped to spread the popularity of both types at once. Again, the era was
also that of the development of the salons and of the art of conversation, a
coincidence which is duplicated in the literary history of France.[409] Letter-
writing, considered as a familiar art—and we have no concern with its other
aspects—is but written conversation, a sort of tête-à-tête, with the talking,
for the moment, all one side. It is dominated by a smiling intimacy, and it is
this note which one feels to be a new thing in the correspondence of the
eighteenth century, a note which is heard but seldom in the letters of an
earlier period. The models of the new style were, in fact, not English. When
Chesterfield was choosing exemplars for his son, he took no account of
English letter-writers; he cites Cicero and Cardinal d’Ossat as models for
serious correspondence, and then adds: ‘For gay and amusing letters, for
enjouement and badinage, there are none that equal Comte Bussy’s and
Madame Sévigné’s. They are so natural that they seem to be the extempore
conversation of two people of wit rather than letters. I would advise you to
let that book be one of your itinerant library.’[410] The regard for Madame
de Sévigné was well-nigh universal. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who
probably found her too womanly, is almost alone in her dislike. Thomas

Gray has been said to imitate her.[411] Fanny Burney, who had read her from
the days of her youth, considered her ‘almost all that can be wished to form
female perfection,’ felt attached to her as though she were alive and in the
same room, and longed to run into her arms.[412] Mrs. Boscawen created an
almost national sensation by circulating a rumour of the discovery in France
of five hundred new letters of Madame de Sévigné. All the blues were in a
flutter over it. Mrs. Montagu wrote to Hannah More that the truth of the
matter would be evident at once upon publication, since Madame de
Sévigné’s style was ‘of all things the most inimitable.’[413] Miss More
yielded to none in her admiration, and in one of her happiest phrases
compares her to a ‘master sketching for his own amusement.’ But all this
admiration is as nothing compared with the worship which Walpole gave
the French writer. ‘My dear Madame de Sévigné,’ he calls her, ‘that divine
woman,’ ‘my saint,’ and ‘Notre Dame de Livry.’ He collected relics of her
with a fervour fairly religious, and enshrined them under her portrait. The
cult became a jest among his friends. Madame du Deffand sent him a snuff-
box, with the likeness of Madame de Sévigné painted upon it, and wrote a
letter as from the lady herself to accompany the gift:

Des champs Elisées.
(Point de succession de tems; point de date.)
Je connois votre folle passion pour moi; votre enthousiasme pour
mes lettres, votre vénération pour les lieux que j’ai habités: J’ai appris
le culte que vous m’y avez rendu: j’en suis si pénétrée que j’ai sollicité
et obtenu la permission de mes Souverains de vous venir trouver pour
ne vous quitter jamais. J’abandonne sans regret ces lieux fortunés; je
vous préfère à tous ses habitans: jouissez du plaisir de me voir; ne vous
plaignez point que ce ne soit qu’en peinture; c’est la seule existence
que puissent avoir les ombres....[414]

When people bored Walpole with talk of Shakespeare and Swift, he would
set his thoughts upon Madame de Sévigné[415] as a monk takes refuge in
holy meditation. ‘If she could have talked nonsense,’ he cries, ‘I should, like
any other bigot, believe she was inspired.’[416]
Worshipping her thus, it is not surprising that he should have been, even
in his own day, compared to her.[417] He affected to regard such praise as
blasphemy; but, though he was in all probability secretly pleased, he was
too great an artist in his own way not to realize that there was a difference
between him and the goddess of his idolatry. It is typical of this difference
that one thinks instinctively of Walpole as the ‘prince of letter-writers’ and
of Madame de Sévigné as a friend. Walpole was too strongly individualist
to be quite the ‘perfect medium’ that we find in the marquise. We are
conscious of his cleverness, his prejudices, his distortions, his rank and
snobbishness. We think of Walpole as often as we think of Walpole’s news.
His art is not, however, the less perfect, but only different in method. He
does not, like Madame de Sévigné, simply transmit the light, but stains and
fractures it so that it glows with a confusion of colours and flashing rays.
Walpole could never have attained to the pearl-like perfection of Madame
de Sévigné. If we must needs deal in parallels, we shall find a much closer
one between Madame de Sévigné and William Cowper. The recluse of
Olney, like the Lady of Livry, had caught the secret of the unpremeditated
art. Walpole—like the prince that he is—is almost never free from a sense
of his rank.
I am tempted to say that this self-consciousness of Walpole is an art in
itself. He enjoys displaying various sides of himself, plays with his
prejudices, exaggerates all his enthusiasms and all his dislikes, affects to be
old and look back over a vista of years, jests about his gout and the
infallible bootikins, pretends to believe that the country is going to the dogs,
and takes refuge at Strawberry Hill among his cats and his cameos. There
are moments when he is as full of humours as Charles Lamb. Throughout

three thousand letters his sprightliness, that subtle union of wit and grace, is
hardly once at fault; everything seems to contribute to it. Does he cross the
Channel in rough weather? He is drowned without being shipwrecked. He
has a ‘lap full of waves,’ is ‘washed from head to foot in the boat at ten
o’clock at night,’ and plunged into the sea up to his knees. ‘Qu’avois-je à
faire dans cette galère? In truth, it is a little late to be seeking
adventures.’[418] Condemned to a state of eternal emaciation, none shall
outdo him in the description of his leanness: he is ‘emaciated, wan,
wrinkled,’ a ‘poor skeleton,’ a ‘thinner Don Quixote.’ Nor is he surpassed
(even by Macaulay) in his account of the ‘tinsel glories’ of Strawberry Hill.
He would certainly have been the first to call himself a snob, had he known
the word, or had it occurred to him to invent it. Meanwhile he made no
pretence of concealing his boredom with most things in heaven and earth:
to three-quarters of the world he displayed only a polished indifference;
most of the rest of it he openly despised, but it was that he might have the
more attention for the few whom he found worth while. His career in the
Parisian salons, which has been already described, his repudiation of the
philosophes and the complete absorption of his interest in Madame du
Deffand, are really typical of the man and of his entire career. If to be loyal
through life to a few friends, to expend one’s genius in giving them delight
—‘spreading one’s leaf gold over them and making them shine’—is to be a
snob, then Walpole richly deserves the name.
There is no lack of naturalness in Walpole’s relations with his friends. He
always ‘lets himself go,’ to a degree, indeed, that is surprising when one
recalls that he knew all along that his letters would one day be printed. Like
Johnson,[419] he feared the press, which, he says, ‘exceeds even the day of
Judgement, for it brings to light everybody’s faults, and a good deal
more.’[420] He was in nervous dread that his letters to Madame du Deffand
would get into print, and made the poor lady wretched by harping upon his
fear; on the other hand, he himself collected and prepared certain of his

letters for print; and yet, in spite of all this, there is nothing of restraint in
his style or of caution in his words. He never sues for the good opinion of
posterity by adopting a judicial tone, but is always delightfully himself. He
knew that his letters to Sir Horace Mann, which extend through forty-five
years with hardly a break, would one day be an invaluable record of public
events,[421] and was concerned that it should be kept intact; yet for all that
he is never betrayed into the manner of the archivist. So strong, indeed, is
Walpole’s individualism, so wayward his humour, that it is sometimes rash
to use his letters as documentary evidence.
There is, perhaps, no species of literature more exposed to
misinterpretation than the familiar letter. It may almost be stated as a
general law of the species that in proportion as a letter is suited for print and
for public reading, it is a poor thing. A letter is, by its very nature, not
addressed to an audience, but to an individual; and as certainly as it
becomes general in its appeal, it loses that intimacy of tone which is its
peculiar charm. What is duller than an ‘open letter’? What is more chilling
than a postscript which invites you, when you have read a letter, to pass it
on to John and to Mary? Not there shall you find anything of that
conversation apart which constitutes the joy of writing as of reading letters.
The letter which is intelligible to everybody is already impersonal and
almost professional in tone, and you may print it with impunity; but a letter
which is addressed to a friend will, in proportion to its intimacy, teem with
allusions, oddities of phrase, and obscure references which make full sense
only to the recipient, and you will print it at your peril. Lockhart, who
declined to ‘Boswellize’ Scott, has given full expression to this fact,
contending that if conversation is not to be misunderstood, ‘it is a necessary
pre-requisite that we should be completely familiar with all the
interlocutors, and understand thoroughly all their minutest relations, and
points of common knowledge.... In proportion as a man is witty and
humorous, there will always be about him and his a widening maze and
wilderness of cues and catchwords, which the uninitiated will, if they are

bold enough to try interpretation, construe, ever and anon, egregiously
amiss—not seldom into arrant falsity.’ Now all this is at least as true of
letter-writing[422] as of conversation. It is, one might argue, never safe to
attempt to understand a familiar letter until you know all about the author of
it, and almost as much about the recipient; for the letter is but the resultant
of the first force working upon the second.
It is obvious, therefore, that no good letter should ever be printed. A
published letter courts all manner of misconstruction, and exacts premature
payment for those idle words whereof we are one day to give account. Few
men would willingly yield up the intimacies of their private correspondence
to the cruelty of public scrutiny and criticism; it is disturbing to think how
much of our published correspondence would perish if the wish of the
writer could effect it.
And yet it is this very unsuitability for print, it is this baffling intimacy,
the covert allusions, the obscure language of friendship, that attract us to
published correspondence. The pleasure in reading it is the fun of seeing,
once in your life, what was never intended for your eye. Every printed letter
seems to reproach us in its revelation of a trust betrayed. There is thus
something almost unholy in the joy of reading published letters. It is never
quite a respectable thing to be doing. There is something of the
eavesdropper in it; it savours of intrusion and at times even of listening at
keyholes. One must be a kind of busybody to find out what it all means.
Sprightly letters are often as obscure as an overheard conversation: witness
the following extract from a letter of Walpole to Thomas Gray:

George Selwyn says I may, if I please, write Historic Doubts on the
present Duke of G. too. Indeed they would be doubts, for I know
nothing certainly.

There is wit here and more than one sly allusion; but it is only by prying
rather deeply into old scandals that you discover the full meaning of the

passage. Familiar correspondence soon comes to need a wealth of
annotation. Walpole speaks of certain letters of Gray to him as not
‘printable yet,’ on the ground that they are ‘too obscure without many
notes.’[423] But all the editorial art in the world will not restore the quondam
lustre. ‘If one’s tongue,’ Walpole writes to George Montagu, ‘don’t move in
the steps of the day, it is only an object of ridicule, like Mrs. Hobart in her
cottillon.’ The brilliancy of this passage is bound up with the precarious
fame of Mrs. Hobart, nay, with the yet more precarious fame of her
dancing. Its elusiveness is an indication of the unfathomable quality in
letters.
Walpole was himself an insatiable reader of letters, and understood and
analyzed his ruling passion:

Fools! yes, I think all the world is turned fool, or was born so; cette
tête à perruque, that wig-block the Chancellor, what do you think he
has done? Burnt all his father’s correspondence with Pope, Swift,
Arbuthnot &c.—why do you think? because several of the letters were
indiscreet. To be sure he thought they would go and publish
themselves, if not burnt, but indeed I suspect the indiscretion was that
there were some truths which it was not proper to preserve, considering
considerandis. That is just what I should like to have seen. There was
otherwise so much discretion, and so little of anything else except
hypocrisy in all the letters of those men that have appeared, that I
should not so much regret what discreet folly has now burnt. Apropos,
did I ever tell you a most admirable bon mot of Mr. Bentley? He was
talking to me of an old devout Lady St. John, who burnt a whole trunk
of letters of the famous Lord Rochester, ‘for which,’ said Mr. Bentley,
‘her soul is now burning in heaven.’ The oddness, confusion and wit of
the idea struck me of all things.[424]

‘That is just what I should like to have seen’—there is the passion of the
letter-monger. It was all very indiscreet, no doubt, but ‘that is just what I
should like to have seen.’ The indiscretion is the best proof that the
correspondence was intimate, that it was not a mere series of messages nor
a volume of essays. To burn it was an eminently safe thing to do with it—
and eminently deplorable.
A good letter-writer, a Walpole, a Lamb, is hardly more concerned with
the cause of edification than with the cause of discretion. His concern is
with the news. He moves genially along the lower levels of life, content to
ramble rather than to soar, and forgets high philosophies and abstract truths.
What he offers his friend is companionship, not education. The news of
yesterday is frequently a harder thing to get at than the learning of the ages,
and all the wisdom of the east will not make a good letter.
This ideal of familiar correspondence was fully stated in the eighteenth
century. It would be possible to construct a whole philosophy of the subject
by marshalling a series of quotations from eighteenth century letters. Even
the bluestockings appreciated the artlessness of letters. Hannah More never
wrote wiser sentences than these:

If I want wisdom, sentiment or information, I can find them much
better in books than in letters. What I want in a letter is a picture of my
friend’s mind, and the common sense of his life. I want to know what
he is saying and doing: I want him to turn out the inside of his heart to
me, without disguise, without appearing better than he is, without
writing for a character. I have the same feeling in writing to him. My
letter is therefore worth nothing to an indifferent person, but it is of
value to my friend who cares for me.[425]

Madame du Deffand, no unworthy successor of Madame de Sévigné, would
have subscribed to all this. She, too, thought that physics and metaphysics
had no place in correspondence, and detested the letters of Abelard and

Héloïse because they lacked the note of intimacy and were filled with
fustian, ‘faux, exagéré, dégoûtant.’ She begs Walpole to fill his letters with
trifles, to send news of his dogs, Vachette and Rosette, to describe his
curios, and to omit politics. ‘J’aime tous les détails domestiques.... Dans les
lettres de Madame de Sévigné c’est un des articles qui me plaît le plus.’[426]
Here was a correspondent worthy of Walpole’s quill.
It was long the custom to sneer at Walpole for his gossip. Lord Macaulay
did not fail to ridicule him for it in language as unmeasured as that of
scandal itself; but Macaulay’s manner is now giving way to apologies and
vindications hardly less damaging. Walpole was indubitably and
incorrigibly a gossip—why should we avoid the word? He did not avoid it.
He was, on the contrary, the first to make the charge. As early as 1749 he
calls his letters to Horace Mann ‘gossiping gazettes’; yet these are perhaps
as little open to the charge as any letters that he wrote. The same charge was
brought against Walpole’s idol, Madame de Sévigné. Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu could find in her letters nothing but gossip—‘sometimes the tittle-
tattle of a fine lady; sometimes that of an old nurse, always tittle-tattle.’[427]
A similar charge may be brought against Cowper, Lamb, Jane Carlyle, and
all favourite letter-writers. It is always ready to hand for those who prefer
disquisitions to news. As for Walpole’s letters, they might almost be
conceived as a delightful defence of the vice.
Now gossip is of course a very dreadful business; but its most hardened
opponents can scarcely deny that it has at times been the staple of some
very fine literature indeed. What is Pepys but gossip? What would Boswell
be without his gossip? Even work that professes to attack gossip is often
interesting chiefly for its illustration of what it denounces. Look at the
career of Lady Teazle. As long as she retains her place in the Scandal
School, she is human, almost lovable, and wholly delightful; but as soon as
she is reformed, she becomes quite insignificant. Her entrance in the fifth
act is the dullest moment in the play, and her demeanour is wholly

unconvincing and perhaps untruthful. One cannot think of her apart from
her glittering geysers of scandal; when she gives up gossip she is as dull as
Maria, and we are glad that the play is over. If there is a more depressing
spectacle than a bird that has lost its wings, it is a wit that has bridled the
tongue.
Gossip, in its milder stages, may even denote a serene interest in the little
affairs of life, which is truly admirable. Cowper’s letters, which Lady Mary
would no doubt have found quite as filled with tittle-tattle as Madame de
Sévigné’s, are in the truest sense of the term the treasure of the humble. The
finest things in them are, like the finest things in The Task, the description
of domestic trifles. The most delightful letter Cowper ever wrote describes a
runaway rabbit. Cowper’s eminence as a letter-writer is an invaluable
illustration of the fact that a man may be a master of this art though his life
contains nothing of excitement or romance. The great explorers and
adventurers have seldom been good letter-writers. Macaulay laughed at
Walpole because he made a serious business of trifles; but it is in this very
fact that half the delight of Walpole’s letters consists. Neither Walpole nor
Cowper could have written the letters he did without that love; the one
lends as much interest to crossing the Channel as to crossing the Alps, and
the other amuses us as much with the loss of a rabbit as with the finding of
a continent. Like Biron in conversation,
His eye begets occasion for his wit;
For every object that the one doth catch,
The other turns to a mirth-moving jest,
Which his fair tongue, conceit’s expositor,
Delivers in such apt and gracious words,
That aged ears play truant at his tales,
And younger hearings are quite ravished;
So sweet and voluble is his discourse.

The display of such a wit as this is all the more delightful in a letter
because of the very intimacy of the thing. It is not done to amuse a
company, but to delight a friend. Every true letter is a gift. If it rises to the
plane of literature, it is literature created in honour of an individual, and is

his to cherish or destroy. It is thus the most personal and private of all
literary types, since it is the only one that can be held to be the peculiar and
exclusive property of an individual. A lover of letters is as jealous as he is
insatiable. Like Madame du Deffand with the letters of Walpole, he is
always looking about for somebody with whom to share his pleasures, and
is for ever discovering that no one is worthy of the honour;[428] and, like
her, his passion is such that he would give the two letters that he has for the
one which he is awaiting. The secret of such a jealous sense of ownership as
this lies in the fact that every intimate letter is really suffused with two
personalities, one of which is that of the recipient.
Such intimate correspondence as this was not without an effect upon
English literature. The idealization of intimacy which made it possible
spread the love of simplicity and of a more familiar tone. The type was,
oddly enough, at one with the new romanticism in this demand for the
natural. The style in which it was expressed is fifty years ahead of its time,
and already prophesies the more familiar tone of such men as Lamb and
Hazlitt. The following passage from Walpole is typical:

Every summer one lives in a state of mutiny and murmur, and I have
found the reason. It is because we will affect to have a summer, and we
have no title to any such thing. Our poets learned their trade of the
Romans, and so adopted the terms of their masters. They talk of shady
groves, purling streams, and cooling breezes, and we get sore throats
and agues with attempting to realize these visions. Master Damon
writes a song and invites Miss Chloe to enjoy the cool of the evening,
and the deuce a bit have we of any such thing as a cool evening.
Zephyr is a north-east wind that makes Damon button up to the chin,
and pinches Chloe’s nose till it is red and blue; and then they cry, ‘This
is a bad summer’—as if we ever had any other. The best sun we have is
made of Newcastle coal, and I am determined never to reckon upon
any other. We ruin ourselves with inviting over foreign trees, and make

our houses clamber up hills to look at prospects. How our ancestors
would laugh at us, who knew there was no being comfortable unless
you had a high hill before your nose and a thick warm wood at your
back![429]

If the style of nineteenth century prose marks an improvement over that of
the eighteenth century in respect of sprightliness, then surely such a passage
as this must be held to indicate the progress towards it.
It is amazing how wide-spread was the knowledge of this craft. There are
scores of letter-writers at the end of the century who may be read with
pleasure. Even Mrs. Montagu could descend from the heights long enough
to write in this pleasant tone to Mrs. Garrick and Miss More:

Most engaged and engaging ladies, will you drink tea with me on
Thursday with a very small party? I think it an age, not a golden age,
since I saw you last.[430]

With the presence of such letter-writers as Cowper, Johnson, Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu, and Horace Walpole, not to mention countless minor
names, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the familiar letter was the
chosen medium of the age, as the periodic essay was of the earlier period
and as the drama was of the Elizabethan age. It will always remain the best
general record of the social life of the century; but its value is more
particular than this. You may read the boisterous life of the age in its novels,
you may find its solidity in Johnson and its superficiality in Chesterfield;
you may see its rags in Hogarth or its grace in Reynolds; but for its
simplicity, its affectionate intimacies, and its smiling ease, you must turn to
its letters.

CHAPTER XIV
F anny B urney and the A rt of the D iarist

The Diary of Fanny Burney cannot, like the conversation of Johnson and
the correspondence of Walpole, be cited as perhaps the finest specimen of
its kind. Of the arts we are discussing, the diarist’s is the most difficult to
define or characterize; for at one extreme, it may shrink into the dulness of
a calendar, and at the other, it may record the agonies of a soul’s attempt to
be honest with its God or with itself. Kinds so distinct as Pepys’s Diary and
the Confessions of Rousseau seem to defy all attempts at common
definition. The Diary of Miss Burney, unlike these works, has no
psychological problems; but exists for the simple and engaging purpose of
recording events of interest. In the beginning she resolved never to mix with
her record, her ‘religious sentiments, opinions, hopes, fears, beliefs, or
aspirations;[431] but to reserve her Diary for worldly dross.’ If not among the
greatest diaries of the world, it is among the most normal; and it is not
impossible to define it roughly. Diaries of this kind may be described as a
sort of letter to oneself.
Miss Burney’s Diary was, however, written to be read by others than
herself. It was addressed to her sisters, to whom sections of it were
despatched from time to time. It partakes, therefore, in large measure of the
nature of private correspondence, and much that has been said of that type
applies obviously to this. But there are important differences. The greatness
of the Diary certainly does not consist in the delightful treatment of
domestic and personal trifles. Nor does Miss Burney paint highly for the
mere love of painting, as the conversationalist and the letter-writer often do.
She is not communicating herself, but the important life with which she is
in touch. She does not so much wish that the reader should see her, as that

he should see with her eyes—and her artistic vision was remarkably shrewd
and keen. The Diary is thus a panorama rather than a portrait. We read
diaries either to get at the personality of the writer or at the events
described. The character of Fanny Burney, combining sweetness, shyness,
wisdom, and pride, presents no particular problems, and is not of
commanding interest. What she saw and what she heard, the people who
loved her, who attached her to them, and who, not unfrequently, preyed
upon her—these constitute the interest of the book; it is these and the art
with which they are set before us that make the Diary what it is.
The thought that is for ever borne in upon the reader is that Miss Burney
was a very lucky woman. Suffering as she did from shyness and an
inflamed sense of propriety, it might easily have been her lot to lead a life
as secluded as that of her friend, Mr. Crisp of Chessington; yet in fact
Johnson himself did not commonly associate with more people whom one
would like to have known. The young lady’s unassuming manner was of
actual value in increasing her circle of desirable acquaintance, when once
she was famous. When once she was famous, I repeat, for most of her
interesting friends and experiences came to her as the result of her celebrity
and of the bluestocking patronage which ensued upon it. It was Mrs. Thrale
who drew Fanny Burney into the great world which she was to adorn and to
record; but the interest of Mrs. Thrale went out rather to the author of
Evelina, than to the mouse-like young lady of St. Martin Street. Seldom has
so timid an entry into the literary world been accorded a reception so
flattering. The young woman who had disposed of her novel under cover of
night and anonymity, as though it had been so much stolen goods, was
presently to find that she had every bluestocking in London at her feet, and
that the King of Letters was proclaiming her the equal of Fielding. One
speculates what would have become of her if she had begun her career with
The Wanderer instead of Evelina. She had the luck to write her best novel—
some will say her only good novel—first; and from that happy beginning
sprang all the rest of her good fortune.

It is to be remembered by those who study Miss Burney’s career that the
appearance of Evelina, in 1778, marks a definite period in the history of
woman’s contribution to English literature. Johnson’s estimate of the book
was of course ludicrously wrong, and it is well to assume that his chivalry
(for once) got the better of his judgment; yet it is impossible to deny the
superlative significance of the book. It was the greatest creative work that
had yet been produced by an Englishwoman. It is still read with delight by
people who never heard of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Miss Fielding’s Peter
Simple, or Charlotte Lennox’s Female Quixote. The bluestockings were
right in feeling that the author had forced a new estimate of the sex. The
respect for her work was universal: extravagant things—impossibilities—
were expected of her.
It was now that Miss Burney’s modesty (so carefully nurtured) was felt to
be but an added grace. The most vicious satirist could discover in ‘little
Burney’ nothing of the arrogance of a femme savante. She gave the
impression of hating her talents and the fame which had been thrust upon
her. Her unassuming demeanour and her youthful sweetness (for she was
still girlish at twenty-six) made her the delight of every drawing-room she
would consent to enter, and not unfrequently brought down upon her
admiration and social attentions which she would have been happier
without. At last, in an unhappy hour, they brought her to the attention of
Queen Charlotte. But for the moment, all was sweetness and triumph and
popularity. Her position among the bluestockings is noticeable; she was
beloved of them all. She was loyal to Mrs. Thrale without sacrificing the
regard of Mrs. Montagu or in any way offending her beloved Mrs. Ord. She
almost reconciled stiff old Mrs. Delany and the dear Duchess of Portland to
literary eminence in a woman. Outside this circle she was no less esteemed.
Johnson loved her as a daughter, and professed himself glad to ‘send his
name down to posterity’ linked with hers. Burke, who read Evelina
repeatedly, distinguished her by a special greeting when she appeared at the
trial of Warren Hastings, as, indeed, did the prisoner himself. Wyndham

delighted to converse with her by the hour. Walpole received her at
Strawberry Hill, and was no less pleased with her unpretentious manner
than with the fact that Mrs. Montagu now had a superior. Had Miss Burney
cared to open a salon, she might have reigned over these men like a more
rational Lespinasse. The more her fortune is dwelt upon, the more obvious
it becomes. As a child she had had David Garrick for a grown-up playmate;
as a young woman she had the privilege of welcoming Sarah Siddons to the
court; later in life, she conversed on terms of intimacy with Madame de
Stael. She had passed the day in Reynolds’s studio, and had looked at the
stars through the glass of Herschel. She was visited at Windsor by Boswell,
proof-sheets in hand; and Sheridan, at the height of his reputation,
repeatedly invited her to write a comedy. She described her acquaintance to
Queen Charlotte as being ‘not only very numerous, but very mixed, taking
in not only most stations in life, but also most parties.’[432] We may marvel
at the fact that the shy Fanny Burney became a novelist; but she could
hardly help becoming a diarist.
Even the great misfortune of her life really contributed to her greatness.
Her life at Court, which half killed her, a life which she repeatedly calls
‘monastic’ and describes as ‘dead and tame’—strong words from one who
thought she adored the Queen—enabled her to depict a kind of life which,
dull as it was, can never lack significance. If for no more important reason,
her account of it will always be read as one of the great dramas of
disillusion. It furnished Macaulay with material for one of his most brilliant
extravaganzas. Like him, we read the third and fourth volume of the Diary,
which detail that life, with feelings of rage at the royal gaolers and at the
Hanoverian ideals of conduct that they almost succeeded in imposing upon
her. The Queen’s obvious delight in checking Miss Burney’s literary
activity and in stiffening her sense of propriety (which needed no stiffening)
makes it difficult to control the judgment; and yet, upon reflection, it will be
seen that the reader’s rage is but a tribute to one of the most effective pieces
of realism in the language. It is true that it is often dull, but so is realism. It

is true that Miss Burney’s adulation of the Royal Family is at times
painfully fulsome; but even this only heightens the description of that life
which, despite all adulation, she found unendurable. The story of her
captivity is no less thrilling than that of Pamela in the clutches of Mrs.
Jewkes.
As a delineation of an ogress, Mrs. Schwellenberg is at once more
horrible and more lifelike than Mrs. Jewkes; beside her, all the
‘weatherbeaten old she-dragons’ of eighteenth century fiction and drama
pale into insignificance. Miss Burney has often been praised for creating the
character of Madame Duval, but that lady is a mere commonplace when
compared with the spiteful old crone who had no interest above piquet and
who divided the slight remnant of affection of which her withered nature
was capable between her royal owner and her tame frogs. Her ambitions for
Fanny Burney, the idol of the blues, was that she should learn piquet, give
up writing, and become like unto herself, a spaniel of the backstairs. Few
characters in literature are at once so comic and so loathsome.
It might be assumed that the depiction of Mrs. Schwellenberg were the
result of mere dislike, if Miss Burney had not, at the same moment, been
proving by her portrayal of Queen Charlotte that her vision was never more
keen and her judgment of character never more unbiassed. She had no
intention whatever of analyzing her mistress. As a lover of royal families,
she was far more prone to idealize her; but for all that she had a genius for
truthfulness, and could not help mirroring the royal nature with a fatal
accuracy. It is the revelation of such royalty as can conceive no happiness
apart from its own presence, of a queenly etiquette in which a native
sweetness is lost in acquired selfishness. For subtlety and moderation this
characterization is unsurpassed in its own century, and not often equalled in
the century that followed it, for all its psychology and realism.
The triumph of Miss Burney’s realism over her personal inclination may
be illustrated by setting side by side two sentences drawn from the same

entry in the Diary for December 1790: ‘Her Majesty was very kind during
this time, and the Princesses interested themselves about me with a
sweetness very grateful to me.’ This is the expression of what is proper
from the Keeper of the Robes; but on the next page it shrivels away before
her sense of actuality: ‘Though I was frequently so ill in her presence that I
could scarcely stand, I saw she concluded me, while life remained,
inevitably hers.’
These court-episodes in the Diary of Miss Burney are of special use in
showing her powers of characterization. The earlier sections of the book
deal with people no less interesting, but so familiar to us from other sources
that Miss Burney’s skill in depicting them is not so readily perceived. No
particular surprise mingles with our pleasure as we read of Johnson and of
Mrs. Thrale, of Reynolds and of Mrs. Montagu, because the author’s art
seems but to reflect, at most to amplify, what we have seen elsewhere. It is
when she has occasion to make us acquainted with persons whom we have
not met elsewhere, with ‘Mr. Turbulent’ and Mrs. Schwellenberg, that we
begin to perceive the extent of her powers. Her five years’ imprisonment in
no way impairs her observation of human nature. The sudden apparition of
James Boswell upon the scene is as captivating a piece of writing as
anything in the whole Diary; the contrast between his cheerful officiousness
and the blundering officiousness of Mr. Turbulent is a sufficient proof of the
fact that Miss Burney has retained all her old skill in characterization. Nor
has the sense for a boisterous scene departed from the author of Evelina.
The quiet little lady with prim demeanour still had a love of broad comedy,
as the following pages may show. The scene is Mrs. Schwellenberg’s table,
the occasion a dinner of the royal attendants in honour of the King’s
birthday, the chief actor the Duke of Clarence (afterwards William IV), the
Royal Sailor, who is shown, to use Miss Burney’s words—and they are
significant of her conscious art—‘in genuine colours.’

Champagne being now brought for the Duke, he ordered it all round.
When it came to me, I whispered to Westerhaults [the footman] to carry
it on: the Duke slapped his hand violently on the table, and called out,
‘Oh ——, you shall drink it!’
There was no resisting this. We all stood up, and the Duke
sonorously gave the Royal toast.
‘And now,’ cried he, making us all sit down again, ‘where are my
rascals of servants? I sha’n’t be in time for the ball; besides, I’ve got a
—— tailor waiting to fix on my epaulette! Here, you, go and see for
my servants! d’ye hear? Scamper off!’
Off ran William.
‘Come, let’s have the King’s health again. De Luc, drink it. Here,
Champagne to De Luc!’
I wish you could have seen Mr. De Luc’s mixed simper—half
pleased, half alarmed. However, the wine came and he drank it, the
Duke taking a bumper for himself at the same time.
‘Poor Stanhope!’ cried he: ‘Stanhope shall have a glass too! Here,
Champagne! What are you all about? Why don’t you give Champagne
to poor Stanhope?’
Mr. Stanhope, with great pleasure, complied, and the Duke again
accompanied him.
‘Come hither, do you hear?’ cried the Duke to the servants, and on
the approach, slow and submissive, of Mrs. Stainforth’s man, he hit
him a violent slap on the back, calling out ‘Hang you! Why don’t you
see for my rascals?’
Away flew the man, and then he called out to Westerhaults,
‘Hark’ee! bring another glass of Champagne to Mr. De Luc!’

Mr. De Luc knows these Royal youths too well to venture at so vain
an experiment as disputing with them; so he only shrugged his
shoulders and drank the wine. The Duke did the same.
‘And now, poor Stanhope,’ cried the Duke, ‘give another to poor
Stanhope, d’ye hear?’
‘Is not your Royal Highness afraid,’ cried Mr. Stanhope, displaying
the full circle of his borrowed teeth, ‘I shall be apt to be rather up in the
world, as the folks say, if I tope on at this rate?’
‘Not at all! you can’t get drunk in a better cause. I’d get drunk
myself if it was not for the ball. Here, Champagne! another glass for
the philosopher! I keep sober for Mary.’...
He then said it was necessary to drink the Queen’s health.
The gentlemen here made no demur, though Mr. De Luc arched his
eyebrows in expressive fear of consequences.
‘A bumper,’ cried the Duke, ‘to the Queen’s gentleman-usher.’
They all stood up and drank the Queen’s health.
‘Here are three of us,’ cried the Duke, ‘all belonging to the Queen:
the Queen’s philosopher, the Queen’s gentleman-usher, and the
Queen’s son; but, thank Heaven, I’m nearest!’
‘Sir,’ cried Mr. Stanhope, a little affronted, ‘I am not now the
Queen’s gentleman-usher; I am the Queen’s equerry, sir.’
‘A glass more of Champagne here! What are you all so slow for?
Where are all my rascals gone? They’ve put me in one passion already
this morning. Come, a glass of Champagne for the Queen’s gentleman-
usher!’ laughing heartily.
‘No, sir,’ repeated Mr. Stanhope, ‘I am equerry now!’

‘And another glass to the Queen’s philosopher!’
Neither gentleman objected; but Mrs. Schwellenberg, who had sat
laughing and happy all this time, now grew alarmed, and said, ‘Your
Royal Highness, I am afraid for the ball!’
‘Hold your potato-jaw, my dear,’ cried the Duke, patting her; but
recollecting himself, he took her hand and pretty abruptly kissed it, and
then, flinging it hastily away, laughed aloud, and called out, ‘There!
that will make amends for anything, so now I may say what I will. So
here! a glass of Champagne for the Queen’s philosopher and the
Queen’s gentleman-usher! Hang me if it will not do them a monstrous
deal of good!’
Here news was brought that the equipage was in order. He started
up, calling out, ‘Now, then, for my —— tailor.’[433]

Scenes as vivid, though not so uproarious, might be cited in every
chapter of the work; to quote them all would be to print half the Diary. The
selection here given is sufficient to show why Miss Burney’s writing is
invariably referred to as dramatic. The Diary is, in parts, so like a novel as
to prompt the query whether it is at all reliable as a record of facts. Did not
the author’s imagination play freely over the events? Did she not select,
arrange, and colour according to the demands of art rather than of history?
Are the conversations not improved? Is not the diarist a novelist still?
Questions of this large kind can hardly be answered save in a large,
impressionistic way. The Diary is, in general, a truthful document and a
reliable account of the life which it records. A mere glance at the book will
reveal the fact that Miss Burney had little of Boswell’s passion for
literalness, for accurate dates, and for written evidence. But Boswell was
unique in his generation, and Boswell was a lawyer. Miss Burney was
writing to amuse her sisters, not to inform the public; but there are passages
which show that she was endowed with a remarkably accurate memory. She

once has occasion[434] to quote a letter from memory; a comparison of it
with the original, which happens to be in existence, reveals no evidence of
misinterpretation, and shows the copy to be, in fact, very nearly a literal
reproduction of the original. We are to remember that Miss Burney had
been in the habit of keeping a diary, recording conversations which had
interested her, ever since the age of fifteen; and that this had strengthened
her memory as well as her powers of observation. It was to a similar
practice that Boswell owed his ability to record conversation with accuracy;
and he himself asserted that the ability grew with practice. There is no
reason for supposing that the results in one case were radically different
from those in the other. Certain it is that Miss Burney’s record of Johnson’s
conversation is in no way inconsistent with Boswell’s. To say that in
describing life at Streatham or at the Court she used her skill in selection
and that she employed the judgment of a novelist in beginning and ending a
conversation effectively is merely to repeat that the Diary is a work of art.
Judgment in the choice of facts to set down need not indicate a
misinterpretation of them.
There is but one quality in Miss Burney which shakes the reader’s
confidence in her judgment of character. There is a tendency to
emotionalism in her which the irreverent will term gush. She was touched
with the sentimentality of her times. The tear of sensibility is ever trembling
in her eyes. Her affection for Mrs. Thrale, Mrs. Locke, Mrs. Delany, and
most other ladies, for ‘dear Daddy Crisp,’ for ‘dear Sir Joshua,’ is so
effusive as to make all terms of endearment seem tawdry.
Hardly less distressing than this mawkishness is the lady’s self-
consciousness, which she mistook for the virtue of modesty. The flattery
which brought the blush of shame to her cheek and kept her on the verge of
swooning, the flattery which made her shrink into corners or retire in
confusion from the scene, the praise which was too gross for her ears, all
this is written down in extenso and with something unpleasantly like gusto.

It flows through the Diary like an apocalyptic river of honey. Macaulay
reminds us, quite properly, that all this was ‘for the eyes of two or three
persons who had loved her from infancy, who had loved her in obscurity,
and to whom her fame gave the purest and most exquisite delight.’ This is
true, no doubt; but might not father and sisters have achieved delight
without this surfeit of sweetness, ‘whereof a little more than a little is by
much too much’? It is all very human, of course, and it would be chivalrous
to forget it. But all the chivalry in the world cannot hide the fact that it is a
serious blot on the art of the Diary, a blot that we cannot but wish away
from so splendid a work.

CHAPTER XV
B oswell and the A rt of I ntimate B iography

It is the privilege of few men in any age to raise an art to such perfection
that it becomes in effect a new thing. The development of intimate
biography is still largely the work of one man. After a hundred years of
memorabilia, personal reminiscences, and interviews, Boswell is still as
indubitably the greatest of biographers as when he referred to his book as
the ‘first in the world,’ or when, fifty years later, Macaulay applied to him
the language of the race-course, and pronounced, ‘Eclipse is first, and the
rest nowhere.’ Later biographers do not eclipse him, nor do earlier ones
explain him. A comparison of his work with what went before serves only
to reveal his utter uniqueness. If an earlier biographer suggests a point of
comparison in his realistic record of conversation, the slightness of his work
gives no conception of the whole life he is writing; if another seems like
Boswell in refusing to write a mere eulogy, he seems chill and judicial
where Boswell is warm with pulsing life. Other lives give us admirable
things: table-talk, a portrait, a eulogy, a handful of anecdotes, a list of dates
from ‘pedigree to funeral,’ or a volume of letters; but Boswell gives us all
these and more. He aspires to be as complete as life itself. Boswell knew
and delighted in other biographies; but was hardly influenced by them. He
knew Plutarch, Xenophon, and Valerius Maximus, among the ancients, and
Jonson’s Timber, Selden’s Table-Talk, and Spence’s Anecdotes, among
modern ana; but is like none of these. He surpasses them all in intimacy,
variety, and what, for want of a better name, may be called his sustained
quality. To read Boswell after these men is like passing to a Flemish
painting from a study in black and white.

Boswell the Journalist
From a series of caricatures of the Journal by Rowlandson and Collings

In so far as he can be said to have learned his art from any man, his
master was Johnson himself. The first sentence in the Life proclaims
Johnson’s superiority to all men in writing the lives of others. Biography
was often discussed by the two men together, and Boswell was also well
acquainted with Johnson’s published remarks on the subject. Johnson
enunciated, with fair consistency, the theory of intimate biography, but he
never fully realized it in any work of his. Thus he was wont to assert that
autobiography was superior to biography, for the simple reason that a man
might more readily reveal the facts concerning himself. If a man’s life is to
be written by another than himself, it should be by one who has ‘eat and
drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.’ The material of biography,

he asserts, at various times, to be ‘trifles,’ the ‘delicate features of the
mind,’ the ‘minute peculiarities of conduct,’ ‘domestic privacies,’ and ‘the
minute details of daily life.’ He approved of much anecdote in biography,
used such incidents with a free hand in his own work, and encouraged
Boswell to record them. He did not, however, anywhere fully embody his
theories. It was, in truth, impossible for him to do so in the Lives of the
Poets, for, with the exception of Savage, he had been on terms of real
intimacy with none of these men. Had he written the life of Goldsmith, as
he once thought of doing, he might, if his indolence had not prevented him,
have produced such a book as would illustrate his own theories. Yet, in spite
of this lack of intimacy in the Lives of the Poets, he was attacked for
making them too familiar. Potter, Mrs. Montagu’s protégé, denounced his
introduction of trifles into serious biography, considering it beneath the
dignity of that art to mention that Pope wore three pairs of stockings to
increase the size of his legs, and that he loved to feast on potted lampreys
which he heated in a silver saucepan. ‘We know,’ writes the critic, ‘that the
greatest men are subject to the infirmities of human nature equally with the
meanest; why then are these infirmities recorded?’
This sentence may be taken to summarize the general conception of
biography before Boswell. The death of a man seems to have been regarded
as an opportunity for rationalizing his views and perfecting his character.
The duty of a biographer was to forget all vices and to idealize all virtues,
with the laudable purpose of setting before the public a notable pattern of
conduct. ‘He that writes the life of another,’ wrote Johnson in the Idler,
‘endeavours to hide the man that he may produce a hero.’ Even Johnson
never felt quite sure how far it was proper to describe a man’s vices in
writing his biography. Boswell notes the inconsistency of his views. When
the subject of the poet Parnell’s drinking arose, Johnson remarked, ‘More ill
may be done by the example, than good by telling the whole truth’; but at
another time he said, ‘If a man is to write A Panegyric, he may keep vices
out of sight; but if he professes to write A Life, he must represent it really as

it was.... It would produce an instructive caution to avoid drinking, when it
was seen that even the learning and genius of Parnell could be debased by
it.’[435] In practice it is clear that Johnson preferred to err on the side of
frankness. Potter was shocked because he revealed the avidity of Addison
by repeating the now-hackneyed story of how Steele was forced to pay a
debt of £100. If biography is regarded as the handmaid of morality, and
eulogy is preferred to actuality, such details are of course worse than
useless. Beattie dwells on ‘the due distinction between what deserves to be
known and what ought to be forgotten.’[436] Miss Burney considered that
the publication of letters verbatim was the ‘greatest injury’ to a man’s
memory. Horace Walpole, who deplored the whole policy of expurgation,
nevertheless gives Mason, the biographer of Gray, the conventional advice.
He avows that the publication of the life of Gray is an opportunity to
establish that poet’s character ‘unimpeached.’ He was shocked at the section
of the biography which Mason had submitted to his criticism, because it
was honest and frank. ‘What can provoke you to be so imprudent?... You
know my idea was that your work should consecrate his name.’[437] Once
such a theory of consecration is adopted, the author of a life is driven
relentlessly towards panegyric; for, not daring to trust the public to interpret
facts, he must suppress everything that is not admirable, lest the mention of
even the slightest fault be taken to point to the existence of thousands that
are passed over in silence. When once you have taken to varnishing, you
must varnish thoroughly, for any cracks or bare spots which reveal the
material beneath ruin your whole effect.
To a public with these lofty notions of propriety Boswell, genially
sacrificing what little was left to him of his reputation, addressed, in 1785,
his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson ... ‘containing ...
A series of his Conversation, Literary Anecdotes and Opinions of Men and
Books.’ It was a jumble of gossip such as readers had hitherto seen only in
the twopenny pamphlets of the scandal-mongers of Grub Street; but was set

forth with an abundance of detail which captured the most frivolous and an
air of authenticity which convinced the most sceptical. It depicted a great
man who had been in his grave but a few months. It was written with
veneration, but wholly without awe, as though a valet had collaborated with
the Recording Angel. It flouted all restraints, and passed the most distant
limits of decency. Nothing like it had ever been heard of. Even in our own
day, to a world whose nerves have been jaded by a thousand exposés, such a
book would come as a surprise, but to the world of 1786 it was a revelation
of new possibilities in literature, as alarming as they were entertaining. With
all the frankness of Pepys the author combines the conscious skill of one
who has mastered the art of anecdote and the joy of a conceited man who
realizes that he is about to attain fame by one of the by-paths of literature. It
was difficult, in 1785, to say whether Johnson’s theory of familiar
biography had been realized or travestied in this book. It was obvious that
he had been hoist with his own petard. The world was informed with the
most scrupulous accuracy of how he said his prayers and how he was
persuaded to wear a woollen night-cap. His idlest word was recorded as
though in a dictograph. ‘I have often thought that if I kept a seraglio, the
ladies should all wear linen gowns,—or cotton; I mean stuffs made of
vegetable substances. I would have no silk; you cannot tell when it is clean,
...’ and so forth. At times the book is hardly quotable. Once when about to
get into a dirty bed, during their travels in the Hebrides, Boswell remarks:
‘We had much hesitation, whether to undress, or lye down with our clothes
on. I said at last, “I’ll plunge in! There will be less harbour for vermin about
me when I’m stripped”—Dr. Johnson said, he was like one hesitating to go
into the cold bath. At last he resolved too.’ The first sensation of the reader
of such amazing stuff as this is that Boswell was engaged in a deliberate
attempt to degrade a great man. He was accused by a writer in the
Gentleman’s Magazine[438] of having ‘exposed and cut up’ his hero ‘in the
most shameful and cruel manner.’ That Boswell had a kind of mischievous
delight in what he was doing, no one need take the trouble to tell us; but

that he was a sort of skilful blackmailer is now unthinkable. He felt that he
was doing the world a service in showing that a great man was human; and
time has proved that he was right. ‘There is something noble,’ Johnson had
remarked to him, ‘in publishing truth, though it condemns one’s self.’
Boswell paid this price. He made Johnson permanently familiar by making
himself almost permanently notorious. Witness the following extract:

Dr. Johnson went to bed soon. When one bowl of punch was
finished, I rose, and was near the door, in my way up stairs to bed; but
Corrichatachin said, it was the first time Col had been in his house, and
he should have his bowl—and would not I join in drinking it? The
heartiness of my honest landlord, and the desire of doing social honour
to our very obliging conductor, induced me to sit down again. Col’s
bowl was finished; and by that time we were well warmed. A third
bowl was soon made, and that too was finished. We were cordial, and
merry to a high degree; but of what passed I have no recollection, with
any accuracy. I remember calling Corrichatachin by the familiar
appellation of Corri, which his friends do. A fourth bowl was made, by
which time Col, and young M’Kinnon, Corrichatachin’s son, slipped
away to bed. I continued a little with Corri and Knockow; but at last I
left them. It was near five in the morning when I got to bed.
Sunday, September 26.
I awaked at noon, with a severe head-ach. I was much vexed that I
should have been guilty of such a riot, and afraid of a reproof from Dr.
Johnson. I thought it very inconsistent with that conduct which I ought
to maintain, while the companion of the Rambler. About one he came
into my room, and accosted me, ‘What, drunk yet?’ His tone of voice
was not that of severe upbraiding; so I was relieved a little. ‘Sir, (said
I,) they kept me up.’ He answered, ‘No, you kept them up, you drunken
dog:’—This he said with good-humoured English pleasantry. Soon
afterwards, Corrichatachin, Col, and other friends assembled round my

bed. Corri had a brandy-bottle and glass with him, and insisted I should
take a dram. ‘Ay, said Dr. Johnson, fill him drunk again. Do it in the
morning, that we may laugh at him all day. It is a poor thing for a
fellow to get drunk at night, and sculk to bed, and let his friends have
no sport.’ Finding him thus jocular, I became quite easy; and when I
offered to get up, he very good naturedly said, ‘You need be in no such
hurry now.’ I took my host’s advice, and drank some brandy, which I
found an effectual cure for my head-ach. When I rose, I went into Dr.
Johnson’s room, and taking up Mrs. M’Kinnon’s Prayer-book, I opened
it at the twentieth Sunday after Trinity, in the epistle for which I read,
‘And be not drunk with wine, wherein there is excess.’ Some would
have taken this as a divine interposition.

Such writing as this at once divided the reading public into hostile camps.
There were many who considered the book delightful; others considered it a
new kind of libel. It became the subject of a long controversy in the
Gentleman’s Magazine. In the December following its appearance, Boswell
was accused of ‘betraying private conversations even of the most trivial
kind.’ In May, the tastes of a ‘gossiping age’ were denounced as well. By
December 1786, the sale of the book having gone triumphantly forward,
Boswell was reminded that his popularity was due solely to the general
interest in Johnson; the sale of his work was compared to the consumption
of potatoes in a time of famine; and the public was instructed that such
works require for their composition nothing but an ear and a memory.
In the spring of the same year, soon after the appearance of Mrs. Piozzi’s
Anecdotes, Walpole wrote to Mann:

She and Boswell and their hero are the joke of the public. A Dr.
Wolcot, soi-disant Peter Pindar, has published a burlesque eclogue,[439]
in which Boswell and the signora are the interlocutors, and all the
absurdest passages in the works of both are ridiculed. The print-shops

teem with satiric prints on them: one, in which Boswell, as a monkey,
is riding on Johnson, the bear,[440] has this witty inscription, ‘My friend
delineavit.’—But enough of these mountebanks![441]

Other caricatures represented the ghost of Johnson haunting Boswell while
he pieced together his Journal from various rags of reminiscence, and the
bust of Johnson frowning down upon Boswell and Mrs. Piozzi as they
wrote. Rowlandson and Collings later made the Tour the subject of a series
of sixteen caricatures.

Boswell Haunted by the Ghost of Johnson
From a contemporary caricature

In 1786, moreover, a pamphlet appeared entitled, A Poetical Epistle from
the Ghost of Dr. Johnson to his Friends, in which Boswell was satirized
together with Strahan, Courtenay, and Mrs. Piozzi. The verses were
elaborately annotated with quotations from the Journal, and Boswell was
addressed by the manes of Johnson in these words:
How oft I mark’d thee, like a watchful cat,
List’ning to catch up all my silly chat;
How oft that chat I still more silly made,
To see it in thy commonplace conveyed.

This was the invariable charge against the book. It was a mass of small talk
collected by a man with a retentive memory, ‘not to do honour to his
[Johnson’s] memory, by judiciously selecting the best and most striking of
his sentences, but with a design to show his own assiduity in exhibiting the
Doctor in the most glaring colours of inconsistency.’[442]
There was a secondary charge against the book. It was conceived as a
libel on living people.[443] Various persons—the Duchess of Hamilton, Sir
Alexander MacDonald, and many of those who had entertained the
travellers in the Hebrides—discovered in the book remarks about
themselves that were anything but palatable. A reference to Mrs. Thrale
created the greatest excitement. Johnson’s remark that she could not get
through Mrs. Montagu’s Essay on Shakespeare was there for all the world
to read. She protested in her Anecdotes; but Boswell reminded her, in the
pages of the Gentleman’s Magazine, that she had read his Journal in
manuscript, without complaining of this, and that he was but quoting
Johnson’s own words regarding her. So ended one controversy. It was not
the only one.
But perhaps the chief excitement rose from the advertisement at the end
of the volume, in which Boswell announced that he had but begun his
memoirs of Johnson. He proposed presently to ‘erect a literary monument
worthy of so great an author,’ and stated that he had been collecting
biographical material for more than twenty years. The promise, for those

who had known Johnson, was not gratifying. If Boswell had upset the
literary world with an account of three months in Johnson’s life, what
would he do in recounting seventy-five years of it? Everybody who had
known Johnson held his breath for fear. Many urged the new biographer to
be cautious. Fanny Burney refused to assist him in his work of showing the
pleasanter side of Johnson’s character, and wrote in her Diary,[444] ‘I feel
sorry to be named or remembered by that biographical, anecdotical
memorandummer till his book of poor Dr. Johnson’s life is finished and
published.’ Sir William Forbes, who was distressed because Boswell had
quoted his approval of the Journal, took the liberty of ‘strongly enjoining
him’ to be more careful about personalities in the later work.[445] He had
perhaps never heard Boswell’s famous reply to Hannah More, who had
urged him to ‘mitigate some of Johnson’s asperities’ when he published the
Journal. ‘He said roughly,’ she writes, ‘“He would not cut off his claws, nor
make a tiger a cat to please anybody.”’[446] This remark has been hackneyed
in every work on Boswell, but it can never be quoted too often, for it is
Boswell’s reply to the world. There is nothing more to be said.
I have dwelt on the reception of Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the
Hebrides because it is the most effective way of showing the novelty and
the magnitude of his achievement. If the author had been any other than
James Boswell, critics would long ere this have expatiated on the splendid
courage of his undertaking; but he enjoyed and esteemed his own work too
highly to elicit such praise. Whatever were Boswell’s superficial faults,
whatever the resentments that he caused, it is impossible to withhold our
admiration from the simple confidence in the letter of the truth that
characterized his Scotch soul. His would be the simplicity of childhood if it
were not the simplicity of genius. The Lord Bishop of Chester
complained[447] that Boswell recorded facts simply because they were facts.
Such was indeed the case.

When, in 1791, the Life appeared, many of the old charges were repeated
and some of the old satires revived; but it is not important to consider them
in detail, for the note of admiration, which had been heard now and again in
the beginning, when the Journal was published, soon became dominant.
The other lives and memoirs of Johnson, with which Boswell’s former work
had often been compared, now served only for purposes of contrast; they
were useful in illustrating the greatness of the new work.
What are the characteristics which tended to give the Life its place in the
history of biography? They are of the simplest kind. Boswell had, as this
entire chapter has been designed to show, a passion for completeness. It is
hardly necessary to labour this point. Boswell himself writes near the
opening of his book: ‘I will venture to say that he will be seen in this work
more completely than any man who has yet lived.’ In this sentence Boswell
wrote his own panegyric, as in his reply to Miss More he had pronounced
his own defence. Like everything that he did, the panegyric is not without
the ludicrous touch, for he adds: ‘Had his other friends been as diligent and
ardent as I was, he might have been almost entirely preserved.’ He might,
indeed; for why should anything be lost, while there is a note-book—and a
Boswell? Boswell, I repeat, aspired to the completeness of life itself.
Nor is it greatly necessary to dwell on Boswell’s fidelity to fact. It has
been often dwelt upon, and, through the labours of Dr. Birkbeck Hill, is
now generally admitted; though by one who liked neither Boswell nor Hill
the matter has recently been once more called in question.[448] It would
seem that a work which in its own day was both praised and denounced for
its scrupulous accuracy might have been accepted without question. It is
scarcely reasonable to demand a more lifelike biographer than Boswell. His
own times readily granted that he had given the true Johnson; that was both
the praise and the blame. Pepys, who knew Johnson and had no illusions
about him, wrote to Hannah More:

The Journal is a most faithful picture of him, so faithful that I think
anybody who has got a clear idea of his person and manner may know
as much of him from that book as by having been acquainted with him
(in the usual way) for three years.[449]

This was written before the Life appeared. Respecting the later work we
have the testimony of Burke to its value as a monument to Johnson’s
conversation.[450] Even more than this may be said. We have the nearest
possible thing to Johnson’s own approval. He had himself read the Journal
in manuscript, and pronounced it a ‘very exact picture of a portion of his
life.’ It is difficult to demand more than this. In the same work Boswell
writes:

He read this day a good deal of my Journal, written in a small book
with which he had supplied me, and was pleased, for he said, ‘I wish
thy books were twice as big.’ He helped me fill up blanks which I had
left in first writing it, when I was not quite sure of what he had said,
and he corrected any mistakes that I had made.[451]

In his accurate reproduction of life, Boswell surpasses all the realists and
attains to something of the inexhaustibility of nature itself. Delightful as is
his book for mere reading, it can never be fully appreciated till it has been
used as a work of reference; for such it was intended to be. The work
exhibits, according to the title-page, ‘a view of literature and literary men in
Great Britain for near half a century.’ Boswell aspired to be not only
stenographer but historian. And to the life that he loved he was both.
We reach at last the core of Boswell’s being, his pagan joy in life, that
greediness of social pleasure which explains all his faults and suggests all
his greatness. He loved social life as other men have loved a noble woman
or a noble cause. He solemnly dedicated his life to it and his genius to the
recording of it. Only when his work is viewed in the large does one see its

grandeur. Like Ulysses, he might have said, when his great work was done,
‘Much have I seen and known, cities of men and manners ... myself not
least but honoured of them all.’
I incline to think that this social avidity is the ruling passion not only of
Boswell but of all the life that we have been studying, of the salons, the
conversationists, the diarists, and the letter-writers. That life at its best
blends two kinds of pleasure that seem ordinarily incompatible, those of
society and solitude, of association and reflection. In the ‘exchange of
mind’ which is its ideal, its disciples find a joy that excels the more passive
pleasures of reading, by bringing them directly into the creation of its
characteristic product, conversation, and to this it adds the pleasure of
seeing the immediate effect of one’s words. Conversation such as this may
be said to represent the active, social, and more human side of the
intellectual life, while meditation stands for its contemplative and eremitical
side. The two are often mutually exclusive. Philosopher and poet belong to
the latter class, because the meditative temper naturally shuns social
distractions; but diarists, letter-writers, and biographers owe their very
existence to this social instinct, and write to exalt it. They cannot bear that
the delights which they have experienced should pass away without leaving
a memorial. They are determined not only to pluck the passing hour, but to
do what they can to preserve the blossom even as it droops in their hand. A
withered flower is better than none at all; at worst, it is a pathetic reminder
of what has been. The memorialist is one whose face is ever towards the
past and the glories that have been, the noctes cæncæque deum. It is in
honour of them that his work is done. His office is to record life, not to
transfigure it. He cannot aspire to be among those who have seen visions
and pointed others towards them; the joy of poetic creation and the passion
of adventurous thought are not for him; but it is his to know men and the
cheerful ways of men, and to unite us with the heroic minds of old, not in
the lonely glory of their visions, but in their more familiar hours and their
more human joys.

INDEX

Addison, Joseph, conversation of, 220;
Spectator, quoted, 103 n.
Alembert, Jean d’, birth, 43;
quoted, 11, 32, 49;
referred to, 11, 27, 52, 55.
Anglomania, in Paris, 12 ff.
Anglomanie, Saurin’s comedy, 12-13.
Anstey, Christopher, 121.
Arblay, Mme. d’, see Burney, Fanny.
Aurelia, Hoole’s poem, 178.

Barbauld, Letitia, 124.
Barmécides, Les, La Harpe’s tragedy, 67.
Barry, James, portrait of Johnson, 199;
of Mrs. Montagu, 199;
relations with Mrs. Montagu, 199.
Bas Bleu, Hannah More’s poem, 23, 123-24, 125.
Bath, Earl of, 123, 125.
Beattie, James, character, 189;
Essay on Truth, 190;
Essays, 192;
Minstrel, The, 190 ff.;
—— dedicated to Mrs. Montagu, 193;
presented to George III, 192;
relations with Mrs. Montagu, 189-95.
Beauclerk, Topham, 53, 104.
Beaufort, Duchess of, 153 n., 205.
Bedford, Countess of, 85.
Behn, Aphra, 94-96, 257.
biography, art of, 268 ff.;
theory of, before Boswell, 270 ff.
Blount, Martha, 100.

‘blue,’ i.e., bluestocking, origin and use of the word, 132-33.
bluestocking, etymology, 127-28;
translated into French, 127, 130, 133.
Bluestocking Club, 123 ff.;
members of, listed, 123-24;
origin of, 129 ff.
bluestockings, as authors, 166 ff.;
as hostesses, 134 ff.;
as patrons of the arts, 189 ff.;
descent from the Marquise de Rambouillet, 22.
Bocage, Mme. du, 35, 52, 75;
poem to Mrs. Montagu, 135 n.;
visits Mrs. Montagu, 105, 135.
Bolingbroke, Lord, relations with Mme. de Tencin, 45.
Boscawen, Admiral, 125, 129.
Boscawen, Mrs. Frances, 153-58;
assemblies, 153;
Boswell’s opinion of, 153;
interest in Mrs. Yearsley, 205;
letters, 154;
patron of letters, 154;
relations with Hannah More, 154-56, 181, 184 ff.;
—— with Pye, 156 n.;
—— with Young, 156 n.;
reports the discovery of new letters by Mme. de Sévigné, 237.
Boswell, James, announces the Life of Johnson, 278-79;
biography, knowledge of, 269;
——, theory of, derived from Johnson, 269 ff.;
caricatures of, 277;
character, 8, 110;
influence on Johnson, 222-23;
Life of Johnson, completeness of, 281;
——, reception of, 280;
truthfulness of, 281;
love of social life, 282;
quoted, 5;
references to bluestockings, 126;
refuses to idealize Johnson, 279;
Tour to the Hebrides, Johnson reads, 282;
——, reception of, 272 ff.;
——, reviewed in the Gentleman’s Magazine, 274;
——, selection from, 274-76;
treatment of his contemporaries, 278.
Boufflers, Mme. de, 53;
relations with Gibbon, 77;
—— with Hume, 27;

—— with Johnson, 53, 104.
bouts rimés, 117, 119, 120.
breakfasts, literary, 105 ff.
Buffon, Georges de, 52.
Burke, Edmund, 123, 139 n.;
indebtedness to Johnson’s conversation, 234;
quoted, 5;
visits Parisian salons, 66-68.
Burney, Dr. Charles, 159, 189.
Burney, Fanny, character, 255, 257;
Diary, art of, 254 ff.;
——, dramatic quality in, 265;
——, selection from, 262-64;
——, truthfulness of, 265;
Evelina, reception of, 257;
friends, 258;
love of boisterous scenes, 262;
luck, 256;
relations with Mrs. Ord, 159-60;
relations with Mrs. Thrale, 163;
self-consciousness, 267;
sensibility, 266;
sojourn at Court, as Dresser to the Queen, 257, 259 ff.

Cardigan Priory, salon at, 91.
card-playing, in salons, 106.
Carlisle, Countess of, 88.
Carter, Elizabeth, 172-77;
catholicity of taste, 176-77;
Johnson’s opinion of, 174;
learning, 157, 173;
Poems, 174;
relations with Gray, 144;
—— with Mrs. Montagu, 173;
romanticism, 175;
translation of Epictetus, 173-74.
Cartwright, William, 89.
Castiglione, Baldassare, his Cortegiano cited, 18 ff.
Centlivre, Susannah, 100.
Chapman, George, 85-86.
Chapone, Mrs. Hester, 177-80;
Essays, 138, 157;
familiar letters, 180;
Letters, 177 ff., 202;

poems, 179;
quoted, 132;
referred to, 124, 179;
relations with Mrs. Carter, 178;
—— with Mrs. Montagu, 178;
—— with Richardson, 177, 180.
Charles II, relations of, with the Duchess of Mazarin, 97.
Charlotte, Queen, 259, 261.
Chesterfield, Lord, opinion of the salon, 46;
relations with Mme. de Tencin, 45 ff.
Cholmondeley, Mrs. Mary, 135, 153.
Church, of England, 9;
of Rome, hatred of, in salons, 37.
circle, seating of guests in, 111, 126, 139, 159.
Clarence, Duke of, 262 ff.
Clubs, literary, 5-7.
Colman, George, 102 n.
conversation, chief amusement in salons, 25, 135;
Goldsmith’s, 220, 221;
ideal of, 7, 20, 25, 223;
Johnson’s, 217 ff.;
—— Boswell’s influence on, 222, 227.
conversazione, nature and office of, 102 ff., 108 ff., 152.
‘Cophthi,’ Walpole’s name for bluestockings, 147.
Cornaro, Caterina, 17.
cosmopolitanism, of salons, 43, 144, 147 n.
court of love, 17.
courts, Renaissance, as predecessors of the salon, 16 ff., 84.
Cowley, Abraham, verses to Mrs. Phillips, 92.
Cowper, William, correspondence, charm of, 249-50;
—— compared with Mme. de Sévigné, 239-40;
relations with Mrs. Montagu, 197-99;
translation of Homer, submitted to Mrs. Montagu, 198.
Crewe, Lady, 131, 135.

Daniel, Samuel, 84, 85, 86.
Davies, Sir John, 85.
Decameron, Boccaccio’s, 18 n.
declamation, fashionable entertainment in salons, 106.
Deffand, Mme. du, blindness, 61;

career and salon, 59-64;
described by Walpole, 59-60;
ennui, 60, 63;
letter to Walpole in manner of Mme. de Sévigné, 238;
opinion of Burke, 67;
—— of Gibbon, 77;
—— of Hume, 51;
—— of Walpole, 57;
quoted, 7, 13, 62 n., 64, 75, 238;
relations with Mlle. de Lespinasse, 61;
—— with Montesquieu, 60 n.;
—— with Walpole, 27, 63-65;
type of her century, 34;
wit, 29.
Delany, Mrs. Mary, 160-63;
friendship with Swift, 161;
interest in Mrs. Yearsley, 205;
relations with Miss Burney, 162;
verses, Miss More’s to, 161.
democracy, in salons, 25;
theory of, 9.
Denham, Sir John, 92.
diary, as a literary type, 254 ff.
Diderot, Denis, 52.
Donne, John, relations with the Countess of Bedford, 86-87.
Drayton, Michael, 85.
Dryden, John, 92, 96.

England, French attitude to, 11 ff.
Englishman in Paris, Foote’s comedy, 42 n.
epigram, Garrick’s on Goldsmith, 116;
Johnson’s on Barnard, 116;
popularity of, in salons, 26, 115-117, 229;
Young’s on Chesterfield, 116.
Este, Beatrice d’, 17.

feminism, in seventeenth century, 98-99.
femmes savantes, 28, 35, 78, 83, 98 n., 105.
Ferguson, Adam, 191.
Fielding, Sarah, 257.
Fontenelle, Bernard de, 45.
Foote, Samuel, quoted, 42 n.

Frederick, Duke of Urbino, 18 ff.
friendship, in salons, 26 ff., 210.

Garrick, David, 123, 139 n.;
declamation, 106;
verses, 121.
Gay, John, 100.
Geoffrin, Mme., career and salon, 47-50;
charity, 73;
described by Walpole, 58;
maxims, 113;
praised by Mlle. de Lespinasse, 73 ff.;
referred to, 25;
relations with Marmontel, 27;
—— with Walpole, 58 ff.;
type of her century, 34, 36;
wit, 29, 48 n.
Gibbon, Edward, career in salons, 74-80, 211;
Decline and Fall, popularity of, in salons, 76;
influence of salon upon, 79;
Mme. du Deffand’s opinion of, 74-75, 77;
Mme. Necker’s opinion of, 75;
quoted, 11;
relations with Mme. Necker, 77-79;
Walpole’s opinion of, 76 n.
Goldsmith, Oliver, account of Parisian salon, 42;
not a frequenter of the London salon, 211;
quoted, 32, 103 n., 105, 113;
visits Mrs. Vesey, 147 n.
Gonzaga, Elizabeth, of Urbino, 17 ff.; 27, 84.
gossip, 223, 245, 248-49;
see also scandal.
government, theories of, 11.
Gray, Thomas, 144;
at Mrs. Vesey’s, 147.
Greville, Lady, 153.
Guibert, Comte de, 67.

Henrietta Maria, Queen, 88.
Herries, Lady, 153.
Hervey, Lady, 135.
Hesketh, Lady, 197-98.
Hogarth, William, depiction of the levee, 103.

Holbach, Baron d’, his salon, 70, 75.
Holcroft, Thomas, quoted, 112, 170 n.
Hoole, Rev. Samuel, quoted, 108 ff., 178.
Hume, Alexander, career in Parisian salons, 50-55;
death, 55;
influence of the salon on, 55;
quarrel with Rousseau, 53 ff.;
quoted, 5.
Huntington, Countess of, 87.

intrigue, flourishes in salons, 89, 95.
Isabella, of Mantua, 17.
Italy, courts of, see courts.

Johnson, Samuel, conversation, 231 ff.;
correspondence, 252;
described by Hoole, 109-10;
dogmatism, 230;
levee, 104;
manner in conversation, 224;
quarrel with Mrs. Montagu, 199-202;
quoted, 5, 6, 7, 9, 100, 101, 231 ff.;
salons, visits, 210-11;
serenity, 223;
style in conversation and in writing compared, 229;
versatility, 226.
Jonson, Ben, 85.

Kauffmann, Angelica, 134.
Kyd, Thomas, 84.

Lambert, Mme. de, 44.
landscape, love of, among bluestockings, 148, 176.
laughter, unpopular in salons, 57.
Lely, Sir Peter, 97 n.
Lennox, Charlotte, 257.
Lespinasse, Julie de, career and salon, 71 ff.;
relations with Burke, 68;
—— with d’Alembert, 25;
—— with Sterne, 71-72;
Sentimental Journey, imitates, 72 ff.;
type of romanticism, 34.
letter-writing, 236 ff.

levee, 102-05.
London, a literary centre, 5, 6.
Lorenzo the Magnificent, 18.
Lucan, Lady, 135, 153.
Lyttelton, Lord, Dialogues of the Dead, 167;
Johnson’s life of, 196 ff.;
poetry, 157;
praises Beattie, 190;
relations with Mrs. Montagu, 139-140, 157.

Macaulay, Mrs. Catherine, 10, 135.
Macaulay, Lord, 225, 259, 267, 268.
Manley, Mrs. Mary, 98, 100.
Mann, Sir Horace, Walpole’s letters to, 242 n.
manners, literature of, 3.
Marmontel, Jean, 52.
Mascarille, 102.
Mathias, T. J., 170.
maxims, see sentiments.
Mazarin, Cardinal, 96.
Mazarin, Duchess of, 96-98.
men of letters, state of, in eighteenth century, 32.
Miller, Lady, career and salon, 117-122;
poems, 120.
Molière, J. B. P., comedies referred to, 26 n., 28, 29, 102, 107.
Monckton, Miss, 153.
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 100-01, 237, 252.
Montagu, Mrs. Elizabeth, achievements, 141;
assemblies, 138;
breakfasts, 105;
conceit, 202-03;
Dialogues of the Dead, 167-69, 200;
Essays on Shakespeare, 169-72, 278;
‘female Mæcenas,’ 189;
‘femme savante,’ a, 140, 171-72;
influence in literary world, 202;
learning, 140, 198;
loyalty, 195;
patron of the arts, 189-208;
quarrel with Johnson, 196, 199-202;
‘Queen of the Blues,’ 133;

relations with Barry, 199;
—— with Beattie, 189-95;
—— with Cowper, 197-99;
—— with Lyttelton, 167, 200;
—— with Mme. du Deffand, 136-37;
—— with Mrs. Yearsley, 204 ff.;
—— with Potter, 195;
—— with Sterne, 202;
salon, originates in London, 124.
More, Hannah, 180-88;
Bas Bleu, 23, 123-25;
Bleeding Rock, 181;
description of an assembly, 106 n.;
Essays, 156, 187;
Fatal Falsehood, 185-86;
Florio, 157, 187;
Inflexible Captive, 181;
influence of bluestockings on, 180, 188;
Ode on the Marquess of Worcester, 155;
Ode to Mrs. Boscawen, 154 ff.;
Percy, 154, 183-85;
piety, 186-88;
relations with Garrick, 181;
—— with Mrs. Boscawen, 181 ff.;
—— with Mrs. Yearsley, 204 ff.;
—— with Walpole, 187;
romanticism, 182;
Sensibility, 156;
Sir Eldred, 181-83;
‘Stella,’ 206;
Thoughts on the Manners of the Great, 188.

Necker, Mme., career and salon, 77-80;
quoted, 7, 14, 38, 63 n.;
relations with Gibbon, 77 ff.;
—— with Hume, 27;
—— with Mrs. Montagu, 136.
Newcastle, Duchess of, 90 n.

Opie, John, portrait of Miss More, 157.
Ord, Mrs. Anne, relations with Miss Burney, 159-60;
salon, 124, 158-159.
‘Orinda,’ see Phillips, Mrs. Katherine.
Ossian, 176.
Otway, Thomas, 96.

Paoli, General, 147 n.

Paris, attraction for Englishmen, 15, 36, 38.
patronage, 30, 84, 189 ff.
Pembroke, Countess of, 84.
Pepys, Sir William, 123.
Percy, Bishop, Reliques, 182.
Phillips, Mrs. Katherine, 91-94.
Piozzi, Mme., see Thrale, Mrs. Hester.
Pix, Mary, 98.
Platonic love, 88, 91, 93.
Polignac, Mme. de, 131.
Portland, Duchess of, 131, 162, 205, 207.
Potter, Robert, attacks Johnson’s Lives, 196, 270;
meets Johnson, 196;
relations with Mrs. Montagu, 195-97.
précieuses galantes, 88.
précieuses ridicules, 29.
Prior, Matthew, relations with Mme. de Tencin, 44 ff.
pseudonyms, classical, 89, 91, 95, 206.
Pye, Henry, poem to Mrs. Boscawen, 156 n.

Queensbury, Duchess of, 100.

Rambouillet, Hôtel de, 22 ff.;
Marquise de, 22 ff., 102 n.
Raynal, Abbé, 144, 150-51.
Restoration, influence of, on the salon, 89-90.
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, indebtedness to Johnson’s conversation, 235.
Richardson, Samuel, his Daughters, 100;
fame in France, 14.
Rousseau, J. J., 9, 40, 54, 59, 176.
Rowe, Nicholas, relations with Mrs. Phillips, 92 n.
ruelle, 102 n.
Rutland, Lady, 87.

Saint Évremond, Charles de, 96-98.
salon, characteristics, 24 ff.;
conservatism, 210 ff.;
conversation in, 25, 125;

cosmopolitanism of, 43;
decline of, 209;
democratic tone, 25;
failure of, in England, 213;
first English, 83;
ideal of, 152;
influence on authors, 39;
literary academy, a, 31;
origin of, 16 ff.;
original works read aloud, 26, 67, 72 n.;
patronage, 30, 84, 189 ff.;
radicalism of, 37;
room, 24;
woman’s place in, 16, 33 ff.
scandal, prevalence of, in salons, 111.
scepticism, in salons, 10, 37, 42, 52, 150.
Schwellenberg, Mrs., 260, 264.
Scudéry, Mlle. de, 26, 95.
sentiments, popular in salons, 113-15.
Sévigné, Mme. de, influence of, in England, 237 ff.
Seward, Anna, 121.
Shakespeare, William, Mrs. Montagu’s Essay on, 169-72;
salon spirit in his comedies, 22, 85.
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, Rivals, 115;
School for Scandal, quoted, 103, 104, 107, 112, 115.
Sheridan, Thomas, 106.
Spenser, Edmund, 84.
Sterne, Laurence, describes salons, 37;
influence of salons upon, 74;
relations with Mrs. Montagu, 202;
—— with Mrs. Vesey, 148 ff.;
Sentimental Journey, quoted, 37, 69;
imitated by Mlle. de Lespinasse, 72 ff.
Stillingfleet, Benjamin, 123, 128-30.
Stuart, Lady Louisa, 126, 139.
Suckling, Sir John, 89.
Swift, Jonathan, 100.

Taylor, Jeremy, relations with Mrs. Phillips, 92-94.
Tencin, Mme. de, career and salon, 43-47, 102;
type of her century, 34.
Tessier, Le, 106.

Thrale, Hester, Anecdotes of Johnson, 164;
——, reception of, 276;
character, 165;
not properly a bluestocking, 124;
relations with Johnson, 163-64;
—— with Miss Burney, 163-64.
Tighe, Edward, 106.
Trotter, Catherine, 98.
Twickenham Park, salon at, 85.

Vaughan, Henry, 94.
Vesey, Agmondesham, 115, 203.
Vesey, Mrs. Elizabeth, agnosticism, 150;
bluestocking, use of the word, 130;
entertains the Literary Club, 33 n., 147;
relations with Sterne, 148 ff.;
romanticism, 147, 151;
salon, 141-52;
——, one of the originators, in London, 124.
Vivonne, Cathérine de, see Rambouillet, Marquise de.
Voiture, Vincent, 25.
Voltaire, François, denounced by bluestockings, 109, 151;
opinion of, in salons, 37;
opinion, his, of the English, 12.

Walpole, Horace, correspondence, art of, 236 ff.;
gossip, love of, 249-50;
influence of salons on, 39, 65-66;
interest in Mrs. Yearsley, 206;
letter to Rousseau, 54, 59;
opinion of Gibbon, 76 n.;
—— of Hume, 51;
—— of the salon, 56 ff.;
popularity in Paris, 59;
quoted, 10, 36, 39, 42, 44 n., 52, 58, 62 n., 66 n., 68, 76 n., 132, 236 ff.;
relations with Mme. du Deffand, 63-65;
—— with Mme. Geoffrin, 57;
salons, career in, 56-66;
uses the word bluestocking, 132.
Walsingham, Mrs., 124, 153, 157.
Woodhouse, the poetical shoemaker, 205.
Wroth, Lady, 87.

Yearsley, Mrs. Ann, the poetical milk-woman, career and poems, 204-08.

Young, Edward, 100, 156 n., 157.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Hume, Boswell, Burke, and Johnson are quoted in turn. The first reference is
to Edinburgh, the rest to London.
[2] Boswell’s Life, Hill’s edition, 2. 75.
[3] Boswell’s Life 3. 253.
[4] Ib., 4. 167.

[5] Ib., 3. 247.
[6] Lettres à Walpole 3. 338; 28 May 1777.
[7] Boswell’s Life 2. 328-29.
[8] Ib., 2. 340.

[9] Boswell’s Life 1. 447.
[10] Letters 6. 301.
[11] In his Memoirs.
[12] See Churton Collins’ Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau in England,
London 1908.
[13] Essai sur la Société des Gens de Lettres et des Grands, sur la Réputation,
sur les Mécènes, et sur les Récompenses Littéraires. In his Mélanges de
Littérature et de Philosophie (1753) 2. 119.

[14] Ib. 2. 121. Cf. Helvétius to Hume (Letters to Hume; 28 June 1767).
‘L’attraction de la terre Britannique agit puissament sur moi.’
[15] See his Memoirs.
[16] Œuvres (1819-25) 43. 320; 14 November 1764. The whole passage is worth
quoting: ‘Mille gens, messieurs, s’élèvent et déclament contre l’anglomanie:
j’ignore ce qu’ils entendent par ce mot. S’ils veulent parler de la fureur de
travestir en modes ridicules quelques usages utiles, de transformer un deshabillé
commode en un vêtement malpropre, de saisir, jusqu’à des jeux nationaux, pour
y mettre des grimaces à la place de la gravité, ils pourraient avoir raison; mais si,
par hasard, ces déclamateurs prétendaient nous faire un crime du désir d’étudier,

d’observer, de philosopher, comme les Anglais, ils auraient certainement bien
tort: car, en supposant que ce désir soit déraisonable, ou même dangereux, il
faudrait avoir beaucoup d’humeur pour nous l’attribuer et ne pas convenir que
nous sommes à cet égard à l’abri de tout reproche.’
[17] Its first published title was L’Orphéline Léguée. See also Walpole’s Letters
6. 360.

[18] Correspondance, ed. Lescure, 1. 497; 14 August 1768.
[19] Mélanges 2. 240.
[20] Gibbon’s Miscellaneous Works 2. 178.
[21] The ideal of a group of ladies and gentlemen who seek in literature the
pleasantest of entertainment is of course encountered in Italian literature long
before this time. The singular vitality of the scheme adopted by Boccaccio for
the framework of the Decameron is proved by the numerous imitations of it. The
Petrarchists, as well as Boccaccio, found favour in the eyes of the court-ladies.

[22] The Book of the Courtier, from the Italian of Count Baldassare Castiglione,
done into English by Sir Thomas Hoby. Edited by Professor Raleigh. London,
1900. See pp. 29 ff.
[23] Spirit.

[24] Figures, allegories.
[25] ‘Arguments,’ discussions, such as the one that follows on the nature of the
true courtier.
[26] The following anecdote of a warrior who affirmed that the entertainments of
the Court were beneath him, may be cited as a specimen: ‘The Gentlewoman
demaundyng him, What is then your profession? He aunswered with a frowning
looke: To fight. Then saide the Gentlewoman: Seing you are not nowe at the
warre nor in place to fight, I woulde thinke it beste for you to bee well besmered
and set up in an armorie with other implementes of warre till time wer that you
should be occupied, least you waxe more rustier than you are.’ p. 49.
[27] See below, p. 124.
[28] Historical Memoirs 1. 14. Chesterfield, who knew the salons at first hand,
writes to his son, 24 December 1750, ‘Le bon goût commença seulement à se
faire jour, sous le règne, je ne dis pas de Louis Treize, mais du Cardinal de
Richelieu, et fut encore épuré sous celui de Louis Quatorze.... Vers la fin du
règne du Cardinal de Richelieu, et au commencement de celui de Louis
Quatorze, l’Hôtel de Rambouillet était le Temple du Goût, mais d’un goût pas
encore tout à fait épuré.’ Letters, ed. Bradshaw, 1. 382.

[29] ‘Arthénice’ is an anagram of her name, Cathérine. It is said to have been
discovered by Malherbe.
[30] This, too, is Italian. Cf. Burckhardt, Renaissance in Italy, tr. Middlemore, p.
359: ‘Social intercourse in its highest and most perfect form now ignored all
distinctions of caste, and was based simply on the existence of an educated
class.’
[31] Thus Mascarille in Les Précieuses Ridicules: ‘Vous verrez courir de ma
façon, dans les belles ruelles de Paris, deux cents chansons, autant de sonnets,
quatre cents épigrammes, et plus de mille madrigaux, sans compter les énigmes
et les portraits.’
[32] Petit de Julleville, Histoire de la Langue et de la Littérature Française 4.
105.
[33] She sneered at précieuses. Lettres à Walpole 1. 417.
[34] Essai sur les Gens de Lettres, etc., op. cit. 2. 136. Cf. Goldsmith, Citizen of
the World, 84: ‘A writer of real merit now may ... talk even to princes with all the
conscious superiority of wisdom.’
[35] ‘Collé regrettera toujours les cafés littéraires et ne se consolera pas de les
voir déserter pour les salons.’ Petit de Julleville, Histoire de la Littérature
Française, 6. 388. It was a significant moment in the history of the Literary Club
in London when, about 1780, it fell into the habit of dining at Mrs. Vesey’s
before its more exclusive sessions at the tavern.
[36] ‘Comme son siècle, Madame du Deffand, dans son extrême viellesse,
retrouva le don d’aimer et la douceur des larmes.’ Lanson, Choix de Lettres,
quoted by Mrs. Toynbee in Lettres à Walpole 1. lx.
[37] ‘Elle symbolise l’évolution qui, à l’époque où elle vécut, s’est opérée dans
l’âme de ses contemporains, lorsque de raisonneur le siècle s’est fait passionné,
de libertin sentimental.’ Ségur, Julie de Lespinasse, p. 15.
[38] Letters 6. 393.
[39] Ib. 6. 367; 2 December 1765.
[40] Ib. 9. 252; [? September] 1775.
[41] Sentimental Journey.
[42] Letters 6. 352; 19 November 1765. Cf. Madame du Deffand to Walpole
(Letters 1. 385; 30 January 1768): ‘Vous n’aimez pas les impiétés, vous êtes, ce
me semble, un peu dévot.’
[43] Letter to Gibbon, 30 September 1776; in Gibbon’s Miscellaneous Works 2.
178.

[44] This function is admirably expressed by Professor Brunel in his account of
Madame de Tencin (Petit de Julleville, Histoire de la Littérature Française 6.
403) ‘[Elle les ramenait] sans cesse au ton léger qui convient, même en un sujet
grave. Tel est bien le rôle d’une femme au milieu de ces têtes pensantes. Elle se
tient audessus et au dehors du débat, qu’elle envisage au seul point de vue
d’agrément, et dont elle règle la marche, toujours souriante, sans le laisser
languir ni s’aigrir.’
[45] Letters 6. 414; 3 February 1766.
[46] Boswell’s Life of Johnson 3. 47.
[47] Madame Necker speaks of the ‘art perfectionné de l’exagération,’ in the
letter to Gibbon cited above.
[48] Thus Marmontel: ‘Leurs entretiens étaient une école pour moi non moins
utile qu’agréable et, autant qu’il m’était possible, je profitais de leurs leçons.’
[49] English visitors in Paris are satirized in two comedies by Samuel Foote, The
Englishman in Paris (1753) and The Englishman returned from Paris (1757). In
the former the leading character, Buck, is offered an introduction to ‘Madame de
Rambouillet’; in the latter he comes home completely Frenchified.
[50] Letters 6. 332; 19 October 1765.
[51] Memoirs of M. de Voltaire. During Goldsmith’s sojourn on the Continent,
Diderot and Fontenelle were still visitors at Madame Geoffrin’s.
[52] In Petit de Julleville’s Histoire de la Littérature Française, op. cit., 6. 404,
Walpole, who must have had her character from Madame du Deffand, tells
Mason that she was ‘a most horrid woman’ who ‘had great parts and so little
principle that she was supposed to have murdered and robbed one of her lovers,
a scrape out of which Lord Harrington and another of them saved her. She had
levees from eight in the morning till night, from the lowest tools to the highest.’
Letters 10. 28; 13 March 1777.
[53] Works of Bolingbroke 7. 169; letter to Hanmer, December 1712 (?).
[54] Ib., 7. 87; 17 October 1712. Prior to Bolingbroke.
[55] Lettres Historiques de Bolingbroke (Paris 1808), 2. 431; 3 June 1715.

[56] Dictionary of National Biography, ‘Saint John.’
[57] See the ribald verses commencing, ‘Tencin, vous avez de l’esprit,’ printed in
Lettres de Bolingbroke, op. cit., 2. 433 n. The second stanza begins,
‘Bolingbroke, es-tu possédé?’

[58] Letters, edited by Bradshaw, 1. 383; 24 December 1750.

[59] See his letter to Madame de Tencin, introducing Mrs. Cleland, in Letters, as
above, 2. 771; 20 August 1742.

[60] Letters, op. cit., 1. 383.
[61] See Professor P. M. Masson’s excellent monograph, Madame de Tencin
(Paris 1909), pp. 278-80. The appendix contains Madame de Tencin’s letters.
[62] Cf. Montesquieu, Lettres; 12 March 1750 (in Œuvres, Paris 1879): ‘Dîtes à
milord Chesterfield que rien ne me flatte tant que son approbation,’ and the rest.
[63] Madame Necker, who had studied Madame Geoffrin’s methods, remarks
(Nouveaux Mélanges 1. 100): ‘Le piquant de l’esprit de Madame Geoffrin
consistait toujours à rendre des idées ingénieuses par des images triviales, et
pour ainsi dire, de ménage; son esprit était toujours enté sur un ton bourgeois.’
The following may serve as specimens (cf. above, p. 29): ‘Madame —— a
frappé à la porte de toutes les vertus sans entrer chez aucune.’ ‘Quand nos amis
sont borgnes, il faut les regarder de profil.’

[64] Letter in Éloges de Madame Geoffrin, ed. M. Morellet, p. 110.
[65] Éloges, op. cit., p. 105.
[66] Letters to Hume, pp. 288-89.
[67] Letters 6. 298; 20 September 1765.
[68] Correspondance Littéraire, Paris 1829, 5. 4: ‘Il est lourd, il n’a ni chaleur,
ni grâce, ni agrément dans l’esprit.’
[69] Lettres à Walpole 1, passim.
[70] Burton’s Life of Hume 2. 168 n.

[71] Letters 6, passim. Cf. Grimm, op. cit., 5. 3-4.
[72] Burton’s Hume 2. 173; 9 November 1673.
[73] An Englishman in Paris wrote to the Earl Marshall of Scotland, ‘L’on
regarde le bonheur de l’y voir comme un des plus doux fruits de la paix.’ Letters
to Hume, p. 63; 4 January 1764.
[74] Burton’s Hume 2. 181.
[75] Du Deffand’s Lettres à Walpole 3. 591.
[76] Lettres à Walpole 1. 232; 5 March 1767, et passim.

[77] See Burton’s Life of Hume; Letters addressed to Hume (1849); Private
Correspondence of Hume (1820); Letters, ed. T. Murray (1841); and Exposé
succinct de la Contestation ... entre M. Hume et M. Rousseau (1766). The
simplest narratives for the general reader are in Ségur’s Julie de Lespinasse,

chapter 7, and in Collins’s Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau in England, pp.
182 ff.
[78] See Garat, Mémoires Historiques 2. 158.
[79] See Letters 6. 396; 12 January 1766, for the complete letter. A second letter,
in the character of Émile, is printed in Madame du Deffand’s Lettres à Walpole 1.
3 n. Madame du Deffand persuaded Walpole not to let it become public.

[80] See above, p. 54 n., and volume one of her Lettres à Walpole, passim.
[81] Burton’s Life of Hume 2. 513.
[82] Lettres à Walpole 3. 253.
[83] In October (?) 1776, Mrs. Montagu wrote to Beattie: ‘As I passed a good
deal of my time with the Litterati at Paris, you may imagine I heard much of the
manner of Mr. Hume’s taking leave of the world. “Les Philosophes” (as they call
themselves) were pleased that he supported the infidel character with so much
constancy.’ M. Forbes’s Beattie and his Friends 130.

[84] Letters 6. 309; 3 October 1765.
[85] Ib., 6. 332.
[86] Ib., 6. 358.
[87] See Letters 6. 332: ‘Good folks, they have no time to laugh.’ ‘M. de
Fontenelle,’ asked Madame Geoffrin one day, ‘Vous n’avez jamais ri?’ ‘Non,’ he
replied, ‘je n’ai jamais fait ah, ah, ah.’ Necker, Nouveaux Mélanges 1. 165.
Chesterfield’s hatred of laughter, that ‘shocking distortion of the face,’ is well-
known; he boasted that he had never been seen to laugh.

[88] Lettres à Walpole 1. 577; 24 May 1769.
[89] Letters 6. 404; 25 January 1766.
[90] Ten years later Madame du Deffand gave him a more startling illustration of
French motherliness. See Letters 9. 236.

[91] Cf. Professor Brunel in Petit de Julleville’s Histoire 6. 410: ‘C’est en effet la
“raison” qu’on reconnaît à Madame Geoffrin pour mérite éminent.’
[92] Letters 6. 395; 11 January 1766.
[93] Ib., 6. 396.

[94] Ib., 6. 404; 25 January 1766.
[95] Montesquieu wrote her (15 June 1751): ‘Je sens qu’il n’y a pas de lectures
qui puissent remplacer un quart d’heure de ces soupers qui faisaient mes délices.’
Œuvres (1879), 7. 377.

[96] Letters 9. 59; 28 September 1774.
[97] Ib., 6. 356; Walpole had met this Duke in Paris.

[98] Montesquieu, Œuvres (1879), 7. 400; 13 September 1752. ‘Ce qui doît nous
consoler, c’est que ceux qui voient clair ne sont pour celà lumineux.’
[99] This description of herself ‘dans le coin d’un couvent’ she sent to Madame
de Boufflers:
Dans son tonneau
On voit une vieille sibylle
Dans son tonneau.
Qui n’a sur les os que la peau,
Qui jamais ne jeûna Vigile,
Qui rarement lit l’Évangile
Dans son tonneau.
—From G. Maugras, La Marquise de Boufflers, p. 101.
[100] ‘Madame du Deffand ... is delicious; that is, as often as I can get her fifty
years back, but she is as eager about what happens every day as I am about the
last century.’ Walpole, Letters 6. 367; 2 December 1765.
[101] D’Alembert called her ‘The Viper,’ and told Hume that she hated
everybody, especially great men. Letters to Hume, p. 201.

[102] ‘Ceux par qui on n’a pas craindre d’être assassiné, mais qui laisseraient
faire les assassins.’ Montesquieu, Œuvres (1879) 7. 379.
[103] Necker, Nouveaux Mélanges 1. 79: ‘Madame du Défan [sic] accusait tous
les penseurs d’affectation.’

[104] Lettres à Walpole 3. 319, et passim.
[105] Ib. 3. 77.
[106] Ib. 2. 373; cf. 3. 203. ‘Toute espèce de lecture m’ennuie.’
[107] Edited by Mrs. Paget Toynbee, London, 1912. There are 838 letters.

[108] Lettres à Walpole 1. 167; 14 November 1766.
[109] Letters 9. 249; 8 September 1775.
[110] ‘If possible she is more worth visiting than ever; and so far am I from
being ashamed of coming hither at my age, that I look on myself as wiser than
one of the Magi, when I travel to adore this star in the East. The star and I went
to the Opera last night, and when we came from Madame de la Vallière’s, at one
in the morning, it wanted to drive about the town, because it was too early to
set.... You nurse a little girl of four years old, and I rake with an old woman of
fourscore!’ Letters 9. 256; to Selwyn, 16 September 1775.

[111] Lettres à Walpole 2. 476.
[112] Ib. 2. 484.

[113] Ib. 2. 479; ‘Il y a des gens ici qui l’appellent Junius.’
[114] J. Morley, Burke, p. 67.
[115] Lettres à Walpole 3. 589, in criticism of his Speech on the Independence of
Parliament, 11 February 1780.

[116] Ib. 2. 479; 481.
[117] ‘Je lui donne une compagnie que j’ai tâché de lui assortir; un M. du Buc,
qui est aussi un grand esprit, le Comte de Broglio, l’Évêque de Mirepoix,
Madame de Cambis, les Caraman, etc.’ Lettres à Walpole 2. 479; 24 February
1773.
[118] Printed in 1778.
[119] By J. A. H. de Guibert, Paris 1773.
[120] See Lettres à Walpole 2. 488. He had spoken of it to Walpole, and
evidently preferred it to La Harpe’s tragedy—which did not please Madame du
Deffand. The tragedy, which was widely known from the author’s reading of it in
the salons, was acted in 1775.
[121] See Bisset, Life of Burke (1798), p. 158. Morley thinks it was in Mlle. de
Lespinasse’s salon that Burke met Diderot.
[122] Letters 8. 252; 11 March 1773.
[123] Diderot.
[124] Morellet.

[125] Professor Cross, however, considers them fairly reliable. Life of Sterne, p.
287.
[126] D. Garat, Mémoires Historiques sur le XVIIIe Siècle 2. 136.
[127] 31 January 1762.

[128] Letters 6. 370; 2 December 1765.
[129] Cf. Cross, Life of Sterne, p. 282.
[130] The rise of Julie de Lespinasse (1732-1776) to a position of first
importance in Parisian society is a thrilling story. See Ségur, Julie de Lespinasse.
The account of her break with Madame du Deffand whose ‘companion’ she had
been, is referred to above, p. 61. Walpole (Letters 9. 59) calls her ‘a pretended
bel esprit,’ and begs Conway not to allow himself to be taken to her salon,
frequented by Englishmen, lest he offend Madame du Deffand.

[131] Necker, Mélanges 2. 287.
[132] Letters to the Count de Guibert (1809) 2. 233.

[133] See Lettres de Mlle. de Lespinasse ... suivies de deux chapitres dans le
genre du Voyage sentimental de Sterne, par le même Auteur. Paris 1809; 3. 261.
[134] The authenticity of these stories is vouched for by the first editor of Mlle.
de Lespinasse’s Letters (1809), op. cit. 1. xiv, and by the author of the ‘Portrait’
in Éloges de Madame Geoffrin (1812), p. 47. Mlle. de Lespinasse read the
chapters aloud in Madame Geoffrin’s salon.
[135] His father had sent him to Lausanne at the age of sixteen. His first literary
venture, his Essai sur l’Étude de la Littérature, was in French.

[136] Lettres à Walpole 3. 342; 8 June 1777.
[137] Gibbon, Miscellaneous Works 2. 247; 21 April 1781.
[138] Lettres à Walpole, 3. 367; 21 September 1777.
[139] Private Letters, ed. Prothero, 1. 29; 12 February 1763. Cf. Memoirs, ed.
Hill, p. 153.
[140] Walpole’s account of him in dispute is less flattering. ‘He coloured; all his
round features squeezed themselves into sharp angles; he screwed up his button-
mouth and [rapped] his snuff-box.... I well knew his vanity, even about his
ridiculous face and person, but thought he had too much sense to avow it so
palpably.’ Letters 11. 376; 27 January 1781. Gibbon avoided disputes with
Johnson, and Boswell (Life 2. 348) assumed that he feared ‘a competition of
abilities.’

[141] Lettres à Walpole 3. 343, 351, and 376.
[142] Private Lettres 1. 312; 16 June 1777.
[143] Lettres à Walpole 3. 336.
[144] Gibbon’s Miscellaneous Works 2. 178; 30 September 1776.

[145] Miscellaneous Works 1. 312; 16 June 1777.
[146] She wrote him in January 1777: ‘Votre entretien, Monsieur, a toujours été
un grand plaisir de ma vie, car vous réunissez l’intérêt pour les petites choses,
l’enthousiasme pour les grandes, l’abondance des idées, à l’attention pour celles
des autres, et une légère causticité, âme de la conversation, à l’indulgence du
moment, la sûreté du caractère et le courage de l’amitié.’ Gibbon, Miscellaneous
Works 2. 193. Madame du Deffand applied to Gibbon’s conversation a phrase of
Fontenelle’s, ‘forte de choses.’ Lettres à Walpole 3. 338; 27 May 1777.

[147] ‘C’est le ton de nos beaux esprits: il n’y a que des ornements, de la parure,
du clinquant, et point du fond ... il a, si je ne me trompe, une grande ambition de
célébrité; il brigue à force ouverte la faveur de tous nos beaux esprits.’ Lettres à
Walpole 3. 357; 10 August 1777.
[148] Gibbon’s Miscellaneous Works 2. 247; 21 April 1781.
[149] Gibbon’s Miscellaneous Works 2. 214; 12 November 1777.

[150] Nicholas Breton’s Pilgrimage to Paradise, quoted by Miss Young.
[151] These and the like illustrations are drawn from Miss Frances Young’s Mary
Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, London 1912.
[152] Epigram 94.

[153] Life and Letters of John Donne 1. 212. Her ‘refining’ influence on Donne’s
mind and judgment is particularly noted in his second Letter to the Countess of
Bedford.
[154] Professor Grierson attributes to her the poem beginning,
‘Death, be not proud, thy hand gave not this blow.’
See his edition of Donne’s poems, 2. cxliv.
[155] Twicknam Garden.

[156] Gosse 2. 79; 1651.
[157] This subject is pleasantly discussed by Professor Fletcher in his Religion of
Beauty in Woman, ‘Précieuses at the Court of Charles I,’ but his discussion
shows how inimical was the new movement to anything like a true patronage of
letters.
[158] Thus there is no suggestion of the salon about such a figure as the Duchess
of Newcastle.
[159] Seventeenth Century Studies, p. 208.

[160] To ‘Berenice,’ in Familiar Letters, London 1697; 1. 147; 30 December
1658.
[161] On the Death of Mrs. Katherine Philips. In his Ode on Orinda’s Poems the
lady’s descent is traced from Boadicea. Rowe, in his Epistle to Daphnis, declares
that she soared as high as Corneille ‘and equalled all his fame.’ Dryden compares
her with Mrs. Killigrew. Cowley may perhaps have owed more than the rest to
her. The following reference to him in her letters seems to show that she had
been of real service to him: ‘I am very glad of Mr. Cowley’s success, and will
concern myself so much as to thank your ladyship for your endeavour in it.’ (To
Berenice, Familiar Letters 1. 143; 25 June [1758?].)

[162] Discourse, p. 38.
[163] Works of Saint Évremond, English translation, 2d edition, London 1728; 2.
247.
[164] Ib. 2. 299.
[165] Her beauty was celebrated by Waller in The Triple Combat. Lely painted
her portrait.

[166] See Dr. Upham’s ‘English Femmes Savantes at the End of the Seventeenth
Century,’ in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, April 1913. This is
a fairly exhaustive treatment of the subject, and reveals a development of
‘feminism’ in England parallel in some respects with that in France. As the
movement, however, reveals no attempt to centre literary activity in salons, the
article must be regarded as treating a different aspect of the general subject from
the one here dealt with.
[167] So Madame du Deffand told Walpole. Walpole’s Letters 10. 28.

[168] Guests were not necessarily received in the sleeping-room. The adjoining
dressing-room was often utilized for the purpose. See Colman’s Man of Business
(1774), opening of Act 2. The levee should be compared with Mme. de
Rambouillet’s more intimate receptions, where a seat near the bedside, in the
ruelle or lane between bed and wall, was the place of honour, as being nearest to
the hostess while she reclined in state.
Morning informality became so popular in Paris that ladies and gentlemen of
quality appeared at lectures, ‘même en robe de chambre’ (Roberts’ Memoirs of
Hannah More 2. 17). Cf. Goldsmith (Citizen of the World, Letter 77), ‘the
modern manner of some of our nobility receiving company in their morning
gowns.’
[169] As early as the days of the Spectator, Addison deplored the custom,
introduced by travelled ladies, of ‘receiving gentlemen in their bed-rooms.’
[170] Probably, as Hill notes, Mme. de Boufflers; cf. above, p. 53.
[171] Boswell’s Life 2. 118; cf. 3. 207.
[172] Boswell’s Life 5. 395; here the word levee is probably loosely employed
for a morning conversazione.
[173] Citizen of the World, Letter 104.
[174] Cf. Boswell’s Life of Johnson 2. 318.
[175] Diary of Mme. D’Arblay 5. 80-81.

[176] Letters (1770) 1. 7; 8 April 1750.

[177] Letters 8. 437.
[178] Roberts’ Memoirs of More 1. 395.

[179] Correspondence of Mrs. Delany 6. 229; 7 September 1784.
[180] Diary for 10 May 1773; M. Forbes’ Life of Beattie, p. 75.
[181] Hannah More’s piquant description of an assembly is worth quoting in full:
‘On Monday I was at a very great assembly at the Bishop of Saint Asaph’s.
Conceive to yourself one hundred and fifty or two hundred people met together,
dressed in the extremity of the fashion; painted as red as bacchanals; poisoning
the air with perfumes; treading on each other’s gowns; making the crowd they
blame; not one in ten able to get a chair; protesting they are engaged to ten other
places; and lamenting the fatigue they are not obliged to endure; ten or a dozen
card-tables, crammed with dowagers of quality, grave ecclesiastics, and yellow
admirals; and you have an idea of an assembly.’ Roberts’ Memoirs of More 1.
242; cf. ib. 1. 311.

[182] Other contemporary descriptions of the salon will be found elsewhere in
this volume. Still others—in general more fragmentary—may be consulted in
Frances Brooke’s Excursion 1. 142, Roberts’ Memoirs of More 2. 22-23; 1. 92-
93; 174; 317.

[183] Horace Walpole’s experiences in the English salons at Turin and Florence
may be consulted in the first volume of his Letters. ‘Only figure the coalition of
prudery, debauchery, sentiment, history, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and
metaphysics; all, except the second, understood by halves, by quarters, or not at
all’ 1. 82; 31 July 1740.
[184] This was an important matter with some of the bluestockings, as the
following quotation from Hannah More may show: ‘I never knew a great party
turn out so pleasantly as the other night at the Pepys’s. There was all the pride of
London—every wit and every wit-ess ... but the spirit of the evening was kept up
on the strength of a little lemonade till past eleven, without cards, scandal, or
politics.’ Roberts’ Memoirs of More 1. 208.
Johnson’s opposition to anything of the sort is shown by his remark on ‘an
evening society for conversation’: ‘There is nothing served about there, neither
tea, nor coffee, nor lemonade, nor anything whatever, and depend upon it, Sir, a
man does not love to go to a place from whence he comes out exactly as he went
in.’ Boswell’s Life 4. 90.
He urged Mrs. Thrale to provide her guests with ‘a profusion of the best
sweetmeats.’

[185] How true this is to the spirit of conversation is shown by a somewhat
scandalous discussion of Miss Hannah More which passed between Mrs.
Cholmondeley and Miss Burney: Mrs. Cholmondeley: ‘I don’t like her at all; that
is, I detest her! She does nothing but flatter and fawn; and then she thinks ill of
nobody. Don’t you hate a person who thinks ill of nobody?’ Diary of Mme.
D’Arblay 1. 188.

[186] 1787. Act 3, scene 2.
[187] See her first conversation with Marlow, Act II. She herself calls it
sentimental, in reference to these platitudes.
[188] Mélanges 3. 243.

[189] Ib. 266.
[190] Correspondence of Mrs. Delany 4. 236; 30 August 1769.
[191] Diary of Mme. D’Arblay 2. 351.
[192] The tails of macaronis’ wigs were notoriously long.

[193] Spence’s Anecdotes 378.
[194] Boswell’s Life 4. 195. A specimen of what this sort of thing may be is seen
in this epigram of Marmontel’s, upon picking up a lady’s pen:
Églé, cette plume est de celles
Qu’à vos pieds déposa l’Amour,
Quand ce Dieu, fixé sans retour,
Vous laissa lui couper les ailes.
Necker, Nouveaux Mélanges 1. 30.
[195] ‘Institutress’ is Mrs. Miller’s unpretending designation of herself. The
quotation is from the preface to a volume entitled, Poetical Amusements at a
Villa near Bath, Bath 1775.

[196] Walpole’s Letters 9. 134; 15 January 1775.
[197] See the preface to the volume for 1777.
[198] 1776; 1777; 1781.
[199] In 1781; a fifth volume had been announced for 1782.

[200] London 1777.
[201] Bath 1776.
[202] Bath 1776.
[203] She calls herself a bluestocking in 1780. Diary 1. 403.

[204] Memoirs of Dr. Burney 2. 262.

[205] See below, p. 140.
[206] See above, p. 105.

[207] Cf. the whole passage. Home’s Lady Louisa Stuart, pp. 159-60.
[208] An Italian equivalent for bluestocking is unknown to Tomaseo and Bellini.
In a pamphlet, entitled Pursuits of Literature, printed in 1797, T. J. Mathias gives
the term calza azzurra as though from Ariosto, quoting,
Fortunata la Calza azzurra e d’ oro
Si grate a Febo e al santo Aonio coro.
The first line quoted, however, is not by Ariosto at all, but by Mathias himself.
Cf. Orlando Furioso, ed. Papini, canto 46, st. 3.

[209] 1. 379 ff.
[210] Larousse, Grande Encyclopédie.
[211] Mills’s explanation of the word was adopted (without acknowledgment) by
Dr. Brewer in his Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, and has therefore had
considerable currency. It has been recently repeated, notably in the Quarterly
Review for January 1903, in an article entitled ‘The Queen of the Bluestockings,’
by an anonymous writer, and in Mrs. Gaussen’s A Later Pepys.
[212] King Henry IV, Part I, Act 2, scene iv.

[213] Home’s Lady Louisa Stuart, p. 156; cf. the Diary of Madame D’Arblay 4.
65.
[214] The following quotation from Mrs. Montagu’s Letters (4. 117) has been
cited (notably in the New English Dictionary and in Hill’s edition of Boswell’s
Life of Johnson) as showing that the term bluestocking was in use as early as
March 8, 1757, on which day Mrs. Montagu writes: ‘I assure you our
philosopher (Mr. Stillingfleet) is so much a man of pleasure, he has left off his
old friends and his blue stockings, and is at operas and other gay assemblies
every night.’ Personally I do not think that this can be regarded as an occurrence
of the word bluestocking at all. I incline to think that Mrs. Montagu means no
more than she literally says, that Mr. Stillingfleet has left off the homely garb for
which he was noted. But, in any case, it is interesting as a reference to the fame
of his stockings, and tends to support Boswell’s explanation of the term.
[215] Life 4. 108.
[216] 1. 210 n.; cf. a similar account by Pennington (who remembered the
salons) in his Letters of Mrs. Carter to Mrs. Montagu.

[217] Memoirs of Dr. Burney 2. 262-63. No explanation of the term bluestocking
is given in the Diary.

[218] Letters of Mrs. Carter to Mrs. Montagu 3. 202; 22 September 1783. The
occurrence is referred to by Hannah More in the ‘Advertisement’ prefixed to Bas
Bleu (1786). The story was apparently reported to the blues by Lady Dartrey. See
Pepys’s letter to Hannah More, in A Later Pepys 2. 235; 13 August 1783.
[219] Gaussen’s A Later Pepys 1. 42.
[220] Those who care to study the playful development of the word may consult
the sprightly article, ‘Bas bleu,’ in the earlier edition of Larousse’s Dictionary.
[221] Letters 13. 217; 13 November 1784.
[222] Diary of Madame D’Arblay 5. 50; 27 December 1791.
[223] Much earlier certainly than the date (1790) given in the New English
Dictionary, ‘In the evening we had a very strong reinforcement of blues,’ wrote
Hannah More in March 1783 (Roberts’ Memoirs of More 1. 275); ‘There was
everything delectable in the blue way,’ writes the same author in 1784 in
reference to Mrs. Ord’s conversazione (Ib. 1. 317).

[224] Diary of Madame D’Arblay 2. 236; 9 December 1783.
[225] Ib. 4. 66; 1 August 1788.
[226] Cf. Fanny Burney, ‘He had no small reverence for us blue-stockings.’
Diary 1. 403; June 1780.

[227] A Series of Letters 4. 218.
[228]

Montaigu, tes dons précieux
M’assurent de ta bienveillance,
Les miens, peu dignes de tes yeux,
Te prouvent mon obéissance.
Ainsi partout on voit les Dieux
Recevoir des chants ennuyeux
Pour les biens que leur main dispense.
Tes bienfaits me sont plus flatteurs
Que les trésors de la fortune,
Toujours aveugle en ses faveurs,
Elle prodigue les honneurs
À ceux dont la voix l’importune;
Mais tes regards doux et perçants
Du vrai mérite ont la balance;
Je juge aussi par tes présents
Qu’ils out souvent de l’indulgence.
Du Bocage, Lettres sur l’Angleterre,
p. 50; 25 May 1750.
[229] Gibbon’s Miscellaneous Works 2. 179; 30 September 1776.

[230] Lettres à Walpole 3. 243, 256.
[231] Ib. 3. 383.

[232] Forbes’s Life of Beattie 1. 389; 3 September 1775.
[233] Correspondence of Mrs. Delany 5. 165.
[234] Diary of Madame D’Arblay 1. 460.
[235] Letters 2. 149; 1 May 1780.

[236] A Later Pepys 1. 404.
[237] Correspondence of Mrs. Delany 4. 204-205.
[238] Home’s Lady Louisa Stuart, p. 158.
[239] The letter is undated, but, as it refers to the death of Lord Bath, it must be
later than 1764. Burke is strangely criticised for ‘an intemperate vivacity of
genius’; the common charge is made against Garrick that he is himself only on
the stage, ‘and an actor everywhere else.’ Johnson is not mentioned. The palm is
given to Lord Chatham among living wits. Lyttelton’s Letters (1780), pp. 122 ff.

[240] Letters 11. 366 and 368; 9 and 14 January 1781.
[241] Roberts, Memoirs of More 1. 298.
[242] Carter, Series of Letters 4. 141.
[243] Letters on Several Subjects 2. 166.

[244] Letters 14. 5.
[245] Diary 1. 253.
[246] She was so called by Mrs. Delany as early as 1751. (Correspondence 3.
21), who adds, ‘The spirits of the air protect her.’

[247] Letters to Mrs. Montagu 1. 242.
[248] Ib. 1. 330.
[249] Ib. 1. 311.
[250] Mrs. Carter writes her (Series of Letters 4. 27), ‘I prevented you from
carrying me to every place you had ever heard of in England or Wales.’
[251] Letters to Mrs. Montagu 1. 335, 2. 355; cf. 2. 109.
[252] Series of Letters 4. 120.
[253] Ib. 4. 137.

[254] Correspondence of Mrs. Delany 3. 40.

[255] Ib. 5. 523.
[256] Hannah More writes: ‘Tuesday I was at Mrs. Vesey’s assembly which was
too full to be very pleasant. She dearly loves company; and as she is connected
with almost everything that is great in the good sense of the word, she is always
sure to have too much.’ Roberts’s Memoirs 1. 278; 29 March 1783.
[257] Diary of Madame D’Arblay 2. 214; 19 June 1783.

[258] Letters 11. 170.
[259] ‘Madam, I have read his book, and I have nothing to say to him.’ Series of
Letters 3. 228 note; Johnsonian Miscellanies 2. 12 note.
[260] Series of Letters 3. 255; 21 May 1765.
[261] ‘She seemed rather desirous to assemble persons of celebrity and talents
under her roof or at her table than assumed or pretended to form one of the
number herself.’ Wraxall’s Historical Memoirs 1. 103. ‘Without attempting to
shine herself she had the happy secret of bringing forward talents of every kind,
and of diffusing over the society the gentleness of her own character.’ Forbes’s
Life of Beattie 1. 209 n.
[262] Letters of Mrs. Carter to Mrs. Montagu 1. 271 and A Series of Letters 3.
292.

[263] Diary of Madame D’Arblay 2. 234.
[264] Her letters, with the exception of a lively but rather incoherent note to
Hannah More, have not been published. Lord Lyttelton wrote to Garrick: ‘You
will be charmed (as I am) with the lively colouring and fine touches in the
epistolary style of our sylph, joined to the most perfect ease. Mrs. Montagu’s
letters are superior to her in nothing but force and compass of thought.’ Garrick,
Correspondence 1. 440; 12 October 1771.
[265] Series of Letters 4. 6.

[266] Ib. 4. 83.
[267] Ib. 4. 354.
[268] Letters to Mrs. Montagu 1. 335.
[269] Diary 1. 253-54.

[270] Letters 9. 152; 24 January 1775: ‘The Cophthi were an Egyptian race, of
whom nobody knows anything but the learned; and thence I gave Mrs.
Montagu’s academies the name of Coptic.’
[271] Johnson, Walpole, Goldsmith, Burke, Reynolds, Boswell, Garrick, Sterne,
General Potemkin, General Paoli, General Oglethorpe, half a dozen bishops, and

all the blues were at various times among her guests. Of one of her
entertainments, Hannah More wrote: ‘She had collected her party from the Baltic
to the Po, for there was a Russian nobleman, an Italian virtuoso, and General
Paoli.’ Roberts’s Memoirs of More 1. 212.
[272] Series of Letters 3. 323.
[273] Ib. 3. 255.
[274] Her prosaic sister-in-law, whom friends called ‘Body,’ as they called Vesey
‘Mind.’
[275] Letters to Mrs. Montagu 1. 358.
[276] See Melville’s Life and Letters of Sterne 2. 67 ff.

[277] Life of Mrs. Delany 5. 307. Gibbon wrote of Raynal (Letters 2. 75; 30
September 1783): ‘His conversation which might be very agreeable, is
intolerably loud, peremptory, and insolent; and you could imagine that he alone
was the Monarch and legislator of the World.’ Walpole, who met him at Baron
d’Holbach’s, was so bored by his questions that he pretended to be deaf. ‘After
dinner he found I was not, and never forgave me.’ Three years later, however, he
dined with Walpole at Strawberry Hill: ‘The Abbé Raynal not only looked at
nothing himself, but kept talking to the Ambassador the whole time, and would
not let him see anything neither. There never was such an impertinent and
tiresome old gossip. He said to one of the Frenchmen, we ought to come abroad
to make us love our own country. This was before Mr. Churchill, who replied
very properly, “Yes we had some Esquimaux here lately, and they liked nothing
because they could get no train-oil for breakfast.”’ Letters 9. 92; 12 November
1774, and 10. 62; 15 June 1777.
[278] Posthumous Works 1. 174. ‘In the hour and half I was in his company, he
uttered as much as would have made him an agreeable companion for a week,
had he allotted time for answers.’
[279] Series of Letters 4. 113; cf. 3. 228 and 4. 108. It would appear that Mrs.
Montagu feared that Mrs. Vesey was about to adopt certain of Rousseau’s
‘absurdities.’ Cf. Letters of Mrs. Carter to Mrs. Montagu 3. 241; 24 June 1785.

[280] Hartley writes to W. W. Pepys (20 August 1800), ‘Mrs. Vesey’s ... was
indeed the most agreeable house for conversation.’ Gaussen’s A Later Pepys 2.
154.
[281] Frances Glanville Boscawen (1719?-1805) was the wife of the Hon.
Edward Boscawen, Admiral (d. 1761), and mother of Viscount Falmouth and the
Duchess of Beaufort.
[282] 3. 331.

[283] Roberts’s Memoirs of More 1. 182; 93.
[284] She did, however, give some assistance to Johnson in the Lives of the
Poets. ‘I have claims,’ she writes to Miss More (Roberts’s Memoirs of More 1.
191), ‘upon Dr. Johnson, but as he never knows me when he meets me, they are
all stifled in the cradle; for he must know who I am before he can remember that
I got him Mr. Spence’s manuscripts.’ These papers were of great use to Johnson,
as he himself remarks (Lives 1. xxvii, ed. Hill). Boswell regrets (Life 4. 63) that
Johnson did not make a more handsome acknowledgment; but Boswell seems to
have been unaware of Mrs. Boscawen’s connection with the whole transaction.
Mrs. Boscawen cannot be serious in what she writes of Johnson’s ignorance of
her. A conversation with Johnson, in which she took part, is described in the Life
(4. 98).
[285] Roberts’s Memoirs of More 1. 129.
[286] Ib. 1. 179.

[287] Ib. 1. 192.
[288] Roberts’s Memoirs of More 1. 190.
[289] Mrs. Boscawen was the subject of more than one literary tribute before
this. Young’s dreary ode, Resignation, was addressed to her, on the death of
Admiral Boscawen; Mrs. Montagu had taken the widow to the ancient poet for
consolation. In this poem she is bidden to ‘go forth a moral Amazon, armed with
undaunted thought.’ Perhaps the last of these poetical tributes was a sonnet (from
which a selection is here printed for the first time), by Pye when poet laureate.
Writing of her villa at Richmond, once the home of Thomson, the poet Pye says:
Still Fancy’s Train your verdant Paths shall trace,
Tho’ closed her fav’rite Votary’s dulcet lay;
Each wonted Haunt their footsteps still shall grace,
Still Genius thro’ your green Retreats shall stray;
For, from the Scene Boscawen loves to grace,
Th’ Attendant Muse shall ne’er be long away.
Brit. Mus. Add. MS. 27578.
[290] Mrs. Boscawen chose Opie to paint the portrait, though the subject, she
writes (Roberts’s Memoirs of More 2. 35), ‘is worthy of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s
superior skill; but I can command Opie, and make him alter, or even refaire if we
do not like it.’ In her reply, Miss More stated that nothing could overcome her
natural repugnance to having her portrait taken, but Mrs. Boscawen’s wishes
which are to her ‘such indisputable commands.’ The portrait, which was hung in
Mrs. Boscawen’s dining-room, became so popular that both Walpole and Mrs.
Walsingham wished copies of it.

[291] Anne Dillingham Ord (d. 1808) was the widow of William Ord (d. 1766),
who had been High Sheriff of Northumberland in 1747. She is often spoken of as
‘Mrs. Ord of Queen Anne Street.’
[292] Notably Doran, Lady of the Last Century, p. 264, and the New English
Dictionary, under ‘Bluestocking.’
[293] Letters 2. 146; cf. 149.

[294] Hannah More and Fanny Burney, e.g. Rev. Montagu Pennington (Carter’s
Letters to Montagu 3. 199 n.) speaks of her as one ‘of whom too much good can
hardly be said, and of whom the editor believes it would be impossible to say
any ill.’
[295] Early Diary of Frances Burney 2. 138.
[296] See p. 139.
[297] Not invariably, however, for Hannah More once found such a crowd that
she thought herself well off to be ‘wedged in with Mr. Smelt, Langton, Ramsay,
and Johnson.’ Roberts’s Memoirs 1. 174; 1780.
[298] Ib. 1. 274; 7 March 1783.
[299] Ib. 1. 317; 1784.
[300] Diary of Madame D’Arblay 2. 378.

[301] She once mustered the whole tribe of blues that Fanny might show her old
friends that a sojourn at Court had not made her forget them. On this occasion
the gathering was exceptionally brilliant, and included Mrs. Montagu, Mrs.
Carter, Mrs. Boscawen, Mrs. Chapone, Mrs. Garrick, Reynolds, Langton, and
Horace Walpole. At this assembly Miss Burney says that she shall be ‘proud to
show everybody the just first place she [Mrs. Ord] holds with me, among all that
set.’ Diary of Madame D’Arblay 3. 357 (3 January 1788).
[302] Diary of Madame D’Arblay 5. 33; 1791.

[303] Ib. 5. 68.
[304] Correspondence of Mrs. Delany 5. 12 n.
[305] Roberts’s Memoirs of More 1. 285 and 1. 92.
[306] Correspondence of Mrs. Delany 4. 283; 1770.

[307] Ib. 4. 489; 30 December 1772.
[308] Ib. 5. 374.
[309] Diary of Madame D’Arblay 2. 364.

[310] A newspaper announced that ‘Miss Burney, the sprightly writer of the
elegant novel Evelina, is now domesticated with Mrs. Thrale, in the same
manner that Miss More is with Mrs. Garrick, and Mrs. Carter with Mrs.
Montagu.’ Diary of Madame D’Arblay 1. 492; May 1781.
[311] Roberts’s Memoirs of More 2. 100.
[312] The phrase is from Bas Bleu.

[313] See Lounsbury’s Shakespeare and Voltaire, New York, 1902.
[314] See Walpole’s Letters 11. 67.
[315] See Lounsbury, op. cit.
[316] Life 2. 88. As late as 1787, she was thus described in the Epilogue to
Thomas Holcroft’s play, Seduction:
Say, shall not we, with conscious pride proclaim
A female critic raised—ev’n Shakespear’s Fame!
Towards the end of the century the fame of the book declined. Mrs. Montagu
was anonymously attacked by Mathias in his Pursuits of Literature (1794). In
speaking of commentators on Shakespeare he says (p. 37):
Nor can I pass Lycisca Montagu,
Her yelp though feeble, and her sandals blue.
[317] Mrs. Montagu and her Friends, chapter 2.
[318] Essay, p. 19.
[319] Ib. p. 18.
[320] Ib. p. 150.

[321] Essay, p. 161.
[322] Ib. p. 153.
[323] Ib. p. 156.
[324] Letters to Mrs. Montagu 3. 251 and 224.

[325] Higginson.
[326] ‘The Temple Classics’ and ‘Everyman’s Library.’
[327] Life 1. 123.
[328] Johnsonian Miscellanies 2. 11.

[329] Numbers 44 and 100. They were reprinted in the editions of her collected
poems.

[330] Young praised her in his poem Resignation (Part 2). Like Eve, Mrs. Carter
and Mrs. Montagu have ‘caused a fall—A fall of fame in man.’ He institutes a
comparison with Addison. But Lord Lyttelton is even bolder: Carter’s singing
reminds him at times of the angels singing over Bethlehem and at times of
Sappho,
‘Greece shall no more
Of Lesbian Sappho boast.... For the sacred head
Of Britain’s poetess the Virtues twine
A nobler wreath.’
—On reading Miss Carter’s Poems in Manuscript. Mr. Smelt told Fanny Burney
that he considered Mrs. Carter’s Ode the best in the language. Diary 4. 222.
[331] Poems on Several Subjects, 3d edition, 1776, p. 94, ‘To Mrs. Vesey.’

[332] Letters to Mrs. Montagu 3. 224.
[333] Ib. 3. 180.
[334] Ib. 2. 292.
[335] Series of Letters 3. 288.

[336] Letters to Mrs. Montagu 1. 313.
[337] Ib. 3. 276.
[338] Ib. 3. 110.
[339] Series of Letters 4. 112.

[340] Dedication to the Letters.
[341] Correspondence of Mrs. Delany 5. 93; 14 January 1775.
[342] Ib. 5. 55, 309.
[343] Posthumous Works of Mrs. Chapone 1. 163.

[344] Her letters to Pepys, printed by Mrs. Gaussen, in A Later Pepys, are not so
interesting. There is a charming note to Fanny Burney in the Diary 5. 50.
[345] Roberts’s Memoirs of Hannah More 1. 47.
[346] Ib. 1. 60.

[347] Roberts’s Memoirs of More 1. 63.
[348] Ib. 1. 64.
[349] See above, pp. 147 ff.; 175.
[350] Notably the Inflexible Captive, based on the story of Regulus.
[351] Act III.

[352] Roberts’s Memoirs of More 1. 140.
[353] Ib. See above, p. 155.

[354] Roberts 1. 130.
[355] Letters 10. 166-67; 11 December 1777.
[356] Diary of Madame D’Arblay 1. 148 (1778).
[357] The ‘sacred’ dramas, Moses in the Bulrushes, David and Goliath,
Belshazzar, and Daniel, escaped the contamination of the stage.
[358] Roberts 2. 153.
[359] Ib. 1. 191.
[360] Roberts 2. 111.

[361] Ib. 2. 415.
[362] Roberts’s Memoirs of More 1. 62.
[363] See ‘Advice to the Herald.’
[364] Forbes’s Life of Beattie 1. 195; letter to Gregory, 13 March 1771.

[365] Ib.
[366] M. Forbes’s Beattie and his Friends, p. 66.
[367] Ib. p. 68.
[368] Forbes’s Life of Beattie 1. 255; May 1773.

[369] Ib. 1. 260. Extract from Beattie’s Diary; 21 May 1773.
[370] Correspondence of Mrs. Delany 4. 516; 13 June 1773.
[371] M. Forbes, op. cit. 78. In this matter Johnson’s view happened to coincide
with hers (ib. p. 90).
[372] Ib. p. 75.
[373] Ib. pp. 95-6.
[374] Essays, Edinburgh 1776.
[375] M. Forbes, p. 120.

[376] Beattie, always nervous about his Scotticisms, was flutteringly pleased,
and some time later repaid her with this astounding piece of flattery: ‘My models
of English are Addison and those who write like Addison, particularly yourself,
Madam, and Lord Lyttelton. We may be allowed to imitate what we cannot hope
to equal.’ Forbes’s Life 2. 115; 30 January 1783.

[377] Forbes’s Life 2. 132 and M. Forbes, op. cit. p. 110.
[378] Arbuthnot. Forbes’s Life 1. 203 and n.

[379] He wrote that he had ‘been making some progress in a little work of which
you saw a sketch at Sandelford, and which you did me the honour to read and
approve of. It was your approbation and that of the Bishop of Chester and Sir
William Forbes that determined me to revise, correct, and enlarge it, with a view
to publication.’ Forbes 2. 164.
[380] See Forbes’s Beattie 2. 41.
[381] Literary Anecdotes of E. H. Barker, London 1852.
[382] Inquiry into some Passages in Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the Poets,
particularly his Observations on Lyric Poetry and the Odes of Gray. London
1783.
[383] Letters 13. 5.
[384] Cowper’s Letters, edited by Thomas Wright, 3. 267.

[385] Cowper’s Letters, edited by Thomas Wright, 3. 306; 21 August 1788; cf. 3.
266; 267; 277.
[386] In March he wrote to Mrs. Throckmorton, ‘The two first books of my Iliad
have been submitted to the inspection and scrutiny of a great critic of your sex, at
the instance of my cousin, as you may suppose. The lady is mistress of more
tongues than a few (it is to be hoped she is single) and particularly she is mistress
of the Greek.’ Letters 3. 444; 21 March 1790. The book was published in July
1791.

[387] Letters 3. 439; 8 March 1790.
[388] See the accompanying illustration.
[389] Barry’s Series of Engravings in the ... Society of Arts, London 1808.
[390] Walpole’s Letters 4. 319; 8 November 1759.

[391] Ib. 11. 410; 3 March 1781.
[392] In his edition of the Diary of Madame D’Arblay.
[393] See Melville’s Life of Sterne 1. 289 ff. and Climenson’s Letters of Mrs.
Montagu 2. 270 ff.

[394] Correspondence of David Garrick 2. 189; 3 November 1776.
[395] Diary 1. 126.
[396] Correspondence of David Garrick 1. 388 ff.

[397] A Later Pepys 2. 283.
[398] Posthumous Works of Mrs. Chapone 1. 151.
[399] Roberts’s Memoirs of More 1. 363; 1784.
[400] Correspondence of Mrs. Delany 6. 209; 22 January 1784.
[401] Letters 13. 214; 13 November 1784.
[402] Letters 13. 432; 22 December 1786.

[403] Wraxall’s Historical Memoirs 1. 115.
[404] Roberts’s Memoirs of More 2. 225; April 1790.
[405] Gibbon’s Miscellaneous Works 1. 163; journal for May 1763.
[406] Private Letters of Gibbon 1. 31; 25 March 1763.

[407] See above, p. 123. As early as 1769, Mrs. Carter had long regretted that he
had left ‘the tranquil pleasures of select society for the turbulent schemes of
ambition.’ Letters to Mrs. Montagu 2. 23.
[408] Miss Burney was well aware of the difference here noted. In talking with
Wyndham of Johnson’s life at Streatham, she gave ‘a little history of his way of
life there,—his good humour, his sport, his kindness, his sociability, and all the
many excellent qualities that, in the world at large, were by so many means
obscured.’ Diary 3. 477.

[409] ‘Cette littérature devait briller des le dix-septième siècle, puisque dès lors
se forme et se propage en France l’esprit de société.... Avant cet âge, en France
du moins, les salons n’existent pas.’ P. de Julleville’s Histoire de la Littérature
Française 5. 600.
[410] Letters, ed. Bradshaw, 1. 55.
[411] Memoirs of Sir James Mackintosh 2. 172.
[412] Diary of Madame D’Arblay 2. 266.
[413] Roberts’s Memoirs of More 2. 26; cf. Walpole’s Letters 14. 65 et passim.

[414] Letters 7. 9-10.
[415] Ib. 5. 87.
[416] Ib. 6. 356.
[417] Madame Necker asserted that he was ‘as like Madame de Sévigné as two
peas.’ Letters 10. 80. Horace Mann had noticed the similarity many years before.
Ib. 2. 410.
[418] Letters 7. 137; 13 October 1767.

[419] Boswell’s Life 4. 102.
[420] Letters 8. 427; 23 February 1774.

[421] These letters he prepared for the press after they had been returned to him
by Mann. In August 1784 he wrote: ‘I have been counting how many letters I
have written to you since I landed in England in 1741: they amount—
astonishing!—to above eight hundred; and we have not met in three-and-forty
years! A correspondence of near half a century is, I suppose, not to be paralleled
in the annals of the post office!’ Letters 13. 182.
[422] In sending to Mason the letters which Gray had written to him, Walpole
wrote: ‘I need not say that there are several things you will find it necessary to
omit.... It is much better to give them [the public] nothing, than what they do not
comprehend and which they consequently misunderstand, because they will
think they comprehend, and which, therefore, must mistake. I do not know
whether it is not best that good writings should appear very late, for they who by
being nearest in time are nearest to understanding them, are also nearest to
misapprehending.’ Letters 8. 202; 19 September 1772.
[423] Letters 8. 376; 8 December 1773.
[424] Letters 9. 308; 21 December 1775.

[425] Roberts’s Memoirs of More 1. 51; cf. 1. 235.
[426] Lettres à Walpole 1. 591; 4 July 1769.
[427] Letters, ed. Thomas, 2. 257; 20 July 1754.
[428] ‘J’aurais bien du plaisir de pouvoir lire vos lettres avec quelqu’un qui en
sentirait le mérite et avec qui j’en pourrais rire.’ Lettres à Walpole 1. 9; 21 April
1766.
[429] Letters 7. 195; 15 June 1768.

[430] Roberts’s Memoirs of More 1. 253; 1782.
[431] 4. 288.

[432] Diary 3. 181.
[433] Diary 4. 471 ff.; 4 June 1791.
[434] Diary, 19 November 1783.
[435] Life 3. 155.
[436] Forbes’s Life of Beattie 2. 175; 15 November 1785.
[437] Letters 8. 443; 17 April 1774.
[438] May 1786.
[439] Bozzy and Piozzi, or the British Biographers, A Town Eclogue, 1786.
[440] This caricature is too unseemly to admit of reproduction here.
[441] Letters 13. 379; 30 April 1786.
[442] Remarks on the Journal of a Tour ... in a Letter to James Boswell, Esq. By
‘Verax.’ 1785.

[443] Cf. Walpole’s remarks about the Life, Letters 14. 438; 26 May 1791.
[444] Diary 3. 219; 26 February 1787.
[445] Life of Beattie 2. 182; 9 January 1786.
[446] Roberts’s Memoirs of More 1. 403; 1785.

[447] Forbes’s Life of Beattie 2. 178.
[448] It has been reserved for Mr. Percy Fitzgerald to revive the old charges
against Boswell and to discover new ones, which he has set forth with a
virulence that would be inexcusable in any one who had not a preposterous
theory to defend.
[449] A Later Pepys 2. 260; 24 October 1785.
[450] Journal, p. 307.
[451] Ib. p. 383.

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