Chauncey Brewster Tinker

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Johnson and the Art of Conversation
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. ”

“ 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 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”