The salon and English letters

by Chauncey Brewster Tinker

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.’