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
English Authors in Parisian Salons
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]