The salon and English letters

by Chauncey Brewster Tinker

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
The Earlier English Salon

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.