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: