On a somewhat lower social plane the notorious Mrs. Aphra Behn carried on the traditions of the matchless Orinda. Like her, Mrs. Behn had her coterie which she celebrated in conventional lyrics. In the poem entitled Our Cabal, the various members are described under pastoral pseudonyms, Alexis, Damon, Amoret, and the like. It is impossible to identify the persons referred to, but it is unlikely that any of them attained to literary fame. Gallantry, coquetry, and the whole paraphernalia of the amatory art formed the exclusive business of the coterie. With the world of letters it had little to do. Thus it touches the salon upon its least important side. But Mrs. Behn, or ‘Astræa,’ as her friends rashly called her, developed another side by emulating the practice of Mlle. Scudéry, and weaving certain of her own adventures—for she had had many—into the body of her novels. This practice of colouring the events of an interminable romance with personal allusions and allegorical meanings was one of the principal results of salon activity in Paris during the later seventeenth century; but it is not characteristic of the salon at its finest and was, so far as English literature was concerned, but a fad which had no future at all. Moreover Mrs. Behn’s romances lack what is best in the type, that courtliness which can alone redeem such works from artificiality and dulness. It is true that Mrs. Behn escapes dulness, but she does not achieve courtliness. Thus she misses the very point at which such work may come under the influence of fine society. As it is, far from serving the cause of literature by attracting authors to the urbanities of life, her scandalous novels brought both their author and her profession into disrepute. Her unique achievement was to show that a woman could make her living by her pen. Her career brought her inevitably into touch and even into competition with male authors, and her easy manners enabled her to associate on terms of pleasant familiarity with Dryden and Otway; but all this is suggestive rather of the camaraderie of the modern literary world than of the atmosphere of salons.
Meanwhile Hortense, Duchess of Mazarin, and niece of the Cardinal of that name, had set up in London a genuine French salon. It owes its somewhat exotic fame entirely to the Chevalier de Saint Évremond who wrote of its mistress in language of the most riotous hyperbole. Some of the best-known pages of this amorous old wit were produced in honour of the fair French refugee at the court of Charles II. He wrote poems to her; he wrote a ‘portrait’ of her, in which her charms are analysed in such detail as almost to indicate a state of dotage in him; to satisfy a whim of hers he wrote a Funeral Oration for her while she was yet alive that she might see her praises set forth in the manner of Bossuet. He wrote a discourse on religion to embody the thoughts which she had drawn out during a conversation in her salon. In a letter to her, which accompanied the essay, he asserts that she has given the lie to the old statement that truth must be banished from ordinary conversation, for she can make truth so attractive as to reconcile all minds to it and restore it to its proper place in the world.[163] But all this is a mere speck in the avalanche of flattery. Her conversation, he assures her elsewhere,[164] surpasses Plutarch in gravity, Seneca in sententiousness, and Montaigne in depth.
But the philosophic goddess and her withered prophet were not always happy together. The Duchess was overfond of bassette, a game in which Saint Évremond indulged chiefly to please her, lamenting the loss of her conversation the while, and addressing poetical protests to her. The passion for gaming, which threatened to become a profession or a fury with her, is less revolting than the amours in which the lady (more beautiful than Helen or Cleopatra[165]) involved herself. The fascination of the Merry Monarch and the death of a favourite lover after a duel fought with an infatuated nephew, bring her love-affairs out of the Platonic atmosphere, so essential to salons, into the realm of ugly realism.
The salon Mazarin, which came to an end with the death of the Duchess in 1699, thus tended to associate the literary hostess with vice as well as with letters. As Mrs. Behn had degraded the name of woman in the world of hack-writers, so the Duchess of Mazarin degraded it in the drawing-room. Her salon represented a vicious and a foreign institution, which, though it gained a foothold at Court, was quite without influence upon English life and literature.
With the death of the Duchess of Mazarin we reach the end of the seventeenth century and the end of anything like a salon in England until the time of the bluestockings. The results of the feminist movement at the close of that century[166] are seen in two distinct yet definitely related facts. In the first place, a large number of women were encouraged, by the success of Mrs. Behn, to attempt the production of literature, and the female author and wit became a current subject of satire. With all this we have here nothing to do. Women like Catherine Trotter, Mary Pix, and Mrs. Manley, far from promoting the social recognition of literature, tended to deflect the influence of woman from the drawing-room to the noise and strife of Grub Street. The satire that was poured out on them and their kind as learned women must not be taken to point to the existence of anything like a salon, strictly considered. Terms borrowed from French literature were freely flung about; but references to ruelles and femmes savantes were so loosely used that they are not to be thought of having the same significance when repeated by English authors that they have in their own country.
In the second place, and largely as a result of the opinion in which such female wits were held, we find a mass of tracts, consisting of Defences of, Apologies for, and Serious Proposals to Women, all working towards a vindication of the sex. Such vindications frequently strike the reader as having been written to prove the very charges which they exist to rebut. In any case, this flood of feeble defences seems to show that woman had forgotten her high office as inspirer and patron of letters, which she had hitherto always taken for granted, and had decided to occupy herself with vague questions of equality and natural capacity. We have moved far from the spacious times of the Countess of Pembroke.
In the age of Anne, English women lost what was probably the best chance they ever had to reëstablish the feminine patronage of letters which distinguished the age of Elizabeth. The tone of urbanity which characterized the literature of the early eighteenth century ought to have given birth to salons. The presence of a Stuart queen upon the throne and the supremacy of a school of authors by no means averse from social pleasures, offered a unique opportunity to women to give social expression to their interest in literature and to inspire and assist authors. But the opportunity was lost. Feminine activity in the literary world continued to be associated with notorious names, with the scurrilous New Atlantis of Mary Manley, and with the loose career of Mrs. Centlivre. Women authors were already Bohemians. ‘In the female world,’ says Johnson in his Life of Addison, ‘any acquaintance with books was distinguished only to be censured.’