The ‘mistake’ made by the ‘foreigner of distinction’ is plainly referred to in a letter from Mrs. Carter to Mrs. Montagu, in reference to the title Bas Bleu: ‘Do not you remember last winter that Madame de Montier (or some such name; she was, however, the French Ambassadress) desired somebody to introduce Monsieur—son Mari to the Bas bleu?’[218]
These explanations, which form a fairly consistent series, and which commended themselves to the bluestockings, ought to be good enough for the twentieth century. Some, however, insist on a more picturesque interpretation, probably in protest against the implication that the first bluestocking was a man. An explanation first offered in 1861 by Mr. Hayward, in the second edition of his Autobiography of Mrs. Piozzi, was given to him by a lady who said she received it from Lady Crewe in the course of a conversation held in 1816. It runs as follows:
Lady Crewe told me that her mother (Mrs. Greville), the Duchess of Portland, and Mrs. Montagu were the first who began the conversation parties in imitation of the noted one, temp. Madame de Sévigné, at Rue St. Honoré. Madame de Polignac, one of the first guests, came in blue silk stockings, then the newest fashion in Paris. Mrs. Greville and all the lady members of Mrs. Montagu’s club, adopted the mode. A foreign gentleman, after spending an evening at Mrs. Montagu’s soirée, wrote to tell a friend of the charming intellectual party who had one rule; ‘they wear blue stockings as a distinction.’
It would hardly be necessary to notice this account at all, were it not that it has been seriously presented in the Dictionary of National Biography as the correct explanation, has been cited by an anonymous writer in the Quarterly Review (January 1903), and recently repeated with full approval.[219] It must be noticed, in the first place, that Mr. Hayward himself does not accept the story, inasmuch as he banishes it to a footnote, and retains the traditional account in the body of his work. Again, the sole source of his authority is the hearsay evidence of an anonymous lady given a century after the fact. We are three stages away from the original informant, without written evidence of any kind until 1816. Moreover, the anecdote bears upon its face all the marks of a story ben trovato. Those who can think of Mrs. Montagu and her friends as genially displaying blue stockings as a sort of badge are, to say the least, but ill acquainted with certain nice prejudices of our literary ladies.
It is clear, however, that there was about this phrase that vague yet eloquent connotation which is the peculiar property of slang and in which the explanations given above are, with the exception of the last, conspicuously deficient. In no other way can the sudden popularity of the word be accounted for.[220] The tendency to play with the phrase became evident at once: ‘When will you blue-stocking yourself and come amongst us?’ wrote Walpole to Hannah More.[221] ‘You may put on your blue stockings,’ wrote Mrs. Chapone to Miss Burney,[222] ‘if you have got any boots to walk about in the mornings, I shall like you as well in them.’ The word was of course presently reduced to blue,[223] partly, no doubt, because of the associations of this colour with the salons ever since the Rambouillet days. When Fanny Burney was asked what Johnson called Mrs. Montagu, she replied, ‘“Queen,” to be sure! “Queen of the Blues!”’[224] and at court she was amused at a gentleman who was ashamed to be found ‘reading to a blue.’[225]
Two facts emerge clearly from these quotations. In the first place, we derive from Mrs. Carter’s letter a definite date for the origin of the phrase bas bleu, the winter of 1782-3. In the second place, it is obvious that this French phrase and the anecdote connected with it account in large measure for the popularity of the word bluestocking. That word had, as we have seen, existed before;[226] indeed the French lady who first used the words bas bleu was but trying to translate an English phrase already familiar to her; but it was only when that phrase assumed a kind of international significance by appearing in French form that the English public generally took up the earlier word bluestocking. From 1782 onwards the word becomes common. Moreover, it was at the same period that public attention began to be directed to the Bluestocking Club, and the date 1782 may conveniently be taken as marking its florescence.
CHAPTER VIII
The London Salon
The London salon corresponds well enough, in its external aspects, with its Parisian prototype. If we apply the fivefold analysis given in the second chapter of this work, we shall discover no essential difference in method between the two institutions. Differences in result there undoubtedly were, but the two were alike in aim. The London salon, like the Parisian, for example, depended for its influence partly on the beauty and interest of its material surroundings. Mrs. Montagu fascinated her guests with Chinese rooms, Athenian rooms, feather rooms, rooms decorated by Angelica Kauffmann, and other gorgeous apartments in her house in Hill Street and in her palace in Portman Square. Mrs. Vesey, less ambitious and more intimate, entertained her friends in a ‘blue-room’ or ‘green-room,’ and often in her little dressing-room which Mrs. Carter called ‘the unostentatious receptacle of liberal society’[227]—unostentatious, no doubt, but bizarre and successfully bizarre like everything that Mrs. Vesey touched.
Like the French hostesses, these women kept up in their assemblies a tone that was at once aristocratic and literary; they made conversation the chief entertainment of the drawing-room, and the patronage of letters their most elegant aim. Each of them attached to herself—perhaps it would be more proper to say, attached herself to—some writer, who frequently repaid her friendship with tributes in verse. These writers were, in general, women; and the friendships of the London salon are usually, though not always, feminine. They offer, therefore, as we shall see later, a notable contrast to literary friendships in Parisian salons.