LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

The Conversazione[Frontispiece]
FACING PAGE
The Levee[102]
Hannah More[157]
Johnson pointing out Mrs. Montagu as a Patron of the Arts[199]
Samuel Johnson[217]
Boswell the Journalist[268]
Boswell Haunted by the Ghost of Johnson[277]

PART I
THE FRENCH BACKGROUND


CHAPTER I
Introduction

It is one of the venerable commonplaces of criticism that ‘manners,’ as distinct from romance and the idealistic interpretation of life, make the bulk of eighteenth century literature. Comment has often begun and more often ended with this platitude. But that large body of work vaguely termed ‘literature of manners’ can no more be dismissed with a truism than can the life that it depicts, but demands a critical method as varied as the matter which is treated. In so far as this prevailing interest of the century manifested itself in belles lettres, in novel, drama, satire, and descriptive verse, it offers no unusual problem to the literary historian; but side by side with such types we have forms no less characteristic of the age, but much less susceptible of adequate criticism: intimate biography, autobiography, memoirs, diaries, and familiar correspondence. These must of necessity be rather summarily passed over by the literary historian as not exclusively belletristic in appeal. And below these, in turn, there are certain expressions of the social spirit so anomalous that they can at most detain the critic but a moment, and must often be dismissed with no consideration at all. Among these, intangible and evanescent by nature, yet of the first importance in bringing certain kinds of literature to birth, are conversation, the salon, the authors’ club, and in general those forms of social activity which exist to stimulate the production or diffuse the appreciation of literature. These, which are in themselves no more literature than are painting and politics, come at times so close to it that dividing lines are blurred. A mere record of conversation, such as gives the pages of Boswell’s Johnson or Fanny Burney’s Diary their unique value, brings us to a borderland between society and letters where a distinction between them is merely formal. What is a critic to do with works which hardly sue for recognition as literature (though the world has so acclaimed them), but avowedly exist to record the delights of social intercourse? To treat them as ‘mere literature,’ neglecting the social life in which they sprang up and to which they are a tribute, is, to say the least, inadequate.

It is with this borderland, this territory where literature and society meet in mutual respect, and presumably to their mutual advantage, that I propose to deal in this volume. I shall trace as well as I can the attempt made in England between 1760 and 1790 to emulate the literary world of Paris by bringing men of letters and men of the world into closer relations, and by making the things of the mind an avocation of the drawing-room; and thereafter I shall endeavour to show the results of this movement as they appear in the improved artistry of three or four types of writing.

So long as letters and society retained this intimate relation and men and manners were deemed the all-sufficient study of poets, it was natural that authors should gather in the metropolis. The city was to them ‘the true scene for a man of letters’; ‘the fountain of intelligence and pleasure,’ the place for ‘splendid society,’ and the place where ‘a man stored his mind better than anywhere else.’[1] When the old ideal of letters was displaced by a wider and perhaps nobler, the supremacy of the metropolis as a literary centre fell with it; but in the Age of Johnson London was still the land of promise, at once a workshop and a club, a discipline and an opportunity. ‘A great city is, to be sure,’ said Johnson, ‘the school for studying life.’ Johnson, Goldsmith, Burke, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Sheridan, Beattie, Chatterton, Crabbe, Boswell, and many another went up thither, as their predecessors for generations had done, to seek their literary fortune or to enjoy their new-established fame.