The salon and English letters

by Chauncey Brewster Tinker

In many other respects Mrs. Thrale showed that she was capable of fulfilling the more important functions of a literary hostess. It was she who attempted to direct the genius of Fanny Burney towards the theatre, prevailing upon her to write a comedy. It is true that the resulting play, The Witlings, was not thought by Dr. Burney a fit successor to Evelina, and was accordingly destroyed; but in the absence of any proof to the contrary and in view of the influence which Mrs. Thrale could bring to bear in the theatrical world through Murphy and others, it is difficult to see why her advice to the young writer was not sound. Sheridan, than whom there was no better judge, gave similar counsel.

Finally, when, after her marriage and departure from England, as Mrs. Piozzi, she printed her Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, the value of what she had to tell and her vivacity in telling it enabled her to triumph over a slipshod style and an inaccurate method, and to establish, once for all, her reputation in the literary world, a reputation which the bluestockings were foolish enough to think she had lost for ever.

There is no need here to discuss the anomalies of Mrs. Thrale’s character. They have been dwelt on unnecessarily and fruitlessly. She had no illusions about her friends, and least of all about her own importance. She looked out on the world in which she moved, shrewdly and, on the whole, sanely. She knew how to make people happy and how to put the Great at their ease. ‘Mrs. Thrale,’ says Mr. Seccombe, ‘moved among them serene, lively, “a pretty woman still,” an exorciser of melancholy, the cheeriest of hostesses, quite unconscious of erudition, gaily spontaneous, the queen of Streatham. Her wayward naturalness made her seem a rose among hot-house flowers. Her innate brightness enabled her, as has been said, to romp with learning and to play blind man’s buff with the sages.’ In the somewhat stifling atmosphere of salons such a personality is of the very highest worth.

CHAPTER IX
Bluestockings as Authors

Much mischief to the cause of criticism is wrought by the specialists. Investigators in the underworld of forgotten books, to which scholarly competition too frequently drives them, often become so accustomed to the darkness about them that they mistake a glimmer for the glorious light of the upper world, and hasten to inform an inattentive public that the dim by-ways and dark corners of the realm of dead authors are by no means lacking in brilliancy. But such assertions serve rather to darken counsel than to illuminate the world. Enthusiasm for a subject sometimes coexists with a state of delusion about it. It ought to be possible to discover that a forgotten book is readable without trying to convince the public that an acquaintance with it is indispensable to all who pretend to culture.

The works of the bluestockings have all long since sunk into this oblivion. The benevolent reader of them has the feeling which Dante experienced so strongly when he met in hell the souls who had once been famous in a brighter world. These books seem to appeal to the reader to reëstablish something of their former fame, even though this, in its turn, prove to be but transitory. Who now reads Montagu? To many the question itself will be unintelligible; or will be taken to refer to another; yet in 1770 all the world was reading her. It is hardly too much to say that as a critic she was esteemed almost as highly as Johnson himself. She was known as the woman who had dared to challenge comparison with Lucian, as the defender and even as the ‘patroness’ of Shakespeare; she was an Eve in the world of critics, an armed Athena who had set her foot on the head of the serpent Voltaire.

Mrs. Montagu’s career as a writer began with the composition of three dialogues which were added to Lord Lyttelton’s Dialogues of the Dead when they appeared in 1760. The works were anonymous; but the news that they were by Mrs. Montagu was soon spread abroad. Many had no doubt inferred her authorship already from the enthusiastic words in which the noble lord spoke of her: ‘I shall think,’ he says, ‘the Public owes me a great Obligation for having excited a Genius so capable of uniting Delight with Instruction, and giving to Knowledge and Virtue those Graces which the Wit of the Age has too often employed all its skill to bestow upon Folly and Vice.’ The public did not disappoint the peer. Five editions were called for before 1768.

Mrs. Montagu’s dialogues might easily be dismissed by saying that they do not reach the level of Lyttelton’s. But if it be required to detect grades of value in work so uniformly flat, we may say that the dialogue between Mercury and a Modern Fine Lady is the best, as that between Hercules and Cadmus is the worst. They are all well called Dialogues of the Dead, for despite all their inflation, they never once betray any semblance of vitality. Of characterization they are wholly innocent, but not of profundity. Cadmus, for example, gives utterance to this: ‘The genuine glory, the proper distinction of the rational Species, arises from the perfection of the mental powers. Courage is apt to be fierce, and Strength is often exerted in acts of Oppression. But Wisdom is the Associate of Justice; It assists her to form equal Laws, to pursue right measures, to correct power, protect weakness, and to unite individuals in a common Interest and general Welfare.’ It is amazing the amount of such platitudinizing which the eighteenth century consumed with relish. It is one of the marvels of that marvellous era. The style derived its popularity in part from Johnson, who himself achieved a bare victory over its deadliness by the vivacity of his intellect.