The salon and English letters

by Chauncey Brewster Tinker

The authors’ clubs, hardly less popular than in the days of Anne, indicate an even closer centralization. A theory of literature squarely based on reason and the tradition of the classics produced a solidarity of sentiment among men of letters which was of great use in making their aims intelligible to society at large. Books were not meant to be caviare to the general. Poets did not strive to be nebulous. The ever growing democracy of readers honoured what it felt that it understood. King, Church, women of society, women of no society, painters, actors, and universities joined in paying respect to a literature that had not yet shattered into the confusion of individualism. The world of letters was, in a word, still a kingdom.

As in Paris, an alliance could, accordingly, be effected. The salon was the natural outgrowth of the intelligent interest of the reading world; it exhibited the same community of sentiment in readers that we have noticed in writers, and writers accordingly honoured it. In London, as in Paris, it became possible to find the men of light and leading gathered in a few places of favourite resort, in drawing-room or club. ‘I will venture to say,’ remarked Johnson[2] to a group of friends, ‘there is more learning and science within the circumference of ten miles from where we now sit than in all the rest of the Kingdom;’ and once, when the boasting fit was on him, he asserted that the company sitting with him round the table was superior to any that could be got together even in Paris.

It was no mean ideal of society that was held by groups such as these. Mere repartee, a display of rhetorical agility, was not its principal aim. The desire to be sound mingled with the desire to be clever, and produced that wisdom which the eighteenth century loved to call wit. Wit was aphoristically pretentious to truth. It was of course important to talk in the mondaine manner, but the mondaine ideal was to talk sense. There was a general willingness to give and to receive information in the ordinary social relations of life. Never to ‘diffuse information,’ to have ‘nothing conclusive’ in one’s talk, was to fail. Johnson once contended that Goldsmith was not ‘a social man’: ‘he never exchanged mind with you.’[3] Burke’s conversation, on the other hand, delighted him because it was the ebullition of a full mind.[4] ‘The man who talks to unburthen his mind is the man to delight you,’ said he.[5] Cheerful familiarity was not the social ideal: true sociability was a communion of minds. Madame du Deffand summed up her criticism of a dinner at Madame Necker’s in the words, ‘I learned nothing there.’[6]

It was to an ideal thus frankly educational that the salon and the club responded. The passion for such society was like that which many serious souls to-day feel for the society of a university. To breathe the air of it was to grow in the grace of wisdom. In such an idealization of the social life, we may find the explanation of many so-called ‘deficiencies’ of the age, its indifference to Nature (whatever that may mean), its preference for city life, its common sense, its dread of the romantic and the imaginary, and of all that seems to repudiate the intellectual life and its social expression.

Such was the delight in society felt by Hannah More and Fanny Burney in their younger days. Such was Boswell’s delight. The greatness of the latter, so ridiculously aspersed, reposes entirely upon his realization of the importance of the social instinct. Boswell was not merely a social ‘climber.’ He was a man who had the sense to see a short-cut to education. To call him toad and tuft-hunter may be an ingenious display of one’s vituperative gifts, but evinces a surprising ignorance of the fact that a man may educate himself by living contact with great minds.

It would be a simple explanation of all this respect for the salon and its discussions to observe that England was now enjoying an age of free speech. It is even simpler to point out that there was much discussion because there was much to discuss. There were problems confronting the public which were no less important than novel. This is all true, but somewhat lacking in subtlety. The peculiar adaptability of these problems to conversation was due to the fact that they were, in general, still problems of a remote and idealistic kind. They did not yet demand instant solution, for better or for worse. Exception must of course be made of questions purely political, but the rest of them—the theory of equality and the republican form of government, the development of machinery, the education of the masses, humanitarianism, the problem of the dormant, self-satisfied, aristocratic Church, romanticism, and the whole swarm of theories popularized by Rousseau—had been stated and widely discussed, but they had not yet shaken society to its foundations. They were still largely theoretical. Men’s thoughts were engaged, and their tongues were busy, but their hearts were not yet failing them for fear.

We may cite as a significant example the position of the lower classes. There had been as yet no serious disturbance of what Boswell loved to call ‘the grand scheme of subordination.’ Now Boswell was no fool. He was, in truth, singularly broad-minded; yet in such a matter as this his notions hardly rose above a benevolent feudalism. Despite his interest in Rousseau, despite his sympathy with Corsica and with America, he could record with bland approval Johnson’s denunciation[7] of a young lady who had married with ‘her inferior in rank,’ and the Great Moralist’s wish that such dereliction ‘should be punished, so as to deter others from the same perversion.’ Democracy could be little more than a theory to Johnson when he asserted[8] that ‘if he were a gentleman of landed property he would turn out all his tenants who did not vote for the candidate whom he supported,’ contending that ‘the law does not mean that the privilege of voting should be independent of old family interest.’ Again, when he explained to Mrs. Macaulay ‘the absurdity of the levelling doctrine’ by requesting her footman to sit down and dine with them,[9] he conceived of himself as smashing a delusion with a single blow. Such ‘levelling’ notions being, for the moment, doctrinaire, might no doubt be put down by a sally of wit. With the fall of the Bastille they took on a different aspect.

Nor was the case widely different with writers less passionately conservative than Johnson. Horace Walpole had a dim perception that the trend of affairs was destructive of the old order, but he never suspected that the theories discussed in the salons were to have immediate practical results. His attitude is well shown by his account of certain Parisian savants who talked scepticism in the presence of their lacqueys. ‘The conversation,’ he writes, ‘was much more unrestrained, even on the Old Testament, than I would suffer at my own table in England, if a single footman was present.’[10] Walpole was certainly no ardent defender of the orthodox faith, but sceptic as he was, he was not ready to meet all the issues involved in the spread of the doctrine. Religion, it seems, will still do very well for menials.

Even Hume and Gibbon, the darlings of the Parisian salon, conceived of the problems they themselves had helped to raise as largely speculative. Gibbon, for example, plumes himself on having vanquished the Abbé Mably in a discussion of the republican form of government[11]—and this but a few years before the foundation of the two great republics of modern times. The irony of his triumph must, presently, have been clear to him, for on September 9, 1789, he wrote to Sheffield: ‘What a scene is France! While the assembly is voting abstract propositions, Paris is an independent republic.’ In the previous August he had expressed his amazement ‘at the French Revolution.’ We may perhaps reserve a portion of our amazement for the historian who had failed to realize that the theories with which he had been long familiar in the salons would one day cease to be mere matters of discussion.

This failure of English authors to come into full sympathy with the French doctrines of the hour is the more remarkable because Frenchmen had long regarded England as the home of reason and of liberty.[12] Indeed France had turned to England for that ‘freedom of thought’ denied to herself; but having adopted it, she had pushed it to extremes of which her teachers, conservative at heart, could never have conceived. D’Alembert, than whom the salons contained no more splendid figure, acknowledged in his Essay on Men of Letters that it was the works of English authors which had communicated to Frenchmen their precious liberty of thought.[13] So common is the praise of England that he now feels compelled to protest against the further progress of Anglicism.[14] But in vain. The decades passed by with no diminution of the respect for England. In 1763 Gibbon[15] still found English opinions, fashions, and games popular in Paris, every Englishman treated as patriot and philosopher, and the very name of England ‘clarum et venerabile gentibus.’ In the next year Voltaire, who had done so much by judicious praise and injudicious blame to spread the knowledge of English literature and philosophy, addressed to the Gazette Littéraire a letter[16] containing a defence of the current Anglomania. In this he laughed at those who thought it a ‘crime’ to study, observe, and philosophize as do the English. A year later, Saurin’s play, l’Anglomanie,[17] had appeared, and though its success on the stage was not great, Walpole thought it worth while to send Lady Hervey a copy of it as an example of a reigning fad. The leading character, Éraste, who affects a preference for Hogarth to all other painters, who quotes Locke and Newton, and drinks tea for breakfast, sums up his views in these verses: