CHAPTER XI
Results
The London salon did not pass away without leaving behind it serious criticisms by serious people who knew it well. Thus Wraxall, writing of Mrs. Montagu’s later assemblies, asserts that the charm departed with the death of Johnson, ‘who formed the nucleus round which all the subordinate members revolved.’[403] Miss More, in reference to the same subject, says: ‘The old little parties are not to be had in the usual style of comfort. Everything is great and vast and late and magnificent and dull.’[404] At a period much earlier than this, Gibbon made an interesting comparison between French and English society which is worthy of consideration in any attempt to judge the London salon. Writing at Paris, in May 1763, he says: ‘Là [i.e. in London] on croit vous faire plaisir en vous recevant. Ici on croit s’en faire à soi-même’;[405] and elsewhere, ‘In two months I am acquainted with more ( and more agreeable) people, than I knew in London in two years. Indeed the way of life is quite different. Much less play, more conversation, and instead of our immense routs, agreeable societies where you know and are known by almost every body you meet.’[406]
There may perhaps be something worth considering in the suggestion that the Gallic temperament lends itself more readily than the Saxon to the life and atmosphere of salons. I have already pointed out that one characteristic of that life, by which, indeed, its vitality is to be tested, is the peculiar nature of the friendships between the hostess and her author-guest. In London such relations are found, but they seem tame, cool, and unequal. Passion is unknown in them. It is inevitable that the salon, if not the literature that springs from it, should suffer from this lack; and this contention cannot be dismissed by insisting that authors are better off without such questionable friendships. For better or for worse, these made for the production of literature, and one cannot think of the great Parisian salons as existing without them.
But we must go farther. The great English authors in general not only declined to form such intimate associations in the salons, but looked on literary assemblies with something approaching contempt, if indeed they paid any attention whatever to them. The attitude of Johnson is hardly to be thought of as an exception to this statement. After his death he was loudly claimed as a member of the innermost bluestocking circle, and he was so considered by more than one contemporary. Miss More, for example, in her Bas Bleu described Johnson as generally participating in the assemblies of the bluestockings. This assertion might be quite misleading, if we did not have Boswell’s Life to correct the impression. The amount of time which Johnson spent in such assemblies is almost negligible. One smiles to think what a tornado would have burst from him, had it been hinted to him that his literary activity was in any way vitalized by women. The attitude of other authors is even clearer. Burke was admittedly a renegade from the salons.[407] Goldsmith does not appear to have had dignity or authority enough to interest the bluestockings very much. Sheridan, who might easily have shone in salons, was pre-occupied with dramatic and political affairs. Sterne, Walpole, and Gibbon knew the Parisian salon too well to have any illusions about its London offspring. Approaching the matter from the other side, it must be obvious that the salon could not win great distinction from those persons who were content to accept its favours and submit to its influence. Beattie and Hannah More, the translator of Epictetus and the translator of Sophocles, and even the author of the excellent Cecilia—these were but feeble luminaries for an institution, which, if it is to win recognition at all, must shine with a splendour that is piercing.
Even when all this has been taken into account, the real question is still to ask. Why did not English authors more generally seek the inspiration and assistance of this institution? The salon was not without a certain power: it was generous; it had influence with publishers and with booksellers; it could bring authors into pleasant and profitable contact with one another. But despite all this, the bluestockings never became, like their French models, true disseminators of ideas; they were never the devotees of new and daring philosophies and of radical transitions. They were always on the side of law and order, and of a conservative tradition. They stood for the classicism of English literature. Now no temper could have been more unfortunate than this at the moment when the bluestockings sought to exert their influence. The things which they represented were already passing away, and with the things that were coming to birth they felt no profound sympathy. They did, it is true, show a certain interest in romanticism, and Mrs. Vesey scandalized her sisters by getting interested in agnosticism; but the true significance of these things they never guessed. None of them glimpsed that dawn in which to be alive was bliss. They were apart from the whole current of European literature. At the moment when poets were hearkening to the voices of new gods, the bluestockings were prolonging faint echoes of conservatism; at the moment when poetry was deserting the metropolis and schools of literature were shattering into individualism, they cast their influence on the side of a yet closer centralization. English literature was about to find its true exponents in two men who were about as far removed from the influence of salons as can well be imagined, the shy recluse of Olney, and the passionate poet of the Lowlands.
Thus the salon, judged by classical models, must be said to have failed. It was born out of its due time. Had the position of woman in the English literary world permitted it to flower fifty years earlier, there might have been a different story to tell. As it is, we must be content to study it as an interesting attempt to domesticate a foreign institution and as a revelation of certain significant features in English literary life. Conceived in its strictest sense, it is difficult to claim for the salon more than this.
But there is a freer sense in which the whole movement may be conceived. We may turn our eyes from the bluestockings and their somewhat tiresome assemblies to consider the broader manifestations of the social instinct. The age which we are studying is unique in English literature as having struck out or brought to perfection types of literature which exist solely to record and celebrate the social life. That body of work is perhaps its most significant, and certainly its most characteristic, contribution to English literature. It is no idle speculation that sees in it the working of the same spirit which tried to express itself in the salon. Full expression was reserved for this spirit in simpler forms of social life, and out of these rose a body of literature worthy to represent it. To this truer manifestation of the social spirit in letters we now address our attention.