The salon and English letters

by Chauncey Brewster Tinker

But Johnson’s conversation is more than a reductio ad principia, as it is more than epigram and more than information. Philosophic in method, it was creative in effect. It fertilized other minds, and attained to new life long after it was uttered and forgotten. Johnson cannot be measured by one who reads only his writings, but he can be measured by one who reads only his conversation. Thus his work is linked with that of men who have accomplished more by the spoken word than by the written thought, so that, on the one hand, it has its place in the history of table-talk, like that of Selden and Coleridge, and, on the other, typifies the relation of society and letters at its best. By the dynamic force of his conversation Johnson developed men, he woke in them powers of which they did not know themselves to be possessed, and raised them to higher levels of attainment than his own. Men listened to him with rage or with wonder, as the Hebrews to a prophet and the Romans to a Sibyl, and they scoffed or recorded according to their mood. Of much of this Johnson was, fortunately, unconscious. He regarded his books as his chief influence upon the world. ‘Now, Sir,’ said he, ‘the good I can do by my conversation bears the same relation to the good I can do by my writings that the practice of a physician retired to a small country town, does to his practice in a great city.’ But Boswell saw more clearly. ‘To me,’ he said, ‘his conversation seemed more remarkable than even his writings.’ When, in 1776, Boswell returned to Johnson’s side, he felt at once the electric force. ‘I felt myself elevated as if brought into another state of being,’ he wrote; and said to Mrs. Thrale, ‘I am quite restored by him, by transfusion of mind.’ The cynical will of course dismiss this as a spasm of hero-worship; but it is more than that. No one will be inclined to accuse Edmund Burke of worshipping Johnson, yet he remarked: ‘To the conversation of this truly great man I am proud to acknowledge that I owe the best part of my education.’ Orme the historian remarked that in conversation Johnson gave one either ‘new thoughts or a new colouring.’ Testimony of an even more striking character may be quoted from Reynolds. Speaking of his own Discourses on Art, Reynolds said:

Whatever merit they have must be imputed, in a great measure, to the education which I may be said to have had under Dr. Johnson. I do not mean to say, though it would certainly be to the credit of these Discourses if I could say it with truth, that he contributed even a single sentiment to them: but he qualified my mind to think justly.... The observations which he made on poetry, on life, and on everything about us, I applied to our art.

Those who heard the conversation of Johnson may be said to have witnessed literature in the making. At any rate, Johnson’s talk became literature by the simple fact of being recorded. It is the best example that can be given of the fusion of the literary life with the social, and brought to bear the same kind of influence which the salons were trying to exert. It was destined to give Johnson his distinctive place in the literature. It was regarded, and properly, by Boswell as constituting the peculiar value of his Life of Johnson, and as it was the chief inspiration, so it remains the chief attraction of that remarkable book.

CHAPTER XIII
Walpole and the Art of Familiar Correspondence

The golden age of English letter-writing arrived without a period of long and painful preparation. With the more rudimentary correspondence of the seventeenth century, the new art had but the slightest relations, appearing in full bloom almost as soon as it appeared at all. There was of course much in England to encourage it. It is significant, for example, that the era of letter-writing was coincident with the production of large numbers of novels in letter-form, which made the art the vehicle of a new realism, and thus helped to spread the popularity of both types at once. Again, the era was also that of the development of the salons and of the art of conversation, a coincidence which is duplicated in the literary history of France.[409] Letter-writing, considered as a familiar art—and we have no concern with its other aspects—is but written conversation, a sort of tête-à-tête, with the talking, for the moment, all one side. It is dominated by a smiling intimacy, and it is this note which one feels to be a new thing in the correspondence of the eighteenth century, a note which is heard but seldom in the letters of an earlier period. The models of the new style were, in fact, not English. When Chesterfield was choosing exemplars for his son, he took no account of English letter-writers; he cites Cicero and Cardinal d’Ossat as models for serious correspondence, and then adds: ‘For gay and amusing letters, for enjouement and badinage, there are none that equal Comte Bussy’s and Madame Sévigné’s. They are so natural that they seem to be the extempore conversation of two people of wit rather than letters. I would advise you to let that book be one of your itinerant library.’[410] The regard for Madame de Sévigné was well-nigh universal. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who probably found her too womanly, is almost alone in her dislike. Thomas Gray has been said to imitate her.[411] Fanny Burney, who had read her from the days of her youth, considered her ‘almost all that can be wished to form female perfection,’ felt attached to her as though she were alive and in the same room, and longed to run into her arms.[412] Mrs. Boscawen created an almost national sensation by circulating a rumour of the discovery in France of five hundred new letters of Madame de Sévigné. All the blues were in a flutter over it. Mrs. Montagu wrote to Hannah More that the truth of the matter would be evident at once upon publication, since Madame de Sévigné’s style was ‘of all things the most inimitable.’[413] Miss More yielded to none in her admiration, and in one of her happiest phrases compares her to a ‘master sketching for his own amusement.’ But all this admiration is as nothing compared with the worship which Walpole gave the French writer. ‘My dear Madame de Sévigné,’ he calls her, ‘that divine woman,’ ‘my saint,’ and ‘Notre Dame de Livry.’ He collected relics of her with a fervour fairly religious, and enshrined them under her portrait. The cult became a jest among his friends. Madame du Deffand sent him a snuff-box, with the likeness of Madame de Sévigné painted upon it, and wrote a letter as from the lady herself to accompany the gift:

Des champs Elisées.
(Point de succession de tems; point de date.)

Je connois votre folle passion pour moi; votre enthousiasme pour mes lettres, votre vénération pour les lieux que j’ai habités: J’ai appris le culte que vous m’y avez rendu: j’en suis si pénétrée que j’ai sollicité et obtenu la permission de mes Souverains de vous venir trouver pour ne vous quitter jamais. J’abandonne sans regret ces lieux fortunés; je vous préfère à tous ses habitans: jouissez du plaisir de me voir; ne vous plaignez point que ce ne soit qu’en peinture; c’est la seule existence que puissent avoir les ombres....[414]

When people bored Walpole with talk of Shakespeare and Swift, he would set his thoughts upon Madame de Sévigné[415] as a monk takes refuge in holy meditation. ‘If she could have talked nonsense,’ he cries, ‘I should, like any other bigot, believe she was inspired.’[416]

Worshipping her thus, it is not surprising that he should have been, even in his own day, compared to her.[417] He affected to regard such praise as blasphemy; but, though he was in all probability secretly pleased, he was too great an artist in his own way not to realize that there was a difference between him and the goddess of his idolatry. It is typical of this difference that one thinks instinctively of Walpole as the ‘prince of letter-writers’ and of Madame de Sévigné as a friend. Walpole was too strongly individualist to be quite the ‘perfect medium’ that we find in the marquise. We are conscious of his cleverness, his prejudices, his distortions, his rank and snobbishness. We think of Walpole as often as we think of Walpole’s news. His art is not, however, the less perfect, but only different in method. He does not, like Madame de Sévigné, simply transmit the light, but stains and fractures it so that it glows with a confusion of colours and flashing rays. Walpole could never have attained to the pearl-like perfection of Madame de Sévigné. If we must needs deal in parallels, we shall find a much closer one between Madame de Sévigné and William Cowper. The recluse of Olney, like the Lady of Livry, had caught the secret of the unpremeditated art. Walpole—like the prince that he is—is almost never free from a sense of his rank.