The salon and English letters

by Chauncey Brewster Tinker

The pupil had thus outrun his master, and had indeed become the master. In the earlier decades of the century, Voltaire and Montesquieu had gone to England to enjoy the privilege of thought: in the later decades Englishmen visited Paris for a precisely similar purpose. From the middle of the century until the outbreak of war in 1778, Englishmen could discover in the conversations of the salons what a nation, always radical at heart, had made of the theories of free thought, liberty, and equality before the law, which they had, through Voltaire and Montesquieu, derived long since from England. English authors were received with a cordiality and a deference which had never been shown them in their own country. They found in Paris a social system conducted in honour of authors and of the philosophies which they were disseminating. It was the salon, the forcing-bed of the new ideas.

CHAPTER II
Origin and Characteristics of the Salon

The one unfailing characteristic of the salon, in all ages and in all countries, is the dominant position which it gives to woman. It is woman who creates the peculiar atmosphere and the peculiar influence of salons; it is she, with her instinct for society and for literature, who is most likely to succeed in the attempt to fuse two ideals of life apparently opposed, the social and the literary. The salon is not a mere drawing-room and not a lonely study, but mediates between the promiscuous chatter of the one and the remote silence of the other. The aims of the salon are well shown by the ridicule of those enemies who accuse the hostess of attempting to transform a school of pedants and hacks into a group of courtiers. The social world is likely to laugh at the salon because it suggests the lecture-hall, and scholars sneer at it because it pretends to the distinction of a literary court.

The first salons were indeed courts—the courts of the Italian Renaissance. We find in the Parisian salons of later centuries the disjecta membra of this earlier Italian society, whose true relationship is understood only when we trace them back to this remote original. In the light of that Italian dawn, all leaps into a consistent scheme. Much that seems odd and unrelated in salon life is brought into perspective: the authoritative position of the scholar, the unique influence of woman, and the tendency to set up ‘Platonic’ relations between the sexes. Humanism, Platonism, and gallantry were aspects of the Renaissance and of the Italian Court, and in their lesser manifestations as learning, philosophism, and ‘Platonic love,’ they remain characteristic of salons. Again, the courts of the fifteenth century brought into focus many movements: they carried on the mediæval system of patronage; they adopted many of the gallantries of the old ‘courts of love’; and they brought the new humanism into vital contact with society, so that the expression of serious thought was no less possible in conversation than in the study or the lecture-hall. Each of these lives on in the salon.

The Renaissance court may be studied in any one of a numerous group. We may find the ideal set forth in the group of artists and men of letters who surrounded the youthful Beatrice d’Este, patroness of Leonardo and many another; we may see it in the court of her sister, Isabella, Marchioness of Mantua; we may see it in the coterie of Caterina Cornaro, once Queen of Cyprus, and in her later days mistress of a little court[21] at Asolo. We may study it at its grandest in the somewhat earlier court of Lorenzo the Magnificent, with its conscious imitation of the Greek symposium. The court which held Politian, Pulci, Ficino the Platonist, Alberti, and, later, Michelangelo, might well have boasted itself ‘the little academe’ of Love’s Labour’s Lost. But perhaps the most useful example is the delightful court of Urbino, described by Castiglione in his Cortegiano.

If it be objected that Castiglione’s description of court life is too radiant to be quite true to fact, if it be a society fairer than any whose existence can be demonstrated, I reply that it is so much the better suited to our purpose. It is ideals that we would be at. We are spared the attempt to reconstruct them for ourselves. There is nothing to be gained by reminding ourselves that courts attracted the parasite, the flatterer, and the opportunist; it is the finer aims of the men of genius and of the noble women who patronized them that will reward our attention. Castiglione knew these aims, and we cannot do better than quote his words as they were given to Elizabethan England in Hoby’s beautiful translation.[22] The first quotation refers to Frederick, first Duke of Urbino:

This man emong his other deedes praisworthy, in the hard and sharpe situation of Urbin buylt a Palaice, to the opinion of many men, the fayrest that was to be founde in all Italy, and so fornished it with everye necessary implement belonging thereto, that it appeared not a palaice, but a Citye in fourme of a palaice, and that not onlye with ordinarie matters, as Silver plate, hanginges for chambers of verye riche cloth of golde, of silke and other like, but also for sightlynesse: and to decke it out withall, placed there a wonderous number of auncyent ymages of marble and mettall, verye excellente peinctinges and instrumentes of musycke of all sortes, and nothinge would he have there but what was moste rare and excellent. To this with verye great charges he gathered together a great number of most excellent and rare bookes, in Greke, Latin and Hebrue, the which all he garnished wyth golde and sylver, esteaming this to be the chieffest ornament of his great palaice....

We turn now to the court of his son Guidobaldo, who carried on the traditions of his father: