The first English salons, broadly so termed, appear in the age of Elizabeth. A tradition of the social patronage of letters was then established which had a short though brilliant history and which might, under favourable conditions, have become of permanent importance to the literature. It could not, however, survive the period of the Civil Wars and the Commonwealth; and thus the earlier English salon, despite its promising beginning, goes from less to less until it disappears altogether about 1700. The later salon had no connection with it; indeed the eighteenth century seems to have been quite unaware of its existence. The earlier institution was perhaps more national in character; it was certainly more vital, and it will therefore be profitable to sketch its history, if only for purposes of contrast. This earlier movement must be carefully distinguished from the larger subject of woman’s place in English literature, from her contribution to and her growing interest in it; above all, it must be distinguished from the history of English femmes savantes. Such a larger subject there is, but I have no intention of treating it here. My purpose is merely to point out those social and literary institutions set up by English women which correspond in a general way with the salons as described in the second and third chapters of this work.
The Elizabethan prototype of the salon is even closer to the Renaissance courts than the French salons themselves. The greatest of the Elizabethan patronesses, the Countess of Pembroke, was, even in her own day, compared with Elizabeth Gonzaga,[150] and her house at Wilton, which contemporaries refer to as a ‘college’ or ‘school,’ was like nothing so much as the little academe that we have seen to be characteristic of Italy. Although the most distinguished female writer of her age, the Countess of Pembroke was, and is, better known for her coterie than for her writings. ‘She was,’ says Aubrey, ‘the greatest patronesse of wit and learning of any lady of her time.’[151] Spenser hailed her (in true salon style) as Urania, and Meres compared her to Octavia, Virgil’s patroness. Like her brother, she was enthusiastic for the classical tradition, and used her influence with Kyd and Daniel to keep Senecan tragedy alive. The dedication to Daniel’s Defence of Ryme implies that the book was produced under her immediate inspiration. The author refers to Wilton as his ‘best schoole,’ in the same tone in which Spenser acknowledges himself ‘bounden’ to it ‘by many singular favours and great graces.’ Miss Young, the recent biographer of the Countess, who proclaims her ‘in the very best sense of the word a bluestocking,’ marshals a list of twenty works dedicated to her, and the list might be almost indefinitely extended by adding to it the passages in Elizabethan poetry written in her praise. To neglect the latter would be to pass over some of the most typical utterances of Edmund Spenser.
Thus Elizabethan England saw the salon at its finest. With the ideal of courtly society numerous translations of the Italian classics had already made it familiar. There is evidence of the ideal everywhere in Shakespeare’s romantic comedies. The preciosity of the court of Navarre and the whole tone of Love’s Labour’s Lost, the badinage of Benedick and Beatrice, the poetic dialogue of Lorenzo and Jessica in praise of the night, and even the mingling of the courtly and the pastoral in the life of Arden Forest—these are all near to the spirit of the Renaissance court and the society with which we are dealing. The company of gallant men and gracious women idealized in Shakespeare’s comedies might well have served as the model of the salon, had the seventeenth century fostered the development of anything so courtly.
Hardly less distinguished is the group of men who surrounded Lucy, Countess of Bedford. Her house at Twickenham Park, famous for its Holbeins and its garden, she loved to fill with men of genius. Ben Jonson, Chapman, Davies, Drayton, and Daniel were all proud to call themselves her friend, and almost every one of them dedicated to her some work of permanent value in English literature. Jonson addressed to her a poetical epistle and three characteristic epigrams. His language, though pompous, is probably sincere:
The Countess was the recipient of more great verse than the entire group of bluestockings. Daniel, who celebrated her in the Vision of the Twelve Goddesses, has been called her poet laureate, and there would be no reason for rejecting the title if it did not more properly belong to John Donne. Not only did that poet write Twicknam Garden in her honour, and address her repeatedly in verse epistles which praise her beauty, virtue, and learning in terms of the most affectionate extravagance, but, says Mr. Gosse, owed to her the very revival of interest in his art.[153] Donne’s letters seem to show that he submitted poems to the judgment of the Countess; for she was herself a poet, and is thought to have written one of the elegies commonly attributed to Donne.[154] Certain it is that at her house he enjoyed the very type of society which, a century later, made the fame of salons. He always speaks of Lady Bedford with the same gratitude and awe which may be found in Castiglione’s praise of the Duchess of Urbino; he accepted the same sort of pecuniary assistance from her that Frenchmen received from Madame Geoffrin. Nay, more, he goes to her in her garden that he may, at eye and ear,
He writes to Sir Henry Goodyer:
For her delight (since she descends to them) I had reserved not only all the verses I should make, but all the thoughts of women’s worthiness.
He is concerned not to be lightly esteemed ‘in that Tribe and that house’ where he has lived.[156]
In all respects, therefore, the Countess’s coterie would seem to stand just half-way between court and salon—if it is necessary to distinguish the two terms at all. If it is urged that we have no evidence of the stimulus wrought by conversation in the group, it may be answered that even this lack is apparent only and is due simply to the meagreness of contemporary records.
Similarly slender is our knowledge of other women whom we ought in all probability to associate with the two just discussed: Lady Rutland, Lady Wroth, and the Countess of Huntington, women who felt a keen interest in poets and in the welfare of poetry. As it is, the death of Lady Bedford in 1627 must be taken as marking the end of the Elizabethan system of feminine patronage.
With the accession of Charles I and the supremacy of French social ideals in the person of Queen Henrietta Maria, a change comes over the salon. A new side of it is developed, and an older side is forgotten. What had been a court of patronage became a court of love. The system of Platonic love, which is a characteristic mark of salons at various periods, comes to the fore. It had existed in the earlier salons, as Donne’s Petrarchan devotion to the Countess of Bedford is sufficient to show; but the new order of things made it the centre of all. This shift of emphasis was a loss to the salon, for literature—or rather poetry—became a tool in the process of courtship rather than an end in itself; and the mistress accepted poetical conceits and extravagant lyrics as evidence of worship from her ‘servants’ in love. Thus the whole system of courtly love was introduced hot from France, and the subtleties and silliness of the précieuses galantes were seen in England.[157] The type of the new salon mistress is the Countess Carlisle, a Percy by birth, the favourite of Henrietta Maria, and the idol of the court. She received poetical tributes of the conventional kind from half the poets of the era, and the story of her gallantries—to give them no harsher name—is a part of the history of England.
Intrigue is the natural result of gallantry such as this, and intrigue lasted long after the original Platonic impetus was spent. Intrigue naturally tends away from social life: Platonic emotions make excellent subjects for discussion, but intrigue is impatient of talk. Any one who will compare Cartwright’s Panegyric to the Countess of Carlisle with Suckling’s Lady Carlisle Walking in Hampton Court Garden may see how readily Platonic ecstasies sank into the filth of the mire. The two poems measure the extremes of courtly verse, and define its nature. It ranges, as Mr. Fletcher has said, ‘all the way from exalted mysticism through mere gallantry, to mocking cynicism.’ Although these moods all flourished in the foreign salons of various periods, they never became in England the peculiar attributes of salon life as distinct from mere social customs. They passed on to the salons of the Restoration little more than a general tradition of Platonic and pastoral mannerism and a handful of classical pseudonyms useful to the conventionally amorous.
When with the Restoration the feminine influence on the current of literature emerges once more, it is again changed in aspect—like everything else. So far as the destinies of the English salon are concerned, the Restoration marks no real advance. If there is not an actual loss of ground, there is at least a change of direction. Women now become aspirants to an independent literary reputation. The groups which literary women formed about themselves never quite suggest the atmosphere of the salon, for their aims seldom give evidence of a desire to approach literature from the social side.[158] It was no longer the ambition of woman to rule the world of letters from above or from beyond as a sort of Muse by whose aid and in whose honour all was to be done, but to enter that world herself and there to claim equality with man. It was again only a shift of emphasis, but it was sufficient to destroy the social aspect of the salon. A salon is not a school of professionals.
It seems strange that the Parisian salon should not have been imported bodily by the returning courtiers. A French salon was for a time conducted at court, as we shall see; but it was not brought there through English influence, and always remained a foreign growth, not even adopting the English language. English literary women, despite the presence of this model, seem to have been incapable of creating anything more than a circle of friends, cordially interested in their literary ambitions, but hardly considering the coterie the highest social expression of the literary life.
The nearest approach to salon life in this period is the coterie formed by the ‘matchless Orinda,’ Mrs. Katherine Philips. This amiable young woman, with a gift for versifying and a truly social instinct, achieved no slight reputation in her own day. At Cardigan Priory, her Welsh estate, she conducted something very like a salon. ‘She instituted,’ says Mr. Gosse,[159] ‘a Society of Friendship to which male and female members were admitted, and in which poetry, religion and the human heart were to form the subjects of discussion.’ Here is the salon spirit and a reliance on conversation as the truest inspiration to social life—a thing which we shall not encounter again till the days of the bluestockings. Orinda adopted the prevalent custom of giving literary names to her friends, indulged in Platonic friendships of the most florid kind, praised her female friends in verse, and despatched glowing sentiments to them in letters:
I gasp for you with an impatience that is not to be imagined by any soul wound up to a less concern in friendship than yours is, and therefore I cannot hope to make others sensible of my vast desires to enjoy you.[160]
Whatever interest Mrs. Philips’s works may possess must be shared with this group, with ‘Rosania,’ ‘Lucasia,’ ‘Poliarchus,’ and the rest, for to them a large proportion of her writing was directly addressed. It is to be regretted that we are not more fully informed regarding the relations of certain eminent men with the coterie. The general interest felt by the Royalist poets in her career has been taken to point to a personal connection with her, but it is doubtful whether the relations of such men as Dryden, Cowley, and Denham with her were anything more than formally courteous. To them she was a new phenomenon in the literary world, a female author, a prodigy that attracted attention but did not threaten rivalry—a woman and therefore to be flattered, a poetess and therefore to be called a tenth Muse. Cowley, who equates her with Pope Joan, is almost comic in his praise:
But this is elegy, not burlesque.
With Jeremy Taylor, ‘Palæmon,’ the case is different. In 1657 he put forth a duodecimo volume entitled A Discourse of the Nature, Offices and Measures of Friendship, which, the title-page announces, was ‘written in answer to a Letter from the most ingenious and vertuous M. K. P.’ Orinda had written to Taylor, with whom she must have been already on terms of intimacy, to inquire ‘how far a dear and perfect friendship is authorized by the principles of Christianity.’ The answer is a wholly delightful essay which was widely popular in the seventeenth century and deserves to be more generally known to-day. Taylor praises Mrs. Philips as ‘not only greatly instructed by the direct notices of things, but also by great experience in the matter of which you now inquire.’ He concludes that it is not ill that she should ‘entertain brave friendships and worthy societies’; but takes occasion to warn her against the fantastic Platonism of the salon:[162]
They that build castles in the aire, and look upon friendship, as upon a fine Romance, a thing that pleases the fancy, but is good for nothing else will doe well when they are asleep, or when they come to Elysium; and for ought I know in the mean time may be as much in love with Mandana in the Grand Cyrus, as with the Countess of Exeter; and by dreaming of perfect and abstracted friendships, make them so immaterial that they perish in the handling and become good for nothing.
In the postscript to Mrs. Philips, she is requested to forward the essay to Dr. Wedderburn, if she ‘shall think it fit that these pass further’ than her own ‘eye and closet.’ Such was Taylor’s trust in Orinda; such his tribute to her.
It must be admitted that Orinda’s relations with the authors of her time are little short of remarkable. Her name is written across some of the most characteristic poetry of the age. When she was but twenty, commendatory verses by her were prefixed to the Poems of Vaughan the Silurist. Before the end of her short life—she died in 1664, soon after her thirty-fourth birthday—she had even attracted the notice of Dryden. Her contemporaries appear to have been serious in their belief that she had made herself a permanent place in English literature, and for many years after her death kept her fame alive by publishing her plays, poems, and letters, in which she was invariably described as ‘celebrated,’ ‘matchless,’ and ‘incomparable.’ Her coterie made but little impression on the literature of its time; but that may well have been due to its short career. Mrs. Philips possessed a refinement of taste and of character by no means common among the literary ladies of the time, and a noble though highly sentimental affection for her friends. These are characteristics which, had she lived, she might have made of practical advantage to the world of letters.
On a somewhat lower social plane the notorious Mrs. Aphra Behn carried on the traditions of the matchless Orinda. Like her, Mrs. Behn had her coterie which she celebrated in conventional lyrics. In the poem entitled Our Cabal, the various members are described under pastoral pseudonyms, Alexis, Damon, Amoret, and the like. It is impossible to identify the persons referred to, but it is unlikely that any of them attained to literary fame. Gallantry, coquetry, and the whole paraphernalia of the amatory art formed the exclusive business of the coterie. With the world of letters it had little to do. Thus it touches the salon upon its least important side. But Mrs. Behn, or ‘Astræa,’ as her friends rashly called her, developed another side by emulating the practice of Mlle. Scudéry, and weaving certain of her own adventures—for she had had many—into the body of her novels. This practice of colouring the events of an interminable romance with personal allusions and allegorical meanings was one of the principal results of salon activity in Paris during the later seventeenth century; but it is not characteristic of the salon at its finest and was, so far as English literature was concerned, but a fad which had no future at all. Moreover Mrs. Behn’s romances lack what is best in the type, that courtliness which can alone redeem such works from artificiality and dulness. It is true that Mrs. Behn escapes dulness, but she does not achieve courtliness. Thus she misses the very point at which such work may come under the influence of fine society. As it is, far from serving the cause of literature by attracting authors to the urbanities of life, her scandalous novels brought both their author and her profession into disrepute. Her unique achievement was to show that a woman could make her living by her pen. Her career brought her inevitably into touch and even into competition with male authors, and her easy manners enabled her to associate on terms of pleasant familiarity with Dryden and Otway; but all this is suggestive rather of the camaraderie of the modern literary world than of the atmosphere of salons.
Meanwhile Hortense, Duchess of Mazarin, and niece of the Cardinal of that name, had set up in London a genuine French salon. It owes its somewhat exotic fame entirely to the Chevalier de Saint Évremond who wrote of its mistress in language of the most riotous hyperbole. Some of the best-known pages of this amorous old wit were produced in honour of the fair French refugee at the court of Charles II. He wrote poems to her; he wrote a ‘portrait’ of her, in which her charms are analysed in such detail as almost to indicate a state of dotage in him; to satisfy a whim of hers he wrote a Funeral Oration for her while she was yet alive that she might see her praises set forth in the manner of Bossuet. He wrote a discourse on religion to embody the thoughts which she had drawn out during a conversation in her salon. In a letter to her, which accompanied the essay, he asserts that she has given the lie to the old statement that truth must be banished from ordinary conversation, for she can make truth so attractive as to reconcile all minds to it and restore it to its proper place in the world.[163] But all this is a mere speck in the avalanche of flattery. Her conversation, he assures her elsewhere,[164] surpasses Plutarch in gravity, Seneca in sententiousness, and Montaigne in depth.
But the philosophic goddess and her withered prophet were not always happy together. The Duchess was overfond of bassette, a game in which Saint Évremond indulged chiefly to please her, lamenting the loss of her conversation the while, and addressing poetical protests to her. The passion for gaming, which threatened to become a profession or a fury with her, is less revolting than the amours in which the lady (more beautiful than Helen or Cleopatra[165]) involved herself. The fascination of the Merry Monarch and the death of a favourite lover after a duel fought with an infatuated nephew, bring her love-affairs out of the Platonic atmosphere, so essential to salons, into the realm of ugly realism.
The salon Mazarin, which came to an end with the death of the Duchess in 1699, thus tended to associate the literary hostess with vice as well as with letters. As Mrs. Behn had degraded the name of woman in the world of hack-writers, so the Duchess of Mazarin degraded it in the drawing-room. Her salon represented a vicious and a foreign institution, which, though it gained a foothold at Court, was quite without influence upon English life and literature.
With the death of the Duchess of Mazarin we reach the end of the seventeenth century and the end of anything like a salon in England until the time of the bluestockings. The results of the feminist movement at the close of that century[166] are seen in two distinct yet definitely related facts. In the first place, a large number of women were encouraged, by the success of Mrs. Behn, to attempt the production of literature, and the female author and wit became a current subject of satire. With all this we have here nothing to do. Women like Catherine Trotter, Mary Pix, and Mrs. Manley, far from promoting the social recognition of literature, tended to deflect the influence of woman from the drawing-room to the noise and strife of Grub Street. The satire that was poured out on them and their kind as learned women must not be taken to point to the existence of anything like a salon, strictly considered. Terms borrowed from French literature were freely flung about; but references to ruelles and femmes savantes were so loosely used that they are not to be thought of having the same significance when repeated by English authors that they have in their own country.
In the second place, and largely as a result of the opinion in which such female wits were held, we find a mass of tracts, consisting of Defences of, Apologies for, and Serious Proposals to Women, all working towards a vindication of the sex. Such vindications frequently strike the reader as having been written to prove the very charges which they exist to rebut. In any case, this flood of feeble defences seems to show that woman had forgotten her high office as inspirer and patron of letters, which she had hitherto always taken for granted, and had decided to occupy herself with vague questions of equality and natural capacity. We have moved far from the spacious times of the Countess of Pembroke.
In the age of Anne, English women lost what was probably the best chance they ever had to reëstablish the feminine patronage of letters which distinguished the age of Elizabeth. The tone of urbanity which characterized the literature of the early eighteenth century ought to have given birth to salons. The presence of a Stuart queen upon the throne and the supremacy of a school of authors by no means averse from social pleasures, offered a unique opportunity to women to give social expression to their interest in literature and to inspire and assist authors. But the opportunity was lost. Feminine activity in the literary world continued to be associated with notorious names, with the scurrilous New Atlantis of Mary Manley, and with the loose career of Mrs. Centlivre. Women authors were already Bohemians. ‘In the female world,’ says Johnson in his Life of Addison, ‘any acquaintance with books was distinguished only to be censured.’
This pronouncement of Johnson’s is of that large general nature which is likely to give offence to specialists. A multitude of exceptions to it will occur at once to any one. The Duchess of Queensbury, for example, patronized Gay; Dean Swift was not uninfluenced by the women who surrounded him; Pope addressed verse-epistles to Martha Blount; later in the century, Young satirized the literary female, and Richardson had his group of adoring ‘Daughters.’ But none of these really changes the significance of Johnson’s summary. When he referred to the censure visited upon literary women he may well have been thinking of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whose acquaintance with the authors of her time was wider than that ever possessed by the bluestockings. But though the noble lady had genuine interest in letters and very remarkable powers, she was wholly without that courtly character which is indispensable to the hostess of a salon. She repelled men as much by her insolent cleverness as by her slovenly manners. Finally her long residence abroad withdrew her completely from the literary circle which she knew so well.
It was the work of the middle decades of the eighteenth century to remove the odium in which women’s interest in literature had been held. The world of female readers became almost as large and influential as that of the male, so that by 1778 Johnson could remark, ‘All our ladies read now.’ The Bluestocking Club, which marks the first definite reappearance of the salon in London, shows the desire of woman to extend her function in the literary world so as to include in it the office of patron, as well as that of author and reader. But this new patronage was to be primarily social, and was to express itself first in various social diversions, which preluded the more formal salons, and to which we now proceed.