Chapter XV Boswell and the Art of Intimate Biography
It is the privilege of few men in any age to raise an art to such perfection that it becomes in effect a new thing. The development of intimate biography is still largely the work of one man. After a hundred years of memorabilia, personal reminiscences, and interviews, Boswell is still as indubitably the greatest of biographers as when he referred to his book as the ‘first in the world,’ or when, fifty years later, Macaulay applied to him the language of the race-course, and pronounced, ‘Eclipse is first, and the rest nowhere.’ Later biographers do not eclipse him, nor do earlier ones explain him. A comparison of his work with what went before serves only to reveal his utter uniqueness. If an earlier biographer suggests a point of comparison in his realistic record of conversation, the slightness of his work gives no conception of the whole life he is writing; if another seems like Boswell in refusing to write a mere eulogy, he seems chill and judicial where Boswell is warm with pulsing life. Other lives give us admirable things: table-talk, a portrait, a eulogy, a handful of anecdotes, a list of dates from ‘pedigree to funeral,’ or a volume of letters; but Boswell gives us all these and more. He aspires to be as complete as life itself. Boswell knew and delighted in other biographies; but was hardly influenced by them. He knew Plutarch, Xenophon, and Valerius Maximus, among the ancients, and Jonson’s Timber, Selden’s Table-Talk, and Spence’s Anecdotes, among modern ana; but is like none of these. He surpasses them all in intimacy, variety, and what, for want of a better name, may be called his sustained quality. To read Boswell after these men is like passing to a Flemish painting from a study in black and white.
In so far as he can be said to have learned his art from any man, his master was Johnson himself. The first sentence in the Life proclaims Johnson’s superiority to all men in writing the lives of others. Biography was often discussed by the two men together, and Boswell was also well acquainted with Johnson’s published remarks on the subject. Johnson enunciated, with fair consistency, the theory of intimate biography, but he never fully realized it in any work of his. Thus he was wont to assert that autobiography was superior to biography, for the simple reason that a man might more readily reveal the facts concerning himself. If a man’s life is to be written by another than himself, it should be by one who has ‘eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.’ The material of biography, he asserts, at various times, to be ‘trifles,’ the ‘delicate features of the mind,’ the ‘minute peculiarities of conduct,’ ‘domestic privacies,’ and ‘the minute details of daily life.’ He approved of much anecdote in biography, used such incidents with a free hand in his own work, and encouraged Boswell to record them. He did not, however, anywhere fully embody his theories. It was, in truth, impossible for him to do so in the Lives of the Poets, for, with the exception of Savage, he had been on terms of real intimacy with none of these men. Had he written the life of Goldsmith, as he once thought of doing, he might, if his indolence had not prevented him, have produced such a book as would illustrate his own theories. Yet, in spite of this lack of intimacy in the Lives of the Poets, he was attacked for making them too familiar. Potter, Mrs. Montagu’s protégé, denounced his introduction of trifles into serious biography, considering it beneath the dignity of that art to mention that Pope wore three pairs of stockings to increase the size of his legs, and that he loved to feast on potted lampreys which he heated in a silver saucepan. ‘We know,’ writes the critic, ‘that the greatest men are subject to the infirmities of human nature equally with the meanest; why then are these infirmities recorded?’
This sentence may be taken to summarize the general conception of biography before Boswell. The death of a man seems to have been regarded as an opportunity for rationalizing his views and perfecting his character. The duty of a biographer was to forget all vices and to idealize all virtues, with the laudable purpose of setting before the public a notable pattern of conduct. ‘He that writes the life of another,’ wrote Johnson in the Idler, ‘endeavours to hide the man that he may produce a hero.’ Even Johnson never felt quite sure how far it was proper to describe a man’s vices in writing his biography. Boswell notes the inconsistency of his views. When the subject of the poet Parnell’s drinking arose, Johnson remarked, ‘More ill may be done by the example, than good by telling the whole truth’; but at another time he said, ‘If a man is to write A Panegyric, he may keep vices out of sight; but if he professes to write A Life, he must represent it really as it was.... It would produce an instructive caution to avoid drinking, when it was seen that even the learning and genius of Parnell could be debased by it.’435 In practice it is clear that Johnson preferred to err on the side of frankness. Potter was shocked because he revealed the avidity of Addison by repeating the now-hackneyed story of how Steele was forced to pay a debt of £100. If biography is regarded as the handmaid of morality, and eulogy is preferred to actuality, such details are of course worse than useless. Beattie dwells on ‘the due distinction between what deserves to be known and what ought to be forgotten.’436 Miss Burney considered that the publication of letters verbatim was the ‘greatest injury’ to a man’s memory. Horace Walpole, who deplored the whole policy of expurgation, nevertheless gives Mason, the biographer of Gray, the conventional advice. He avows that the publication of the life of Gray is an opportunity to establish that poet’s character ‘unimpeached.’ He was shocked at the section of the biography which Mason had submitted to his criticism, because it was honest and frank. ‘What can provoke you to be so imprudent?... You know my idea was that your work should consecrate his name.’437 Once such a theory of consecration is adopted, the author of a life is driven relentlessly towards panegyric; for, not daring to trust the public to interpret facts, he must suppress everything that is not admirable, lest the mention of even the slightest fault be taken to point to the existence of thousands that are passed over in silence. When once you have taken to varnishing, you must varnish thoroughly, for any cracks or bare spots which reveal the material beneath ruin your whole effect.
To a public with these lofty notions of propriety Boswell, genially sacrificing what little was left to him of his reputation, addressed, in 1785, his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson... ‘containing... A series of his Conversation, Literary Anecdotes and Opinions of Men and Books.’ It was a jumble of gossip such as readers had hitherto seen only in the twopenny pamphlets of the scandal-mongers of Grub Street; but was set forth with an abundance of detail which captured the most frivolous and an air of authenticity which convinced the most sceptical. It depicted a great man who had been in his grave but a few months. It was written with veneration, but wholly without awe, as though a valet had collaborated with the Recording Angel. It flouted all restraints, and passed the most distant limits of decency. Nothing like it had ever been heard of. Even in our own day, to a world whose nerves have been jaded by a thousand exposés, such a book would come as a surprise, but to the world of 1786 it was a revelation of new possibilities in literature, as alarming as they were entertaining. With all the frankness of Pepys the author combines the conscious skill of one who has mastered the art of anecdote and the joy of a conceited man who realizes that he is about to attain fame by one of the by-paths of literature. It was difficult, in 1785, to say whether Johnson’s theory of familiar biography had been realized or travestied in this book. It was obvious that he had been hoist with his own petard. The world was informed with the most scrupulous accuracy of how he said his prayers and how he was persuaded to wear a woollen night-cap. His idlest word was recorded as though in a dictograph. ‘I have often thought that if I kept a seraglio, the ladies should all wear linen gowns,—or cotton; I mean stuffs made of vegetable substances. I would have no silk; you cannot tell when it is clean,...’ and so forth. At times the book is hardly quotable. Once when about to get into a dirty bed, during their travels in the Hebrides, Boswell remarks: ‘We had much hesitation, whether to undress, or lye down with our clothes on. I said at last, “I’ll plunge in! There will be less harbour for vermin about me when I’m stripped”—Dr. Johnson said, he was like one hesitating to go into the cold bath. At last he resolved too.’ The first sensation of the reader of such amazing stuff as this is that Boswell was engaged in a deliberate attempt to degrade a great man. He was accused by a writer in the Gentleman’s Magazine438 of having ‘exposed and cut up’ his hero ‘in the most shameful and cruel manner.’ That Boswell had a kind of mischievous delight in what he was doing, no one need take the trouble to tell us; but that he was a sort of skilful blackmailer is now unthinkable. He felt that he was doing the world a service in showing that a great man was human; and time has proved that he was right. ‘There is something noble,’ Johnson had remarked to him, ‘in publishing truth, though it condemns one’s self.’ Boswell paid this price. He made Johnson permanently familiar by making himself almost permanently notorious. Witness the following extract:
Dr. Johnson went to bed soon. When one bowl of punch was finished, I rose, and was near the door, in my way up stairs to bed; but Corrichatachin said, it was the first time Col had been in his house, and he should have his bowl—and would not I join in drinking it? The heartiness of my honest landlord, and the desire of doing social honour to our very obliging conductor, induced me to sit down again. Col’s bowl was finished; and by that time we were well warmed. A third bowl was soon made, and that too was finished. We were cordial, and merry to a high degree; but of what passed I have no recollection, with any accuracy. I remember calling Corrichatachin by the familiar appellation of Corri, which his friends do. A fourth bowl was made, by which time Col, and young M’Kinnon, Corrichatachin’s son, slipped away to bed. I continued a little with Corri and Knockow; but at last I left them. It was near five in the morning when I got to bed.
Sunday, September 26.
I awaked at noon, with a severe head-ach. I was much vexed that I should have been guilty of such a riot, and afraid of a reproof from Dr. Johnson. I thought it very inconsistent with that conduct which I ought to maintain, while the companion of the Rambler. About one he came into my room, and accosted me, ‘What, drunk yet?’ His tone of voice was not that of severe upbraiding; so I was relieved a little. ‘Sir, (said I,) they kept me up.’ He answered, ‘No, you kept them up, you drunken dog:’—This he said with good-humoured English pleasantry. Soon afterwards, Corrichatachin, Col, and other friends assembled round my bed. Corri had a brandy-bottle and glass with him, and insisted I should take a dram. ‘Ay, said Dr. Johnson, fill him drunk again. Do it in the morning, that we may laugh at him all day. It is a poor thing for a fellow to get drunk at night, and sculk to bed, and let his friends have no sport.’ Finding him thus jocular, I became quite easy; and when I offered to get up, he very good naturedly said, ‘You need be in no such hurry now.’ I took my host’s advice, and drank some brandy, which I found an effectual cure for my head-ach. When I rose, I went into Dr. Johnson’s room, and taking up Mrs. M’Kinnon’s Prayer-book, I opened it at the twentieth Sunday after Trinity, in the epistle for which I read, ’And be not drunk with wine, wherein there is excess.’ Some would have taken this as a divine interposition.
Such writing as this at once divided the reading public into hostile camps. There were many who considered the book delightful; others considered it a new kind of libel. It became the subject of a long controversy in the Gentleman’s Magazine. In the December following its appearance, Boswell was accused of ‘betraying private conversations even of the most trivial kind.’ In May, the tastes of a ‘gossiping age’ were denounced as well. By December 1786, the sale of the book having gone triumphantly forward, Boswell was reminded that his popularity was due solely to the general interest in Johnson; the sale of his work was compared to the consumption of potatoes in a time of famine; and the public was instructed that such works require for their composition nothing but an ear and a memory.
In the spring of the same year, soon after the appearance of Mrs. Piozzi’s Anecdotes, Walpole wrote to Mann:
She and Boswell and their hero are the joke of the public. A Dr. Wolcot, soi-disant Peter Pindar, has published a burlesque eclogue,439 in which Boswell and the signora are the interlocutors, and all the absurdest passages in the works of both are ridiculed. The print-shops teem with satiric prints on them: one, in which Boswell, as a monkey, is riding on Johnson, the bear,440 has this witty inscription, ‘My friend delineavit.’—But enough of these mountebanks!441
Other caricatures represented the ghost of Johnson haunting Boswell while he pieced together his Journal from various rags of reminiscence, and the bust of Johnson frowning down upon Boswell and Mrs. Piozzi as they wrote. Rowlandson and Collings later made the Tour the subject of a series of sixteen caricatures.
In 1786, moreover, a pamphlet appeared entitled, A Poetical Epistle from the Ghost of Dr. Johnson to his Friends, in which Boswell was satirized together with Strahan, Courtenay, and Mrs. Piozzi. The verses were elaborately annotated with quotations from the Journal, and Boswell was addressed by the manes of Johnson in these words:
How oft I mark’d thee, like a watchful cat,
List’ning to catch up all my silly chat;
How oft that chat I still more silly made,
To see it in thy commonplace conveyed.
This was the invariable charge against the book. It was a mass of small talk collected by a man with a retentive memory, ‘not to do honour to his [Johnson’s] memory, by judiciously selecting the best and most striking of his sentences, but with a design to show his own assiduity in exhibiting the Doctor in the most glaring colours of inconsistency.’442
There was a secondary charge against the book. It was conceived as a libel on living people.443 Various persons—the Duchess of Hamilton, Sir Alexander MacDonald, and many of those who had entertained the travellers in the Hebrides—discovered in the book remarks about themselves that were anything but palatable. A reference to Mrs. Thrale created the greatest excitement. Johnson’s remark that she could not get through Mrs. Montagu’s Essay on Shakespeare was there for all the world to read. She protested in her Anecdotes; but Boswell reminded her, in the pages of the Gentleman’s Magazine, that she had read his Journal in manuscript, without complaining of this, and that he was but quoting Johnson’s own words regarding her. So ended one controversy. It was not the only one.
But perhaps the chief excitement rose from the advertisement at the end of the volume, in which Boswell announced that he had but begun his memoirs of Johnson. He proposed presently to ‘erect a literary monument worthy of so great an author,’ and stated that he had been collecting biographical material for more than twenty years. The promise, for those who had known Johnson, was not gratifying. If Boswell had upset the literary world with an account of three months in Johnson’s life, what would he do in recounting seventy-five years of it? Everybody who had known Johnson held his breath for fear. Many urged the new biographer to be cautious. Fanny Burney refused to assist him in his work of showing the pleasanter side of Johnson’s character, and wrote in her Diary,444 ‘I feel sorry to be named or remembered by that biographical, anecdotical memorandummer till his book of poor Dr. Johnson’s life is finished and published.’ Sir William Forbes, who was distressed because Boswell had quoted his approval of the Journal, took the liberty of ‘strongly enjoining him’ to be more careful about personalities in the later work.445 He had perhaps never heard Boswell’s famous reply to Hannah More, who had urged him to ‘mitigate some of Johnson’s asperities’ when he published the Journal. ‘He said roughly,’ she writes, ‘“He would not cut off his claws, nor make a tiger a cat to please anybody.”’446 This remark has been hackneyed in every work on Boswell, but it can never be quoted too often, for it is Boswell’s reply to the world. There is nothing more to be said.
I have dwelt on the reception of Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides because it is the most effective way of showing the novelty and the magnitude of his achievement. If the author had been any other than James Boswell, critics would long ere this have expatiated on the splendid courage of his undertaking; but he enjoyed and esteemed his own work too highly to elicit such praise. Whatever were Boswell’s superficial faults, whatever the resentments that he caused, it is impossible to withhold our admiration from the simple confidence in the letter of the truth that characterized his Scotch soul. His would be the simplicity of childhood if it were not the simplicity of genius. The Lord Bishop of Chester complained447 that Boswell recorded facts simply because they were facts. Such was indeed the case.
When, in 1791, the Life appeared, many of the old charges were repeated and some of the old satires revived; but it is not important to consider them in detail, for the note of admiration, which had been heard now and again in the beginning, when the Journal was published, soon became dominant. The other lives and memoirs of Johnson, with which Boswell’s former work had often been compared, now served only for purposes of contrast; they were useful in illustrating the greatness of the new work.
What are the characteristics which tended to give the Life its place in the history of biography? They are of the simplest kind. Boswell had, as this entire chapter has been designed to show, a passion for completeness. It is hardly necessary to labour this point. Boswell himself writes near the opening of his book: ‘I will venture to say that he will be seen in this work more completely than any man who has yet lived.’ In this sentence Boswell wrote his own panegyric, as in his reply to Miss More he had pronounced his own defence. Like everything that he did, the panegyric is not without the ludicrous touch, for he adds: ‘Had his other friends been as diligent and ardent as I was, he might have been almost entirely preserved.’ He might, indeed; for why should anything be lost, while there is a note-book—and a Boswell? Boswell, I repeat, aspired to the completeness of life itself.
Nor is it greatly necessary to dwell on Boswell’s fidelity to fact. It has been often dwelt upon, and, through the labours of Dr. Birkbeck Hill, is now generally admitted; though by one who liked neither Boswell nor Hill the matter has recently been once more called in question.448 It would seem that a work which in its own day was both praised and denounced for its scrupulous accuracy might have been accepted without question. It is scarcely reasonable to demand a more lifelike biographer than Boswell. His own times readily granted that he had given the true Johnson; that was both the praise and the blame. Pepys, who knew Johnson and had no illusions about him, wrote to Hannah More:
The Journal is a most faithful picture of him, so faithful that I think anybody who has got a clear idea of his person and manner may know as much of him from that book as by having been acquainted with him (in the usual way) for three years.449
This was written before the Life appeared. Respecting the later work we have the testimony of Burke to its value as a monument to Johnson’s conversation.450 Even more than this may be said. We have the nearest possible thing to Johnson’s own approval. He had himself read the Journal in manuscript, and pronounced it a ‘very exact picture of a portion of his life.’ It is difficult to demand more than this. In the same work Boswell writes:
He read this day a good deal of my Journal, written in a small book with which he had supplied me, and was pleased, for he said, ‘I wish thy books were twice as big.’ He helped me fill up blanks which I had left in first writing it, when I was not quite sure of what he had said, and he corrected any mistakes that I had made.451
In his accurate reproduction of life, Boswell surpasses all the realists and attains to something of the inexhaustibility of nature itself. Delightful as is his book for mere reading, it can never be fully appreciated till it has been used as a work of reference; for such it was intended to be. The work exhibits, according to the title-page, ‘a view of literature and literary men in Great Britain for near half a century.’ Boswell aspired to be not only stenographer but historian. And to the life that he loved he was both.
We reach at last the core of Boswell’s being, his pagan joy in life, that greediness of social pleasure which explains all his faults and suggests all his greatness. He loved social life as other men have loved a noble woman or a noble cause. He solemnly dedicated his life to it and his genius to the recording of it. Only when his work is viewed in the large does one see its grandeur. Like Ulysses, he might have said, when his great work was done, ‘Much have I seen and known, cities of men and manners... myself not least but honoured of them all.’
I incline to think that this social avidity is the ruling passion not only of Boswell but of all the life that we have been studying, of the salons, the conversationists, the diarists, and the letter-writers. That life at its best blends two kinds of pleasure that seem ordinarily incompatible, those of society and solitude, of association and reflection. In the ‘exchange of mind’ which is its ideal, its disciples find a joy that excels the more passive pleasures of reading, by bringing them directly into the creation of its characteristic product, conversation, and to this it adds the pleasure of seeing the immediate effect of one’s words. Conversation such as this may be said to represent the active, social, and more human side of the intellectual life, while meditation stands for its contemplative and eremitical side. The two are often mutually exclusive. Philosopher and poet belong to the latter class, because the meditative temper naturally shuns social distractions; but diarists, letter-writers, and biographers owe their very existence to this social instinct, and write to exalt it. They cannot bear that the delights which they have experienced should pass away without leaving a memorial. They are determined not only to pluck the passing hour, but to do what they can to preserve the blossom even as it droops in their hand. A withered flower is better than none at all; at worst, it is a pathetic reminder of what has been. The memorialist is one whose face is ever towards the past and the glories that have been, the noctes cæncæque deum. It is in honour of them that his work is done. His office is to record life, not to transfigure it. He cannot aspire to be among those who have seen visions and pointed others towards them; the joy of poetic creation and the passion of adventurous thought are not for him; but it is his to know men and the cheerful ways of men, and to unite us with the heroic minds of old, not in the lonely glory of their visions, but in their more familiar hours and their more human joys.
Footnotes
1 Hume, Boswell, Burke, and Johnson are quoted in turn. The first reference is to Edinburgh, the rest to London.
2 Boswell’s Life, Hill’s edition, 2. 75.
3 Boswell’s Life 3. 253.
4 Ib., 4. 167.
5 Ib., 3. 247.
6 Lettres à Walpole 3. 338; 28 May 1777.
7 Boswell’s Life 2. 328-29.
8 Ib., 2. 340.
9 Boswell’s Life 1. 447.
10 Letters 6. 301.
11 In his Memoirs.
12 See Churton Collins’ Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau in England, London 1908.
13 Essai sur la Société des Gens de Lettres et des Grands, sur la Réputation, sur les Mécènes, et sur les Récompenses Littéraires. In his Mélanges de Littérature et de Philosophie (1753) 2. 119.
14 Ib. 2. 121. Cf. Helvétius to Hume (Letters to Hume; 28 June 1767). ‘L’attraction de la terre Britannique agit puissament sur moi.’
15 See his Memoirs.
16 Œuvres (1819-25) 43. 320; 14 November 1764. The whole passage is worth quoting: ‘Mille gens, messieurs, s’élèvent et déclament contre l’anglomanie: j’ignore ce qu’ils entendent par ce mot. S’ils veulent parler de la fureur de travestir en modes ridicules quelques usages utiles, de transformer un deshabillé commode en un vêtement malpropre, de saisir, jusqu’à des jeux nationaux, pour y mettre des grimaces à la place de la gravité, ils pourraient avoir raison; mais si, par hasard, ces déclamateurs prétendaient nous faire un crime du désir d’étudier, d’observer, de philosopher, comme les Anglais, ils auraient certainement bien tort: car, en supposant que ce désir soit déraisonable, ou même dangereux, il faudrait avoir beaucoup d’humeur pour nous l’attribuer et ne pas convenir que nous sommes à cet égard à l’abri de tout reproche.’
17 Its first published title was L’Orphéline Léguée. See also Walpole’s Letters 6. 360.
18 Correspondance, ed. Lescure, 1. 497; 14 August 1768.
19 Mélanges 2. 240.
20 Gibbon’s Miscellaneous Works 2. 178.
21 The ideal of a group of ladies and gentlemen who seek in literature the pleasantest of entertainment is of course encountered in Italian literature long before this time. The singular vitality of the scheme adopted by Boccaccio for the framework of the Decameron is proved by the numerous imitations of it. The Petrarchists, as well as Boccaccio, found favour in the eyes of the court-ladies.
22 The Book of the Courtier, from the Italian of Count Baldassare Castiglione, done into English by Sir Thomas Hoby. Edited by Professor Raleigh. London, 1900. See pp. 29 ff.
23 Spirit.
24 Figures, allegories.
25 ‘Arguments,’ discussions, such as the one that follows on the nature of the true courtier.
26 The following anecdote of a warrior who affirmed that the entertainments of the Court were beneath him, may be cited as a specimen: ‘The Gentlewoman demaundyng him, What is then your profession? He aunswered with a frowning looke: To fight. Then saide the Gentlewoman: Seing you are not nowe at the warre nor in place to fight, I woulde thinke it beste for you to bee well besmered and set up in an armorie with other implementes of warre till time wer that you should be occupied, least you waxe more rustier than you are.’ p. 49.
27 See below, p. 124.
28 Historical Memoirs 1. 14. Chesterfield, who knew the salons at first hand, writes to his son, 24 December 1750, ‘Le bon goût commença seulement à se faire jour, sous le règne, je ne dis pas de Louis Treize, mais du Cardinal de Richelieu, et fut encore épuré sous celui de Louis Quatorze.... Vers la fin du règne du Cardinal de Richelieu, et au commencement de celui de Louis Quatorze, l’Hôtel de Rambouillet était le Temple du Goût, mais d’un goût pas encore tout à fait épuré.’ Letters, ed. Bradshaw, 1. 382.
29 ‘Arthénice’ is an anagram of her name, Cathérine. It is said to have been discovered by Malherbe.
30 This, too, is Italian. Cf. Burckhardt, Renaissance in Italy, tr. Middlemore, p. 359: ‘Social intercourse in its highest and most perfect form now ignored all distinctions of caste, and was based simply on the existence of an educated class.’
31 Thus Mascarille in Les Précieuses Ridicules: ‘Vous verrez courir de ma façon, dans les belles ruelles de Paris, deux cents chansons, autant de sonnets, quatre cents épigrammes, et plus de mille madrigaux, sans compter les énigmes et les portraits.’
32 Petit de Julleville, Histoire de la Langue et de la Littérature Française 4. 105.
33 She sneered at précieuses. Lettres à Walpole 1. 417.
34 Essai sur les Gens de Lettres, etc., op. cit. 2. 136. Cf. Goldsmith, Citizen of the World, 84: ‘A writer of real merit now may... talk even to princes with all the conscious superiority of wisdom.’
35 ‘Collé regrettera toujours les cafés littéraires et ne se consolera pas de les voir déserter pour les salons.’ Petit de Julleville, Histoire de la Littérature Française, 6. 388. It was a significant moment in the history of the Literary Club in London when, about 1780, it fell into the habit of dining at Mrs. Vesey’s before its more exclusive sessions at the tavern.
36 ‘Comme son siècle, Madame du Deffand, dans son extrême viellesse, retrouva le don d’aimer et la douceur des larmes.’ Lanson, Choix de Lettres, quoted by Mrs. Toynbee in Lettres à Walpole 1. lx.
37 ‘Elle symbolise l’évolution qui, à l’époque où elle vécut, s’est opérée dans l’âme de ses contemporains, lorsque de raisonneur le siècle s’est fait passionné, de libertin sentimental.’ Ségur, Julie de Lespinasse, p. 15.
38 Letters 6. 393.
39 Ib. 6. 367; 2 December 1765.
40 Ib. 9. 252; [? September] 1775.
41 Sentimental Journey.
42 Letters 6. 352; 19 November 1765. Cf. Madame du Deffand to Walpole (Letters 1. 385; 30 January 1768): ‘Vous n’aimez pas les impiétés, vous êtes, ce me semble, un peu dévot.’
43 Letter to Gibbon, 30 September 1776; in Gibbon’s Miscellaneous Works 2. 178.
44 This function is admirably expressed by Professor Brunel in his account of Madame de Tencin (Petit de Julleville, Histoire de la Littérature Française 6. 403) ‘[Elle les ramenait] sans cesse au ton léger qui convient, même en un sujet grave. Tel est bien le rôle d’une femme au milieu de ces têtes pensantes. Elle se tient audessus et au dehors du débat, qu’elle envisage au seul point de vue d’agrément, et dont elle règle la marche, toujours souriante, sans le laisser languir ni s’aigrir.’
45 Letters 6. 414; 3 February 1766.
46 Boswell’s Life of Johnson 3. 47.
47 Madame Necker speaks of the ‘art perfectionné de l’exagération,’ in the letter to Gibbon cited above.
48 Thus Marmontel: ‘Leurs entretiens étaient une école pour moi non moins utile qu’agréable et, autant qu’il m’était possible, je profitais de leurs leçons.’
49 English visitors in Paris are satirized in two comedies by Samuel Foote, The Englishman in Paris (1753) and The Englishman returned from Paris (1757). In the former the leading character, Buck, is offered an introduction to ‘Madame de Rambouillet’; in the latter he comes home completely Frenchified.
50 Letters 6. 332; 19 October 1765.
51 Memoirs of M. de Voltaire. During Goldsmith’s sojourn on the Continent, Diderot and Fontenelle were still visitors at Madame Geoffrin’s.
52 In Petit de Julleville’s Histoire de la Littérature Française, op. cit., 6. 404, Walpole, who must have had her character from Madame du Deffand, tells Mason that she was ‘a most horrid woman’ who ‘had great parts and so little principle that she was supposed to have murdered and robbed one of her lovers, a scrape out of which Lord Harrington and another of them saved her. She had levees from eight in the morning till night, from the lowest tools to the highest.’ Letters 10. 28; 13 March 1777.
53 Works of Bolingbroke 7. 169; letter to Hanmer, December 1712 (?).
54 Ib., 7. 87; 17 October 1712. Prior to Bolingbroke.
55 Lettres Historiques de Bolingbroke (Paris 1808), 2. 431; 3 June 1715.
56 Dictionary of National Biography, ‘Saint John.’
57 See the ribald verses commencing, ‘Tencin, vous avez de l’esprit,’ printed in Lettres de Bolingbroke, op. cit., 2. 433 n. The second stanza begins, ‘Bolingbroke, es-tu possédé?’
58 Letters, edited by Bradshaw, 1. 383; 24 December 1750.
59 See his letter to Madame de Tencin, introducing Mrs. Cleland, in Letters, as above, 2. 771; 20 August 1742.
60 Letters, op. cit., 1. 383.
61 See Professor P. M. Masson’s excellent monograph, Madame de Tencin (Paris 1909), pp. 278-80. The appendix contains Madame de Tencin’s letters.
62 Cf. Montesquieu, Lettres; 12 March 1750 (in Œuvres, Paris 1879): ‘Dîtes à milord Chesterfield que rien ne me flatte tant que son approbation,’ and the rest.
63 Madame Necker, who had studied Madame Geoffrin’s methods, remarks (Nouveaux Mélanges 1. 100): ‘Le piquant de l’esprit de Madame Geoffrin consistait toujours à rendre des idées ingénieuses par des images triviales, et pour ainsi dire, de ménage; son esprit était toujours enté sur un ton bourgeois.’ The following may serve as specimens (cf. above, p. 29): ‘Madame —— a frappé à la porte de toutes les vertus sans entrer chez aucune.’ ‘Quand nos amis sont borgnes, il faut les regarder de profil.’
64 Letter in Éloges de Madame Geoffrin, ed. M. Morellet, p. 110.
65 Éloges, op. cit., p. 105.
66 Letters to Hume, pp. 288-89.
67 Letters 6. 298; 20 September 1765.
68 Correspondance Littéraire, Paris 1829, 5. 4: ‘Il est lourd, il n’a ni chaleur, ni grâce, ni agrément dans l’esprit.’
69 Lettres à Walpole 1, passim.
70 Burton’s Life of Hume 2. 168 n.
71 Letters 6, passim. Cf. Grimm, op. cit., 5. 3-4.
72 Burton’s Hume 2. 173; 9 November 1673.
73 An Englishman in Paris wrote to the Earl Marshall of Scotland, ‘L’on regarde le bonheur de l’y voir comme un des plus doux fruits de la paix.’ Letters to Hume, p. 63; 4 January 1764.
74 Burton’s Hume 2. 181.
75 Du Deffand’s Lettres à Walpole 3. 591.
76 Lettres à Walpole 1. 232; 5 March 1767, et passim.
77 See Burton’s Life of Hume; Letters addressed to Hume (1849); Private Correspondence of Hume (1820); Letters, ed. T. Murray (1841); and Exposé succinct de la Contestation... entre M. Hume et M. Rousseau (1766). The simplest narratives for the general reader are in Ségur’s Julie de Lespinasse, chapter 7, and in Collins’s Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau in England, pp. 182 ff.
78 See Garat, Mémoires Historiques 2. 158.
79 See Letters 6. 396; 12 January 1766, for the complete letter. A second letter, in the character of Émile, is printed in Madame du Deffand’s Lettres à Walpole 1. 3 n. Madame du Deffand persuaded Walpole not to let it become public.
80 See above, p. 54 n., and volume one of her Lettres à Walpole, passim.
81 Burton’s Life of Hume 2. 513.
82 Lettres à Walpole 3. 253.
83 In October (?) 1776, Mrs. Montagu wrote to Beattie: ‘As I passed a good deal of my time with the Litterati at Paris, you may imagine I heard much of the manner of Mr. Hume’s taking leave of the world. “Les Philosophes” (as they call themselves) were pleased that he supported the infidel character with so much constancy.’ M. Forbes’s Beattie and his Friends 130.
84 Letters 6. 309; 3 October 1765.
85 Ib., 6. 332.
86 Ib., 6. 358.
87 See Letters 6. 332: ‘Good folks, they have no time to laugh.’ ‘M. de Fontenelle,’ asked Madame Geoffrin one day, ‘Vous n’avez jamais ri?’ ‘Non,’ he replied, ‘je n’ai jamais fait ah, ah, ah.’ Necker, Nouveaux Mélanges 1. 165. Chesterfield’s hatred of laughter, that ‘shocking distortion of the face,’ is well-known; he boasted that he had never been seen to laugh.
88 Lettres à Walpole 1. 577; 24 May 1769.
89 Letters 6. 404; 25 January 1766.
90 Ten years later Madame du Deffand gave him a more startling illustration of French motherliness. See Letters 9. 236.
91 Cf. Professor Brunel in Petit de Julleville’s Histoire 6. 410: ‘C’est en effet la “raison” qu’on reconnaît à Madame Geoffrin pour mérite éminent.’
92 Letters 6. 395; 11 January 1766.
93 Ib., 6. 396.
94 Ib., 6. 404; 25 January 1766.
95 Montesquieu wrote her (15 June 1751): ‘Je sens qu’il n’y a pas de lectures qui puissent remplacer un quart d’heure de ces soupers qui faisaient mes délices.’ Œuvres (1879), 7. 377.
96 Letters 9. 59; 28 September 1774.
97 Ib., 6. 356; Walpole had met this Duke in Paris.
98 Montesquieu, Œuvres (1879), 7. 400; 13 September 1752. ‘Ce qui doît nous consoler, c’est que ceux qui voient clair ne sont pour celà lumineux.’
99 This description of herself ‘dans le coin d’un couvent’ she sent to Madame de Boufflers:
Dans son tonneau
On voit une vieille sibylle
Dans son tonneau.
Qui n’a sur les os que la peau,
Qui jamais ne jeûna Vigile,
Qui rarement lit l’Évangile
Dans son tonneau.
—From G. Maugras, La Marquise de Boufflers, p. 101.
100 ‘Madame du Deffand... is delicious; that is, as often as I can get her fifty years back, but she is as eager about what happens every day as I am about the last century.’ Walpole, Letters 6. 367; 2 December 1765.
101 D’Alembert called her ‘The Viper,’ and told Hume that she hated everybody, especially great men. Letters to Hume, p. 201.
102 ‘Ceux par qui on n’a pas craindre d’être assassiné, mais qui laisseraient faire les assassins.’ Montesquieu, Œuvres (1879) 7. 379.
103 Necker, Nouveaux Mélanges 1. 79: ‘Madame du Défan [sic] accusait tous les penseurs d’affectation.’
104 Lettres à Walpole 3. 319, et passim.
105 Ib. 3. 77.
106 Ib. 2. 373; cf. 3. 203. ‘Toute espèce de lecture m’ennuie.’
107 Edited by Mrs. Paget Toynbee, London, 1912. There are 838 letters.
108 Lettres à Walpole 1. 167; 14 November 1766.
109 Letters 9. 249; 8 September 1775.
110 ‘If possible she is more worth visiting than ever; and so far am I from being ashamed of coming hither at my age, that I look on myself as wiser than one of the Magi, when I travel to adore this star in the East. The star and I went to the Opera last night, and when we came from Madame de la Vallière’s, at one in the morning, it wanted to drive about the town, because it was too early to set.... You nurse a little girl of four years old, and I rake with an old woman of fourscore!’ Letters 9. 256; to Selwyn, 16 September 1775.
111 Lettres à Walpole 2. 476.
112 Ib. 2. 484.
113 Ib. 2. 479; ‘Il y a des gens ici qui l’appellent Junius.’
114 J. Morley, Burke, p. 67.
115 Lettres à Walpole 3. 589, in criticism of his Speech on the Independence of Parliament, 11 February 1780.
116 Ib. 2. 479; 481.
117 ‘Je lui donne une compagnie que j’ai tâché de lui assortir; un M. du Buc, qui est aussi un grand esprit, le Comte de Broglio, l’Évêque de Mirepoix, Madame de Cambis, les Caraman, etc.’ Lettres à Walpole 2. 479; 24 February 1773.
118 Printed in 1778.
119 By J. A. H. de Guibert, Paris 1773.
120 See Lettres à Walpole 2. 488. He had spoken of it to Walpole, and evidently preferred it to La Harpe’s tragedy—which did not please Madame du Deffand. The tragedy, which was widely known from the author’s reading of it in the salons, was acted in 1775.
121 See Bisset, Life of Burke (1798), p. 158. Morley thinks it was in Mlle. de Lespinasse’s salon that Burke met Diderot.
122 Letters 8. 252; 11 March 1773.
123 Diderot.
124 Morellet.
125 Professor Cross, however, considers them fairly reliable. Life of Sterne, p. 287.
126 D. Garat, Mémoires Historiques sur le XVIIIe Siècle 2. 136.
127 31 January 1762.
128 Letters 6. 370; 2 December 1765.
129 Cf. Cross, Life of Sterne, p. 282.
130 The rise of Julie de Lespinasse (1732-1776) to a position of first importance in Parisian society is a thrilling story. See Ségur, Julie de Lespinasse. The account of her break with Madame du Deffand whose ‘companion’ she had been, is referred to above, p. 61. Walpole (Letters 9. 59) calls her ‘a pretended bel esprit,’ and begs Conway not to allow himself to be taken to her salon, frequented by Englishmen, lest he offend Madame du Deffand.
131 Necker, Mélanges 2. 287.
132 Letters to the Count de Guibert (1809) 2. 233.
133 See Lettres de Mlle. de Lespinasse... suivies de deux chapitres dans le genre du Voyage sentimental de Sterne, par le même Auteur. Paris 1809; 3. 261.
134 The authenticity of these stories is vouched for by the first editor of Mlle. de Lespinasse’s Letters (1809), op. cit. 1. xiv, and by the author of the ‘Portrait’ in Éloges de Madame Geoffrin (1812), p. 47. Mlle. de Lespinasse read the chapters aloud in Madame Geoffrin’s salon.
135 His father had sent him to Lausanne at the age of sixteen. His first literary venture, his Essai sur l’Étude de la Littérature, was in French.
136 Lettres à Walpole 3. 342; 8 June 1777.
137 Gibbon, Miscellaneous Works 2. 247; 21 April 1781.
138 Lettres à Walpole, 3. 367; 21 September 1777.
139 Private Letters, ed. Prothero, 1. 29; 12 February 1763. Cf. Memoirs, ed. Hill, p. 153.
140 Walpole’s account of him in dispute is less flattering. ‘He coloured; all his round features squeezed themselves into sharp angles; he screwed up his button-mouth and [rapped] his snuff-box.... I well knew his vanity, even about his ridiculous face and person, but thought he had too much sense to avow it so palpably.’ Letters 11. 376; 27 January 1781. Gibbon avoided disputes with Johnson, and Boswell (Life 2. 348) assumed that he feared ‘a competition of abilities.’
141 Lettres à Walpole 3. 343, 351, and 376.
142 Private Lettres 1. 312; 16 June 1777.
143 Lettres à Walpole 3. 336.
144 Gibbon’s Miscellaneous Works 2. 178; 30 September 1776.
145 Miscellaneous Works 1. 312; 16 June 1777.
146 She wrote him in January 1777: ‘Votre entretien, Monsieur, a toujours été un grand plaisir de ma vie, car vous réunissez l’intérêt pour les petites choses, l’enthousiasme pour les grandes, l’abondance des idées, à l’attention pour celles des autres, et une légère causticité, âme de la conversation, à l’indulgence du moment, la sûreté du caractère et le courage de l’amitié.’ Gibbon, Miscellaneous Works 2. 193. Madame du Deffand applied to Gibbon’s conversation a phrase of Fontenelle’s, ‘forte de choses.’ Lettres à Walpole 3. 338; 27 May 1777.
147 ‘C’est le ton de nos beaux esprits: il n’y a que des ornements, de la parure, du clinquant, et point du fond... il a, si je ne me trompe, une grande ambition de célébrité; il brigue à force ouverte la faveur de tous nos beaux esprits.’ Lettres à Walpole 3. 357; 10 August 1777.
148 Gibbon’s Miscellaneous Works 2. 247; 21 April 1781.
149 Gibbon’s Miscellaneous Works 2. 214; 12 November 1777.
150 Nicholas Breton’s Pilgrimage to Paradise, quoted by Miss Young.
151 These and the like illustrations are drawn from Miss Frances Young’s Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, London 1912.
152 Epigram 94.
153 Life and Letters of John Donne 1. 212. Her ‘refining’ influence on Donne’s mind and judgment is particularly noted in his second Letter to the Countess of Bedford.
154 Professor Grierson attributes to her the poem beginning,
‘Death, be not proud, thy hand gave not this blow.’
See his edition of Donne’s poems, 2. cxliv.
155 Twicknam Garden.
156 Gosse 2. 79; 1651.
157 This subject is pleasantly discussed by Professor Fletcher in his Religion of Beauty in Woman, ‘Précieuses at the Court of Charles I,’ but his discussion shows how inimical was the new movement to anything like a true patronage of letters.
158 Thus there is no suggestion of the salon about such a figure as the Duchess of Newcastle.
159 Seventeenth Century Studies, p. 208.
160 To ‘Berenice,’ in Familiar Letters, London 1697; 1. 147; 30 December 1658.
161 On the Death of Mrs. Katherine Philips. In his Ode on Orinda’s Poems the lady’s descent is traced from Boadicea. Rowe, in his Epistle to Daphnis, declares that she soared as high as Corneille ‘and equalled all his fame.’ Dryden compares her with Mrs. Killigrew. Cowley may perhaps have owed more than the rest to her. The following reference to him in her letters seems to show that she had been of real service to him: ‘I am very glad of Mr. Cowley’s success, and will concern myself so much as to thank your ladyship for your endeavour in it.’ (To Berenice, Familiar Letters 1. 143; 25 June [1758?].)
162 Discourse, p. 38.
163 Works of Saint Évremond, English translation, 2d edition, London 1728; 2. 247.
164 Ib. 2. 299.
165 Her beauty was celebrated by Waller in The Triple Combat. Lely painted her portrait.
166 See Dr. Upham’s ‘English Femmes Savantes at the End of the Seventeenth Century,’ in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, April 1913. This is a fairly exhaustive treatment of the subject, and reveals a development of ‘feminism’ in England parallel in some respects with that in France. As the movement, however, reveals no attempt to centre literary activity in salons, the article must be regarded as treating a different aspect of the general subject from the one here dealt with.
167 So Madame du Deffand told Walpole. Walpole’s Letters 10. 28.
168 Guests were not necessarily received in the sleeping-room. The adjoining dressing-room was often utilized for the purpose. See Colman’s Man of Business (1774), opening of Act 2. The levee should be compared with Mme. de Rambouillet’s more intimate receptions, where a seat near the bedside, in the ruelle or lane between bed and wall, was the place of honour, as being nearest to the hostess while she reclined in state.
Morning informality became so popular in Paris that ladies and gentlemen of quality appeared at lectures, ‘même en robe de chambre’ (Roberts’ Memoirs of Hannah More 2. 17). Cf. Goldsmith (Citizen of the World, Letter 77), ‘the modern manner of some of our nobility receiving company in their morning gowns.’
169 As early as the days of the Spectator, Addison deplored the custom, introduced by travelled ladies, of ‘receiving gentlemen in their bed-rooms.’
170 Probably, as Hill notes, Mme. de Boufflers; cf. above, p. 53.
171 Boswell’s Life 2. 118; cf. 3. 207.
172 Boswell’s Life 5. 395; here the word levee is probably loosely employed for a morning conversazione.
173 Citizen of the World, Letter 104.
174 Cf. Boswell’s Life of Johnson 2. 318.
175 Diary of Mme. D’Arblay 5. 80-81.
176 Letters (1770) 1. 7; 8 April 1750.
177 Letters 8. 437.
178 Roberts’ Memoirs of More 1. 395.
179 Correspondence of Mrs. Delany 6. 229; 7 September 1784.
180 Diary for 10 May 1773; M. Forbes’ Life of Beattie, p. 75.
181 Hannah More’s piquant description of an assembly is worth quoting in full:
‘On Monday I was at a very great assembly at the Bishop of Saint Asaph’s. Conceive to yourself one hundred and fifty or two hundred people met together, dressed in the extremity of the fashion; painted as red as bacchanals; poisoning the air with perfumes; treading on each other’s gowns; making the crowd they blame; not one in ten able to get a chair; protesting they are engaged to ten other places; and lamenting the fatigue they are not obliged to endure; ten or a dozen card-tables, crammed with dowagers of quality, grave ecclesiastics, and yellow admirals; and you have an idea of an assembly.’ Roberts’ Memoirs of More 1. 242; cf. ib. 1. 311.
182 Other contemporary descriptions of the salon will be found elsewhere in this volume. Still others—in general more fragmentary—may be consulted in Frances Brooke’s Excursion 1. 142, Roberts’ Memoirs of More 2. 22-23; 1. 92-93; 174; 317.
183 Horace Walpole’s experiences in the English salons at Turin and Florence may be consulted in the first volume of his Letters. ‘Only figure the coalition of prudery, debauchery, sentiment, history, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and metaphysics; all, except the second, understood by halves, by quarters, or not at all’ 1. 82; 31 July 1740.
184 This was an important matter with some of the bluestockings, as the following quotation from Hannah More may show: ‘I never knew a great party turn out so pleasantly as the other night at the Pepys’s. There was all the pride of London—every wit and every wit-ess... but the spirit of the evening was kept up on the strength of a little lemonade till past eleven, without cards, scandal, or politics.’ Roberts’ Memoirs of More 1. 208.
Johnson’s opposition to anything of the sort is shown by his remark on ‘an evening society for conversation’: ‘There is nothing served about there, neither tea, nor coffee, nor lemonade, nor anything whatever, and depend upon it, Sir, a man does not love to go to a place from whence he comes out exactly as he went in.’ Boswell’s Life 4. 90.
He urged Mrs. Thrale to provide her guests with ‘a profusion of the best sweetmeats.’
185 How true this is to the spirit of conversation is shown by a somewhat scandalous discussion of Miss Hannah More which passed between Mrs. Cholmondeley and Miss Burney: Mrs. Cholmondeley: ‘I don’t like her at all; that is, I detest her! She does nothing but flatter and fawn; and then she thinks ill of nobody. Don’t you hate a person who thinks ill of nobody?’ Diary of Mme. D’Arblay 1. 188.
186 1787. Act 3, scene 2.
187 See her first conversation with Marlow, Act II. She herself calls it sentimental, in reference to these platitudes.
188 Mélanges 3. 243.
189 Ib. 266.
190 Correspondence of Mrs. Delany 4. 236; 30 August 1769.
191 Diary of Mme. D’Arblay 2. 351.
192 The tails of macaronis’ wigs were notoriously long.
193 Spence’s Anecdotes 378.
194 Boswell’s Life 4. 195. A specimen of what this sort of thing may be is seen in this epigram of Marmontel’s, upon picking up a lady’s pen:
Églé, cette plume est de celles
Qu’à vos pieds déposa l’Amour,
Quand ce Dieu, fixé sans retour,
Vous laissa lui couper les ailes.
Necker, Nouveaux Mélanges 1. 30.
195 ‘Institutress’ is Mrs. Miller’s unpretending designation of herself. The quotation is from the preface to a volume entitled, Poetical Amusements at a Villa near Bath, Bath 1775.
196 Walpole’s Letters 9. 134; 15 January 1775.
197 See the preface to the volume for 1777.
198 1776; 1777; 1781.
199 In 1781; a fifth volume had been announced for 1782.
200 London 1777.
201 Bath 1776.
202 Bath 1776.
203 She calls herself a bluestocking in 1780. Diary 1. 403.
204 Memoirs of Dr. Burney 2. 262.
205 See below, p. 140.
206 See above, p. 105.
207 Cf. the whole passage. Home’s Lady Louisa Stuart, pp. 159-60.
208 An Italian equivalent for bluestocking is unknown to Tomaseo and Bellini. In a pamphlet, entitled Pursuits of Literature, printed in 1797, T. J. Mathias gives the term calza azzurra as though from Ariosto, quoting,
Fortunata la Calza azzurra e d’ oro
Si grate a Febo e al santo Aonio coro.
The first line quoted, however, is not by Ariosto at all, but by Mathias himself. Cf. Orlando Furioso, ed. Papini, canto 46, st. 3.
209 1. 379 ff.
210 Larousse, Grande Encyclopédie.
211 Mills’s explanation of the word was adopted (without acknowledgment) by Dr. Brewer in his Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, and has therefore had considerable currency. It has been recently repeated, notably in the Quarterly Review for January 1903, in an article entitled ‘The Queen of the Bluestockings,’ by an anonymous writer, and in Mrs. Gaussen’s A Later Pepys.
212 King Henry IV, Part I, Act 2, scene iv.
213 Home’s Lady Louisa Stuart, p. 156; cf. the Diary of Madame D’Arblay 4. 65.
214 The following quotation from Mrs. Montagu’s Letters (4. 117) has been cited (notably in the New English Dictionary and in Hill’s edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson) as showing that the term bluestocking was in use as early as March 8, 1757, on which day Mrs. Montagu writes: ‘I assure you our philosopher (Mr. Stillingfleet) is so much a man of pleasure, he has left off his old friends and his blue stockings, and is at operas and other gay assemblies every night.’ Personally I do not think that this can be regarded as an occurrence of the word bluestocking at all. I incline to think that Mrs. Montagu means no more than she literally says, that Mr. Stillingfleet has left off the homely garb for which he was noted. But, in any case, it is interesting as a reference to the fame of his stockings, and tends to support Boswell’s explanation of the term.
215 Life 4. 108.
216 1. 210 n.; cf. a similar account by Pennington (who remembered the salons) in his Letters of Mrs. Carter to Mrs. Montagu.
217 Memoirs of Dr. Burney 2. 262-63. No explanation of the term bluestocking is given in the Diary.
218 Letters of Mrs. Carter to Mrs. Montagu 3. 202; 22 September 1783. The occurrence is referred to by Hannah More in the ‘Advertisement’ prefixed to Bas Bleu (1786). The story was apparently reported to the blues by Lady Dartrey. See Pepys’s letter to Hannah More, in A Later Pepys 2. 235; 13 August 1783.
219 Gaussen’s A Later Pepys 1. 42.
220 Those who care to study the playful development of the word may consult the sprightly article, ‘Bas bleu,’ in the earlier edition of Larousse’s Dictionary.
221 Letters 13. 217; 13 November 1784.
222 Diary of Madame D’Arblay 5. 50; 27 December 1791.
223 Much earlier certainly than the date (1790) given in the New English Dictionary, ‘In the evening we had a very strong reinforcement of blues,’ wrote Hannah More in March 1783 (Roberts’ Memoirs of More 1. 275); ‘There was everything delectable in the blue way,’ writes the same author in 1784 in reference to Mrs. Ord’s conversazione (Ib. 1. 317).
224 Diary of Madame D’Arblay 2. 236; 9 December 1783.
225 Ib. 4. 66; 1 August 1788.
226 Cf. Fanny Burney, ‘He had no small reverence for us blue-stockings.’ Diary 1. 403; June 1780.
227 A Series of Letters 4. 218.
228 Montaigu, tes dons précieux
M’assurent de ta bienveillance,
Les miens, peu dignes de tes yeux,
Te prouvent mon obéissance.
Ainsi partout on voit les Dieux
Recevoir des chants ennuyeux
Pour les biens que leur main dispense.
Tes bienfaits me sont plus flatteurs
Que les trésors de la fortune,
Toujours aveugle en ses faveurs,
Elle prodigue les honneurs
À ceux dont la voix l’importune;
Mais tes regards doux et perçants
Du vrai mérite ont la balance;
Je juge aussi par tes présents
Qu’ils out souvent de l’indulgence.
Du Bocage, Lettres sur l’Angleterre,
p. 50; 25 May 1750.
229 Gibbon’s Miscellaneous Works 2. 179; 30 September 1776.
230 Lettres à Walpole 3. 243, 256.
231 Ib. 3. 383.
232 Forbes’s Life of Beattie 1. 389; 3 September 1775.
233 Correspondence of Mrs. Delany 5. 165.
234 Diary of Madame D’Arblay 1. 460.
235 Letters 2. 149; 1 May 1780.
236 A Later Pepys 1. 404.
237 Correspondence of Mrs. Delany 4. 204-205.
238 Home’s Lady Louisa Stuart, p. 158.
239 The letter is undated, but, as it refers to the death of Lord Bath, it must be later than 1764. Burke is strangely criticised for ‘an intemperate vivacity of genius’; the common charge is made against Garrick that he is himself only on the stage, ‘and an actor everywhere else.’ Johnson is not mentioned. The palm is given to Lord Chatham among living wits. Lyttelton’s Letters (1780), pp. 122 ff.
240 Letters 11. 366 and 368; 9 and 14 January 1781.
241 Roberts, Memoirs of More 1. 298.
242 Carter, Series of Letters 4. 141.
243 Letters on Several Subjects 2. 166.
244 Letters 14. 5.
245 Diary 1. 253.
246 She was so called by Mrs. Delany as early as 1751. (Correspondence 3. 21), who adds, ‘The spirits of the air protect her.’
247 Letters to Mrs. Montagu 1. 242.
248 Ib. 1. 330.
249 Ib. 1. 311.
250 Mrs. Carter writes her (Series of Letters 4. 27), ‘I prevented you from carrying me to every place you had ever heard of in England or Wales.’
251 Letters to Mrs. Montagu 1. 335, 2. 355; cf. 2. 109.
252 Series of Letters 4. 120.
253 Ib. 4. 137.
254 Correspondence of Mrs. Delany 3. 40.
255 Ib. 5. 523.
256 Hannah More writes: ‘Tuesday I was at Mrs. Vesey’s assembly which was too full to be very pleasant. She dearly loves company; and as she is connected with almost everything that is great in the good sense of the word, she is always sure to have too much.’ Roberts’s Memoirs 1. 278; 29 March 1783.
257 Diary of Madame D’Arblay 2. 214; 19 June 1783.
258 Letters 11. 170.
259 ‘Madam, I have read his book, and I have nothing to say to him.’ Series of Letters 3. 228 note; Johnsonian Miscellanies 2. 12 note.
260 Series of Letters 3. 255; 21 May 1765.
261 ‘She seemed rather desirous to assemble persons of celebrity and talents under her roof or at her table than assumed or pretended to form one of the number herself.’ Wraxall’s Historical Memoirs 1. 103. ‘Without attempting to shine herself she had the happy secret of bringing forward talents of every kind, and of diffusing over the society the gentleness of her own character.’ Forbes’s Life of Beattie 1. 209 n.
262 Letters of Mrs. Carter to Mrs. Montagu 1. 271 and A Series of Letters 3. 292.
263 Diary of Madame D’Arblay 2. 234.
264 Her letters, with the exception of a lively but rather incoherent note to Hannah More, have not been published. Lord Lyttelton wrote to Garrick: ‘You will be charmed (as I am) with the lively colouring and fine touches in the epistolary style of our sylph, joined to the most perfect ease. Mrs. Montagu’s letters are superior to her in nothing but force and compass of thought.’ Garrick, Correspondence 1. 440; 12 October 1771.
265 Series of Letters 4. 6.
266 Ib. 4. 83.
267 Ib. 4. 354.
268 Letters to Mrs. Montagu 1. 335.
269 Diary 1. 253-54.
270 Letters 9. 152; 24 January 1775: ‘The Cophthi were an Egyptian race, of whom nobody knows anything but the learned; and thence I gave Mrs. Montagu’s academies the name of Coptic.’
271 Johnson, Walpole, Goldsmith, Burke, Reynolds, Boswell, Garrick, Sterne, General Potemkin, General Paoli, General Oglethorpe, half a dozen bishops, and all the blues were at various times among her guests. Of one of her entertainments, Hannah More wrote: ‘She had collected her party from the Baltic to the Po, for there was a Russian nobleman, an Italian virtuoso, and General Paoli.’ Roberts’s Memoirs of More 1. 212.
272 Series of Letters 3. 323.
273 Ib. 3. 255.
274 Her prosaic sister-in-law, whom friends called ‘Body,’ as they called Vesey ‘Mind.’
275 Letters to Mrs. Montagu 1. 358.
276 See Melville’s Life and Letters of Sterne 2. 67 ff.
277 Life of Mrs. Delany 5. 307. Gibbon wrote of Raynal (Letters 2. 75; 30 September 1783): ‘His conversation which might be very agreeable, is intolerably loud, peremptory, and insolent; and you could imagine that he alone was the Monarch and legislator of the World.’ Walpole, who met him at Baron d’Holbach’s, was so bored by his questions that he pretended to be deaf. ‘After dinner he found I was not, and never forgave me.’ Three years later, however, he dined with Walpole at Strawberry Hill: ‘The Abbé Raynal not only looked at nothing himself, but kept talking to the Ambassador the whole time, and would not let him see anything neither. There never was such an impertinent and tiresome old gossip. He said to one of the Frenchmen, we ought to come abroad to make us love our own country. This was before Mr. Churchill, who replied very properly, “Yes we had some Esquimaux here lately, and they liked nothing because they could get no train-oil for breakfast.”’ Letters 9. 92; 12 November 1774, and 10. 62; 15 June 1777.
278 Posthumous Works 1. 174. ‘In the hour and half I was in his company, he uttered as much as would have made him an agreeable companion for a week, had he allotted time for answers.’
279 Series of Letters 4. 113; cf. 3. 228 and 4. 108. It would appear that Mrs. Montagu feared that Mrs. Vesey was about to adopt certain of Rousseau’s ‘absurdities.’ Cf. Letters of Mrs. Carter to Mrs. Montagu 3. 241; 24 June 1785.
280 Hartley writes to W. W. Pepys (20 August 1800), ‘Mrs. Vesey’s... was indeed the most agreeable house for conversation.’ Gaussen’s A Later Pepys 2. 154.
281 Frances Glanville Boscawen (1719?-1805) was the wife of the Hon. Edward Boscawen, Admiral (d. 1761), and mother of Viscount Falmouth and the Duchess of Beaufort.
282 3. 331.
283 Roberts’s Memoirs of More 1. 182; 93.
284 She did, however, give some assistance to Johnson in the Lives of the Poets. ‘I have claims,’ she writes to Miss More (Roberts’s Memoirs of More 1. 191), ‘upon Dr. Johnson, but as he never knows me when he meets me, they are all stifled in the cradle; for he must know who I am before he can remember that I got him Mr. Spence’s manuscripts.’ These papers were of great use to Johnson, as he himself remarks (Lives 1. xxvii, ed. Hill). Boswell regrets (Life 4. 63) that Johnson did not make a more handsome acknowledgment; but Boswell seems to have been unaware of Mrs. Boscawen’s connection with the whole transaction. Mrs. Boscawen cannot be serious in what she writes of Johnson’s ignorance of her. A conversation with Johnson, in which she took part, is described in the Life (4. 98).
285 Roberts’s Memoirs of More 1. 129.
286 Ib. 1. 179.
287 Ib. 1. 192.
288 Roberts’s Memoirs of More 1. 190.
289 Mrs. Boscawen was the subject of more than one literary tribute before this. Young’s dreary ode, Resignation, was addressed to her, on the death of Admiral Boscawen; Mrs. Montagu had taken the widow to the ancient poet for consolation. In this poem she is bidden to ‘go forth a moral Amazon, armed with undaunted thought.’ Perhaps the last of these poetical tributes was a sonnet (from which a selection is here printed for the first time), by Pye when poet laureate. Writing of her villa at Richmond, once the home of Thomson, the poet Pye says:
Still Fancy’s Train your verdant Paths shall trace,
Tho’ closed her fav’rite Votary’s dulcet lay;
Each wonted Haunt their footsteps still shall grace,
Still Genius thro’ your green Retreats shall stray;
For, from the Scene Boscawen loves to grace,
Th’ Attendant Muse shall ne’er be long away.
Brit. Mus. Add. MS. 27578.
290 Mrs. Boscawen chose Opie to paint the portrait, though the subject, she writes (Roberts’s Memoirs of More 2. 35), ‘is worthy of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s superior skill; but I can command Opie, and make him alter, or even refaire if we do not like it.’ In her reply, Miss More stated that nothing could overcome her natural repugnance to having her portrait taken, but Mrs. Boscawen’s wishes which are to her ‘such indisputable commands.’ The portrait, which was hung in Mrs. Boscawen’s dining-room, became so popular that both Walpole and Mrs. Walsingham wished copies of it.
291 Anne Dillingham Ord (d. 1808) was the widow of William Ord (d. 1766), who had been High Sheriff of Northumberland in 1747. She is often spoken of as ‘Mrs. Ord of Queen Anne Street.’
292 Notably Doran, Lady of the Last Century, p. 264, and the New English Dictionary, under ‘Bluestocking.’
293 Letters 2. 146; cf. 149.
294 Hannah More and Fanny Burney, e.g. Rev. Montagu Pennington (Carter’s Letters to Montagu 3. 199 n.) speaks of her as one ‘of whom too much good can hardly be said, and of whom the editor believes it would be impossible to say any ill.’
295 Early Diary of Frances Burney 2. 138.
296 See p. 139.
297 Not invariably, however, for Hannah More once found such a crowd that she thought herself well off to be ‘wedged in with Mr. Smelt, Langton, Ramsay, and Johnson.’ Roberts’s Memoirs 1. 174; 1780.
298 Ib. 1. 274; 7 March 1783.
299 Ib. 1. 317; 1784.
300 Diary of Madame D’Arblay 2. 378.
301 She once mustered the whole tribe of blues that Fanny might show her old friends that a sojourn at Court had not made her forget them. On this occasion the gathering was exceptionally brilliant, and included Mrs. Montagu, Mrs. Carter, Mrs. Boscawen, Mrs. Chapone, Mrs. Garrick, Reynolds, Langton, and Horace Walpole. At this assembly Miss Burney says that she shall be ‘proud to show everybody the just first place she [Mrs. Ord] holds with me, among all that set.’ Diary of Madame D’Arblay 3. 357 (3 January 1788).
302 Diary of Madame D’Arblay 5. 33; 1791.
303 Ib. 5. 68.
304 Correspondence of Mrs. Delany 5. 12 n.
305 Roberts’s Memoirs of More 1. 285 and 1. 92.
306 Correspondence of Mrs. Delany 4. 283; 1770.
307 Ib. 4. 489; 30 December 1772.
308 Ib. 5. 374.
309 Diary of Madame D’Arblay 2. 364.
310 A newspaper announced that ‘Miss Burney, the sprightly writer of the elegant novel Evelina, is now domesticated with Mrs. Thrale, in the same manner that Miss More is with Mrs. Garrick, and Mrs. Carter with Mrs. Montagu.’ Diary of Madame D’Arblay 1. 492; May 1781.
311 Roberts’s Memoirs of More 2. 100.
312 The phrase is from Bas Bleu.
313 See Lounsbury’s Shakespeare and Voltaire, New York, 1902.
314 See Walpole’s Letters 11. 67.
315 See Lounsbury, op. cit.
316 Life 2. 88. As late as 1787, she was thus described in the Epilogue to Thomas Holcroft’s play, Seduction:
Say, shall not we, with conscious pride proclaim
A female critic raised—ev’n Shakespear’s Fame!
Towards the end of the century the fame of the book declined. Mrs. Montagu was anonymously attacked by Mathias in his Pursuits of Literature (1794). In speaking of commentators on Shakespeare he says (p. 37):
Nor can I pass Lycisca Montagu,
Her yelp though feeble, and her sandals blue.
317 Mrs. Montagu and her Friends, chapter 2.
318 Essay, p. 19.
319 Ib. p. 18.
320 Ib. p. 150.
321 Essay, p. 161.
322 Ib. p. 153.
323 Ib. p. 156.
324 Letters to Mrs. Montagu 3. 251 and 224.
325 Higginson.
326 ‘The Temple Classics’ and ‘Everyman’s Library.’
327 Life 1. 123.
328 Johnsonian Miscellanies 2. 11.
329 Numbers 44 and 100. They were reprinted in the editions of her collected poems.
330 Young praised her in his poem Resignation (Part 2). Like Eve, Mrs. Carter and Mrs. Montagu have ‘caused a fall—A fall of fame in man.’ He institutes a comparison with Addison. But Lord Lyttelton is even bolder: Carter’s singing reminds him at times of the angels singing over Bethlehem and at times of Sappho,
‘Greece shall no more
Of Lesbian Sappho boast.... For the sacred head
Of Britain’s poetess the Virtues twine
A nobler wreath.’
—On reading Miss Carter’s Poems in Manuscript. Mr. Smelt told Fanny Burney that he considered Mrs. Carter’s Ode the best in the language. Diary 4. 222.
331 Poems on Several Subjects, 3d edition, 1776, p. 94, ‘To Mrs. Vesey.’
332 Letters to Mrs. Montagu 3. 224.
333 Ib. 3. 180.
334 Ib. 2. 292.
335 Series of Letters 3. 288.
336 Letters to Mrs. Montagu 1. 313.
337 Ib. 3. 276.
338 Ib. 3. 110.
339 Series of Letters 4. 112.
340 Dedication to the Letters.
341 Correspondence of Mrs. Delany 5. 93; 14 January 1775.
342 Ib. 5. 55, 309.
343 Posthumous Works of Mrs. Chapone 1. 163.
344 Her letters to Pepys, printed by Mrs. Gaussen, in A Later Pepys, are not so interesting. There is a charming note to Fanny Burney in the Diary 5. 50.
345 Roberts’s Memoirs of Hannah More 1. 47.
346 Ib. 1. 60.
347 Roberts’s Memoirs of More 1. 63.
348 Ib. 1. 64.
349 See above, pp. 147 ff.; 175.
350 Notably the Inflexible Captive, based on the story of Regulus.
351 Act III.
352 Roberts’s Memoirs of More 1. 140.
353 Ib. See above, p. 155.
354 Roberts 1. 130.
355 Letters 10. 166-67; 11 December 1777.
356 Diary of Madame D’Arblay 1. 148 (1778).
357 The ‘sacred’ dramas, Moses in the Bulrushes, David and Goliath, Belshazzar, and Daniel, escaped the contamination of the stage.
358 Roberts 2. 153.
359 Ib. 1. 191.
360 Roberts 2. 111.
361 Ib. 2. 415.
362 Roberts’s Memoirs of More 1. 62.
363 See ‘Advice to the Herald.’
364 Forbes’s Life of Beattie 1. 195; letter to Gregory, 13 March 1771.
365 Ib.
366 M. Forbes’s Beattie and his Friends, p. 66.
367 Ib. p. 68.
368 Forbes’s Life of Beattie 1. 255; May 1773.
369 Ib. 1. 260. Extract from Beattie’s Diary; 21 May 1773.
370 Correspondence of Mrs. Delany 4. 516; 13 June 1773.
371 M. Forbes, op. cit. 78. In this matter Johnson’s view happened to coincide with hers (ib. p. 90).
372 Ib. p. 75.
373 Ib. pp. 95-6.
374 Essays, Edinburgh 1776.
375 M. Forbes, p. 120.
376 Beattie, always nervous about his Scotticisms, was flutteringly pleased, and some time later repaid her with this astounding piece of flattery: ‘My models of English are Addison and those who write like Addison, particularly yourself, Madam, and Lord Lyttelton. We may be allowed to imitate what we cannot hope to equal.’ Forbes’s Life 2. 115; 30 January 1783.
377 Forbes’s Life 2. 132 and M. Forbes, op. cit. p. 110.
378 Arbuthnot. Forbes’s Life 1. 203 and n.
379 He wrote that he had ‘been making some progress in a little work of which you saw a sketch at Sandelford, and which you did me the honour to read and approve of. It was your approbation and that of the Bishop of Chester and Sir William Forbes that determined me to revise, correct, and enlarge it, with a view to publication.’ Forbes 2. 164.
380 See Forbes’s Beattie 2. 41.
381 Literary Anecdotes of E. H. Barker, London 1852.
382 Inquiry into some Passages in Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, particularly his Observations on Lyric Poetry and the Odes of Gray. London 1783.
383 Letters 13. 5.
384 Cowper’s Letters, edited by Thomas Wright, 3. 267.
385 Cowper’s Letters, edited by Thomas Wright, 3. 306; 21 August 1788; cf. 3. 266; 267; 277.
386 In March he wrote to Mrs. Throckmorton, ‘The two first books of my Iliad have been submitted to the inspection and scrutiny of a great critic of your sex, at the instance of my cousin, as you may suppose. The lady is mistress of more tongues than a few (it is to be hoped she is single) and particularly she is mistress of the Greek.’ Letters 3. 444; 21 March 1790. The book was published in July 1791.
387 Letters 3. 439; 8 March 1790.
388 See the accompanying illustration.
389 Barry’s Series of Engravings in the... Society of Arts, London 1808.
390 Walpole’s Letters 4. 319; 8 November 1759.
391 Ib. 11. 410; 3 March 1781.
392 In his edition of the Diary of Madame D’Arblay.
393 See Melville’s Life of Sterne 1. 289 ff. and Climenson’s Letters of Mrs. Montagu 2. 270 ff.
394 Correspondence of David Garrick 2. 189; 3 November 1776.
395 Diary 1. 126.
396 Correspondence of David Garrick 1. 388 ff.
397 A Later Pepys 2. 283.
398 Posthumous Works of Mrs. Chapone 1. 151.
399 Roberts’s Memoirs of More 1. 363; 1784.
400 Correspondence of Mrs. Delany 6. 209; 22 January 1784.
401 Letters 13. 214; 13 November 1784.
402 Letters 13. 432; 22 December 1786.
403 Wraxall’s Historical Memoirs 1. 115.
404 Roberts’s Memoirs of More 2. 225; April 1790.
405 Gibbon’s Miscellaneous Works 1. 163; journal for May 1763.
406 Private Letters of Gibbon 1. 31; 25 March 1763.
407 See above, p. 123. As early as 1769, Mrs. Carter had long regretted that he had left ‘the tranquil pleasures of select society for the turbulent schemes of ambition.’ Letters to Mrs. Montagu 2. 23.
408 Miss Burney was well aware of the difference here noted. In talking with Wyndham of Johnson’s life at Streatham, she gave ‘a little history of his way of life there,—his good humour, his sport, his kindness, his sociability, and all the many excellent qualities that, in the world at large, were by so many means obscured.’ Diary 3. 477.
409 ‘Cette littérature devait briller des le dix-septième siècle, puisque dès lors se forme et se propage en France l’esprit de société.... Avant cet âge, en France du moins, les salons n’existent pas.’ P. de Julleville’s Histoire de la Littérature Française 5. 600.
410 Letters, ed. Bradshaw, 1. 55.
411 Memoirs of Sir James Mackintosh 2. 172.
412 Diary of Madame D’Arblay 2. 266.
413 Roberts’s Memoirs of More 2. 26; cf. Walpole’s Letters 14. 65 et passim.
414 Letters 7. 9-10.
415 Ib. 5. 87.
416 Ib. 6. 356.
417 Madame Necker asserted that he was ‘as like Madame de Sévigné as two peas.’ Letters 10. 80. Horace Mann had noticed the similarity many years before. Ib. 2. 410.
418 Letters 7. 137; 13 October 1767.
419 Boswell’s Life 4. 102.
420 Letters 8. 427; 23 February 1774.
421 These letters he prepared for the press after they had been returned to him by Mann. In August 1784 he wrote: ‘I have been counting how many letters I have written to you since I landed in England in 1741: they amount—astonishing!—to above eight hundred; and we have not met in three-and-forty years! A correspondence of near half a century is, I suppose, not to be paralleled in the annals of the post office!’ Letters 13. 182.
422 In sending to Mason the letters which Gray had written to him, Walpole wrote: ‘I need not say that there are several things you will find it necessary to omit.... It is much better to give them [the public] nothing, than what they do not comprehend and which they consequently misunderstand, because they will think they comprehend, and which, therefore, must mistake. I do not know whether it is not best that good writings should appear very late, for they who by being nearest in time are nearest to understanding them, are also nearest to misapprehending.’ Letters 8. 202; 19 September 1772.
423 Letters 8. 376; 8 December 1773.
424 Letters 9. 308; 21 December 1775.
425 Roberts’s Memoirs of More 1. 51; cf. 1. 235.
426 Lettres à Walpole 1. 591; 4 July 1769.
427 Letters, ed. Thomas, 2. 257; 20 July 1754.
428 ‘J’aurais bien du plaisir de pouvoir lire vos lettres avec quelqu’un qui en sentirait le mérite et avec qui j’en pourrais rire.’ Lettres à Walpole 1. 9; 21 April 1766.
429 Letters 7. 195; 15 June 1768.
430 Roberts’s Memoirs of More 1. 253; 1782.
431 4. 288.
432 Diary 3. 181.
433 Diary 4. 471 ff.; 4 June 1791.
434 Diary, 19 November 1783.
435 Life 3. 155.
436 Forbes’s Life of Beattie 2. 175; 15 November 1785.
437 Letters 8. 443; 17 April 1774.
438 May 1786.
439 Bozzy and Piozzi, or the British Biographers, A Town Eclogue, 1786.
440 This caricature is too unseemly to admit of reproduction here.
441 Letters 13. 379; 30 April 1786.
442 Remarks on the Journal of a Tour... in a Letter to James Boswell, Esq. By ‘Verax.’ 1785.
443 Cf. Walpole’s remarks about the Life, Letters 14. 438; 26 May 1791.
444 Diary 3. 219; 26 February 1787.
445 Life of Beattie 2. 182; 9 January 1786.
446 Roberts’s Memoirs of More 1. 403; 1785.
447 Forbes’s Life of Beattie 2. 178.
448 It has been reserved for Mr. Percy Fitzgerald to revive the old charges against Boswell and to discover new ones, which he has set forth with a virulence that would be inexcusable in any one who had not a preposterous theory to defend.
449 A Later Pepys 2. 260; 24 October 1785.
450 Journal, p. 307.
451 Ib. p. 383.