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The Salon and English Letters; Chapters on the Interrelations of Literature and Society in the Age of Johnson
The Salon and English Letters Chapters on the Interrelations of Literature and Society in the Age of Johnson Author:Chauncey Brewster Tinker General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1915 Original Publisher: The Macmillan Company Subjects: Salons Great Britain English literature England Literary Criticism / General History / General History / Europe / Great Britain Literary Criticism / General Literary Criticism / European / English, I... more »rish, Scottish, Welsh Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER III The Eighteenth Century Salon A Salon is not a mere literary club. It is something other than a group of men and women gathered in a drawing-room to discuss literature or meet a poet. It aims to exert a creative influence in the literary world. It does not concern itself with literature as a finished product to be studied, but with literature as a growing thing that may be trained. Hence it gets behind the product to the producer, and seeks to influence the characters and ideas out of which books are formed. It is an informal academy. Its aim is private in that it is directly concerned with improving the condition of authors, and public in that it attempts to mould public opinion. Thus it is, at bottom, a system of patronage. It offers to the author that aid, advertisement, and protection which he had once sought from a patron. Patronage of literature was, as we have seen, an essential feature of the court life of the Renaissance. It had lived on through the seventeenth century at courts and in noble houses. During its rapid decline in the eighteenth century, many of its duties were taken over by the salons. In the person of the hostess, the salon made gifts of money, granted unofficial pensions, paid printers' bills, and even gave authors a home. Walpole was amused at the number of authors who were' planted' in...« less