The Kit-Cat Club: Friends Who Imagined a Nation. Ophelia Field

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СКАЧАТЬ approbation was the only reward on offer. Though Will's Coffee House was supposed to be an ‘Exchange for Wit’, the fact that there was more profit in publishing a good line than throwing it away on one's friends caused the ‘Wit-Merchants’ to meet there, it was said, ‘without bringing the Commodity with them, which they leave at home in the Warehouses’.²² A character in one of Congreve's plays similarly refers to wit as an alternative currency, in which writers are naturally richer than their patrons: ‘None but dull rogues think; witty men, like rich fellows, are always ready for all expenses; while your blockheads, like poor needy scoundrels, are forced to examine their stock and forecast the charges of the day.’²³

      A later satirical play about the Kit-Cat Club referred to certain members ‘who only listen in it’²⁴—these were the aristocratic patrons who came in the spirit of an audience, ready to exchange one currency for another. It was a fair exchange, in so far as a poet might determine a patron's reputation among contemporary readers (and voters) and in the eyes of posterity. Tonson shrewdly realized that busy, wealthy and powerful men would gladly pay for the glamour of association with popular writers such as Vanbrugh and Congreve, or at least would prefer to play patrons than become targets of their satire. As Ned Ward put it, some Whig grandees joined ‘in hopes to be accounted wits, and others to avoid the very opposite imputation’.²⁵

      The Kit-Cat authors, in their poetry and classical translations, self-interestedly perpetuated the idea that a well-rounded nobleman must be a generous patron. They constantly reminded their superiors that there was a parallel value system, independent of inheritance, in which the nobly born were expected to compete, if not with their own literary talent then at least as discerning patrons. The Kit-Cat Club's broad membership implied a hierarchy based on values other than birth and wealth: ‘Though not of Title, Men of Sense and Wit.’²⁶

      Prior and Stepney, for example, showed an imaginative sensitivity throughout their writings and classical translations to the theme of ‘meanly born’ men who led virtuous lives, or proved themselves great senators, lawyers or soldiers. In his translation of Juvenal's Eighth Satire, Stepney contrasted the great achievements of lowborn Cicero, or Tully ‘the native mushroom’, to highborn Rubellius whose useless life was no better than that of ‘a living statue’.²⁷ It was an old Christian idea, given a fresh political edge: the natural corollary, or ultimate logic, of the Whig theory of kingship, that each man had to earn his own honour in this world.

      Lord Dorset was flattered as ‘bountiful Maecenas’, especially after his appointment as the King's Lord Chamberlain. This was a reference to the Roman patron whose circle had included Virgil and Horace, and who was therefore the prime classical model for Kit-Cat patronage. Dorset had been a patron to Tonson's authors, including Dryden, since before the Revolution, and when Tonson published Congreve's second play, Love for Love (1695), it was with a dedication to Dorset attached—a transparent bid by Congreve to become another of the Earl's favoured ‘Boys’. The publisher tended to broker the patronage of Somers when one of his prose authors needed subsidy, but that of Dorset when it was an aspiring poet or playwright.

      The contemporary writer John Macky emphasized Dorset's role as one of the Kit-Cat Club's ‘first founders’,²⁸ alongside Tonson and Somers, and if this was indeed the case, then Dorset's motives were largely nostalgic and escapist. By the mid-1690s, Dorset was in his late fifties and his second marriage was souring because of quarrels over his wife's estate. He was therefore spending more time in town, pretending to a bachelor's lifestyle. At Charles II's Restoration Court, Dorset had enjoyed a dissipated youth, one of the ‘Merry Gang’ of poets and rakes alongside the infamous Earl of Rochester. Dorset had fought in street brawls and duels, been Nell Gwynn's lover and survived nearly fifteen years of nocturnal, riotous, self-destructive living. He had escaped frequent brushes with the law, including charges of murder and of gross indecency after a drunken appearance stark naked on a tavern balcony. Now in the 1690s, having a mid-life crisis, Dorset wanted to recapture the carefree spirit of his youth, or at least help the next generation of poets enjoy a similar camaraderie.

      For Montagu, as for Prior and Stepney, nostalgia for the collegiality of Westminster and Cambridge was a significant motive in their clubbing. These men treasured memories of sharing the life of the mind, before the realities of the world had separated them. To their eighteenth-century minds, family was directly associated with nature, in contrast to friendship, which they associated with the power of reason to make discerning, civilized choices. Montagu, at least, sought a place where his intellectually noble friendships with Prior and Stepney might be preserved, despite all that had changed in their relative circumstances since Cambridge. He also sought to extend his reputation as a patron by supporting other authors beyond his childhood friends. The Old Batchelor, for example, had won Congreve Montagu's patronage and friendship—something that may have aroused some jealousy from Prior and Stepney, since Prior once complimented Stepney's poetry by comparing it favourably to Congreve's weaker efforts.²⁹

      For the Whig government ministers, furthermore, solidifying friendships through new clubs and associations was part of a wider civic duty to resolidify the nation. Civil turmoil had meant not knowing who your friends were from one day to the next; post-Revolutionary peace and prosperity now required rebuilding trust between like-minded men. When Dorset or Montagu was flattered as a modern Maecenas, it was not simply because they were each generous literary patrons, but because their aims resembled those of the Roman governor who, via his literary circle, had tried to reconcile a fractured society and forge ideals of ‘Roman-ness’ in the decades following a civil war.

      Over the years, many observers would complain that the Kit-Cat Club monopolized literary patronage. One imagined Tonson boasting:

      I am the Touchstone of all Modern Wit,

      Without my Stamp in vain your Poets write. Those only purchase ever-living Fame, That in my Miscellany plant their Name.³⁰

      Another saw the Club's monopoly of literary fame as a corruption of literary justice: ‘But Mastiff Poets oft are doomed to Starve, / Whilst Lapdog Wits are hugged, who less deserve.’³¹ Cognoscenti have been envied in every age, but the Kit-Cat Club's networking was more acutely resented because it was unapologetically partisan. The Whigs recognized, years before the Tories, the benefits of creating a ‘sympathetic climate of opinion’ through art, and set about establishing a patronage network to incubate this ‘climate’.³² Dr Johnson called Dorset and Montagu ‘universal’ and ‘general’ patrons, meaning they rewarded writers of either party, but the majority of their largesse was dispensed within their own political fold.³³ They did not regard the exclusion of Tory writers from the Kit-Cat Club as a corruption of the arts by politics, since they shared a belief in ‘amicitia‘—a community in which political fellowship flowed naturally from virtuous characters thinking and acting in perfect accord. The Tories of the 1690s may have shared the same classical reference points, but their power base, centred on country squires and clergy, was—for the time being at least—intrinsically less ‘clubbable’ than that of the more metropolitan Whigs.

      Another motive of the Kit-Cat patrons, to which Blackmore alluded in his verse account of the Club's foundation, was that ‘warlike William’ had no interest in English literature, so that authors ‘met with small Respect’ at Court and felt they must seek their rewards СКАЧАТЬ