REFORM OF MALE MANNERS
The “indexical theory” formalized for historical writing a widespread—even foundational—trope of the period, according to which leisured, educated women acted as a refining force within what Hume in his “Of Essay Writing” called the “conversable realm.”24 Hume’s conversable realm presumably included coffee-houses, private parties, theaters, concerts, clubs, societies, academies, and salons as contexts for exchange, but, employing a broad brush, he styled it the “republic of letters.” That republican metaphor figured the conversable realm as a relatively free zone for exchange in which protocols of rank were partly and temporarily set aside in the interests of rationality, wit, and pleasure. But within the same paragraph from “Of Essay Writing” Hume also characterized this republic as an empire governed by a female monarch. Specifically, he installed “women of sense and education” as “sovereigns of the empire of conversation” and claimed to address them in his published work “with reverence.” The mixed political metaphors do not necessarily reveal a text spinning out of authorial control. They enabled Hume to characterize the conversable realm as being at once relatively free and tightly organized, a place in which despotism (here another name for sovereignty) is softened by female embodiment and acts less as a source of severe legislation than as a template for emulation. The political system enacted, in miniature, in the salon is what Hume called “civilised monarchy”—his description of the then current British system of monarchic despotism reformed by (some degree of) democratic government and Enlightenment legal reform.25 Male gallantry toward women resembles that “inclination to please superiors” that characterizes the gentle hierarchy of “civilised monarchy [in which] there is a long train of dependence from the prince to the peasant, which is not great enough to render property precarious, or depress the minds of the people; but is sufficient to beget in every one an inclination to please his superiors, and to form himself upon those models which are most acceptable to people of condition and education.”26 A context for intellectual exchange, undoubtedly, Hume’s vision of salon culture also rehearsed deference and emulation as responses to inequality. Indeed, the desire to please united the politics and literary production of the salon.
Hume bestowed the sovereign’s crown on women because they are “better judges of all polite writing than men of the same degree of understanding.” This superior critical faculty, however, involves and valorizes conventional notions of female weakness and closeness to nature. Women, Hume asserted, possess more “delicacy of taste” and a greater sensitivity, all the more authentic for being “unguided by rules” (that is, by knowledge of literary-critical theory). These characteristics are not valued in isolation but through their transformative power over men, who, without female influence, pursue knowledge in the dark, dank cell of isolated rumination, ensnared in pedantry, pursuing intellectual chimeras.27 Of the instrumental function of women Hume observed that “both sexes meet in an easy and sociable manner; and the tempers of men, as well as their behaviour, refine apace.” Elsewhere he spelled things out: “What better school for manners than the company of virtuous women, where the mutual endeavour to please must insensibly polish the mind, where the example of the female softness and modesty must communicate itself to their admirers, and where the delicacy of that sex puts everyone on his guard, lest he give offence by any breach of decency.”28
Such accounts of positive feminization aside, women serve more broadly in Hume to measure distance from barbarism and antiquity, in which, he insists, women were hidden from view in virtual slavery. The sovereignty of women in Hume’s conversable realm feminized that space not to reduce its value, nor to imply a literal female rule, but rather as a way of characterizing its fascinating and transformative modernity: sociable, peaceful, animated, intellectual, polite, improving, luxurious, unprejudiced. The female sovereign stands metonymically for the ideal citizen (or subject) of the republic (or empire) who deals not in literal, legislative power but in discursive authority and persuasion. She is an aspect of the (male) author’s voice, as much as a critic and reader of his work.29
The trope of refining womanhood is felt in Burney’s frequent and approving references to the mixed company and elegant manners of musical salons and soirées. For example, in Florence Burney attended the salon, or, as he called it, conversatione, of Signora Madalena Morelli, “which is much frequented by the foreigners, and men of letters, at Florence.” He described Morelli as a figure of broad accomplishment able to foster a range of artistic activities: “Besides her wonderful talent of speaking verses extempore upon any given subject, and being able to play a ripieno part, on the violin, in concert, she sings with a great deal of expression, and has a considerable share of execution.”30 Such scenes are formalized in A General History where, women (so to speak) break into the last chapter, their very presence a distinguishing feature of music history’s most recent chapter. Not just the presence but the absence of women is given explanatory power in Burney’s Tours. Much of Burney’s famous criticism of music at the Berlin court of Frederick the Great of Prussia turns on the reported absence of women and, related to this, the persistence of rough, unreformed male manners. Dismissing a flute concerto by M. Reidt as “ancient and coarse,” Burney likened Berlin musicians to a gang of sailors shoving each other in “the old naval sport of running the hoop.”31 That is, they compete by force, playing in a constant forte, without dynamic nuance or coordinated ensemble. The notion that unreformed masculinity belongs to the past comes through in Burney’s comments on the historically fixed military parade at Potsdam that takes place “in a field, enclosed by a wall. . . . With respect to music, the same stability of style, and of taste, is observable here as at court; and I did not find that the Prussians, in their marches, had advanced a single step towards novelty, or refinement, since the first years of his present majesty’s reign.” Apollo and his muses still inhabit Berlin, but the former is constrained in his movements, Burney advised, and his muses are not daughters but “sons.”
There is a telling exception to the banishment of women from Berlin in the figure of Gertrud Schmeling, the prima donna at the Berlin court, who appears in Burney’s narrative as a sort of Germania enchained. Although her compass and coloratura are “truly astonishing” and her powers are perhaps unrivalled anywhere in the world, she at the same time is unable to complete her development—to become perfect, a living muse. Constrained to sing airs “in which she has passages, that degrade the voice into an instrument . . . [s]he does not seem, at present, to be placed in the best school for advancement in taste, expression, high finishing.” Were she to spend time in Italy she would return, in Burney’s analogy, “like the Venus of Apelles . . . an aggregate of all that is exquisite and beautiful.”32 The Venus of the Greek painter Apelles (mentioned by Pliny and said to have inspired Botticelli’s iconic Birth of Venus) did not survive antiquity but served in critical discourse as a reference to both perfect mimesis and feminine gracefulness. Burney compared Schmeling not to the painter but to this painted image, even as he set that image out of reach, awaiting a period of greater liberty. For the time being Schmeling is just a brilliant singer; before she can become perfect, an ideal aesthetic construct, male manners must reform and despotism withdraw from the temple of the muses.
Burney often figured modern musical style as (in a positive sense) feminized, largely equating feminization with progress from barbarism to civility. Although he was alive to differences connected to compositional genre, function, and locale, and occasionally nostalgic for the rough sublimity of earlier styles, Burney nonetheless projected an understanding of music history as a movement from the rough to the smooth, the confused to the crystalline, the pedantic to the pleasing, and the inflexible to the insinuating. In speaking of Telemann’s “first and second manners” Burney came close to a parody of his own historiography: “This author, like the painter Raphael, had a first and second manner, which were extremely different from each other. In the first, he was hard, stiff, dry, and inelegant; in the second, all that was pleasing, graceful, and refined.”33 Such bald binary oppositions also attend Burney’s conceptualizations of performance and organology; writing about a “M. Spandau,” in the Hague, who had brought new elegance to the French horn, Burney wrote: “He has contrived, by his delicacy, taste, and expression, to render an instrument, which, from
