THE DILETTANTI SOCIETY.*
THE Dining Associations of London are not the least remarkable feature in its highly complex society. Their name is Legion, but four are more peculiarly interesting, from their long history and the number of men, famous in various sections of national life, who have taken an active part in them. These are The Club, founded in 1764 by Sir Joshua Reynolds, assisted by Burke, Johnson, and Goldsmith; the Literary Society, founded in 1806, of which Wordsworth and Rogers were original members ; Grillion's, founded in 1812 for the purpose of keeping socially united, men of diametrically opposite politics ; and the Dilettanti Society, which forms the subject of the volume we propose to notice.
The exact date of its foundation has not been ascertained, but in all probability it was December, 1732. The first minute-book belongs to the spring of the year 1736. In May of that year there were forty-six members, most of them young men of fashion, who had made the grand tour, usually under the guidance of some more or less discreet personage in holy orders. Several of these Mentors were among the earliest members, such as Robert Hay, who died as Archbishop of York, and Arthur Smyth, who became Primate of Ireland. It may be guessed, however, that these divines did not impart much of their seriousness to their companions, when we mention that Sir Francis Dashwood, more perhaps than any one else, gave the tone to their gatherings. Bred in the school of Boling- broke, he wandered over Europe, and obtained everywhere an unedifying fame, while on his return to his own country he scandalised a not too prudish age by being the High Priest of Medmenham Abbey. Later in life he atoned in various ways for these strange doings ; but his best title to such gratitude as posterity may see fit to accord to him certainly comes from • History of the Society of Dilettanti. Compiled by Lionel Cog, M.A., and Edited by Sidney Colvin, M.A. London; Macmillan and Co.
the fact that he was for fifty years a member of the Society of Dilettanti, and that he supported, if he did not even suggest, some of its best enterprises. Other original members of importance were the Earl of Middlesex, who became Duke of Dorset ; Sir Hugh Smithson, the ancestor of the Dukes of Northumberland ; Sir Andrew Mitchell, who was Minister at the Court of Frederick II.; Thomas Villiers, the first Earl of Clarendon; and Sir Charles Hanbury Williams. Ere long another name, too famous in later days, was added to the Society by the election of the Earl of Sandwich; but of him, too, there is a great deal of good to be said, which the authors of this work most properly bring before us, especially reminding us that he was the chief supporter of Captain Cook, and richly deserved to give his name to the Hawaiian Islands. His intimate friend, John Duke of Bedford, the first Earl of Leicester, and Robert D'Arcy, Earl of Holdernesse, who joined the Dilettanti in 1745, when he was Ambassador to Venice, were also elected at an early period.
Mr. Lionel Cast and Mr. Sidney Colvin, the joint authors of the work under review, the one being described on the title-page as compiler, the other as editor, after setting forth in adequate detail the facts most essential to be known about the original members of the Society, and their immediate successors, proceed to give an account of their manners and customs. Some of them were not of the best, as may be learnt from Horace Walpole and others. These, happily, have long vanished away, but the Society has kept on foot many quaint practices which it would have been a thousand pities to have discarded. A full description of these will be found in the second chapter. In it the reader will find, amongst other particulars, that one of the rules, ere travelling became so general, was that no one could be proposed unless by a member who had been personally acquainted with him or her in Italy. After a certain election, however, it was discovered that the proposing member had met his friend not in Italy, but in Avignon. Thereupon two resolutions were passed :—
(1) That it is the opinion of the Society that Avignon is in Italy.
(2) That no other town in France is in Italy.
It does not appear that the members availed themselves of the permission, implied in the above-mentioned rale, to propose ladies.
Established chiefly with a view of bringing together per- sons whose tastes were similar, the members of the Dilettanti Society even in very early days did more than dine together. They helped on the building of Westminster Bridge, they did something with but moderate success to establish an Italian Opera, took the first steps towards creating the Royal Academy, and as far back as 1761, on the motion of Sir Francis Dashwood, they passed a resolution which was the beginning of all efforts made in England towards enriching this country with a gallery of casts.
L'appetit vient en man geant, and the Society, after interest- ing itself in promoting the fine arts at home, turned its attention to larger enterprises having the same general pur- pose, abroad. The fourth chapter opens with a succinct but clear account of the progress of the study of classical archreology in England from the middle of the seventeenth century onwards. Much good work had been done and much enthusiasm expended in other countries, from the commence- ment of the Renaissance onwards, in studying the archmology of Italy ; but the archmology of Greece was all but a sealed book till an English nobleman, the Earl of Arundel, turned his attention to it. He had worthy followers or rivals in the famous Duke of Buckingham, Lord Pembroke, and others, nor did the study, interrupted for a time by the Civil War, ever die out amongst Englishmen of position and pro- perty. Many individual members of the Dilettanti Society had occupied themselves with it before 1764, but it was in that year that the Society as a body threw into the scale a weight so decisive that an eminent German savant, Professor Kruse, followed by Michaelis, divides the history of Greece into five periods, of which the foundation of the Dilettanti Society is the fifth. And he is quite right in doing so, because it cannot be sufficiently insisted on that it is the history of the mind of Greece, its poetry, its philosophy, its art, which is important. Its political history has been viewed through misleading media, and its value for after times wildly exaggerated. It was in 1764 that the Society sent Mr. (afterwards Dr.) Chandler, Mr. Revett, and Mr. Pars to Asia Minor, where, as well as in Attica and the Morea, they collected a great deal of most precious material, much of which was published in 1769 Tinder the title of Ionian Antiquities, a second volume of which appeared a good many years later. The Society also assisted the publication of Dr. Chandler's Travels and the Antiquities of Athens by Athenian Stuart, whose house, built in St. James's Square on Greek lines for Lord Anson, bears witness to its architect's careful study of his models, no less than to the inapplicability of that kind of architecture to our climate and mode of life.
Gradually the first members of the Society vanished from the scene, their last survivor being the Earl of Bessborough who lived to 1793. It was still full of young men of fashion, but a rather graver tone began to prevail, though Charles Fox, who became a member at twenty, hardly tended to in- crease its gravity. It was connected with The Club not only through Sir Joshua Reynolds, who became a member of the Dilettanti in the very year in which he founded that institu- tion, but through, amongst others, Beniaet Langton, Tophain Beauclerk, Colman, Garrick, and Viscount Palmerston. The last-named passed his life in pursuits widely different from those of his famous son, but was very active in his own line as a collector, finding a happy hunting-ground in Paris even in the midst of the Revolution. The archmological and artistic work of the Society attracted to it such men as Sir William Hamilton, Sir George Beaumont, Mr. Charles Townley, Sir Henry Englefield, and Mr. Payne Knight, of all of whom brief sketches are to be found in these pages. Reynolds became its painter in 1769. It was not till ten years later that Sir Joseph Banks was elected a member, but he took the most active part in all the proceedings of the Society, and was treasurer and secretary for eighteen years. In the days of Dashwood and Sandwich the Dilettanti were content, as we have seen, to set on foot explorations and to promote arch mological work. In their graver stage individual members did a good deal of writing themselves, sometimes with good success, sometimes not, and in their less happy moments they led the Society into scrapes. Payne Knight was the great offender in this way, for he it was who committed it to the worst mistake it ever made,—its opposition to the wise and admirable work of Lord Elgin in rescuing from ruin the marbles which bear his name. Before the recent war showed, the civilised world the condition of the Greek kingdom, pro- posals were sometimes made to restore to them the treasures of the Parthenon. The judgment of most judicious people as to these proposals was neatly summed up in a reply which was made by the late Mr. Boehm to a young Member of Parliament, who asked him what he thought about a Motion he intended to make, that effect should be given to them. "If you succeeded," said the sculptor, "I would curse you with my dying breath." We may draw a veil over the errors into which Payne Knight led his friends, and remember only that he did a good day's work when by his Travels in Sicily he led Goethe to visit that island. The Society was much more happily inspired when it published Select Specimens of Antient Sculpture in the Collections of Great Britain, and when its members vied with each other, as they did through the closing decade of the eighteenth century, in importing treasures from Italy, many of which passed from the collections of Townley, Cracherode, and others into the British Museum.
We will not attempt further to pursue the history of the Dilettanti, although the seventh and eighth chapters, which bring it down to our own times, are as interesting as any of their predecessors. The ninth and last chapter contains a. full account of the pictures in the possession of the Society, and now to be seen in the lower room of the Grafton Galleries, where the dinners, at present, take place. A great many of the portraits are reproduced in the volume before us, including the two great Sir Joshuas which became well known to the public while they were temporarily deposited in the National Gallery. An appendix contains a list of the members from 1736 to the end of last year.
In a book of this sort, minute, even pedantic, accuracy is highly desirable, and we should advise those who are responsible for it to have it carefully revised, if a new edition of the letter- press is called for, with a view to getting rid of such mistakes as making the late Lord Arthur Russell the son of Lord George
Russell, and the like. With the exception, however, of trifling, though teasing, errors of this sort, we see nothing to find fault with, and we can only congratulate Mr. Oust and Mr. Colvin upon having made a valuable addition to our libraries. We could wish that they had not dressed so choice a volume in a hideous suit of buckram, but perhaps they desired to encourage artistic bookbinding by forcing every one to submit his copy or copies to one of its more eminent professors. That is the most charitable explanation which we have heard, and we trust it is as correct as it is charitable.
The conditions amidst which the Dilettanti Society now finds itself are very unlike those amidst which it had its origin and grew to maturity through two generations. Travel was then the luxury of the wealthy ; it has now become comparatively cheap. Numbers of new organisations are at work in clas- sical lands far more specialised and far more suited than the Dilettanti Society to add to the world's knowledge, each in its own department. One is especially devoted to Hellenic studies in Greece ; another ransacks Egypt for Greek manuscripts ; Asia Minor has been carefully explored by an Aberdeen Professor, and so on. Under these circum- stances, the Society has no call to send out new expedi- tions or to publish huge illustrated works. Its best friends would like to see it long remain a clasp uniting together the principal persons connected with the various organisations now working to increase our knowledge of the art and litera- ture of Greece and Rome, such of them at least as have their roots in British soil. They would like to see it able to say with regard to every sensible effort of this kind, " Pars," if not "Pars magna fui." An enthusiastic member once declared in a conversation with Mr. Gladstone that the Dilettanti had founded the Italian Opera, the Royal Academy. and the British Museum. That was an incorrect and exag- gerated statement, no doubt, but still the Society had much to do, directly and indirectly, with all these three institutions, and we trust that in the future, as in the past, it may be zealous of all good works which come within or near the edge of its province.
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