Part 2
Lady Mary was not only practical in her household, but in all the other common concerns of life. Few women have pushed their husbands on in the world with more vigorous energy than is shown in the letters she writes to Mr. Wortley Montagu, urging him to drop his diffidence and claim what he deserves. “No modest man ever did, or ever will, make his fortune.”
As regards money, also, she was eminently a woman of business—too eminently, say her enemies. One reason alleged for her quarrel with Pope is his well-meant advice which brought her large losses in South Sea speculation. However much one may like and admire her, it is impossible wholly to explain away Walpole’s picture of her sordid avarice, which cannot be omitted, though hideous. “Lady Mary Wortley is arrived; I have seen her; I think her avarice, her dirt, and her vivacity are all increased. Her dress, like her languages, is a _galimatias_ of several countries, the groundwork, rags; and the embroidery nastiness. She wears no cap, no handkerchief, no gown, no petticoat, no shoes. An old black-laced hood represents the first; the fur of a horseman’s coat, which replaces the third, serves for the second; a dimity petticoat is deputy, and officiates for the fourth; and slippers act the part of the last.”
It is easy to see here the brush of hatred deepening the colors; but hatred can hardly have invented the whole. Yet all the references to money matters in Lady Mary’s letters are sane and commendable. She hates poverty, and she hates extravagance as the road to poverty, and she cherishes thrift as the assurance of independence and comfort. That sort of lavish living which is certain to end in suffering for self and others she condemns bitterly. Will any one say she can condemn it too bitterly? “He lives upon rapine—I mean running in debt to poor people, who perhaps he will never be able to pay.” But I do not find that she cherishes money for itself. We should seek riches, she says, but why? “As the world is, and will be, ’tis a sort of duty to be rich, that it may be in one’s power to do good, riches being another word for power.” With which compare the remark of Gray, a man surely not liable to the charge of avarice: “It is a striking thing that one can’t only not live as one pleases, but where and with whom one pleases, without money. Swift somewhere says, that money is liberty; and I fear money is friendship, too, and society, and almost every external blessing. It is a great, though ill-natured, comfort, to see most of those who have it in plenty, without pleasure, without liberty, and without friends.”
Nevertheless, it must be admitted that in these questions of conduct Lady Mary does not err on the side of enthusiasm. In a long and curious passage she enlarges on the virtues of her favorite model—Atticus, the typical trimmer and opportunist, who lived in one of the greatest crises of the world, and weathered it safe and rich, who had many friends and served many and betrayed none, but did not think any cause good enough to die for.
As regards social life and general human relations, it is very much the same. Lady Mary had vast acquaintance. I do not find that she had many friends, either dear or intimate. Of Lady Oxford she does, indeed, always speak with deep affection. And she says of herself, no doubt truly: “I have a constancy in my nature that makes me always remember my old friends.” Also her love of a snapping exchange of wit made her appreciate conversation. “You know I have ever been of opinion that a chosen conversation composed of a few that one esteems is the greatest happiness of life.” Yet she was too full of resources to need people, too critical to love people, too little sympathetic to pity people. And in one of the lightning sentences of self-revelation she shows a temperament not perfectly endowed by heaven for friendship: “I manage my friends with such a strong yet with a gentle hand, that they are both willing to do whatever I have a mind to.”
But, if she did not love mankind, she found them endlessly amusing, a perpetual food for observation and curiosity. And the wandering life she led nourished this taste to the fullest degree. “It was a violent transition from your palace and company to be locked up all day with my chambermaid, and sleep at night in a hovel; but my whole life has been in the Pindaric style.” It is this love of diversity, this keen sense of the human in all its phases, which give zest to her Turkish letters and the record of wanderings and hardships which might not now be encountered in a journey to the Pole. But long wanderings and strange faces are not necessary for the naturalist of souls who can find the ugliest weeds and tenderest flowers at his own front door. Lady Mary was never tired of studying souls and thought highly of her own discernment in them. “I have seldom been mistaken in my first judgment of those I thought it worth while to consider.” This confidence I am sorry to find in her; for I have always believed it a good rule that those who asserted their sure judgment of men knew little about them. True insight is more modest. At any rate, mistaken or not, she found the varied spectacle of human action endlessly diverting and again and again recurs to the charm of it: “I endeavour upon this occasion to do as I have hitherto done in all the odd turns of my life; turn them, if I can, to my diversion.” “I own I enjoy vast delight in the folly of mankind; and, God be praised, that is an inexhaustible source of entertainment.”
Thus she could always amuse herself with men and women. At the same time, she could amuse herself without them and needed neither courtship nor cards nor gossip to keep her heart at ease. It is true that in youth she knew youth’s restlessness, and that haunting dread, chronic to some souls, which fills one day with anxiety as to what may fill the next. To Mrs. Hewet she writes: “Be so good as never to read a letter of mine but in one of those minutes when you are entirely alone, weary of everything, and _inquiète_ to think of what you shall do next. All people who live in the country must have some of those minutes.” But time soothes this and makes the present seem so insufficient that the poor shreds of life remaining can never quite eke it out. “I have now lived almost seven years in a stricter retirement than yours in the Isle of Bute, and can assure you, I have never had half an hour heavy on my hands, for want of something to do.”
Her country life did not, indeed, include much ecstasy over the natural world. She was born too early for Rousseau and it is doubtful whether high romance could ever have seriously appealed to her. She finds Venice a gay social centre. Of its poetry, its mystery, its moonlight, never a word. Perhaps these did not exist before Byron. On the Alps and their sublimity she has as delightful a phrase as the whole eighteenth century can furnish (italics mine): “The prodigious prospect of mountains covered with eternal snow, clouds hanging far below our feet, and the vast cascades tumbling down the rocks with a confused roaring, would have been _solemnly entertaining_ to me, if I had suffered less from the extreme cold that reigns here.” If that is not Salvator Rosa in little, what is? I know few things better, unless it be Ovid’s _Nile jocose_, gamesome Nile.
No. Lady Mary’s nature, like that of most of her contemporaries, was an artful invention of trim lawns, boxed walks, shady alleys with a statue at the end or a ruined temple on a turfy hill. Such gardens she liked well enough to stroll in; but the garden that charmed her most was the garden of her soul. “Whoever will cultivate their own mind, will find full employment. Every virtue does not only require great care in the planting, but as much daily solicitude in cherishing, as exotic fruits and flowers.... Add to this the search after knowledge (every branch of which is entertaining), and the longest life is too short for the pursuit of it.”
In that pursuit she never tired, from her early youth to her latest years. Indeed, among her contemporaries she had the reputation of a learning as masculine as some of her other tastes and habits. Here rumor probably exaggerated, as usual. She herself, in her many curious and interesting references to her education, disclaims anything of the sort. She was a bright, quick child, left to herself, with a passion for reading and many books accessible. She learned Latin, French, and Italian, and used them, but rather as a reader than as a scholar. Systematic intellectual training she could hardly have had or desired, merely that passionate delight in the things of the mind which is one of the greatest blessings that can be bestowed upon a human being. “If,” she says of her granddaughter, “she has the same inclination (I should say passion) for learning that I was born with, history, geography, and philosophy will furnish her materials to pass away cheerfully a longer life than is allotted to mortals.”
She had, however, little disposition to brag of her acquirements. On the contrary, it is singular with what insistence, bitterness almost, she urges that a woman should never, never allow herself to be thought wiser or more studious than her kind. Read, if you please; think, if you please; but keep it to yourself. Otherwise women will laugh at you and men avoid you. “I never studied anything in my life, and have always (at least from fifteen) thought the reputation of learning a misfortune to a woman.” And again, of her granddaughter, with a sharp tang that hints at many sad experiences, “The second caution to be given her is to conceal whatever learning she attains, with as much solicitude as she would hide crookedness or lameness; the parade of it can only serve to draw on her the envy, and consequently the most inveterate hatred, of all he and she fools, which will certainly be at least three parts in four of all her acquaintance.”
It is in this spirit that Lady Mary speaks very slightingly of her own poems and other writings; and indeed, they do not deserve much better. For us they are chiefly significant as emphasizing, in their coarseness and in some other peculiarities, that masculine strain which has been so apparent in many sides of her interesting personality.
As a critic she is more fruitful than as an author, and her remarks on contemporary writers have a singular vigor and independence. Johnson she recommends for the idle and ignorant. “Such gentle readers may be improved by a moral hint, which, though repeated over and over from generation to generation, they never heard in their lives.” Fielding and Smollett she adores—again the man’s taste, you see. On Clarissa she is charming. The man in her disapproves, derides. The woman weeps, “like any milkmaid of sixteen over the ballad of the Lady’s Fall.” But weeping, or laughing, or yawning, she reads, reads, reads. For she is a true lover of books. And she thus delightfully amplifies Montesquieu’s delightful eulogy, “_Je n’ai jamais eu de chagrin qu’une demi-heure de lecture ne pouvait dissiper_.” “I wish your daughters to resemble me in nothing but the love of reading, knowing, by experience, how far it is capable of softening the cruellest accidents of life; even the happiest cannot be passed over without many uneasy hours; and there is no remedy so easy as books, which, if they do not give cheerfulness, at least restore quiet to the most troubled mind. Those that fly to cards or company for relief, generally find they only exchange one misfortune for another.”
It must be by this time manifest that in the things of the spirit Lady Mary was as masculine and as stoical as in things of the flesh. In very early youth she translated Epictetus and he stood by her to the grave. Life has its vexations and many of them. People fret and torment, till even her equanimity sometimes gives way. “I am sick with vexation.” But, in general, she surmounts or forgets, now with an unpleasant, haughty fling of cynical scorn, “For my part, as it is my established opinion that this globe of ours is no better than a Holland cheese, and the walkers about in it mites, I possess my mind in patience, let what will happen; and should feel tolerably easy, though a great rat came and ate half of it up;” now, as in her very last years, with a gentler reminiscence of her heroic teacher: “In this world much must be suffered, and we ought all to follow the rule of Epictetus, ‘Bear and forbear.’”
As for nerves, vapors, melancholy, she has little experience of such feminine weakness, and no patience with it. “Mutability of sublunary things is the only melancholy reflection I have to make on my own account.” She seldom makes any other. “Strictly speaking, there is but one real evil—I mean acute pain; all other complaints are so considerably diminished by time, that it is plain the grief of it is owing to our passion, since the sensation of it vanishes when that is over.” If by chance any little wrinkle shows itself, sigh from some unknown despair, winter shadow of old age and failing strength and falling friends, let us smother it, strangle it, obliterate it, by a book, or a flower, or a smile. In these matters habit is everything.
And what was God in Lady Mary’s life? Apparently, little or nothing. As strangely little as in so many eighteenth century lives. There is no rebellion, no passionate debate of hope or doubt; simply, as it seems, very little thought given to the subject. Religion is a useful thing—for the million, oh, an excellent thing, under any garb, in Turkey, in Italy, in England. Respect it? Yes. Cherish it? Yes. Believe it? The question is—well, an impertinent one. And if it be said that there may have been a feeling that some things were too sacred to be spoken about, let anyone who can read Lady Mary’s letters through and retain that idea, cling to it for his comfort.
No, she lived like a gentlewoman, I had almost said like a gentleman, with a decent regard for the proprieties, a fundamental instinct of duty, a fair share of human charity, and an inexhaustible delight in the fleeting shows of time. And she died as she had lived. “Lady Mary Wortley, too, is departing,” says Horace Walpole. “She brought over a cancer in her breast, which she concealed till about six weeks ago. It burst and there are no hopes of her. She behaves with great fortitude, and says she has lived long enough.”
Altogether, not a winning figure, but a solid one, who, with many oddities, treads earth firmly, and makes life seem respectable, if not bewitching.
II
LADY HOLLAND
CHRONOLOGY
Elizabeth Vassall Born March 25, 1771. Married Sir Godfrey Webster 1786. Traveled abroad 1791-1796. Divorced July 4, 1797. Married Lord Holland July 6, 1797. Lord Holland died 1840. Died 1845.
[Illustration: _Elizabeth, Lady Holland_]
II
LADY HOLLAND
The brilliant salons which have made so conspicuous a figure in French social life have had few counterparts in England. English women have perhaps influenced politics and thought quite as powerfully as have their French sisters. But in England the work has been done through husbands or fathers or brothers, domestically, not in an open social circle where wit glitters and ideas clash.
One of the most notable exceptions to this rule was the Holland House society during the first half of the nineteenth century. Politically Holland House was a Whig centre; but its hospitable doors were open to all who talked or thought. Fox, Canning, Brougham, Grey, Melbourne, John Russell, unbent there and discussed great themes and little. Rogers mocked, Sydney Smith laughed, Moore sang, Macaulay unwound his memory, and Greville listened and recorded. Wordsworth dropped a thought there, Talleyrand a witticism. Irving brought over the America of the eighteenth century, Ticknor of the nineteenth.
“It is the house of all Europe,” says Greville. “All like it more or less; and whenever ... it shall come to an end, a vacuum will be made in society which nothing can supply. The world will suffer by the loss; and it may be said with truth that it will ‘eclipse the gaiety of nations.’” Macaulay adorned the theme with his ample rhetoric: “Former guests will recollect how many men who have guided the politics of Europe, who have moved great assemblies by reason and eloquence, who have put life into bronze or canvas, or who have left to posterity things so written that it shall not willingly let them die, were there mixed with all that was loveliest and gayest in the society of the most splendid of capitals. They will remember the peculiar character which belonged to that circle, in which every talent and accomplishment, every art and science, had its place.... They will remember, above all, the grace, and the kindness, far more admirable than grace, with which the princely hospitality of that ancient mansion was dispensed. They will remember the venerable and benignant countenance and the cordial voice of him who bade them welcome.... They will remember, too, that he whose name they hold in reverence was not less distinguished by the inflexible uprightness of his political conduct than by his loving disposition and his winning manners. They will remember that, in the last lines which he traced, he expressed his joy that he had done nothing unworthy of the friend of Fox and Grey; and they will have reason to feel similar joy, if, in looking back on many troubled years, they cannot accuse themselves of having done anything unworthy of men who were distinguished by the friendship of Lord Holland.”
You will observe that little is said here of the mistress of the house. As regards Lord Holland, it is instructive to turn from Macaulay’s swelling periods to the cool comment of Greville, who was neither a rhetorician nor a cynic: “I doubt, from all I see, whether anybody (except his own family, including Allen) had really a very warm affection for Lord Holland, and the reason probably is that he had none for anybody.”
There was a mistress of the house and Macaulay elsewhere has enough to say about her. It is quite astonishing, the unanimity with which her guests combine to slight her character and emphasize her defects. Macaulay asserts, in the passage quoted above, that “all that was loveliest and gayest” met at Holland House. This is quite false; for few women went there. Those who did had little good to say of their hostess. In the early years before she married Lord Holland, Miss Holroyd wrote of her: “If anybody ever offends you so grievously that you do not recollect any punishment bad enough for them, only wish them on a party of pleasure with Lady Webster!... Everything that was proposed she decidedly determined on a contrary scheme, and as regularly altered her mind in a few hours.” Long after, Fanny Kemble expresses herself quite as bitterly: “The impression she made upon me was so disagreeable that for a time it involved every member of that dinner party in a halo of undistinguishable dislike in my mind.”
When the women condemn, one expects the men to praise. In this case they do not. All alike, in milder or harsher terms, record her acts that crushed, her speeches that stung. The gentle Moore takes Irving to visit her. “Lady H. said, ‘What an uncouth hour to come at,’ which alarmed me a little, but she was very civil to him.” Rogers told Dyce that “when she wanted to get rid of a fop, she would beg his pardon and ask him to sit little further off, adding ‘there is something on your handkerchief I do not quite like.’” She observed to Rogers himself: “Your poetry is bad enough, so pray be sparing of your prose.” And to Lord Porchester: “I am sorry to hear you are going to publish a poem. Can’t you suppress it?”
Also they paid her back in kind, with a vim which, in gentlemen, as they all were, seems to imply immense provocation. “My lady ... asked me how I could write those vulgar verses the other day about Hunt,” writes Moore. “Asked her in turn, why she should take it for granted, if they were so vulgar, that it was I who wrote them.” Croker records: “Lady Holland was saying yesterday to her assembled coterie, ‘Why should not Lord Holland be Secretary for Foreign Affairs—why not as well as Lord Landsdowne for the Home Department?’ Little Lord John Russell is said to have replied, in his quiet way, ‘Why, they say, Ma’am, that you open all Lord Holland’s letters, and the Foreign Ministers might not like _that_.’” Rogers was talking of beautiful hair. “Why, Rogers, only a few years ago I had such a head of hair that I could hide myself in it, and I’ve lost it all.” Rogers merely answered, “What a pity!” “But with such a look and tone,” says Fanny Kemble, “that an exultant giggle ran round the table at her expense.” And the table was her own! To Ticknor she said “That she believed New England was originally colonized by convicts sent over from the mother country. Mr. Ticknor replied that he was not aware of it, but said he knew that some of the Vassall family—ancestors of Lady Holland—had settled early in Massachusetts.” Finally, there is the almost incredible incident so vividly narrated by Macaulay. “Lady Holland is in a most extraordinary state. She came to Rogers’s, with Allen, in so bad a humour that we were all forced to rally and make common cause against her. There was not a person at table to whom she was not rude; and none of us were inclined to submit. Rogers sneered; Sydney made merciless sport of her; Tom Moore looked excessively impertinent; Bobus put her down with simple, straightforward rudeness; and I treated her with what I meant to be the coldest civility. Allen flew into a rage with us all, and especially with Sydney, whose guffaws, as the Scotch say, were indeed tremendous.”
One and all, they felt that the lady wished to domineer, to rule over everything and everybody, and they did not like it. “Now, Macaulay,” she would say, “we have had enough of this. Give us something else.” At a crowded table, when a late guest came: “Luttrell, make room.” “It must be made,” murmured Luttrell; “for it does not exist.” “The centurion did not keep his soldiers in better order than she kept her guests,” Macaulay writes. “It is to one, ‘Go,’ and he goeth; and to another, ‘Do this,’ and it is done.” Some one asked Lord Dudley why he did not go to Holland House. He said that he did not choose to be tyrannized over while he was eating his dinner.