THE BLUE-STOCKINGS
Posterity is spiteful towards those who do not make good their claim to
immortality; and for a long time the Blue-stockings have been the butt of
the superior modern. Yet they were remarkable women, and by their dash to
capture for themselves some of the treasures of man's learning they helped
to open up a new way for the modern woman.
We can dispense no doubt with Mrs Montagu's _Essay_, in which she defends
Shakespeare against the rash onslaught of Voltaire. We may even forget her
three _Dialogues of the Dead_, although Mrs Modish speaks with the genuine
accent of the polite world: "Indeed, Mr Mercury, I cannot have the
pleasure of waiting upon you now, I am engaged, absolutely engaged."
(There was a fourth Dialogue returned to her by Lord Lyttelton in which
Cleopatra tells Berenice only what every woman knows.) But we cannot forgo
without loss to ourselves her letters to the Duchess of Portland and many
other friends, which are lively, witty, and entertaining, and second in
her time only to those of that prince of letter-writers, Horace Walpole.
Mrs Montagu's friends did their best to turn her head. Mrs Carter writes
to her of "the elegant brilliancy of my dearest Mrs Montagu," and not
content with prose as a medium of praise, sends her an ode which leads up
by a strong crescendo to these two verses:
"O blest with ev'ry talent, ev'ry Grace
Which native Fire, or happy Art supplies,
How short a Period, how confined a Space,
Must bound thy shining Course below the Skies!
For wider Glories, for immortal Fame,
Were all those talents, all those Graces given:
And may thy life pursue that noblest aim,
The final plaudit of approving Heav'n."
Mrs Carter thought that Dr Johnson's preface to Shakespeare was "very
defective," and she adds to Mrs Montagu, certain that her Latin will be
understood without the aid of a dictionary: "Res integra tibi reservatur."
Elsewhere she writes: "you, who have proved yourself the most accurate and
judicious of all his commentators." This opinion was shared by the entire
circle of Blue-stockings, and even outside that charmed circle the
Reverend Montagu Pennington, nephew of Mrs Carter and godson of Mrs
Montagu, felt that she was guilty of something like mortal sin in omitting
to defend the British Public against the pernicious influence of Lord
Chesterfield's _Letters to his Son_.
Mrs Carter, loaded with languages, and much addicted to snuff and green
tea, was scarcely inferior to Mrs Montagu. She was modest and almost
apologetic for her much learning. She and the rest of the heady sisterhood
were not without misgivings that in pursuing man's studies they might
become manly, and therefore they never ceased to express in season and out
of season pious female sentiments. Indeed, Mrs Carter protested against
being thought of as a walking tripod, and was what used to be called "a
sweet woman." Thus she writes of "the infernal composition of deadly weeds
made up by Voltaire." _Candide_ was "so horrid in all respects." _Werther_
she detested. She is relieved to hear that Pascal is "very respectable,"
for she considered him "a dangerous author to all kinds of readers."
Rousseau "quite sunk her spirits." Of course her spirits were liable to
the same shock during her extensive readings among the ancients, and,
indeed, she said that Quintilian's impiety was "quite shocking"; but very
justly she considered that they were to be excused because they had not
the light of revelation, while Voltaire and Rousseau were sinning against
that light.
Mrs Carter and Mrs Montagu fully agreed in their admiration for Mrs Vesey,
whom they familiarly called "our Sylph." Hannah More in her _Bas Bleu_
seems to reckon her the first of the Blues, and specially commends her for
the skill she displayed in breaking the formidable circle that Mrs
Montagu's guests were forced to make. Her lively Irish nature was
refreshing to Mrs Carter, her head full and aching after a strenuous
tussle with Aristotle's _Ethics_. She wrote to Mrs Montagu: "As little of
the turbulent as there is in her (our Sylph's) composition, the uproar of
a mighty sea is as much adapted to the sublime of her imagination, as the
soft murmurs of a gliding stream to the gentleness of her temper."
The conversaziones of the Blue-stockings were as successful as might be.
There was always a difficulty in procuring men. Dr Johnson could be baited
from time to time. Horace Walpole, driven by curiosity, appeared and
disappeared. At Mrs Ord's, 35 Queen Anne Street, where Fanny Burney met
"everything delectable in the Blue way," one catches a glimpse of Mr
Smelt, Captain Phillips, Dr Burney, Lord Mulgrave, Sir Lucas Pepys, and
the Bishop of London. The kindness and patronage of Lord Bath and Lord
Lyttelton could always be relied upon. Yet there was no full and easy
interchange of ideas with men. The time had not yet come. In France it had
been accomplished by the ladies who were willing to step beyond the bounds
of strict propriety, but the pious English Blues were the last to wish to
follow the example of their French sisters. And so their best chance of
getting a man was to catch one young and struggling whom they might
patronize and be kind to.
In this way all the luck fell to Mrs Mathew, of 27 Rathbone Place. If Mrs
Montagu had the advantage of a rich and indulgent husband, Mrs Mathew
excelled all in the respectability of hers. The Reverend Henry Mathew was
incumbent of Percy Chapel, Charlotte Street, and afternoon preacher at St
Martin's-in-the-Fields. The latter church alone is sufficient to make a
man's reputation; but Mr Mathew had already made his both by his piety and
his taste.
No one has such opportunities as one of the priesthood for discovering
promising young men. Mr Mathew's first find was little Flaxman struggling
with a Latin book. Learning the nature of the book, he promised him a
better and invited him to his house. Mrs Mathew herself was well read in
Latin and Greek, and here was a boy of genius thrown into her very lap.
Rising to the great occasion, she taught him, read to him while he
sketched, and by her treatment of him alone made more than amends for
being a Blue.
When Flaxman was full grown he did all in his power to show his gratitude.
Mrs Mathew was desirous to turn her back parlour into a Gothic chamber.
Here was an opportunity. Flaxman modelled little figures of sand and
putty and placed them in niches. Another protege, Oram, son of old Oram
and Loutherbourg's assistant, painted the windows, and between them they
made the book-cases, tables, and chairs to match. With such a room, Mrs
Mathew might ask whom she would and not be ashamed. To her tea parties
came Mrs Montagu, Mrs Carter when staying in Clarges Street, Mrs Barbauld,
Mrs Chapone, Mrs Brooke, and many others.
Blake and Flaxman first met in 1780 and soon became friends. Flaxman, by
native bent and Mrs Mathew's teaching, was steeped in Greek. By this time
he had shown himself wonderful alike in his designs and sculptures, and
already held a high place in what has been called the Second Renaissance.
Blake was a romantic rather than a Greek, but as a later Greek, Goethe,
has assured us that there is no antagonism between a true romantic and a
true Greek, it is not surprising that the two men found a deep
congeniality of spirit. There was an even deeper fellowship, which became
explicit later on when both concurred in admiring Swedenborg.
Flaxman, generously anxious that his friend should get on, introduced him,
in 1782, to Mr and Mrs Mathew, who asked him and Mrs Blake to their
evenings. And so at last we see rebel Blake and his illiterate wife in the
midst of a charmed circle of Blues who were mistresses of everything that
was learned, cultured, elegant, decorous, and _du bon ton_.
Our first glimpse of Blake in Society we owe to John Thomas Smith, Keeper
of the Prints at the British Museum and frequent visitor at Mrs Mathew's.
He says in his _Book for a Rainy Day_: "At Mrs Mathew's most agreeable
conversaziones I first met the late William Blake, the artist, to whom she
and Mr Flaxman had been truly kind. There I have often heard him read and
sing several of his poems. He was listened to by the company with profound
silence, and allowed by most of the visitors to possess original and
extraordinary merit."
That is a pleasant picture. Would that we had been there! But as time went
on several things became clear to Blake and likewise to the company, only
their interpretation of the situation differed. Mrs Blake proved a
touchstone to the other ladies. They of course could see at once that she
was not a lady, but that they must be kind to her. She, not having read
Mrs Chapone on the improvement of the mind or practised the elegancies,
was quite unable to imitate their manners and catch their tone. She was
throughout a simple, direct, noble woman set down in the midst of an
artificial society, and she was made to suffer accordingly. These things
sank deep into Blake, to reappear again as poems in his _Ideas of Good and
Evil_. Many times he himself felt the same discomfort both at Mrs Mathew's
and later at Mr Hayley's. The words he puts into Mary's (Catherine's) lips
he speaks in his own person in lines that he afterwards addressed to
Flaxman:
"Oh, why was I born with a different face?
Why was I not born like this envious race?
Why did Heaven adorn me with bountiful hand,
And then set me down in an envious land?"
Still Blake was "allowed by most of the visitors to possess original and
extraordinary merit." The songs he sang were inspired by his reading of
the Elizabethans, whom the Blues could appreciate. The _Poetical Sketches_
came within the purview of professed admirers of Ben Jonson and Spenser;
and therefore Mrs Mathew could genuinely agree with Flaxman that it was
worth helping Blake to get them published. The _Poetical Sketches_ were
gathered together and printed at the expense of Flaxman and the Mathews,
Mr Mathew himself writing an apologetic _Advertisement_ which would save
his skin and lack of discernment if the pieces were unapproved by the
great Public. Since it is short, I will quote it entire:
"The following sketches were the production of untutored youth, commenced
in his twelfth, and occasionally resumed by the author till his twentieth
year; since which time, his talents having been wholly directed to the
attainment of excellence in his profession, he has been deprived of the
leisure requisite to such a revisal of these sheets as might have rendered
them less unfit to meet the public eye. Conscious of the irregularities
and defects to be found in almost every page, his friends have still
believed that they possessed a poetical originality, which merited some
respite from oblivion. These their opinions remain, however, to be now
reproved or confirmed by a less partial public."
It was hardly want of leisure that had prevented Blake from polishing his
verses. Mr Mathew had argued with him on the necessity, and he had proved
tiresomely obstinate, and, what is worse, remained of the same opinion
eight years afterwards when he wrote in _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_:
"Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement
are roads of Genius."
Mr Mathew was but one of those Bunglers that "can never see perfection,
but in the journeyman's labour." However, he saved his name for his
generation and lost it for posterity.
Blake's _Poetical Sketches_ were printed but not published. The copies
were handed over to him to give or sell, but they brought him neither fame
nor money.
It is long since anyone doubted the worth of the _Poetical Sketches_. The
twentieth century wholly endorses the glowing and just criticism that
Swinburne wrote fifty years ago. It must have startled the stolid bookish
people of the 'sixties to be told that the best of Blake's _Poetical
Sketches_--_To Spring_, _To Memory_, _To the Muses_, _To the Evening
Star_--were comparable to the world's best in any age. Swinburne
frequently exaggerated in his excitement; but here was no exaggeration,
and the poems which were once thought by a partial friend "to merit some
respite from oblivion" are now reckoned among the chief pearls of great
price in England's rich treasury of Songs.
There remains little more for the critic to say, but the biographer turns
to these _Sketches_ for any intimation of Blake's spiritual and mental
growth.
We must not be misled by the "scent and sound of Elizabethan times" that
is upon them. It is of course interesting to the literary mind to discover
Ben Jonson in _How sweet I roamed_, Beaumont and Fletcher in _My Silks and
fine Array_, Webster in the _Mad Song_, and Shakespeare in _King Edward
the Third_; but these intimations of kinship are only such as are found in
original geniuses of the same age. That which gives life and immortality
and irresistible sweetness to the songs is Blake's own child-spirit seeing
with wide-eyed simplicity the simple commonplace things of this world that
God made, and that are to the pure in heart the immediate revelation of
Him. If in fashioning into Song the things that he saw Blake refuses the
artifice of his time and catches the scent and sound of a more robust age,
yet the prime inspiration was entirely his own; and we can only wonder
that such inspiration should have come to him while still a mere boy.
The other pieces in the collection, though of much less importance, have
their interest. _Fair Elinor_ with the "silent tower," the "castle gate,"
the "dreary vaults," and "sickly smells," like Horace Walpole's
_Mysterious Mother_ and _Castle of Otranto_, is not of the time but
anticipatory of the romantic horrors that Mrs Radcliffe was to make
entirely her own. _Gwen King of Norway_ and _King Edward the Third_ are
remarkable for their martial language. This was no accident. Blake was a
born fighter. The heroic side of War stirred his spirit, even though
"The God of War is drunk with blood;
The Earth doth faint and fail:
The stench of blood makes sick the Heav'ns;
Ghosts glut the throat of Hell!"
His feeling for England recalls old John of Gaunt's speech:
"Lord Percy cannot mean that we should suffer
This disgrace: if so, we are not sovereigns
Of the sea--our right, that Heaven gave
To England, when at the birth of nature
She was seated in the deep; the Ocean ceas'd
His mighty roar, and fawning play'd around
Her snowy feet, and own'd his awful Queen."
Grim War is a means to glorious liberty:
"Then let the clarion of War begin;
I'll fight and weep, 'tis in my country's cause;
I'll weep and shout for glorious liberty.
Grim War shall laugh and shout, decked in tears,
And blood shall flow like streams across the meadows,
That murmur down their pebbly channels, and
Spend their sweet lives to do their country service:
Then shall England's verdure shoot, her fields shall smile,
Her ships shall sing across the foaming sea,
Her mariners shall use the flute and viol,
And rattling guns, and black and dreary war,
Shall be no more."
Later on the War spirit in him, without diminishing, underwent a change.
It is still England's green and pleasant fields that he loves, and he
still longs for glorious liberty. This shall be effected by the building
of Jerusalem. But as the root of the evil is in man, the weapons of his
warfare become spiritual. Casting aside the rattling guns, he shouts:
"Bring me my bow of burning gold,
Bring me my arrows of desire;
Bring me my spear; O clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land."
For War breeds hate and every evil thing. Until we arouse ourselves and
fight like warriors the evil that is in ourselves, there can be no
glorious liberty, whether for England or any other nation of the world.
The _Poetical Sketches_ were a failure. Mrs Mathew had generously tried to
help, but her influence was not wide.
A magnificent opportunity had come to the Blue-stockings, and to Mrs
Montagu in particular, who with all her money and wide influence, which
she was always ready to use for her needy friends, might have helped quite
incalculably when Blake most needed it, and earned our undying gratitude.
Yet we must be just and not blame them for their lost opportunity. Their
significance lies in the fact that they objected to being perfect dunces
like the rest of their English sisters, and so they made a bold dash to
understand the things that men understand. They were not the first learned
women the world had seen. The ladies of the Italian Renaissance could have
given them points all round. Their work was that of restoration and not
revolution, and that was more than sufficient to occupy their thoughts and
energies without their peering into the new world that was at work in
Blake. When whiffs of the new spirit blew on them from Voltaire, Rousseau,
Goethe, and Hume, they were chilled and shocked, and thanked Heaven that
in Dr Johnson there was a champion who knew all about the new and stoutly
maintained the old. That was sufficient for them. Unfortunately they lived
at a time when Society was more than usually artificial and woman
suppressed, and the odd contrast between them and their sisters made them
appear to men somewhat as monsters, like singing mice or performing pigs.
The charge of being a Blue-stocking must always brand with a stigma, but
happily now that women are establishing their right to meet men on an
equality, the charge need never be made again.