By Gamaliel Bradford
PORTRAITS OF WOMEN. Illustrated.
UNION PORTRAITS. Illustrated.
CONFEDERATE PORTRAITS. Illustrated.
LEE THE AMERICAN. Illustrated.
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
PORTRAITS OF WOMEN
PORTRAITS OF WOMEN
BY
GAMALIEL BRADFORD
_With Illustrations_
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1916
COPYRIGHT, 1912, 1913, 1914, 1915, BY THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW
COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY THE SUWANEE REVIEW
COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY THE SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY
COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY GAMALIEL BRADFORD
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Published October 1916_
TO MY DAUGHTER
_Out, hyperbolical fiend! talkest thou nothing but of ladies?_
TWELFTH NIGHT.
PREFACE
The nine portraits contained in this volume are preliminary studies
or sketches for the series of portraits of American women which will
follow my Union portraits. Such a collection of portraits of women will
certainly fill a most important section in the gallery of historical
likenesses selected from the whole of American history, which it is my
wish to complete, if possible.
There is always a certain impertinence about a man’s attempt to portray
the characters of women. And this impertinence is not got rid of by
the charming, but not wholly felicitous, epigraph of Sainte-Beuve’s
_Portraits de Femmes_: _“Avez vous donc été femme, Monsieur, pour
prétendre ainsi nous connâitre?”—“Non, Madame, je ne suis pas le devin
Tirésias, je ne suis qu’un humble mortel qui vous a beaucoup aimées.”_
There is, however, an equal impertinence in trying to portray the
characters of men, indeed of anybody but one’s self, and though this
last undertaking is always delightful, it is apt to lead to even more
astonishing results than accompany one’s attempts upon others. While
endeavoring constantly to strengthen and deepen the accuracy of my
portraits as regards mere fact, I yet become more and more convinced
that their value must be more in suggestion and stimulation than in any
reliable or final presentment of character. Such presentments do not
exist.
The selection of portraits in this volume has grown in a rather haphazard
way. Although the types depicted differ from one another, sometimes with
marked contrast, still, if I had planned the series deliberately as a
whole, I should have picked out figures more representative of entirely
different lines of life. A disadvantage, much more marked in portraying
women than in portraying men, is the necessity of dealing with exceptions
rather than with average personages. The psychographer must have abundant
material, and usually it is women who have lived exceptional lives that
leave such material behind them. The psychography of queens and artists
and authors and saints is little, if any, more interesting, than that
of your mother or mine, or of the first shopgirl we meet. I would paint
the shopgirl’s portrait with the greatest pleasure, but the material is
lacking.
It will be noted, also, that none of these portraits presents the modern
woman. Eugénie de Guérin is the latest in date and she is about as modern
as Eve. The projection of woman into the very middle of the stage of
active life, her participation on equal terms in almost all the lines of
man’s achievement, are effecting the vastest social revolution since the
appearance of Christianity. The outcome of this revolution is something
no man—or woman—can foresee. But its most obvious and perhaps principal
effect is in moulding the life, character, and habits of man. Woman
already dominates our manners, our morals, our literature, our stage, our
private finances. She proposes to dominate our politics. And it is by no
means sure that she will not end by the subjugation of our intelligence.
This feminine supremacy obtains, if I am correctly informed, in the
kingdom of the spiders and also, according to some seers, in the most
advanced development of the planetary worlds. While such a conquest must,
of course, to some extent, react upon the conqueror, it seems probable
that the fundamental instincts of the feminine temperament are what
they were a thousand, or two thousand years ago, and that the new woman
remains the same old woman in a little different garb, which propensity
to a little different garb is the oldest thing about her.
As I have already explained in the preface to “Union Portraits,” the word
“Portrait” is very unsatisfactory, in spite of the high authority of
Sainte-Beuve. Analogies between different arts are always misleading and
this particular analogy is particularly objectionable. Critics, otherwise
kindly, have urged that a portrait takes a man only at one special moment
of his life and may therefore be quite untrue to the larger lines of his
character. This is perfectly just, and the word “psychographs” should be
substituted for “portraits.” Psychography aims at precisely the opposite
of photography. It seeks to extricate from the fleeting, shifting,
many-colored tissue of a man’s long life those habits of action,
usually known as qualities of character, which are the slow product of
inheritance and training, and which, once formed at a comparatively early
age, usually alter little and that only by imperceptible degrees. The
art of psychography is to disentangle these habits from the immaterial,
inessential matter of biography, to illustrate them by touches of speech
and action that are significant and by those only, and thus to burn
them into the attention of the reader, not by any means as a final or
unchangeable verdict, but as something that cannot be changed without
vigorous thinking on the part of the reader himself.
But “Psychographs of Women,” on the back of a book, is as yet rather
startling for the publisher, for the purchaser, and even for me.
GAMALIEL BRADFORD
WELLESLEY HILLS, MASS. _May 26, 1916_
CONTENTS
I. LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU 1
II. LADY HOLLAND 23
III. MISS AUSTEN 45
IV. MADAME D’ARBLAY 67
V. MRS. PEPYS 89
VI. MADAME DE SÉVIGNÉ 111
VII. MADAME DU DEFFAND 133
VIII. MADAME DE CHOISEUL 155
IX. EUGÉNIE DE GUÉRIN 177
ILLUSTRATIONS
LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU _Frontispiece_
After the painting by Sir Godfrey Kneller
ELIZABETH, LADY HOLLAND 24
After the painting by Fagan
JANE AUSTEN 46
After the water-color drawing by her sister in the possession
of W. Austen Leigh, Esq.
MADAME D’ARBLAY 68
After the painting by Edward Francis Burney in 1782.
MRS. PEPYS AS ST. KATHARINE 90
From an engraving by Hollyer after the painting by Hayls
MADAME DE SÉVIGNÉ 112
After the original pastel by Nanteuil
MADAME DU DEFFAND 134
From an engraving after the painting by Carmontelle
MADAME DE CHOISEUL 156
From a photogravure in _Le Duc et la Duchesse de Choiseul_,
by Gaston Maugras, after a portrait owned by the Comte de
Ludre
PORTRAITS OF WOMEN
I
LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU
CHRONOLOGY
Lady Mary Pierrepont.
Born London, May 26, 1689.
Married Edward Wortley Montagu, August 16, 1712.
In Constantinople 1716-1718.
In Italy 1739-1761.
Husband died 1761.
Died London, August 21, 1762.
[Illustration: _Lady Mary Wortley Montagu_]
I
LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (born Pierrepont) wrote poems, essays, and
translations of some note in her own day, of none in ours. She also wrote
letters which can never die, letters less charming, indeed, than Madame
de Sévigné’s because the writer was less charming, but full of light for
the first half of the eighteenth century and also for Lady Mary herself.
I do not refer so much to the celebrated letters from Constantinople,
because those were probably arranged and edited for literary purposes,
but to the general correspondence, which throbs and vibrates and sparkles
like a live thing.
The writer knew quite well what she was doing. Speaking of Madame de
Sévigné’s productions she says: “Mine will be full as entertaining
forty years hence.” And, perhaps with a touch of jealousy not wholly
uncharacteristic, she depreciates her French predecessor, “who only
gives us, in a lively manner and fashionable phrases, mean sentiments,
vulgar prejudices, and endless repetitions. Sometimes the tittle-tattle
of a fine lady, sometimes the tittle-tattle of an old nurse, always
tittle-tattle.” Those who find the divine tittle-tattle of “Notre Dame
des Rochers” not only among the liveliest, but among the most human and
even the wisest, things in literature, will not be the less ready to
appreciate Lady Mary, who has her own tittle-tattle as well as her own
wisdom and liveliness. How easy she is, how ready, and how graceful. Her
letters, she says, are “written with rapidity and sent without reading
over.” This may be true and may not. At any rate, they have, at their
best, the freshness of first thoughts, the careless brilliancy of a
high-bred, keen-witted woman, talking in her own parlor, indifferent to
effect, yet naturally elegant, in her speech, as in her dress and motion.
With what vivacity she touches everything and everybody about her, “a
certain sprightly folly that (I thank God) I was born with” she calls
it, but it is only folly in the sense of making dull things gay and sad
things tolerable. See how she finds laughter in the imminence of sea
peril. An ancient English lady “had bought a fine point head, which she
was contriving to conceal from the custom-house officers.... When the
wind grew high, and our little vessel cracked, she fell heartily to her
prayers, and thought wholly of her soul. When it seemed to abate, she
returned to the worldly care of her head-dress, and addressed herself
to me: ‘Dear madam, will you take care of this point? If it should be
lost!—Ah, Lord, we shall all be lost!—Lord have mercy on my soul!—Pray,
madam, take care of this head-dress.’ This easy transition from her soul
to her head-dress, and the alternate agonies that both gave her, made it
hard to determine which she thought of greatest value.”
In the constant imminence of life’s world perils Lady Mary had still by
her this resource of merriment, which some call flippancy, but which, by
any name, is not without its comforts.
True, such a glib tongue or pen is a dangerous play-thing and liable
to abuse. Lady Mary’s own daughter said that her mother was too apt to
set down people of a meek and gentle character for fools. People of any
character, perhaps, whenever the wayward fancy struck her. She darted her
shafts right and left. They stung and they clung, for they were barbed,
if not poisoned. Sometimes they made near friends as cold as strangers.
Too often they turned indifferent strangers into enemies. Enemies, too
many, Lady Mary had all her life, and they seized on her weak points and
amplified or invented ugly things about her till those who admire her
most find defence somewhat difficult.
Yet she did not gloat over evil. “’Tis always a mortification to me to
observe there is no perfection in humanity.” Her unkindness was far more
on her tongue than in her heart. “This I know, that revenge has so few
joys for me, I shall never lose so much time as to undertake it.” She
had the keenest sense of human sorrow and suffering: “I think nothing so
terrible as objects of misery, except one had the God-like attribute of
being able to redress them.” What she could do to redress them she did.
In her efforts to introduce inoculation for smallpox she surely proved
herself one of the greatest benefactors of humanity. In many smaller
things, also, she was kindly and sympathetic. And what pleases me most
is that she makes little mention of such deeds herself. One is left to
divine them from curt, half-sarcastic remarks in other connections.
Thus, during her long residence in Italy, it appears that she ministered
to her neighbors both in body and soul. “I do what good I am able in
the village round me, which is a very large one; and have had so much
success, that I am thought a great physician, and should be esteemed a
saint if I went to mass.” Later she had much ado to keep the people from
erecting a statue to her. But she shrank from love in Italy which was
sure to breed laughter in England.
Also, even in her bursts of ill-nature, she had a certain reserve, a
certain control, a certain sobriety. Indeed, she compliments herself, in
old age, on her freedom from petulance. “To say truth, I think myself
an uncommon kind of creature, being an old woman without superstition,
peevishness, or censoriousness.” This is, perhaps, more than we could
say for her. But in youth and age both she loved moderation and shunned
excess. When she was twenty-three, she wrote, “I would throw off all
partiality and passion, and be calm in my opinion.” She threw them off
too much, she was too calm, she was cold. Walpole called her letters too
womanish, but Lady Craven thought they must have been written by a man.
Most readers will agree with Lady Craven. Even her vivacity lacks warmth.
And it is here that she most falls short of the golden sunshine of Madame
de Sévigné. Lady Mary is not quite the woman, even in her malice. Through
her wit, through her thought, through her comment on life, even through
her human relations runs a strain of something that was masculine.
Nowhere is this more curious and amusing than in her love and marriage.
She was beautiful, and knew it, though the smallpox, by depriving her of
eyelashes, had given a certain staring boldness to her eyes. When she was
over thirty, she “led up a ball” and “believed in her conscience she made
one of the best figures there.” When she was old, for all her philosophy,
she did not look in a glass for eleven years. “The last reflexion I saw
there was so disagreeable, I resolved to spare myself such mortifications
for the future.”
She fed her youthful fancy with the vast fictions then in fashion and the
result was a romantic head and a cool heart. These appear alternately
in her strange correspondence with her lover and future husband,
Edward Wortley Montagu. When they first met, the gentleman admired her
learning—at fourteen! And Latinity seems to have drawn them together
quite as much as love. There was a sister, Miss Anne Wortley, and sisters
are of great use on such occasions. Lady Mary wrote to her in language
of extravagant regard, and Miss Wortley wrote back—at her brother’s
dictation. Then it became obviously simpler for the lovers to write
direct.
Obstacles arose. Mr. Wortley Montagu would make no settlement on his
wife. Lady Mary’s father would not hear of a marriage without one, and
hunted up another suitor, rich—and unacceptable. There was doubt, debate,
delay—and then an elopement. Lady Mary eloping! What elements of comedy!
And her letters make it so.
That she loved her lover as much as she could love is evident. “My
protestations of friendship are not like other people’s, I never speak
but what I mean, and when I say I love, ’tis for ever.” “I am willing
to abandon all conversation but yours. If you please I will never see
another man. In short, I will part with anything for you, but you. I will
not have you a month to lose you for the rest of my life.” “I would die
to be secure of your heart, though but for a moment.”
Yet this apparent passion is tempered with doubt and reversal. She cannot
make him happy, nor he her. “I can esteem, I can be a friend, but I don’t
know whether I can love.” “You would be soon tired with seeing every
day the same thing.” No, it is all folly. Cancel it, break it up, throw
it over. Begin again, a new life, a new world. She will write to him no
more. “I resolve against all correspondence of the kind; my resolutions
are seldom made, and never broken.”
This one is broken in a few days. Again she loves, again she hopes.
Everything shall be right, so far as it lies with her. “If my
opinion could sway, nothing should displease you. Nobody ever was
so disinterested as I am.” And yet once more cold analysis twitches
her sleeve, murmurs in her ear. “You are the first I ever had a
correspondence with, and I thank God I have done with it for all my
life.” “When I have no more to say to you, you will like me no longer.”
Then she blows the doubts away, makes her stolen marriage, gives all to
love, and in the very doing of it, lets fall one word that shows the
doubter more than ever (italics mine): “I foresee all that will happen
on this occasion. I shall incense my family in the highest degree. The
generality of the world will blame my conduct ...; yet, _’tis possible_,
you may recompence everything to me.” How two little words will show a
heart!
And afterwards? She fared pretty much as she expected. Love hardened into
marriage with some, not unusual, hours of agony. “I cannot forbear any
longer telling you, I think you use me very unkindly.” When he fails to
write to her, she cries for two hours. Then all becomes domestic, and
decorous, and as it should be; and her matured opinion of marriage agrees
very well with the previsions of her youth. “Where are people matched?
I suppose we shall all come right in Heaven; as in a country dance, the
hands are strangely given and taken, while they are in motion, at last
all meet their partners when the jig is done.”
Perhaps because she showed no great conjugal affection, there was plenty
of gossip about affection less legitimate. Pope lavished rhetorical
devotion on her. She laughed at it and, I fear, at him. In consequence he
lampooned her with the savage spite of an eighteenth-century poet. She
said unkind things about Sir Robert Walpole and Sir Robert’s son said
unkind things about her, mentioned some lovers by name, and implied many
others. Lady Mary’s careful editors have dealt with these slanders most
painstakingly; and though in one case, that of an Italian adventure, they
have overlooked a passage in Sir Horace Mann’s letters oddly confirmatory
of Walpole, I think they have cleared their heroine with entire success.
After all, Lady Mary’s best defense against scandal is her own
temperament and her own words. It is true, those who have lived a wild
life are often the first to exclaim against it. But in this case the
language bears every mark of being prompted by observation rather than
experience. She says of the notorious Lady Vane: “I think there is
no rational creature that would not prefer the life of the strictest
Carmelite to the round of hurry and misfortune she has gone through.”
Lady Mary’s long sojourn in Italy towards the close of her life did much
to increase suspicion in regard to her relations with her husband. Her
greatest admirers have not been able to explain clearly why she wished to
exile herself in such a fashion. But the tone in which, during the whole
period, she writes both to Mr. Wortley Montagu and of him, is absolutely
incompatible with any serious coldness between them. “My most fervent
wishes are for your health and happiness.” And again: “I have never heard
from her since, nor from any other person in England, which gives me the
greatest uneasiness; but the most sensible part of it is in regard of
your health, which is truly and sincerely the dearest concern I have in
this world.”
Lady Mary had two children, and as a mother she is very much what she
is as a wife, reasonable, prudent, devoted, but neither clinging nor
adoring. She had, indeed, a happy art of expressing maternal tenderness,
as of expressing everything, by which I do not imply that her feelings
were not sincere, but simply that they were not very vital or very
overwhelming. When she sets out on her travels, she is heartbroken over
the perils and exposures for her son: “I have long learnt to hold myself
at nothing; but when I think of the fatigue my poor infant must suffer, I
have all a mother’s fondness in my eyes, and all her tender passions in
my heart.” But her language about this same son, when grown to manhood,
is somewhat astounding. He was a most extraordinary black sheep, wasted
money, contracted debts, gambled, liked evil occupations and worse
company, varied a multiplicity of wives with a multiplicity of religions,
was once in jail, and never respectable. All this Lady Mary deplores,
but she is not driven to despair by it; on the contrary, she analyzes
his character to his father with singular cold soberness. “It is very
disagreeable to me to converse with one from whom I do not expect to hear
a word of truth, and, who, I am very sure, will repeat many things that
never passed in our conversation.” Or, more generally, “I suppose you are
now convinced I have never been mistaken in his character; which remains
unchanged, and what is yet worse, I think is unchangeable. I never saw
such a complication of folly and falsity as in his letter to Mr. G.”
Her daughter, Lady Bute, she was fond of. “Your happiness,” she writes to
her, “was my first wish, and the pursuit of all my actions, divested of
all self-interest.” Nevertheless, she lived contentedly without seeing
her for twenty years.
That Lady Mary was a good manager domestically hardly admits of doubt;
but I find no evidence that she loved peculiarly feminine occupations,
though she does somewhere remark that she considers certain types of
learned ladies “much inferior to the plain sense of a cook maid, who
can make a good pudding and keep the kitchen in good order.” Among her
numerous benefactions in Italy was the teaching of her neighbors how to
make bread and butter.
It is said that her servants loved her, not unnaturally, if she carried
out her own maxim: “The small proportion of authority that has fallen
to my share (only over a few children and servants) has always been a
burden, ... and I believe every one finds it so who acts from a maxim ...
that whoever is under my power is under my protection.” She was a natural
aristocrat, however, both socially and politically, and any leveling
tendencies that she may have cherished in the ardor of youth, vanished
entirely with years and experience. “Was it possible for me to elevate
anybody from the station in which they were born, I now would not do it:
perhaps it is a rebellion against that Providence that has placed them;
all we ought to do is to endeavour to make them easy in the rank assigned
them.” And elsewhere, in a much more elaborate passage, she expresses
herself with a deliberate haughtiness of rank and privilege which has
rarely been surpassed. In her youth, she says, silly prejudice taught
her that she was to treat no one as an inferior. But she has learned
better and come to see that such a notion made her “admit many familiar
acquaintances, of which I have heartily repented every one, and the
greatest examples I have known of honor and integrity have been among
those of the highest birth and fortunes.” The English tendency to mingle
classes and level distinctions will, she believes, have some day fatal
consequences. How curious, in so keen a wit, the failure to foresee that
just this English social elasticity would avert the terrible disaster
which was to befall the neat gradations of French order and system!
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.
Her friends thought she wished to regulate their lives, especially to
regulate them in the way that suited her comfort and convenience. What
could be more remarkable than the scene Macaulay describes, when she
implored, ordered him to refuse his high appointment in India? “I had
a most extraordinary scene with Lady Holland. If she had been as young
and as handsome as she was thirty years ago, she would have turned my
head. She was quite hysterical about my going; paid me such compliments
as I cannot repeat; cried; raved; called me dear dear Macaulay. ‘You are
sacrificed to your family. I see it all. You are too good to them. They
are always making a tool of you; last session about the slaves; and now
sending you to India.’ I always do my best to keep my temper with Lady
Holland for three reasons: because she is a woman; because she is very
unhappy in her health, and in the circumstances of her position; and
because she has a real kindness for me. But at last she said something
about you. This was too much, and I was beginning to answer her in a
voice trembling with anger, when she broke out again: ‘I beg your pardon.
Pray forgive me, dear Macaulay. I was very impertinent. I know you will
forgive me. Nobody has such a temper as you. I said so to Allen only this
morning. I am sure you will bear with my weakness. I shall never see
you again’; and she cried, and I cooled; for it would have been to very
little purpose to be angry with her. I hear that it is not to me alone
that she runs on in this way. She storms at the ministry for letting me
go.”
And she was supposed to tyrannize over her household as well as over her
guests. The Allen referred to above is a curious figure. Originally
recommended to Lord Holland as a traveling physician, he entered the
family and remained in it. He was an immense reader, a careful student,
and supplied many a Holland House politician with the stuff of oratory.
He had opinions of his own, was a violent enemy of all religion, and
was gibingly known as “Lady Holland’s atheist.” He did not hesitate to
contradict his patroness and some even assert that she was a little
afraid of him. At any rate, he was deeply attached to her, remained with
her after Lord Holland’s death, and suffered himself in practical matters
to be ordered about like a domestic poodle. Moore records an interesting
bit of mutual self-confession, when Allen, after years of intimate
contact with the deepest thought and brightest wit in Europe, admitted
that to keep up conversation during these evenings was “frequently a most
heavy task and that if he had followed his own taste and wishes he would
long since have given up that mode of life.” And Moore himself adds that
the “Holland House sort of existence, though by far the best specimen
of its kind going, would appear to me, for any continuance, the most
wearisome of all forms of slavery.”