Portland, and Mrs. Montagu were the first who began the conversation
parties in imitation of the noted ones, _temp._ Madame de Sevigne',
at Rue St. Honore. Madame de Polignac, one of the first guests, came
in blue silk stockings, then the newest fashion in Paris. Mrs.
Greville and all the lady members of Mrs. Montagu's _club_, adopted
the _mode_. A foreign gentleman, after spending an evening at Mrs.
Montagu's _soirée_, wrote to tell a friend of the charming
intellectual party, who had one rule; 'they wear blue stockings as a
distinction.'"
Wraxall, who makes the same comparison, remarks: "Mrs. Thrale always
appeared to me to possess at least as much information, a mind as
cultivated, and more brilliancy of intellect than Mrs. Montagu, but
she did not descend among men from such an eminence, and she talked
much more, as well as more unguardedly, on every subject. She was the
provider and conductress of Johnson, who lived almost constantly
under her roof, or more properly under that of Mr. Thrale, both in
Town and at Streatham. He did not, however, spare her more than other
women in his attacks if she courted and provoked his animadversions."
Although he seldom appeared to greater advantage than when under the
combined spell of feminine influence and rank, his demeanour varied
with his mood. On Miss Monkton's (afterwards Countess of Cork)
insisting, one evening, that Sterne's writings were very pathetic,
Johnson bluntly denied it. "I am sure," she rejoined, "they have
affected me." "Why," said Johnson, smiling and rolling himself about,
"that is because, dearest, you're a dunce." When she some time
afterwards mentioned this to him, he said, with equal truth and
politeness, "Madam, if I had thought so, I certainly should not have
said it."
He did not come off so well on another occasion, when the presence of
women he respected might be expected to operate as a cheek. Talking,
at Mrs. Garrick's, of a very respectable author, he told us, says
Boswell, "a curious circumstance in his life, which was that he had
married a printer's devil. _Reynolds_. 'A printer's devil, Sir! why,
I thought a printer's devil was a creature with a black face and in
rags.' _Johnson_. 'Yes, Sir. But I suppose he had her face washed,
and put clean clothes on her.' Then, looking very serious, and very
earnest. 'And she did not disgrace him;--the woman had a bottom of
good sense.' The word _bottom_ thus introduced was so ludicrous when
contrasted with his gravity, that most of us could not forbear
tittering and laughing; though I recollect that the Bishop of
Killaloe kept his countenance with perfect steadiness, while Miss
Hannah More slily hid her face behind a lady's back who sat on the
same settee with her. His pride could not bear that any expression of
his should excite ridicule, when he did not intend it: he therefore
resolved to assume and exercise despotic power, glanced sternly
around, and called out in a strong tone, 'Where's the merriment?'
Then collecting himself, and looking awful, to make us feel how he
could impose restraint, and as it were searching his mind for a still
more ludicrous word, he slowly pronounced, 'I say the _woman_ was
_fundamentally_ sensible;' as if he had said, Hear this now, and
laugh if you dare. We all sat composed as at a funeral."
This resembles the influence exercised by the "great commoner" over
the House of Commons. An instance being mentioned of his throwing an
adversary into irretrievable confusion by an arrogant expression of
contempt, the late Mr. Charles Butler asked the relator, an
eye-witness, whether the House did not laugh at the ridiculous figure
of the poor member. "No, Sir," was the reply, "we were too much awed
to laugh."
It was a marked feature in Johnson's character that he was fond of
female society; so fond, indeed, that on coming to London he was
obliged to be on his guard against the temptations to which it
exposed him. He left off attending the Green Room, telling Grarrick,
"I'll come no more behind your scenes, Davy; for the silk stockings
and white bosoms of your actresses excite my amorous propensities."
The proneness of his imagination to wander in this forbidden field is
unwittingly betrayed by his remarking at Sky, in support of the
doctrine that animal substances are less cleanly than vegetable: "I
have _often_ thought that, if I kept a seraglio, the ladies should
all wear linen gowns, or cotton, I mean stuffs made of vegetable
substances. I would have no silks: you cannot tell when it is clean:
it will be very nasty before it is perceived to be so; linen detects
its own dirtiness." His virtue thawed instead of becoming more rigid
in the North. "This evening," records Boswell of their visit to an
Hebridean chief, "one of our married ladies, a lively pretty little
woman, good-humouredly sat down upon Dr. Johnson's knee, and being
encouraged by some of the company, put her hands round his neck and
kissed him. 'Do it again,' said he, 'and let us see who will tire
first.' He kept her on his knee some time whilst he and she drank
tea."
The Rev. Dr. Maxwell relates in his "Collectanea," that "Two young
women from Staffordshire visited him when I was present, to consult
him on the subject of Methodism, to which they were inclined. 'Come,'
said he, 'you pretty fools, dine with Maxwell and me at the Mitre,
and we will talk over that subject:' which they did, and after dinner
he took one of them upon his knee, and fondled her for half an hour
together." [1]
[Footnote 1: "Amongst his singularities, his love of conversing with
the prostitutes he met in the streets, was not the least. He has been
known to carry some of these unfortunate creatures into a tavern, for
the sake of striving to awaken in them a proper sense of their
condition. I remember, he said, once asking one of them for what
purpose she supposed her Maker had bestowed on her so much beauty.
Her answer was, 'To please the gentlemen, to be sure; for what other
purpose could it be given me?" _(Johnsoniana.)_ He once carried one,
fainting from exhaustion, home on his back.]
Women almost always like men who like women; or as the phenomenon is
explained by Pope--
"Lust, through some certain strainers well refined, Is gentle love,
and charms all womankind."
Johnson, despite of his unwieldy figure, scarred features and uncouth
gestures, was a favourite with the fair, and talked of affairs of the
heart as things of which he was entitled to speak from personal
experience as confidently as of any other moral or social topics. He
told Mrs. Thrale, without the smallest consciousness of presumption
or what Mr. Square would term the unfitness of things, of his and
Lord Lyttleton's having contended for Miss Boothby's preference with
an emulation that occasioned hearty disgust and ended in lasting
animosity. "You may see," he added, when the Lives of the Poets were
printed, "that dear Boothby is at my heart still. She would delight
in that fellow Lyttleton's company though, all that I could do, and I
cannot forgive even his memory the preference given by a mind like
hers." [1]
[Footnote 1: In point of personal advantages the man of rank and
fashion and the scholar were nearly on a par.
"But who is this astride the pony,
So long, so lean, so lank, so bony?
Dat be de great orator, Littletony."]
Mr. Croker surmises that "Molly Aston," not "dear Boothby," must have
been the object of this rivalry[1]; and the surmise is strengthened
by Johnson's calling Molly the loveliest creature he ever saw; adding
(to Mrs. Thrale), "My wife was a little jealous, and happening one
day when walking in the country to meet a fortune-hunting gipsy, Mrs.
Johnson made the wench look at my hand, but soon repented of her
curiosity,'for,' says the gipsy, 'your heart is divided between a
Betty and a Molly: Betty loves you best, but you take most delight in
Molly's company.' When I turned about to laugh, I saw my wife was
crying. Pretty charmer, she had no reason." This pretty charmer was
in her forty-eighth year when he married her, he being then
twenty-seven. He told Beauclerc that it was a love match on both
sides; and Garrick used to draw ludicrous pictures of their mutual
fondness, which he heightened by representing her as short, fat,
tawdrily dressed, and highly rouged.
[Footnote 1: See "Croker's Boswell," p. 672, and Malone's note in the
prior edition.]
On the question whether "Molly Aston" or "dear Boothby" was the cause
of his dislike of Lyttleton, one of Mrs. Piozzi's marginal notes is
decisive. "Mrs. Thrale (says Boswell) suggests that he was offended
by Molly Aston's preference of his lordship to him." She retorts: "I
never said so. I believe Lord Lyttleton and Molly Aston were not
acquainted. No, no: it was Miss Boothby whose preference he professed
to have been jealous of, and so I said in the 'Anecdotes.'"
One of Rochefoucauld's maxims is: "Young women who do not wish to
appear _coquette_, and men of advanced years who do not wish to
appear ridiculous, should never speak of love as of a thing in which
they might take part." Mrs. Thrale relates an amusing instance of
Johnson's adroitness in escaping from the dilemma: "As we had been
saying one day that no subject failed of receiving dignity from the
manner in which Mr. Johnson treated it, a lady at my house said, she
would make him talk about love; and took her measures accordingly,
deriding the novels of the day because they treated about love. 'It
is not,' replied our philosopher, 'because they treat, as you call
it, about love, but because they treat of nothing, that they are
despicable: we must not ridicule a passion which he who never felt,
never was happy, and he who laughs at, never deserves to feel--a
passion which has caused the change of empires, and the loss of
worlds--a passion which has inspired heroism and subdued avarice.' He
thought he had already said too much. 'A passion, in short,' added
he, with an altered tone, 'that consumes me away for my pretty Fanny
here, and she 'is very cruel,' speaking of another lady (Miss Burney)
in the room."
As the high-flown language which he occasionally employed in
addressing or discussing women, has originated a theory that the
basis or essence of his character was romance, it may be as well to
contrast what he said in soberer moods on love. He remarked to Dr.
Maxwell, that "its violence and ill-effects were much exaggerated;
for who knows any real sufferings on that head, more than from the
exorbitancy of any other passion?" On Boswell asking him whether he
did not suppose that there are fifty women in the world with any of
whom a man may be as happy as with any one woman in particular, he
replied, "Ay, Sir, fifty thousand. I believe marriages would in
general be as happy, and often more so, if they were all made by the
lord-chancellor upon a due consideration of the characters and
circumstances without the parties having any choice in the matter."
On another occasion he observed that sensible men rarely married for
love.
These peculiarities throw light on more questions than one relating
to Johnson's prolonged intimacy and alleged quarrel with Mrs. Thrale.
His gallantry, and the flattering air of deferential tenderness which
he threw into his commerce with his female favourites, may have had
little less to do with his domestication at Streatham than his
celebrity, his learning, or his wit. The most submissive wife will
manage to dislodge an inmate who is displeasing to her, "Aye, a
marriage, man," said Bucklaw to his led captain, "but wherefore
droops thy mighty spirit? The board will have a corner, and the
corner will have a trencher, and the trencher will have a glass
beside it; and the board end shall be filled, and the trencher and
the glass shall be replenished for thee, if all the petticoats in
Lothian had sworn the contrary." "So says many an honest fellow,"
said Craigenfelt, "and some of my special friends; but curse me if I
know the reason, the women could never bear me, and always contrived
to trundle me out before the honey-moon was over."[1]
[Footnote 1: Bride of Lammermoor.]
It was all very well for Johnson to tell Boswell, "I know no man who
is more master of his wife and family than Thrale. If he holds up a
finger, he is obeyed." The sage never acted on the theory, and
instead of treating the wife as a cipher, lost no opportunity of
paying court to her, though in a manner quite compatible with his own
lofty spirit of independence and self-respect. Thus, attention having
been called to some Italian verses by Baretti, he converted them into
an elegant compliment to her by an improvised paraphrase:
"Viva! viva la padrona!
Tutta bella, e tutta buona,
La padrona e un angiolella
Tutta buona e tutta bella;
Tutta bella e tutta buona;
Viva! viva la padrona!"
"Long may live my lovely Hetty!
Always young and always pretty;
Always pretty, always young,
Live my lovely Hetty long!
Always young and always pretty;
Long may live my lovely Hetty!"
Her marginal note in the copy of the "Anecdotes" presented by her to
Sir James Fellowes in 1816 is:--"I heard these verses sung at Mr.
Thomas's by three voices not three weeks ago."
It was in the eighth year of their acquaintance that Johnson solaced
his fatigue in the Hebrides by writing a Latin ode to her. "About
fourteen years since," wrote Sir Walter Scott, in 1829, "I landed in
Sky with a party of friends, and had the curiosity to ask what was
the first idea on every one's mind at landing. All answered
separately that it was this ode." Thinking Miss Cornelia Knight's
version too diffuse, I asked Mr. Milnes for a translation or
paraphrase, and he kindly complied by producing these spirited
stanzas:
"Where constant mist enshrouds the rocks,
Shattered in earth's primeval shocks,
And niggard Nature ever mocks
The labourer's toil,
I roam through clans of savage men,
Untamed by arts, untaught by pen;
Or cower within some squalid den
O'er reeking soil.
Through paths that halt from stone to stone,
Amid the din of tongues unknown,
One image haunts my soul alone,
Thine, gentle Thrale!
Soothes she, I ask, her spouse's care?
Does mother-love its charge prepare?
Stores she her mind with knowledge rare,
Or lively tale?
Forget me not! thy faith I claim,
Holding a faith that cannot die,
That fills with thy benignant name
These shores of Sky."
"On another occasion," says Mrs. Thrale, in the "Anecdotes," "I can
boast verses from Dr. Johnson. As I went into his room the morning of
my birthday once and said to him, 'Nobody sends me any verses now,
because I am five-and-thirty years old; and Stella was fed with them
till forty-six, I remember.' My being just recovered from illness and
confinement will account for the manner in which he burst out
suddenly, for so he did without the least previous hesitation
whatsoever, and without having entertained the smallest intention
towards it half a minute before:
"Oft in danger, yet alive,
We are come to thirty-five;
Long may better years arrive,
Better years than thirty-five.
Could philosophers contrive
Life to stop at thirty-five,
Time his hours should never drive
O'er the bounds of thirty-five.
High to soar, and deep to dive,
Nature gives at thirty-five.
Ladies, stock and tend your hive,
Trifle not at thirty-five;
For howe'er we boast and strive,
Life declines from thirty-five;
He that ever hopes to thrive
Must begin by thirty-five;
And all who wisely wish to wive
Must look on Thrale at thirty-five."
"'And now,' said he, as I was writing them down, 'you may see what it
is to come for poetry to a dictionary-maker; you may observe that the
rhymes run in alphabetical order exactly.' And so they do."
Byron's estimate of life at the same age, is somewhat different:
"Too old for youth--too young, at thirty-five
To herd with boys, or hoard with good threescore,
I wonder people should he left alive.
But since they are, that epoch is a bore."
Lady Aldborough, whose best witticisms unluckily lie under the same
merited ban as Rochester's best verses, resolved not to pass
twenty-five, and had her passport made out accordingly till her death
at eighty-five. She used to boast that, whenever a foreign official
objected, she never failed to silence him by the remark, that he was
the first gentleman of his country who ever told a lady she was older
than she said she was. Actuated probably by a similar feeling, and in
the hope of securing to herself the benefit of the doubt, Mrs. Thrale
omitted in the "Anecdotes" the year when these verses were addressed
to her, and a sharp controversy has been raised as to the respective
ages of herself and Dr. Johnson at the time. It is thus summed up by
one of the combatants:
"In one place Mr. Croker says that at the commencement of the
intimacy between Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale, in 1765, the lady was
twenty-five years old. In other places he says that Mrs. Thrale's
thirty-fifth year coincided with Johnson's seventieth. Johnson was
born in 1709. If, therefore, Mrs. Thrale's thirty-fifth year
coincided with Johnson's seventieth, she could have been only
twenty-one years old in 1765. This is not all. Mr. Croker, in another
place, assigns the year 1777 as the date of the complimentary lines
which Johnson made on Mrs. Thrale's thirty-fifth birthday. If this
date be correct Mrs. Thrale must have been born in 1742, and could
have been only twenty-three when her acquaintance commenced. Mr.
Croker, therefore, gives us three different statements as to her age.
Two of the three must be incorrect. We will not decide between
them."[1]
[Footnote 1: Macaulay's Essays.]
Mr. Salusbury, referring to a china bowl in his possession, says:
"The slip of paper now in it is in my father's handwriting, and
copied, I have heard him say, from the original slip, which was worn
out by age and fingering. The exact words are, 'In this bason was
baptised Hester Lynch Salusbury, 16th Jan. 1740-41 old style, at
Bodville in Carnarvonshire.'"
The incident of the verses is thus narrated in "Thraliana": "And this
year, 1777[1], when I told him that it was my birthday, and that I
was then thirty-five years old, he repeated me these verses, which I
wrote down from his mouth as he made them." If she was born in
1740-41, she must have been thirty-six in 1777; and there is no
perfectly satisfactory settlement of the controversy, which many will
think derives its sole importance from the two chief
controversialists.
[Footnote 1: In one of her Memorandum books, 1776.]
The highest authorities differ equally about her looks. "My readers,"
says Boswell, "will naturally wish for some representation of the
figures of this couple. Mr. Thrale was tall, well-proportioned, and
stately. As for _Madam_, or _My Mistress_, by which epithets Johnson
used to mention Mrs. Thrale, she was short, plump, and brisk." "He
should have added," observes Mr. Croker, "that she was very pretty."
This was not her own opinion, nor that of her cotemporaries, although
her face was attractive from animation and expression, and her
personal appearance pleasing on the whole. Sometimes, when visiting
the author of "Piozziana,"[1] she used to look at her little self, as
she called it, and spoke drolly of what she once was, as if speaking
of some one else; and one day, turning to him, she exclaimed: "No, I
never was handsome: I had always too many strong points in my face
for beauty." On his expressing a doubt of this, and hinting that Dr.
Johnson was certainly an admirer of her personal charms, she replied
that his devotion was at least as warm towards the table and the
table-cloth at Streatham.
[Footnote 1: "Piozziana; or Recollections of the late Mrs. Piozzi,
with Remarks. By a Friend." (The Rev. E. Mangin.) Moxon, 1833. These
reminiscences, unluckily limited to the last eight or ten years of
her life at Bath, contain much curious information, and leave a
highly favourable impression of Mrs. Piozzi.]
One day when he was ill, exceedingly low-spirited, and persuaded that
death was not far distant, she appeared before him in a dark-coloured
gown, which his bad sight, and worse apprehensions, made him mistake
for an iron-grey. "'Why do you delight,' said he, 'thus to thicken
the gloom of misery that surrounds me? is not here sufficient
accumulation of horror without anticipated mourning?'--'This is not
mourning, Sir!' said I, drawing the curtain, that the light might
fall upon the silk, and show it was a purple mixed with
green.--'Well, well!' replied he, changing his voice; 'you little
creatures should never wear those sort of clothes, however; they are
unsuitable in every way. What! have not all insects gay colours?'"
According to the author of "Piozziana," who became acquainted with
her late in life, "She was short, and though well-proportioned,
broad, and deep-chested. Her hands were muscular and almost coarse,
but her writing was, even in her eightieth year, exquisitely
beautiful; and one day, while conversing with her on the subject of
education, she observed that 'all Misses now-a-days, wrote so like
each other, that it was provoking;' adding, 'I love to see
individuality of character, and abhor sameness, especially in what is
feeble and flimsy.' Then, spreading her hand, she said, 'I believe I
owe what you are pleased to call my good writing, to the shape of
this hand, for my uncle, Sir Robert Cotton, thought it was too manly
to be employed in writing like a boarding-school girl; and so I came
by my vigorous, black manuscript.'"
It was fortunate that the hand-writing compensated for the hands; and
as she attached great importance to blood and race, that she did not
live to read Byron's "thoroughbred and tapering fingers," or to be
shocked by his theory that "the hand is almost the only sign of blood
which aristocracy can generate." Her Bath friend appeals to a
miniature (engraved for this work) by Roche, of Bath, taken when she
was in her seventy-seventh year. Like Cromwell, who told the painter
that if he softened a harsh line or so much as omitted a wart, he
should never be paid a sixpence,--she desired the artist to paint her
face deeply rouged, which it always was[1], and to introduce a
trivial deformity of the jaw, produced by a horse treading on her as
she lay on the ground after a fall. In this respect she proved
superior to Johnson; who, with all his love of truth, could not bear
to be painted with his defects. He was displeased at being drawn
holding a pen close to his eye; and on its being suggested that
Reynolds had painted himself holding his ear in his hand to catch the
sound, he replied: "He may paint himself as deaf as he pleases, but I
will not be Blinking Sam."
[Footnote 1: "One day I called early at her house, and as I entered
her drawing-room, she passed me, saying, 'Dear Sir, I will be with
you in a few minutes; but, while I think of it, I must go to my
dressing-closet and paint my face, which I forgot to do this
morning.' Accordingly she soon returned, wearing the requisite
quantity of bloom; which, it must be noticed, was not in the least
like that of youth and beauty. I then said that I was surprised she
should so far sacrifice to fashion, as to take that trouble. Her
answer was that, as I might conclude, her practice of painting did
not proceed from any silly compliance with Bath fashion, or any
fashion; still less, if possible, from the desire of appearing
younger than she was, but from this circumstance, that in early life
she had worn rouge, as other young persons did in her day, as a part
of dress; and after continuing the habit for some years, discovered
that it had introduced a dull yellow colour into her complexion,
quite unlike that of her natural skin, and that she wished to conceal
the deformity."--_Piozziana_.]
Reynolds' portrait of Mrs. Thrale conveys a highly agreeable
impression of her; and so does Hogarth's, when she sat to him for the
principal figure in "The Lady's Last Stake." She was then only
fourteen; and he probably idealised his model; but that he also
produced a striking likeness, is obvious on comparing his picture
with the professed portraits. The history of this picture (which has
been engraved, at Lord Macaulay's suggestion, for this work) will be
found in the Autobiography and the Letters.