Leaving this point undetermined, however, for want of evidence, let us
proceed to the costume of the “angelical creatures” of whom we have been
speaking. But Lady Montague must here take the pen into her own hand;
for, in describing the mysteries of the toilet, she possesses a
felicitous, luxuriant eloquence, which it would be vain in any thing out
of petticoats to endeavour to rival. “The first part of my dress (she
had adopted the Turkish habit) is a pair of drawers, very full, that
reach to my shoes, and conceal the legs more modestly than your
petticoats. They are of a thin rose-coloured damask, brocaded with
silver flowers. My shoes are of white kid leather, embroidered with
gold. Over this hangs my smock, of a fine white silk gauze, edged with
embroidery. This smock has wide sleeves, hanging half-way down the arm,
and is closed at the neck with a diamond button; but the shape and
colour of the bosom are very well to be distinguished through it. The
antery is a waistcoat, made close to the shape, of white and gold
damask, with very long sleeves falling back, and fringed with deep gold
fringe, and should have diamond or pearl buttons. My caftan, of the same
stuff with my drawers, is a robe exactly fitted to my shape, and
reaching to my feet, with very long, straight falling sleeves. Over this
is my girdle, of about four fingers broad, which all that can afford it
have entirely of diamonds or other precious stones; those who will not
be at that expense have it of exquisite embroidery or satin; but it must
be fastened before with a clasp of diamonds. The curdee is a loose robe
they throw off or put on according to the weather, being of a rich
brocade (mine is green and gold), either lined with ermine or sables;
the sleeves reach very little below the shoulders. The headdress is
composed of a cap, called talpack, which is in winter of fine velvet,
embroidered with pearl or diamonds, and in summer of a light shining
silver stuff. This is fixed on one side of the head, hanging a little
way down, with a gold tassel, and bound on, either with a circle of
diamonds (as I have seen several), or a rich embroidered handkerchief.
On the other side of the head the hair is laid flat; and here the ladies
are at liberty to show their fancies, some putting flowers, others a
plume of herons’ feathers, and, in short, what they please; but the most
general fashion is a large bouquet of jewels, made like natural flowers;
that is, the buds of pearl, the roses of different-coloured rubies, the
jessamines of diamonds, the jonquils of topazes, &c., so well set and
enamelled, ’tis hard to imagine any thing of that kind so beautiful. The
hair hangs at its full length behind, divided into tresses braided with
pearl or riband, which is always in great quantity. I never saw in my
life so many fine heads of hair. In one lady’s I have counted a hundred
and ten of the tresses, all natural.”
Our traveller, whose faith in the virtue of her sex was exceedingly
slender, informs us, however, that these beautiful creatures were
vehemently addicted to intrigue, which they were enabled to carry on
much more securely than our Christian ladies, from their fashion of
perpetually going abroad in masquerade, that is, thickly veiled, so that
no man could know his own wife in the street. This, with the Jews’
shops, which were so many places of rendezvous, enabled the fair sinners
almost invariably to avoid detection; and when discovered, a sack and a
horse-pond, when the Bosphorus was not within a convenient distance,
terminated the affair in a few minutes. Still the risk was comparatively
small, and “you may easily imagine,” says Lady Mary—who seems to have
thought that women are never virtuous except when kept within the pale
of duty by the fear of imminent danger—“you may easily imagine the
number of faithful wives very small in a country where they have nothing
to fear from a lover’s indiscretion!” Had we met with so profligate an
article of faith in the creed of a male traveller, we should have
inferred that he had spent the greater part of his life in
gambling-houses and their appendages; but since it is a lady—an
ambassadress—an illustrious scion of a noble stock, who thus libels the
posterity of Eve, we place our finger upon our lips, and keep our
inferences to ourselves.
Pope, in a letter to her at Adrianople, accompanying the third volume of
his translation of the Iliad, pretends, as a graceful piece of flattery,
to imagine that because she had resided some few weeks on the banks of
the Hebrus among Asiatic barbarians, and barbarized descendants of the
Greeks, she could doubtless throw peculiar light upon various passages
of Homer; and the lady, interpreting the joke seriously, replies, that
there was not one instrument of music among the Greek or Roman statues
which was not to be found in the hands of the Roumeliotes; that young
shepherd lads still diverted themselves with making garlands for their
favourite lambs; and that, in reality, she found “several little
passages” in Homer explained, which she “did not before entirely
comprehend the beauty of.”
During her stay at Adrianople she discovered something better, however,
than Turkish illustrations of Homer, for it was here that she first
observed the practice of inoculation for the small-pox, which she had
the hardihood to try upon her own children, and was the first to
introduce it into England. Among the Turks, who, in all probability,
were not its inventors, it was termed _ingrafting_, and the whole
economy of the thing, according to the invariable policy of barbarians,
was intrusted to the management of old women. Upon the return of the
embassy to England, a Mr. Maitland, the ambassador’s physician,
endeavoured, under the patronage of Lady Montague, who ardently desired
its extension, to introduce the practice in London; and in 1721, the
public attention having been strongly directed to the subject, and the
curiosity of professional men awakened, an experiment, sanctioned by the
College of Physicians, and authorized by government, was made upon five
condemned criminals. With four of these the trial perfectly succeeded,
and the fifth, a woman, upon whom no effect was produced, afterward
confessed that she had had the small-pox while an infant. The merit of
this action of Lady Montague can scarcely be overrated, as, by exciting
curiosity and inquiry, it seems unquestionably to have led the way to
the discovery of vaccination, that great preservative of life and
beauty, and produced at the time immense positive good.[4]
Footnote 4:
A writer in the Annual Register for 1762, thus calculates the amount
of the benefit conferred on the British public by Lady Montague:—“If
one person in _seven_ die of the small-pox in the natural way, and one
in _three hundred and twelve_ by inoculation, as proved at the
small-pox hospital, then, as 1,000,000 divided by seven, gives
142,857½, 1,000,000 divided by 312, gives 3,205 46-312. The lives
saved in 1,000,000 by inoculation must be 139,652 11-31. In Lord
Petre’s family, 18 individuals died of the small-pox in 27 years. The
present generation, who have enjoyed all the advantages of
inoculation, are adequate judges of the extremely fatal prevalence of
the original disease, and of their consequently great obligations to
Lady Mary Wortley Montague.”—Sir Richard Steele, in the Plain Dealer,
prefers the introduction of this practice to all “those wide
endowments and deep foundations of public charity which have made most
noise in the world.”
To return, however, to Adrianople: among the most remarkable things
which our fair traveller beheld during her residence in the East was
Fatima, the wife of the kihaya, or vizier’s lieutenant, a woman “so
gloriously beautiful,” to borrow the expression of her panegyrist, that
all lovely things appeared to dwindle into insignificance in her
presence. The passage in which this lady is described, though in a
certain point of view it may be liable to objection, is in every other
respect the finest portion of Lady Mary’s travels; exhibiting a
remarkable power of affording the imagination of the reader glimpses of
corporeal beauties which language is never sufficiently rich and vivid
to paint exactly, and betraying at the same time so enthusiastic and
unreserved an admiration of another woman’s superior perfections, that
we with difficulty recognise in these hurried, ingenuous overflowings of
natural eloquence, the female Diogenes of 1740. The whole palace of the
kihaya appeared at the moment a fairy creation. Two black eunuchs,
meeting the traveller at the door, led her into the harem, between two
rows of beautiful female slaves, with their profuse and finely-plaited
hair hanging almost to their feet, and dressed in fine light damasks,
brocaded with silver. She next passed through a magnificent pavilion,
adorned with gilded sashes, now all thrown up to admit the air, and
opening into a garden, where there grew a number of large trees, with
jessamine and honey-suckles twisted round their trunks, and emitting an
exquisite perfume. A fountain of scented water was falling at the lower
end of the apartment into three or four basins of white marble, at the
same time diffusing an agreeable odour and a refreshing coolness through
the air. Over the ceiling the pencil had scattered flowers in gilded
baskets. But all these things were forgotten on beholding Fatima. When
Lady Mary entered she was sitting on a sofa raised three steps above the
floor, and leaning on cushions of white embroidered satin. Two young
girls, “lovely as angels,” sat at her feet clothed in the richest
costume of the East, and sparkling with jewels. They were her daughters.
The mother, however, was so transcendently beautiful, that, in the
opinion of Lady Mary, neither these girls, nor any thing that ever was
called lovely, either in England or Germany, were capable of exciting
the least admiration near her. There is truth in the old saying, that
beauty possesses a power which irresistibly subdues the soul. No one
ever looked for the first time upon a beautiful form without
experiencing a certain awe, or consciousness of being in the presence of
a superior nature, which the pagans imagined people felt when some deity
overawed them with its Shekinah. That an acquaintance with the
intellectual or moral imperfections which too frequently attend on
beauty very quickly dissipates this impression, we all know: but at the
outset most persons feel like our traveller, who says, “I was so struck
with admiration, that I could not for some time speak to her, being
wholly taken up in gazing. That surprising harmony of features! that
charming result of the whole! that exact proportion of body! that lovely
bloom of complexion unsullied by art! the unutterable enchantment of her
smile!—But her eyes!—large and black, with the soft languishment of the
blue! every turn of her face discovering some new grace.”
Into the details of her dress, in the description of which Lady Mary
employs warm colouring, it is not necessary to enter. Fatima, on her
part, very quickly divined the taste and temperament of her guest, and
after a little conversation, carried on through the medium of a Greek
lady who accompanied the traveller, she made a sign to four of her
beautiful slaves to entertain the stranger with music and dancing. Those
who have read descriptions of the fandango of the Spanish ladies, the
chironomia of antiquity, or the performances of the Hindoo dancing
girls, or voluptuous _almé_ of Egypt, will perhaps be able to form a
just conception of the dance with which the ladies of the harem amuse
themselves and their female visiters. “This dance,” says Lady Montague,
“was very different from what I had seen before. The tunes so soft!—the
motions so languishing!—accompanied with pauses and dying eyes! half
falling back, and then recovering themselves in so artful a manner.”
Before her departure from Adrianople, she went to visit the mosque of
Sultan Selim I., and being in a Turkish dress was admitted without
difficulty; though she supposes, no doubt rightly, that the doorkeepers
understood well enough whom they had allowed to enter. The walls were
inlaid with Japan china in the form of flowers, the marble pavement was
covered with rich Persian carpets, and the whole body of the edifice
free from those pews, forms, and chairs which encumber our churches,
both Protestant and Catholic, and give the latter, during week-days, the
appearance of a lumber-room. About two thousand lamps were suspended in
various parts of the building, which, when lighted at night, must show
off to great advantage the solemn splendour of the architecture.
The road to Constantinople carried them through the richest meadows,
which, as it was then the month of May, were clothed with exceeding
beauty, and so thickly sprinkled with flowers and aromatic herbs, that
the wheels of the carriages, crushing them as they drove along,
literally perfumed the air. At Kutchuk Tchekmedje, where they lodged in
what had formerly been a monastery of dervishes, Lady Montague requested
the owner, a country schoolmaster, to show her his own apartments, and
was surprised, says she, to see him point to a tall cypress-tree in the
garden, on the top of which was a place for a bed for himself, and a
little lower one for his wife and two children, who slept there every
night. I was so much diverted with the fancy, I resolved to examine his
nest nearer; but, after going up fifty steps, I found I had still fifty
to go up, and then I must climb from branch to branch with some hazard
of my neck; I thought it, therefore, the best way to come down again.
Navigators in the South Sea have found whole nations who, like this
romantic Ottomite, lived perched upon trees, like eagles, descending
only when in lack of prey or recreation.
The first objects which struck her on arriving at Constantinople were
the cemeteries, which upon the whole seemed to occupy more ground than
the city itself. These, however, with their tombs and chapels, have been
so frequently described by modern travellers, that it is unnecessary to
dwell upon them, curious as they are; though we may remark, in passing,
that their fancy of sculpturing a rose on the monuments of unmarried
women is a delicate allusion to the purity of the dead. In the month of
June they were driven by the heat of the weather to the village of
Belgrade, fourteen miles from Constantinople, on the shores of the Black
Sea, one of the usual retreats of the European embassies. Here our fair
traveller found an earthly representation of the Elysian Fields:
Devenere locos lætos, et amœna vireta
Fortunatorum nemorum, sedesque beatas.
Largior hic campos, æther et lumine vestit
Purpureo.
Their house, the site of which, nothing more remaining, is still visited
by European travellers, stood in the middle of a grove chiefly of
fruit-trees. The walks, carpeted with short soft grass, were shady and
cool; and on all sides a perpetual verdure was maintained by numerous
fountains of pure, beautiful water. From the house and various other
points views were obtained of the Black Sea, with its picturesque
verdant shores, while the fresh breezes which blew continually from that
quarter sufficiently tempered the heat of summer. The charms of such
scenes inspire gayety even in the oppressed. For here the Greeks,
forgetting for a moment the yoke of the Ottomite, assembled in great
numbers of both sexes every evening, to laugh and sing, and “dance away
their time.”
From an absurd request which had been made to her by Lady Rich to
purchase her a Greek slave, Lady Montague, having observed that the
“Greeks were _subjects_, not _slaves_!” takes occasion to describe to
her friend the various kinds of female slaves which were to be found in
Turkey. And though brief, her account is not particularly incorrect. But
she eagerly seizes upon this opportunity to disparage the relations of
all former travellers, treating them collectively as a herd of low
people, who had never enjoyed the advantage of conversing with
barbarians of quality. She was therefore ignorant that Busbequius,
Pietro della Valle, Chardin, and others had lived upon most familiar
terms with Turks of the highest consideration in the empire; and that,
excepting in what relates to the harem, from which their sex excluded
them, they might have afforded her ladyship very important instruction
upon several particulars of Turkish manners. Upon cosmetics her
authority, of course, is paramount. Neither Della Valle nor Chardin ever
daubed their faces with balm of Mecca, and consequently could not
pretend to speak of its virtues with the same confidence as Lady Mary,
who, as she confesses with indignation, was rendered, by the indiscreet
application of it, a perfect monster for three days. Having been
presented with a small quantity of the best sort, “I with great joy,”
says she, “applied it to my face, expecting some wonderful effect to my
advantage. The next morning the change indeed was wonderful; my face was
swelled to a very extraordinary size, and all over as red as my Lady
H——’s. It remained in this lamentable state three days, during which,
you may be sure, I passed my time very ill. I believed it would never be
otherwise; and to add to my mortification, Mr. Wortley reproached my
indiscretion without ceasing. However, my face is since _in statu_ quo;
nay, I am told by the ladies here that it is much mended by the
operation, which I confess I cannot perceive in my looking-glass.”
On the 6th of June, 1718, she left Constantinople with regret. And at
this I do not wonder, for there was in her character a coarse sensual
bent, closely approximating to the oriental cast of mind, which in a
wild unpoliced capital, where, according to her own account, women live
in a state of perpetual masquerade, might still more easily be yielded
to even than in London. Of study and the sciences she had by this time
grown tired. She regretted that her youth had been spent in the
acquisition of knowledge. The Turks, who consumed their lives “in music,
gardens, wine, and delicate eating,” appeared upon the whole much wiser
than the English, who tormented their brains with some scheme of
politics, I use her own words, or in studying some science to which they
could never attain. “Considering what short-lived weak animals men are,”
she adds, “is there any study so beneficial as the study of _present
pleasure?_” And lest any one should mistake her after all, she subjoins,
“but I allow you to laugh at me for my sensual declaration in saying
that I had rather be a rich _effendi_ with all his ignorance, than Sir
Isaac Newton with all his knowledge.” No doubt; and Lais, Cleopatra, or
Ninon would have said the same thing.
Sailing down the Dardanelles, they cast anchor between the castles of
Sestos and Abydos, where,
————In the month of cold December,
Leander, daring boy, was wont,—
What maid will not the tale remember?—
To cross thy stream, broad Hellespont!
Here she enjoyed a full view of Mount Ida,
Where Juno once caressed her amorous Jove,
And the world’s master lay subdued by love.
The quotation is Lady Montague’s. Descending a league farther down the
Hellespont, she landed at the promontory of Sigeum, and climbed up to
visit the barrow beneath which the heroic bones of Achilles repose.
Experiencing no enthusiasm at the sight of these Homeric scenes, she was
unquestionably right in not affecting what she did not feel; but who,
save herself, could have viewed the plains of Troy, the Simois, and the
Scamander without having any other ideas awakened in the mind than such
as the adventure of Æschines’s companion and the lewd tale of Lafontaine
had implanted there? However, to do her justice, though she gives her
favourite ideas the precedence, she afterward observes, “there is some
pleasure in seeing the valley where I imagined the famous duel of
Menelaus and Paris had been fought, and where the greatest city in the
world was situated.” Here, though she is mistaken about the magnitude of
the city, there is some sign of the only feeling which ever ought to
lead a traveller out of his way to behold such a scene; and she goes on
to say, “I spent several hours here in as agreeable cogitations as ever
Don Quixote had on Mount Montesinos;” in which cogitations let us be
charitable enough to suppose that “the tale of Troy divine” was not
forgotten.
From the Hellespont they sailed between the islands of the Archipelago,
and passing by Sicily and Malta, where they landed, were driven by a
storm into Porta Farina, on the coast of Africa, near Tunis, where they
remained at the house of the British consul for some days. Being so near
the ruins of Carthage, her curiosity to behold so remarkable a spot was
not to be resisted; and accordingly she proceeded to the scene, through
groves of date, olive, and fig-trees; but the most extraordinary objects
she met with were the women of the country, who were so frightfully ugly
that her delicate imagination immediately suggested to her the
probability of some intermarriages having formerly taken place between
their ancestors and the baboons of the country.
From Tunis they in a few days set sail for Genoa; whence after a little
repose they proceeded across the Alps, and through France, to England,
where they arrived on the 20th of October, 1718.
Shortly after her return she was induced by the solicitations of Pope,
whom two years of reflection had not cured, to take up her residence at
Twickenham. But the poet must very soon have discovered that, in
comparison with the “rich _effendis_” and “three-tailed” pashas of the
East, his poor little, ailing person, in spite of his grotto and his
muse, had dwindled to nothing in the estimation of Lady Mary. Lord
Hervey, who, though he wrote verses, had not been “blasted with poetic
fire,” was considered, for reasons not given, more worthy of her
ladyship’s friendship. However, these changes were not immediately
apparent, and other affairs, which came still more home to her bosom
than friendship, in the interim occupied her attention; among the rest
the idea of realizing immense sums by embarking in the South Sea scheme.
She likewise allowed the poet, whom the original had captivated so long,
to employ the pencil of Sir Godfrey Kneller in copying her mature charms
to adorn his hermitage. She was drawn in the meretricious taste of the
times: and the physiognomy of the portrait answers exactly in expression
to the idea which we form of Lady Mary from her writings; that is, it
exhibits a mixture of intellectuality and voluptuousness, of calm,
confident, commanding complacency, bordering a little on defiance or
scorn. Pope received the finished picture with the delight of a lover,
and immediately expressed his conception of it in the following lines:—
The playful smiles around the dimpled mouth,
That happy air of majesty and truth,
So would I draw (but oh! ’tis vain to try,
My narrow genius does the power deny),
The equal lustre of the heavenly mind,
Where every grace with every virtue’s joined,
Learning not vain, and wisdom not severe,
With greatness easy, and with wit sincere,
With just description show the soul divine,
And the whole princess in my work should shine.
The verses are insipid enough, like most compliments; but they express
an opinion which circumstances very shortly afterward compelled him to
change, when the princess became transformed into a modern “Sappho” and,
thrown with Lord Fanny, Sporus, Atossa, and many others, into a group,
was “damned” by satire to “everlasting fame.”
Lady Montague’s life, many years after her return from the East, was
spent like that of most other ladies of fashion, who mingle a taste for
literature and politics with gallantry. Her letters to her sister, who
now, through the attainder and exile of her husband, Erskine Earl of
Mar, resided abroad, abound with evidences that the pleasures which she
had heretofore regarded as the _summum bonum_ soon palled the appetite;
and that as the effervescence of animal spirits which, during her youth,
had given a keen relish to life subsided, a metamorphosis, the reverse
of that of the butterfly, took place, changing the gay fluttering summer
insect into a grub. A cynical contempt of all things human succeeded.
Into the grounds of her separation from her husband I shall not inquire.
Ill health was at the time the cause assigned. The triumph of the
political party to which she was opposed has since been absurdly put
forward to account for it: but she had, no doubt, other reasons, much
more powerful, for cutting herself off, during a period of twenty-two
years, from all personal intercourse with her family.
Be this however as it may, in the month of July, 1739, she departed from
England, and bade an eternal adieu to Mr. Montague and the greater
number of her old friends. Her first place of residence on the Continent
was Venice, from whence she made an excursion to Rome and Naples, and,
returning to Brescia, took up her abode in one of the palaces of that
city. She likewise visited the south of France and Switzerland. The
summer months she usually spent at Louverre, on the lake of Isis, in the
territories of Venice, where gardening, silk-worms, and books appear to
have afforded her considerable amusement. In 1758 she removed to Venice,
and, her husband dying in 1761, she was prevailed upon by her daughter,
the Countess of Bute, to return to England. However, she survived Mr.
Montague but a single year; for, whether the sudden transition to a
northern climate was too violent a shock for her frame, or that a
gradual decay had been going on, and was now naturally approaching its
termination, she breathed her last on the 21st of August, 1762, in the
seventy-third year of her age.
Her letters have been compared with those of Madame de Sevigné, but they
do not at all resemble them. The latter have a calm, quiet interest, a
sweetness, an ingenuous tenderness, a natural simplicity, which
powerfully recommend them to us in those moments when we ourselves are
calm or melancholy. Lady Montague’s have infinitely more nerve and
vigour, excite a far deeper interest, but of an equivocal and painful
cast, and while, in a certain sense, they amuse and gratify, inspire
aversion for their writer. On the other hand, Madame de Sevigné is a
person whom one would like to have known. She is garrulous, she
frequently repeats herself; but it is maternal love which causes the
error. In one word, we admire the talents of Lady Montague, but we love
the character of Madame de Sevigné.
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