MRS. MONTAGU AS A PATRON OF THE ARTS
Above all things Mrs. Montagu longed to send her reputation down
to posterity as an acknowledged patron of letters. She wished to
attach to herself, after the manner of the French literary ladies,
some poet, essayist, or scholar, whose work she might inspire and
supervise, and whose reward was to be the association of her name
with his. Hannah More, recognizing this ambition, calls her ‘the
female Mæcenas of Hill Street,’[362] and Dr. Burney asserts that she
‘makes each rising art her care.’[363] The poet for whom she had
been waiting appeared in the summer of 1766, in the person of James
Beattie, a young professor of moral philosophy at Aberdeen, who was,
at the time, unknown in England.
Beattie was by nature shy, nervous, self-conscious, and uncertain of
his powers—a type familiar in the academic world. He was for ever
finding his poems unworthy of him, suppressing them, altering and
correcting them, and threatening never to complete them. For such
a person a patron might do much. Mrs. Montagu at once expressed
herself to Dr. Gregory (a common friend resident in Aberdeen) as
highly pleased with Beattie’s poetry. But it was not until she saw
the first canto of the _Minstrel_, early in 1771, that her judgment
was fully convinced. She now set to work with as much industry as
charity to advance her chosen poet in the world of letters. She sent
a copy of the new poem to Lord Chatham,[364] recommended it to the
attention of Percy (the inspiration of whose essay on the minstrels
had been acknowledged by Beattie in his preface), and encouraged
her _protégé_ by quoting to him the praises of Lord Lyttelton. She
offered suggestions respecting the advertisement of the poem, and
wrote to a bookseller of her acquaintance that he must recommend the
poem ‘to all people of taste.’ Such were the powers of the female
patron in this new age.
Mrs. Montagu also interested herself in another work of Beattie’s,
a book now quite forgotten but then just entering upon a brilliant
career of popularity. This was no other than an _Essay on Truth_,
which had been published in 1770, and had almost immediately passed
into a second edition. Mrs. Montagu very flatteringly describes the
vain efforts of the English public to come at this volume. She has
herself recommended it ‘to many of our Bishops and others; but all
have complained this whole winter that the booksellers deny having
either the first or second edition. I dare say many hundreds would
have been sold if people could have got them.’[365] It is quite
obvious that the academic young poet needs the practical assistance
of the bluestocking, friend of ‘Bishops and others.’ He therefore
came up to London in the autumn of this year, and then first made the
acquaintance of the woman whom he ever after gratefully acknowledged
as his patron. And thus the Defender of Truth and the Defender of
Shakespeare met together—to their mutual advantage. Mrs. Montagu’s
mind was already teeming with projects for the advancement of her
favourite. In the spring of the next year, upon hearing that Adam
Ferguson of Edinburgh University was to go abroad, she conceived the
plan of having Beattie transferred to his chair, and succeeded in
interesting the Archbishop of York in the matter, only to learn that
the professor had every intention of returning to his work after his
temporary absence.[366] Nevertheless she was the means of introducing
Beattie to the Archbishop and to his brother, Lord Kinnoul,[367]
who became warm friends of the new poet. In the following year she
instructed Beattie in the best means of bringing his case to the
attention of the King,[368] assuring him that if the government did
nothing for him, she would herself ‘claim the honour of rendering
his situation in life more comfortable.’[369] But the government
did not disappoint her. Beattie was presented to the King at his
levee, received the incense of his praise, and, later, a pension
of two hundred pounds, and a degree of Doctor of Laws from Oxford.
Mrs. Montagu shared in the general praise. ‘Do you not honour Mrs.
Montagu,’ wrote Hester Chapone to Mrs. Delany, ‘for the pains she has
taken to introduce this _excellent champion of Christianity_ into the
notice of the great world and to obtain for him some other regard
than that of barren fame?’[370]
Her efforts on his behalf had but begun. Abandoning a plan that
he should enter the Church of England—partly no doubt because
of Beattie’s own lukewarmness—she thinks he may perhaps do more
service to religion as a layman than as a priest,[371] and she
now urges the publication, by subscription, of a quarto volume of
_Essays_. In this way, she thought, eight hundred or a thousand
pounds might be gained.[372] Patron and _protégé_ together drew up
a form of ‘subscription-paper,’ and, since Beattie shrank from any
advertisement in newspapers, Mrs. Montagu agreed, with the assistance
of a few friends, to circulate the document herself.[373] She did her
work well. In the list of subscribers to the book[374] she contrived
to include not only every prominent bluestocking, but Reynolds,
Garrick, Johnson, a host of peers, her friends the Bishops, the two
Archbishops, and the libraries of Oxford. She was the recognized
sponsor of the volume, and when the publication of it was delayed,
it was part of her office to circulate an explanatory card of
Beattie’s.[375] When it finally appeared she was delighted with it
in its every aspect, but professed to find it rather insolent in a
native of Aberdeen to outdo the English in style.[376]
Meanwhile the second canto of the _Minstrel_ had been sent to her for
criticism, and was, if we are to believe Beattie, published at her
request.[377] Four years later a volume of select poems was submitted
to her with the request that she suppress those of which she did not
approve; and when at last Beattie put forth the _Minstrel_ in its
final form, he requested permission to dedicate the first canto to
her by putting her name into the last stanza in a space which had
been left blank from the first:
Here pause, my gothic lyre, a little while,
The leisure hour is all that thou canst claim.
But on this verse if Montagu should smile,
New strains ere long shall animate thy frame.
And her applause to me is more than fame;
And still with truth accords her taste refined.
At lucre or renown let others aim,
I only wish to please the gentle mind
Whom Nature’s charms inspire and love of human kind.
The sweetness of this languidly conventional note must have been
somewhat spoiled for Mrs. Montagu by the fact that the lines were
written before Beattie knew her, and were, if we may trust the poet’s
biographer, originally intended for another.[378] But there can be
no doubt of Beattie’s gratitude. He honoured his patroness by naming
a son Montagu, and continued to visit her in London or in Sandelford
and to submit his works to her for her approval,[379] that form of
flattery which she coveted most of all. They honoured each other for
many years with a reasonable regularity of correspondence which,
however, does more credit to their earnestness than to their wit.
The relations of Beattie and Mrs. Montagu continued serene throughout
their lives. Each was grateful to the other and never failed to make
a public display of that gratitude. Mrs. Montagu bestowed her favours
without offence, and Beattie received them without any pretence of
hesitation. Each was happier for having known the other. And if the
relation of author and patron must needs exist, theirs is a specimen
of what the relation may be at its best.
* * * * *
The relations of Robert Potter, the translator of Æschylus, with Mrs.
Montagu are of the same general nature as those of Beattie. It was
with trembling gratitude that he accepted and incredible flattery
that he repaid the favours which the lady bestowed upon him. Her
attention had, it would appear, been caught by the publication of the
Greek tragedian in English,—the publication of translations being
always a welcome event for bluestockings—and she at once suggested to
the translator the propriety of adding explanatory notes. He adopted
the suggestion, and, when publishing his Notes in the following year
(1778), improved the opportunity to dedicate not only these but the
original volume to his new-found patron. In a prefatory letter to her
he outdid Beattie in the use of superlatives. The notes are written,
he proclaims, only because Mrs. Montagu has asked for them, and with
him a hint from that lady is a command; though he is incapable of
understanding why so accomplished a person should ask for notes,
since she needs them ‘as little as any person alive.’ The approbation
of Mrs. Montagu, he concludes, is ‘the highest honour any writer can
receive.’
Loyalty was one of Mrs. Montagu’s qualities. None of her _protégés_
ever had occasion to complain that she lost interest or declined
support. Her career as a patron of the arts is sullied by no
quarrels; she was the subject of no anonymous libels from the
offended recipients of her charity. She continued her favours to
Potter, urging him to proceed with his translation of Euripides,[380]
and appearing prominently among the subscribers to that volume. She
received him at her assemblies, and, according to a somewhat doubtful
anecdote, presented him to Dr. Johnson.[381] Johnson, who considered
Potter’s work ‘verbiage’ (doubtless because it was in blank verse),
snubbed the scholar and mumbled to the bluestocking, ‘Well, well!’
and ‘Well, Madam, and what then?’
This ungracious reception may have helped Mrs. Montagu in inciting
Potter to attack Johnson’s _Lives of the Poets_, some years later;
but, according to Walpole, the chief aim was ‘to revenge the attack
on Lord Lyttelton.’ There is, I believe, no existing evidence for
this gossip, apart from the pamphlet itself; but there seems to be
no good reason for rejecting it. In this paper, which, it must be
said, is a sufficiently dignified and worthy pamphlet as pamphlets
go, Potter quotes Mrs. Montagu’s _Essay on Shakspeare_ by way of
demolishing Johnson’s criticism of _The Bard_, and the lady and
Bishop Hurd are proclaimed ‘the two best Critics of this or any other
age.’[382] Of this piece of nonsense Walpole has written the last
word:
Were I Johnson, I had rather be criticized than flattered so
fulsomely. There is nothing more foolish than the hyperboles of
contemporaries on one another, who, like the nominal Dukes of
Aquitaine and Normandy at a coronation, have place given to them
above all peers, and the next day shrink to simple knights.[383]
It is a pity that Potter could not have known that the utility of
his translations, which have been reprinted again and again, would
outlive the fame of his patron.
* * * * *
A classicist of much more importance than Potter did not disdain
to court Mrs. Montagu. It was in June 1788, that William Cowper
published in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ his pleasant verses _On Mrs.
Montagu’s Feather Hangings_. He had himself not seen the room, but
knew it from the descriptions of his cousin, Lady Hesketh, who was
an aspirant to Mrs. Montagu’s ‘academy.’[384] The poet’s purpose in
the presentation of this poetical tribute seems to have been missed
by his editors; but it is clear that he was yielding to the pressure
of Lady Hesketh and attempting to bring himself and his forthcoming
translation of Homer to the attention of the bluestocking. The first
move was a failure. Mrs. Montagu, it would seem, took no notice of
the lines in the magazine, though they were set forth as ‘by the
author of _The Task_,’ already a poem of national fame. In August,
Cowper writes to Lady Hesketh:
To me, my dear, it seemeth that we shall never by any management
make a deep impression on Mrs. Montagu. Persons who have been so
long accustomed to praise become proof against it.[385]
[Illustration:
Mrs. Montagu Johnson
JOHNSON POINTING OUT MRS. MONTAGU AS A PATRON OF THE ARTS
Reproduced from Barry’s fresco in the Royal Society of Arts, by kind
permission of the Society]
It was necessary to adopt a new plan. Two years later Lady Hesketh
decided to approach Mrs. Montagu herself, and requested Cowper
to permit her to show a portion of the manuscript to that lady.
The poet, who had long since admired the _Essay on Shakspeare_
and who had acquired the most exaggerated notions of the lady’s
learning,[386] chose the first two books of the _Iliad_ to present as
a sample intending to ‘carry her by a _coup de main_,’ and employing
‘Achilles, Agamemnon, and the two armies of Greece and Troy,’ in his
charge upon the bluestocking. To these the sixteenth book of the
_Odyssey_ was added by Lady Hesketh. ‘It was very kind in thee,’
he writes,[387] ‘to sacrifice to this Minerva on my account.’ But
Minerva, who was now seventy, was probably glad to escape from the
affair with a concealment of her ignorance of Homer. She wrote an
enthusiastic, and, be it added, modest letter to Lady Hesketh about
the new translation, and put her name on the subscribers’ list.
Cowper read the letter and expressed his pride in what was said; and
there the matter ended.
* * * * *
The precise nature and extent of the assistance which Mrs. Montagu
rendered to James Barry, the painter, it is now impossible to
determine. Certain it is that she consented to be painted by him (in
hideous profile) for that hodge-podge of fresco with which Barry
covered the walls of the Royal Society of Arts. She is there depicted
in her capacity as a patron of the arts.[388]
‘Towards the centre of the picture,’ writes Barry, ‘is seen that
distinguished example of female excellence, Mrs. Montagu, who
long honoured the Society with her name and subscription.... Mrs.
Montagu appears here recommending the ingenuity and industry of a
young female whose work she is producing.... Between these ladies
[the Duchesses of Devonshire and Portland] the late Dr. Samuel
Johnson seems pointing out this example of Mrs. Montagu to their
Graces’ attention and imitation.’[389]
The juxtaposition of Johnson and Mrs. Montagu, the Great Dictator and
the female Mæcenas, must have caused inextinguishable mirth among the
spectators who knew of their great quarrel. Mrs. Montagu’s resentment
at Johnson’s treatment of Lyttelton in the _Lives of the Poets_ has
been much discussed; but the story must be repeated once more for the
sake of the light which it throws upon Mrs. Montagu’s ambitions to
control the destinies of literature.
Mrs. Montagu and Lord Lyttelton had been close friends for many years
preceding the death of the latter. They had laboured together on the
_Dialogues of the Dead_ (to the scandal, Walpole delighted to relate,
of the lady’s postilion[390]); and thus Mrs. Montagu’s literary fame
was, in a way, bound up with the peer’s. When, eight years after
the death of Lyttelton, Johnson’s account of him appeared, it was
found to contain remarks which did not please the friends of the
late nobleman. Far from being satisfied that he should have been
deemed worthy of inclusion even in so inclusive a list as Johnson’s,
they decided to take offence because a certain amount of blame was
mingled with a certain amount of praise. Johnson had, for example,
criticised ‘poor Lyttelton’ for thanking the Critical Reviewers for
their commendatory notice of the _Dialogues of the Dead_; he spoke of
Lyttelton’s poems as having ‘nothing to be despised and little to be
admired,’ and of his songs, in particular, as ‘sometimes spritely and
sometimes insipid.’ Here surely is as much praise as posterity would
care to give to Lyttelton; but it was not sufficient for the women
who owed some part of their reputation to the fact that they had been
intimate with a peer. According to Walpole, it was Mrs. Vesey who
began the attack, but it was certainly Mrs. Montagu who conducted the
campaign. The reader of Fanny Burney’s _Diary_ is familiar with the
details of this feud; the reader of Walpole will find four references
to it in the letters written at the opening of 1781.
‘She told me,’ writes the latter, ‘as a mark of her high
displeasure, that she would never ask him to dinner again. I took
her side, and fomented the quarrel, and wished I could have made
Dagon and Ashtaroth scold in Coptic.’[391]
Nothing came of this literary feud save a scene at Streatham between
Johnson and Pepys which frightened Fanny Burney, and Potter’s attack
on the _Lives_ which has been mentioned already; and Mr. Dobson
remarks that modern readers ‘will perhaps wonder what the dispute was
about.’[392] But it is significant as showing the influence which
Mrs. Montagu thought she exerted in the world of letters, and the
means which she adopted to make her influence felt.
Johnson’s behaviour during this quarrel must, I think, have been due
to something other than wounded vanity. It was, I am convinced, due
to this very patronage of literature which the bluestockings, with
Mrs. Montagu at their head, were attempting to set up. There can be
no more annoying spectacle than that of a person to whom wealth and
social talents have given a certain minor position in the literary
world, and who, mistaking gifts for genius, attempts to exalt
that position to one of authority. This is what Mrs. Montagu was
trying to do. She had, without a shadow of doubt, achieved a certain
influence. She had bestowed pensions and gifts upon deserving authors
and scholars. She had placed her name on a hundred subscription
lists. She had contributed to the success of Hannah More’s tragedy,
_Percy_, by appearing, more than once, in a box at the theatre where
it was being performed. Elizabeth Carter and Hester Chapone (who
dedicated her _Letters_ to Mrs. Montagu) were examples of the worthy
writer whom she assisted in one way or another by her unostentatious
charity. Laurence Sterne was content, as early as 1761, to make her
a sort of literary executor,[393] ‘not because she is our cousin—but
because I am sure she has a good heart.’ But when, through the
influence of flattery, she mistook her kind heart and her pleasant
interest in literature for the critical authority of a scholar and
arbiter, an authority which can belong to but one or two in any age,
she brought down upon herself, not unnaturally, the wrath of Johnson
and the scorn of Walpole. By November 1776, she had reached the point
where she could write thus to Garrick:
‘I must say I felt for Shakspeare the anxiety one does for a dead
friend, who can no longer speak for himself.’[394]
In 1778 she could seriously offer Fanny Burney, already renowned
as the author of _Evelina_, the gift of her ‘influence,’ adding,
‘We shall all be glad to assist in spreading the fame of Miss
Burney.’[395]
She had the desire to direct and to manage which is characteristic of
the experienced woman of fashion, who knows the value of her personal
charm, rather than of the true literary critic, who is usually a
person too wise to attempt to direct the stream of literature. But
Mrs. Montagu was not content to let that stream flow as it would.
She must bring comedies to the attention of Garrick[396] and suggest
subjects to Hannah More[397] and Mrs. Carter;[398] she must guide
Potter and encourage Beattie. In the pride of her power she even
attempted the delicate task of influencing the elections to the
Literary Club; and it would appear that, escaping the detection of
Johnson, she succeeded in her aim, for her candidate, who was no
other than Mr. Vesey, was chosen. But when she aspired to reverse the
estimate of the greatest living critic and substitute the indulgent
opinion of a personal friend, it is not surprising that Johnson
should somewhat sharply have reminded her and her coterie of what
their opinion was really worth. Few to-day will be found to regret
that the lady’s view did not prevail.
At one point Mrs. Montagu’s relations with her _protégés_ come
dangerously near to farce comedy. Like all the bluestockings, she
was one of the believers in the genius of Ann Yearsley, the poetical
milk-woman of Bristol, who was regarded for a time as a female
Chatterton. It was part of the work of bluestockings to discover
genius. They had discovered Hannah More; they had discovered Beattie
and Mrs. Chapone; if they had not discovered Fanny Burney they had
at least ferreted her out of the obscurity in which she wished to
remain. But none of their literary finds seemed to them so bright
with promise as the marvellous woman who sold milk from door to door
in the unpoetical town of Bristol. It was Miss More who found her,
and who, with Mrs. Montagu, advertised her with an ardour which
does more credit to the quickness of their sympathies than to the
quickness of their wits.
In 1783 Miss More discovered that Ann Yearsley, the milk-woman who
called daily at her house in Bristol for kitchen-refuse with which
to feed her pig, was accustomed to employ her leisure moments in
the composition of verses. She at once took the woman in charge,
taught her spelling, and the simplest rules of rhetoric, and after
a lapse of some months felt that her pupil had made such progress
that she might safely submit her verses to bluestocking judgment.
The enthusiasm with which Mrs. Montagu and her friends received them
is significant at once of their eagerness to assist the development
of poetry and of their unfitness for the task. Mrs. Montagu had
not believed in Woodhouse, the poetical shoemaker, but a female
Chatterton had more appeal. She wrote to Miss More,
‘Let me come to the wondrous story of the milk-woman. Indeed she
is one of the nature’s miracles. What force of imagination! what
harmony of numbers! In Pagan times one could have supposed Apollo
had fallen in love with her rosy cheek, snatched her to the top of
Mt. Parnassus, given her a glass of his best helicon, and ordered
the nine muses to attend her call.’
This hypothesis being unsuitable to a Christian age, Mrs. Montagu
suggests that the Scriptures, the Psalms, and the Book of Job in
particular, may have taught the artless numbers to flow; whereupon
she herself indulges in a flight:
Avaunt! grammarians; stand away! logicians; far, far away all
heathen ethics and mythology, geometry and algebra, and make room
for the Bible and Milton when a poet is to be made. The proud
philosopher ends far short of what has been revealed to the simple
in our religion. Wonder not, therefore, if our humble dame rises
above Pindar or steps beyond Æschylus.[399]
Mrs. Montagu joyfully promises her support.
The rest of the blues were hardly less enthusiastic. Old Mrs. Delany
circulated the milk-woman’s ‘proposals’ to print;[400] Mrs. Boscawen
sent in a ‘handsome list of subscribers’; the Duchess of Beaufort
requested a visit from Mrs. Yearsley; the Duchess of Portland sent
a twenty-pound bank-note. Walpole gave her money and the works of
Hannah More.[401] The Duchess of Devonshire presented her with an
edition of the English poets. All social London and half of literary
London put its name on the list of subscribers. When, in 1785, the
volume appeared, it was prefaced by a letter from Hannah More to
Mrs. Montagu, telling Mrs. Yearsley’s story, and recommending her to
the good attentions of Mrs. Montagu, whose delight ‘in protecting
real genius’ is well known. Mrs. Montagu’s name was, indeed, writ
large in the volume. In the address, _To Stella_ (Stella being the
milk-woman’s name for Hannah More), Mrs. Montagu is referred to as
That bright fair who decks a Shakespeare’s urn
With deathless glories.
Similar adulation is diffused through some seventy lines of a blank
verse poem, _On Mrs. Montagu_. A passage from this will serve as well
as anything to illustrate ‘Lactilla’s’ powers:
Lo! where she, mounting, spurns the stedfast earth,
And, sailing on the cloud of science, bears
The banner of Perfection.—
Ask Gallia’s mimic sons how strong her powers,
Whom, flush’d with plunder from her Shakespeare’s page,
She swift detects amid their dark retreats;
(Horrid as Cacus in their thievish dens)
Regains the trophies, bears in triumph back
The pilfer’d glories to a wond’ring world.
So Stella boasts, from her the tale I learned;
With pride she told it, I with rapture heard.
Mrs. Yearsley was not loath to address the great in verse. Mr.
Raikes of Manchester, the founder of Sunday Schools, the Duchess
of Portland, and the Author of _The Castle of Otranto_ (genially
referred to as ‘the Honourable H—e W—e’) were all commemorated. Their
influential patronage and sad Lactilla’s melancholy tale made the
volume immediately successful, and it passed into a fourth edition in
1786.
Lactilla might, however, have been happier had she been less
successful. There had come to her, after the publication of her
book, the not inconsiderable sum of three hundred and fifty pounds,
which Hannah More held in trust for her. One is not surprised to
learn that Miss More was cautious in paying out this money to Mrs.
Yearsley, nor that this caution impressed the owner of the money as
mere niggardliness. A sharp quarrel ensued which was fully set forth
by both women, by Hannah More in her letters to Mrs. Montagu and by
the poetess in the preface to her next volume of verses. It cost the
poor milk-woman all her fine friends and the fine reputation which
they had blown up for her. She sank gradually from view, and when she
died, in 1806, was probably as obscure as when she was ‘discovered’
some twenty years before. Had she been of a philosophical
temperament, she might perhaps have extracted some comfort from the
cynical reflection that her fall had been well-nigh as humiliating
to her discoverers and patrons as to herself. Walpole continued for
months to chuckle over the collapse of her reputation, asserting
that, if wise, she would now put gin in her milk and kill herself by
way of attaining to an immortality like Chatterton’s;[402] but the
bluestockings were glad to forget the poor creature and the mischief
they had done her, and the pathos of her latter state moved them only
to passionate descriptions of her ingratitude.