A LESSER ELIZABETH.
Mrs. Montagu, " Queen of the Blues " : Her Letters and Friendships from 1762 to 1800. Edited by Reginald Blunt. 2 V ols. (London : Constable. £2 2s. net.)
"WHO is Silvia," who was Mrs. Montagu, that two volumes so finely printed and embellished now commend her ? One might be forgiven at this distance of time for a vagueness on the point. A violet—" Queen of the Blues" though she might have been—is lost in a general haze of violets, now that we look back through the age of drawing-room scrapbooks. It was the less amicable opinion of Johnson which, somehow; had impressed itself from the scattered notices in Boswell ; Mrs. Montagu was the lady who wrote the essay on Shakes- peare—" Yes, sir ; it does her honour, but it would do nobody else honour "—who, indeed, on the same authority, had the Shakespearean affinity of "small Latin and less Greek.". Did not she, too, celebrate each year the first of May by feasting the chimney-sweepers ? But even that genuine distinction has been obscured by the - brightness of those merrier suppers of Jem White and their perpetuation in " Elia."
Some such precarious reflections will probably pass through the mind of the ordinary reader, when he takes in hand the, bulky memorials now published. But there on the wrapper, serene from her oval medallion of decorous blue, gazes Mrs. Montagu with more than a suspicion of frigidity. If one doubts that there is a certain domination in the lady's eye, one need but turn to the larger copy in the second volume. No wonder that she queened it. No wonder that she " dropped 7 Samuel Johnson. "She had a horror," observes Mr. Blunt, "of small confined rooms and a passion for air and space about her." We thoroughly believe it ; and the summary of her married state in the words "the pair pursued their somewhat divergent paths in mutual tranquillity and esteem" causes no surprise. •
Mr. Blunt's compilation concludes the work on Elizabeth Montagu which her great-great-niece, Mrs. Emily Climenson, began with two volumes issued in 1906. Mrs. Montagu's characteristically extensive correspondence was gathered in soon after her death in 1800 by her nephew, who published part of it. Not much was left in the open. The effect of this reclaiming which concerns us was upon Mr. Blunt, and it must have been considerable. By the terms of Mrs. Climen- son's will" he found himself faced with .a consignment of some four or five thousand letters, and with numerous bundles of memoranda, note-books, diaries, verses, and other somewhat inchoate material." Mrs. Montagu's letters were for the most part undated. What were the paltry -points of- chronology, though perhaps not displeasing to the mathematician her husband, to an ornament of Shakespearean criticism and the best society ? Notwithstanding, Mr. Blunt has set out his s-elections-in clear and engaging style.
In 1762, -Mrs. Montagu, not long past her fortieth year,, was able to interrupt her political effusions to Lord Bath:. with something truly diverting. "In the morning yesterday I went with a party to see the Cherokee King'. . . . the general caste of his physiognomy is not amiss. . . . He wears the Chinese boot, as we see them in the pictures." She took stock of the red man, and he no doubt of her ; she saw in his looks "sense and intrepidity," and perhaps he saw the same in hers. Such qualities are evident in her advising her absent husband, "To laugh with Falstaffe is only a natural sympathy, and one must be illnatured as well as dull not to do so." At Spa the next year she had the English news from Edmund Burke, and sent home traveller's letters to Stilling- fleet the naturalist and her dear Lord Lyttelton. One decides that she found an exalted pleasure in the composition of such budgets ; and it is an excuse for pride of race to think of her in such moods, towering above her topics in the most natural way. She sweeps through Scotland : "We travelled along a glen [Glencoe] encompassed by vast hoar mountains down whose wrinkled sides rushed impetuous streams which ended in the vale below. In a sort of proportion mountain rose above mountain, some from the steep declivity had had all the soil washed away and the rocks like the bones of a giant exhibited its strength without softness or mitigation, and made imagination tremble through all her powers. In this glen we stopped to dine. . . . " Imagination was only trembling by the rules of etiquette.
That the inoculation of Elizabeth should have been a rather more pompous ceremony than that of a private soldier instantly appears probable ; Mr. Blunt has withheld a great deal of the archives on the event, but what he reveals sets up a cold vibration in all the imaginative powers. It is written that in the spring of 1767, Mrs. Montagu's house- keeper impolitely developed smallpox. Her mistress took action at once, went not into hysterics but into lodgings, arranged to be inoculated by Mr. Sutton,had her affairs legally arranged by her brother, and sent out the news to her friends. These responded with a concordance which almost suggests
an agreed irony. " Mrs: Carter came from Deal to be with her through the critical period ; Sir John Pringle, M.D., consulted with Mr. Sutton on every circumstance of her constitution ; the Duchess of Portland, Mrs. Boscawen, and other friends came up specially to visit her ; Lord Lyttelton, )rd Karnes, Dr. Monsey, and many others wrote • letters full • of direst solicitude." The resolute woman, accepting with gracious ease these proofs of comprehension, swallowed Sutton's pill. And then ? Nothing.
By comparison with the ton, literary matters do not seem to have occupied this literary lady overmuch. She "elected deliberately," her latest champion claims, "to welcome lowly talent rather than titled sinners " ; but she would have gone further if lowly talent had not also distressed her stately propriety. Woodhouse, one of England's poetical shoe- makers, owed much to her generosity ; Mrs. Yearsley, the harmonious milk-woman who served Hannah More, was indebted to her for presents of twenty-two guineas. But there was a suggestion of independence about the cobbler, and a whole manifesto of the same on the part of Lactilla, which made them seem difficult and dubious objects of atten- tion. Woodhouse saw the affair with greater subtlety than Mrs. Yearsley, who broke out in the most insubordinate style against " trustees " and verse-correctors, so completely cooking her goose that the Queen of the Blues commented on her dead child, "it possibly might have risen to some great station—in _Botany Bay."
Nor was her acquaintance with Johnson a soothing reflection of benevolence in formal gratitude. The man was meritorious, but not humble. He stayed too long, under the ridiculous impression that his presence was valuable. He attacked "poor Lyttelton," was unwieldy, loud and cross-eyed. He nevertheless wrote to her with "that respect which is always due to benevolence," keeping his "though I could give her a bite ! " in the background ; and, after mortally offending her by bawling at her friend, Mr. Weller Pepys, at dinner like a sergeant-major—perhaps he perfected the manner on that visit to the Lincolnshire militia at Warley Camp—after this unforgivable exhibition, he defeated her. She would never speak to him again. She cut him. He was remorseless, "Well, madam, what's become of your fine new house ? " and within a few minutes her prearranged marble facade was in ruins, and "she was as civil as ever."
She should have been spared Johnson, as Carlyle should have been spared Lamb. One suspects destiny of a lapse.
Why, after all, should she not have been Queen of tea and comfortable advice, unruffled by the obtrusion of genius, large appetite and huge voice ? Dr. Beattie must have been a source of special gratification to her. He was so like Mrs.
Carter. There is no record that the author of The Minstrel ever raised his voice above a not unmusical cooing. After all, we should have been cautious over voice-production in the Blue-Stocking Club, though perhaps a nicely shaded insistence on an essay on Shakespeare might have come
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