Tough Old Bluestocking
Montagu. Volume 2, 1721-51. By Robert
THIS volume, like the first, is edited with firm, unobtrusive scholarship by Robert Halsband. He has added two important series of letters to the corpus of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's letters and it is most unlikely that this edition will ever be bettered. Halsband and Montagu will go hand in hand down the ages, Wharncliffe and Moy Thomas must now relax their grasp and fall into oblivion. After all they have had a good run. For nearly a hundred years their edition of Lady Mary's letters has had undisputed sway, full of errors and omissions as it was. Now it is Halsband for the foreseeable future.
For the scholar these letters make smooth and easy reading. They are stuffed with gossip— cynical, urbane, spiced with a frankness about sex that displays the emancipated, aristocratic woman of the eighteenth century at her best. Are you amused to know that Mrs Murray, nearly raped by her footman, took a bishop's son to bed and afterwards a duke or that Mrs West needed two lovers, one for show. the other for use; or that the Duchess of Marl- borough's belly, after lying twenty years fallow, was made great by William Congreve, the poet? All this, and more too, is stuffed into the letters to her sister, Lady Mar, a melancholic who was steadily but surely slipping into insanity.
Lady Mary, by her brittle vivacity, tried to keep up her sister's interest in life which showed, perhaps, more heart than sense, for the effect of these letters must have been like showing the richest, fattiest foods to someone dying of cancer of the liver. Then Lady Mary possessed little empathy. The plate glass window behind which she lived (she called herself quite rightly a spectator) reduced life to the surface. So long as she is describing—landscapes, towns, balls, the outward appearance of people, gossip she has heard, then she is admirable. And at a certain level, she shows considerable human wisdom, but it derives from the mind rather than the heart. She knows life is long, lonely, and full of disappointments : that gardens, books, nature, a few friends to write to rather than see, are surer solaces than passion.
It is hard to believe that Lady Mary was ever really driven by love but here are the letters to Algarotti to prove it. Or so it would seem. They are urgent enough, and, after all, her purpose in leaving England was to be with him. And yet doubt lingers. Did she not inflate her passion in order to escape not only from Wortley but from the London world which had grown very uncongenial? Lady Mary needed to acquire dis- tance. She preferred to write to her husband, her son and her daughter rather than be with them. And the pursuit of Algarotti kept her out of England long after Algarotti had faded from her life. Indeed the choice of Algarotti indicates too that Lady Mary's passion was, in a sense, evasive.
Like all good spectators with literary skill— Horace Walpole, Charles Greville are others— Lady Mary entertains so long as you are pre- pared to accept the social trivialities that amused her. Basically, as a creative artist, she fails. She lacks true engagement, she cannot bear the truths of passionate life. Indeed in this volume one simple letter by Lord Hervey, nearing his death, makes the whole of Lady Mary's corres- pondence seem trivial. In a few poignant sen- tences he touches common humanity, brings us a sharp realisation of what death must mean. Such depths of feeling and expression are beyond Lady Mary's range. As a sort of historical William Hickey she is superb: as a quarry for historical detail, admirable: as a tough, cynical old bluestocking, excellent. Yet, like Horace Walpole, she is drawn to triviality. Like him she lacked bottom, gniritas, judgment, call it what you will.
J. H. PLUMB
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