A Dazzling Woman

Portrait of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. By Iris Barry. (Ernest Bann. 158.) " BUT you have dared to have wit joined to beauty," wrote Edward Montagu to Lady Mary Pierrepont in the course of that interminable and acrimonious correspondence which preceded their marriage. Old, exhausted, ravaged by disease, embittered by the world's ingratitude, Lady Mary Montagu must have felt, when she looked back on life from her Italian exile, that she had indeed paid dearly for her audacity. When she came to Rome, she could only say, " If among the foun- tains I could find the waters of Lethe, I should be completely happy. I carry the serpent that poisons the Paradise I am in."

Miss Iris Barry has written a striking portrait of this famous and unfortunate Englishwoman, and has written it in so easy a style that it delights the reader as it would have delighted Lady Mary herself. The sober historian may be shocked by Miss Barry's transitions. from the known to the unknown ; by her failure to give much indication of when she is quoting and when reconstructing ; and by the absence of references to sources of information ; but for our part, we are confident that she has fully justified her method. There is no claim here to dry-as-dust scholarship, nor to the appraisal of some great figure of the period--a Marlborough, a Pitt, or a Walpole, round whom controversy rages. Lady Mary, as our author says, " never meddled in politics—she simply knew that the Whigs were the right people." And the importance of her life rests entirely on what she was, not what she did. Therefore, historical truth, in the deepest sense of the words, depends even more on the insight of her biographer than on the verification of the events of her existence. We believe, then, that Miss Barry has rightly interpreted her subject, and in doing that she has done everything. Yet." the real woman," she admits, " is something of a mystery." True, but every woman and every man is very much of a mystery, and we are quite willing to follow Miss Barry's enterprising and entertaining guessing, rather than to arraign her for not .sticking more closely to the dry bones of history.

The great merit of the book is that it traces and exposes the fundamental development of Lady Mary's character. How deep, how physiological almost, that change must, have been we can realize when we compare the true, tender (but indeed always capable) girl disclosed in the Edward Montagu correspondence with the brilliant but inhuman and infinitely cold woman-of the Lord Hervey period. This profound change for the worse was the fault, Miss Barry suggests (without ever quite saying so), of Montagu ; and no doubt she is right. But no matter whose fault it was, it was certainly Lady Mary's tragedy. In old age, perhaps, she changed again, and recaptured something of her girlhood's humanity. But then it was easy to be humane, philosophical, tender, in the half compulsory retirement into which Alexander Pope (- the wicked wasp of Twickenham," as she called him) and the malice of the world had driven her. How terrible is the story of her relationship with Pope! There was a dazzling first meeting of these two persons of genius. Pope wrote marvellous wit-encrusted letters to her, of which Miss Barry gives this perfect specimen :-

" You may easily imagine how desirous I must be of a corre- spondence with a person who had taught me long ago that it was as possible to esteem at first sight as to love ; and who has since ruined for me all the conversation of one sex, and almost all the friendship of the other.. I am but too sensible, through your means, that the company of men wants a certain softness to recom- mend it, and that of woman wants everything else . . . "

But the corroding venom of Pope's attack upon her, after she had laughed at him, made the world see poor Lady Mary

as worse than any of her contemporaries, pillorying her with the nickname of " Sappho," which he had first given in adulation :-

" Yet here, as e'en in hell, there must be still One giant vice, so excellently ill

That all beside one pities, not abhors : As who knowS Sappho, smiles at other --- "

But what finally broke Lady Mary and drove her into exile was the pitiless letter of Lord Peterborough, that great

adventurous soldier, to whom she had written for help against her tormentor. His Lordship returned what Miss Barry well calls the most courteously disobliging letter a woman could fear to receive " :-

" Mr. Pope wondered how the town could apply those lines to any but some noted common woman ; that he should be yet more surprised if you should take them to yourself."

And so this brilliant woman went out for the last period of

her life to farm (most seriously) in Northern Italy ; to write a great series of letters to her daughter, Lady Bute, who was just coining into the power and glory which her mother had grasped at so avidly and had seen fade from her. Writing to her daughter, and warning her of the inevitable disappoint- Ments of life, she says :--

" It is more in our power than is commonly belieVed to soften whatever ills are founded or augmented by fancy. Strictly speaking, there is but one real evil—I mean, acute pain ; all other complaints are so considerably diminished by time, that it is plain the grief is owing to our passion, since the sensation of it vanishes when that is over."

It is perhaps appropriate that the author of such words should have introduced preventive vaccination against smallpox to these islands. As a matter of fact, Lady Mary thought nothing of this matter, and was only desperately bored by the number of people who ivorried her about it. Nothing would have astounded her more than that her repu- tation should rest, to a large extent, upon this discovery.

And, indeed, in a sense her astonishment would be justified, for it was only the chance result of her husband's embassy to Turkey. Her reputation should rest, and Miss Barry's book will help it to do so, not upon anything she did, or even upon anything she said, but on what she was --a dazzling woman, set in the midst of one of the most brilliant societies that have ever held the stage in England.