FOOTNOTES:
[15] "The World's Olio" (1655) contains an essay on "The Inferiority of Woman, morally and physically".
[16] See Forsyth, Novels and Novelists of the Eighteenth Century, pp. 18-24.
[17] Letter 126.
[18] Letter 298.
[19] Letter 76.
[20] Letter 481.
[21] Letter 78.
[22] Letter 124.
[23] The above statement may at first sight seem rather too sweeping. But it is supported by the authority of Mary Astell (cf. page 90), who in her "Serious Proposal to the Ladies" remarks that it was generally considered quite unnecessary to waste money on the education of daughters. Most parents, she says, "took as much pains to beat girls away from knowledge as to beat boys towards it". She was quite aware that her scheme for the establishment of a nunnery in which the daughters of the aristocracy were to be saved from neglect must be shocking to the parents of her generation, who feared that such an education might in all probability corrupt their morals(!) and would certainly prevent them from marrying. In this lies the gist of all deliberate discouragement of female learning. The only object in a girl's life being to make a suitable match,—meaning a wealthy one,—it followed that everything was subordinated to this consideration. And it unfortunately happened that the men of the century preferred their partners in wedlock silly and ignorant, and consequently easy-going and submissive.
At one time Mary Astell's scheme came very near to realisation. The devout, intellectual and wealthy Lady Elizabeth Hastings became interested in it and declared herself willing to supply the necessary funds. But it so happened that Bishop Burnet heard of the plan and of the promised donation. A scheme for a rational education for girls struck this conservative churchman as so absurd that in his Anglican hatred of Catholicism he rather irrelevantly referred to it as "a popish project", using all his influence to divert Lady Elizabeth's charity, in which effort he was completely successful.
[24] A Caveat to the Fair Sex.
[25] Letter to the Countess of Bute, March 6, 1753.
[26] "Introductory Anecdotes" to Lord Wharncliffe's Edition of the Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Paris, 1837).
CHAPTER V. Qualified Feminism: The Bluestockings.
"Feminism", says M. Ascoli, in an article in the "Revue de Synthèse historique", "is the mental attitude of those who refuse to admit a natural and necessary inequality between the faculties of the sexes, and, in consequence of this, between their respective rights; who believe that—within certain limits clearly defined by Nature—women are capable of the same occupations as men, in which they will succeed equally well when, prepared for their task by an adequate education, they will be no longer opposed by the ill-will and the hostile jealousy of the opposite sex; of those who, eager for the birth of a more extensive liberty and a more liberal justice, hope for the realisation of an ideal which will bring the greatest boon not only to women, but to all humanity."
If the above is a correct and exhaustive definition of feminism, the Bluestockings certainly cannot be called feminists, for they none of them believed that the future of the human race was in any way dependent on a recognised equality between the sexes. This, however, should not be understood as implying that they did nothing to promote the march of feminism, or rather to prepare the national mind for the first symptoms of a more directly feminine movement which were to manifest themselves before the more or less artificial conversations of the Bluestocking côteries had retired into insignificance before the looming spectre of Revolution, filling the mind with speculations of more direct importance, and arousing the hereditary conservatism which slumbers at the bottom of every true British heart in a common effort to uphold the laws of the country against the revolutionary element, sown broadcast at home, and prevailing with most disastrous consequences abroad. But the contribution of the English salons to feminism in its narrower sense, however important in its consequences, must be described as largely unintentional, and extremely qualified. The very mention of Mary Wollstonecraft's name was enough to arouse indignation and disgust in the bosom of every true "Blue" except Miss Seward, on the joint score of her being considered an extreme feminist, a revolutionary and most of all: an atheist.
The charge of atheism is of the many accusations brought against the author of "A Vindication of the Rights of Women" beyond any doubt the most absurd, and where there was so little mutual understanding, it is not astonishing that there should be an utter lack of appreciation between such women as Hannah More and Mary Wollstonecraft, both of whom were actuated by the noblest motives and whom a closer acquaintance could not have failed to bring nearer together. Of the main contentions in the former's "Strictures" a very considerable majority, stripped of their dogmatic spirit of orthodox Christianity, and worded in such a manner as to make them sound as a vindication of inalienable rights and corresponding duties rather than an exhortation to a life of moral virtue, are an exact repetition of the notions put forward in the "Rights of Women"; with the contents of which Hannah More was unacquainted. Horace Walpole, the tone of whose letters to "Saint Hannah" is so completely different from his usual scoffing as to suggest a conflict in the writer's mind between irony and genuine admiration, in referring to the Paris massacres, expresses his disgust of "the philosophing serpent", and is pleased to find that his friend has not read her works; to which Hannah replies that she has been "much pestered" to read the "Rights of Women", which she evidently never did.
Mary's feminism was of the most comprehensive description. Although very far from atheism, her religious notions, shaken by bitter experience, were not sufficiently strong to support her in what was to her the very cruel struggle for life, the facts of which were, from her earliest infancy, so hideous as to leave her no leisure for the gradual development of social ideas under the regulating influence of a riper mind, but put her through the hard school of suffering. The problem with which she found herself confronted was an urgent one, calling for immediate solution.
Considerations of a future existence certainly did come at different times to comfort her, but they were to her a remnant of convention and called forth in times of pressure rather than an inherent part of her being. In proportion as the more tangible ideals of the Revolution came to absorb her interest, the hope of salvation became a secondary consideration, which was not to be allowed to interfere with the necessity for correcting present evils and relieving present wants. To her, the problem of the female cause was stern reality which was well worth the devotion of a lifetime. Her energetic mind took in the subject in its entirety and thought it out to the minutest details, suggesting radical changes without stopping to consider their feasibility, and impressing us with the almost masculine width of its range.
How insipid and uninteresting compared to her radicalism are the attempts at a partial reform of a Hannah More, the very limitations of which bring out more clearly the utter want of breadth, the narrow conventionality which hampered the growth of the ideal! To her and to her associates the Woman Question had a much narrower range, and remained limited to the problem of moral improvement. Hannah More, indeed, had no cause to complain of scornful treatment at the hands of men, and in her circle, next to one or two of the greatest men of the day, women were the ruling influence. Of the lower classes and their struggles her early youth had taught her little or nothing, and her sympathy with the poor and humble was awakened in the course of the long and bitter struggle of conventionalism against radicalism, in which, viewing the matter broadly, she ranged herself among the defenders of a doubtful cause. It gave her a better insight into the social conditions of England, and no doubt she grew to realise that the great problem of humanity had reached an acute stage, and that even in her own cherished country there were many wrongs to be righted. From that time she became more and more of a social reformer, but the pressing need of the case was forever mitigated by considerations of Eternity. To her, who pinned her faith on the promise of life everlasting, the most glaring pictures of human misery faded before the beacon-light of faith and trust. She never found it difficult to be reconciled to the preponderance of evil, for she looked upon it "as making part of the dispensations of God", who in his supreme wisdom meant this world for a scene of discipline, not of remuneration. Hence the utter incompatibility of the orthodox view with the doctrine of perfectibility, and the hostile attitude of the Bluestocking ladies towards those of the new faith, by which this world was looked upon as all-in-all, and in which want and misery were considered as evils arising solely from the defects of human governments. "Whatever is, is right", was Hannah More's guiding principle, and to remove that inequality which in her eyes was a portion of God's great scheme seemed to her rebelling against God's own decree. She relieved human misery where she could, from a sense of Christian duty and propriety, and by establishing schools tried to rouse the poor to a sense of moral duty, teaching them to be satisfied in the position in which it had pleased God to place them and to live in the hope of Eternity. The practice of that humility which is among the first duties of a Christian forbade any attempt at rising in the social scale. Likewise, in the case of woman, there was to her only one great and leading circumstance that raised her importance, and might to a certain extent establish her equality: "Christianity had exalted them to true and undisputed dignity; in Christ Jezus, as there is neither rich nor poor, bond nor free, so there is neither male nor female. In the view of that immortality which is brought to light by the Gospel, she has no superior. Women, to borrow the idea of an excellent prelate, make up one half of the human race, equally with men redeemed by the blood of Christ." All other forms of equality do not seen to her worth fighting for.
This view of Hannah More's was fully shared by those among the Bluestockings who took a more direct interest in social questions: Mrs. Montagu, Mrs. Chapone and Mrs. Carter. In their opinions about social inequality they were guided by the conservatism of dogmatic faith, as their views of the position of women derived colour from notions of propriety. They rejoiced with the rest of the nation at the news of the fall of the Bastille, which to every true John Bull had become the symbol of French slavery and which served as an opportunity to assert his own superiority and praise that perfect liberty which he imagined to be the privilege of every individual Briton—and no doubt thought themselves extremely enlightened in doing so. But at the first reports of bloodshed and lawlessness propriety suggested that they had suffered themselves by their all-embracing love of humanity to be betrayed into feelings which might be thought distinctly improper, or be translated into a want of patriotic feeling. They chose to be Englishwomen rather than cosmopolitans. This choice was made the easier for them as they had come to regard France as the chief bulwark of irreligion. Hannah More complains (1799) that "that cold compound of irony, irreligion, selfishness and sneer, which make up what the French (from whom we borrow the thing as well as the word) so well express by the term persiflage, has of late years made an incredible progress in blasting the opening buds of piety in young persons of fashion."[27] When the immediate danger of revolution in England was over, some Bluestockings—in particular Mrs. Montagu, Hannah More and Mrs. Carter—responded to the appeal of suffering humanity, in a narrow compass, to the best of their ability, and in the case of the second with highly creditable zeal and devotion, but they did not, like Mary Wollstonecraft, rise to the occasion, forego public praise and suffer martyrdom for the cause of humanity.
The Bluestockings, therefore, cannot be ranked as militant feminists. They were content with the position of dependence which the authority of the Bible assigns to women. It is true that even from among their circle an occasional protest was heard against the deliberate subjection of the female sex. The learned Mrs. Carter once complained to her friend Archbishop Seeker of the partiality of the male translator of the Bible, who in rendering the First Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians had translated the same verb in different ways so as to bring out what he thought ought to be the relations between husband and wife, writing that he was not to "put away" his wife, and that she was not to "leave" him; and the archbishop, who began by contradicting her, on referring to the Bible was forced to acknowledge that she was right. On the whole, however, the literary remains of the Bluestockings demonstrate pretty clearly that their confidence in female equivalence was not great. Mrs. Chapone, in her letters, mostly adheres to the creed of male superiority. She tries, however, to effect a compromise. Man, the appointed ruler and head, is undoubtedly woman's superior, but a woman "should choose for her husband one whom she can heartily and willingly acknowledge her superior, and whose understanding and judgment she can prefer to her own". This sounds most revolutionary at a time when women, as a rule, were not allowed to choose their own husbands. It is interesting to note that Miss Hester Mulso did, and made a love-match with Mr. Chapone, whom she soon after lost through death. She goes on to say that the husband should have "such an opinion of his wife's understanding, principles and integrity of heart, as will induce him to exalt her to the rank of his first and dearest friend", and concludes: "I believe it necessary that all such inequality and subjection as must check and refrain that unbounded confidence and frankness which are the essence of friendship, be laid aside or suffered to sleep". A qualified superiority, therefore, upon which the lord and master is supposed not to presume.
Among the correspondence of Mrs. Montagu, the "Queen of the Blues", published "by her great-great niece" Miss E. J. Climenson, is a letter to her devoted friend and admirer the Earl of Bath on the subject of her archenemy Voltaire's tragedy of "Tancred", in which she finds fault with the character of Aménaide for not following virtue as by law established, but despising forms and following sentiment, "a dangerous guide". This is what we should expect from a Bluestocking leader. She continues: "Designed by nature to act but a second part, it is a woman's duty to obey rules; she is not to make or redress them". Hannah More also admits the male superiority in a chapter on conversation in her "Strictures", where she follows Swift and Mrs. Barbauld in suggesting that men shall concur in the education of the female sex by allowing them the humble part of interested listeners to their superior conversation. "It is to be regretted", she says, "that many men, even of distinguished sense and learning, are too apt to consider the society of ladies as a scene in which they are rather to rest their understandings than to exercise them; while ladies, in return, are too much addicted to make their court by lending themselves to this spirit of trifling: they often avoid making use of what abilities they have, and affect to talk below their natural and acquired powers of mind, considering it as a tacit and welcome flattery to the understanding of men to renounce the exercise of their own"[28]. The last part of this statement strikes a higher note in its denunciation of the pernicious system of "relativity". Mrs. Carter also refers somewhere in her correspondence to the indignity of ladies and gentlemen at various assemblies being kept separated, as if the former were disqualified by the shortcomings of their sex from listening to the improving conversation of the latter.
In conclusion it may be stated that the Bluestocking assemblies in all probability arose from an ardent wish on the part of some intellectual ladies to intermingle with the conversation of the members of Dr. Johnson's club the charms of their own. One of the Literary Clubbists informs us that a certain lady, whom he does not name, but describes as distinguished by her beauty and taste for literature, used to invite them to dinner and share in the conversation. He may have meant Miss Reynolds, Sir Joshua's sister, who wrote a much praised "Essay on Taste", and whose salon was among the first where Wits and Bluestockings learnt to appreciate each other's society. Boswell, in his "Life of Johnson" says: "It was much the fashion for several ladies to have evening assemblies, where the fair sex might participate in conversation with literary and ingenious men, animated by a desire to please". Although the duty of receiving the guests and so placing them as to ensure animated discussions fell to the share of the women, yet few of them were bold enough to let themselves be heard in the presence of the literary dictator, whose oracular speeches were delivered with pompous assurance and listened to and taken in with becoming deference and humility. Dr. Johnson made and marred the literary and conversational reputations of his bevy of female admirers; Fanny Burney owed her success as a Bluestocking principally to his praise of "Evelina", as Hannah did hers—next to the kind protection of Garrick—to his unstinted eulogy of her "Bas Bleu" poem. Johnson had said that "there was no name in poetry that might not be glad to own it." But after Johnson's death there came a radical change, and in the absence of a male dictator to occupy the vacant throne, the female element predominated more and more. Especially Mrs. Montagu "queened it" over her satellites, both male and female, and of all the Bluestocking hostesses who vied for supremacy she came nearest to justifying the charge of pedantry.
The question whether the Bluestocking societies were either directly or indirectly an imitation of the older French salons must be answered with some degree of circumspection. That the influence of the latter was considerable may be taken for granted, and the direct points of contact were numerous. Horace Walpole in particular was an intimate of both, David Hume frequented several Paris salons and Mme du Bocage, Mme de Genlis and Mme de Staël—the last two in the year of their exile from France—were repeatedly seen in blue society. It is to the pen of the first that we owe one of the most vivid descriptions of Mrs. Montagu's convivial meetings. If we moreover consider that French interest in England which is a prominent feature of 18th century society and the close relations between the two countries, we do not wonder that a parallel movement to that of the French salon should have sprung up. And yet the Bluestocking assemblies had a distinct individuality of their own; inferior to their French rivals in some respects, they were superior to them in others. Most critics of the time agree in asserting their inferiority, which is a natural circumstance in view of the fact that they considered them as a literary and conversational movement, in which the chief aim was literary taste and polished, witty conversation. Their estimate never went beyond these limits to consider the influence exercised by these côteries upon society in general. And it is when throwing into the scale the moral improvement, especially among women, which was the result of the efforts of the Bluestocking ladies, that we realise that although different, they were not necessarily inferior to their French rivals.
Wraxall in his "Historical Memoirs" opines that "neither in the period of its duration, nor in the number, merit or intellectual eminence of the principal members, could the English society be held upon any parity with that of France." He might have added with equal truth that the average Frenchwoman of the cultivated class is distinguished from her English sister by greater keenness of wit and by a greater brilliance of conversation. The chief talents of the French are of the mind, "de l'esprit", and are shown off to the best advantage, those of the English are rather of the heart and are not flaunted in public. English society, in the matter of outside splendour and brilliance, has always been completely overshadowed by the greater expansiveness of the French. The Bluestocking hostesses were upon the whole less brilliant specimens of female magnificence, but they were undoubtedly far better women. For the light-hearted gallantry practised in the French salons they substituted warm and generous friendship, which considerations of envy only very rarely disturbed. The Bluestocking atmosphere was purer, allowing one to breathe more comfortably than in some French salon where intrigue ruled the hour. The women were like the men, lacking in that "finesse" in which the French excelled, but kind and considerate, and upon the whole quicker to praise than to find fault. Hannah More realised this when singing the praises of the Blues in her "Bas Bleu" poem. She describes the members of the French assemblies as brilliant and witty, but lacking common sense and simplicity. Her verdict would have been more correct if for the Hôtel de Rambouillet, against which her disapprobation is directed, she had substituted the later salons of the decline, where indeed a mistaken "préciosité" prevailed and "where point, and turn, and équivoque distorted every word they spoke". For indeed the parallelism with the salon of the 17th century is far more marked than with that of the 18th. The evolution of both French and English polite literary society furnishes a strong argument in favour of Rousseau's theory that "everything degenerates in the hands of man"—by which he meant "humanity"—for after a short spell of glory both degenerated sadly. In both pedantry supplanted wit, and Molière's "Femmes Savantes" might have found its counterpart—though probably not its equivalent—in Fanny Burney's play of "The Witlings", which the unfavourable criticism of her friends induced her to destroy. The history of Bluestocking pedantry is a repetition of what took place in French society with the exception that to the Bluestocking society of England no second blossoming was granted by the chilling blasts of Revolution. Pedantry, that archenemy of Wit, robbed it of all its charm, leaving naked Learning, than which nothing can be less sociable. Fanny Burney signalled its approach, warned against it, and ended by joining in the general homage.
There can be no doubt that the French salons occupy the more important place in the history of 18th century thought. No daring philosophical schemes were hatched under the auspices of the Bluestockings, and if their conversation showed the influence of the rationalist spirit, their rationalism was not made subservient to projects of a revolutionary nature, but made to support with its evidence the long-established truth of orthodox religion. Mrs. Chapone in her "Letters on the Improvement of the Mind" warns her niece that Reason, which may help us to discover some of the great laws of morality, is yet liable to error. The sending of God's son therefore is to be looked upon as a demonstration or revelation of the evidences of the Christian religion, by which we become convinced on rational grounds of its divine authority. Here, as in the matter of sexual preeminence, Mrs. Chapone loved a compromise between the head and the heart. The company at Mrs. Vesey's is described as a good "rational society" by Hannah More, who herself rather affected a "comfortable, rational day". Where politics are discussed, the door is opened wide to intrigue, and party-feelings will prevail. Politics had been the ruin of many a periodical attempt and their exclusion at the Bluestocking assemblies left the field to literary conversation. Philanthropy, or active benevolence, was practised instead, and the light moralising tendencies of the Spectator enlistened the same sympathy among the Bluestockings which the sterner moral code of Port Royal awakened in the heart of the more serious Hannah.
Upon the whole the Bluestockings were not, like their French rivals, recruited from the aristocracy. They belonged to the middle-class, to whom the 18th century was a time of great financial prosperity. Mrs. Montagu's wealth was considerable, and she made a liberal use of it not only in philanthropy, but also in encouraging needy authors, which made Hannah More refer to her as "the female Maecenas of Hill Street"[29]. They were mostly the daughters of clergymen and schoolmasters, who in early youth acquired that taste for learning which their fathers or near relations were able to gratify, and that serious cast of mind which never forsook some of them and fitted them to be religious moralists.
The tone of their conversation and writings was a distinct improvement upon that of the ladies of the preceding generation, of whom it was said that those who—like Mrs. Aphra Behn and Mrs. de la Rivière Manley—excelled in wit, failed signally in chastity. The love of scandal which had been their chief characteristic, and which Sheridan justly satirised, was an object of scorn to the Bluestockings, who were as careful to preserve the reputation of others as they were of their own. That some of them occasionally went too far in constituting themselves the mentors of others who were fully able to take care of themselves, is an "amiable weakness" which may be readily forgiven. Thus, for instance, Mrs. Thrale's second marriage with the Italian vocalist Signor Piozzi aroused a good deal of unfavourable comment, brought about an indirect rupture with Fanny Burney and partly caused her withdrawal from the Bluestocking circles. The same exaggerated notions, arising partly from hatred of the Encyclopedian spirit of revolutionism embodied in the much-reviled Rousseau, occur in Mrs. Delany's "Essay on Propriety" and in her extremely voluminous correspondence. Mrs. Chapone's Letters insist on a proper regard to reputation as one of the most desirable qualities in a friend. She emphatically distinguished between love of reputation, which is nothing but discretion, and undue regard of opinion, which is only vanity. Here her views coincided with Mary Wollstonecraft's, who had pointed out the error of wanting to make opinion "the high throne of Virtue" to women in Rousseau's Emile, but who did not make Mrs. Chapone's distinction. In the behaviour of young women towards gentlemen, the latter says, great delicacy is required, "yet women oftener err from too great a consciousness of the supposed views of men, than from inattention to those views, or want of caution against them." She therefore agreed that the "desire to please" should be kept under a certain amount of restriction.
All the Bluestockings' actions arose from a strong sense of duty, which the majority of French hostesses—with the emphatic exception of Mme de Lambert—sadly lacked. One of their deliberate aims was the substitution of conversation "à la française" for cards. The first determined attack upon the greatest social curse of the age was made by Mrs. Chapone,—then Miss Mulso—in collaboration with Johnson in No. 10 of the Rambler in the year 1750. She wrote to Johnson in his capacity of censor of manners, informing him that she, "Lady Racket", intended to have "cards at her house every Sunday". She, of course, intended that Johnson should seize the opportunity to attack gambling and thus range himself openly on the side of the intellectual ladies who were in open revolt against the practice. Johnson replied that even at the most brilliant of card-tables he had always thought his visit lost, "for I could know nothing of the company but their clothes and their faces." Their complete absorption in the vicissitudes of the game, their exulting triumph when successful, and their flush of rage at defeat or at "the unskilful or unlucky play of a partner" so disgusted him that he soon retired. "They were too trifling for me when I was grave, and too dull when I was cheerful". Mrs. Carter, who did not object to taking an occasional hand at whist or quadrille, was vehement in her condemnation of faro, which she hoped Horace Walpole on getting into the House would succeed in putting down. Hannah More's "Bas Bleu" further endorses the statement that the substitution of conversation for cards was one of the objects of Bluestockingism. The introduction states its origin and character. The ladies at Mrs. Vesey's, Mrs. Montagu's and Mrs. Boscawen's, to mention the three hostesses to whom according to their chronicler Hannah More "the triple crown divided fell", although in the opinion of others Mrs. Thrale and Mrs. Ord were candidates for Mrs. Boscawen's place—assembled "for the sole purpose of conversation, and were different in no respect from other parties, but that the company did not play at cards." It was there that Hannah More found the Rambouillet-ideal realised of learning without pedantry, good taste without affectation, and conversation without calumny, levity or any censurable error.
The attacks directed against whist, "that desolating Hun", and quadrille, "that Vandal of colloquial wit", were made not so much on the score of their devastating influence on the moral character as of their exclusion of conversation. It should be remembered, however, that Hannah More wrote her "Bas Bleu" in the years before the desire to effect moral reforms got the better of the natural vanity of displaying her considerable intellectual talents.
Conversation thus became in itself a pursuit, almost a cult, the purpose of which was to "mend the taste and form the mind". The record of what was said by the most prominent male and female wits at the Bluestocking gatherings was kept with a minuteness which is characteristic of the time in the endless memoirs and the voluminous correspondence in which every literary lady indulged, and upon which she lavished her talents as an author. Immeasurably the best is Fanny Burney's diary, with its clever and vivid sidelights upon gatherings in which she herself as the successful author of Evelina, and the protégée of Johnson, was lionised, although she never became a Bluestocking in the full sense of the word, her temperament being far too sprightly and volatile, and the language of her pen too gushing to suit the notions of propriety of some ladies, whom she further offended by her marriage to a French refugee and by the freedom with which she published details that were not meant for the general ear.
The constellation in the Bluestocking circles differed somewhat from French society, where the hostess received in her drawing-room a number of prominent men-of-letters, scientists, diplomatists, artists and philosophers, the female element being represented by herself, and only a very few privileged friends. At the English assemblies the majority were ladies, and although some members of the Literary Club, Johnson's satellites, were regular frequenters, the female element predominated. Boswell, Johnson's biographer, the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, the politicians Fox and Burke—before the stirring political events that drew them apart,—the historian Gibbon, the poet Goldsmith, the actor Garrick and the author Lyttleton—Mrs. Montagu's friend and collaborator in the "Dialogues of the Dead"—alike delighted in Bluestocking society and by their conversation helped in that diffusion of high principles which to Mrs. Chapone in her "Essay on Conversation" seemed more important than the French object of sharpening the wit. In her "Letters on the Improvement of the Mind" she says that conversation must be cultivated "by the mutual communication of whatever may conduce to the improvement or innocent entertainment of each other."
The literature which was the direct outcome of Bluestockingism is far slighter in bulk than the poetical effusions called forth by the spirit of gallantry which dominated the early French salons. There was between the ladies and gentlemen of the English circles rather less love-making and rather more mutual esteem. There was hardly any of that complimentary occasional poetry of the lighter kind in which the love-sick French swains of the Montausier type had found relief. One of the rare instances of verse-making at an assembly occurred in Mrs.—afterwards Lady—Miller's provincial drawing-room at Batheaston, where, in imitation of a French custom, each of the assembled guests deposited his or her poetry in an antique vase, to be read aloud and judged. That this "puppet-show Parnassus[30]" called forth the ridicule of Walpole and Johnson proves sufficiently that emulation of this kind was not regarded with sympathy among Bluestockings and their wellwishers.
It is difficult to say whether the Bluestockings' contribution to the increase of female importance and influence rivalled that of the French societies, but we undeniably find, that in the latter half of the 18th century the popular verdict regarding women is undergoing a distinct change. Instead of the scornful blame to which Pope, Swift and Chesterfield have made us accustomed we actually find women recognised as an influence in literature by no less a critic than the great Doctor himself. Madame d'Arblay's Diary relates how—in 1799—Johnson once talked to Mrs. Thrale and Sir Philip Jennings about "the amazing progress made of late years in literature by the women." He said he himself was astonished at it, and told them he well remembered when a woman who could spell a common letter was regarded as all-accomplished; but now they vied with the men in everything. The same Diary makes mention (in 1782) of the verses published by the author's father—Dr. Burney—in the Herald, making women the object of praise instead of blame and ridicule. The composition was entitled "Advice to the Herald", published anonymously, and ascribed to Sir W. W. Pepys, until in 1822 a M. S. copy was found among Dr. Burney's papers. They exhort the paper not only to proclaim the shame of woman, but to also "record in story such as shine their sex's glory". Hannah More's "pathetic pen", Mrs. Carter's "piety and learning", Fanny Burney's "quick discerning" are praised; and special places are retained for Mrs. Chapone, "high-bred, elegant Mrs. Boscawen"; Lady Lucan, Mrs. Leveson Gower, Mrs. Greville, Lady Crewe and "fertile-minded" Mrs. Montagu.
David Garrick, Hannah More's faithful friend and supporter, in referring to the success of her ballad entitled "Sir Eldred of the Bower", followed by another poem called "The Bleeding Rock", playfully represents the male sex as mortified by female success and makes Apollo the author. And in Hoole's "Aurelia, or the Contest", likewise referred to in Fanny Burney's Diary, the example of "the wiser females" is glanced at to counterbalance female folly. All which examples tend to show that public opinion regarding women was undergoing a slow process of change. Now that women themselves had taken their moral improvement in hand, the male authors felt that they could again indulge in some measure of praise.
On the other hand, women had become sufficiently conscious of the moral shortcomings of the opposite sex, to take an occasional share in their reclamation and point out the error of their ways. When, after long circulating in manuscript, the "Bas Bleu" poem was at last published, it was accompanied by another entitled "Florio", describing the fopperies and the utter worthlessness of a typical "maccaroni" or young man of fashion, a criticism which none of us would think of calling undeserved.
The department of literature in which women were qualified to shine par excellence was the novel. Richardson's novels had succeeded marvellously in awakening interest in the workings of the female heart, and analysis of the female character to its minutest details was what the reading public had grown to expect. This was a field in which women have since abundantly proved themselves in many ways the equals of men, and the story of the universal praise with which "Evelina" was welcomed, and the author's mingled pride in her achievement and bashfulness, arising out of the fear that she might be thought lacking in modesty, is among the most amusing parts of her diary. Unfortunately, for all her keenness of perception and fine sense of humour, there was about her character a certain want of depth, which became more apparent as she grew older. But she certainly paved the way for the later female novelists, and particularly for Jane Austen.
Not the least among the Bluestockings' merits was the fact that by the example some of them gave they accustomed the British public to seeing females engaged in different occupations which before had been the exclusive work of men. Where ladies of such a strong sense of propriety did not shrink from appearing before the public as authors, and even pseudonyms were often thought unnecessary, the domain of literature ceased to be the exclusive property of men. Strangely enough, the notion that female knowledge should be carefully concealed, originating in Molière's Femmes Savantes and prevailing all through the 17th and 18th centuries in both literatures until Mary Wollstonecraft openly disregarded it, was implicitly obeyed by the Bluestockings.
Not all the Bluestocking ladies were authors; Mrs. Vesey for instance, probably the most loveable among the hostesses, who understood better than any of her rivals the art of making her guests comfortable, has left us no literary legacy. Of the others, Mrs. Delany and Mrs. Boscawen concentrated their literary energies chiefly upon their correspondence, while Mrs. Carter's clever translation of Epictetus which elicited the unstinted praise of Mr. Long, a later translator, who repeatedly, when in doubt, consulted her text, is of no importance to her sex. The principal literary contributions to the subject of feminism were made by three Bluestockings: Mrs. Montagu, Mrs. Chapone and Mrs. Hannah More, the nature of whose contributions corresponds closely with their respective characters.
The natural bias of Elizabeth Robinson's character was strengthened by the circumstances of her education. In her early youth she was often at Cambridge, where her grandmother's second husband, Dr. Conyers Middleton, took great delight in her keenness of understanding, and often kept her in the room while he was conversing with his visitors, among whom were the greatest philosophers and scholars of the day. Her father was also amused at the child's precocity and they used to have frequent "brain cudgellings", until he became painfully aware that he was no longer a match for his clever daughter. She was a furious letter-writer, which occupation, if it sharpened her wit, also developed in her that insatiable intellectual vanity which afterwards became her ruling passion, distinguished her as a Bluestocking from her more modest rivals and prevented her from being as universally liked as a Mrs. Vesey. Her biographer Mr. Huchon says that "she was all mind, if not all soul", and was more respected than loved. Sentimentality was not among her weaknesses, her sound practical sense dictated both to herself and to others. She strongly opposed the love-match which her ward Miss Dorothea Gregory—one of the daughters to whom the well-known physician of that name addressed his legacy of advice—asked her permission to make, and the ubiquitous Fanny Burney writes that Mrs. Montagu once asked her, "if she should write a play, to let her know of it", which vexed Fanny's "second Daddy", Mr. Crisp, as it "implied interference". Her own marriage (1742) was purely a "marriage de raison", the husband being considerably older, and a man of great wealth. Mrs. Chapone afterwards called her with reason "an ignoramus in love", which did not in this case prevent the marriage from being fairly happy.
Neither was Mrs. Montagu free from affectation. Much-praised simplicity and humility were not among her virtues, and no flattery seems to have been too gross for her to accept. Lady Louisa Stuart—Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's granddaughter, to whom we are indebted for some humorous pictures of Bluestocking society—describes her as thoroughly satisfied with herself. Her speech is described as affected, although ready wit can scarcely be denied her. Her reply on being informed that Voltaire, Shakespeare's translator, had boasted of having been the first Frenchman to find "quelques perles dans son fumier": "c'est donc un fumier qui a fertilisé une terre bien ingrate" is a good specimen both of her proficiency in the French language and of her quickness of repartee. However, she often descended from the heights of rhetoric, and her affectation of speech seems to have been a weakness into which she was occasionally betrayed by a momentary lapse of her fine judgment. Speaking of Mr. Gray she once said: "I think he is the first poet of my age; but if he comes to my fireside, I will teach him not only to speak prose, but to talk nonsense, if occasion be."
She loved to make a display of her learning, and Johnson said of her that "she diffused more knowledge in her conversation than any women he knew." At the same time she criticised others freely, which procured her many enemies. Mr. Crisp thought her "a vain, empty, conceited pretender, and little else"; Wraxall judged that "there was nothing feminine about her"; and an essay by Cumberland in the Observer of 1785 describes the "Feast of Reason" at Mrs. Montagu's house in Portman Square, where the lady herself is satirised under the name of "Vanessa". It describes her as stimulated to charity, affability and hospitality exclusively by the dictates of inordinate vanity, and even accuses her of bribing her critics: "Authors were fee'd for dedications, and players patronised on benefit nights".
Her charity was, indeed, of a condescending kind. Thus her annual feast to the chimney-sweeps on May day rather smacks of the doctrine of Good Works pointing the way to Salvation, and to the working people in her coal-mines she was a dutiful but immeasurably superior patroness. In a few isolated cases, however, there were flashes of real kindness. She gave unstinted financial support to Mrs. Williams, the blind poetess whose lot had aroused Johnson's compassion, and her letter of condolence to Mrs. Delany on the occasion of the death of their mutual friend the Duchess of Portland has the genuine ring of grief and sympathy. It tries to find solace in considerations of eternity. Mrs. Montagu's religious views were strict, and religious worship was a serious matter with her. However, her strong individuality would not suffer her to bow her intellect before that of any man. Beyond the admitted fact that "God is the loving father of all", she has only Hope, but no definite knowledge of the certainty of a future state.
Such was the character of the lady whom Johnson called "Queen of the Blues", and Fanny Burney "our sex's glory". The incident which had a determining influence on her further life was the death of her only child. Grief of that kind may be to some extent drowned in religion or in social intercourse, and Mrs. Montagu tried both. She emphatically believed in the social state as productive of good through the friction of minds. Thus it came about that in the middle of the century—the exact date is nowhere given, which makes it difficult to decide whether Mrs. Montagu, or Mrs. Vesey, or Miss Frances Reynolds had the right to consider herself the first Bluestocking hostess,—Mrs. Montagu opened her salon in Hill Street, where she entertained a great number of guests of the most widely different description, her rooms being often filled from eleven in the morning till eleven at night.
The best descriptions of Mrs. Montagu's parties are to be found in Hannah More's correspondence and in Mme du Bocage's "Letters on England, Holland and Italy." The latter visited England at a time when Mrs. Montagu's breakfasts were all the fashion, served "in a closet lined with painted paper of Pekin and furnished with the choicest movables of China", the so-called Chinese Room, recalling the splendours of the "Chambre bleue" of the marquise de Rambouillet. It was probably at Mrs. Montagu's and at Mrs. Thrale's that Dr. Johnson chiefly indulged in his tea-orgies, and Mme Du Bocage describes his hostess as pouring out her delicious tea, attired in a white apron and a large straw hat. On the whole the English ladies paid more attention to gastric delights than their French sisters, and in Mrs. Montagu's case her well-provided table often relieved her from the wearisome duty of keeping up the flow of conversation. In this lay the characteristic difference between Mrs. Montagu and Mrs. Vesey. The latter wanted her guests to forget her and to consult their own inclinations in the forming of groups of conversation, contenting herself with listening to her literary lions; Mrs. Montagu on the other hand, to quote Fanny Burney, "cared not a fig, as long as she spoke herself". That her intellectual queenship involved the duty of maintaining conversation at a high pitch seems to have considerably worried her upon occasions.
The Bluestocking hostesses kept a great variety of hours. In the last decades of the century late teas were in vogue, but the usual entertainments were breakfasts and dinners, in which there was a great variety. We read of Mrs. Garrick's dinner parties to a select company of eight chosen friends, among whom Hannah More was proud to find herself, and according to Horace Walpole Mrs. Montagu's breakfasts at her house in Portman Square sometimes included seven hundred guests, from royalty downwards. To this magnificent abode she removed in 1781, six years after the death of her husband. She spared no cost in fitting it up in the most gorgeous fashion, and although Walpole thought her decorations in good taste, one cannot help feeling doubts as to the room with the feather hangings of which Cowper wrote in 1788 that "the birds put off their every hue, to dress a room for Montagu." The famous "Room of the Cupidons" made her a little ridiculous in the eyes of the more sober-minded ladies, one of whom (Mrs. Delany) in a letter refers somewhat spitefully to "her age".
There are no references to any of Mrs. Montagu's parties taking place out of doors, but some of the minor hostesses would sometimes send out invitations to tea, followed by a walk in the Park or fields. This custom was perhaps an imitation of the habits prevailing among Rambouillet-circles. Neither do we find anywhere mention of stated days, such as were kept by the French hostesses, although Sundays were objected to by some of the more orthodox.
The greater artificiality of arrangement at the Bluestocking assemblies appears from the pains taken by the hostess to so place her guests as to ensure a free flow of wit. In connection with Mrs. Montagu, reports are contradictory. Hannah More's correspondence informs us that the company used to split up into little groups of five or six; Fanny Burney on the contrary relates how the guests were seated in a semi-circle round the fire. Here again, Mrs. Vesey followed her individual inclinations, for the Bas-Bleu poem tells us how her "potent ward the circle broke", insisting on an easy informality in the grouping of her guests. Mrs. Ord seems to have preferred the later method of drawing chairs round a table in the centre.
Mrs. Montagu's early correspondence is full of wit and humour, and displays so much discrimination that we feel surprised the writer did not make her mark later in life as a novelist. The critical faculty she possessed in so eminent a degree fitted her for satire, the object being naturally contemporary society. In a letter, written when she was twenty, she gives a vivid description of fashionable life at Bath, ridiculing the emptiness of daily conversation and signalising the general depravity of morals. "How d'ye do?" prevails in the morning, and "What's trumps?" at night; the ladies' only topic is diseases, and the men are all bad. "There is not one good, no not one." She likewise freely vented her ridicule of overdone fashions, and descriptions like the following are by no means rare. "Lady P. and her two daughters make a very remarkable figure, and will ruin the poor mad woman of Tunbridge by out-doing her in dress. Such hats, capuchins, and short sacks as were never seen! One of the ladies looked like a state-bed running upon castors. She had robbed the valance and tester of a bed for a trimming."
Although her satire is chiefly directed against her own sex, she strongly protested against the opinion that women were morally inferior to men, whose insincere flattery was largely responsible for female frivolity.
One of her most constant friends and Platonic admirers was Mr. (afterwards Lord) Lyttleton, her vindication of whose memory against Dr. Johnson in later years led to the most famous of Bluestocking quarrels. In 1760, Lyttleton published his "Dialogues of the Dead"—referred to rather unkindly by Walpole as the "Dead Dialogues". The preface says that after the dialogues of Lucan, Fénelon and Fontenelle, English literature can boast only the learned dialogues of one Mr. Hurde, who takes living persons for his characters. The author proposes to take his cue from the history of all times and nations, opposing them to or comparing them with each other, "which is, perhaps, one of the most agreeable methods that can be employed of conveying to the mind any critical, moral or political observations". Needless to say, the dead are supposed to know all that has taken place since their decease.
Mr. Lyttelton goes on to say that the last three dialogues are by a different hand. "If the friend who favoured me with them should write any more, I shall think the public owes me a great obligation, for having excited a genius so capable of uniting delight with instruction, and giving to knowledge and virtue those graces which the wit of the age has too often employed all its skill to bestow upon folly and vice."
The above sufficiently denotes the character of the dialogues in which Mrs. Montagu—for the "different hand" was hers—had every opportunity to display her satirical vein. The numbers 27 and 28, of which the former satirises fashionable conduct and the latter the literature of gallantry, are illustrative of her opinions of contemporary female character. The characters of No. 27 are Mercury and a Modern Fine Lady, whose name is Mrs. Modish. The god comes to fetch her to the nether world, but she begs to be excused: "I am engaged, absolutely engaged". Mercury thinks she is referring to her duties to her husband and children, but he is quickly disillusioned. "Look on my chimneypiece, and you will see I was engaged to the play on Mondays, balls on Tuesdays, the Opera on Saturdays, and to card-assemblies the rest of the week, for two months to come; and it would be the rudest thing in the world not to keep my appointments. If you will stay with me till the summer season, I will wait on you with all my heart. Perhaps the Elysian Fields may be less detestable than the country in our world. Pray have you a fine Vauxhall and Ranelagh? I think I should not dislike drinking the Lethe waters when you have a full season." When Mercury objects that she has made pleasure the only object in her life, she replies that she has indeed made diversion her chief business, but has got no real pleasure out of it. For late hours and fatigue have given her the vapours and spoiled the natural cheerfulness of her temper. Her ambition to be thought "du bon ton" (which Mrs. Montagu explains in a note is French cant for the fashionable air of conversation and manners) has ruled her conduct. When asked by Mercury to define the term, Mrs. Modish is somewhat perplexed. "It is—I can never tell you what it is; but I will try to tell you what it is not. In conversation it is not wit, in manners it is not politeness, in behaviour it is not address; but it is a little like them all. It can only belong to people of a certain rank; who live in a certain manner, with certain persons, who have not certain virtues, and who have certain vices, and who inhabit a certain part of the town. Like a place by courtesy, it gets a higher rank than the person can claim, but which those who have a legal title to precedency dare not dispute for fear of being thought not to understand the rules of politeness."
Mercury finds fault with her for sacrificing all her real interests and duties to so arbitrary a thing as "bon ton". She asks him what he would have had her do? To which Mercury replies that her real business consisted in promoting her husband's happiness and devoting herself to the education of her children. It appears that their religion, sentiments and manners were to be learnt from a dancing-master, a music-master and a French governess. The result will be "wives without conjugal affection and mothers without maternal care." Mercury's final advice to the lady is to "remain on this side the Styx", and to wander about without end or aim, to look into the Elysian Fields, but never attempt to enter them, lest Minos should push her into Tartarus, "for duties neglected may bring on a sentence not much less severe than crimes committed."
The characters of the next dialogue are Plutarch, Charon and a modern bookseller. It contains a pointed satire on literary taste. It appears that the works of Plutarch do not command any sale whatever except to "a few pedants," but "The Lives of Highwaymen" have brought our bookseller a competent fortune, and the enormous sale of "The Lives of Men that never Lived" (by which the novel is meant) have set him up for life. This latest modern improvement in writing enables a man to "read all his life and have no knowledge at all." Modern books not only dispose to gallantry and coquetry, but give rules for them. Caesar's commentaries and the account of Xenophon's expedition are not more studied by military commanders than our novels are by the fair; to a different purpose indeed, for their military maxims teach to conquer, ours to yield; those inflame the vain and idle love of glory, these inculcate a noble contempt of reputation. If the women had not the friendly assistance of modern fiction, the bookseller fears they might long remain "in an insipid purity of mind; with a discouraging reserve of behaviour."
Plutarch is shocked at so much degeneracy of taste and wishes that for the sake of the good example he had expatiated more on the character of Lucretia and some other heroines. It grieves him to hear that chastity is no longer valued, and that crime and immorality, far from meeting with the punishment they deserve, are universally applauded. And yet it is not more than a century since a Frenchman wrote a much admired Life of Cyrus under the name of Artamenes[31], in which he ascribed to him far greater actions than those recorded of him by Xenophon and Herodotus. He goes on to praise the gallant days of chivalry, when authors made it their business to incite men to virtue by holding up as an example the deeds of fabulous heroes, whereas it seems to be the custom of a later age to incite them to vice by the history of fabulous scoundrels. "Men of fine imagination have soared into the regions of fancy to bring back Astrea: you go thither in search of Pandora, oh disgrace to letters! Oh shame to the Muses!"
The bookseller's feeble remonstrance that authors have to comply with the manners and disposition of those who are to read them, is met with the indignant remark that they should first of all correct the vices and follies of their age. To give examples of domestic virtue would surely be more useful to women than to inflame their minds with the deeds of great heroines. "True female praise arises not from the pursuit of public fame, but from an equal progress in the path marked out for them by their great Creator."
Thus we find that even Plutarch is pressed into service to inculcate a religious moral. The Bluestocking ladies were sufficiently enlightened to recognise the deep wisdom of the Ancients, which is of all ages and independent of religious doctrines. Mrs. Carter, the translator of Epictetus, was a woman of profound piety.
The bookseller now remarks that some authors have indeed tried to instil virtuous notions. In Clarissa Harlowe "one finds the dignity of heroism tempered by the meekness and humility of religion, a perfect purity of mind and sanctity of manners", and Sir Charles Grandison is "a noble pattern of every private virtue, with sentiments so exalted as to render him equal to every public duty." Next to Richardson, Fielding and Marivaux are remarkable for their fine moral touches, and some comfort is to be derived from the reflection that when there is wit and elegance enough in a book to make it sell, it is not the worse for good morals.
Here Charon appears to conduct our bookseller to his future abode, but deeming him after all "too frivolous an animal to present to wise Minos", proposes to constitute him friseur to Tisiphone, and make him "curl up her locks with satires and libels".
The above pieces derive their chief interest from the fact that they are among the very first instances of female satire of a kind which in being more pointed and more direct than that of the Spectator, and less bitter and exaggerated than that of Swift, written by a member of the sex who was herself a recognised leader of society, was more calculated than anything else to impress the female mind with the necessity of thorough reform.
Strange to say, Mrs. Montagu's claims for female instruction other than moral are very modest. It is a subject she seldom refers to, although there is a letter dated 1773 to her sister-in-law Mrs. Robinson, containing a reference to the education of her little niece, in which she certainly does not aim very high. A boarding-school is recommended in spite of the fact that what girls learn there is most trifling, "but they unlearn what would be of great disservice—a provincial dialect which is extremely ungenteel, and other tricks that they learn in the nursery." French lessons she deems unnecessary, "unless for persons in very high life", and she expects a great deal of benefit from a good air and a good dancing-master. Mrs. Montagu here presents that curious mixture of good sense and narrow conventionality which proves the extreme difficulty of getting away from influences and forming an independent judgment.
In the "Essay on Shakespeare" (1769) Mrs. Montagu appears as a literary critic. She felt offended at Voltaire's disparagement of the great English author and also at the Frenchman's haughty arrogance. The Essay was favourably criticised in the Critical Review, and Cowper praised it in a letter to Lady Hesketh in the following words: "I no longer wonder that Mrs. Montagu stands at the head of all that is called learned, and that every critic veils his bonnet to her superior judgment.... The learning, the good sense, the sound judgment, and the wit displayed in it fully justify not only my compliment, but all compliments that either have been already paid to her talents or shall be paid hereafter." But Johnson spoke scornfully of it. He said he had "taken up the end of the web, and finding it packthread, had thought it useless to go further in search of embroidery," but had to grant afterwards that it was conclusive against Voltaire. It procured Mrs. Montagu a great many friends in France, where such wit as hers was sure to find full appreciation. When, seven years later, she visited Paris, Voltaire wrote another furious article against Shakespeare, which was read at the Académie in her presence. "I think Madam," said one of the members when the reading was over, "you must be rather sorry at what you have just heard." Mrs. Montagu shrugged her shoulders. "I, Sir! Not at all! I am not one of M. Voltaire's friends!"
Of quite a different cast of character was Mrs. Chapone, whose "Letters on the Improvement of the Mind" were dedicated to Mrs. Montagu. She was plain and uninteresting, and when the romance of her life had taken an untimely ending, it is to be feared her conversation became too much like sermonizing to suit vivacious young ladies like Fanny Burney, who thought her assemblies "very dull". But whatever she wrote bears the stamp of sincerity. She was evidently deeply concerned about the moral welfare of the niece she addressed in her Letters—the example set by Mme de Sévigné and imitated by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had found followers—and she honestly tried to reconcile what was noble and proper in her eyes with the demands of convention. Above all she tried to inculcate that sense of responsibility for our actions which she held to be the basis of true Christianity. All our strivings should have the same purpose; that of bringing us nearer to God. Her niece is told to render herself more useful and pleasing to her fellow-creatures (a concession to prevailing opinions), "and consequently more acceptable to God". This last addition completely subverts the meaning of what precedes. Without it, the sense would be: "Please others and you will please your own vanity," which now becomes: "Please others and try to make them happy, and you will please God."
Mrs. Chapone thought pride and vanity the worst vices. Men were particularly addicted to the former, since to be proud is to admire oneself; and women to the latter, for vain is she who desires to be admired by others. It is the vice of little minds, chiefly conversant with trifling subjects, and brings affectation in its train.
The vain woman turns exaggerated weakness to account to ensure her empire over the stronger sex. Thus arises that false sensibility which will weep for a fly and leads to a thousand excesses. A well-directed reason will keep the feelings under control and spur us to actions of Christian charity. Those who relieve the sufferer are of more benefit to him than those who lament over his misfortunes.
Sensibility is, indeed, one of the catchwords of the century. Originally a laudable compassion and sympathy with the sufferings of others and a reaction against "the faithless coldness of the times", Richardson's novels show how soon it began to degenerate into sickly sentimentality which, when indulging in the luxury of woe, forgot to relieve the suffering which called forth the tears of sentiment. One of the most serious charges brought against J. J. Rousseau was that in his "Nouvelle Héloise" and in his "Confessions" he makes his lovers wallow to a sickening extent in the ecstasy of grief, inducing others by the magic of his personality to imitate him. This false sensibility was as much the abomination of the Bluestocking ladies as a well-regulated fellow-feeling was thought commendable, and here at least Mary Wollstonecraft heartily agreed with them. The usual reproach that the revolutionary leaders, those "friends of humanity", in fighting for the interest of the human race neglected the immediate wants of the individual—of which argument especially the Anti-Jacobin made ample use—was, therefore, in her case at least, utterly undeserved.
Hannah More made "Sensibility" the subject of a poem dedicated to Mrs. Boscawen, and in her "Strictures" devoted an entire chapter to it. In both the conclusion runs that sensibility has received its true direction when it is supremely turned to the love of God: "But if religious bias rule the soul, then sensibility exalts the whole."
There is, of course, in Mrs. Chapone's letters the usual warning against the danger of fiction, especially of the sentimental kind, the chief nurse of false sensibility, and also an element arising from the wish to reconcile Christian charity with the "necessary inequality" among individuals: the question of the treatment of inferiors. Since the chief duties of woman are of a domestic nature, it follows that the management of servants will be her task, and the Christian in Mrs. Chapone would see them treated with kind civility, while the lady of quality in her warns against the danger of too close intimacy with people of low birth and education. The idea of raising them by slow degrees to a higher social level probably never suggested itself to her.
Her ideal of female instruction must be likewise described as in the main conventional, with a few useful hints to mark a partial advance. Dancing and French are "so universal that they cannot be dispensed with", but music and drawing she wanted to be taught only to those who were qualified by possessing talent. The study of history is recommended as giving a liberal and comprehensive view of human nature, and supplying materials for conversation, and the reading of poetry will improve the female imagination, which only wants regulating to be superior to that of men. Shakespeare, Milton, and Mrs. Montagu's Essay ought to be the object of diligent study, and even heathen mythology and Greek philosophy may be recommended as containing a strong moral element. The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake clearly did not appeal to Mrs. Chapone at all.
The most pronounced character among the Bluestockings, as well as the most privileged among them in literary gifts was beyond any doubt Mrs. Hannah More.[32] It will be interesting, in continuation of the more general appreciation of respective tendencies in the introduction to this chapter, to contrast her with Mary Wollstonecraft with a view to establishing the chief causes from which the difference in their ideas arose, and arriving at a vindication of the laudable intentions of both.
If Mary Wollstonecraft was turned into a social reformer chiefly through the influence of the outward circumstances which dominated her youth, Hannah More's career was largely the consequence of certain innate qualities, which predestined her to become a moralist. She may have inherited her preaching propensities from her father, who had himself been designed for the church before circumstances interfered to turn him into a schoolmaster. Her mother, a farmer's daughter, devoted herself entirely to the children's education. In her earliest youth, little Hannah's favourite pastime—as her biographer and admirer Mr. W. Roberts tells us in his memoirs—was the writing of long exhortative letters "to depraved characters", and when in later years she lived at Mrs. Garrick's we find her referred to as the latter's "domestic chaplain". And yet she could be witty enough when she chose and was not without a sense of humour. At the time of the writing of her "Bas Bleu" she sent her friend Mrs. Pepys a pair of stockings for one of her children, accompanied by a letter, "The Bas Blanc", in which she treats the subject as if it were an epic, "so far of a moral cast that its chief end is utility,"—hoping the child will be able "to run through it with pleasure". She goes on to say that "the exordium is the natural introduction by which you are led into the whole work. The middle, I trust, is free from any unnatural humour or inflation, and the end from any disproportionate littleness. I have avoided bringing about the catastrophe too suddenly, as I know that would hurt him at whose feet I lay it", and so on in the same strain. Mary Wollstonecraft would have been utterly incapable of such playfulness. A further determining factor in the difference in the lives of both was the treatment received at the hands of the influential. Mary was first treated with indifference and coldness, and afterwards reviled for her opinions, whereas Hannah More was courted and flattered in a way which might have turned the head of any more volatile girl. To the struggle for life of which Mary bore the marks till her dying-day, Hannah was a total stranger, having had a comfortable annuity settled on her by a Mr. Turner, who once made her an offer of marriage. Thus secured against penury, that constant dread of rising authors, Hannah could go to London and give herself up to social amusements and to literature. Her meeting with Garrick ensured her a hearty welcome in Bluestocking circles, and his support smoothed her brief dramatic career and contributed to the warm reception of her first poetic attempts. They represent her contribution to romanticism, and gained the approval of no less a critic than Dr. Johnson himself.
Hannah More thus became a universal favourite, and her "vers de société" became very popular. However, her career as a dramatist came to an end with Garrick's death, and after the success of "Bas Bleu" and "Sensibility" she more and more directed her energies towards social and moral reform. The Bluestocking assemblies, much as they appealed to her love of witty conversation, afforded no outlet for that pent-up energy which made her long for some worthy object on which to concentrate herself for the benefit of society. It may be said that from the decade which saw the outbreak of the French Revolution dates the participation of English women in the discussion of the great social problems by which the times were stirred. It was as natural that Hannah More should openly declare herself in favour of a strict maintenance of the existing social order as that Mary Wollstonecraft should become the champion of radical social and political reform. Thus, each of the contending parties numbered among the warmest advocates of their cause a member of the female sex. And yet, previous to the great social upheaval in France, Hannah More at one time seemed likely to range herself among the partisans of moderate social reform. Her first social object was found in the struggle for the abolition of the slave-trade which in 1787 held the attention of Parliament. Mr. Wilberforce became her "Red Cross Knight", and Hannah wrote a poem entitled "The Black Slave Trade", in which her attitude towards the Revolution is foreshadowed. The lines:
Shall Britain, where the soul of freedom reigns,
Forge chains for others she herself disdains?
Forbid it, Heaven! O let the nation know,
The liberty she tastes she will bestow;
are sufficient to show that she consented to be the champion of liberty in other countries only while they regarded England as the natural home of Freedom. Burke had no more faithful follower among his conservative friends than the reformer Hannah More.
After the outbreak of the Revolution she soon altered her opinion that, although the capture of the Bastille had been undertaken by "lawless rabble" yet "some good" might be expected from it. Price's sermon filled her with horror, and Burke's Reflections had her undivided sympathy. While engaged upon religious tracts and plans for instructing the children of the poor came the news of Dupont's speech in the National Assembly, attacking all religion and calling Nature and Reason the gods of men. Indignation made Hannah take up her pen in reply, and refute the atheistic arguments in a pamphlet. The success of this effort caused her to be solicited from all sides to undertake the refutation of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man. Her humorous treatment of the subject in this second tract, entitled "Village Politics, by Will Chip", appealed to the class for whom it was chiefly intended and was a distinct success, as were her doggerel ballads on the subject, some of which were to popular tunes, preaching submission to the existing social order, for, as "Will Chip" puts it in his "true Rights of Man":
That some must be poorer, this truth will I sing,
Is the law of my Maker, and not of my king;
And the true Rights of Man, and the life of his cause,
Is not equal possessions; but equal, just laws.
Hannah's sympathy went out to patient Joe, the Newcastle collier, who held that "all things which happened were best", and to the ploughman who felt safe in his cottage with the British laws for his guard: "If the Squire should oppress, I get instant redress"; a view which the author of Caleb Williams emphatically did not share, and which makes the modern reader feel as if Hannah More were "laying it on a little too thick."
Hannah More and Mary Wollstonecraft—who, as will be seen in the next chapter, ranged herself among the opponents of Burke—thus took opposite sides in the great struggle, defending diametrically opposed principles, yet collaborating in gradually weaning the reading public from the conventional notion that the domain of literature was taboo to women and in accustoming them to the unwonted spectacle of women participating in a social struggle.
Mary Wollstonecraft's claims for a complete emancipation impressed Hannah More as directed straight against the divine authority. The state of inequality, we have seen, was looked upon by her as God's will, and to rebel against it was to oppose the decrees of the Almighty. The right way to benefit her sex seemed to her to insist on a better moral education. On this subject at least the two political adversaries were agreed. "In those countries in which fondness for the mere persons of women is carried to the highest excess, they are slaves; their moral and intellectual degradation increases in direct proportion to the adoration which is paid to their charms" is one of the many statements in Hannah More's "Strictures on Female Education"[33] which Mary Wollstonecraft might have written, and both saw in a liberal moral education the only remedy. At this point, however, the two paths become separated. To Mary Wollstonecraft female education was merely one of the milestones in the march towards perfection; to Hannah More it seemed that women might be made instrumental "to raise the depressed tone of public morals and to awaken the drowsy spirit of religious principle", and also that they might be called upon "to come forward and contribute their full and fair proportion towards the saving of their country." With Hannah More, high morality and patriotism necessarily went hand in hand. Her ideal was to see all English women join in a thorough reform of manners and morals, that her country might become not only the bulwark of tradition against the mania for innovation, but also that of the religion she held sacred against the onslaughts of atheism coming from across the Channel.
If she had a less fervent temperament than Mary, she compensated for this lack through her practical insight, which told her that sudden radical changes are apt to destroy the edifice of ages, without offering anything solid as a substitute. She felt the guardian of her sex against the attacks of infidelity which in her eyes were principally directed against the female heart. "Conscious of the influence of women in civil society, conscious of the effect which female infidelity produced in France, they attribute the ill success of their attempts in this country to their having been hitherto chiefly addressed to the male sex. They are now sedulously labouring to destroy the religious principles of women, and in too many instances have fatally succeeded. For this purpose not only novels and romances have been made the vehicles of vice and infidelity, but the same allurement has been held out to the women of our country which was employed in the Garden of Eden by the first philosophist to the first sinner,—knowledge"[34].
The above lines determine Hannah More's attitude towards female learning, which she regarded as the devil's own bait. As an example of the corrupting tendencies of foreign literature she makes a few remarks on the much-admired German plays of "The Robbers" and "The Stranger", the second of which presents the character of an adulteress in the most pleasing and fascinating colours. "To make matters worse, the German example has found a follower in a woman, a professed admirer and imitator of the German suicide Werter. The female Werter, as she is styled by her biographer, asserts in a work entitled, "The Wrongs of Women" that adultery is justifiable, and that the restrictions placed on it by the laws of England, constitute one of the wrongs of women".[35]
To come to a correct understanding of this passage, it is necessary to remember that the "Strictures" were written in 1799, when the remembrance of Mary Wollstonecraft's attempt at suicide was still fresh, and when her unexpected death had drawn attention to Godwin's edition of her works, the only one containing "Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman".
In their ideas of marriage, as indeed in all their applications of religious precepts, the gulf between Hannah More and Mary Wollstonecraft becomes immeasurably wide. But wherever the sense of moral duty, unhampered by convention or by a rigid philosophical harness, was free to assert itself, it is curious to note the close affinity between the ideas of two women who occupied such widely different positions in the social life of their time, yet were both so extremely conscious of the moral responsibility of their sex. It remains for us to consider the interesting—if somewhat eccentric—personality of the woman who had brought down upon herself so many charges of gross immorality.