“The morning of life, like the morning of the day, should be dedicated to business. Give it therefore, dear Mr. Lyttelton, to strenuous exertion and labour of mind, before the indolence of the meridian hour, or the unabated fervour of the exhausted day, renders you unfit for severe application.”
“Unabated fervour of the exhausted day” is a phrase to be commended. We remember with awe that Mrs. Montagu was the brightest star in the chaste firmament of female intellect;—“the first woman for literary knowledge in England,” wrote Mrs. Thrale; “and, if in England, I hope I may say in the world.” We hope so, indeed. None but a libertine would doubt it. And no one less contumelious than Dr. Johnson ever questioned Mrs. Montagu’s supremacy. She was, according to her great-grandniece, Miss Climenson, “adored by men,” while “purest of the pure”; which was equally pleasant for herself and for Mr. Montagu. She wrote more letters, with fewer punctuation marks, than any Englishwoman of her day; and her nephew, the fourth Baron Rokeby, nearly blinded himself in deciphering the two volumes of undated correspondence which were printed in 1810. Two more followed in 1813, after which the gallant Baron either died at his post or was smitten with despair; for sixty-eight cases of letters lay undisturbed for the best part of a century, when they passed into Miss Climenson’s hands. This intrepid lady received them—so she says—with “unbounded joy”; and has already published two fat volumes, with the promise of several others in the near future. “Les morts n’écrivent point,” said Madame de Maintenon hopefully; but of what benefit is this inactivity, when we still continue to receive their letters?
Miss Elizabeth Carter, called by courtesy Mrs. Carter, was the most vigorous of Mrs. Montagu’s correspondents. Although a lady of learning, who read Greek and had dipped into Hebrew, she was far too “humble and unambitious” to claim an acquaintance with the exalted mistress of Montagu House; but that patroness of literature treated her with such true condescension that they were soon on the happiest terms. When Mrs. Montagu writes to Miss Carter that she has seen the splendid coronation of George III, Miss Carter hastens to remind her that such splendour is for majesty alone.
“High rank and power require every external aid of pomp and éclat that may awe and astonish spectators by the ideas of the magnificent and sublime; while the ornaments of more equal conditions should be adapted to the quiet tenour of general life, and be content to charm and engage by the gentler graces of the beautiful and pleasing.”
Mrs. Montagu was fond of display. All her friends admitted, and some deplored the fact. But surely there was no likelihood of her appropriating the coronation services as a feature for the entertainments at Portman Square.
Advice, however, was the order of the day. As the excellent Mrs. Chapone wrote to Sir William Pepys: “It is a dangerous commerce for friends to praise each other’s Virtues, instead of reminding each other of duties and of failings.” Yet a too robust candour carried perils of its own, for Miss Seward having written to her “beloved Sophia Weston” with “an ingenuousness which I thought necessary for her welfare, but which her high spirits would not brook,” Sophia was so unaffectedly angry that twelve years of soothing silence followed.
Another wonderful thing about the letter-writers, especially the female letter-writers, of this engaging period is the wealth of hyperbole in which they rioted. Nothing is told in plain terms. Tropes, metaphors, and similes adorn every page; and the supreme elegance of the language is rivalled only by the elusiveness of the idea, which is lost in an eddy of words. Marriage is always alluded to as the “hymeneal torch,” or the “hymeneal chain,” or “hymeneal emancipation from parental care.” Birds are “feathered muses,” and a heart is a “vital urn.” When Mrs. Montagu writes to Mr. Gilbert West, that “miracle of the Moral World,” to condole with him on his gout, she laments that his “writing hand, first dedicated to the Muses, then with maturer judgment consecrated to the Nymphs of Solyma, should be led captive by the cruel foe.” If Mr. West chanced not to know who or what the Nymphs of Solyma were, he had the intelligent pleasure of finding out. Miss Seward describes Mrs. Tighe’s sprightly charms as “Aonian inspiration added to the cestus of Venus”; and speaks of the elderly “ladies of Llangollen” as, “in all but the voluptuous sense, Armidas of its bowers.” Duelling is to her “the murderous punctilio of Luciferian honour.” A Scotch gentleman who writes verse is “a Cambrian Orpheus”; a Lichfield gentleman who sketches is “our Lichfield Claude”; and a budding clerical writer is “our young sacerdotal Marcellus.” When the “Swan” wished to apprise Scott of Dr. Darwin’s death, it never occurred to her to write, as we in this dull age should do: “Dr. Darwin died last night,” or, “Poor Dr. Darwin died last night.” She wrote: “A bright luminary in this neighbourhood recently shot from his sphere with awful and deplorable suddenness”;—thus pricking Sir Walter’s imagination to the wonder point before descending to facts. Even the rain and snow were never spoken of in the plain language of the Weather Bureau; and the elements had a set of allegories all their own. Miss Carter would have scorned to take a walk by the sea. She “chased the ebbing Neptune.” Mrs. Chapone was not blown by the wind. She was “buffeted by Eolus and his sons.” Miss Seward does not hope that Mr. Whalley’s rheumatism is better; but that he has overcome “the malinfluence of marine damps, and the monotonous murmuring of boundless waters.” Perhaps the most triumphant instance on record of sustained metaphor is Madame d’Arblay’s account of Mrs. Montagu’s yearly dinner to the London chimney-sweeps, in which the word sweep is never once used, so that the editor was actually compelled to add a footnote to explain what the lady meant. The boys are “jetty objects,” “degraded outcasts from society,” and “sooty little agents of our most blessed luxury.” They are “hapless artificers who perform the most abject offices of any authorized calling”; they are “active guardians of our blazing hearth”; but plain chimney-sweeps, never! Madame d’Arblay would have perished at the stake before using so vulgar and obvious a term.
How was this mass of correspondence preserved? How did it happen that the letters were never torn up, or made into spills,—the common fate of all such missives when I was a little girl. Granted that Miss Carter treasured Mrs. Montagu’s letters (she declared fervidly she could never be so barbarous as to destroy one), and that Mrs. Montagu treasured Miss Carter’s. Granted that Miss Weston treasured Mr. Whalley’s, and that Mr. Whalley treasured Miss Weston’s. Granted that Miss Seward provided against all contingencies by copying her own letters into fat blank books before they were mailed, elaborating her spineless sentences, and omitting everything she deemed too trivial or too domestic for the public ear. But is it likely that young Lyttelton at Oxford laid sacredly away Mrs. Montagu’s pages of good counsel, or that young Franks at Cambridge preserved the ponderous dissertations of Sir William Pepys? Sir William was a Baronet, a Master in Chancery, and—unlike his famous ancestor—a most respectable and exemplary gentleman. His innocent ambition was to be on terms of intimacy with the literary lights of his day. He knew and ardently admired Dr. Johnson, who in return detested him cordially. He knew and revered, “in unison with the rest of the world,” Miss Hannah More. He corresponded at great length with lesser lights,—with Mrs. Chapone, and Mrs. Hartley, and Sir Nathaniel Wraxall. He wrote endless commentaries on Homer and Virgil to young Franks, and reams of good advice to his little son at Eton. There is something pathetic in his regret that the limitations of life will not permit him to be as verbose as he would like. “I could write for an hour,” he assures poor Franks, “upon that most delightful of all passages, the Lion deprived of its Young; but the few minutes one can catch amidst the Noise, hurry and confusion of an Assize town will not admit of any Classical discussions. But was I in the calm retirement of your Study at Acton, I have much to say to you, to which I can only allude.”
The publication of scores and scores of such letters, all written to one unresponsive young man at Cambridge (who is repeatedly reproached for not answering them), makes us wonder afresh who kept the correspondence; and the problem is deepened by the appearance of Sir William’s letters to his son. This is the way the first one begins:—
“My dear Boy,—I cannot let a Post escape me without giving you the Pleasure of knowing how much you have gladdened the Hearts of two as affectionate Parents as ever lived; when you tell us that the Principles of Religion begin already to exert their efficacy in making you look down with contempt on the wretched grovelling Vices with which you are surrounded, you make the most delightful Return you can ever make for our Parental Care and Affection; you make Us at Peace with Ourselves; and enable us to hope that our dear Boy will Persevere in that Path which will ensure the greatest Share of Comfort here, and a certainty of everlasting Happiness hereafter.”