There was, moreover, evidently much of the femme savante about Mrs. Montagu. Walpole described her in his most merciless manner as a ‘piece of learned nonsense’; she and her friends, he continues, ‘vie with one another till they are as unintelligible as the good folks at Babel.’[240] This of course is not fair. When was Walpole ever fair? But it certainly may be taken as evidence that Mrs. Montagu did not hesitate to make a display of her knowledge. She had mastered the art, no doubt, of wearing her learning gracefully, but never that of gracefully dispensing with it. It cumbers her correspondence. With Garrick she must discuss Plautus, Terence, and Molière, with Elizabeth Carter the Ethics of Aristotle, with Beattie the Greek dramatists, Ossian, Homer, and the ‘wilder Oriental poets.’ But the reader has throughout the feeling that the writer is making the best of resources that are somewhat limited and undisciplined. Her knowledge of the classics was at best amateurish.
But this deficiency—if such it be—was not fatal. The learning of a professional scholar is by no means essential in the mistress of a salon. It may, indeed, as I have already shown, prove a serious obstacle to her success; for the means by which she diffuses her influence are of a totally different sort. With more essential things, high social rank, a large fortune, wit, interest in the course of literature, and a faith in her own power to influence it for good, Mrs. Montagu was richly endowed. Without her there would have been no London salons; for all existed in more or less conscious imitation of hers. She alone succeeded in becoming a patron of letters. To say that she did not equal the great Frenchwomen in this art is merely to say that she was not a genius. She had the power of attracting people of real importance to her drawing-room, and even those who ridiculed her social methods were obliged to admit that they produced an effect. That effect it is difficult to estimate with precision; for it is by no means identical with that which she produced by her own writings or even by her patronage of writers. She has the honour of having assisted in spreading the esteem in which literature and men of letters were held at the close of the century, as opposed to the anomaly of their position fifty years earlier. Her achievement is not the less real because it cannot be exactly calculated.
A far more lovable figure than Mrs. Montagu is her friendly rival, Elizabeth Vesey. Though the daughter of a bishop, the wife of a Member of Parliament, and mistress of as popular a drawing-room as could be found in London, she was as free from vanity as from pretensions to literary gifts. She never dreamed of shining as a critical essayist; she scribbled no verses. She was a withered old lady with the heart of a child, who amused everybody by her enthusiasm and her naïve manners, which were always a bit slipshod. She was so notoriously informal that her guests forgot their elegant reserve, and became, like her, good-humoured and lively. She moves about her crowded assemblies like a fairy crone, her parchment skin seamed and shrivelled with age, her ear-trumpet dangling from her neck, while she distributes her promiscuous company, pats her guests on the arm, breaks up their cliques, and squares the social circle.[241] She touched every one into good spirits with what Elizabeth Carter called the wave of her fairy wand.[242] Everybody adored her, men and women alike. To Martin Sherlock[243] she was ‘good Mrs. Vesey—indeed she is all goodness’; and Horace Walpole bursts into momentary enthusiasm,[244] ‘What English heart ever excelled hers?’
If she found favour in the eyes of all London, it was not by any charms of person, for at the time of her great fame, she had long since lost every trace of beauty. In 1779, when Miss Burney first met her, she was a very pattern of old age, with ‘the most wrinkled, sallow, time-beaten face’ ever seen.[245] But her vivid imagination never deserted her, and to the sophisticated people by whom she was surrounded she seemed a sort of ethereal meddler in human affairs. Her friends called her the Sylph.[246] Mrs. Carter could detect nothing mortal in her save a love of London,[247] and felt about her a suspicion of ‘coral groves and submarine palaces.’[248] If she was ordered to take fresh-water baths, she must, like a child, make a game of it all, play at being primitive, and rear in imagination an ‘American hut’ on the banks of the Liffey.[249] She flitted eagerly about England and Ireland, anxious to know everybody and see everything.[250] Mrs. Carter found her like Bartholomew Cokes, who wanted every plaything in the Fair.[251] Indeed, the world must have seemed to Mrs. Vesey a vast toyshop with endless opportunities for play, for she could amuse herself by planning a fête champêtre,[252] or by inventing a new teapot, lacking, to be sure, both spout and handle, but of ‘a beautiful Etruscan form.’[253] Her guests never knew what to expect, for she might present them with an atheist philosopher hot from the salons of Paris or set them to cutting out Indian figures and flowers, to paste on her dressing-room windows in imitation of painted glass.[254] Dowagers marvel at her, and lament that oddities are become the fashion.[255]
Her parties were informal to the point of becoming promiscuous. Her first aim was to get together every one of importance,[256] literary, political, social, and ecclesiastical, to keep them broken up into small groups, and to insist on uniting those of different tastes and mood. She got Walpole side by side with Fanny Burney[257] (whom he liked at once), and again side by side with Sir William Jones (whom he did not).[258] She tried to present Dr. Johnson to the Abbé Raynal, and drew from the Great Moralist an immortal refusal.[259] She was apparently even ambitious to marry Elizabeth Carter to Thomas Gray.[260] Yet withal she had the rare gift of self-obliteration.[261] She gave herself no airs. She was by nature absent-minded, and she affected to be more distraite than she actually was. When excitedly denouncing second marriages she could quite overlook (or seem to overlook) the fact that she herself had been married twice. ‘Bless me, my dear! I had quite forgotten it.’ Such wit was but ill-understood in salons which had never before witnessed the spectacle of a bluestocking laughing at herself. There is an Irish whimsicality about her remarks. When ill, she could declare that her only happy moment in fourteen days was in a fainting fit, or again that she was in dread of losing seven or eight of her senses.[262] ‘It’s a very disagreeable thing, I think,’ said she to Mr. Cambridge, ‘when one has just made an acquaintance with anybody, and likes them, to have them die,’[263] a sentiment that set Fanny Burney to ‘grinning irresistibly,’ and filliping the macaroon crumbs from her muff to hide her embarrassment. Mrs. Vesey somehow contrived to make even her deafness a source of amusement. When Lady Spencer brought her some silver ears to use instead of trumpets, she promptly tried them on before her guests, and greeted George Cambridge with one of them still clinging to her ear, but as she was moving away from him spilled it unaware. Surely this bluestocking is a very human sort.
Those who smiled at her naïveté forgot that it was a quality very near to wisdom. Her conversation, and perhaps her letters,[264] revealed that instinctive knowledge of the human heart which is the peculiar possession of extreme innocence. ‘Few people,’ she said to Mrs. Carter,[265] who quotes her words with approval—the imprimatur of common sense—‘give themselves time to be friends’; and as if she only half understood the century into which she had been born, inquired ‘why the head is always so suspicious of the heart.’[266] The wise Carter, whose knowledge was so much more sophisticated, can but honour her for having the simplicity of a little child, though she would like to whip her for having its imprudence.[267] But it was this very simplicity of soul that enabled the good creature to ‘accommodate herself so fully to the awkward customs and manners of mere actually existing men and women.’ Mrs. Carter finds it ‘very surprising,’[268] as does the student, and as did Montagu and all the dowagers, no doubt; but Miss Burney, with her keen observation, saw at once that her skill in selecting guests and her ‘address in rendering them easy with one another’ was an art that implied ‘no mean understanding.’[269] She had sufficient skill to persuade Horace Walpole, who professed to hate her ‘Babels,’ to come and join the Cophthi,[270] and not to snub them one and all; she had the skill to keep always on good terms with Mrs. Montagu; she could attract the whole Literary Club on alternate Tuesdays, and filled her drawing-room with the most difficult people in England to manage.[271] Yet her methods were always of the simplest, her collations modest though delicate, and her house, though interesting because of its oddity, was hardly an attraction apart from its mistress.
With all the new emotions of sentimentalism and romanticism, Mrs. Vesey was in full sympathy, and she must have done something to popularize these movements among the beaux esprits of London. She adored the Sentimental Journey. She and Mrs. Carter write each other of the solemn awe of storms at sea, of ‘sublime and terrible’ Welsh ‘prospects,’[272] of dim-lit Gothic cloisters, and the sad note of the owl at set of sun. She loved the poetry of Gray, and even tempted the shy poet into her drawing-room.[273] She was obliged to pass much of her time in Ireland, and on her journeys there and back improved the opportunity of studying the wild scenery of Wales. She writes to Mrs. Carter of her journey through Anglesey and over Penmuenmaur. The story thrilled Mrs. Carter, for she wrote of it to Mrs. Montagu:
In the midst of her passage through these wild regions, she and Mrs. Hancock[274] were overtaken by a tempest which greatly heightened the sublime and terrible of the scene; and you may guess what a description such an adventure would furnish to an imagination like hers.[275]
Mrs. Vesey, moreover, appears to have been alone among the blues in aspiring to the easier standards of French manners and to the new ‘freedom of thought,’ though she never really abandoned herself to them. She was one of the ladies who lent diversity to the amatory career of Laurence Sterne; but the flirtation, though feverish enough for a time, either escaped the notice of Mrs. Vesey’s precise friends or was, by general consent, hushed up; for it expired at last quite harmlessly and left only a handful of letters as proof of its former vitality. Yorick and this earlier ‘Eliza’ met, it would appear, in 1762, when Sterne was at the height of his fame, and enjoying the pleasures of metropolitan life for a season. He heard Mrs. Vesey sing; walked twenty paces beside her; felt the ‘harmonic vibrations’ of a heart truly sentimental, and had no sooner left her than he opened an amatory correspondence with her. He would give one of his cassocks to explain the magic of her personality: ‘I believe in my conscience, dear lady, if truth was known, that you have no inside at all. That you are graceful, elegant, and desirable, etc., etc.—every common beholder who can stare at you, as a Dutch boor does to the Queen of Sheba,—can easily find out—but that you are sensible, gentle, and tender and from one end to the other of you full of the sweetest tones and modulations require a deeper research—You are a system of harmonic vibrations—the softest and best attuned of all instruments.—Lord! I would give away my other cassock to touch you.’[276] Tristram Shandy protests that his head is turned.