In the dialogue between Mercury and Mrs. Modish, the author was at once less pretentious and in closer touch with her subject. Yet even here her desire to give instruction triumphs over any temptation to depict human nature. Mrs. Modish, the frivolous butterfly, explains the phrase bon ton quite as seriously as Mrs. Carter the bluestocking would have done: ‘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.’ This is perhaps the best thing in the dialogues. One great advantage of these works remains to be mentioned. They triumph over the form in which they are written, for they never once remind us of Lucian.
But Mrs. Montagu had yet to achieve her unique distinction. It was nine years later that she delighted the world by appearing as the champion of Shakespeare, redressing his wrongs,[312] and vindicating him from the charges of Voltaire. She published a work somewhat largely entitled, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare, Compared with the Greek and French Dramatic Poets, with some Remarks upon the Misrepresentations of Mons. de Voltaire. The attacks upon Shakespeare which Mrs. Montagu felt it incumbent upon herself to answer need no discussion here;[313] it may suffice to say that her defence was more widely read in England than the ‘misrepresentations’ which called it into being. It was regarded as a standard piece of criticism, and its fame penetrated to France and even to Italy.[314] It is impossible to give adequate illustrations of the esteem in which the book was held.[315] It conferred upon Mrs. Montagu the reputation of a critic, and gave her an enviable position among English writers for the space of thirty years. In the chorus of praise with which this feeble book was greeted there was but one discordant voice. When Reynolds remarked that Mrs. Montagu’s essay did her honour, Dr. Johnson retorted: ‘Yes, Sir, it does her honour, but it would do nobody else honour. I have indeed, not read it all. But when I take up the end of a web, and find it packthread, I do not expect by looking further to find it embroidery. Sir, I will venture to say, there is not one sentence of true criticism in her book.’[316]
It is to this view that posterity—when it has had any views at all on the subject—has inclined. Professor Huchon naturally deplores it,[317] and builds up a judicious defence of the defence. But the modern reader will probably agree with Mr. Lounsbury that ‘it is in many ways one of the most exasperating of books.’ Mrs. Montagu’s ignorance of the Elizabethan era was both profound and extensive. Her conception of Shakespeare’s environment may be deduced from the following quotation:
The songs sung by our bards at feasts and merry-makings were of a very coarse kind: as the people were totally illiterate, and only the better sort could read even their mother tongue, their taste was formed on these compositions. As yet our stage had exhibited only those palpable allegories by which rude unlettered moralists instruct and please the gross and ignorant multitude.[318]
A woman who conceived of Shakespeare as living ‘in the dark shades of Gothic barbarism,’[319] and who lamented his lack of ‘the admonitions of delicate connoisseurs’[320] had in effect yielded all that the most virulent critic could demand. Mrs. Montagu’s enthusiasms seem very pallid after her alarming concessions. She considers Falstaff humorous and Macbeth tragic, and is, in general and as usual, platitudinous. But her continuous apologies and concessions really form the staple of her work. ‘She found,’ says Lounsbury, ‘the speech of Brutus to the people in Julius Cæsar, quaint and affected. She exhibited her utter incapacity to comprehend the rhetorical skill of Antony by declaring that the repetition of the epithet “honorable” in his speech was perhaps too frequent. The character of Pistol in the second part of Henry IV was too much for her to understand. Following previous critics she found many bombast speeches in the tragedy of Macbeth. Like her predecessors she unfortunately forgot to particularize them; lapse of time has now made it difficult to discover them.’
One of the features of Mrs. Montagu’s Essay was a series of comparisons between the Shakespearian drama and the ancient Greek. Here she was indeed on dangerous ground, for she could not read the language of Æschylus. This, however, did not discourage her from expressing herself very decidedly on the characteristics of his art. She pronounces the supernatural element in The Persians unfitted to the piece, and finds ‘something of a comic and satirical turn’ in the ghost of Darius.[321] She asserts that the Eumenides of the Oresteian trilogy ‘seem both acting out of their sphere and below their character’;[322] but admits that the whole story ‘might be allegorical.’ Such indeed she considered very nearly all of Æschylus to be; for she had a peculiar notion that his materials were derived at second-hand ‘from the hieroglyphic land of Egypt,’ and, though in the grosser times of Greece literally understood by the vulgar, were in more philosophic ages ‘again transmuted into allegory.’[323] But it is idle longer to stir this forgotten dust.
A woman truly learned in the classics, whose abiding common sense protected her from the ridicule freely poured out upon bluestockings, was Miss (or, by courtesy, Mrs.) Elizabeth Carter, the spinster of Deal. To Mrs. Montagu (patron of letters) she was an indulgent preceptress, a very Pierian source of learning, and much that passed as erudition in the ‘female Mæcenas’ was in reality derived at second-hand from Mrs. Carter. Mrs. Montagu was never unwilling to sit at the feet of the woman whose reading ranged from Aristotle to Petrarch and from Diodorus Siculus to the Sorrows of Werther,[324] who would correspond with her respecting the Newtonian mechanics or the Stoic philosophers.
Mrs. Carter’s reputation was made by a translation of the extant works of Epictetus, an elegant quarto put forth in 1758, provided with an introduction and ample notes. The style of the translation is, in a very high degree, chaste and pleasing, and nowhere suggests the line-by-line method of the laborious translator. The introductory essay is an admirable exposition of the Stoic philosophy. The following specimen may show that Mrs. Carter was capable not only of a spirited style, but of genuine critical treatment of her subject:
About the generality of mankind, the Stoics do not appear to have given themselves any kind of trouble. They seemed to consider all (except the few who were students in the intricacies of a philosophic system) as very little superior to Beasts: and, with great tranquillity, left them to follow the devices of their own ungoverned appetites and passions.