Johnson Pointing out Mrs. Montagu as a Patron of the Arts
Reproduced from Barry’s fresco in the Royal Society of Arts, by kind permission of the Society
It was necessary to adopt a new plan. Two years later Lady Hesketh decided to approach Mrs. Montagu herself, and requested Cowper to permit her to show a portion of the manuscript to that lady. The poet, who had long since admired the Essay on Shakspeare and who had acquired the most exaggerated notions of the lady’s learning,[386] chose the first two books of the Iliad to present as a sample intending to ‘carry her by a coup de main,’ and employing ‘Achilles, Agamemnon, and the two armies of Greece and Troy,’ in his charge upon the bluestocking. To these the sixteenth book of the Odyssey was added by Lady Hesketh. ‘It was very kind in thee,’ he writes,[387] ‘to sacrifice to this Minerva on my account.’ But Minerva, who was now seventy, was probably glad to escape from the affair with a concealment of her ignorance of Homer. She wrote an enthusiastic, and, be it added, modest letter to Lady Hesketh about the new translation, and put her name on the subscribers’ list. Cowper read the letter and expressed his pride in what was said; and there the matter ended.
The precise nature and extent of the assistance which Mrs. Montagu rendered to James Barry, the painter, it is now impossible to determine. Certain it is that she consented to be painted by him (in hideous profile) for that hodge-podge of fresco with which Barry covered the walls of the Royal Society of Arts. She is there depicted in her capacity as a patron of the arts.[388]
‘Towards the centre of the picture,’ writes Barry, ‘is seen that distinguished example of female excellence, Mrs. Montagu, who long honoured the Society with her name and subscription.... Mrs. Montagu appears here recommending the ingenuity and industry of a young female whose work she is producing.... Between these ladies [the Duchesses of Devonshire and Portland] the late Dr. Samuel Johnson seems pointing out this example of Mrs. Montagu to their Graces’ attention and imitation.’[389]
The juxtaposition of Johnson and Mrs. Montagu, the Great Dictator and the female Mæcenas, must have caused inextinguishable mirth among the spectators who knew of their great quarrel. Mrs. Montagu’s resentment at Johnson’s treatment of Lyttelton in the Lives of the Poets has been much discussed; but the story must be repeated once more for the sake of the light which it throws upon Mrs. Montagu’s ambitions to control the destinies of literature.
Mrs. Montagu and Lord Lyttelton had been close friends for many years preceding the death of the latter. They had laboured together on the Dialogues of the Dead (to the scandal, Walpole delighted to relate, of the lady’s postilion[390]); and thus Mrs. Montagu’s literary fame was, in a way, bound up with the peer’s. When, eight years after the death of Lyttelton, Johnson’s account of him appeared, it was found to contain remarks which did not please the friends of the late nobleman. Far from being satisfied that he should have been deemed worthy of inclusion even in so inclusive a list as Johnson’s, they decided to take offence because a certain amount of blame was mingled with a certain amount of praise. Johnson had, for example, criticised ‘poor Lyttelton’ for thanking the Critical Reviewers for their commendatory notice of the Dialogues of the Dead; he spoke of Lyttelton’s poems as having ‘nothing to be despised and little to be admired,’ and of his songs, in particular, as ‘sometimes spritely and sometimes insipid.’ Here surely is as much praise as posterity would care to give to Lyttelton; but it was not sufficient for the women who owed some part of their reputation to the fact that they had been intimate with a peer. According to Walpole, it was Mrs. Vesey who began the attack, but it was certainly Mrs. Montagu who conducted the campaign. The reader of Fanny Burney’s Diary is familiar with the details of this feud; the reader of Walpole will find four references to it in the letters written at the opening of 1781.
‘She told me,’ writes the latter, ‘as a mark of her high displeasure, that she would never ask him to dinner again. I took her side, and fomented the quarrel, and wished I could have made Dagon and Ashtaroth scold in Coptic.’[391]
Nothing came of this literary feud save a scene at Streatham between Johnson and Pepys which frightened Fanny Burney, and Potter’s attack on the Lives which has been mentioned already; and Mr. Dobson remarks that modern readers ‘will perhaps wonder what the dispute was about.’[392] But it is significant as showing the influence which Mrs. Montagu thought she exerted in the world of letters, and the means which she adopted to make her influence felt.
Johnson’s behaviour during this quarrel must, I think, have been due to something other than wounded vanity. It was, I am convinced, due to this very patronage of literature which the bluestockings, with Mrs. Montagu at their head, were attempting to set up. There can be no more annoying spectacle than that of a person to whom wealth and social talents have given a certain minor position in the literary world, and who, mistaking gifts for genius, attempts to exalt that position to one of authority. This is what Mrs. Montagu was trying to do. She had, without a shadow of doubt, achieved a certain influence. She had bestowed pensions and gifts upon deserving authors and scholars. She had placed her name on a hundred subscription lists. She had contributed to the success of Hannah More’s tragedy, Percy, by appearing, more than once, in a box at the theatre where it was being performed. Elizabeth Carter and Hester Chapone (who dedicated her Letters to Mrs. Montagu) were examples of the worthy writer whom she assisted in one way or another by her unostentatious charity. Laurence Sterne was content, as early as 1761, to make her a sort of literary executor,[393] ‘not because she is our cousin—but because I am sure she has a good heart.’ But when, through the influence of flattery, she mistook her kind heart and her pleasant interest in literature for the critical authority of a scholar and arbiter, an authority which can belong to but one or two in any age, she brought down upon herself, not unnaturally, the wrath of Johnson and the scorn of Walpole. By November 1776, she had reached the point where she could write thus to Garrick: