When the fashionable world flocked to Mrs. Montagu’s house in Hill Street, in the middle of last century, the street was not paved, and the road was very much at the mercy of the weather. To get to the house was not always an easy matter. When entered, the visitor found it furnished in a style of which much was said, and at which the hostess herself laughed. “Sick of Grecian elegance and symmetry, or Gothick grandeur and magnificence, we must all seek the barbarious gaudy goût of the Chinese; and fat-headed pagods and shaking mandarins bear the prize from the finest works of antiquity; and Apollo and Venus must give way to a fat idol with a sconce on his head. You will wonder I should condemn the taste I have complied with, but in trifles I shall always conform to the fashion.”
There were duties connected with her position which Mrs. Montagu as scrupulously fulfilled. Receiving and returning visits was “a great devoir.” Resort to assemblies was a “necessary thing;” the duty of seeing and being seen was an indispensable duty; but she had mental resources which enabled her to pity the “polite world,” which had no way of driving away ennui but by pleasure. If in Hill Street she was of “the quality,” as Chesterfield called them, in the country she was not only what she loved to call herself, a farmer’s wife, but a political economist. At Sandleford we see a poor wretch standing at the door of the mansion. She is hideous from dirt, poverty, and contagious disease born of both. The lady farmer was not only charitable but something besides. “I was very angry with her,” she says, “that she has lately introduced another heir to wretchedness and want. She has not half Hamlet’s delicacies on the question. To be or not to be! The law’s delays are very puny evils to those her offspring must endure. The world affords no law to make her rich, and yet she will increase and multiply over the face of the earth.”
Throughout the printed letters, continual examples occur of Mrs. Montagu’s acute observation of character, and of her happy expression when she described it. She not only watched closely, but spoke boldly of the ladies around her, and of their more or less pretty ways. Thus, Mrs. Montagu saw that all the ladies courted Doctor Young, the poet, but she was sure it was only because they had heard he was a genius, and not that they knew he was one. When some misses expressed their delight at a particular ball, she remarked that their delight was probably increased by the absence of Miss Bladen, who became Lord Essex’s second countess, and who was not there to outshine them! “So strong in women,” she said, “was the desire of pleasing, each would have that happy power confined to her own person.” It did not escape her eye that Lady Abercorn and Lady Townshend, “each determining to have the most wit of any person in the company, always chose different parties and different ends of the room.” How gracefully serene is the portrait of the Duchess of Somerset, who did what was civil without intending to be gracious, and who so surprised Mrs. Montagu, in 1749, because the princely state and pride the duchess had so long been used to, had “left her such an easiness of manners.” One of her exceptional touches was when she described the pious Countess of Huntingdon as a “well-meaning fanatic.” That must have been after Gilbert West and Lord Lyttelton had brought her out of the field of Free Inquirers, and the Primate of Ireland had made her of the religion of the Established Church. At that period she would have placed the church above the law, resembling the old Scottish woman of the kirk, who, on pronouncing that to take a walk on the Sabbath was a deadly sin, was reminded that Jesus himself had walked in the corn-fields on the Sabbath-day, to which she replied, “Ah weel, it is as ye say; but I think none the better o’ him for it!”
Adverting to a wicked saying, that few women have the virtues of an honest man, Mrs. Montagu maintained that a little of the blame thereof falls on the men, “who are more easily deluded than persuaded into compliance. This makes the women have recourse to artifice to gain power, which, as they have gained by the weakness or caprice of those they govern, they are afraid to lose by the same kind of arts addressed to the same kind of qualities; and the flattery bestowed by the men on all the fair from fifteen, makes them so greedy of praise that they most excessively hate, detest, and revile every quality in another woman which they think can obtain it.” This is the censure, or judgment, be it remembered, on Last Century Ladies!
When Mrs. Fielding, to benefit those ladies, wrote a novel called “The Penitents,” supposed to be the history of the unhappy fair ones in the Magdalen House, Mrs. Montagu remarked, hesitatingly, “As all the girls in England are reading novels, it may be useful to put them on their guard;” but she adds, decisively, “If I had a daughter, I should rather trust her to ignorance and innocence than to the effect of these cautions!”
Of course, Mrs. Montagu studied the gentlemen as profoundly as the ladies. As one result, she gently laughed at Doctor Young’s philosophy, which brought him to believe that one vice corrects another, till an animal made up of ten thousand bad qualities grows to be a social creature tolerable to live with. Sir William Brown could hardly claim this toleration, for he had not discovered (said Mrs. Montagu) that the wisest man in the company is not always the most welcome, and that people are not at all times disposed to be informed. Fancy may easily bring before the reader the sort of conversation which Mrs. Montagu was able to hold with Mr. Plunket. She says of it: “Some people reduce their wit to an impalpable powder, and mix it up in a rebus; others wrap up theirs in a riddle: but mine and Mr. Plunket’s certainly went off by insensible perspiration in small talk.” She was so satisfied that there was a right place for a wise man to play the fool in, that she expressed a hope to Gilbert West (who was turning much of her thought from this world to the next) and to his wife, that “you will, both of you, leave so much of your wisdom at Wickham as would be inconvenient in town.” West feared that, at Sandleford, she sent invitations to beaux and belles to fill the vacant apartments of her mind. She merrily answered, that there was empty space enough there for French hoops and echoes of French sentiments; but she also seriously replied, “There are few of the fine world whom I should invite into my mind, and fewer still who are familiar enough there to come unasked.”
Mrs. Montagu hated no man, but she thoroughly despised Warburton. The way he mauled Shakespeare by explaining him, excited her scornful laughter; the way in which he marred Christianity by defending it, excited much more than angry contempt. “The levity shocks me, the indecency displeases me, the grossièreté disgusts me. I love to see the doctrine of Christianity defended by the spirit of Christianity.” Bishop Warburton and some country parsons were equally silly in her mind. Of a poor riddle, she says, “A country parson could not puzzle his parish with it, even if he should endeavour to explain it in his next Sunday’s sermon. Though I have known some of them explain a thing till all men doubted it.”
From the rule by which she measured all men, she did not except any one of her brothers: and never did sister love her brothers more tenderly and reasonably. Her brother William, the clergyman, was restless in temper from excess of love of ease. “My brother Robinson,” she wrote to her sister, Mrs. Scott, in 1755, “is emulating the great Diogenes ... he flies the delights of London, and leads a life of such privacy and seriousness, as looks to the beholders like wisdom, but, for my part, no life of inaction deserves that name.” Other characters she strikes off in a single sentence. That referring to Sir Charles Williams is a very good sample from an overflowing measure. “Sir Charles,” she said, “is still so flighty, that had he not always been a wit, he would still pass for a madman!” When she refers to Lord Hyde’s printed, but never acted comedy, “The Mistakes, or the Happy Resentment,” and says, “I suppose you will read the play, as it is by so great a man,” she was probably thinking of Miss Tibbs, who, “it is well known, always showed her good breeding by devoting all her attention to the people of highest rank in the company.”
Mrs. Montagu was as clever at generalities as when sketching individuals and special peculiarities. The numerous Jews at Tunbridge Wells, in 1745, she describes as having “worse countenances than their friend Pontius Pilate in a bad tapestry-hanging.” Good farmer’s wife as she said of herself, and also very fond of refined luxury, she laughed in her letters at those persons who built palaces in gardens of beauty, and left, as she said, nothing rude and waste but their minds; nothing harsh and unpolished but their tempers. To her, no knowledge came amiss. Amid all the gaieties of the life at Bath, she took interest in the chemistry of every-day life. During one of her visits, she was initiated into the mysteries of making malt!
Her very affectations, as they were called, sprung from her endowments. Her learning and reading, and intercourse with scholars and thinkers, furnished her with extraordinary figures and illustrations that were applied to very ordinary uses.