Lola was bold enough to tell her American audience that the palm of beauty must be awarded to Englishwomen, and that the Yankees were too mercantile and practical to entertain the old spirit of gallantry. She mollified her hearers by adding that, after all, in America, “love dived the deepest and came out dryest”—a dark saying, from which she derived the conclusion that love in the United States was as brave, honest, and sincere a passion as elsewhere. The lecture on Romanism will not be regarded as a very formidable instrument of attack upon the Catholic Church. It concludes: “America does not yet recognise how much she owes to the Protestant principle. It has given the world the four greatest facts of modern times—steam-boats, railroads, telegraphs, and the American Republic!”
We can imagine with what enthusiasm this sentiment was received in Hope Chapel, where the lecture was delivered in October 1858, in aid of a fund for a church which should be open free to the poor and unfortunate (as, by the way, all Roman Catholic churches are). By this time Lola appears to have been weaned of her spiritualistic heresies, and had become interested in Methodism. In her new zeal for her own soul’s welfare she did not, however, forget the corporal needs of her fellows, and with native generosity, stimulated by religious considerations, she showered the money earned at her lectures upon the poor and afflicted. To replenish her store, and encouraged by the success of her new enterprize in New York, she resolved to try her luck once more on the other side of the Atlantic.
XXXII
A LAST VISIT TO ENGLAND
Lola landed from the American steam-ship, Pacific, at Galway on 23rd November 1858. She had not set foot in her native land since she left it, the bride of Thomas James, more than twenty years before. In Dublin she had last appeared as a débutante at the viceregal court; now, on 10th December, she appeared there, on the boards of the Round Room, as a public curiosity, as a woman whose fame not one among her auditors would have envied. But they flocked to see her in hundreds, and the opening promised a highly profitable tour. In her regenerate frame of mind the lecturer was distressed by the publication in the Freeman of a long article referring to her connection with Dujarier and the King of Bavaria. Being the daughter of an Anglo-Indian officer, Lola had inherited a tendency to write to the papers on every possible occasion, and she at once sent a letter to the journal, defending her character. Her relations with Dujarier and Louis were, she insisted, absolutely proper and regular: to the former she was engaged; of the latter she was merely the friend and the adviser. The aspersions of her fair fame she attributed to the intrigues of Austria. She was in Ireland, and it was as well not to refer to the Jesuits.
At the new year she crossed over to England, beginning her tour at Manchester. We hear of her at Sheffield, Nottingham, Leicester, Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Leamington, Worcester, Bristol, and Bath. She drew crowded houses, though everywhere she went she had to contend with a strong counter-attraction in the person of Phineas T. Barnum, the celebrated showman, who was also touring England. Of course, she disappointed expectation. The public wanted to see the dashing, dazzling dare-devil of other days, not a rather sad woman, slightly tinged with Yankee religiosity. She arrived at last in London, where she lectured at St. James’s Hall. Two or three of the writer’s friends faintly recollect having seen her on this occasion. For the impression she produced on her audience, I prefer, however, to rely on the notice in the Era, under date 10th April 1859.
“Following closely upon the heels of Mr. Barnum, Madame Lola Montez, parenthetically putting forth her more aristocratic title of Countess of Landsfeld, commenced on Thursday evening [7th April 1859] the first of a series of lectures at the St. James’s Hall. Revisiting this country, she has first felt her footing as a lecturer in the provinces, and now venturing upon the ordeal of a London audience, she has boldly added her name to the list of those who have sought, single-handed, to engage their attention. If any amongst the full and fashionable auditory that attended her first appearance fancied, with a lively recollection of certain scandalous chronicles, that they were about to behold a formidable-looking woman of Amazonian audacity, and palpably strong-wristed, as well as strong-minded, their disappointment must have been grievous; greater if they anticipated the legendary bull-dog at her side and the traditionary pistols in her girdle and the horsewhip in her hand. The Lola Montez who made a graceful and impressive obeisance to those who gave her on Thursday night so cordial and encouraging a reception, appeared simply as a good-looking lady in the bloom of womanhood, attired in a plain black dress, with easy, unrestrained manners, and speaking earnestly and distinctly, with the slightest touch of a foreign accent that might belong to any language from Irish to Bavarian. The subject selected by the fair lecturer was the distinction between the English and the American character, which she proceeded to demonstrate by a discourse that must be pronounced decidedly didactic rather than diverting. With most of the characteristics mentioned as illustrative of each country, we presume the majority of her hearers had, in the course of their reading or experience, become already acquainted. That America looked to the future for her greatness, England to the past; that Americans believed in the spittoon as a valuable institution, and speed as the great condition of success in all things—it hardly needed a Lola Montez to come from the West to inform us. The excitable temperament of our transatlantic brethren, their readiness to raise idols and to demolish them, the great liberty of opinion that there prevails, and the little toleration of its expression, were the leading points of a lecture lasting an hour and a quarter, blended with a compliment to the American ladies, a tributary acknowledgment of the virtues of our own, and a digression into American politics as connected with everything. There was no attempt to weave into the subject a few threads of personal interest, no mention of any incident that had happened to her, and no anecdote that might have enlivened the dissertation in any way. The lecture might have been a newspaper article, the first chapter of a book of travels, or the speech of a long-winded American ambassador at a Mansion House dinner. All was exceedingly decorous and diplomatic, slightly gilded here and there with those commonplace laudations that stir a British public into the utterance of patriotic plaudits. A more inoffensive entertainment could hardly be imagined; and when the six sections into which the lady had divided her discourse were exhausted, and her final bow elicited a renewal of the applause that had accompanied her entrance, the impression on the departing visitors must have been that of having spent an hour in company with a well-informed lady who had gone to America, had seen much to admire there, and, coming back, had had over the tea-table the talk of the evening to herself. Whatever the future disquisitions of the Countess of Landsfeld may be, there is little doubt that many will go to hear them for the sake of the peculiar celebrity of the lecturer.”