With what vivacity she touches everything and everybody about her, “a certain sprightly folly that (I thank God) I was born with” she calls it, but it is only folly in the sense of making dull things gay and sad things tolerable. See how she finds laughter in the imminence of sea peril. An ancient English lady “had bought a fine point head, which she was contriving to conceal from the custom-house officers.... When the wind grew high, and our little vessel cracked, she fell heartily to her prayers, and thought wholly of her soul. When it seemed to abate, she returned to the worldly care of her head-dress, and addressed herself to me: ‘Dear madam, will you take care of this point? If it should be lost!—Ah, Lord, we shall all be lost!—Lord have mercy on my soul!—Pray, madam, take care of this head-dress.’ This easy transition from her soul to her head-dress, and the alternate agonies that both gave her, made it hard to determine which she thought of greatest value.”
In the constant imminence of life’s world perils Lady Mary had still by her this resource of merriment, which some call flippancy, but which, by any name, is not without its comforts.
True, such a glib tongue or pen is a dangerous play-thing and liable to abuse. Lady Mary’s own daughter said that her mother was too apt to set down people of a meek and gentle character for fools. People of any character, perhaps, whenever the wayward fancy struck her. She darted her shafts right and left. They stung and they clung, for they were barbed, if not poisoned. Sometimes they made near friends as cold as strangers. Too often they turned indifferent strangers into enemies. Enemies, too many, Lady Mary had all her life, and they seized on her weak points and amplified or invented ugly things about her till those who admire her most find defence somewhat difficult.
Yet she did not gloat over evil. “’Tis always a mortification to me to observe there is no perfection in humanity.” Her unkindness was far more on her tongue than in her heart. “This I know, that revenge has so few joys for me, I shall never lose so much time as to undertake it.” She had the keenest sense of human sorrow and suffering: “I think nothing so terrible as objects of misery, except one had the God-like attribute of being able to redress them.” What she could do to redress them she did. In her efforts to introduce inoculation for smallpox she surely proved herself one of the greatest benefactors of humanity. In many smaller things, also, she was kindly and sympathetic. And what pleases me most is that she makes little mention of such deeds herself. One is left to divine them from curt, half-sarcastic remarks in other connections. Thus, during her long residence in Italy, it appears that she ministered to her neighbors both in body and soul. “I do what good I am able in the village round me, which is a very large one; and have had so much success, that I am thought a great physician, and should be esteemed a saint if I went to mass.” Later she had much ado to keep the people from erecting a statue to her. But she shrank from love in Italy which was sure to breed laughter in England.
Also, even in her bursts of ill-nature, she had a certain reserve, a certain control, a certain sobriety. Indeed, she compliments herself, in old age, on her freedom from petulance. “To say truth, I think myself an uncommon kind of creature, being an old woman without superstition, peevishness, or censoriousness.” This is, perhaps, more than we could say for her. But in youth and age both she loved moderation and shunned excess. When she was twenty-three, she wrote, “I would throw off all partiality and passion, and be calm in my opinion.” She threw them off too much, she was too calm, she was cold. Walpole called her letters too womanish, but Lady Craven thought they must have been written by a man. Most readers will agree with Lady Craven. Even her vivacity lacks warmth. And it is here that she most falls short of the golden sunshine of Madame de Sévigné. Lady Mary is not quite the woman, even in her malice. Through her wit, through her thought, through her comment on life, even through her human relations runs a strain of something that was masculine.
Nowhere is this more curious and amusing than in her love and marriage. She was beautiful, and knew it, though the smallpox, by depriving her of eyelashes, had given a certain staring boldness to her eyes. When she was over thirty, she “led up a ball” and “believed in her conscience she made one of the best figures there.” When she was old, for all her philosophy, she did not look in a glass for eleven years. “The last reflexion I saw there was so disagreeable, I resolved to spare myself such mortifications for the future.”
She fed her youthful fancy with the vast fictions then in fashion and the result was a romantic head and a cool heart. These appear alternately in her strange correspondence with her lover and future husband, Edward Wortley Montagu. When they first met, the gentleman admired her learning—at fourteen! And Latinity seems to have drawn them together quite as much as love. There was a sister, Miss Anne Wortley, and sisters are of great use on such occasions. Lady Mary wrote to her in language of extravagant regard, and Miss Wortley wrote back—at her brother’s dictation. Then it became obviously simpler for the lovers to write direct.
Obstacles arose. Mr. Wortley Montagu would make no settlement on his wife. Lady Mary’s father would not hear of a marriage without one, and hunted up another suitor, rich—and unacceptable. There was doubt, debate, delay—and then an elopement. Lady Mary eloping! What elements of comedy! And her letters make it so.
That she loved her lover as much as she could love is evident. “My protestations of friendship are not like other people’s, I never speak but what I mean, and when I say I love, ’tis for ever.” “I am willing to abandon all conversation but yours. If you please I will never see another man. In short, I will part with anything for you, but you. I will not have you a month to lose you for the rest of my life.” “I would die to be secure of your heart, though but for a moment.”