That Lady Mary was a good manager domestically hardly admits of doubt; but I find no evidence that she loved peculiarly feminine occupations, though she does somewhere remark that she considers certain types of learned ladies “much inferior to the plain sense of a cook maid, who can make a good pudding and keep the kitchen in good order.” Among her numerous benefactions in Italy was the teaching of her neighbors how to make bread and butter.
It is said that her servants loved her, not unnaturally, if she carried out her own maxim: “The small proportion of authority that has fallen to my share (only over a few children and servants) has always been a burden, ... and I believe every one finds it so who acts from a maxim ... that whoever is under my power is under my protection.” She was a natural aristocrat, however, both socially and politically, and any leveling tendencies that she may have cherished in the ardor of youth, vanished entirely with years and experience. “Was it possible for me to elevate anybody from the station in which they were born, I now would not do it: perhaps it is a rebellion against that Providence that has placed them; all we ought to do is to endeavour to make them easy in the rank assigned them.” And elsewhere, in a much more elaborate passage, she expresses herself with a deliberate haughtiness of rank and privilege which has rarely been surpassed. In her youth, she says, silly prejudice taught her that she was to treat no one as an inferior. But she has learned better and come to see that such a notion made her “admit many familiar acquaintances, of which I have heartily repented every one, and the greatest examples I have known of honor and integrity have been among those of the highest birth and fortunes.” The English tendency to mingle classes and level distinctions will, she believes, have some day fatal consequences. How curious, in so keen a wit, the failure to foresee that just this English social elasticity would avert the terrible disaster which was to befall the neat gradations of French order and system!
Lady Mary was not only practical in her household, but in all the other common concerns of life. Few women have pushed their husbands on in the world with more vigorous energy than is shown in the letters she writes to Mr. Wortley Montagu, urging him to drop his diffidence and claim what he deserves. “No modest man ever did, or ever will, make his fortune.”
As regards money, also, she was eminently a woman of business—too eminently, say her enemies. One reason alleged for her quarrel with Pope is his well-meant advice which brought her large losses in South Sea speculation. However much one may like and admire her, it is impossible wholly to explain away Walpole’s picture of her sordid avarice, which cannot be omitted, though hideous. “Lady Mary Wortley is arrived; I have seen her; I think her avarice, her dirt, and her vivacity are all increased. Her dress, like her languages, is a galimatias of several countries, the groundwork, rags; and the embroidery nastiness. She wears no cap, no handkerchief, no gown, no petticoat, no shoes. An old black-laced hood represents the first; the fur of a horseman’s coat, which replaces the third, serves for the second; a dimity petticoat is deputy, and officiates for the fourth; and slippers act the part of the last.”
It is easy to see here the brush of hatred deepening the colors; but hatred can hardly have invented the whole. Yet all the references to money matters in Lady Mary’s letters are sane and commendable. She hates poverty, and she hates extravagance as the road to poverty, and she cherishes thrift as the assurance of independence and comfort. That sort of lavish living which is certain to end in suffering for self and others she condemns bitterly. Will any one say she can condemn it too bitterly? “He lives upon rapine—I mean running in debt to poor people, who perhaps he will never be able to pay.” But I do not find that she cherishes money for itself. We should seek riches, she says, but why? “As the world is, and will be, ’tis a sort of duty to be rich, that it may be in one’s power to do good, riches being another word for power.” With which compare the remark of Gray, a man surely not liable to the charge of avarice: “It is a striking thing that one can’t only not live as one pleases, but where and with whom one pleases, without money. Swift somewhere says, that money is liberty; and I fear money is friendship, too, and society, and almost every external blessing. It is a great, though ill-natured, comfort, to see most of those who have it in plenty, without pleasure, without liberty, and without friends.”
Nevertheless, it must be admitted that in these questions of conduct Lady Mary does not err on the side of enthusiasm. In a long and curious passage she enlarges on the virtues of her favorite model—Atticus, the typical trimmer and opportunist, who lived in one of the greatest crises of the world, and weathered it safe and rich, who had many friends and served many and betrayed none, but did not think any cause good enough to die for.
As regards social life and general human relations, it is very much the same. Lady Mary had vast acquaintance. I do not find that she had many friends, either dear or intimate. Of Lady Oxford she does, indeed, always speak with deep affection. And she says of herself, no doubt truly: “I have a constancy in my nature that makes me always remember my old friends.” Also her love of a snapping exchange of wit made her appreciate conversation. “You know I have ever been of opinion that a chosen conversation composed of a few that one esteems is the greatest happiness of life.” Yet she was too full of resources to need people, too critical to love people, too little sympathetic to pity people. And in one of the lightning sentences of self-revelation she shows a temperament not perfectly endowed by heaven for friendship: “I manage my friends with such a strong yet with a gentle hand, that they are both willing to do whatever I have a mind to.”
But, if she did not love mankind, she found them endlessly amusing, a perpetual food for observation and curiosity. And the wandering life she led nourished this taste to the fullest degree. “It was a violent transition from your palace and company to be locked up all day with my chambermaid, and sleep at night in a hovel; but my whole life has been in the Pindaric style.” It is this love of diversity, this keen sense of the human in all its phases, which give zest to her Turkish letters and the record of wanderings and hardships which might not now be encountered in a journey to the Pole. But long wanderings and strange faces are not necessary for the naturalist of souls who can find the ugliest weeds and tenderest flowers at his own front door. Lady Mary was never tired of studying souls and thought highly of her own discernment in them. “I have seldom been mistaken in my first judgment of those I thought it worth while to consider.” This confidence I am sorry to find in her; for I have always believed it a good rule that those who asserted their sure judgment of men knew little about them. True insight is more modest. At any rate, mistaken or not, she found the varied spectacle of human action endlessly diverting and again and again recurs to the charm of it: “I endeavour upon this occasion to do as I have hitherto done in all the odd turns of my life; turn them, if I can, to my diversion.” “I own I enjoy vast delight in the folly of mankind; and, God be praised, that is an inexhaustible source of entertainment.”
Thus she could always amuse herself with men and women. At the same time, she could amuse herself without them and needed neither courtship nor cards nor gossip to keep her heart at ease. It is true that in youth she knew youth’s restlessness, and that haunting dread, chronic to some souls, which fills one day with anxiety as to what may fill the next. To Mrs. Hewet she writes: “Be so good as never to read a letter of mine but in one of those minutes when you are entirely alone, weary of everything, and inquiète to think of what you shall do next. All people who live in the country must have some of those minutes.” But time soothes this and makes the present seem so insufficient that the poor shreds of life remaining can never quite eke it out. “I have now lived almost seven years in a stricter retirement than yours in the Isle of Bute, and can assure you, I have never had half an hour heavy on my hands, for want of something to do.”
Her country life did not, indeed, include much ecstasy over the natural world. She was born too early for Rousseau and it is doubtful whether high romance could ever have seriously appealed to her. She finds Venice a gay social centre. Of its poetry, its mystery, its moonlight, never a word. Perhaps these did not exist before Byron. On the Alps and their sublimity she has as delightful a phrase as the whole eighteenth century can furnish (italics mine): “The prodigious prospect of mountains covered with eternal snow, clouds hanging far below our feet, and the vast cascades tumbling down the rocks with a confused roaring, would have been solemnly entertaining to me, if I had suffered less from the extreme cold that reigns here.” If that is not Salvator Rosa in little, what is? I know few things better, unless it be Ovid’s Nile jocose, gamesome Nile.