No. Lady Mary’s nature, like that of most of her contemporaries, was an artful invention of trim lawns, boxed walks, shady alleys with a statue at the end or a ruined temple on a turfy hill. Such gardens she liked well enough to stroll in; but the garden that charmed her most was the garden of her soul. “Whoever will cultivate their own mind, will find full employment. Every virtue does not only require great care in the planting, but as much daily solicitude in cherishing, as exotic fruits and flowers.... Add to this the search after knowledge (every branch of which is entertaining), and the longest life is too short for the pursuit of it.”
In that pursuit she never tired, from her early youth to her latest years. Indeed, among her contemporaries she had the reputation of a learning as masculine as some of her other tastes and habits. Here rumor probably exaggerated, as usual. She herself, in her many curious and interesting references to her education, disclaims anything of the sort. She was a bright, quick child, left to herself, with a passion for reading and many books accessible. She learned Latin, French, and Italian, and used them, but rather as a reader than as a scholar. Systematic intellectual training she could hardly have had or desired, merely that passionate delight in the things of the mind which is one of the greatest blessings that can be bestowed upon a human being. “If,” she says of her granddaughter, “she has the same inclination (I should say passion) for learning that I was born with, history, geography, and philosophy will furnish her materials to pass away cheerfully a longer life than is allotted to mortals.”
She had, however, little disposition to brag of her acquirements. On the contrary, it is singular with what insistence, bitterness almost, she urges that a woman should never, never allow herself to be thought wiser or more studious than her kind. Read, if you please; think, if you please; but keep it to yourself. Otherwise women will laugh at you and men avoid you. “I never studied anything in my life, and have always (at least from fifteen) thought the reputation of learning a misfortune to a woman.” And again, of her granddaughter, with a sharp tang that hints at many sad experiences, “The second caution to be given her is to conceal whatever learning she attains, with as much solicitude as she would hide crookedness or lameness; the parade of it can only serve to draw on her the envy, and consequently the most inveterate hatred, of all he and she fools, which will certainly be at least three parts in four of all her acquaintance.”
It is in this spirit that Lady Mary speaks very slightingly of her own poems and other writings; and indeed, they do not deserve much better. For us they are chiefly significant as emphasizing, in their coarseness and in some other peculiarities, that masculine strain which has been so apparent in many sides of her interesting personality.
As a critic she is more fruitful than as an author, and her remarks on contemporary writers have a singular vigor and independence. Johnson she recommends for the idle and ignorant. “Such gentle readers may be improved by a moral hint, which, though repeated over and over from generation to generation, they never heard in their lives.” Fielding and Smollett she adores—again the man’s taste, you see. On Clarissa she is charming. The man in her disapproves, derides. The woman weeps, “like any milkmaid of sixteen over the ballad of the Lady’s Fall.” But weeping, or laughing, or yawning, she reads, reads, reads. For she is a true lover of books. And she thus delightfully amplifies Montesquieu’s delightful eulogy, “Je n’ai jamais eu de chagrin qu’une demi-heure de lecture ne pouvait dissiper.” “I wish your daughters to resemble me in nothing but the love of reading, knowing, by experience, how far it is capable of softening the cruellest accidents of life; even the happiest cannot be passed over without many uneasy hours; and there is no remedy so easy as books, which, if they do not give cheerfulness, at least restore quiet to the most troubled mind. Those that fly to cards or company for relief, generally find they only exchange one misfortune for another.”
It must be by this time manifest that in the things of the spirit Lady Mary was as masculine and as stoical as in things of the flesh. In very early youth she translated Epictetus and he stood by her to the grave. Life has its vexations and many of them. People fret and torment, till even her equanimity sometimes gives way. “I am sick with vexation.” But, in general, she surmounts or forgets, now with an unpleasant, haughty fling of cynical scorn, “For my part, as it is my established opinion that this globe of ours is no better than a Holland cheese, and the walkers about in it mites, I possess my mind in patience, let what will happen; and should feel tolerably easy, though a great rat came and ate half of it up;” now, as in her very last years, with a gentler reminiscence of her heroic teacher: “In this world much must be suffered, and we ought all to follow the rule of Epictetus, ‘Bear and forbear.’”
As for nerves, vapors, melancholy, she has little experience of such feminine weakness, and no patience with it. “Mutability of sublunary things is the only melancholy reflection I have to make on my own account.” She seldom makes any other. “Strictly speaking, there is but one real evil—I mean acute pain; all other complaints are so considerably diminished by time, that it is plain the grief of it is owing to our passion, since the sensation of it vanishes when that is over.” If by chance any little wrinkle shows itself, sigh from some unknown despair, winter shadow of old age and failing strength and falling friends, let us smother it, strangle it, obliterate it, by a book, or a flower, or a smile. In these matters habit is everything.
And what was God in Lady Mary’s life? Apparently, little or nothing. As strangely little as in so many eighteenth century lives. There is no rebellion, no passionate debate of hope or doubt; simply, as it seems, very little thought given to the subject. Religion is a useful thing—for the million, oh, an excellent thing, under any garb, in Turkey, in Italy, in England. Respect it? Yes. Cherish it? Yes. Believe it? The question is—well, an impertinent one. And if it be said that there may have been a feeling that some things were too sacred to be spoken about, let anyone who can read Lady Mary’s letters through and retain that idea, cling to it for his comfort.
No, she lived like a gentlewoman, I had almost said like a gentleman, with a decent regard for the proprieties, a fundamental instinct of duty, a fair share of human charity, and an inexhaustible delight in the fleeting shows of time. And she died as she had lived. “Lady Mary Wortley, too, is departing,” says Horace Walpole. “She brought over a cancer in her breast, which she concealed till about six weeks ago. It burst and there are no hopes of her. She behaves with great fortitude, and says she has lived long enough.”
Altogether, not a winning figure, but a solid one, who, with many oddities, treads earth firmly, and makes life seem respectable, if not bewitching.