The greater artificiality of arrangement at the Bluestocking assemblies appears from the pains taken by the hostess to so place her guests as to ensure a free flow of wit. In connection with Mrs. Montagu, reports are contradictory. Hannah More's correspondence informs us that the company used to split up into little groups of five or six; Fanny Burney on the contrary relates how the guests were seated in a semi-circle round the fire. Here again, Mrs. Vesey followed her individual inclinations, for the Bas-Bleu poem tells us how her "potent ward the circle broke", insisting on an easy informality in the grouping of her guests. Mrs. Ord seems to have preferred the later method of drawing chairs round a table in the centre.
Mrs. Montagu's early correspondence is full of wit and humour, and displays so much discrimination that we feel surprised the writer did not make her mark later in life as a novelist. The critical faculty she possessed in so eminent a degree fitted her for satire, the object being naturally contemporary society. In a letter, written when she was twenty, she gives a vivid description of fashionable life at Bath, ridiculing the emptiness of daily conversation and signalising the general depravity of morals. "How d'ye do?" prevails in the morning, and "What's trumps?" at night; the ladies' only topic is diseases, and the men are all bad. "There is not one good, no not one." She likewise freely vented her ridicule of overdone fashions, and descriptions like the following are by no means rare. "Lady P. and her two daughters make a very remarkable figure, and will ruin the poor mad woman of Tunbridge by out-doing her in dress. Such hats, capuchins, and short sacks as were never seen! One of the ladies looked like a state-bed running upon castors. She had robbed the valance and tester of a bed for a trimming."
Although her satire is chiefly directed against her own sex, she strongly protested against the opinion that women were morally inferior to men, whose insincere flattery was largely responsible for female frivolity.
One of her most constant friends and Platonic admirers was Mr. (afterwards Lord) Lyttleton, her vindication of whose memory against Dr. Johnson in later years led to the most famous of Bluestocking quarrels. In 1760, Lyttleton published his "Dialogues of the Dead"—referred to rather unkindly by Walpole as the "Dead Dialogues". The preface says that after the dialogues of Lucan, Fénelon and Fontenelle, English literature can boast only the learned dialogues of one Mr. Hurde, who takes living persons for his characters. The author proposes to take his cue from the history of all times and nations, opposing them to or comparing them with each other, "which is, perhaps, one of the most agreeable methods that can be employed of conveying to the mind any critical, moral or political observations". Needless to say, the dead are supposed to know all that has taken place since their decease.
Mr. Lyttelton goes on to say that the last three dialogues are by a different hand. "If the friend who favoured me with them should write any more, I shall think the public owes me a great obligation, for having excited a genius so capable of uniting delight with instruction, and giving to knowledge and virtue those graces which the wit of the age has too often employed all its skill to bestow upon folly and vice."
The above sufficiently denotes the character of the dialogues in which Mrs. Montagu—for the "different hand" was hers—had every opportunity to display her satirical vein. The numbers 27 and 28, of which the former satirises fashionable conduct and the latter the literature of gallantry, are illustrative of her opinions of contemporary female character. The characters of No. 27 are Mercury and a Modern Fine Lady, whose name is Mrs. Modish. The god comes to fetch her to the nether world, but she begs to be excused: "I am engaged, absolutely engaged". Mercury thinks she is referring to her duties to her husband and children, but he is quickly disillusioned. "Look on my chimneypiece, and you will see I was engaged to the play on Mondays, balls on Tuesdays, the Opera on Saturdays, and to card-assemblies the rest of the week, for two months to come; and it would be the rudest thing in the world not to keep my appointments. If you will stay with me till the summer season, I will wait on you with all my heart. Perhaps the Elysian Fields may be less detestable than the country in our world. Pray have you a fine Vauxhall and Ranelagh? I think I should not dislike drinking the Lethe waters when you have a full season." When Mercury objects that she has made pleasure the only object in her life, she replies that she has indeed made diversion her chief business, but has got no real pleasure out of it. For late hours and fatigue have given her the vapours and spoiled the natural cheerfulness of her temper. Her ambition to be thought "du bon ton" (which Mrs. Montagu explains in a note is French cant for the fashionable air of conversation and manners) has ruled her conduct. When asked by Mercury to define the term, Mrs. Modish is somewhat perplexed. "It is—I can never tell you what it is; but I will try to tell you what it is not. In conversation it is not wit, in manners it is not politeness, in behaviour it is not address; but it is a little like them all. It can only belong to people of a certain rank; who live in a certain manner, with certain persons, who have not certain virtues, and who have certain vices, and who inhabit a certain part of the town. Like a place by courtesy, it gets a higher rank than the person can claim, but which those who have a legal title to precedency dare not dispute for fear of being thought not to understand the rules of politeness."
Mercury finds fault with her for sacrificing all her real interests and duties to so arbitrary a thing as "bon ton". She asks him what he would have had her do? To which Mercury replies that her real business consisted in promoting her husband's happiness and devoting herself to the education of her children. It appears that their religion, sentiments and manners were to be learnt from a dancing-master, a music-master and a French governess. The result will be "wives without conjugal affection and mothers without maternal care." Mercury's final advice to the lady is to "remain on this side the Styx", and to wander about without end or aim, to look into the Elysian Fields, but never attempt to enter them, lest Minos should push her into Tartarus, "for duties neglected may bring on a sentence not much less severe than crimes committed."
The characters of the next dialogue are Plutarch, Charon and a modern bookseller. It contains a pointed satire on literary taste. It appears that the works of Plutarch do not command any sale whatever except to "a few pedants," but "The Lives of Highwaymen" have brought our bookseller a competent fortune, and the enormous sale of "The Lives of Men that never Lived" (by which the novel is meant) have set him up for life. This latest modern improvement in writing enables a man to "read all his life and have no knowledge at all." Modern books not only dispose to gallantry and coquetry, but give rules for them. Caesar's commentaries and the account of Xenophon's expedition are not more studied by military commanders than our novels are by the fair; to a different purpose indeed, for their military maxims teach to conquer, ours to yield; those inflame the vain and idle love of glory, these inculcate a noble contempt of reputation. If the women had not the friendly assistance of modern fiction, the bookseller fears they might long remain "in an insipid purity of mind; with a discouraging reserve of behaviour."
Plutarch is shocked at so much degeneracy of taste and wishes that for the sake of the good example he had expatiated more on the character of Lucretia and some other heroines. It grieves him to hear that chastity is no longer valued, and that crime and immorality, far from meeting with the punishment they deserve, are universally applauded. And yet it is not more than a century since a Frenchman wrote a much admired Life of Cyrus under the name of Artamenes[31], in which he ascribed to him far greater actions than those recorded of him by Xenophon and Herodotus. He goes on to praise the gallant days of chivalry, when authors made it their business to incite men to virtue by holding up as an example the deeds of fabulous heroes, whereas it seems to be the custom of a later age to incite them to vice by the history of fabulous scoundrels. "Men of fine imagination have soared into the regions of fancy to bring back Astrea: you go thither in search of Pandora, oh disgrace to letters! Oh shame to the Muses!"
The bookseller's feeble remonstrance that authors have to comply with the manners and disposition of those who are to read them, is met with the indignant remark that they should first of all correct the vices and follies of their age. To give examples of domestic virtue would surely be more useful to women than to inflame their minds with the deeds of great heroines. "True female praise arises not from the pursuit of public fame, but from an equal progress in the path marked out for them by their great Creator."