SOURCE: West, Rebecca. “Elizabeth Montagu (1720-1800).” In From Anne to Victoria: Essays by Various Hands, edited by Bonamy Dobrée, pp. 164-87. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, Inc., 1967.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1937, West offers a critical overview of Montagu's life and works.]

In every age there are certain women who, because they are feminine without being womanly, because they conform completely to the masculine notion of what a woman should be and disregard all instructions from their own nature, enjoy great material success yet leave no sense of triumph. This class was conspicuously represented in eighteenth-century England by Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu, the Queen of the Blue Stockings. The world put itself out to go her way. She was extremely rich; when she built the great house which still stands across the north-west corner of Portman Square, she paid for it out of income. All her life long, and she lived for eighty years, she never lacked the company of amusing acquaintances and affectionate friends, and because an international reputation rewarded her extravagantly for her intellectual gifts, which were, in fact, negligible, she could know whomsoever she chose out of all Europe. It is a life that knew only once the touch of defeat, yet it radiates a low degree of light and heat. It dispenses through the ages hardly more warmth than chandeliers blazing away behind the closed windows of a great house; and even in its own day it could not relieve Mrs. Montagu herself from a sensation of debilitating chill. For what saves her record from being intolerable is that she was the first to think it so.

From the first her circumstances were favourable. She was born in 1720, fourth of the twelve children, nine of whom lived to grow up, born to a country gentleman named Matthew Robinson by his wife, an heiress named Elizabeth Drake, whom he had married when he was eighteen. They were both advantageously connected. One of Elizabeth's brothers inherited the Barony of Rokeby from Richard Robinson, Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of Ireland; and her father was close kin to “Long” Sir Thomas Robinson, of whom Chesterfield wrote:

Unlike my subject will I make my song,
It shall be witty, and it shan't be long,

and of whom Walpole maliciously suggested that he was appointed to the Governorship of Barbadoes because a member of the Government wanted to rent his house. Elizabeth's mother belonged to an established Kentish family from which she inherited Mount Morris, near Hythe, a pleasant seat where the Robinsons spent most of their time, though her husband had three other estates, two in Yorkshire and one in Cambridgeshire.

Though Elizabeth was brought up in the country there was nothing bumpkinish about her upbringing. Her father made no secret that he would have lived in London had it not been that he needed to manage his lands and consider the interests of his young family, and that he regarded this as the natural preference of any sensible man. He was, moreover, something of a dilettante, being one of the innumerable members of the English governing classes who have been said by their relatives to have “acquired so great a proficiency as to excel most of the professed artists of his day in landscape”, and he was considered a wit, with a turn for sarcasm and a languid inclination towards free thought. His children were not brought up to be very pious, though they received an excellent education. The brothers were taught enough to put them on the road to being sound scholars at Cambridge, and their sisters shared in their studies sufficiently to make them what would have counted in any age as very well-read women. Elizabeth's interest in things of the mind was still further stimulated by her grandmother's second husband, Dr. Conyers Middleton, fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and University Librarian. He believed the child a genius and tried to train her intellect from the tenderest age by making her listen attentively to the conversation of his learned friends. This is represented by those relatives of Mrs. Montagu who have been her chief biographers as a bland baptism in the Pierian spring; but it must be remembered that this is the same Dr. Middleton who wrote a famous pamphlet: A true account of the Present State of Trinity College, Cambridge, under the Oppressive Government of their Master, Richard Bentley, D.D., with the aim “to give a better Light into the general Character of the Man, which cannot be perfectly drawn in short, than in what was said of him the other Day, by a Gentleman in Conversation, that he is one of the greatest Savages these latter Ages have produced.” He also was inclined to free thought, being more of a deist than most people thought a clergyman should be.

Elizabeth grew up, therefore, with a full knowledge of what strands in life were worth taking hold of, if one wanted permanent dignity and interest. From her earliest years she had the intention of distinguishing herself socially and intellectually. She had to help her, as well as her family connections, a certain amount of prettiness, as much as comes from a combination of dark hair, blue eyes, and a brilliant complexion. We are forbidden to credit her with more by the testimony of her nephew, who, aching and straining with domestic piety, can only declare, “she was of middle stature, and stooped a little, which gave an air of modesty to her countenance, in which the features were otherwise so strongly marked as to express an elevation of sentiment befitting the most exalted condition.” She was also gifted with great mental and physical vitality, which made her able to read books and write letters all day and dance all night. But she owed most of her advancement to that irrational disposition of humanity to feel coldness and impatience towards people who betray possession of the power to love, and to welcome warmly those whose most salient characteristic is indifference to their fellow-creatures. From first to last her writings show an inherent lack of geniality. She was not without deep founts of feeling, but for all practical purposes they were sealed. Her attitude to people whom she met casually was gibing and incurious, and though in later life she was slowly and ponderously to build up a number of friendships, she was apt to imply that her friends had earned their position by successfully discharging an onus of proving themselves free from certain vices and fully inoculated with certain virtues. But all her life long the world denied her nothing that was in its power to give her.

She entered social life at the very early age that was then permitted; she was at Canterbury Races and Assembly before she was twelve, and at Tunbridge Wells a year later. If she suffered any defeats such as awkward youth usually experiences, she would have recorded them, for she was not insensitive and was strictly honest. But nobody seems to have done other than admire her, and very early she made a useful friendship with Lady Margaret Cavendish Harley, Lord Oxford's daughter, a girl just six years her senior, who at twenty married the Duke of Portland. Both the young Duchess and her husband were deeply fond of their dear “Fidget” and were of great service to her. “You know,” Elizabeth wrote to her father when she was seventeen, “this year I am to be introduced by the Duchess to the best company in the town, and when she lies in, am both to receive in form with her all her visits as Lady Bell used to do on that occasion, all the people of quality of both sexes that are in London, and I must be in full dress, and shall go about with her all the winter, therefore a suit of cloathes will be necessary for me, the value of which I submit to give you.” After moving happily between London, the spas, her father's country estates, and the Duchess's seat, Bulstrode, until she was twenty-two, she resolved to marry. It is certain that she had several suitors to choose from, and that some among these were deeply and passionately in love with her. She decided on a very wealthy Member of Parliament, named Mr. Edward Montagu, grandson of the great Earl of Sandwich who was Lord High Admiral of the Fleet to Charles II, and cousin to the Earl of Halifax and the Duke of Montagu. He was twenty-nine years older than she was, but he was a man of great good will and considerable intellectual gifts, and she felt as warmly towards him as she ever did towards any man; for she records that she never fell in love. Until senility fell upon him he never failed in generosity towards her.

A year after Mrs. Montagu's marriage she gave birth to a son. It is possible that had he not died in his second year she might have made a very different figure in the world. Though she objected to child-birth with a definiteness rare in women of that time, she adored the boy and wrote of him with a selfless joy which nothing else evoked in her. She who could write copiously on any subject under the sun could write hardly a word about his death; and in a will made over thirty years afterwards she ordered that when she came to be buried he should be taken from his little grave and laid beside her. It is probable that the world never saw a mature Mrs. Montagu, and that at the period when she should have left her immaturity behind her she was confirmed in it for ever, because the mainspring of her character had been broken by shock. After her loss she went back and continued to carry out the programme of advancement in the social and literary worlds which she had conceived when a child. Her letters to the Duchess of Portland became longer and more portentous than ever, young sermons, embryo contributions to an encyclopædia; and they were but a portion of her fertility. She cast a network of correspondence over Great Britain, and by the time she had reached middle life she was regularly exchanging voluminous letters with the “good” Lord Lyttelton; with the first Earl of Bath, that delightful old man who had been first the friend and then the foe of Walpole; with the Reverend Gilbert West, the translator of Pindar and imitator of Spenser; with Mrs. Vesey, the Irish hostess known as the Sylph, whom the world and Laurence Sterne loved none the less because her mind was slightly deranged; with Dr. Messenger Mounsey, the eccentric physician who was licensed buffoon to a group of great ladies; and with Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, the hearty old soul who translated Epictetus and wrote the ode to wisdom used by Richardson in Clarissa. These were only her chief correspondents, grandees of an extensive society. There were scores more, and all alike rejoiced in their privileges. Gilbert West showed a copy of her letter on Warburton's attack on Bolingbroke to the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was deeply impressed and desired a copy; Lord Bath and Lord Lyttelton urged her to publish her letters; Mrs. Carter filled page after page during three decades recommending her qualities to the posthumous daughter of the second son of the Bishop of Durham. Thus was built up a reputation as solid as her fortune.

Yet Mrs. Montagu was not one of the world's great letter-writers. She was for the most part, indeed, not a tolerable letter-writer at all. Only when something had pricked her down to the level of original sin did she write really well and wittily. Occasion vouchsafed her the strength to describe the sweetness of Mrs. Vesey in these acid terms, “Even Samuel Johnson was seldom brutally rude in her society,” and to coin an unforgettable image of indecorum in the perfectly decorous phrase, written regarding Miss Chudleigh's appearance at a masquerade, “She was Iphigenia for the sacrifice, but was so naked, the High Priest might easily inspect the entrails of the victim;” and under the stress of family feeling she could rise to an eloquence that recalls King Lear. But at all other times she wrote a prolix, colourless and empty style, which can interest us to-day only as it illustrates the calamitous change that befell our language at the beginning of the eighteenth century. In earlier ages people seemed to be beating out English as they felt the need of it to express their ideas and desires, but now the leisured classes were so excessively literate that the common consciousness bore a burden of phrases far beyond what they could possibly require for the purposes of communication. Writers had no longer the air of seeking for words. Rather it was as if words had found them out and were threatening smotheration if they were not guided down the conduit of some recognized literary form. Readers were in the position of people who have the radio turned on all day, and so are miserable if they find themselves in silence and must whistle or sing. Mrs. Montagu was something of a writer and very much of a reader, so when Mr. Gilbert West stocked his garden with evergreens, it was a relief for her to write:

“You introduce me to a known world when you carry me into a garden planted with firs and laurel, and you offer them to me for subjects of moral reflections, for which, as you rightly judge, I have by nature and circumstances, all the leisure and dulness from whence they usually proceed. You seem so satisfied in your choice of plants, it would be barbarous to say anything against so well-weighted an opinion, and perhaps, considering how small a part of time they share, ‘That are both wonderous sweet and fair,’ you may do best to prefer the lasting to the delicate beauties of nature: however, I am far from thinking, as you seem to do, that you have triumphed over the power of Time. You have deferred to him as men do to a tyrant in a rigorous government, where the penalty of sumptuary laws imposes an involuntary temperance in luxury and ornament, and they can escape the fine only by homely plainness and rigid simplicity. There are animals and vegetables whose existence …”

And so on, and so on, for pages. Nor did she write more tolerably when she was dealing with more learned matters. Though she was extremely well-read in history and philosophy her mind never grasped the subject-matter of these sciences, though she could at times pass a shrewd enough judgment on the temper and dialectics of a particular work. Her intellectual limitations are curiously exposed by a letter she wrote to “the good” Lord Lyttelton's son, Tom, when he went up to Oxford, attempting, vainly, since the lad was soon to earn the name of “the bad” Lord Lyttelton, to indicate the proper lines of his moral and intellectual development. On such a challenging occasion she had nothing to produce except a string of platitudes.

Mrs. Montagu made only two incursions into other literary forms than the letter. One of these, her contributions to “the good” Lord Lyttelton's Dialogues of the Dead, is on the same level as her letters. The other, an essay on Shakespeare, is a much better piece of work. It was an intervention in that amazing controversy which convulsed literary France and England for a generation, did a great deal of harm by starting off the debate between classicism and romanticism at a time when the debaters were in a state of confusion regarding their terms, and did no good whatsoever except to demonstrate what an odd fish a great man can be. Voltaire had furnished a supreme proof of his genius by effectively plagiarizing the works of Shakespeare from an understanding and knowledge of them so elementary that he believed Falstaff to have been a Lord Chief Justice. At the same time he conceived against Shakespeare one of those long, bickering, unscrupulous hatreds which were as hobbies to him; and just as when he attacked Pascal he became at every turn of the argument more recognizably the Pascalian man, so when he attacked Shakespeare he appeared every minute more like an amalgam of Shakespearian character, a pedant run mad, a winking snapper-up of unconsidered trifles, a fantastical duke of dark corners. It was a strange performance, and when Dr. Johnson, after long delays, brought out his edition of Shakespeare he rebuked Voltaire in the preface, and Voltaire took vengeance on him in his essay on Dramatic Art in his Dictionary. Dr. Johnson never replied, but Mrs. Montagu took the matter in hand by publishing anonymously An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare, compared with the Greek and French dramatic poets, with some remarks upon the misrepresentations of Monsieur de Voltaire.

Though this is not as good a book as it was said to be at the time of its publication, it is much better than a great many people have pretended since. It is important to note that it was not a mere desire to stand on the side of accepted opinion which made her take up the challenge for Shakespeare. She was less swayed by such considerations than one might suppose. For example, the piety which she constantly expresses in her letters sounds conventional, but it is actually proof of an independent spirit; for her husband, like her father and her stepfather, was inclined to free thought. She was as hardy in her defence of Shakespeare, since a great many of the writers with whom she would have liked to rank as an equal, such as Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke, Chesterfield, and David Hume, regarded him as either unimportant or as an inspired barbarian. Had she joined them in their shuddering rejection, it might have given her a pleasantly eclectic reputation. But she owned to her real opinions and made a very creditable show in justifying them. It is true that she makes some concessions to the legend of Shakespeare's barbarism, but it must be remembered that the Georgians were genuinely shocked by the Elizabethans, though they were certainly under a misapprehension regarding the reason for their emotions. It cannot really have been Shakespeare's lack of the classical spirit which distressed Mr. Aaron Hill, whose drama, Hengist and Horsa, ends in a scene laid in a Druidical grove, where Merlin shows Hengist and Vortigern a vision of the future glories of English History, culminating in the “whole present Royal Family, surrounded above with angels, smiling and pointing thro' clouds; from the midst of which a beam of light shoots down, over the head of the King.” Yet Mr. Hill was really distressed by something in Shakespeare, and so too, probably, was Mrs. Montagu.

But she soon got over that emotion, and settled down to a treatment of her subject which, even when compared with Dr. Johnson's Preface, is not at all contemptible. It is, of course, pompously and diffusely written, and the examination of Corneille is hardly fair, since it dwells too much on his least important works. But it contains a very workmanlike exposure of Voltaire's inaccuracies and mistranslations. In the exegetical passages there are hardly any fatuities to match Dr. Johnson's opinion that in Shakespeare's “tragick scenes there is always something wanting”, or that Catherine of Aragon's last speech is “above any other part of Shakespeare's tragedies”, and his blindness to the poetic value of Ariel's songs and Antony and Cleopatra. Her discussion of Macbeth is very much more intelligent than his, and in her chapter on “Preternatural Beings” she actually begins to discuss what Herder was discussing in Germany, on such an infinitely higher critical level than herself and her friends that it seems extraordinary they were contemporaries: the place of myth in poetry. She is not to be despised when she points out the immense advantage enjoyed by poets who write of myths in which they and their hearers believe, and the diminution in poetic intensity caused by the change from fable to allegory which is bound to accompany an advance towards rationalism. Dr. Johnson said the worst about her book when he said that it was nearly impossible to get through it. There is certainly a nucleus of critical thought in it which makes it regrettable that Mrs. Montagu did not write on behalf of Shakespeare as lucidly and tersely as when she spoke for him. For she scored an indisputable point when, on a visit to Paris, she was shown the letter to d'Argental in which Voltaire alluded to Shakespeare as “un énorme fumier”, and she observed that “ce malheureux fumier avait engraissé une terre ingrate”.

But neither Mrs. Montagu's spoken wit nor her written ponderousness accounted for her authority over society. The basis of that was her great wealth. Mr. Montagu had been a rich man when she married him, and shortly afterwards Chancery made him the guardian and trustee of his cousin, John Rogers, a lunatic with immense estates in Northumberland that included several collieries. These estates, which had for years been derelict, were restored to order by Mr. Montagu's able management; and when John Rogers died, fifteen years later, Mr. Montagu acquired “half the estate by descent, a share by testamentary disposition, and a part by purchase”. On hearing the news Mrs. Montagu wrote to him, with an air of exclusively moral satisfaction which is not quite decent: “It gives me pleasure to think I shall see you with unblemished integrity and unsoiled with unjust gain, enjoying that affluence many purchase with the loss of honesty and honour.” When he died in 1775 all that affluence, save for bequests amounting to a few thousand pounds, came to his widow. Such wealth would by itself command the respect of any community; and Mrs. Montagu laid hers out in ways that impressed both the worldly and the serious.

A few years after her marriage she moved from her husband's old house in Dover Street to a fine newly-built house in Hill Street, Berkeley Square, which was decorated in the Chinese taste while that was the fashion, and was then repainted with amoretti by the brothers Adam. “Mrs. Montagu received me with the most encouraging kindness,” wrote Hannah More. “She is not only the finest genius, but the finest lady I ever saw; she lives in the highest style of magnificence; her apartments are in the most splendid taste; but what baubles are these when speaking of a Montagu!” In those days she gave receptions that lasted from eleven in the morning till eleven at night, and called together more than a hundred guests at a time, and in her widowhood her hospitality became still more sumptuous. Stuart built her her great house in Portman Square, famous for its pillared hall and its room hung with birds' feathers, and there the guests came by the five hundred, and the Queen and six princesses sat down to one o'clock breakfast. All this dazzled the worldly; and at the same time she pleased the serious by her respect for them, and her determination to incorporate them into her social life. If she had to have her Queen and her princesses, she also had to have her Dr. Johnson and her Sir Joshua Reynolds. Even she had to have her Mrs. Carter and her Hannah More, for she was never more obstinate than in her flouting of the English tradition that intellectual distinction is an asset to a man and a handicap to a woman. She filled her rooms with wits of both sexes, forbade them to follow the custom of separating into two groups on opposite sides of the room, banished cards, and made them talk. These parties, and those like them which were given by Mrs. Vesey and other of her close friends, were called the meetings of the Blue Stockings' Club. It is said that they received that title when the naturalist, Benjamin Stillingfleet, a delightful being who had struggled against all forms of misery without losing his sweetness, pleaded the lack of evening clothes as a reason for not accepting one of Mrs. Vesey's invitations; for she answered him, drawing out of her tumbled mind a seventeenth century phrase alluding to puritanical homeliness of attire, “Pho, pho! Don't mind dress! Come in your blue stockings!” Whether the story be true or not, it aptly illustrates the character of these gatherings, which was easy and cheerfully contemptuous of materialistic standards. By this characteristic dualism of routs and Blue Stocking parties, of conformity and unconventionality, Mrs. Montagu built up an influence unique in breadth of scope, and made an honourable impress on social tradition.

But she hoped that the intellectual value of these gatherings would be high; and that it was not can be seen by a glance at those which were taking place at the same time in Paris under like female dominance. A sensible contemporary observer, Sir Nathaniel Wraxall, who had opportunities of comparing Mrs. Montagu with Madame du Deffand, Madame Geoffrin, and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, formed the opinion that, “neither in the period of its duration, nor in the number, merit, or intellectual eminence of the principal members, could the English society be held up on any parity with that of France.” The time and place were against the Blue Stocking parties, working on the guests and on the hostess alike. Even the ablest Englishmen loved inordinately to gamble and to drink; for that they would run from any party to their clubs. Also, the art of general conversation was cultivated and enjoyed in France, and a band of friends could arrange to meet one or two days a week in confidence that sufficiently serious and amusing topics would be thrashed out in concert; while in London a party was a matter of jostling contacts and fortuitous groups, and a regular succession of them could not be trusted to provide a continuous, developing interest. But even more important, a factor of differentiation lay in the personalities of the hostesses. Madame du Deffand and Madame Geoffrin and Julie de Lespinasse were women; they were of unequal moral value, and one of them was horrible, but they were all women. Mrs. Montagu and Mrs. Vesey and Hannah More and Elizabeth Carter and Fanny Burney were not. There is hardly a line written by Madame du Deffand or a phrase uttered by Madame Geoffrin, and not a twist or turn in the untrue lover's knot of Julie de Lespinasse's life, which could possibly be ascribed to a man. But in all their works and ways the Englishwomen might have been youths seeking to please parents and tutors by fidelity to the programme laid down for them. The poor Blue Stockings had created themselves according to the image of the female presented to them as a pattern by male opinion, and they can have been hardly more inspiring companions than a pile of neat copy-books. The Frenchwomen had not unsexed themselves, and they could meet their visitors with the strength and attraction that proceeds from the reality of womanhood.

The time and the place were very powerful enemies of Mrs. Montagu. Had she lived elsewhere and in another age, it might well have been that her finest attribute would not have so closely resembled a vice that all her judges, and possibly herself, were thrown into confusion. She expressed this essential part of her character in a phrase she used when she wrote to Mrs. Vesey about Mrs. Thrale's marriage to Piozzi: “She has very uncommon parts, but certainly never appeared a Person of sound understanding; who ever possesses that blessing never is guilty of absurd conduct, or does anything which the world calls strange.” At first sight this looks simply a case of adherence to the system of prudential morality, so much more prudent than moral, which was enjoined on women of that time with a cynicism more disagreeable than much which has excited the utmost wrath of the historians. Countless moralists have reproached Lord Chesterfield for informing his son that a love-affair with a woman of the world would improve his manners; but few have denounced his grandfather, Lord Halifax, for laying down laws in his “Advice to a daughter”, which would deny the well-bred woman none of the experiences of a prostitute save those which might possibly humanize her. Mrs. Montagu had been brought up in an atmosphere poisoned by such prescriptions, and she was deeply tainted by them. If she did not believe that a woman should live wholly without principle and think no ruse illegitimate if it gained her public reputation, she did believe that a woman should never utter what she found in her heart if it was critical of existing institutions or altered the status quo of art and thought as men had made them. But in her objection to “anything which the World calls strange” she was writing not only as a cringing woman, but also as a sane and energetic human being who was determined to be sensible in an age which was pitifully lacking in sense. It was that determination which reinforced the authority of her wealth, and which makes her character profoundly respectable.

The eighteenth century deserved to be called the Age of Reason only when it had its head in its books, for in its domestic relationships and its economic affairs it practised the purest folly. As we turn over the pages of letters and memoirs belonging to that time, we find that, although the persons involved incessantly utter the most prudent and practical maxims, their model of conduct appears to have been the goose. If we take an example at hazard, and look into the life of Mrs. Delany, one of Mrs. Montagu's most charming friends, we must be appalled by the wild silliness of the actions which conditioned her life. When she was a girl of fifteen, so exquisite that she could have had half the world as her suitors, her uncle, Lord Lansdowne, who was apparently very fond of her, married her off for no ascertainable reason to a drunken and eccentric country squire of sixty, and took no precautions to see that the old man left her his money; and when she married Swift's friend, Dr. Delany, they became involved in interminable legal difficulties because from sheer ineptitude he had destroyed the marriage settlement of his first wife. This is the age of monstrous and causeless family quarrels; of elopements so frivolous that the lovers separated in a few weeks and so catastrophic that they brought historic houses to misery; and, above all, of vast and imbecile financial recklessness. Great men and little alike lost immense fortunes at the gaming tables: Charles James Fox incurred a debt of £140,000, Chesterfield had to recoup himself for his ill-luck by his undelectable marriage, countless lordlings lost ten and fifteen thousand pounds in an evening. Because of these and other improvidences families that had been famous and that were to be so again, lay in sluttish ruin; and Mrs. Montagu, who wanted the world to be proud and glittering, perceived the horror of it. In 1767 she writes of a visit to Hatfield:

“… The fate of the Cecil family affects one disagreeably as their Seat, one feels for it a pity mixed with contempt and loathing. To see the heir of that Burleigh who so long held the reins of government now proud to drive a pair of coach horses is horrible. In this great Seat there are only two or three inhabitants. I observed a guitar lying in a window, and the maid who shews the house, told me it was played on by the young Lady who was Housekeeper, and I observed a dumb waiter with three bottles of wine, or gin perhaps, proposed for the same young Lady's dinner. Horses and Strumpets are the noble Earl's noble delight. The Park is the only spot in all Hertfordshire that is not green, it betrays the carelessness and poverty of the owner. Thus, alas, terminates Burleighs wisdom, Elizabeths power, the pilfering of the Treasury, and the extortions of the Star Chamber.”

But Mrs. Montagu was even more powerfully affected by a certain manifestation of the irresponsibility of the privileged classes in that age which frequently brought misery on old and helpless people. Her letters contain repeated references to the shamefully careless wills left by her wealthy contemporaries. The Duchess of Portland, who had been her friend from girlhood, muddled her fortune to the edge of bankruptcy and left no legacy to her dependent, the charming Mrs. Delany, then eighty-five years old. Lord Bath, with an estate consisting of over twelve hundred thousand pounds in land and money, and four hundred thousand pounds in cash, stocks and mortgage, left nothing to his many needy relations and friends and handed it almost intact to his aged brother. “The legacies he left were trifling, for in truth he cared for nobody;” wrote Lord Chesterfield, “the words give and bequeath were too shocking for him to repeat and so he left all, in one word, to his brother.” But Lord Chesterfield's own will was remarkable for its tasteless and illegal treatment of his wife and its crazily inadequate provision for servants of whom he was sincerely fond. This testamentary dementia operated even in Mrs. Montagu's own very united family. When her cousin, the Primate of Ireland, died he disinherited the young man who was to inherit from him the Barony of Rokeby, for the unprimatical reason that he had advised the lad “to go to White's Coffee House, as he wd there meet young men of fashion,” and the young man had refused on the ground that “they were Cardplayers, it made it so dull he could not do it”. The Primate's brother, Long Sir Thomas Robinson, did his heirs an even worse mischief by dissipating his fortune till he was obliged to sell the Yorkshire estate which had been in the family two hundred and fifty years.

Mrs. Montagu was, therefore, not bending before the wind of fashion when she professed the gospel of good sense and moderation, but breasting a running tide; and she practised what she preached with greater success than is usual. She wrote once that her letters were ever “fond to spread friendships and to cover heats”, and she could have made the same claim for her social and intimate relationships. In an age which was as coarse as it was fine, which was as boisterous in its brawling as it was delicate in its courtesy, she sustained the peace of drawing-rooms. In spite of a superb equipment for conducting feuds, the nearest she ever came to one was her excessive, but not lasting or envenomed, resentment against Dr. Samuel Johnson, for his patronizing remarks about Lord Lyttelton in his Lives of the Poets. Her marriage was an unremitting attempt to guarantee two people tranquillity and comfort, good fame and a sense of honourable achievement, by excluding from their lives all emotions but sage benevolence towards each other and the outer world. There exist the letters in which she and Mr. Montagu discussed whether she should pay her respects at Court or sacrifice this social advantage out of regard for his career as a Whig member of Parliament; and these show with what patience and delicacy these people considered how to safeguard their relationship from rage and reproach.

But even more patient and delicate was Mrs. Montagu's repudiation of the financial recklessness common in her kind. She had always been a model housewife, and at her country house, Sandleford, describes herself as being “deep in accounts” and “travelling from tubs of soap to firkins of butter, and from thence to chaldrons of coal”; and that this was not meanness but a way of handsomeness is proved by the happiness her guests found in staying with her. When her husband inherited the Rogers estate she helped him in the heavy task of bringing it back to order, and after his death she managed it alone with the greatest possible wisdom, facing and solving both agricultural and industrial problems. Then, as always, she kept faith in her disposal of it with her conviction that “it is the duty of the rich to justify the ways of God to Man by imparting to unendow'd merit some of their abundance”. It is true that she showed an ineffective regret that boys of seven were working in the collieries from which she drew her fortune, but nobody can be blamed for not being in advance of the social ideas of their time. One of her first acts after she became a widow was to give allowances to Dr. Johnson's blind friend, Miss Anna Williams, and to Mrs. Carter, for whom she had not been able to provide before because Mr. Montagu, with a solitary gesture of preference for the orthodox conception of muliebrity, had always disliked the worthy female scholar. This was but a trifle in that steady munificence which made Dr. Johnson reply, when Boswell jeered at it as a means of self-advertisement: “I have seen no beings who do so much good from benevolence as she does from whatever motive.” It took a charming form in her annual May Day feast for the little chimneysweeps, who could come to the “Palace in Portman Square” any time from one o'clock to four and sit at tables in the garden eating beef and pudding; but it often took less spectacular and more thoughtful and enduring form in housing schemes and works for the unemployed. Indeed, she built her fortune into a solid edifice which could repel criticism from both the economic and moral points of view; and she saw that it should not fall to ruins after her death by adopting one of her nephews and training him to continue her administration on the same lines. She deserved the respect of contemporary society because she was as fine a justification for its capitalist system as the time provided, and not to remember her as that to-day is to withhold justice.

But Mrs. Montagu had her failures. “Of what use,” she once asked peevishly concerning an explorer, “is the discovery of the source of the Nile? I have a due respect for this River of old and long established fame and power, but it derives little of its consequence from its source; it owes its greatness to other causes. I may be interested to know by what means a great Man, son of a mean one, acquired wealth and importance, but I don't wish to see his mean Parents' picture.” It is a point of view that has its drawbacks. Sometimes from far-off sources, mean parents of a great river, there come floods which engulf its banks and bridges and turn it into a straggling swamp. When she was sixty-three a frenzy swept her from some such unexamined sources. She had a quarrel with her beautiful young companion which is like a tinkling echo of the quarrel between Madame du Deffand and Julie de Lespinasse. Miss Dora Gregory did nothing worse than go home to Scotland on holiday and become engaged to the Reverend Archibald Alison, who was later to write a popular Essay on Taste; but the painful howl went up in Portman Square, as it had in the Convent St. Joseph, of a passion so fundamentally unreasonable that it must shelter in such a corner of the mind as is most inaccessible to reason, and therefore must bear its frustration unconsoled. It was the more baffling in England because it never forgot to use the terms of prudence, and spoke of the disadvantages of marriage on inadequate means when it wanted to complain that it had lost the light of its eyes.

And there were the Sternes. Laurence Sterne had married Mrs. Montagu's needy cousin, Elizabeth Lumley, and the pair was a thorn in her side. They were indigent, for one thing, and it was not spiritually easy for her to relieve them, because of Tristram Shandy. She found a good phrase for Laurence, “he is full of the milk of human kindness, harmless as a child, but often a naughty boy, and a little apt to dirty his frock;” and she believed she had once moved him to “penetent tears”. But “I can assure you,” she explained after his death, “his witt never atoned with me for the indecency of his writings;” and she felt no special tenderness for his widow and his daughter Lydia, of whom she wrote to her sister:

“I had a letter from Miss A. Morett of York on Sunday telling me she had collected upwards of £700 for Miss Sterne, that she had promised the subscribers it should be converted into an annuity for the girl for she added Mrs. Sterne was so little loved or esteemed there would not have been a single guinea given if that condition had not been made. I had heard Miss Morett extremely well spoken of, and by her manner of acting by the Sternes and from her letters I imagine she has an uncommon share of goodness and of sense. She begs me to advise Miss Sterne not to affect witt, a desire of being distinguished that way she says has ruined the whole family.”

This bracing advice she transmitted to Miss Sterne, who humbly answered:

“As to inheriting my father's witt I have not the least grain in my composition, we both thought it an unhappy turn in my father. I look on satire with detestation and I must own when we returned from France we were much hurt with the satirical things we hear in every company we went into, having lived for six years amongst people who know not what it is to be satirical—and instead of attacking anybody endeavour to make everyone in the company happy and never speak ill of the absent. I am so far from being a diseuse of bon mots I think I never made one in my life. I am when in company extremely diffident, seldom give my opinion but upon the most trivial things.”

If she had gone on long enough she would surely have proved that as a matter of fact, owing to some oversight of her parents, she had never learned to speak. Perhaps because of this and other overtones in the letter Mrs. Montagu allowed her and her mother but twenty pounds a year. It is true that we know Lydia to have been something of a slut, from her dealings with her father's posthumous publications; but one should temper the wind to the shorn sluts. That Mrs. Montagu was never able to do in this particular case. Lydia, some years later, wrote from France to ask her to pay to Mrs. Sterne alone the allowance she had been paying to both, since she herself was going to marry a Frenchman, whose father insisted on her mother giving her whole estate as part of the dowry; and Mrs. Montagu replied:

“I cannot hesitate a moment to transfer entirely to your Mamma during her life the little I used to send for your mutual service so that the article of your letter which relates to this point is most easily answered, and with as much pleasure on my side as it can be received on yours. The more momentous affair your marriage I cannot assent to with the same good will. What I shall say on this subject is not meant to offend the gentleman who you have a desire to marry. I am a perfect stranger to his character, his fortune and even his name. You do not say anything of them, all you give your friends is that you are going to marry a man of a different Religion, and to reduce your Mother to almost beggary, both these things you confess. You seem at the same time to declare steadfastness in Religion and Filial piety to your parent. My dear cousin, the actions not the words are what shall decide the judgment of God and man. If your husband has any zeal or regard for his religion he will be earnest to make you embrace it from regard to you and reverence to God, if he is void of religion he will think such a mark of your complaisance a trifle, and the authority of the husband will interpose where Faith stands Neuter. Your children must of necessity be——”

Here the copy Mrs. Montagu took of her letter ends abruptly. She was probably herself distressed by the violence of the flood that had swept down on her from the “mean Parents” of her nature. Perhaps a part of her rage was due to that sudden sick panic at the thought of indigence which is one of the occupational risks of wealth; but its ultimate cause was the difference between the children of Mary and the children of Martha, and that unjust and divine judgment regarding the better part. An honest part of her mind had to recognize that the shiftless, leering parson who wrote Tristram Shandy was to the impartial stars less valuable and yet more precious than herself; and that must have been torture to her whose passion was order, since it proved that the universe was framed on a principle which seemed clearly disorderly to her intellect, remarkable as that had been certified to be by Lord Bath and the good Lord Lyttelton, by Dr. Beattie and Gilbert West. It must have tortured her when the order of her own character broke down, for then there was disorder within and without. And such moments came, particularly as Mr. Montagu drew near his end. There is a letter in which she complains of him in his eighty-second year; at its beginning comes the superb phrase, “his temper is less violent than in health, and perfect churlishness spreads over the whole character,” and at its end there whistles through it a full blast of Goneril-like loathing for senility. So ended a marriage which had begun with the intention not “to enlist entirely under the banners of Cupid or Pluto, but take prudent consideration and decent inclination for my advisers”, and which had been carried on handsomely and reasonably for over thirty years.

But nobody could be more aware of these things than Mrs. Montagu herself. Her letters are given a form and coherence not to be ascribed to her ideas, by the unremitting pressure of merciless self-criticism, which owned handsomely that though everywhere there was much to be censured it found most censurable what was within her nature. Perhaps that is why her personality chills the spectator through the ages. It hints at the futility of all human effort that a moral force so intense, and so patiently aided by the intellect, should be unable to remove the causes of her despondency. But that cause lay in an irreconcilable difference between what she was and what she chose to be, which was contrived by her time. She had elected to live the classical life by the calm application of wisdom; her century informed her that it was proper to do so. But she was a romantic by temperament. The ardour with which she proclaims her own coldness, the passion with which she professes moderation, betray her type. For this reason she is uneasy as she is distinguished; and though her gifts were clear cut, the fuzzy outlines of a pretentious thinker and pedant blur the image of a woman of action which she should have stamped on the page of history, profoundly respectable in power and generosity.