English Lands Letters and Kings Part 2

First of all Englishwomen, she had her son inoculated for the small-pox; this method of prevention being practised at that time in portions of Turkey. Succeeding in this, she brought the method, and strong advocacy of it, back to England with her. It was a bold thing to do, and she {24} always loved boldnesses. It was a humane thing to do, and her humanities were always active. The medical professors looked doubtingly upon it; even the clergy preached against it as contravening the intentions of Providence--just as some zealots, fifty years ago, declared against the employment of chloroform and other anaesthetics. But Lady Mary succeeded in her endeavors, and inoculation became shortly after an approved and adopted practice.

On the return from the Turkish emba.s.sy Mr. Montagu, perhaps at the instance of Pope, bought a home for her at Twickenham, a delightful suburb of London, where the poet was then residing, and at the zenith of his fame. His poetic wors.h.i.+p at her shrine was renewed with all the old ardor. He gave Sir G.o.dfrey Kneller a commission to paint her portrait in Turkish dress, with which she had done great execution at court b.a.l.l.s.

"The picture," says Pope, in a letter to her, "dwells really at my heart, and I have made a perfect pa.s.sion of preferring your present face to your past."

{25}

What the past had been we may infer from this bit of verse, written while she was in the East:

"In vain my structures rise, my gardens grow, In vain fair Thames reflects the double scenes Of hanging mountains and of sloping greens.

Joy dwells not there; to happier seats it flies, And only dwells where Wortley casts her eyes.

What are the gay parterre and checkered shade, The morning bower, the evening colonnade, But soft recesses of uneasy minds To sigh unheard into the pa.s.sing winds; So the struck deer in some sequestered part Lies down to die, the arrow at his heart; There, stretched unseen, in coverts hid from day Bleeds drop by drop and pants his life away."

But this wors.h.i.+p is not for very long; there comes a quarrel, which is so sharp and bitter, and with such echoes in ode or satire, as to become the scandal of the neighborhood.

What brought it about cannot be so distinctly told. Lady Mary persisted in saying that the crippled sensitive poet had forgotten himself to so impudent an avowal of love that she had repelled him with a shout of laughter, and so turned his heart into gall.

That his heart was all gall toward her {26} thereafter there needed no proof beyond his stinging couplets; and though he denied her tale with unction, he never told a story of his own in respect to this affair which made _her_ character seem the worse, or _his_ the better.

In an evil hour her ladys.h.i.+p (who had written verse already, which for her fame's sake it were better she had never written), undertook, with the aid of her friend Lord Hervey, to reply to the lampoons of Pope.

Thereupon the shrinking, keen-smarting poet made other burning verses, by which the Hervey and the Montagu were both put to the torture. It must have been uncomfortable weather for her ladys.h.i.+p at Twickenham in those days. True, Hervey, Peterborough, Bolingbroke, and many of the courtiers were at her service; and she was a favorite of George I.--so far as any respectable woman could be called a favorite of that gross creature; but Pope's shafts of ridicule had a feather of grace about them that carried them straight and far. Mr. Montagu himself was a husband who loved London and his coal-fields without her ladys.h.i.+p, rather better than Twickenham gardens _with_ her ladys.h.i.+p.

{27}

Twenty years of gay "outing" she lives, between London and its suburbs; happy, yet not happy; courted and not courted. She writes to her sister Lady Mar[14] in these times:

"Don't you remember how miserable we were in the little parlor at Th.o.r.esby? We then thought marrying would put us at once in possession of all we wanted.... One should pluck up a spirit and live upon cordials, when one can have no other nourishment. These are my present endeavors, and I run about though I have five thousand pins and needles running into my heart. I try to console myself with a small damsel [her daughter, afterward Lady Bute] who is at present everything I like; but, alas, she is yet in a white frock. At fourteen she may run away with the butler."

And when this maiden in white had married (better than the mother dared hope), and her son, a vagrant, had gone out into the world and the night, Lady Mary--believing in "cordials"--gathered her robes about her, and took her fading face into the blaze of the Continental cities.

Her reputation for wit, and daring, and beauty has gone before her, and she writes piquantly and with great complacency of the attentions and {28} greetings that meet her in Venice, Florence, and Milan. The appet.i.te for this life grows with feeding; so it becomes virtually a separation from her husband, though cool, business-like letters regularly pa.s.s between them. Her son, though grown up into an "accomplished" man, is a scoundrel--drifting about Europe; and when they encounter the mother insists that he shall drop his name, and deny relations.h.i.+p.

Twenty-two years she lives in that Continental exile, writing all the while letters to her daughter, which she loved to compare with the letters of Madame de Sevigne. They are witty and sparkling and have pa.s.sed into a certain place in English literature, but they are not Sevigne letters. Toward the last of her residence abroad she bought an old ruinous palace in Lombardy, not far from Lago di Guarda, equipped three or four of its rooms, and with a little bevy of servants, lived in retirement--busied with reading, with her ducks, her pigeons, and her garden.

She writes her daughter:

"The active scenes are over at my age; I indulge, with all the art I can, my taste for reading. If I _could_ confine it to {29} valuable books; they are almost as scarce as valuable men.... As I approach a second childhood I endeavor to enter into the pleasures of it.... I am reading an idle tale, not expecting wit or truth in it; and am very glad it is not metaphysics to puzzle my judgment, or history to mislead my opinion."

She is well past sixty and has lost all her old graces when she falls into this misanthropic spirit; has grown strangely neglectful of her person too; she says that for eleven years now she has not looked in a mirror.[15]

But presently Mr. Montagu dies leaving an immense fortune; there are business reasons demanding her return; so she brings back that shrunken, unseemly face, and figure of hers to London; takes a house there and fills it with servants. A cousin, speaking of a call upon her, says:

"It is like the Tower of Babel; a Hungarian servant takes your name at the door, he gives it to an Italian, who delivers it to a Frenchman.

The Frenchman to a Swiss, and the Swiss to a Polander; so that by the time you get to her ladys.h.i.+p's presence you have changed your name five times, without the expense of an Act of Parliament."

{30}

Horace Walpole pays her a visit, and says, "she was old, dirty, tawdry, and painted." But he did not like her: I do not think she liked him.

Could it be that this old lady--past seventy--with her fine house and her polyglot of service and her flush purse, thought to call back the old trail of flatterers? I do not know. I know very well she did not, and that within a twelvemonth she died.

There is in Lichfield Cathedral a cenotaph representing Beauty weeping the loss of her Preserver; it was placed there by some grateful person to perpetuate the memory of the Lady Mary's benevolence in introducing inoculation; and I think it is the only eulogy to be found on any memorial tablet of this strange, witty, beautiful, indiscreet, studious, unhappy, disappointed woman.

_Alexander Pope._

[Sidenote: Alexander Pope.]

We close our chapter with some mention of that proud, shy, infirm poet of whom we have caught shadowy glimpses in the story of Wortley {31} Montagu. There are scores of little crackling couplets floating about on the lips of people well known as Pope's.[16]

"A wit's a feather and a chief's a rod, An honest man's the n.o.blest work of G.o.d."

"Know then, this truth, eno' for man to know, Virtue alone is happiness below."

"Honor and shame from no condition rise, Act well your part; _there_ all the honor lies!"

These must be familiar; and your school must differ from most schools, if some of these or other such, from the same author, have not one time done service as snappers at the end of a composition, or as a bit of decoration in the middle of it.

All know, too, in a general way, that Pope was an infirm man, without perhaps a clear idea of what his infirmity may have been; some of those {32} fierce lampoons already alluded to, which went flying back and forth around the shades of Twickenham, speak of the poet as an ape, a hunchback, a monster. The truth is that he inherited from his father a feeble and crooked frame with some spinal weakness which did give a measure of excuse to the coa.r.s.e and brutal satirists of those days.

His height was much below that of ordinary men, so that cus.h.i.+ons or a higher chair were always necessary at table to bring him to the level of his friends; his legs were thin and shrunken and he walked feebly; his countenance was drawn and pinched; yet he had good features, with the delicate complexion of a woman, and a great blue eye, full of expression. His toilette was always a serious affair for him--specially when he went abroad or would appear at his best (as he always wished to do)--involving the a.s.sistance of one or two attendants to adjust his paddings, his stays, his canvas jackets, and his twice doubled hose.

I have dwelt with more particularity upon his personal aspect, because it serves to explain, or at least largely to qualify, a great many apparent mysteries in his social career.

{33}

He was a London boy, born of Romish parents; his father being a small trader in the city, but retiring, about the time of this weakly boy's birth, to a home at Binfield--a country parish lying between Windsor and Reading, where they show now a grove of beaches which was a favorite haunt of the boy poet. He caught schooling in a hap-hazard way, as Romanists needed to do in those times; but had a quick, big brain, that made up for many shortcomings in teachers. Before twelve he had his Latin with some Greek, and had written verse; and after that age was his own master--sucking literary sweets where he could find them.

Before twelve, too, he had made many London visitations--partly to study French there and partly to find his way to Will's coffee-house, and catch sight of old John Dryden, then drawing near to the end of his worldly honors. And this thin, white-faced, crippled boy looking stealthily up at the master, even then had wild ambitious dreams of the day when he too should have his dignities and lay down the law for English letters.

Out by Binfield he happened upon good friends. {34} Among others a Blount family to which belonged two daughters Blount--sympathetic companions to him then and long afterward; scores of letters, too, there were, to which now Teresa Blount and now Miss Patty Blount were parties: He seeming in those romantic days (upon the edge of Windsor Forest) sometimes in love with one and sometimes the other; and they, in this mixing of letters getting probably as confused as he, and a great deal more vexed; and so came coldness and short-lived quarrelling, making one thing pretty sure--that when a young man or woman begins to play with the different tenses of the verb "I love," a single correspondent is much better than two. However, his friends.h.i.+p with Miss Patty Blount lasted his life out.

An old baronet of the neighborhood, who had been diplomat in James I.'s day, took a fancy to this keen-thoughted lad and made a companion of him. He came to know old Wycherly too, and scores of men about town; even Jacob Tonson, the famous publisher of those times, had written to Pope before he was twenty, asking the privilege of printing certain pastorals of his writing, which {35} had been handed about in the clubs; and thought them--what they really were--astonis.h.i.+ng for their literary finish.

_His Poetic Methods._

[Sidenote: Poetry of Pope.]

But young Mr. Pope does not think much of the pastorals, save as stepping-stones; they paved his way to a large acquaintance with the London wits; and it would seem that at one time he thought of living at the dreadful pace of these gentlemen--in bottles and midnight routs; perhaps he tried it for a while; but his feeble frame could stand no such neck-breaking gallop. He can, however, put more of wearisome elaboration and pains-taking skill to his rhymes than any of the verse-makers of his time. He has by nature a mincing step of his own--different as possible from the long, easy lope of Dryden--and that step he perfects by unwearied practice, and word-mongering, until it comes to the wondrous ten-syllabled movement, which for polish, and rhythmic tric-trac is unmatchable.

The _Essay on Criticism_, _Windsor Forest_, and {36} the _Rape of the Lock_, all belonged to those early years at Binfield, and I give a test of each; first, from the _Essay_:--