Above all things Mrs. Montagu longed to send her reputation down to posterity as an acknowledged patron of letters. She wished to attach to herself, after the manner of the French literary ladies, some poet, essayist, or scholar, whose work she might inspire and supervise, and whose reward was to be the association of her name with his. Hannah More, recognizing this ambition, calls her ‘the female Mæcenas of Hill Street,’[362] and Dr. Burney asserts that she ‘makes each rising art her care.’[363] The poet for whom she had been waiting appeared in the summer of 1766, in the person of James Beattie, a young professor of moral philosophy at Aberdeen, who was, at the time, unknown in England.
Beattie was by nature shy, nervous, self-conscious, and uncertain of his powers—a type familiar in the academic world. He was for ever finding his poems unworthy of him, suppressing them, altering and correcting them, and threatening never to complete them. For such a person a patron might do much. Mrs. Montagu at once expressed herself to Dr. Gregory (a common friend resident in Aberdeen) as highly pleased with Beattie’s poetry. But it was not until she saw the first canto of the Minstrel, early in 1771, that her judgment was fully convinced. She now set to work with as much industry as charity to advance her chosen poet in the world of letters. She sent a copy of the new poem to Lord Chatham,[364] recommended it to the attention of Percy (the inspiration of whose essay on the minstrels had been acknowledged by Beattie in his preface), and encouraged her protégé by quoting to him the praises of Lord Lyttelton. She offered suggestions respecting the advertisement of the poem, and wrote to a bookseller of her acquaintance that he must recommend the poem ‘to all people of taste.’ Such were the powers of the female patron in this new age.
Mrs. Montagu also interested herself in another work of Beattie’s, a book now quite forgotten but then just entering upon a brilliant career of popularity. This was no other than an Essay on Truth, which had been published in 1770, and had almost immediately passed into a second edition. Mrs. Montagu very flatteringly describes the vain efforts of the English public to come at this volume. She has herself recommended it ‘to many of our Bishops and others; but all have complained this whole winter that the booksellers deny having either the first or second edition. I dare say many hundreds would have been sold if people could have got them.’[365] It is quite obvious that the academic young poet needs the practical assistance of the bluestocking, friend of ‘Bishops and others.’ He therefore came up to London in the autumn of this year, and then first made the acquaintance of the woman whom he ever after gratefully acknowledged as his patron. And thus the Defender of Truth and the Defender of Shakespeare met together—to their mutual advantage. Mrs. Montagu’s mind was already teeming with projects for the advancement of her favourite. In the spring of the next year, upon hearing that Adam Ferguson of Edinburgh University was to go abroad, she conceived the plan of having Beattie transferred to his chair, and succeeded in interesting the Archbishop of York in the matter, only to learn that the professor had every intention of returning to his work after his temporary absence.[366] Nevertheless she was the means of introducing Beattie to the Archbishop and to his brother, Lord Kinnoul,[367] who became warm friends of the new poet. In the following year she instructed Beattie in the best means of bringing his case to the attention of the King,[368] assuring him that if the government did nothing for him, she would herself ‘claim the honour of rendering his situation in life more comfortable.’[369] But the government did not disappoint her. Beattie was presented to the King at his levee, received the incense of his praise, and, later, a pension of two hundred pounds, and a degree of Doctor of Laws from Oxford. Mrs. Montagu shared in the general praise. ‘Do you not honour Mrs. Montagu,’ wrote Hester Chapone to Mrs. Delany, ‘for the pains she has taken to introduce this excellent champion of Christianity into the notice of the great world and to obtain for him some other regard than that of barren fame?’[370]
Her efforts on his behalf had but begun. Abandoning a plan that he should enter the Church of England—partly no doubt because of Beattie’s own lukewarmness—she thinks he may perhaps do more service to religion as a layman than as a priest,[371] and she now urges the publication, by subscription, of a quarto volume of Essays. In this way, she thought, eight hundred or a thousand pounds might be gained.[372] Patron and protégé together drew up a form of ‘subscription-paper,’ and, since Beattie shrank from any advertisement in newspapers, Mrs. Montagu agreed, with the assistance of a few friends, to circulate the document herself.[373] She did her work well. In the list of subscribers to the book[374] she contrived to include not only every prominent bluestocking, but Reynolds, Garrick, Johnson, a host of peers, her friends the Bishops, the two Archbishops, and the libraries of Oxford. She was the recognized sponsor of the volume, and when the publication of it was delayed, it was part of her office to circulate an explanatory card of Beattie’s.[375] When it finally appeared she was delighted with it in its every aspect, but professed to find it rather insolent in a native of Aberdeen to outdo the English in style.[376]
Meanwhile the second canto of the Minstrel had been sent to her for criticism, and was, if we are to believe Beattie, published at her request.[377] Four years later a volume of select poems was submitted to her with the request that she suppress those of which she did not approve; and when at last Beattie put forth the Minstrel in its final form, he requested permission to dedicate the first canto to her by putting her name into the last stanza in a space which had been left blank from the first:
The sweetness of this languidly conventional note must have been somewhat spoiled for Mrs. Montagu by the fact that the lines were written before Beattie knew her, and were, if we may trust the poet’s biographer, originally intended for another.[378] But there can be no doubt of Beattie’s gratitude. He honoured his patroness by naming a son Montagu, and continued to visit her in London or in Sandelford and to submit his works to her for her approval,[379] that form of flattery which she coveted most of all. They honoured each other for many years with a reasonable regularity of correspondence which, however, does more credit to their earnestness than to their wit.
The relations of Beattie and Mrs. Montagu continued serene throughout their lives. Each was grateful to the other and never failed to make a public display of that gratitude. Mrs. Montagu bestowed her favours without offence, and Beattie received them without any pretence of hesitation. Each was happier for having known the other. And if the relation of author and patron must needs exist, theirs is a specimen of what the relation may be at its best.
The relations of Robert Potter, the translator of Æschylus, with Mrs. Montagu are of the same general nature as those of Beattie. It was with trembling gratitude that he accepted and incredible flattery that he repaid the favours which the lady bestowed upon him. Her attention had, it would appear, been caught by the publication of the Greek tragedian in English,—the publication of translations being always a welcome event for bluestockings—and she at once suggested to the translator the propriety of adding explanatory notes. He adopted the suggestion, and, when publishing his Notes in the following year (1778), improved the opportunity to dedicate not only these but the original volume to his new-found patron. In a prefatory letter to her he outdid Beattie in the use of superlatives. The notes are written, he proclaims, only because Mrs. Montagu has asked for them, and with him a hint from that lady is a command; though he is incapable of understanding why so accomplished a person should ask for notes, since she needs them ‘as little as any person alive.’ The approbation of Mrs. Montagu, he concludes, is ‘the highest honour any writer can receive.’
Loyalty was one of Mrs. Montagu’s qualities. None of her protégés ever had occasion to complain that she lost interest or declined support. Her career as a patron of the arts is sullied by no quarrels; she was the subject of no anonymous libels from the offended recipients of her charity. She continued her favours to Potter, urging him to proceed with his translation of Euripides,[380] and appearing prominently among the subscribers to that volume. She received him at her assemblies, and, according to a somewhat doubtful anecdote, presented him to Dr. Johnson.[381] Johnson, who considered Potter’s work ‘verbiage’ (doubtless because it was in blank verse), snubbed the scholar and mumbled to the bluestocking, ‘Well, well!’ and ‘Well, Madam, and what then?’
This ungracious reception may have helped Mrs. Montagu in inciting Potter to attack Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, some years later; but, according to Walpole, the chief aim was ‘to revenge the attack on Lord Lyttelton.’ There is, I believe, no existing evidence for this gossip, apart from the pamphlet itself; but there seems to be no good reason for rejecting it. In this paper, which, it must be said, is a sufficiently dignified and worthy pamphlet as pamphlets go, Potter quotes Mrs. Montagu’s Essay on Shakspeare by way of demolishing Johnson’s criticism of The Bard, and the lady and Bishop Hurd are proclaimed ‘the two best Critics of this or any other age.’[382] Of this piece of nonsense Walpole has written the last word:
Were I Johnson, I had rather be criticized than flattered so fulsomely. There is nothing more foolish than the hyperboles of contemporaries on one another, who, like the nominal Dukes of Aquitaine and Normandy at a coronation, have place given to them above all peers, and the next day shrink to simple knights.[383]
It is a pity that Potter could not have known that the utility of his translations, which have been reprinted again and again, would outlive the fame of his patron.
A classicist of much more importance than Potter did not disdain to court Mrs. Montagu. It was in June 1788, that William Cowper published in the Gentleman’s Magazine his pleasant verses On Mrs. Montagu’s Feather Hangings. He had himself not seen the room, but knew it from the descriptions of his cousin, Lady Hesketh, who was an aspirant to Mrs. Montagu’s ‘academy.’[384] The poet’s purpose in the presentation of this poetical tribute seems to have been missed by his editors; but it is clear that he was yielding to the pressure of Lady Hesketh and attempting to bring himself and his forthcoming translation of Homer to the attention of the bluestocking. The first move was a failure. Mrs. Montagu, it would seem, took no notice of the lines in the magazine, though they were set forth as ‘by the author of The Task,’ already a poem of national fame. In August, Cowper writes to Lady Hesketh:
To me, my dear, it seemeth that we shall never by any management make a deep impression on Mrs. Montagu. Persons who have been so long accustomed to praise become proof against it.[385]
Mrs. Montagu Johnson
Fresco of people including Samuel Johnson and Mrs. MontaguIt was necessary to adopt a new plan. Two years later Lady Hesketh decided to approach Mrs. Montagu herself, and requested Cowper to permit her to show a portion of the manuscript to that lady. The poet, who had long since admired the Essay on Shakspeare and who had acquired the most exaggerated notions of the lady’s learning,[386] chose the first two books of the Iliad to present as a sample intending to ‘carry her by a coup de main,’ and employing ‘Achilles, Agamemnon, and the two armies of Greece and Troy,’ in his charge upon the bluestocking. To these the sixteenth book of the Odyssey was added by Lady Hesketh. ‘It was very kind in thee,’ he writes,[387] ‘to sacrifice to this Minerva on my account.’ But Minerva, who was now seventy, was probably glad to escape from the affair with a concealment of her ignorance of Homer. She wrote an enthusiastic, and, be it added, modest letter to Lady Hesketh about the new translation, and put her name on the subscribers’ list. Cowper read the letter and expressed his pride in what was said; and there the matter ended.
The precise nature and extent of the assistance which Mrs. Montagu rendered to James Barry, the painter, it is now impossible to determine. Certain it is that she consented to be painted by him (in hideous profile) for that hodge-podge of fresco with which Barry covered the walls of the Royal Society of Arts. She is there depicted in her capacity as a patron of the arts.[388]
‘Towards the centre of the picture,’ writes Barry, ‘is seen that distinguished example of female excellence, Mrs. Montagu, who long honoured the Society with her name and subscription.... Mrs. Montagu appears here recommending the ingenuity and industry of a young female whose work she is producing.... Between these ladies [the Duchesses of Devonshire and Portland] the late Dr. Samuel Johnson seems pointing out this example of Mrs. Montagu to their Graces’ attention and imitation.’[389]
The juxtaposition of Johnson and Mrs. Montagu, the Great Dictator and the female Mæcenas, must have caused inextinguishable mirth among the spectators who knew of their great quarrel. Mrs. Montagu’s resentment at Johnson’s treatment of Lyttelton in the Lives of the Poets has been much discussed; but the story must be repeated once more for the sake of the light which it throws upon Mrs. Montagu’s ambitions to control the destinies of literature.
Mrs. Montagu and Lord Lyttelton had been close friends for many years preceding the death of the latter. They had laboured together on the Dialogues of the Dead (to the scandal, Walpole delighted to relate, of the lady’s postilion[390]); and thus Mrs. Montagu’s literary fame was, in a way, bound up with the peer’s. When, eight years after the death of Lyttelton, Johnson’s account of him appeared, it was found to contain remarks which did not please the friends of the late nobleman. Far from being satisfied that he should have been deemed worthy of inclusion even in so inclusive a list as Johnson’s, they decided to take offence because a certain amount of blame was mingled with a certain amount of praise. Johnson had, for example, criticised ‘poor Lyttelton’ for thanking the Critical Reviewers for their commendatory notice of the Dialogues of the Dead; he spoke of Lyttelton’s poems as having ‘nothing to be despised and little to be admired,’ and of his songs, in particular, as ‘sometimes spritely and sometimes insipid.’ Here surely is as much praise as posterity would care to give to Lyttelton; but it was not sufficient for the women who owed some part of their reputation to the fact that they had been intimate with a peer. According to Walpole, it was Mrs. Vesey who began the attack, but it was certainly Mrs. Montagu who conducted the campaign. The reader of Fanny Burney’s Diary is familiar with the details of this feud; the reader of Walpole will find four references to it in the letters written at the opening of 1781.
‘She told me,’ writes the latter, ‘as a mark of her high displeasure, that she would never ask him to dinner again. I took her side, and fomented the quarrel, and wished I could have made Dagon and Ashtaroth scold in Coptic.’[391]
Nothing came of this literary feud save a scene at Streatham between Johnson and Pepys which frightened Fanny Burney, and Potter’s attack on the Lives which has been mentioned already; and Mr. Dobson remarks that modern readers ‘will perhaps wonder what the dispute was about.’[392] But it is significant as showing the influence which Mrs. Montagu thought she exerted in the world of letters, and the means which she adopted to make her influence felt.
Johnson’s behaviour during this quarrel must, I think, have been due to something other than wounded vanity. It was, I am convinced, due to this very patronage of literature which the bluestockings, with Mrs. Montagu at their head, were attempting to set up. There can be no more annoying spectacle than that of a person to whom wealth and social talents have given a certain minor position in the literary world, and who, mistaking gifts for genius, attempts to exalt that position to one of authority. This is what Mrs. Montagu was trying to do. She had, without a shadow of doubt, achieved a certain influence. She had bestowed pensions and gifts upon deserving authors and scholars. She had placed her name on a hundred subscription lists. She had contributed to the success of Hannah More’s tragedy, Percy, by appearing, more than once, in a box at the theatre where it was being performed. Elizabeth Carter and Hester Chapone (who dedicated her Letters to Mrs. Montagu) were examples of the worthy writer whom she assisted in one way or another by her unostentatious charity. Laurence Sterne was content, as early as 1761, to make her a sort of literary executor,[393] ‘not because she is our cousin—but because I am sure she has a good heart.’ But when, through the influence of flattery, she mistook her kind heart and her pleasant interest in literature for the critical authority of a scholar and arbiter, an authority which can belong to but one or two in any age, she brought down upon herself, not unnaturally, the wrath of Johnson and the scorn of Walpole. By November 1776, she had reached the point where she could write thus to Garrick:
‘I must say I felt for Shakspeare the anxiety one does for a dead friend, who can no longer speak for himself.’[394]
In 1778 she could seriously offer Fanny Burney, already renowned as the author of Evelina, the gift of her ‘influence,’ adding, ‘We shall all be glad to assist in spreading the fame of Miss Burney.’[395]
She had the desire to direct and to manage which is characteristic of the experienced woman of fashion, who knows the value of her personal charm, rather than of the true literary critic, who is usually a person too wise to attempt to direct the stream of literature. But Mrs. Montagu was not content to let that stream flow as it would. She must bring comedies to the attention of Garrick[396] and suggest subjects to Hannah More[397] and Mrs. Carter;[398] she must guide Potter and encourage Beattie. In the pride of her power she even attempted the delicate task of influencing the elections to the Literary Club; and it would appear that, escaping the detection of Johnson, she succeeded in her aim, for her candidate, who was no other than Mr. Vesey, was chosen. But when she aspired to reverse the estimate of the greatest living critic and substitute the indulgent opinion of a personal friend, it is not surprising that Johnson should somewhat sharply have reminded her and her coterie of what their opinion was really worth. Few to-day will be found to regret that the lady’s view did not prevail.
At one point Mrs. Montagu’s relations with her protégés come dangerously near to farce comedy. Like all the bluestockings, she was one of the believers in the genius of Ann Yearsley, the poetical milk-woman of Bristol, who was regarded for a time as a female Chatterton. It was part of the work of bluestockings to discover genius. They had discovered Hannah More; they had discovered Beattie and Mrs. Chapone; if they had not discovered Fanny Burney they had at least ferreted her out of the obscurity in which she wished to remain. But none of their literary finds seemed to them so bright with promise as the marvellous woman who sold milk from door to door in the unpoetical town of Bristol. It was Miss More who found her, and who, with Mrs. Montagu, advertised her with an ardour which does more credit to the quickness of their sympathies than to the quickness of their wits.
In 1783 Miss More discovered that Ann Yearsley, the milk-woman who called daily at her house in Bristol for kitchen-refuse with which to feed her pig, was accustomed to employ her leisure moments in the composition of verses. She at once took the woman in charge, taught her spelling, and the simplest rules of rhetoric, and after a lapse of some months felt that her pupil had made such progress that she might safely submit her verses to bluestocking judgment. The enthusiasm with which Mrs. Montagu and her friends received them is significant at once of their eagerness to assist the development of poetry and of their unfitness for the task. Mrs. Montagu had not believed in Woodhouse, the poetical shoemaker, but a female Chatterton had more appeal. She wrote to Miss More,
‘Let me come to the wondrous story of the milk-woman. Indeed she is one of the nature’s miracles. What force of imagination! what harmony of numbers! In Pagan times one could have supposed Apollo had fallen in love with her rosy cheek, snatched her to the top of Mt. Parnassus, given her a glass of his best helicon, and ordered the nine muses to attend her call.’
This hypothesis being unsuitable to a Christian age, Mrs. Montagu suggests that the Scriptures, the Psalms, and the Book of Job in particular, may have taught the artless numbers to flow; whereupon she herself indulges in a flight:
Avaunt! grammarians; stand away! logicians; far, far away all heathen ethics and mythology, geometry and algebra, and make room for the Bible and Milton when a poet is to be made. The proud philosopher ends far short of what has been revealed to the simple in our religion. Wonder not, therefore, if our humble dame rises above Pindar or steps beyond Æschylus.[399]
Mrs. Montagu joyfully promises her support.
The rest of the blues were hardly less enthusiastic. Old Mrs. Delany circulated the milk-woman’s ‘proposals’ to print;[400] Mrs. Boscawen sent in a ‘handsome list of subscribers’; the Duchess of Beaufort requested a visit from Mrs. Yearsley; the Duchess of Portland sent a twenty-pound bank-note. Walpole gave her money and the works of Hannah More.[401] The Duchess of Devonshire presented her with an edition of the English poets. All social London and half of literary London put its name on the list of subscribers. When, in 1785, the volume appeared, it was prefaced by a letter from Hannah More to Mrs. Montagu, telling Mrs. Yearsley’s story, and recommending her to the good attentions of Mrs. Montagu, whose delight ‘in protecting real genius’ is well known. Mrs. Montagu’s name was, indeed, writ large in the volume. In the address, To Stella (Stella being the milk-woman’s name for Hannah More), Mrs. Montagu is referred to as
Similar adulation is diffused through some seventy lines of a blank verse poem, On Mrs. Montagu. A passage from this will serve as well as anything to illustrate ‘Lactilla’s’ powers:
Mrs. Yearsley was not loath to address the great in verse. Mr. Raikes of Manchester, the founder of Sunday Schools, the Duchess of Portland, and the Author of The Castle of Otranto (genially referred to as ‘the Honourable H—e W—e’) were all commemorated. Their influential patronage and sad Lactilla’s melancholy tale made the volume immediately successful, and it passed into a fourth edition in 1786.
Lactilla might, however, have been happier had she been less successful. There had come to her, after the publication of her book, the not inconsiderable sum of three hundred and fifty pounds, which Hannah More held in trust for her. One is not surprised to learn that Miss More was cautious in paying out this money to Mrs. Yearsley, nor that this caution impressed the owner of the money as mere niggardliness. A sharp quarrel ensued which was fully set forth by both women, by Hannah More in her letters to Mrs. Montagu and by the poetess in the preface to her next volume of verses. It cost the poor milk-woman all her fine friends and the fine reputation which they had blown up for her. She sank gradually from view, and when she died, in 1806, was probably as obscure as when she was ‘discovered’ some twenty years before. Had she been of a philosophical temperament, she might perhaps have extracted some comfort from the cynical reflection that her fall had been well-nigh as humiliating to her discoverers and patrons as to herself. Walpole continued for months to chuckle over the collapse of her reputation, asserting that, if wise, she would now put gin in her milk and kill herself by way of attaining to an immortality like Chatterton’s;[402] but the bluestockings were glad to forget the poor creature and the mischief they had done her, and the pathos of her latter state moved them only to passionate descriptions of her ingratitude.