Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi Part 2

Johnson was in the zenith of his fame when literature, politics, and fashion began to blend together again by hardly perceptible shades, like the colours in shot-silk, as they had partially done in the Augustan age of Queen Anne. One marked sign was the formation of the Literary Club (The Club, as it still claims to be called), which brought together Fox, Burke, Gibbon, Johnson, Goldsmith, Garrick, Reynolds, and Beauclerc, besides blackballing a bishop (the Bishop of Chester), and a lord-chancellor (Camden).[1] Yet it is curious to observe within how narrow a circle of good houses the Doctor's engagements were restricted. Reynolds, Paoli, Beauclerc, Allan Ramsay, Hoole, Dilly, Strahan, Lord Lucan, Langton, Garrick, and the Club formed his main reliance as regards dinners; and we find Boswell recording with manifest symptoms of exultation in 1781: "I dined with him at a bishop's where were Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mr. Berenger, and some more company. He had dined the day before at another bishop's."

His reverence for the episcopal bench well merited some return on their part. Mr. Seward saw him presented to the Archbishop of York, and described his bow to an Archbishop as such a studied elaboration of homage, such an extension of limb, such a flexion of body, as have seldom or ever been equalled. The lay n.o.bility were not equally grateful, although his deference for the peerage was extreme. Except in Scotland or on his travels, he is seldom found dining with a n.o.bleman.

[Footnote 1: Canning was blackballed the first time he was proposed.

He was elected in 1798, Mr. Windham being his proposer, and Dr.

Burney his seconder.]

It is therefore hardly an exaggeration to say that he owed more social enjoyment to the Thrales than to all the rest of his acquaintance put together. Holland House alone, and in its best days, would convey to persons living in our time an adequate conception of the Streatham circle, when it comprised Burke, Reynolds, Garrick, Goldsmith, Boswell, Murphy, Dr. Burney and his daughter, Mrs.

Montagu, Mrs. Boscawen, Mrs. Crewe, Lord Loughborough, Dunning (afterwards Lord Ashburton), Lord Mulgrave, Lord Westcote, Sir Lucas and Mr. (afterwards Sir William) Pepys, Major Holroyd afterwards Lord Sheffield, the Bishop of London and Mrs. Porteous, the Bishop of Peterborough and Mrs. Hinchcliffe, Miss Gregory, Miss Streatfield, &c. As at Holland House, the chief scene of warm colloquial contest or quiet interchange of mind was the library, a large and handsome room, which the pencil of Reynolds gradually enriched with portraits of all the princ.i.p.al persons who had conversed or studied in it. To supply any deficiencies on the shelves, a hundred pounds, Madame D'Arblay states, was placed at Johnson's disposal to expend in books; and we may take it for granted that any new publication suggested by him was ordered at once. But a bookish couple, surrounded by a literary set, were surely not exclusively dependent on him for this description of help, nor laid under any extraordinary obligation by reason of it. Whilst the "Lives of the Poets" was in progress, Dr.

Johnson "would frequently produce one of the proof sheets to embellish the breakfast table, which was always in the library, and was certainly the most sprightly and agreeable meeting of the day."

... "These proof sheets Mrs. Thrale was permitted to read aloud, and the discussions to which they led were in the highest degree entertaining."[1]

[Footnote 1: "Memoirs of Dr. Burney," &c., by his daughter, Madame D'Arblay. In three volumes, 1832. Vol. ii. p. 173-178.]

It was mainly owing to his domestication with the Thrales that he began to frequent drawing-rooms at an age when the arm-chair at home or at the club has an irresistible charm for most men of sedentary pursuits. It must be admitted that the evening parties in which he was seen, afforded a chance of something better than the "unidead chatter of girls," with an undue fondness for which he reproached Langton; for the _Blue Stocking_ clubs had just come into fashion,--so called from a casual allusion to the blue stockings of an _habitue_, Mr. Stillingfleet.[1] Their founders were Mrs. Vesey and Mrs. Montagu; but according to Madame D'Arblay, "more bland and more gleeful than that of either of them, was the personal celebrity of Mrs. Thrale. Mrs. Vesey, indeed, gentle and diffident, dreamed not of any compet.i.tion, but Mrs. Montagu and Mrs. Thrale had long been set up as rival candidates for colloquial eminence, and each of them thought the other alone worthy to be her peer. Openly therefore when they met, they combated for precedence of admiration, with placid though high-strained intellectual exertion on the one side, and an exuberant pleasantry or cla.s.sical allusion or quotation on the other; without the smallest malice in either."

[Footnote 1: The first of these was then (about 1768) in the meridian of its l.u.s.tre, but had been inst.i.tuted many years previously at Bath, It owed its name to an apology made by Mr. Stillingfleet in declining to accept an invitation to a literary meeting at Mrs. Vesey's, from not being, he said, in the habit of displaying a proper equipment for an evening a.s.sembly. "Pho, pho," said she, "don't mind dress. Come in your blue stockings." With which words, humorously repeating them as he entered the apartment of the chosen coterie, Mr. Stillingfleet claimed permission for entering according to order. And these words, ever after, were fixed, in playful stigma, upon Mrs. Vesey's a.s.sociations. _(Madame D'Arblay.)_ Boswell also traces the term to Stillingfleet's blue stockings; and Hannah More's "Bas-Bleu" gave it a permanent place in literature.]

A different account of the origin of Bluestocking parties was given by Lady Crewe to a lady who has allowed me to copy her note of the conversation, made at the time (1816):

"Lady Crewe told me that her mother (Mrs. Greville), the d.u.c.h.ess of Portland, and Mrs. Montagu were the first who began the conversation parties in imitation of the noted ones, _temp._ Madame de Sevigne', at Rue St. Honore. Madame de Polignac, one of the first guests, came in blue silk stockings, then the newest fashion in Paris. Mrs.

Greville and all the lady members of Mrs. Montagu's _club_, adopted the _mode_. A foreign gentleman, after spending an evening at Mrs.

Montagu's _soiree_, wrote to tell a friend of the charming intellectual party, who had one rule; 'they wear blue stockings as a distinction.'"

Wraxall, who makes the same comparison, remarks: "Mrs. Thrale always appeared to me to possess at least as much information, a mind as cultivated, and more brilliancy of intellect than Mrs. Montagu, but she did not descend among men from such an eminence, and she talked much more, as well as more unguardedly, on every subject. She was the provider and conductress of Johnson, who lived almost constantly under her roof, or more properly under that of Mr. Thrale, both in Town and at Streatham. He did not, however, spare her more than other women in his attacks if she courted and provoked his animadversions."

Although he seldom appeared to greater advantage than when under the combined spell of feminine influence and rank, his demeanour varied with his mood. On Miss Monkton's (afterwards Countess of Cork) insisting, one evening, that Sterne's writings were very pathetic, Johnson bluntly denied it. "I am sure," she rejoined, "they have affected me." "Why," said Johnson, smiling and rolling himself about, "that is because, dearest, you're a dunce." When she some time afterwards mentioned this to him, he said, with equal truth and politeness, "Madam, if I had thought so, I certainly should not have said it."

He did not come off so well on another occasion, when the presence of women he respected might be expected to operate as a cheek. Talking, at Mrs. Garrick's, of a very respectable author, he told us, says Boswell, "a curious circ.u.mstance in his life, which was that he had married a printer's devil. _Reynolds_. 'A printer's devil, Sir! why, I thought a printer's devil was a creature with a black face and in rags.' _Johnson_. 'Yes, Sir. But I suppose he had her face washed, and put clean clothes on her.' Then, looking very serious, and very earnest. 'And she did not disgrace him;--the woman had a bottom of good sense.' The word _bottom_ thus introduced was so ludicrous when contrasted with his gravity, that most of us could not forbear t.i.ttering and laughing; though I recollect that the Bishop of Killaloe kept his countenance with perfect steadiness, while Miss Hannah More slily hid her face behind a lady's back who sat on the same settee with her. His pride could not bear that any expression of his should excite ridicule, when he did not intend it: he therefore resolved to a.s.sume and exercise despotic power, glanced sternly around, and called out in a strong tone, 'Where's the merriment?'

Then collecting himself, and looking awful, to make us feel how he could impose restraint, and as it were searching his mind for a still more ludicrous word, he slowly p.r.o.nounced, 'I say the _woman_ was _fundamentally_ sensible;' as if he had said, Hear this now, and laugh if you dare. We all sat composed as at a funeral."

This resembles the influence exercised by the "great commoner" over the House of Commons. An instance being mentioned of his throwing an adversary into irretrievable confusion by an arrogant expression of contempt, the late Mr. Charles Butler asked the relator, an eye-witness, whether the House did not laugh at the ridiculous figure of the poor member. "No, Sir," was the reply, "we were too much awed to laugh."

It was a marked feature in Johnson's character that he was fond of female society; so fond, indeed, that on coming to London he was obliged to be on his guard against the temptations to which it exposed him. He left off attending the Green Room, telling Grarrick, "I'll come no more behind your scenes, Davy; for the silk stockings and white bosoms of your actresses excite my amorous propensities."

The p.r.o.neness of his imagination to wander in this forbidden field is unwittingly betrayed by his remarking at Sky, in support of the doctrine that animal substances are less cleanly than vegetable: "I have _often_ thought that, if I kept a seraglio, the ladies should all wear linen gowns, or cotton, I mean stuffs made of vegetable substances. I would have no silks: you cannot tell when it is clean: it will be very nasty before it is perceived to be so; linen detects its own dirtiness." His virtue thawed instead of becoming more rigid in the North. "This evening," records Boswell of their visit to an Hebridean chief, "one of our married ladies, a lively pretty little woman, good-humouredly sat down upon Dr. Johnson's knee, and being encouraged by some of the company, put her hands round his neck and kissed him. 'Do it again,' said he, 'and let us see who will tire first.' He kept her on his knee some time whilst he and she drank tea."

The Rev. Dr. Maxwell relates in his "Collectanea," that "Two young women from Staffordshire visited him when I was present, to consult him on the subject of Methodism, to which they were inclined. 'Come,'

said he, 'you pretty fools, dine with Maxwell and me at the Mitre, and we will talk over that subject:' which they did, and after dinner he took one of them upon his knee, and fondled her for half an hour together." [1]

[Footnote 1: "Amongst his singularities, his love of conversing with the prost.i.tutes he met in the streets, was not the least. He has been known to carry some of these unfortunate creatures into a tavern, for the sake of striving to awaken in them a proper sense of their condition. I remember, he said, once asking one of them for what purpose she supposed her Maker had bestowed on her so much beauty.

Her answer was, 'To please the gentlemen, to be sure; for what other purpose could it be given me?" _(Johnsoniana.)_ He once carried one, fainting from exhaustion, home on his back.]

Women almost always like men who like women; or as the phenomenon is explained by Pope--

"l.u.s.t, through some certain strainers well refined, Is gentle love, and charms all womankind."

Johnson, despite of his unwieldy figure, scarred features and uncouth gestures, was a favourite with the fair, and talked of affairs of the heart as things of which he was ent.i.tled to speak from personal experience as confidently as of any other moral or social topics. He told Mrs. Thrale, without the smallest consciousness of presumption or what Mr. Square would term the unfitness of things, of his and Lord Lyttleton's having contended for Miss Boothby's preference with an emulation that occasioned hearty disgust and ended in lasting animosity. "You may see," he added, when the Lives of the Poets were printed, "that dear Boothby is at my heart still. She would delight in that fellow Lyttleton's company though, all that I could do, and I cannot forgive even his memory the preference given by a mind like hers." [1]

[Footnote 1: In point of personal advantages the man of rank and fashion and the scholar were nearly on a par.

"But who is this astride the pony, So long, so lean, so lank, so bony?

Dat be de great orator, Littletony."]

Mr. Croker surmises that "Molly Aston," not "dear Boothby," must have been the object of this rivalry[1]; and the surmise is strengthened by Johnson's calling Molly the loveliest creature he ever saw; adding (to Mrs. Thrale), "My wife was a little jealous, and happening one day when walking in the country to meet a fortune-hunting gipsy, Mrs.

Johnson made the wench look at my hand, but soon repented of her curiosity,'for,' says the gipsy, 'your heart is divided between a Betty and a Molly: Betty loves you best, but you take most delight in Molly's company.' When I turned about to laugh, I saw my wife was crying. Pretty charmer, she had no reason." This pretty charmer was in her forty-eighth year when he married her, he being then twenty-seven. He told Beauclerc that it was a love match on both sides; and Garrick used to draw ludicrous pictures of their mutual fondness, which he heightened by representing her as short, fat, tawdrily dressed, and highly rouged.

[Footnote 1: See "Croker's Boswell," p. 672, and Malone's note in the prior edition.]

On the question whether "Molly Aston" or "dear Boothby" was the cause of his dislike of Lyttleton, one of Mrs. Piozzi's marginal notes is decisive. "Mrs. Thrale (says Boswell) suggests that he was offended by Molly Aston's preference of his lordship to him." She retorts: "I never said so. I believe Lord Lyttleton and Molly Aston were not acquainted. No, no: it was Miss Boothby whose preference he professed to have been jealous of, and so I said in the 'Anecdotes.'"

One of Rochefoucauld's maxims is: "Young women who do not wish to appear _coquette_, and men of advanced years who do not wish to appear ridiculous, should never speak of love as of a thing in which they might take part." Mrs. Thrale relates an amusing instance of Johnson's adroitness in escaping from the dilemma: "As we had been saying one day that no subject failed of receiving dignity from the manner in which Mr. Johnson treated it, a lady at my house said, she would make him talk about love; and took her measures accordingly, deriding the novels of the day because they treated about love. 'It is not,' replied our philosopher, 'because they treat, as you call it, about love, but because they treat of nothing, that they are despicable: we must not ridicule a pa.s.sion which he who never felt, never was happy, and he who laughs at, never deserves to feel--a pa.s.sion which has caused the change of empires, and the loss of worlds--a pa.s.sion which has inspired heroism and subdued avarice.' He thought he had already said too much. 'A pa.s.sion, in short,' added he, with an altered tone, 'that consumes me away for my pretty f.a.n.n.y here, and she 'is very cruel,' speaking of another lady (Miss Burney) in the room."

As the high-flown language which he occasionally employed in addressing or discussing women, has originated a theory that the basis or essence of his character was romance, it may be as well to contrast what he said in soberer moods on love. He remarked to Dr.

Maxwell, that "its violence and ill-effects were much exaggerated; for who knows any real sufferings on that head, more than from the exorbitancy of any other pa.s.sion?" On Boswell asking him whether he did not suppose that there are fifty women in the world with any of whom a man may be as happy as with any one woman in particular, he replied, "Ay, Sir, fifty thousand. I believe marriages would in general be as happy, and often more so, if they were all made by the lord-chancellor upon a due consideration of the characters and circ.u.mstances without the parties having any choice in the matter."

On another occasion he observed that sensible men rarely married for love.

These peculiarities throw light on more questions than one relating to Johnson's prolonged intimacy and alleged quarrel with Mrs. Thrale.

His gallantry, and the flattering air of deferential tenderness which he threw into his commerce with his female favourites, may have had little less to do with his domestication at Streatham than his celebrity, his learning, or his wit. The most submissive wife will manage to dislodge an inmate who is displeasing to her, "Aye, a marriage, man," said Bucklaw to his led captain, "but wherefore droops thy mighty spirit? The board will have a corner, and the corner will have a trencher, and the trencher will have a gla.s.s beside it; and the board end shall be filled, and the trencher and the gla.s.s shall be replenished for thee, if all the petticoats in Lothian had sworn the contrary." "So says many an honest fellow,"

said Craigenfelt, "and some of my special friends; but curse me if I know the reason, the women could never bear me, and always contrived to trundle me out before the honey-moon was over."[1]

[Footnote 1: Bride of Lammermoor.]

It was all very well for Johnson to tell Boswell, "I know no man who is more master of his wife and family than Thrale. If he holds up a finger, he is obeyed." The sage never acted on the theory, and instead of treating the wife as a cipher, lost no opportunity of paying court to her, though in a manner quite compatible with his own lofty spirit of independence and self-respect. Thus, attention having been called to some Italian verses by Baretti, he converted them into an elegant compliment to her by an improvised paraphrase:

"Viva! viva la padrona!

Tutta bella, e tutta buona, La padrona e un angiolella Tutta buona e tutta bella; Tutta bella e tutta buona; Viva! viva la padrona!"

"Long may live my lovely Hetty!

Always young and always pretty; Always pretty, always young, Live my lovely Hetty long!

Always young and always pretty; Long may live my lovely Hetty!"

Her marginal note in the copy of the "Anecdotes" presented by her to Sir James Fellowes in 1816 is:--"I heard these verses sung at Mr.

Thomas's by three voices not three weeks ago."

It was in the eighth year of their acquaintance that Johnson solaced his fatigue in the Hebrides by writing a Latin ode to her. "About fourteen years since," wrote Sir Walter Scott, in 1829, "I landed in Sky with a party of friends, and had the curiosity to ask what was the first idea on every one's mind at landing. All answered separately that it was this ode." Thinking Miss Cornelia Knight's version too diffuse, I asked Mr. Milnes for a translation or paraphrase, and he kindly complied by producing these spirited stanzas:

"Where constant mist enshrouds the rocks, Shattered in earth's primeval shocks, And n.i.g.g.ard Nature ever mocks The labourer's toil,

I roam through clans of savage men, Untamed by arts, untaught by pen; Or cower within some squalid den O'er reeking soil.

Through paths that halt from stone to stone, Amid the din of tongues unknown, One image haunts my soul alone, Thine, gentle Thrale!

Soothes she, I ask, her spouse's care?

Does mother-love its charge prepare?

Stores she her mind with knowledge rare, Or lively tale?

Forget me not! thy faith I claim, Holding a faith that cannot die, That fills with thy benignant name These sh.o.r.es of Sky."

"On another occasion," says Mrs. Thrale, in the "Anecdotes," "I can boast verses from Dr. Johnson. As I went into his room the morning of my birthday once and said to him, 'n.o.body sends me any verses now, because I am five-and-thirty years old; and Stella was fed with them till forty-six, I remember.' My being just recovered from illness and confinement will account for the manner in which he burst out suddenly, for so he did without the least previous hesitation whatsoever, and without having entertained the smallest intention towards it half a minute before: