The Romance of Biography Volume II Part 21

And sure, if fate some future bard shall join,

down to

He best can paint them, who can feel them most,

as applicable to himself and to his feelings towards her.

And yet, whatever might have been his devotion to Lady Mary before she went abroad, it was increased tenfold after her memorable travels. At present, when ladies of fashion make excursions of pleasure to the pyramids of Egypt and the ruins of Babylon, a journey to Constantinople is little more than a trip to Rome or Vienna; but in the last age it was a prodigious and marvellous undertaking; and Lady Mary, on her return, was gazed upon as an object of wonder and curiosity, and sought as the most entertaining person in the world: her sprightliness and her beauty, her oriental stories and her Turkish costume, were the rage of the day.

With Pope, she was on the most friendly terms:--by his interference and negociation, a house was procured for her and Mr. Wortley, at Twickenham, so that their intercourse was almost constant. When he finished his translation of the Iliad, in 1720, Gay wrote him a complimentary poem, in which he enumerates the host of friends who welcomed the poet home from Greece; and among them, Lady Mary stands conspicuous.

What lady's that to whom he gently bends?

Who knows not her! Ah, those are Wortley's eyes; How art thou honoured, numbered with her friends,-- For she distinguishes the good and wise!

To this period we may also refer the composition of the Stanzas to Lady Mary, which begin, "In beauty and wit."[133] The measure is trivial and disagreeable, but the compliments are very sprightly and pointed.

She sat to Kneller for him in her Turkish dress; and we have the following note from him on the subject, which shows how much he felt the condescension.

"The picture dwells really at my heart, and I have made a perfect pa.s.sion of preferring your present face to your past. I know and thoroughly esteem yourself of this year. I know no more of Lady Mary Pierrepoint than to admire at what I have heard of her, or be pleased with some fragments of hers, as I am with Sappho's. But now--I cannot say what I would say of you now. Only still give me cause to say you are good to me, and allow me as much of your person as Sir G.o.dfrey can help me to. Upon conferring with him yesterday, I find he thinks it absolutely necessary to draw your face first, which, he says, can never be set right on your figure, if the drapery and posture be finished before. To give you as little trouble as possible, he purposes to draw your face with crayons, and finish it up at your own house of a morning; from whence he will transfer it to canva.s.s, so that you need not go to sit at his house. This, I must observe, is a manner they seldom draw any but crowned heads, and I observe it with a secret pride and pleasure. Be so kind as to tell me if you care, he should do this to-morrow at twelve. Though, if I am but a.s.sured from you of the thing, let the manner and time be what you best like; let every decorum you please be observed. I should be very unworthy of any favour from your hands, if I desired any at the expense of your quiet or conveniency in any degree."

He was charmed with the picture, and composed an extemporary compliment, beginning

The playful smiles around the dimpled mouth, That happy air of majesty and truth; &c.

which, considering that they are Pope's, are strangely defective in rhyme, in sense, and in grammar. In a far different strain are the beautiful lines addressed to Gay, during Lady Mary's absence from Twickenham, and which he afterwards endeavoured to suppress. They are curious on this account, as well as for being the solitary example of amatory verse contained in his works.

Ah friend! 'tis true,--this truth you lovers know, In vain my structures rise, my gardens grow; In vain fair Thames reflects the double scenes, Of hanging mountains, and of sloping greens; Joy lives not here, to happier seats it flies, And only dwells where Wortley casts her eyes.

What are the gay parterre, the chequer'd shade, The morning bower, the evening colonnade, But soft recesses of uneasy minds, To sigh unheard in to the pa.s.sing winds?

So the struck deer, in some sequester'd part, Lies down to die, the arrow at his heart; There, stretch'd unseen in coverts hid from day, Bleeds drop by drop, and pants his life away.

These sweet and musical lines, which fall on the ear with such a lulling harmony, are dashed with discord when we remember that the same woman who inspired them, was afterwards malignantly and coa.r.s.ely designated as the Sappho of his satires. The generous heart never coolly degraded and insulted what it has once loved; but Pope _could_ not be magnanimous,--it was not in his spiteful nature to forgive. He says of himself,

Whoe'er offends, at some unlucky time Slides into verse, and hitches in a rhyme.[134]

One of Pope's biographers[135] seems to insinuate, that he had been led on, by the lady's coquetry, to presume too far, and in consequence received a repulse, which he never forgave. This is not probable: Pope was not likely to be so desperate or dangerous an admirer; nor was Lady Mary, who had written with her diamond ring on a window,

Let this great maxim be my virtue's guide: In part, she is to blame that has been tried,-- He comes too near, that comes to be denied!--

at all likely to expose herself to such ridiculous audacity. The truth is, I rather imagine, that there was a great deal of vanity on both sides; that the lady was amused and flattered, and the poet bewitched and in earnest: that _she_ gave the first offence by some pointed sarcasm or personal ridicule, in which she was an adept, and that Pope, gradually awakened from his dream of adoration, was stung to the quick by her laughing scorn, and mortified and irritated by the consciousness of his wasted attachment. He makes this confession with extreme bitterness,--

Yet soft by nature, more a dupe than wit, Sappho can tell you how this man was bit.

_Prologue to the Satires._

The lines as they stand in a first edition are even more pointed and significant, and have much more asperity.

Once, and but once, his heedless youth was bit, And liked that dangerous thing, a female wit.

Safe as he thought, though all the prudent chid, He wrote no libels, but _my lady_ did; Great odds in amorous or poetic game, Where woman's is the _sin_, and man's the _shame_!

The result was a deadly and interminable feud. Lady Mary might possibly have inflicted the first private offence, but Pope gave the first public affront. A man who, under such circ.u.mstances, could grossly satirize a female, would, in a less civilized state of society, have revenged himself with a blow. The brutality and cowardice were the same.

The war of words did not, however, proceed at once to such extremity; the first indication of Pope's revolt from his sworn allegiance, and a conscious hint of the secret cause, may be found in some lines addressed to a lady poetess,[136] to whom he pays a compliment at Lady Mary's expense.

Though sprightly Sappho force our love and praise, A softer wonder my pleased soul surveys,-- The mild Erinna blushing in her bays; So while the sun's broad beam yet strikes the sight, All mild appears the moon's more sober light.

Serene in virgin majesty she shines, And un.o.bserved, the glaring orb declines.

Soon after appeared that ribald and ruffian-like attack on her in the satires. She sent Lord Peterborough to remonstrate with Pope, to whom he denied the intended application; and his disavowal is a proved falsehood. Lady Mary, exasperated, forgot her good sense and her feminine dignity, and made common cause with Lord Hervey (the Lord f.a.n.n.y and the Sporus of the Satires.) They concocted an attack in verse, addressed to the imitator of Horace; but nothing could be more unequal than such a warfare. Pope, in return, grasped the blasting and vollied lightnings of his wit, and would have annihilated both his adversaries, if more than half a grain of truth had been on his side. But posterity has been just: in his anger, he overcharged his weapon, it recoiled, and the engineer has been "hoisted by his own petard."

Lady Mary's personal negligence afforded grounds for Pope's coa.r.s.e and severe allusions to the "colour of her linen, &c." His asperity, however, did not reform her in this respect: it was a fault which increased with age and foreign habits. Horace Walpole, who met her at Florence twenty years afterwards, draws a hateful and disgusting picture of her, as "old, dirty, tawdry, painted," and flirting and gambling with all the young men in the place. But Walpole is terribly satirical; he had a personal dislike to Lady Mary Wortley, whom he coa.r.s.ely designates as _Moll Worthless_,--and his description is certainly overcharged. How differently the same characters will strike different people! Spence, who also met Lady Mary abroad, about that time, thus writes to his mother: "I always desired to be acquainted with Lady Mary, and could never bring it about, though we were so often together in London. Soon after we came to this place, her ladyship came here, and in five days I was well acquainted with her. She is one of the most shining characters in the world,--but shines like a comet: she is all irregularity, and always wandering: the most wise, most imprudent, loveliest, most disagreeable, best-natured, cruellest woman in the world!" Walpole could see nothing but her dirt and her paint. Those who recollect his coa.r.s.e description, and do _not_ remember her letters to her daughter, written from Italy about the same time, would do well to refer to them as a corrective: it is always so easy to be satirical and ill-natured, and sometimes so difficult to be just and merciful!

The cold scornful levity with which she treated certain topics, is mingled with touches of tenderness and profound thought, which show her to have been a disappointed, not a heartless woman. The extreme care with which she cultivated pleasurable feelings and ideas, and shrunk from all disagreeable impressions; her determination never to view her own face in a gla.s.s, after the approach of age, or to p.r.o.nounce the name of her mad, profligate son, may be referred to a cause very different from either selfishness or vanity: but I think the principle was mistaken. While she was amusing herself with her silk-worms and her orangerie at Como, her husband Wortley, with whom she kept up a constant correspondence, was h.o.a.rding money and drinking tokay to keep himself alive. He died, however, in 1761; and that he was connected with the motives, whatever those were, which induced Lady Mary to reside abroad, is proved by the fact, that the moment she heard of his death she prepared to return to England, and she reached London in January 1762.

"Lady Mary is arrived," says Walpole, writing to George Montagu. "I have seen her. I think her avarice, her dirt, and her vivacity, are all increased. Her dress, like her language, is a galimatias of several countries. She needs no cap, no handkerchief, no gown, no petticoat, no shoes; an old black-laced hood represents the first; the fur of a horseman's coat, which replaces the third, serves for the second; a dimity petticoat is deputy, and officiates for the fourth; and slippers act the part of the last." About six months after her arrival she died in the arms of her daughter, the Countess of Bute, of a cruel and shocking disease, the agonies of which she had borne with heroism rather than resignation. The present Marquess of Bute, and the present Lord Wharncliffe, are the great-grandsons of this distinguished woman: the latter is the representative of the Wortley family.

FOOTNOTES:

[129] In Litchfield Cathedral stands the only memorial ever raised, by public or private grat.i.tude, to Lady Mary; it is a cenotaph, with Beauty weeping the loss of her preserver, and an inscription, of which the following words form the conclusion:--"To perpetuate the memory of such benevolence, and to express her grat.i.tude for the benefit she herself received from this alleviating art, this monument is erected by Henrietta Inge, relict of Theodore William Inge, and daughter of Sir John Wrottesley, Bart, in 1789." One would like to have known the woman who raised this monument.

[130] "You shall see (said Lady Mary referring to these letters) what a G.o.ddess he made of me in some of them, though he makes such a devil of me in his writings afterwards, without any reason that I know of."--_Spence._

[131] I remember seeing, I think, in one of D'Israeli's works a fragment of some lines which Lady Mary wrote on her husband, and which expressed the utmost bitterness of female scorn.

[132] See, in Pope's Miscellanies, the sprightly stanzas, beginning "Yes, I beheld th' Athenian Queen." They are addressed to Lady f.a.n.n.y, who had presented the poet with a standish, and two pens, one of steel and one of gold. She was the fourth daughter of Earl Ferrers. After numbering more adorers in her train than any beauty of her time, she died unmarried, in 1778.--_Collins' Peerage, by Brydges._

[133]

In beauty and wit, No mortal as yet, To question your empire has dared; But men of discerning Have thought that, in learning, To yield to a lady was hard.

[134] "I have often wondered," says the gentle-spirited Cowper, "that the same poet who wrote the Dunciad should have written these lines,--

That mercy I to others show, That mercy show to me!

Alas! for Pope, if the mercy he showed to others, was the measure of the mercy he received!"--_Cowper's Letters_, vol. iii. p. 195.

[135] Mr. Bowles.

[136] Erinna: her real name is not known. But she was a friend of Lady Suffolk, who wrote bad verses, and submitted them to Pope for correction.

CHAPTER XVII.

POETICAL OLD BACHELORS.

There is a certain cla.s.s of poets, not a very numerous one, whom I would call poetical old bachelors. They are such as enjoy a certain degree of fame and popularity themselves, without sharing their celebrity with any fair piece of excellence; but walk each on his solitary path to glory, wearing their lonely honours with more dignity than grace: for instance, Corneille, Racine, Boileau, the cla.s.sical names of French poetry, were all poetical old bachelors. Racine--_le tendre Racine_--as he is called _par excellence_, is said never to have been in love in his life; nor has he left us a single verse in which any of his personal feelings can be traced. He was, however, the kind and faithful husband of a cold, bigoted woman, who was persuaded, and at length persuaded _him_, that he would be _grill_ in the other world, for writing heathen tragedies in this; and made it her boast that she had never read a single line of her husband's works! Peace be with her!

And O, let her by whom the muse was scorn'd, Alive nor dead, be of the muse adorn'd!

Our own Gray was in every sense, real and poetical, a cold fastidious old bachelor, who buried himself in the recesses of his college; at once shy and proud, sensitive and selfish. I cannot, on looking through his memoirs, letters, and poems, discover the slightest trace of pa.s.sion, or one proof or even indication that he was ever under the influence of woman. He loved his mother, and was dutiful to two tiresome old aunts, who thought poetry one of the seven deadly sins--_et voil tout_. He spent his life in ama.s.sing an inconceivable quant.i.ty of knowledge, which lay as buried and useless as a miser's treasure; but with this difference, that when the miser dies, his wealth flows forth into its natural channels, and enriches others; Gray's learning was entombed with him: his genius survives in his elegy and his odes;--what became of his heart I know not. He is generally supposed to have possessed one, though none can guess what he did with it:--he might well moralise on his bachelorship, and call himself "a solitary fly,"--