The American Scene; Remarkable Lady Mary

Good morning. This is Howard Vincent, doing the arts for Illinois Institute of Technology in the American scene. In doing the arts, we've covered music. We haven't covered the drama yet. We've covered literature. We've covered other arts too. Today I thought we might deal with the art of biography. Now as one of the coordinating principles of this show is to have some connection with Chicago. And you will wonder why the remarkable lady Mary has anything to do with Chicago. Well, she doesn't. Chicago was not in existence when Lady Mary was. But one of the distinguishing signs of our time is the eminence of American scholarship in the field of English letters. This is rather interesting and to me it's rather amusing that the great scholarship on the great literary figures of England is being done not in England, but in America. The great editions, the great critical studies even. And the great editions of letters. And that is true in this instance

with the remarkable lady Mary. The man I have asked to come and talk about the remarkable lady Mary is Professor Robert Halspin. And the reason I asked him because he has written the life of Lady Mary, the authoritative definitive, if there is such a thing as a definitive life of Lady Mary, Wartley, Montague. Mr. Robert Halspin, or Dr. Robert Halspin, is a professor at Hunter College in New York City. But he started his work on Lady Mary when he was a graduate student here at Northwestern University, where he will be speaking, where he has been speaking, and the spring. And out of the beginning studies of Lady Mary from his thesis, he went on to write this big, not so very big, but this impressive, this formidable, in the sense of its quality, fine quality, biography. Now, stop this plower and get to Lady Mary herself and do Professor Halspin. I think we might begin with the question, what

started you off, Bob, on Lady Mary? What's the question that I'm always asked, Howard, so there's no trouble at all in telling you why? When I was still an undergraduate, I once picked up a copy of her letters, and I was amazed at how brilliant, and when you read a woman's letters, particularly one who lived 200 years ago, you think they'll be sort of fuzzy and vague and not very interesting. But there's a mind and a style that's terribly incisive. Sometimes feel that these women, the other women, writers of the period, wrote with cotton at the end of their pens. But she wrote with real steel, and that quality appealed to me very much. A point of view was very, very tough, stoical, and perhaps that's my attitude. Well, here I notice you said, quote, smaller, never equal by any letter writer, any sex age or nation, involuntary even admitted the same eminence. And you felt that as you read them. Yes, I did. But you should add about that small -it quotation. At the time, small -it wrote that, he was working for Lady Mary's son -in -law, the Prime Minister. Oh, yes. So that

maybe he was, yeah. So that perhaps he was being a little more favorite. But Voltaire had no axe to grind, and he really admired it tremendously. Yes, he even took criticism from her at Indy. That's right. The comment about his essay, it was a very witty comment, shows here. What did she say about? Well, he had claimed to write in English a criticism of paradise lost, and she said that it wasn't really good enough to be Voltaire's, but it was also too bad to be a good English writer, so she left him hanging between us, but he forgave her. Well, I imagine you appreciated it after all. Before we get very far in this, let's see a picture of Lady Mary. Let's get that cleared. All right. Picture that in the front of the piece of your book. This is Lady Mary's a young woman. As a young woman before her marriage. What was your name before her marriage? She was Lady Mary Pierpont. Her father was an aristocrat, became the Duke of Kingston, and it was because she married Mr. Edward Wirtley Montague that she now has that terribly mouth -filling name of Lady Mary

Wirtley Montague. Takes up lots of space. Montague, not a capulet, and without the e, and without the e. Well, there she is. Well, the beautiful lovely picture by Charles Javis. I'm sure we don't have a color reproduction, because here this is being shown in color, it would be very fine to have. Is there any print of it in color? No, there isn't. The original zone by her descendant, the buttes. Well, was there any indication of how old was she at this time with this picture? I guess we just have to guess she was about 20. 20. And she wasn't yet, she hadn't yet arrived, was she showing the signs of her great wit? Not really, because in her early letters there's nothing very remarkable. I think after her marriage when she came to London, her husband was a prominent wig politician, and she came to the court of George I. I think that brought out a great deal of her talent. And then when her husband became ambassador to Turkey and she traveled to the east, that was a period I think of fruition for her when she was stimulated by

the Islamic culture which she saw and wrote about. Well, I suppose in gathering your materials, which incidentally, as I agreed to here, it's an impressive collection of materials, you had to travel all over. That was one of the nicest parts of writing the book, because I had a good excuse. I traveled as far west as the Huntington Library in California and as far east as Easton Bull. And as far north as Scotland and as far south as Naples, so that I covered a pretty wide range of territory getting material. Many stations in between. Many stations in between. One of her books landed in Australia. I mean, one of her manuscripts. No, I didn't go to Australia, but photo stats make it possible to use the material there. Well, in gathering these materials, after all there have been two biographies over before yours. There have been many biographies, yeah, because she's very popular, her sensational life, her friendships with Pope, her introduction of smallpox inoculation in Europe, which she had discovered in Turkey. And her generally sensational life makes

her a favorite subject for scissors and paste biographers. But no biographer had bothered to dig and dig and dig as I did. Well, the results show up. You found your materials in these various places. What important new batches and material did you turn up? Well, I suppose the largest single body of material explained a question which nobody had ever been able to explain. And that is why when she was 50 years old, she left England and went to the continent and stayed abroad for 20 years and never returned home. This was the great mystery. Well, I discovered through putting together a series of letters which in different places that just before this time she had fallen in love with a young Italian half -or -age who'd come to England, a well -known literary figure of his time named Francisco Algorotti. We have a picture of it to show that person. Yes, I've got an illustration of that in the book. And she felt madly in love with her. How old was he now?

She was 15, he was about 23 or 4. Oh my. And it's rather remarkable that she'd been like Lady Mary whom we think of as being so tough should suddenly fall in love and write the kind of letters that a romantic school girl will had just revealing her impassioned love for this man who I'm afraid didn't really return it. She was a three -starz money and he saw that as an opportunity. Yes, that's right. He was a great opportunity as he simply wanted to attach himself to any of you. And we have the next picture of her at this time. Yes, at this time there's another portrait of Lady Mary which shows what she looks like at this time. Notice this is an unusual picture because she's resting her hand on a human skull. And although this style of this decoration and painting was popular in the 17th century, it had fallen out of use in the 18th, the Memento Mori, I suppose. And in the in the other hand she's holding a book because she is

the literary lady and she doesn't want to forget that. She was attractive in this picture, isn't she? I mean, if she is 50, she's still, I can see why Algarade wouldn't be uninterested. That's right. That picture incidentally is landed now in Turkey. It was sold by the family and bought by the British government and sent out to the embassy in Turkey. Oh, how very close of this yet. Where it belongs. Yes. Well now in this business of falling in love with Algarade, you say he didn't return her interest to this. Well, he didn't because she left England then in order to meet him in Venice and to live with him there. But in the meantime, he didn't know our husband about knowing anything about it. That's right. Apparently the family knew nothing about it. And in the meantime, Algarade had been traveling, had visited Frederick the Great's Court just before Frederick got the throne. And so while poor Lady Mary was waiting for him in Venice, Frederick's father died and Frederick immediately wrote to Algarade, he'd come and stay at my court. And so he just stood up Lady Mary and went to Prussia where he

stayed at Frederick's court. But when they finally did get together, it was very disappointing meeting for some reason. Yes, I think it was simply that Algarade was amused by her impetuosity. And he had a rather cold attitude toward life and ambition. And he wanted to get ahead. And he could get ahead much faster and much more profitably than with Lady Mary. Well now that leads me to the question that I want answered even after reading your book. I still want to answer. And that is why did you stay away for 20 years? Well, as I said to you, when you ask me that question, how are there some recesses of the human mind or imagination which even the most diligent biographer can't penetrate. However, I think we can speculate fairly well about this. When she, in England, when she left, she had outlived most of her friends. Some of her closest friends had died. Then her enmity with Alexander Pope had smeared her reputation in England in

general. And so when she went to Venice, she was very much courted by the nobility and by the upper classes, she suddenly discovered that she was a woman of consequence, of great dignity. And she found that life there was also cheaper. And she wasn't wealthy. She had to live on the allowance which her husband sent her. She basked in this glory. Exactly. I think when you travel abroad, that's true today. You may be nobody in your hometown. But if you go abroad, you're suddenly taken up taken up by people. You're somebody of importance and consequence. And she said, we stayed abroad. And that's the reason. And now this is a quarrel with Pope. You can't dodge that. That has to be taken up here. He was in love with her, wasn't he? He was certainly in love with her and wrote a series of impassioned letters which sound very much like the letters which she wrote to Algorati. You have all sorts of ironic counterpoints in your life. And Algorati was handsome where I perpoked with her miserable physical special. That's right. He was very beautiful eyes.

That's right. You're going to ask me the exact reason for that. I'm afraid I can't be sufficient, right? Well, the usual, the family tradition is that once Pope declared his love for her and translated into other words that you know what that means. And she simply laughed at him. And for that, he never forgave her. But I think that may be just part of the reason. The upper class society in which both Pope and Lady Mary moved at that time, there was a great deal of circulation of nasty poems. And she suspected him of writing nasty poems about her and he suspected her. And I think it was a gradual strangement. And there was certain, yes, except that we don't have any proof that she wrote nasty poems about him. She may have, and they haven't survived, but we have definitely proof of his nasty poems about her because they were published. And once he began to attack her, he kept up the continual campaign adding to the vituperation

with each new addition of each poem. Also, she was a very close friend of one of Pope's other enemies, wasn't he? Lord Harvey. That's right. She, she with Lord Harvey. Spore us that thing of what is it? How does it go? That thing of something silk. It's a, yes. As is milk and so on. That's right. It's one of a great portrait of acid etched an acid. That's right. It is indeed. Well, that friendship didn't help her cause with Pope at all to it. No, because there were also political reasons, I think. She was always staunchly a wig. And Harvey was one of the wig supporters. Pope's friends were Tories, and Pope sympathized with the Tories. And I think that political estrangement helped to bring them to put them further apart. Well, she was so intelligent, it could write so well, why didn't more material published in her lifetime? Well, she was an aristocratic lady. And according to the

aristocratic code of her time, it was considered undignified to publish, because if you publish, you were publishing for profit. And if you were publishing for profit, it meant you were being entrained. I think there's a remark that George II made about Pope, dismissing him as just somebody who wrote for money. It was undignified. So that in Lady Mary, and this runs throughout her whole life right to the very, one of her last actions, this dichotomy or conflict between her code as an aristocrat, she wasn't permitted to write for publication. On the other hand, her tremendous ambition to achieve some kind of status in the world of letters, because women at this time had a very low position. There simply wasn't a respectable woman writing until the second half of the century, when you have Mrs. Montague and Fanny Bernie. Yes, Elizabeth Montague. And Fanny Bernie, and so on, through Jane

Austen. Quite a contrast to Eiffra Bain. But where is at the beginning of the century, the women, the disillute, hangers on, and so on. Yes. So that Lady Mary simply could. Oh, this explains then. This compelling drive of this extremely witty and talented woman wanting to write and not being able to, this explains maybe her feminism, would you say so? Yes, because she was one of the early feminists who, in her writing, argues for a better position for women. Because Defoe and Swift and Addison and Steel in their essays did so too. But she was much more vigorous, much more violent, much more state, and she had much more reason to, much more experience. But she's often confused with a blue stocking, but she was not a blue stocking. She thought that the reputation of learning was very unfortunate for a woman. Well, there's even one sad part in your book that, at the end of her life, she looked down at the people she had known, Congress, Pope, and so on. That's right. And she regretted that part of her life. That's right. Well, what I call the glory for me. Yes. Yes. Well, what I,

what I call that in the lecture, I'm giving it Northwestern this afternoon, I call that the calcification of her aristocratic principles. That is, when she was a young woman, she was perfectly content with the camaraderie of all these other bellesprie in London. She was quite proud, in fact, to be a friend of Pope. Yes. And very proud when a poem was being circulated and people said they didn't know whether it was Lady Mary's or Popes, because that meant she could write as well as he. But then as she grew older, and I suppose it happens to so often that people who are liberal in their younger days, and whether it's politics or general social theory, begin to calcify as they get older, and that's what happened to her. Very well put. And also, she was writing these letters in which she expresses this point of view to her very stuffy daughter, the Countess of Butte, and naturally a good letter writer, as Lady Mary was, is always delicately attuning her ideas to the recipient of her letters. And so naturally this aspect of her thought becomes more emphasized

in her great achievements, smallpox business. Explain that. Well, smallpox was one of the most dangerous diseases at the beginning of the 18th century. And there was no cure known for it. Lady Mary herself suffered her brother, her only brother died of it. She survived. She, herself, that's right, suffered very seriously and survived by losing her eyebrows and getting slightly popped, which I think explains why she used heavy makeup, something that Horace Walpole liked to criticize in her. But then when she went to Turkey with her husband, which was only a year after she herself had suffered, she saw that the Turks, actually the Greeks living in Turkey, had a method of inoculation. It sounds terribly crude and dangerous to us. What they did was to take the live virus from a patient who had the smallpox, scratch the arm, and let it stay on the patient, on the, get it

into the blood system of somebody. And it's true that occasionally a patient died, but the incidence was, I forget the exact statistics, I think about 2 % as compared with the real smallpox, which was much, much greater. And she tried this out on her son in Constantinople, her only son. And it worked successfully. Then when she came back to England, she had it done to her only daughter. And the Princess of Wales Caroline was very much impressed with this, and so had the two little princesses inoculated. Though she first tried it out on six criminals in Newgate who survived it, then the Princess of Wales tried it out on all the parish children of St. James's. They survived it, and she tried it out on the princesses. She was being careful of her control. That established it, and that remained the dominant form of prevention until Jenner came along with his

vaccine, which is an attenuated form of the virus. But that didn't happen until the 1790s, which is 70 years later. It was happening in America, two wasn't it? Boyle's not right. And Cotton Mather. Cotton Mather. At the same time, there was an epidemic in London, there was an epidemic in Boston in 1720 to 22. And Cotton Mather, curiously enough, in Boston, the clergymen were very much in favor of it, whereas in England many clergymen opposed it. They said it was flying in the face of God's will. It was, all right, but they helped persuade the English to them. Having that example of the New England success, it didn't carry some weight in England. I don't think very much, because by then it had gotten into London. Well, this is a smallpox business. This is part of the feminism. I think so, yes. It's part of her independence and her pragmatic way of thinking. She wasn't interested in theorizing or speculating. Here was a method which

worked. And there was no reason why it shouldn't be used if it saved lives. She confronted situations and faced them. That's right. And so, she confronted her husband, for example. When he a dull dog, he certainly was. Why do you say she confronted him? She married him. She married him. But she confronted his dullness and decided how to live with it. Yes, she decided how to live with it by not living with him. Well, that's right. But just staying married to him. That's right. Yes. Well, I was wondering why she didn't divorce him. I can't understand, well, I do understand now, because some new letters have turned up just last summer to explain why she married a man who was so terribly dull. And the reason is that she was determined to get married. She wanted to get married. She wanted to get away from her father's family and supervision. And she was 22 or so. And she did get married. She was fascinated somewhat by workly, I think, because he was a prominent politician. He was a great friend of Addison and Steele. And so, this was her way of achieving entree into the cultivated. He was

fairly handsome. And I think she was very much in love with him too. Because from one of these letters, soon after her marriage, she did achieve paradise. And she calls it herself. But then the letters of their early married life show that he was very neglectful. And I think she did have this warm impulse to want to love and be loved. But there was no response from this cold fish of a husband. And I think that helped to envy her and give her some of that nasty tone of personality, which she sometimes showed. She had tragedy. Didn't she also with her son? Yes, her son turned out to be a nad -du -well. And she wanted one of her later letters. She calls him that animal. And she completely broke with him. And there's very little that can be said about him, very little good that can be said about him. You don't get much sense of the artors in the

soft yielding way with Lady Mary. Do you? When they do occur, they occur in French. That's right. Well, don't you think it's because if one is brought up with English, these very passionate sentiments are rather embarrassing. In the English language, it doesn't lend itself to passionate prose. To Latin dress, as French does. And I think another example of that. If you remember in the Magic Mountain, where the, which I haven't read for years and years, but in the love passages between Hun's custom and what is the name of the oriental woman he falls in love with or it's Slavic woman, all those they talk in French. They can perfectly well have spoken in German. And in the translation of Mon, that's kept in French, and the effect is rather good because the French language lends itself to the more the sentiments. Yes. But is that great mom to love me? Yes,

but she was so concerned with the great mom. Yes, see. Well, this remarkable woman, when come back to this collaboration, and not collaborating, wondering around Europe for 20 years, she didn't wander along. She went from place to place, but she met this count. What's it called? Palazzo. What did I explain that? You have, you've been the first one to discover that haven't you? Yes. But explain it to me. Oddly enough, I'll know much more about it next week. It sounds terrible. It was written a book which is, which you call definitive, but I did it in quotes. So new material is turned up in the Venetian archives about the Palazzo thing. I don't think it'll change my interpretation of it, but it may simply give additional support for it. After she discovered when she went to it, Lee, that she and Algorati could not share a life together, she moved to Avignon and stayed there for four years. It was then a papal state, which had remained until the French Revolution. I can't understand. Four

years in Avignon. I thought you'd gone crazy. Well, she kept busy with writing and reading. Then she moved to the Italian lake country. That's very important because I think she's the first tourist who moved to Northern Italy. Of course, the Italians in Northern Italy all know about Lady Mary. They're extremely grateful because during the 19th century, there was a tremendous traffic of tourism in Northern Italy, as there still is. What you're saying is woman touches on so many important things on the medical history, upon Orientalism and upon Tourism. That's right. Yes, as well as upon writing. Well, let's go and get back to the country. When she lived up in the Italian lake country near Brescia, she had been taken there under Escort of a young Italian palazzo, and she stayed with his mother as a guest. Then there began to be rumors that she was being held prisoner so they could extract money from her. But from an affidavit, which she drew up at the end of that, and which I quote from

in my book, I don't think it was a love affair. I think this was an impoverished family. Here was a rich and rich by their standards, a rich eccentric English woman, and they simply thought they could milk whatever money they could add. Those jewels, they did, didn't they? That's right. Those jewels are like a melladrama. Lots of weeping and screaming and scenes. The count was a very demonstrative man. She tells in this affidavit how he threw himself at her feet and wept and said, you will ruin my family if you go to the police and so on. Why don't you do the book of an opera on Lady Mary and have Mariah Callas play? Well, I thought it would make a good movie with Betty Davis. You got the cast. You mentioned Orientalism, Howard, but we haven't touched on that. She wrote a series of letters about her travels in Turkey, and these were published soon after she died, and they had a tremendous vogue all

over Europe that would give them a great historian, read them, and thought they were fascinating Voltaire did. And I'm finding out that even artists were influenced by an anger, for example, in that famous painting of his of the ladies and the baths in the bathroom, Le Banteur. Based it, I don't know, did he ever go to Turkey? I think not. No, he didn't go to Turkey. He's a great way of Orientalism in France. Yes, but he says in one of his letters that he based that picture on Lady Mary's description of the baths of Saint Sophia. She tells that interesting anecdote about when she was thinking of going to the baths when the ladies in this bath asked her if she wouldn't join them. And so when she undressed and they saw this type corset, they said, my gosh, do your husbands imprison you that way in England? You're now editing the letters, aren't you? Yes, I am. How many volumes will they be? So far three.

That and expensive ones. All right, fat and expensive, but important. Yes, well, I think there's nothing more delightful than dipping into the volumes of a fine letter, rather like Keats or Van Gogh, I think better than dipping how it is reading them. You can't read three volumes in a row or just like that you do. What would probably happen, I hope is that I'll extract the over and the more interesting ones for a small sort of world classics reprint. Yes. And that will make them of course much more accessible and available to readers. Yes, well that would that'll be splendid or both will the scholarly edition. Well, thank you very much Robert Halstmann for telling us about the life of Lady Mary Wirtley -Montagieu, who's this fascinating remarkable woman of the 18th century. Thank you.