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Xerox University Microfilms 300 North ZoobRood Ann Arbor, Michigan 481 OS 76 - 24,685

SCHWARTZL Kathryn Carlisle, 1926- THE RHETORICAL RESOURCES OF LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU.

The Ohjto State University, Ph.D., 1976 Literature, English

Xerox University MicrofilmsAnn , Arbor, Michigan 48100

©Copyright by Kathryn Carlisle Schwartz 1976 THE RHETORICAL RESOURCES

OF LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU

DISSERTATION

Presented In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

Kathryn Carlisle Schwartz, B.A., M.A.

*****

The Ohio State University 1976

Reading Committeet Approved By

Professor James Battersby Professor Edward P. J* Corbett Professor John Sena Adviser /1 Department of English ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am Indebted to Professor Edward P. J. Corbett for constructive

criticism and advice on ail aspects of this dissertation, and most particularly for his invaluable assistance in establishing the large-

scale structure of the chapters and for his close attention to my

style. Professor Corbett's unfailing patience and encouragement assured a steady progress toward what at times seemed an infinitely receding goal. Professor James Battersby's many challenges to the

smaller phases of my arguments were constantly stimulating, and

Professor John Sena's thoughts on the possible ramifications of my discoveries about Lady Mary's rhetoric were important in determining my focus.

Without my family's unflagging support and their faith in a

successful outcome I could never have completed this dissertation.

11 VITA

November 17, 1926 . , . Bora - Blltaore, North Carolina

1947 • • . . • B.A,, Bard College, Annandale-on- Hudson, New York

Graduate Study, Department of Philosophy, New York University, New York, New York

1948 • * . , . Graduate Study, The Kenyon School of English, Kenyon College, Gambler, Ohio

1967 . . . * . M.A., The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1970 . . . , , Teaching Associate, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1974-5 .... Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of English, Kenyon College, Gambler, Ohio

1974-6 • * * . Teaching Associate In Plano, Department of Music, Kenyon College, Gambler, Ohio

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: English Literature of the Eighteenth Century*

Studies in Rhetoric. Professor Edward P. J. Corbett

Studies in Prose Style. Professor Ruth Hughey

Studies In Swift and Pope, Professor Thomas E. Maresca

lit TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENT ii

VITA H i

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

Chapter

I. ARGUMENTATION "If we go to Naples"

Letter of 12 August 1712, to Edward Wortley Montagu .... 17

II. DESCRIPTION "What I 8aw remarkable at Sophia"

Letter of 1 April 1717, to Lady ...... 58

III. GENERALIZATIONS AND PARTICULARS "This is the General state of Affairs"

Letter of 31 October 1723, to Lady Mar ...... 100

IV. EXPLANATION "Telling you that I love you"

Letter of 10 September 1736, to Francesco Algarotti . • « • • 136

V. NARRATION "An Adventure exactly resembling and, I belelve, copy'd from Pamela"

Letter of 8 December 1754, to Lady Bute 173

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 221

iv INTRODUCTION

Letter-writing was long recognised in the English rhetorical

tradition as an important branch of applied rhetoric, if only because

it was the one form of written rhetoric that every literate person was almost certain to engage in at some time in his Ilfe.^ Although popular interest in the art and skills of letter-writing has waned in recent times, the modem student of rhetoric can find a fertile field of inves­ tigation in the correspondence of accomplished letter-wrlters. The present study will undertake a rhetorical analysis of five letters of

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762),2 one of the great practitioners of the Golden Age of English letter-writing, as Robert Halsband, Lady

Mary's most recent editor and biographer, has called the eighteenth century.^

l-The importance attached to letter-writing can already be seen in the first English rhetoric, Thomas Wilson's Arte of Rhetorique (1560), where Wilson illustrates deliberative rhetoric anT"the rhetoric of “comfort" with letters. The most popular instructional rhetoric of the later sixteenth century, Angel Day's The English Secretorie (1586), was completely devoted to letter-writing.

^The letters are available in an authoritative edition: The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. 3 Vo Is*, ed. Robert Halsband* (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1967).

**In "Lady Mary Wortley Montagu as Letter-Wrlter," PMLA, 80 (1965), 163.

1 In the broadest tease* I understand rhetoric to be "that art or

talent by which the discourse Is adapted to Its end,"4 and for the narrow

purposes of this study, I consider the rhetoric of a given letter to be

the sun of the strategies Lady Mary enploys In that letter as she adjusts

her discourse to suit the correspondent, the subject, the occasion, and

her Intent* This approach to the art of an esteemed letter-wrlter was

suggested to me by the long rhetorical tradition In which letter-writing vaB treated from the stance of the writer and handled as a problem In

applied rhetoric: how to affect a given correspondent In a definite way

through the use of specific strategies.^

Such an approach seemed particularly appropriate In the case of an

eighteenth-century letter-wrlter, for that period Is generally agreed to be the culmination of two centuries of Intense and wide-spread interest

in the epistolary art, evidenced by the publication of much instructional material on how to write letters and of numerous collections of letters, many of which were Intended to serve as models for the aspiring letter- wrlter; and, of course, the epistolary form was employed in a host of

*The definition is from the eighteenth-century English rhetorician, George Campbell, In his Philosophy of Rhetoric, ed. Lloyd F. Bitzer (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963), p. 1. Campbell presents the definition as a quotation from Quintilian, citing "Dicere secundum vlrtutem oration!*'1 (Instituto Pretoria. II, xv, 36) and "Scientia bene dicendl" (II, xv, 2)4).Campbell's definition la more in the nature of a free rendering than a translation.

■*Tvo works by Wilbur Samuel Howell cover the material in this tradition exhaustively: Logic and Rhetoric in England: 1500-1700 (Hew York: Russell and Russell, 1961) and Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 197lV. other genres.6 That Lady Mary herself was avare of this tradition la clear from the number of collections of letters In her library,^ Includ­

ing those then most esteemed as models, from references In her letters

to other letter-writers, and from her allusions to conventions taught in the instructional manuals;6 *nd that she often consciously viewed her own letter-writing in terms of how she is affecting her correspondent is apparent from frequent asides and statements to that effect throughout the correspondence, examples of which will be seen in the letters that are analyzed in the body of the dissertation. An approach to the art of letter-writing that carefully scrutinizes individual letters as rhetori­ cal documents has been neglected by modern scholars, for though scholars have recently treated the works of esteemed letter-wrlters in a variety of ways, none of their methods of dealing with personal correspondence

6The state of all these manifestations of epistolary activity just before and during Lady Mary's formative years is succinctly described by James Sutherland In English Literature of the Seventeenth Century (Oxfordt Claredon Press, 19^9), pp. 230-3. The epistolary novel is, of course, the moat important purely literary manifestation of the Intense Interest in epistolary form.

^A copy of the 1739 catalogue of Lady Mary's library w s b kindly supplied to me by the Department of Local History and Archives, Sheffield Central Library, Sheffield, England.

®For example, in her letter of April 1751, Lady Mary speaks of "the common place Topics that are us'd (generally to no purpose) in Letters of Consolation," a remark showing familiarity with standard rhetorical terminology and with the kind of categorisation of letters cossaonly found in the manuals and formularies! see Complete Letters. II, 480. Throughout the dissertation, the dating of Lady Mary's letters is taken from Halsband's edition, and henceforth, the volume and page numbers cited for the letters refer to that edition. resembles the approsch adopted for this study***

The scops of whet I hope to achieve through this rhstorical treat­

ment of Lady Mary's letters requires explanation. As my title Indicates*

my ambition is to discover and assess the sum of the strategies that

Lady Mary has at her command to influence her correspondents according to

her intent. However* the sheer bulk of the correspondence in itself

makes it unlikely that this ambition could be fully realized. Lady Mary's

complete extant letters comprise three volumes; the letters were written

over a span of fifty years* and they were addressed to many correspond­

ents* were prompted by different kinds of situations* and were concerned with a number of subjects. It is this very variety that makes Lady

Mary's letters absorbing objects for rhetorical scrutiny* yet to identify

all the strategies contained in the correspondence is clearly impossible.

Nevertheless* I believed that it was possible to arrive at some procedure

that would succeed in displaying Lady Mary's rhetorical resources in

sufficient variety and significance to warrant my title.

A brief sketch of the search for such a procedure* describing the

issues on which decisions had to be made* what the decisions were* and

the reasons for those decisions* should offer some notion of how close

this study comes to meeting the implied claim of its title. The first

q For examples of recent treatments of letter-writers* see William Henry Irving* The Providence of Wit in the English Letter Writers (Durham* N.C.: Duke University Press, 1*9^5!) * an interesting and informative historical survey stressing influences and characterizing a number of letter writers; and The Familiar Letter in the Eighteenth Century, ed, Howard Anderson et al. (Lawrence* Kansas: University of Kansas, 1966), a collection of essays by a number of authors in which one topic that Interested many of the scholars was the relationship of the personal letters of the literary figures under discussion to the more formal genres they practiced. Issue to be resolved was whether to proceed by performing thorough analyses of a limited number of letters or by working with many letters

In terms of strategies noted to be of frequent and significant occurrence throughout the correspondence. My decision here was to concentrate on a few carefully chosen letters, for only this procedure would permit a thorough consideration of all the factors that determine Lady Mary's choice and deployment of her strategies. What I lost in scope I hoped to gain In precision. The next major issue was then to find some principle for selecting the letters to work with so that the dissertation would at least approach its goal of being a study of Lady Mary as a letter-wrlter rather than being a random collection of discussions of letters that I happened to find attractive for one reason or another.

Two preliminary decisions were helpful in reducing the number of letters that should be considered and then In determining how many of the remain­ ing letters should be selected for analysis.

The first preliminary decision was simply that the letters consid­ ered should not be "typical" or "average" letters» but among the "best" letterst to discover the extent of Lady Mary's rhetorical resources, she needed to be seen at her fullest capacity. Of course, such a casual standard leaves a great deal to subjective judgment, but it is a fact that many letters In a large and complete correspondence are simply less interesting than others on almost any conceivable grounds, and I believed that almost any reader would eliminate the same letters In a search for the most Interesting letters. Of those remaining, different readers would no doubt judge different letters to be the few "best," but I believed that the letters I chose would be generally agreed to be 6 among the mote Interesting letters, end in any case, my choices would be justified if the analyses' demonstrated the presence of a significant number of rhetorically effective strategies.

The second preliminary decision affected the number of letters to be finally selected. The nature of the proposed analyses suggested, and experimental work with single letters confirmed, that a chapter would be required for each letter. A sensible limitation for the whole study seemed to be four or five chapters. Three would be too few to produce sufficient coverage of Lady Mary as a letter-wrlter, while six, I believed, would probably begin to produce an overlap of discovered strategies.

From these preliminary decisions emerged Beveral requirements for the principle that would provide the basis for the selection of the letters, a principle that would represent some very general rhetorical feature present in many kinds of letters. First, the selection principle itself should divide naturally into four or five sub-categories, each of which would represent an important large-scale rhetorical feature capable of permeating an entire latter; one letter would be chosen as an example of each sub-division, producing the required four or five letters. The second requirement follows from the first; each selected letter should be a well-developed example of whatever rhetorical feature the sub-division represented. Third, the principle with its sub-divisions should produce letters in which distinctive sets of specific strategies would occur, thus avoiding overlap.

One of the organising principles I considered was the notion of

"life situation," a broad concept that would give a desirable chrono- logical range to the study. Lady Mary's letters fall of their own accord into sets determined by the successive Important situations that impel­ led her to write them. For example, one sixable set of letters concerns the difficult courtship with her future husband, and these letters have a distinct flavor. My thought here was that the situation and the facets of the writer's personality that respond to it bring forth a character­ istic group of rhetorical resources to cope with It. A closely related principle that 1 also considered was to group the letters according to the major correspondents and types of minor correspondent and select from each group the letter that seemed most fully and forcefully to contain the distinctive recurring themes or subjects of each correspond­ ence. The different correspondents and the different themes and subjects associated with them might, 1 thought, call forth distinct sets of strategies* Another similar possibility was to work with Lady Mary's role in relation to her correspondent. For example, Lady Mary functions as reporter in the series of letters she wrote from her journey to the *■ • » Near East to friends back home and also in the series of letters from home to her sister exiled abroad; she functions as counsellor in her letters to her husband about the management of their eccentric son and also in her letters to her daughter about the education of her grand­ daughters. These varied roles and the contrasts within a single role seemed capable of producing a promising selection of letters to work with

However, all of these related principles of selection, though based on considerations that are Important components of the rhetorical picture had practical and theoretical disadvantages. For one thing, they required too many letters. The grouping by correspondents, for example, demanded at least six chapters and the grouping by role even more.

Another objection was that all of these organizational schemes produced considerable overlap of strategies; the letters turned up by these principles of selection were not sufficiently distinguished from each other In their technical make-up to display distinctive sets of specific strategies. On the other hand, all of these related principles had the

4 * • advantage of permitting a selection of letters that was fairly evenly distributed over the entire correspondence, thus giving balance and range In representing the whole corpus, an Important matter In presenting

Lady Mary as a letter-wrlter and not merely as a writer of certain letters.

A somewhat different kind of principle that I considered and re­ jected was the purpose of the writer. From classical times through the eighteenth century, rhetoricians classified the purposes behind rhetori­ cal discourse* While some theoreticians came up with three basic purposes and others with four,10 the similarity and persistence of this kind of categorizing suggested that it reflected an abiding truth about rhetori­ cal discourse on which a useful principle of selection could be grounded.

The statement of basic purposes that seemed most congenial to Lady Mary's letters was that of George Campbell, the great eighteenth-century rhetorician, who Identified four basic purposes, under which specific

Intents In specific cases of discourse would fall; "to enlighten the

^°In his Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student. 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p, 623, Edward P.J. Corbett notes the similarity between Cicero and Campbell in this respect. understanding, to please the imagination, to move the passions, or to influence the vlll.'*^ It seemed possible that a writer would fulfill these distinct purposes through distinct sets of strategies; and the schema had the practical advantage of producing four chapters# To give examples of possible applications of this principle, Lady Mary's letters containing her literary criticism might be regarded as a specific case of the broad purpose of enlightening the understanding of her daughter, or her efforts to talk a friend Into being in love with her would perhaps be a case of purposing to move the passions#

Dut this principle too proved unsatisfactory,^ for a more careful examination of many of the more interesting letters revealed a complex of specific intents that would fall into more than one of the basic pur­ poses, especially when the whole background of a letter was taken into account# Rhetoricians from Cicero to Campbell were, of course, aware of this difficulty in assigning Intent, and solved it by asserting that

^Campbell, p. 1#

^Another kind of categorization according to purpose that I did not consider seriously should be mentioned because it is so well known# This scheme stems from Aristotle's division of rhetoric into deliber­ ative, forensic, and epideictic discourses; it was taken up by Angel Day, who applied it to letters, added the category "familiar letters," and made a host of sub-divisions, for example, "letters deliberative" into letters hortatory, suasory, petitionary, cocuendatory, consolatory, amatory, etc., and "letters familiar" into nunclatory, congratulatory, remuneratory, collandatory, joculatory, prestolatory, objurgatory, etc. The large categories of the scheme are not suited to Lady Mary's letters, and the sub-divisions, many of which became coomon coin, are too de­ tailed and cumbersome for my purposes. 10 however many intents were present, only one would be predominant or openly displayed, and that one predominant intent would be a specific case of one of the basic purposes,^ But in practice I often found It so difficult to determine which Intent was predominant that the scheme brought more problems than it solved. It did, however, serve to suggest another system of categorizing rhetorical discourses, the classification into form of discourse: explanation, argumentation, description, or narration. The two systems have some relationship inasmuch as it is often expected (but not necessarily the case) that, for example, the understanding will be enlightened through explanation, or the will in- vluenced through argumentation.

This principle of categorizing and then selecting the letters for analysis according to form of discourse turned out to have compelling advantages, both practical and theoretical. First, form of discourse

(that is, whether a letter is predominantly descriptive, narrative, explanatory, or argumentative) can be identified more readily and indubitably than intent. Second, many of the letters that I found of greatest interest on general grounds were those in which Lady Mary sustains and develops one form of discourse; the opposite tended to be true of intent: an almoBt inseparable complex of intents often made for an interesting letter* Next, form of discourse is more technical in nature than the principles of selection considered earlier; since the

13 See Cicero, De Or store, ed. H. Rackham, Loeb Library (London: Heinemann, 1942), I, 435, and Campbell, p. 1. specific strategies the selection principle should lead to are definable

as techniques of thought and style, form of discourse seemed more likely

to lead directly to the strategies and to turn up distinctive sets of

• • • strategies for each form than vould the other principles and their sub- - divisions. Further, having to select letters that were predominantly

in one form would considerably reduce the number of letters that quali­

fied for selection, a great help In dealing with such a large corres­ pondence, and, of course, selection by form of discourse would produce

the desirable number of letters. Finally, if it is true that all dis­ course is in one of the four forms at any given moment, working with

letters that arc each well-developed in one of the forms should go a long way toward displaying the extent of Lady Mary's rhetorical resources.

For all these reasons, 1 adopted form of discourse as the principle for selecting the letters to work with.

But even the most suitable abstract scheme when applied to an actual body of art must turn out to be something of a Procrustean bed, and one nagging area of misfit became apparent. Since I was convinced that there was no better solution to finding a selection principle, rather than abandon the adopted scheme or ignore the misfitting area, I determined

to go slightly beyond the scheme to accommodate it. The problem was that one interesting and characteristic type of letter would be excluded by

the unamended scheme, Lady Mary's brilliant gossip letters. In this

type, forms of discourse are mingled, and the effectiveness of the type

is attributable to the interplay among the forms: Lady Mary presents

specific snippets of news, descriptive or narrative in nature, and precedes or follows them with interpretive comment that can be 12 categorized as explanatory generalization. With such a mixture of generalizing explanation and specific narration or description, we are dealing with one of the fundamental principles of discourse, the perpet­ ual swing between general and particular and the varying ways of relating these two poles.^ Of course, this generalization/particulars pattern also operates in letters that are predominantly and continuously in. one form of discourse, but it is so prominent in the gossip letters and so much at the heart of their effectiveness that concentrating on that feature in this type of letter is particularly fitting. Hence, to the four chopters devoted to letters predominantly in each of the four forms of discourse, I have added a fifth chapter that focusses on Lady Mary's handling of the Interplay between generalization and supporting detail.

With the major problem of the principle of selection thus solved, I should stress that the large-scale rhetorical feature that was to serve as that principle was at no point conceived of as excluding a consider­ ation of the other components of the rhetorical picture or even as being of greater importance than the others. It was simply to be the large- scale factor that would most efficiently discover and display Lady Mary's small-scale resources. In dealing with the individual selected letters, it would still be crucial to include intent, correspondent, subject or theme, situation or occasion, and in any given letter any one or combin­ ation of these elements might be of lesser or greater importance.

^C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards see these poles as a fundamental characteristic of all mental activity: "• . • in all thought processes two tendencies are present, one toward greater definiteness or precision, the other toward wider scope and range," The Meaning of Meaning (New York* Harcourt, Brace, 1936), p. 64. The fifth category I add is at least aB basic a compositional feature as the four forms of discourse. To Incorporate all of these considerations, I decided on the following format., .Each chapter would consist of two sections* The first section would present the complex of rhetorical determinants (mentioned above) that affect the given letter and would Include, where pertinent, reference to the series of related letters In which the selected letter occurs. The second section would then consist of a detailed analysis of the letter, focussing on the letter as an example of explanation, argumentation, description, narration, or generalization/particular pattern, and proceeding In terms of the techniques and strategics that make up that particular form of discourse In that particular letter. In the course of the analysis, reference to the material established in the first section would show the relationship of the strategics to these crucial rhetorical determinants.

With a place found for the most significant components of the rhetorical picture, the one desirable factor still not accounted for was that of chronological scope. This omission would be easily remedied if letters in certain forms of discourse turned out to be characteristic of certain periods in Lady Mary's correspondence, or if equally good examples of each form occurred in several periods. Taken together, these two conditions prevailed sufficiently to permit a fairly good chrono­ logical distribution of the letters selected. For example, the courtship letters (1710-12) to Edward Wortley Montagu, with their accusations and defences, proposals and counter-proposals, have a generally argumentative flavor; hence there was little question that argumentation would be well represented by a letter from this series. Similarly, it seemed fitting that the letter of description should be taken from the Turkish Embassy Letters (1716-18), for description of life In Central Europe and the

Near East Is the dominant Impression produced by that famed series of

travel letters. The type of letter which the generalization/particular

category was Introduced to accommodate was written most characteristically

to Lady Mary's sister. Lady Mar, between 1721 and 1727, years during which

Lady Mary was established In London and environs as a participant In and observer of the highest social circles. Examples of explanation were not

so conveniently and characteristically concentrated, but good examples occur In several periods. The letter I chose is from the correspondence with Francesco Algarotti from 1736 to 1741, a' period and relationship

that marked a turning-point In Lady Mary's life* In this letter, she exposes, analyzes, and Illustrates the state of her emotions toward

Algarotti. The narrative letter Is taken from Lady Mary's correspondence vltli her daughter, Lady Bute, from 1746 to 1761, years when Lady Mary resided on the Continent. While that correspondence Is so extensive and varied that no one kind of letter begins to typify It, more examples r « of developed narrative occur there than in any other single series of

letters.

Two remaining matters require brief attention because they are questions that a study such as this might be expected to deal with; however, both lie outside the scope of what I am here attempting. First,

I will not attempt to account for the presence of the strategies discovered In the letters In terms of how or where Lady Mary could have

come by a knowledge of them. Whether she arrived at her strategies

through a study of formal rhetoric, through absorption from the numerous

examples she must have encountered in her extensive reading, or whether she re-Invented them out o£ her own talent and need for expression, are all considerations that are irrelevant to the narrow purpose of this study, which is only to establish the presence and manner of functioning of the strategies in the individual letters in order to define the nature » * * and extent of Lady Mary's rhetorical resources.

The second matter, the degree of the writer's premeditation or self- * * * consciousness, is so often raised in regard to letter-writers that it must bo mentioned. To indicate what could be the dimensions of the problem for this study, we need only note the seeming contradiction in the letter-wrlting-as-rhetorlc tradition when the personal letter, according to a long-established esthetic, is supposed to be a spontaneous production imitating familiar conversation, and when the rhetorician is commonly conceived of as a calculating person who carefully contrives his every effect. However, the whole problem is inadmissible in this study (even if we could know what went on in Lady Mary's mind while she wrote), for the study Is concerned only with the letters as finished rhetorical documents that contain discoverable rhetorical means and ends that are responses to ascertainable situations. However, a manner of speaking that I occasionally adopt might mislead the reader who is aware of the problem outlined just above into thinking that I am implicitly asserting that Lady Mary consciously contrived her letters; that is, I will often speak of Lady Mary choosing this means, meeting such an obstacle, creating that effect. I have used this phrasing, first, as a convenience, finding it the most direct way of presenting my findings, and second, as an essentially accurate way of presentation: in some 16 way and on some level of her psyche, Lady Mary determines her responses, makes her calculations, and chooses her means. The precise how and where of these mental activities are unknowable; the letters may be

spontaneous, lightning-quick, Intuitive responses to the people and

circumstances, the ideas and feelings, she was confronted with at any

given time, or her letters may be artful and labored-over contrivances,

or anywhere in between. However interesting that question may be, it

Is not a concern of the present study# CHAPTER I

ARGUMENTATION: "If we go to Naples"

Letter of 12 August 1712, to Edward Wortley Montagu i'

Lady Mary's abilities In argumentative discourse are for the most part displayed in letters prompted by three concerns that occupied her at three different times in her life. These concerns were her courtship with her future husband, Edward Wortley Montagu, reflected In the numer­ ous letters she wrote to him from 1710 to 1712; the management of her eccentric adult son, about which she corresponded with Wortley during the 1740's; and the education of her granddaughters, a subject she dealt with in letters to her daughter, Lady Bute, in the 1750's.

In the many courtship letters that evidence an argumentative spirit,

Lady Mary contends with her lover over interpretations of each other's statements and behavior, over the ramifications of her father's dis­ approval of the match, over plans for the future. Many of these letters are very brief, but others present sustained arguments that give a good picture of Lady Mary's abilities in this form of discourse. The letters of 25 April (Iv 29-31), 22 August 1710 (I, 55-6), 6 August 1712 (I,

140-3), and 12 August 1712 (I, 152-6) are among the more notable examples.

In the second and third situations listed above, Lady Mary acted as counsellor on matters in which she was not a primary participant.

17 However, she wee not merely giving adylce to open-minded listeners, for

In both situations her opinions ran counter to what she knew to be the opinions of her correspondents, and hence her letters about the manage-

* • * ment of her son and the education of her granddaughters take on a strongly argumentative cast* To Lady Mary's mind, her husband entertained un­ realistic hopes for rehabilitating their son and dealt with him too leniently, whereas she was firmly convinced that the young man was an irremediable fool and scoundrel and that any yielding to him was to the disadvantage of both father and son* The letters of 8 September 1741

(II, 249-50) and 10 July 1742 (II, 285-9) ere relatively well-developed

Instances of Lady Mary's methods of argumentation on this subject.

Similarly, Lady Mary knew that her advice on the education of her grand­ daughters would have much opposition to overcome, for her views were contrary to the generally accepted notion of a proper education for girls*

Further, her son-in-law would find her views shocking, and Lady Mary had not educated her own daughter according to the plan she advocated for her granddaughters.1 Lady Mary's most sustained arguments for a learned education for girls ere found in her letters of 19 February 1750 (II,

450-2), 28 January 1753 (III, 20-4), and 6 March 1753 (III, 25-8).

Finally, apart from the letters dealing with the three situations described above, we should note a well-developed isolated example of

Lady Mary's argumentative abilities on a relatively impersonal topic*

^Vbord Bute will be extremely shocked at the proposal of a learned Education for Daughters" (III, 25); "You will tell me, I did not make [learning] a part of your Education" (III, 21). 19 la a long digression In her latter of 20 October 1755 (III, 91-8), Lady

Mary recounts her methods of controverting Catholic doctrine when she Is

forced Into dispute with her many acquaintances among the Roman clergy*

From among the letters that might be expected to yield Interesting

results In an Investigation of Lady Mary*s argumentative strategies, I have chosen to analyze her letter of 12 August 1712* The letter belongs

to by far the most sizable group of letters that Is dominated by an argumentative spirit, and the courtship situation was to Lady Mary of more immediate and critical personal Import, difficulty, and complexity

than the other situations described. Hence a well-developed letter prompted by that absorbing experience might reasonably be expected to be

richer In strategies than letters dealing with the more removed concerns*

The 12 August 1712 letter sums up the major issues of the courtship at a crucial juncture and brings them to bear on a specific proposal for action on which the writer believes that nothing less than a lifetime of happiness or of misery depends*

The aspects of the courtship situation that become the elements of

this letter Include externally imposed practical difficulties and questions of values, character, and temperament. Lady Mary's corres­ pondent In the courtship letters was Edward Wortley Montagu, a bachelor

of thirty when Lady Mary met him in 1709 through her friendship with his

sister, Anne.^ Wortley was a lawyer by profession and a rising Whig

Member of Parliament, A man of serious intellectual Interests, Wortley

2 ’ * Robert Halsband, The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1956), p. 8; hereafter. Life. had a reputation for classical learning, and his close friends Included

Joseph Addison and Richard Steele* Though he had only a small Income

at the time, Wortley was heir to his father, who was the second son of

the first Karl of Sandwich and a man of ample estate, and Wortley himself was heir to the Karldom after his cousin.3 in 1709 Lady Mary, a girl of

nineteen, was leading a busy social life in London and acting as hostess

for her widowed father* Her father, Earl of Kingston and Marquess of

Dorchester, was a man of prominent aristocratic family, a leading Whig

politician, and a friend of Addison, Steele, William Congreve, and Dr.

Samuel Garth. Lady Mary frequently met these learned and literary men,

and their Influence further encouraged her own Interests in learning and

writing, which she manifested even in childhood.^ Thus in family position,

personal interests, social circle, and political leanings, the lovers were well-matched.

Lady Mary's first letter to Wortley (28 March 1710) shows that

marriage was already a topic of discussion.^ in early summer 1710,

Wortley made a formal proposal for Lady Mary's hand to Lord Dorchester,

and the two men began negotiations for the marriage settlement. By the'

3Life, p. 9, pp. 12-13* For Wortley's association with Steele on the Tatler, see Richmond F. Bond, The Tatler: The Making of a Literary Journal (Cambridge! Harvard University Press, 19Yl), p. lTJf p”. 29#

^Life* p. 1, pp. 7-8.

■*In. this letter. Lady Mary speaks of the qualifications of a good wife, states "£ know how to make a Man of sense happy," and uses the phrase "if I am your Wife," The letter concludes with the first of many declarations and threats of breaking off found in the correspond­ ence; this one seems self-protective! she has never before written such a letter to a man and is not sure how it trill be received. end o£ July, the negotiations vece broken. o££t the main points o£ contention being Dorchester's Insistence that Wortley entail his estate on a first son and the amount of the financial settlementWortley's subsequent thoughts of reopening the talks came to nothing, for he was equally unwilling to give up lady Mary or to give in to Lord Dorchester, and by the time Wortley and Lady Mary were close to their personal agreement to marry (Just before their elopement in the summer of 1712),

Lady Mary assured her lover that .Lord Dorchester had gone so far with negotiations with another suitor that he would not deal with Wortley on any terms.7

Lord Dorchester had for some time been working out the terms of a marriage settlement with an Irish peer, Clotworthy Skefflngton, despite the strong opposition of Lady Mary, whose only desire in the situation, she told Wortley, was to "be free of a Man I hated" with an "Aversion .

• . too great to be overcome" (26 July 1712, I, 134, 135). Lady Mary and

Wortley had broken with each other over a personal isBue (to be described shortly) early in May 1711, and when they resumed their relationship over a year later (June 1712), a time of decision about her future was fast approaching for Lady Mary, for the marriage papers with the approved suitor were about to be signed. The state of her relationship with

Wortley, the stage of Dorchester's dealings with the Irish peer, and

Dorchester's attitude toward Lady Mary and the whole question of her

^Life. p. 13; also, Wortley*s letter of 10 August 1710, I, 51-2.

7I, 142-3. 22 « * * marriage left three choices open to her.

First, she could marry vhere her father wished. In this case, she would be liberally provided for under legally binding terms, and, since she believed she could make Skeffington "allvays think whatever I please," she believed she would have considerable freedom of action in the marriage to compensate for her personal dislike for him,8 Although Lord i * * Dorchester told Lady Mary that he would never permit her to marry any other man, he allowed her the option of remaining single, but on very disadvantageous terms: he would confine her "where I might repent at leisure" and disinherit her except for the small annuity of four hundred pounds after his death (26 July 1712, I, 134-5). These terms represented a severe limitation of her alternatives, for she had earlier believed that she would soon receive a settlement of ten thousand pounds Indepen­ dent of her marital status and under her own control*^ Her third choice was to elope with Wortley, the man she loved and esteemed, and be totally dependent on him financially, a dependence unusual and potentially de­ meaning for a married woman of her social class.

This third alternative was the only one Lady Mary actively desired, yet her doubts about it continued almost up to the elopement Itself, so that the other alternatives were still real, though undesirable, possi­ bilities* Lady Mary was acutely aware of the implications of marrying without the safeguards of a dowry and a legal settlement* As we will see from the letter of 12 August 1712, Lady Mary feared that if she could

8I, 141 (6 August 1712): Life, p* 23

9I, 53 (20 August 1710). 23 no longer make Wortley happy through her personal qualities, not only would she be miserable over the emotional failure, but Wortley, and hence ultimately she too, would regret that she had brought nothing to

the marriage to compensate him for his loss of Interest in her. Wortley,

in his letter of 10 August 1710 (I, 51) giving his side of the breakdown of the negotiations with Dorchester, had bluntly said as much: "I cannot so readily agree to make my selfe uncapable of any satisfaction in case

I should have none from you." Further, Lady Mary had doubts about being entirely at the mercy of Wortley*e generosity, and her late efforts at reassuring herself that a jointure was unnecessary sound a little tenta­

tive: "I begin to think my selfe in the wrong to imagine a Man so generous to take me without a Fortune would not be also generous enough to make me easy every other way" (11 August 1712, 1, 151). But of one implication of the financial situation Lady Mary seemed firmly convinced:

"A Man that marrys a Woman without any advantages of Fortune or Alliance

(as will be the case) has a very good title to her future Obedience.

He has a right to be made easy every other way" (6 August 1712, I, 140-1).

However, as the letter of 12 August 1712 will show, there was a limit to her obedience: logically enough, she would not accede to Wortley'a wishes in a matter that could diminish or destroy the personal qualities on which her ability to make him happy depended, for if she lost those qualities, the outcome of the marriage would be disastrous. In view of all the above Implications, Lady Mary believed that it was of the utmost importance that she and Wortley agree beforehand on the conditions that could assure their lasting happiness together, and to her mind, their future place of residence and their attendant life-style were the 24

crucial natters.

Wortley had early declared that when he married he Intended to

settle In the country; he enjoyed country living, he did not care £or

the pleasures of the town, and he found the city air bad for his health.

He further told Lady Mary that he could not afford to maintain a town

residence for her and a country residence for himself, and late In the

courtship he stated that If she married, him, she must accept the change

from "a fine Court Lady" to a "plain Country Wife."10

For her part, Lady Mary vas perfectly willing to give up the high

social life of the town, for which she often expressed contempt, but she would have found leading an unpretentious life in London to her taste.11

In letters to two women friends written in the summer of 1710 while she was staying In the country, Lady Mary set forth her opinions of country

llfe.1^ She detested the solitude and the paucity of diversions: "Tls not the place but the solitude of the place that Is lntollerable . • • •

The Diversion here is walking, which indeed are very pritty all about

the place [sic: "walking" Is the only antecedent for "which"], but then

you may walk 2 mile without meeting a living creature but a few strag­

gling cows" (I, 42-3). And she was appalled at the effect of country

10Life, p. 22: see also the letters from Wortley of 14 March 1711 (I, 92)T2TOctober 1710 (I, 58), and 16 June 1712 (I, 125).

11Lady Mary renounced the fashionable life in London many times; for example, see her letter of 26 February 1711 (I, 83-4); for her suggestion of a simple life In town, see I, 30 (25 April 1710).

^See the letter of 5 July 1710 (I, 42-3) to Anne Justice and that of 2 August 1710 (1, 49-50) to Frances Hewet. Her father had sent her to her grandmother's country seat In Wiltshire while he negotiated with Wortley. It is interesting that Lady Mary expresses these views with marriage to Wortley, who liked the country, in the offing. 25 living on the people she did meet and observe: "But people mistake very much in placeing peace In woods and Shades; I believe solitude puts folks out of Humour and makes em disposed to quarrel"; the men were

insensible of other pleasures than Hunting and drinking, the consequence of which is the poor female part of their family being seldom permitted a Coach, or, at best, but a couple of starv'd Jades to drag a dirty Chariot, their Lords and masters having no Occasion for such a Machine, the morning spent among the Hounds and the nights with as Beastly compannlons, with what Liquor they can get in this country, which is not very famous for good drink* (I, 49-50),

Later, Lady Mary reversed her stand against residing in the country with

Wortley, stating, though without enthusiasm, "I could be content to passe my Life in the Country" (7 March 1711, I, 88), but finally she came out firmly against the "solitude" as a permanent residence*

But from the beginning of the correspondence, Lady Mary's preference was for travel, springing from a desire "never to stay perpetually in the same place," as she put it to her friend Frances Hewet (June 1710, 1, 42),

After first broaching the subject to Wortley in her letter of 25 April

1710 (I, 30), she continued in her 20 August 1710 letter (1,53): "If you realy intend to travel, as it is the thing upon Earth I should most wish, I should prefer that manner of living to any other; and with utmost

Sincerity I confeaee I should chuse you before any Match could be offerd me," a statement that suggests that to Lady Mary the manner of living is as Important as the man* Toward the end of the courtship, Lady

Mary again pressed for travel in the modified form of residence in

Naples, seeing in this scheme a solution to several problems: it was an alternative to the town life Wortley disliked and the country life she disliked; In Italy they could live quietly on their small income* removed from the social demands of their acquaintances; and going abroad would remove them from the prying and disapproving eyes of her family

Thus in her letter of 6 August 1712 (I* 141), Lady Mary wrote, "I don't see why you should not persue the plan that you say you begun with your

Freind [Addison]. I don't mean take him with-you, but why may not 1 supply his place? At Maples we may live after our own fashion." What she meant by "our own fashion" becomes apparent in her 11 August 1712 letter: "The Scheme I propose to myselfe is living in an agreable

Country, with a Man that I like, that likes me, and forgetting the rest of the world as much as if there was no other people in the world, and that NapleB were the Garden of Eden" (I, 151). It is to the proposal that they lead a retired life in Naples that Lady Mary argues in her letter of 12 August 1712, and in that letter she Identifies a still more

Important advantage in the proposed place and manner of living: it will do no less than assure their lasting happiness*

What the Wortley-Addlson plan was is not known. Peter Smlthers, in his Life of Joseph Addison (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1968), the only full-length biography of Addison, does mention two plans that Wortley and Addison had for travelling and staying together. In 1711, the friends discussed s trip to Newcastle, and in the same year Wortley

Invited Addison for a long visit at his country seat in Yorkshire

(Smlthers, pp. 235-6). Neither of these plans was acted on, and hence

Life, 20. Lady Mary speaks of the difficulty of living where she would encounter her family in her letters of 6 August 1712 (I, 141) and 11 August 1712 (I, 151). 27

they were "plans begun," but neither much resembles Lady Mery's scheme

, , of a prolonged residence In Naples. The two men had travelled together

on the Grand Tour, and In the winter of 1711-12 they lodged together

in Kensington, so It is not impossible that they had some plan for future

domestic companionship if neither married; Addison's courtship of Lady

Warwick was at this period only half-serious and had also suffered a

reverse (Smlthers, 234-5), and we have noted the uncertain state of

Wortley*s courtship. It would be of considerable rhetorical Interest to

know just what the Wortley-Addlson plan and its attendant circumstances

were, for the way Lady Mary argues for her proposal in the 12 August

letter could well be affected by such matters as how closely the men's

plan resembled hers, how seriously they contemplated their plan, how

long ago or how recently they had discussed it, and when they thought to

act on it. But our later discussion of the 12 August 1712 letter will

have to proceed without further reference to these potentially pertinent

matters*

It was, of course, Lady Mary's concept of happiness that led her to

choose Wortley over the suitor her father approved, end that concept was

also at the root of her proposal to live in Naples with Wortley. Lady

Mary's fullest discussion of happiness, of what it is and what it is not,

is found in her latter of 24 March 1711*

If I marry, I propose to my selfe a Retirement. There is few of my Acquaintance I should ever wish to see again, and the pleasing One, and only One, is the way I design to please my selfe.

Happynesse is the natural design of all the World, and every thing we see done, is meant in order to attain it. My Imagination places it In Frelndship. 28

By Frelndshlp I mean, an Intire Communication of thoughts, Wishes, Interests, and Pleasures being undivided, a mutual Esteem, which naturally carrye with it a pleasing sveetnesse of conversation, and terminates in the desire of makeing one or Another happy, without being forc'd to run into Visits. Noise, and Hurry, which serve rather to trouble than compose the thoughts of any reasonable Creature. There are few capable of a Frelndshlp such as 1 have describ'd, and tis necessary for the generaility of the World to be taken up with Trlffles. (I, 95)

Wortley had expressed a comparable view in his letter of 8 April 1710t

I have ever.believ'd the compleatest Plan of Felicity that we are acquainted with, was to enjoy one woman friend, one Man, and to think it of little moment whether those that were made use of to fill up some idle hours were Princes or Peasants, wise or foolish, but rather to seek the Lover as less likely to work any change in a mind thoroughly satisfi'd that knew no want nor so much as a wish. Had I you, I should have at one view before me all the Charms of either sex met together. I shoud enjoy a perpetual succession of new Pleasures, a constant Variety in One. This Is far beyond what I thought sufficient to make life Happy. (I, 26)

Lady Mary and Wortley agree that their happiness would center in each other and in the quality of friendship. Wortley does not define "friend­ ship," but considering that Joseph Addison, who "valued [Wortley*s] conversation more than any other man's,"^ was his closest man friend, and Lady Mary, for whom friendship consisted in a complete communication of thoughts, hla closest woman friend, it is safe to say that for both

Wortley and Lady Mary the essence of happiness was the exchange of thoughts through conversation in an atmosphere of mutual regard. It was perhaps Wortley'a statement that he found in her the combined advantages of friendship with a man and a woman that encouraged Lady Mary to suggest

w Llfe, p. 9 the substitution of herself for Addison in "the plan,"

However, not surprisingly, Wortley's feeling for Lady Mary had an.

additional aspect that her feeling for him lackeds he often spoke of

his "passion" for her, for example, In his letter of 2 May 1711 (1,105),

* • • where he says that he cannot cover up "the violence of my passion," To

Lady Mary, "passion" was suspect, founded on Fancy rather than on Reason

« * and hence subject to decay,^ Besides not approving of the irrational,

transitory emotion, she asserted that she had never experienced that or

any other violent emotiont

If you expect Passion I am utterly unacquainted with any. It may be a fault of my temper. Tie a stupidity I could never justifye, but I do not know I was in my Life ever touch'd with any, 1 have no Notion of a Transport of Anger, Love, or any other, I here tell you the plain state of my Heart, , ■ , Flights of Passion I neither know how to feel or to counterfeit, (20 August 1710, I , 53-4)

These assertions have the ring of over-statement, but whatever posing may be present, they reveal Lady Mary's determination to assess her and

Wortley's situation in a cool, sensible manner, unswayed by any passion of his (or her own), and to let him know it. Lady Mary preferred the

term "friendship" to "love" because "love" as commonly understood signi­

fied "passion, "I® yet she also used the term "love" for her relationship

to Wortley, In her 12 August 1712 letter she speaka of passion, friend­

ship, and love, and she uses Mlove" first In the one sense and then in

the other, to what purpose and effect we will see later.

^ I , 96 (24 March 1711). 16- 30

Another important issue debated by the lovers was Lady Mary's

conduct vith other men, and it vas over this issue that she and Wortley

broke off for over a year (May 1711-June 1712)• A large factor in the

coquetry-jealouay dispute vas the necessarily clandestine nature of the

•courtship for all but the brief period between Wortley*8 formal proposal

and the failure of the negotiations with Lord Dorchester. Lady Mary

lived in fear of discovery by her father;^ Wortley*s jealousy was pro­

voked by the open sociability Lady Mary enjoyed with other men, including

the approved suitor, and she was perhaps not above flirting with others

to maintain Wortley'a interest.1®

The issue of coquetry was an old one in the courtship, for in her

first letter to Wortley, Lady Mary Is apparently answering such a chargej

"The pritty Fellows you speak of, I own entertain me sometimes, but is

it impossible to be diverted with what one dlsplses? I can laugh at a

puppet show, at the same time I know there is nothing in it worth my

attention or regard" (28 March 1710,. I, 24). Just before the lovers

broke off, Wortley accused Lady Mary of encouraging a Mr. K. and trifling

vith a Mr. D. Lady Mary's defence was that the former gentleman addres­

sed her no more seriously than he did many other women and that a "little

1 ft * * * raillery" was all that passed between her and Mr. Wortley was still

^See, for example, I, 35 (5 May 1710) and I, 88 (7 March 1711). 18 Halaband'a opinion, based on a general remark to Anne Justice (3 February 1711, I, 71); see Life, p. 19.

^Thia exchange is found in Wortley's letters of 16 April 1711 (1, 102-3) and in Lady Mary's letter of 28 April 1711 (I, 104-5). 31 alluding to Lady Mary's behavior vith other admirers very shortly before

her letter of 12 August 1712,2® q u ^ the degree of his worry over this

Issue can be seen In his letter of 15 August 1712, In which he bluntly

and somewhat coarsely says, "If you are likely to think of Cockoldom you

are mad If you marry me" (I, 158), We will see that Lady Mary effectively

handles the charge of "gallantry" In her 12 August letter*

Apart from the specific difficulties the lovers confronted, basic

differences of temperament also seem to be at work In the contentions of

the courtship letters, for the same kinds of charges reappear in dif­

ferent contexts. Wortley'a most general charge against Lady Mary was

Insincerity, by which he meant both lying about matters of fact and

falling to be candid about thoughts and feelingst she did not tell the

truth about her father's financial Intentions in regard to her marriage, about her attachments to other men, about where she wao willing to live, about her esteem for him.21 in return, she vigorously and continually asserted her sincerity and high-mlndedness, and she accused him of being ill-natured, fault-finding, and suspicious. 22 However, the lovers were

20In his letter of 8 August 1712, I, 146.

21IO cite but a few of the many expressions of this attitudet I, 13, 59, 96, 147* In his letter of 14 February 1711 (I, 78), Wortley poses a series of rhetorical questions In which he obliquely states the main areas In which he distrusts Lady Mary*

22For a few examples of Lady Mary's many protestations of sincerity, see 1, 30, 94, 129; and for examples of her many accusations, see I, 62, 70 (ill-natured)) I, 64, 81 (fault-finding)) I, 61, 66 (suspicious)* 32

much alike In Che extreme scrupulousness of their determination to avoid

or smooth over no difficulty* to leave.each other free to break off the

relationship at any time for any reason* and to have the same freedom

each on fils own account.23 This scrupulousness* compounded with all the

difficulties described above* accounts for the many times the lovers

considered breaking off* each usually claiming (as does Lady Mary In her

12 August letter) the ultimate welfare of the other for the reason.

In her letter of 12 August 1712* Lady Mary brings together the

aspects of the courtship that are described above to form an argumenta­

tive discourse. We will now consider how she employs her material to

persuade her correspondent to adopt the course of action she recommends.

The complete text (I, 152-6) follows;2^

To Wortley [12 Aug. 1712]

Tuesday night

I receiv'd both your Monday Letters since I writ the Enclos'd* which however I send you. The kind Letter was writ and sent Friday morning* and I did not receive yours till the Satterday noon* or (to speak truth) you would never have had it, there were so manny things in yours to put me out of Humour. Thus you see it was on no design to repair any thing that offended you* You only shew me how industrious you are to find imaginary Faults in me. Why will you not suffer me to be pleas'd vith you?

I would see you if I could (tho* perhaps it may be wrong), but In the way I am here* tls impossible. I can't come to Town but In companny with my sister In law. I can carry her no where but where she pleases, or If I could I would

230f the many offers to break off (which continued up to the elopement), only a few need be citedt I, 36, 54, 82, 99, 140* 147.

2^A11 complete letters and quotations from letters in the disserta­ tion are accurately transcribed from Professor Halaband's Complete Letters; I spare my reader the many notations of [sic] that would be necessary for Lady Mary's many non-standard spellings and punctuations. 33

. . trust her with nothing. 1 could not walk out alone without giving Suspicion to the whole Family. Should I he watch'd and seen to meet a Kan * judge o£ the Consequence.

You speak of treating with my Father, as If you belelv'd he would come to Terms afterwards, 1 will not suffer you to remain In that thought, however advantageous It might be to me; I will deceive you in nothing. I am fully persuaded he will never hear of terms afterwards. You may say, tis talking oddly of him. I can't answer to that, but tis my real Opinion, and I think I know him. You talk to me of Estates as if I was the most Interested Woman in the World. Whatever faults I may have shewn In my Life, I know not one Action of it that ever prov'd me Mercenary. I think there cannot be a greater proof of the contrary than treating with you, where X am to depend entirely on your generosity, at the same time that I have settle'd on me L300 per Annum pin money and a considerable jointure in another place, not to reckon that I may have by his temper what command of his Estate I please; and with you I have nothing to pretend to. I do not however make a Merit of this to you. Money is very little to me because all beyond necessarys I do not value that is to [be] purchas'd by it. If the man propos'd to me had L10,000 per Annum and I was sure to dispose of it all, I should act just as I do. I have In my Life known a good deal of shew, and never found my selfe the happier for it.

In proposelng to you to follow the scheme begun with your Frelnd, I think tis absolutely necessary for both our Sakes. I would have you want no pleasure which a single Life would afford you; you own that you think nothing so agreable. A Woman that adds nothing to a Man's fortune ought not to take from his happynesse. If possible I would add to It, but I will not take from you any satisfaction you could enjoy without mew On my own side, I endeavor to form as right a judgment of the Temper of Humane Nature, and of my own In particular, as I am capable of. I would throw off all partlalllty and passion, and be calm in my Opinion. Allmost all people are apt to run Into a mistake, that when they once feel or give a passion, there needs nothing to entertain it. This Mistake makes, In the Number of Women that inspire (even) violent passions, hardly one preserve one after possession. If we marry, our happynesse must consist in loveing one Another. Tis principally my concern to think of the most probable method of makeing that Love Eternal.

You object.against living in London. I am not fond of it my selfe, and readily give It up to you, tho' I am Assur'd there needs more art to keep a fondness alive in Solitude, where it gennerally preys upon it selfe* There is one Article absolutely necesaaryt to be ever belov'd, one tnust be ever agreeble* There is no such thing as being agreable without a thorrough good humour, a natural sweetnesse of temper, enliven'd by Cheerfullnesse* — Whatever natural Fund of gaity one is born with, to keep that up tis necessary to be entertain'd with agreable Objects* Any body capable of tasting pleasure, when they confine them selves to one place should take care tis the place In the World the most pleasing. Whatever you may now think (now perhaps you have some fond- nesse for me), tho' your Love should continue in its full force, there are Hours when the most beloved Mlstrlsse would be troublesome* People are not ever (nor Is it in Humane Nature they should be) dispos'd to be fond. You would be glad to find in me the Freind and the Compannion* To be agreably this last, it is necessary to be gay and Entertaining. A Perpetual Solitude in a place where you see nothing to raise your spirits at length wears them out, and Conversation insensibly falls into Dull and insipid* — When I have no more to say to you, You will like me no longer. How dreadfull is that veiwl You will refflect, for my sake you have abandonn'd the conversation of a Freind that you llke'd add your Situation in a Country where all things would have contributed to make your Life passe in (the true volupte) a smooth Tranquillity. I shall lose the vivacity that should entertain you, and you will have nothing to recompense you for what you have lost* Very few people that have settled entirely in the Country but have grown at length weary of one another. The Lady's conversation gennerally falls into a thousand importlent Effects of IdlenesBe, and the Gentleman falls in Love with his dogs and horses, and out of Love with every thing else. I am not now arguing in favour of the Town; you have answer'd me as to that point* In respect of your health, tis the first thing to be consider'd, and I shall never ask you to do any thing injurious to that* But tie my Opinion tis necessary to being happy that we neither of us think any place more agreable than that where we are. I have nothing to do in London, and tis indifferent to me if 1 never see it more* I know not how to answer your mentioning Gallantry, nor in what sense to understand you; I am sure in onet who­ ever I marry, when I am marry'd, I renounce all things of that kind* I am willing to abandonn all conversation but yours; if you please I will never see another Han; in short, I will part vith any thing for you, But you* I will not have you a month, to lose you for the rest of my Life* If you can persue the plan of happynesse begun vith your Freind and take me for that Freind, I am ever yours*

I have examin'd my own heart whither I can leave every thing for you* I think I can* If I change my Hind, you 35

shall know before Sunday. After that I will not change my Hind. If tie necessary for your Affairs to stay in England to assist your father in. his busynesse, as I suppose the time will be short, I would be as little injurious to your fortune as I can, and I will do it. But I am still of Opinion, nothing is so likely to make (us) both happy as what I propose. I foresee I may break with you on this point, and I shall certainly be displeas'd with my selfe for it, and wish a thousand times that I had done whatever you pleas'd, hut however, I hope I shall allways remember how much more mlaarable than any thing else could make me, should I be to live with you and please you no longer. You can be pleas'd with nothing when you are not pleas'd with your selfe. One of the Spectators is very Just* • * that sqys a Man ought allways to be on his guard against Spleen and too severe s Philosophy, a Woman against Levity and Coquettry. If we go to Naples, I will make no Acquaintance there of any kind, and you will be in a place where a variety of agreable Objects will dispose you to be ever pleas'd. If such a thing is possible, this will secure our everlasting Happynesse, end I am ready to wait on you without leaving a thought behind mo. —

The fourth and fifth paragraphs of the latter contain Lady Mary's argument against living in the country and her defense against Wortley's charge of gallantry. At the beginning of the fourth paragraph she makes a statement that seems to Introduce a new subject and that has the ring of a thesis that requires and will receive a supporting argument: "In proposing to you to follow the scheme begun with your Freind, I think tis absolutely necessary for both our Sakes." A major section of the argument thus launched ends with the last sentence of the fifth para­ graph: "If you can persue the plan of happynesse begun with your

Freind and take me for that Freind, I am ever yours." This statement has the ring of a summing up of the argument advanced thus far, for it presents a succinct statement of the happy consequence of Wortley agreeing to the thesis and it employs reminiscences of the diction of the thesis, two devices that suggest that an important segment of what was begun with the Initial statement has been concluded*

The £lrst step In considering this major segment o£ the argument

will be to examine the thesis in its relation to the general course of

the argument* A slight reordering of the first sentence of the fourth * • * paragraph yields a more straightforward statementt "It is absolutely

necessary for both our sakes to follow the scheme begun with your • i i Freind." As we saw in the first section of this chapter, this scheme,

as Lady Mary adjusted and applied it to herself and Wortley, was that

they reside in Naples and live there in a retired manner, a scheme (or

something like a scheme) that Wortley had originally contemplated for

himself and Addison. The function of the phrase "begun with your freind"

could merely be to identify which scheme Lady Mary is referring to, in which case the main drift of the argument would be to show why it is necessary for both their sakes that they live in Naples rather than in

any other place. On the other hand, the phrase could be a component that needs demonstration in itself, in which case, at least part of the argument would need to focus on the greater desirability of Wortley

choosing Lady Mary's company over Addison's, again for both her and

Wortley's sake. Or Lady Mary could deal with both of these possible emphases.

The reader night expect that Lady Mary would want or need to argue

the substitution of herself for Addison in explicit terms and at some length, for twice in the present letter (see above) and once in her

6 August letter ("the plan of happynesse begun vith your Freind"), she modified "plan" or "scheme" by referring to the friend, a reiteration that seems more than a mere Identification of which plan she means, and 37 she further and explicitly emphasizes the substitution when she also says in her 6 August letter, "I don't mean take him vith you, but why may not I supply his place?" and in this letter, **and take me for that

Freind." However, no part of Lady Mary's overt argument Is directed to the substitution, though we will see that she meets the challenge of the place the friend holds in Wortley's estimation In covert ways.

Neither does Lady Mary speak directly to the benefits of living in Naples in the central section of the argument. Rather, the main drift of her argument here is to establish the undesirability of living in the country. Though this direction is unexpected in terms of the way the thesis is stated, it is the necessary direction, considering the state of mind of the correspondent. As we remember, Wortley was determined to live in the country after his marriage; hence Lady Mary's firBt and major (but not only) task would be to clear the way to Naples by reject­ ing the place Wortley vas set on*

After the statement of the thesis, Lady Mary makes some introductory remarks (to be discussed later), predisposing the correspondent in favor of the thesis and the argument Itself beginB toward the end of the fourth paragraph with the presentation of the assumptions that ore basic to the argument:

Allmost all people are apt to run into a mistake, that whan they once feel or give a paaaion, there needs nothing' to entertain it* This Mistake makes, in the Number of Women that inspire (even) violent passions, hardly one preserve one after possession* If we marry, our happynesae must consist in loveing one Another* Tis principally my concern to think of the most probable method of makelng that Love Eternal*

These assumptions form a chain of reasoning: to be happy we must 38

continue to love each other; initial passion does not last; therefore,

to be happy we must find some method to make our love last. Lady Mary

here sets up an implicit dichotomy between love-permanence and passion-

decay and equates happiness with the first pair* Remembering her defini­

tion of happiness from the first section, we may expect that she will

proceed to Identify love-permanence-happiness with friendship and,

remembering that the thesis 1b concerned with where and how to live, that

she will show a necessary connection between these qualities and,a place

and manner of living. And Indeed, Immediately after her statement of

basic assumptions, Lady Mary begins a discussion of possible places to

live. London is quickly disposed of, for she and Wortley agree on re­ jecting It, and she turns to argue against the place on which they disagree, the country.

Perhaps the most visible of Lady Mary's strategies in the argument consists of a line of deductive reasoning in which she traces what happens when people "capable of tasting pleasure" live in "a perpetual

Solitude," that is, the country.2^ Although Lady Mary concurrently scores other related important points through other means (to be discussed shortly), this strategy may be said to form the core of her argument against tha country. In her Introductory remarks after the thesis, Lady

2®In speaking of "a Solitude" and "a perpetual Solitude" In this latter, Lady Mary Is referring to the country, a piece where there are few people (and those disagreeable) and where nothing exists or happens to interest a cultivated person. We remember that in her letter to Anne Justice she found these conditions Intolerable. Hence when she speaks of solitude In this letter, she Is not referring to the private manner of living she proposes with Wortley in Naples, although an outside reader might find that such a state la well described by the term "solitude." 39

Mary had said, "On my ova side, X endeavor to £orm ae right a Judgment of the Temper of Humane Nature, and of my ovn in particular, at I an capable of," and, aa she indicates In these remarks, in her argument she presents some of her points twice, speaking both in the general terms of

"Humane Nature" ("one," "anybody," "people," the indefinite "you") and also in terms of herself and Wortley specifically ("I," "you"). In the following reduction, I have eliminated these repetitions and cast the remaining points in the first person:

(1) For you to love me always, 1 must be always the agreeable companion; (2) to be an agreeable companion, I must be entertaining; (3) to be entertaining, I must live in a place that offers interesting topics of conversation and pleasures to keep up my spirits.

The country does not provide these resources.

Therefore: (3) if we live in the country I will become dispirited and my conversation will become dull and insipid; as a result, (2) I will no longer be entertaining; as a result, (1) you will no longer find me an agreeable companion, and you will no longer love me.

This deductive argument may be further reduced and generalized:

Our lasting happiness depends on our living in a certain kind of place. The country la not that kind of place. Therefore, if we live in the country we cannot be ever­ lastingly happy.

The chain of reasoning Itself is logical and persuasive, and Wortley would probably accept this one strand of the argument provided he granted each link as reflecting a probable state of affairs.

lady Mary's recourse (noted above) to general principles of human nature, or what she claims to be such principles, constitutes a subsidiary strategy in itself, and it is Interesting rhetorically to consider what aha gains thereby. In her introductory renarks following the theaia statement, Lady Mary told Wortley that "a Woman that adds nothing to a Man's fortune ought not to take from his happynesse," a sentiment she had also expressed in earlier letters} Wortley had lived in the country off and On and liked it very well and now thinks that settling there permanently with his wife is the best thing to do* Thus

Lady Mary cannot appeal to Wortley's own experiences and desires in order to dissuade him from the country; nor in the light of the statement just quoted can she put her wishes above his. With these courses of persuasion closed, an effective alternative is to advance a deductive argument based on general principles of human nature, interpolating enough refer­ ences to "you" and "I" to imply that she and Wortley are merely examples of general rules of human nature whose behavior must necessarily conform to the principles she sets forth* The disastrous course she describes In her deductive argument thus becomes a cortainty. The "human nature" argument has the added advantage of absolving Lady Mary from any personal responsibility for the threatened loss of the personal qualities on which

Wortley's continued love depends* such would be the fate of "any body capable of tasting pleasure*" Considering that Wortley liked the country very much and that he probably regarded himself as a man of taste, Lady

Mary's argument is both bold and disingenuous. Though Wortley could take offense at the Implied criticism of himself, the argument, in pretending to the objectivity of stating facts about human nature, is not on its face personally offensive.

Another strategy that contributes to the central argument against 41

living In che country is the explicit setting forth of positive require­ ments that "the country" cannot meet* Lady Mary sets two such require­ ments, the first early in the argument, where she states that "any body

capable of tasting pleasure, when they confine them selves to one place

should take care tis the place in the World the most pleasing*" This

requirement vas not, strictly speaking, a step in the chain of deductive

reasoning presented above, where Lady Mary only needed to declare that

the country had "nothing" in it to raise her splrltB. However, to inject

the "most pleasing place" requirement at this point decidedly strengthens what Lady Mary accomplishes through that reasonlngi the country is so far from being the "most pleasing place" that judging it by such a high standard makos it appear not merely Inadequate but beneath contempt* Of course, the effect of hopeless disparity la created not only by the extremely high standard but also by Lady Mary's equally extreme evalua­ tion of the country as a place where absolutely nothing happens that could interest or entertain a person of taste* *- Y In a statement toward the end of her argument against the country,

Lady Mary repeats her "most pleasing place" requirement and adds the requirement that she and Wortley agree on what specific place is the most pleasing* The statement is the third sentence In the passage belowi

I am not now arguing In favour of the Town; you have answer'd me as to that point* In respect of your health, tis the first thing to be consider'd, and I shall never ask you to do any thing Injurious to that* But tis my Opinion tis necessary to being happy that we neither of us think any place more agreable than that where we are* I have nothing to do in London, and tis indifferent to me If I never see it more*

In Itself, the statement serves as an obvious and Immediate rejection of 42 the countryt for even if Wortley thinks the country the most agreeable place, Lady Mary does not* But through her placement of the statement,

Lady Mary makes another kind of contribution to her argument against the country. It seems a little odd to set forth the "agreement on the most pleasing place" requirement in the context of remarks about the town, a place that neither Lady Mary nor Wortley found pleasing and that they had already agreed on rejecting (''You object against living in London.

I am not fond of it my selfe, and readily give It up to you"). However, setting up such a requirement is appropriate in regard to the country, a place that one of the two lovers found highly pleasing and about which there was disagreement. In effect, then, Lady Mary, through her place­ ment, Is referring to the disagreement over the country while she other­ wise talks about their agreement over the town. She is inviting Wortley to consider the two cases together in something like the following manner.

From the passage quoted above and from Lady Mary's earlier remarks in the fifth paragraph, it Is obvious that Wortley felt very strongly against the town while Lady Mary vas merely indifferent, rejecting the town for the sake of Wortley's health and because of his strong objec­ tions* Conversely, Lady Mary felt very strongly against the country, at least as strongly as Wortley felt against the town. Through her interpo­ lation of the "agreement" requirement among remarks rejecting the town, along with the placement of the whole passage after her argument against the country, Lady Mary is sending Wortley the following message: "you should see from my argument so far that the country would be as bad for ny mental and emotional atate aa the tovn la bad for your physical

state* I willingly gave up the tovn for your sake; you should give up

the country for m y sake; there is a place we both agree Is pleasant."

Of course, Lady Mary Is careful always to couch her overt statements In

terms of Wortley*s welfaret her argument has made clear that her mental

and emotional well-being should be Important to him because her ability

4 to please him depends on it; and her reference here to his health further

emphasizes her concern for him. Yet she is also drawing attention to

herself as a person who feels concerned for the welfare of the person she

loves, and she Is offering herself as an example to him. We know that

Lody Mary detested the country and would not have wonted to live there

whether or not Wortloy’s ultimate happiness was at stake* It would even

be possible to view the whole letter In a cynical spirit and see It as a

large subterfuge on Lady Mary's part to get her way for her own sake on

a matter of crucial Importance to herself, that she not have to live in

the country vith anyone for any reason. But even if we accept the

genuineness of her concern over Wortley'a happiness— and I think we

certainly should, if only for the (cynical) reason that he could make

her life miserable should she fall to please him— we need not be surprised

that Lady Mary would make a bid for fair, give-and-take play from

Wortley, and we would expect that an able rhetorician would make the bid

through a subtly Insinuating strategy. In this Instance, placement,

rather than through explicit statement*

Lady Mary employs a curious blend of devices in quick succession

in the following passage: 44

Very few people that have settled entirely In the Country but have grown at length weary o£ one another* The Lady's conversation generally falls into a thousand Impertinent Effects of Idlenesse, and the Gentleman falls In Love with his dogs and horses, and out of Love with every thing else*

The passage is put In such a way that It seems to be based on personal observation, and the assertions themselves are In the same spirit as the opinions on the country that Lady Mary expressed in letters to her women friends while she was staying there* Wortley too knew country living well, ao Lady Mary seems to be looking confidently to him for corroboration from his experience, a bold ploy considering that she knew he liked the country* But at the same time, in her sketches of the

Country Lady and the Country Gentleman, she la again exploiting general principles of human nature and, more specifically, the literary tradition of character-writing* Hence Lady Mary seems to be aaylngi you and I have seen and everybody knows that this is what happens to people who live permanently in the country.

Thus far we have looked at argumentative strategies aimed at per­ suading Wortley against the country. Lady Mary also argues for the substitution of herself for Addison, but in a covert way* She undertakes the task in the following passages:

Whatever you may now think (now perhaps you have some fondness for me), tho' your Love should continue in its full force, there are Hours when the most beloved Mlstrisse would be troublesome* People are not ever (nor is it Humane Nature they should be) dispos'd to be fond* You would be glad to find In me the Freind and the Compannion*

You will reffleet, for my sake you have abandonn'd the conversation of a Freind that you like'd and your Situation in a Country where all things would have 45

contributed to make your Life passe in (the true volupte) a smooth Tranquillity*

The meaning of "love" in the first passage is no longer vhat it was in

the statement of basic assumptions in the fourth paragraph, where it was

identified with permanence and happiness and (by extension) with friend­

ship, and was contrasted with "passion*" "Love" is now "fondness" and

is an intermittent emotion directed toward a "beloved Mlstrisse*" Lady

Mary Implicitly contrasts the beloved mistress, who becomes a bother when the love-fondness is not operating, with the friend to whom Wortley will gladly turn in his more rational moments* The love-fondness in

this passage begins to sound like the "passion" of the fourth paragraph, to be "love" In what Lady Maiy said in an earlier letter is the "usual

Sense," that 1b , "passion." Further, the "love" in the present passage

is expressly Wortley's ("your Love"), yet Wortley, she makes clear, also needs friendship* We note too that although Lady Mary explicitly

Identifies herself only as the "friend," she must also be the "beloved mistress" to whom Wortley's forceful love-passlon is directed. We may then inquire into Lady Mary's purpose in separating passion and friend­ ship in Wortley's feeling for her and in dividing herself into mistress and friend*

A clue is provided by her reference to the friend and the friend's conversation that Wortley will be abandoning for her sake ("abandoning" in the sense of not having the daily contact that the scheme of living together would afford— Lady Mary's extremeness is again apparent) and that he will regret when her own powers of conversation are destroyed by life in the country* Lady Mary is suggesting that the part of 46

Wortley's psyche. which responds to the friend could just as well be directed to herself; she could be the friend, and Wortley need never regret the other friend. To make this point, she has to set aside the passlon-mistress aspect of her and Wortley's relationship so that the quality in which she corresponds to the friend can stand as a separate entity, thus making the substitution conceivable and possible. Dy never naming the friend— though she knew him well personally— Lady Mary further facilitates the substitution; she is saying that it is the qual­ ity of friendship, not the unique qualities of a particular friend, that is Important, and one person, provided the general requirements are present— in this case, capacity for conversation that will entertain a man of sense— can supply the need for friendship as well as another. It is a curiously generalized sort of argument, but clearly, Lady Mary would have found it much more difficult, if not impossible, to argue the sub­ stitution of herself as an Individual for Joseph Addison as an individual.

At the same time that it facilitates the substitution, the separation of herself into friend and mistress (with the seeming rejection of the mistress role) reminds Wortley that whereas Addison can be only the friend, she can be friend and mistress. Lady Mary is adept at having it both ways.

Lady Mary's argumentation in this letter is not confined to the sections that directly address the thesis. In the third paragraph, she takes up Issues that do not bear immediately on the rejection of the country, but even so, she draws on the points she establishes in the third paragraph in her main argument. First, we will see what these earlier issues are and what strategies she uses to argue them. The 47

reader la referred to the entire paragraph In the complete text of the

letter.

Lady Mary's main argumentative strategy in the third paragraph Is

inductive reasoning, more specifically, the demonstration of her asser­

tions by recourse to facts in her own experience. In asserting that her

father will never come to terms, she bases her opinion on her past know­

ledge of him, acknowledging that the opinion may sound "odd," that is,

contrary to the general expectations of the behavior of fathers in such

cases. Though she does not present specific examples of her past experience with her father, her clear implication is that she could easily do so ("I know him")• In opposing her individual experience to

generally accepted principles of human nature (in this case, something like "fathers usually come around eventually"), Lady Mary shows an approach that is radically different from the deductive process that is so Important in her central argument.

In the second example of inductive reasoning in this paragraph,

Lady Mary does support her assertion— that she Is not mercenary— with a specific example! she has continued her relationship with Wortley and rejected the approved suitor, a fact she develops In very specific terms, pointing out the great financial loss to herself in choosing the course she has. tier ordering of the two issues she deals with in this paragraph is also strategically skillful. The "fact" she has just established— that her father will remain irreconcilable after their marriage— strengthens her inductive proof of her lack of mercenary motives, for she is convinced that she will never receive anything from her father if she marries Wortley; hence she marries him knowing that her financial loss 48 will be total and permanent*

Having established her own considerable loss in marrying Wortley* every time she later mentions Wortley's financial loss In marrying her* she is making a bid for him to remember her greater loss. Hence when she says in the fourth paragraph that "a Woman that adds nothing to a

Kan's fortune ought not to take from his happynesse*" her concurrent covert message tells Wortley that a woman who gives up all fortune for a man ought to have her happiness considered. And when she tells him that after she has lost the power to please him he will have nothing to recom­ pense him for what he has lost* she is reminding him that she would have no financial resources at all to make her position of unloved wife bear­ able. It is* of course* rhetorically desirable for Lady Mary to couch her argument consistently in teems of Wortley's welfare* for she is persuading him against something he thinks he wants* but it is also rhetorically advantageous for her to remind him covertly that her position is also to be considered. Thus Lady Mary makes the seemingly separate * issues of the third paragraph function as hidden persuaders in her main argument•

Toward the end of the fifth paragraph Lady Mary Introduces what seems to be another separate issue* her "gallantry."26 This issue leads

26 The contemporary meaning of "gallantry" that is pertinent here is "amorous Intercourse or Intrigue" (sea the OED entry* Item 8, citations from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). Wortley feared that Lady Mary's coquetry was a habit that would soon lead to adultery when they were married. When Lady Mary here says that she renounces "all things of that kind . . . when I am marry'd" she admits Implicitly to "something of that kind" while she is not married. Lady Mary is not* of course* here tacitly acknowledging that she has been having full-blown affairs* but, knowing Wortley's suspicions* she is using "gallantry" to mean "my coque­ try that you believe will end in adultery*" Her later reference to “Coquetry" is thus a continuation of the "gallantry" issue. 49 out of the major fleet section and Into the final stages of the argument, where Lady Mary at lost urges the benefits of living in Naples* In handling the "gallantry" issue, she displays yet other argumentative strategies.

The introduction of the gallantry issue seems abrupt, for it

Immediately follows the statement, "I have nothing to do in London, and tis indifferent to me if I never see it more." But on closer scrutiny, the association between "London" and "gallantry" is not hard to see; it is the association between the scene of temptation and the resulting transgression. While it is dearly advantageous for Lady Mary to preface her answer to the gallantry charge with the protest that she does not care if she ever sees London again, an explicit transition would destroy the air of injured innocence she affects about the charge, her customary pose when dealing with this familiar accusation. Indeed, since this makes the third time in the letter that she has "given up" London, it would seem that the main purpose of this repetition is to anticipate and allay Wortley's suspicion that she rejects the country because she wants to continue to enjoy the society of other men in London.

In taking up the charge, Lady Mary first claims, "I know not how to answer your mentioning Gallantry, nor in what sense to understand you."

Since up to this point she has both claimed and shown that she is very good at both analyzing situations and arguing her causes, the effect of her claimed bewilderment is the helplessness of the sensible person confronted with something that is preposterous. Yet the following renunciation of "all things of that kind" "when I am marry'd" is an admission that things of that kind have been occurring. This admission 50

is quickly minimized when Lady Mary goes on to Imply chat Wortley is

jealous over the mere fact that she has engaged In conversation with

other men: "I am willing to abandon all conversation but yours; if you

please I will never see another Man." The extremity of this statement

is both a tacit criticism of the unreasonableness of his suspicions and

a further protest of innocence in the familiar and somewhat childish

pattern that goes "and just to prove it to you I will never (or always)

. ■ . [some impossible vow]." Lady Mary uses her renunciation of the

company of all other men to lead Into a reminder of everything else she

is totally renouncing for Wortley's sake: "in short, I will part with

any thing for you, But you." The slight paradoxical twist Lady Mary gives

to this statement calls for further explanation, and in explaining it,

Lady Mary makes a clever transition back to the central argument; her

statement, "1 will not have you a month, to lose you for the rest of my

Life," is a summary of what she has predicted will happen if they live

in the country. Her immediately following reiteration of her own pro­

posal completes the absorption of the gallantry issue into the argument

against the country. Thus, Lady Mary haB sidestepped rather than

answered the gallantry charge. She has used it to accuse Wortley of unreasonable jealousy, to proclaim her devotion to him, to remind him of what she gives up for him, to summarize her argument against what ha wants to do, and to put forth her own plan once more. She has used a weakness to excellent advantage.

But Lady Mary is not through with the gallantry issue. She reverts

to it in the final stages of her argument (sixth paragraph) by intro­ ducing an indirect quotation from the Spectator No. 128 [Addison]. This authority on human nature had, in the Issue of 27 July 1711, fortuitously coupled vhat Wortley considered Lady Mary's worst fault with what she considered his worst faulti "A Man ought allways to be on his guard against Spleen and too severe a Philosophy, a Woman against

Levity and Coquettry" [Lady Mary's paraphrase]. The coupling of the faults through the quotation makes it possible for Lady Mary to admit tacitly that there Is something to Wortley's charge of gallantry and at the same time to remind him that he Is not perfect either. The "human nature" tactic ("a Man," "a Woman"), familiar from the earlier section of the argument, contributes an extenuating and therefore conciliating element, and citing Wortley's "Frelnd" as an authority is an added dis­ ingenuous touch; that he is a rival or a threat or anything except a wise and good friend of her future husband has (of course) not occurred to her.

Lady Mary turns the gallantry issue to final advantage as she puts forward this fault of hers and Wortley's corresponding fault as the only direct and positive argument for living In Naples in a retired manner.

The delights of Naples will Improve Wortley's disposition; Lady Mary will be far removed from her present acquaintance and will make no other

* (that she might flirt with): "If we go to Naples, I will make no Acqua­ intance there of any kind, and you will be In a place where a variety of agreable Objects will dispose you to be ever pleased." Thus, living in

Naples is, as Lady Mary stated In her thesis, "necessary for both our sakes." While this confirmatory argument is curiously negative In being based on personal fallings, it has the advantage of having great emotional force, for these failings have been the most keenly-felt cause of the 52

lovers* constant contentions* Besides being persuasive on an objective

level, the strategies we have just reviewed all track to weaken Wortley's

emotional ability to reject Lady Mary*s proposal (as do many of her other

strategies). If he rejects her appeal to her sacrifices, he is an in­

grate; if he rejects her appeal to Addison's authority, he doee not value

the judgment of his best friend; if he rejects her appeal to their per­

sonal fallings, he denies their existence or importance* All of these

are consequences that Wortley would instinctively shrink from even if

they could be shown to be rationally unjustified*

Lady Mary also exerts considerable persuasiveness on an emotional

level by presenting herself in a favorable light throughout the letter, by exerting what the classical rhetoricians called ethical appeal. The concept of ethical appeal is a recognition of the fact that a speaker adds force to his argument by impressing his audience as a person of good character, good sense, and good will* In the present letter, ethical appeal is crucial, for Lady Mary's nature is a substantive factor in the proposal she is arguing, for the proposal deals with the way she proposes to live with her "audience" and with her capacity to make him happy*

The letter requires that we broaden the notion of "good character" to include "pleasing personality," for Lady Mary makes much of her agreeable qualities, and it also requires that we extend the notion of "good will" to include the whole range of Lady Mary's attitudes toward Wortley, for he Is both the audience to be persuaded and the opponent who must be refuted, a double role that requires considerable variation of tone.

Although the introductory paragraphs do not bear directly on the main subject of the letter, they are Important in tracing the traits and 53

attitudes that Lady Mary manifests throughout the letter and that make

up her ethical appeal* In the first paragraph* Lady Mary appears as a

person of uncompromising honesty; she will not have Wortley think she

answered an unjustly fault-finding letter with a kind letter just to

repair the relationship. This same character trait is explicitly claimed

in the third paragraph when she declares, "I will deceive you in nothing,"

disabusing Wortley of another false belief that would be to her advantage,

namely, that her father will eventually agree to an appropriate settle­

ment. In denying that she is mercenary, she disclaims any merit for her

lack of interest in worldly goods, because, she says, she simply does not

care about them. While her disclaimer sounds modest, she is, by in­

direction, laying claim to the very high merit of an inborn lofty-rainded-

ness. Early in the letter, then, Lady Mary presents herself as the

possessor of two admirable character traits, absolute Integrity and

Indifference to worldly vanities.

However, there are no traces of good will toward Wortley so far.

She Is angry with him for starting up the wrangling again with his

industrious fault-finding. Her "I will deceive you in nothing" seems as much an expression of Belf-respect (something like "deception is beneath me") as a benevolent desire to enlighten him. And she Insinuates that

Wortley, In talking so much of estates and having false hopes of

fortunes, is really the mercenary one. All of these Issues, their wrangling, his fault-finding, her sincerity, his concern with a settle­ ment, have, we recall, a long history of contention In the courtship that would add impact to the tone of displeasure.

A sudden change of tone enters in the fourth paragraph. The plan 54

Lady Mary la proposing is really Wortley's own; his pleasure is to be

considered) his rights safeguarded:

I would have you want no pleasure which a single Life would afford you; you own that you think no­ thing so agreable. A. woman that adds nothing to a Han’s fortune ought not to take from his happy- nease* If possible I would add to it, but I will not take from you any satisfaction you could enjoy without me*

These expressions of abounding good will are obviously well placed in

relation to the argument) coming as they do between the statement of the

thesis and the beginning of the argument* In addition* they are height­

ened by the contrast with the foregoing section. The back-drop of Lady

Mary's indignation againBt Wortley for his concern about estates lends

her present concern for his well-being a luster of magnanimity; and her

factual recital of what she gives up in taking him makes her concern that

he give up no pleasure for her sake shine the brighter. She is estab­

lishing a moral superiority that is a powerful offensive weapon.

Lady Mary next makes on explicit claim for her own good sense. She

is capable of calm* objective) and correct judgment of human nature in

general and herself in particular* and she will use this capability to refute a widespread mistaken opinion ("On my own side . • through

" • • • nothing to entertain it")* That she is refuting this opinion

implies that Wortley holds it; she is again claiming superiority: she

thinks for herself* he accepts vulgar errors* Clearly, he should listen carefully to what she is going to say about their happiness*

In the argument itself* Lady Mary mentions certain qualities of personality in making generalizations about human nature* Since she 55

applies these generalizations to her ovn case, she takes these qualities

to herself* To her already Impressive hut somewhat austere collection of traits— honesty, lofty-mlndedness, and good judgment— she adds a stock of the companionable virtues: sweetness of temper, cheerfulness, gaiety, agreeableness, the ability to entertain. Clearly, Wortley could not find a more pleasing companion, especially since. In addition to having these qualities, her greatest desire Is to please. The only strongly emotive diction In the letter Is reserved for this point. The thought that Wortley will like her no longer Is "dreadfull"; it would make her "more miserable than any thing else" to live with him and please him no longer. His happiness Is to consist in being pleased with her, hers in pleasing him. Wortley can safely abandon the "Freind."

Another character trait emerges in the final stages of the argument: uncompromising decisiveness* Lady Mary will make up her mind by a certain day and then not change It; she will tolerate a postponement of putting the plan Into action for a practical reason, but it must not «* be for long; she will (regretfully) break with Wortley unless he agrees to the plan; for herself, she is ready to go as soon as he does agree.

This uncompromising decisiveness casts a new light on the unconditional offer of herself that marked the end of the first long section of the argument. "If you can persue the plan of happynesse begun with your

Freind and take me for that Freind, I am ever yours" becomes a veiled statement of "If you cannot pursue that plan of happiness I will never be yours." Her decisiveness forces Wortley to a decision.

Taken together. Lady Mary's self-commendatlon, her attitudes toward Wortley, and her changes In tone have considerable persuasive 56 effectiveness. They set up an undetcurtent o£ meaning that wotke to support her proposal. It Is as if Lady Mary were sending Wortley this message: "Here am I, a woman o£ admirable character, judicious mind, and delightful disposition, and the thing I care about most in all the world is pleasing you; all I ask of you is that you adopt a plan that will make it possible for me to please you always, thus assuring our lasting happiness; if you will not adopt the plan, I will not marry you; now is the time of decision,"

Enough instances of effective placement have been noted in discus­ sing Lady Mary's argumentative strategies so that her overall arrangement of the parts of the letter into an ordered structure need not be discussed in any detail as a separate strategy. We should, though, note one out­ standing manifestation of Lady Mary's instinct for effective form, and this is her handling of the final stages of the argument. Most of the material in the sixth paragraph has already been treated in connection with other strategies, so it will be necessary only to emphasize that

Lady Mary has here brought together material that is calculated to leave a final strong impression on her correspondent, firing him to favorable action on her proposal. She briefly restates her thesis ("nothing is so likely to make ua both happy as what X propose") and encapsulates her argument against the country in highly emotive terms ("I hope I shall allwaya remember how much more miserable than any thing else could make me, should X be to live with you and please you no longer"). She reminds

Wortley that she is giving up everything for him ("I think I can • . . leave everything for you"), emphasizes in unusually effusive terms her desire to please him ("I shall • • . wish a thousand times that I had 57 done whatever you pleas'd"), and aorrovfully threatens to break with him if he does not accept her proposal ("I foresee 1 may break with you on this point, and I shall certainly be displeas'd with my selfe for it")*

She saves her confirmatory argument for the end, supporting It with the moat emotional material she has, the personal fallings of each that most distress the other* She turns what has been a discussion of ultimate values into a practical matter that requires lmaedlate decision, and she sets an example of favorable action on her part while issuing a ringing call for action on his part*

In her letter of 12 August 1712, then. Lady Mary has dealt with the major components of a complex situation, comprising practical diffi­ culties and questions of character, temperament, and ultimate values, and she has brought them to bear on a concrete proposal for a course of action* She has met the major obstacles of her correspondent's counter­ plan and of a rival for his friendship and domestic companionship. She has turned practical difficulties into proof of her fine character and a personal weakness into a strong confirmatory argument. She has employed strategies that make explicit appeals to logic, experience, traditional wisdom, and authority* Concurrently, while keeping the overt focus on her correspondent's welfare, ahe has employed covert strategies that work on his emotions and his sense of fair play, thus further weakening his grounds of opposition* Lady Mary has composed a highly effective piece of deliberative rhetoric, thus manifesting a considerable connand of the argumentative mode of discourse. CHAPTER II

DESCRIPTION! "What I saw remarkable at Sophia"

Letter of 1 April 1717, to Lady ______

Daring the two periods of her life that Lady Mary travelled and resided abroad, she entertained and informed her correspondents by writing descriptions of the unfamiliar phenomena she observed* From

August 1716 through October 1718, she accompanied her husband, Edvard

Wortley Montagu, on his ambassadorship to the Sublime Porte* The out­ going journey through Holland, Germany, Austria, and the provinces of the Turkish Empire, the short stay in Adrianople and the longer stay in

Constantinople, and the return trip through the Mediterranean, Italy, and France provided Lady Mary with material for the descriptions of the many facets of life in foreign lands that abound in the famed Turkish

Embassy Letters*

In some of the Letters, brief descriptive passages serve s b integral ports of explanations of customs and of narrations of historical events, private histories, or Lady Mary's personal activities. Other letters contain sustained descriptive passages that lead into explanations; for example, in one of the nine letters bearing the date 1 April 1717 (I,

325-30), Lady Mary's long description of her Turkish apparel leads into an explanation of how Turkish women are able to conduct their amorous

Intrigues undetected, and in her 1 April 1717 letter to Alexander Pope

58 59

(It 330-7) Lady Mary describes common. Near Eastern pastoral and domestic sights and relates them to pastoral poetry and Homeric descriptions.

Some letters consist entirely of a succession of loosely connected des­ criptions; for example, in another 1 April 1717 letter (Z, 340-4) Lady

Mary moves from beasts and birds to domestic architecture, interior decor, private and public gardens. Other entirely descriptive letters discuss aspects of a given city, for Instance, the letter of 17 May 1717 (I, 353-

GO) describing the environs, buildings, and people of Adrlanople and a military procession Lady Mary witnessed there, or the more unified letter of 10 April 1718 (I, 396-403) treating the major public buildings of

Constantinople. In other letters the description centers around a particular event, the case in the letter of 18 April 1717 (I, 347-52) describing an entertainment given by the Grand Vizier's lady, and in the

1 April 1717 letter (I, 312-15) describing Lady Mary's visit to the

Turkish women's bath in Sophia.

The second period of Lady Mary's travels and residence abroad w s b much more extensive, covering the twenty-three years from July 1739 to

January 1762, years of self-imposed exile spent mostly in northern Italy.

Lady Mary settled first in Venice, then in Avignon for four years. She spent the decade 1746-56 on her small country estate in Brescia, with extended stays in the little resort town of Lovere, and from 1756 until her return to England, Lady Mary again lived in Venice. Brief descriptive passages occur fairly frequently in many of the letters from this long period abroad, and Lady Mary wrote her correspondents longer descriptions of her principal places of residence. For example, in her letter of

1 June 1740 to Wortley (II, 189-92), Lady Mary describes the regatta at Venice, end her letters o£ 20 December 1743 (II» 315-7) and 17 February

1744 (II, 319-21) to Wortley contain descriptions of Avignon, In later

letters to her daughter, Lady Bute, Lady Mary described her estate at

Gottolengo (10 July 1748, II, 402-5; 26 July 1748, II, 407-8), the pros­ pects and palaces along nearby Lago di Garda (17 October 1750, II, 467-

70), and the situation, buildings, entertainments, and people of Lovere

(24 July 1749, II, 433-5; 23 June 1754, III, 52-5), letters all remarkable for their evocation of the northern Italian lake country, then a region largely unknown to foreign travellers.

To investigate Lady Mary's abilities in the descriptive form of discourse, I have chosen (from on embarrassment of riches) the letter of

1 April 1717 describing the women's bath at Sophia. The focussing on one specific scene, the surprising nature of the Beene, the kinds of significance Lady Mary finds in it, and the artful order she Imposes on her description all contribute to make this letter an excellent example of Lady Mary's ability to give meaningful verbal expression to a visual experience. To understand the letter as an example of the rhetoric of description, we must define a context that identifies Lady Mary's audience, her purposes, and her problems in realizing those purposes.

Whereas the relevant context for Lady Mary's argumentative letter was an intimate personal situation, the relevant context for this particular descriptive letter is the peculiar nature of the Turkish Embassy Letters as a literary enterprise, so ve will next look at those aspects of the

Letters as a whole that are pertinent to Lady Mary's rhetoric of descrip­ tion as it is manifested in the letter describing the bath at Sophia, 61

The Turkish Embassy Letters are fifty-two in number, dated from

3 August 1716 (Rotterdam) through September 1716 (Paris). The letters

have not survived in their original versions and are known only through

copies edited and compiled by Lady Mary in the years shortly after her

return to England. In the opinion of Robert Holsbond, the compilation

is very close to the original letters in the accounts of life abroad,

Lady Mary's editing consisting chiefly in the excision of material she

considered too personal or too trivial for her apparent purpose of pro­

ducing a travel memoir and in the transposition of sections among letters

for a more artistic arrangement. During her lifetime, Lady Mary kept

the two manuscript albums of the letters with her and circulated them

among her friends wherever she went, but a few months before she died,

she took steps to assure publication after her death, and the letters were published less than a year thereafter.

The question of the audience at which Lady Mary aimed the letters is

thus a rather complex issue, but, in the absence of relevant information, one about which only suggestions con be made. We can identify three possible audiencest 1) the individual correspondents to whom the original letters were addressed; 2) the audience of friends and acquaint­ ances among whom Lady Mary circulated the edited compilation during her

lifetime; and 3) the public audience that the published letters finally reached. Which audience hod the most effect on the work as it now

stands, or just how the successive audiences might have influenced the work, is largely a matter of conjecture.

1I, xiv-xvii. As for the first audience, the Influence of the individual corres­

pondent would seen to be obscured by the nature of Lady Mary's editing.

Lady Mary does in sone cases natch her subject-matter to the known special

Interests of sone of the designated correspondents, whan, for example,

she writes about Mohammedanism to the Abbe Conti, or addresses letters

on literary matters to Alexander Pope, but the subject matters are always

of general interest to a cultivated audience. The strenuous efforts

Lady Mary makes throughout the compilation to establish her credibility

(a matter to be discussed shortly) seem to be in excess of what would be required In actual letters to friends, and coming as these statements usually do at the beginnings and endings of letters, they hove a tackod- on quality, as of something added or elaborated for the benefit of outside readers. In the compilation, Lady Mary headed the letters only with initials or titles (I, 248, n. 3), a fact that suggests that although she wished to retain the flavor of personal letters by indicating the existence of a correspondent, the correspondent as a unique indlvi- #• dual is not of great importance.^ But in spite of all these features that tend to work against the rhetorical importance of the individual correspondent, the letters give a strong impression of being real letters written to real people. They abound in the "I" and "you" of personal correspondence, and* the descriptions often appear in the "this

2 The identity of some of the correspondents has always been known, and others have been supplied by scholarly research. Professor Halsband expands Lady Mary's headings wherever possible. The correspondents of eleven of the Letters remain unidentified; of these, Halsband makes no comment on eight, rejects efforts at identification by former editors for two, and suggests a correspondent for one (I, 272, n. 3; 285, n.l; 403, n. 3). 63

is what t have been doing lately" context so common in letters to

friends and relatives, a context that lends a generally desirable live­

liness and Isnedlacy to the whole collection* Hence, of those features

that might or do show the influence o l the first audience, Lady Mary

excised what would not be of general interest and kept what would be of

advantage with any audience*

As for the third audience, it is quite possible that Lady Mary had

eventual publication in mind when she made the compilation* The travel

book in epistolary form was a genre that had been popular since the

Renaissance,3 and it Is unlikely that a person of Lady Mary's literary

sophistication would work up her letters into such a form without having

some thought of publication* This conjecture is supported by remarks in

the preface that Lady Mary allowed the feminist Mary Astell to inscribe

in the second album of the Letters on 18 December 17241 "The most

Ingenious Author has condemn'd the manuscript to obscurity during her

Life • * * • However, if these Letters appear hereafter, when I am in my Grave, let this attend them in testimony to Posterity • . .

The date of these author-approved remarks that so strongly imply the

Intent of eventual publication is fairly close to the period during which Lady Mary put the Letters into their present form* Lady Mary's social code did not permit an aristocratic lady to publish under her own name during her lifetime* Hence the remoteness of the public audience

^1, xlv-xv; Sutherland, p* 233, pp* 288-96*

4I, 466-7. 64

vaa simply a condition, that she accepted, and that remoteness should

probably not be construed as a point against the importance of the public

audience to the author when she re-vorked the original letters* Finally,

the great concern with credibility that seemed somewhat exaggerated if

directed at the first audience would be appropriate in relation to a

public audience unknown to the author*

The second audience was the immediate one for the Letters as a total

work, and the concern with credibility has a side that is particularly

appropriate to this audience! besides fulfilling (as we will see) an

important rhetorical requirement, Lady Kary's frequent assertions that

she is Imparting new and accurate Information and that she has worked

diligently to gather this Information reveal an understandable pride in

her accomplishment and a desire to be given full credit for it, a kind

of credit that comes more gratifyingly from a sizable circle of readers

known personally to the author than from a few single correspondents or

from hopes of acceptance by posterity.

Thus some Influence of each audience may be conjectured. From

Lady Mary's comments on her accounts and from the accounts themselves

(as we will further see) it is apparent that whichever audience she is

primarily addressing, she assumes readers who are curious about other

parts of the world, who require accurate information, and who are capable

of Interest in a wide variety of topics.

Throughout the Letters Lady Mary makes explicit statements of her principle purpose of "entertaining" or "amusing" her readers through the

imparting of new information, the "novelties" or "curiosities" she often mentions! "I am carefull in endeavoring to amuse you by the Account of 65 all I sea that I think you care to hear of • . • a full and true

Relation of the Novelty* of this Place" (I, 326); she promises to meet her readers* expectations of hearing "something very new" (I, 330); and she will report "all that is curious" (X, 353). Lady Mary often emphasizes that she has spared herself no effort thus to amuse her correspondentst "I shall not regret all the fatigues I have suffer'd in

[my journey] if it gives me an oportunity of Amuseing your Royal Highness by an Account of places utterly unknown amongst us" (I, 310), and she speaks of "my Inclination to give you (to the utmost of my power) all the

Diverting part of my travells while you are exempt from all the fatigue and inconveniencys" (I, 380).

The faculty in her readers that Lady Mary most often speaks of appealing to is their curiosity. She speaks of "being much more soli*, citous to content your Curiosity than to indulge my own repose" (I, 281), expresses hopes that "your Curiosity will be satisfy'd with the Accounts

I shall give you" (I, 315), and states that the object of her inquires is to "give me occasion of entertaining your curiosity" (I, 337), It is her own curlouity as well as her desire to entertain her correspondents that has Impelled her researches! "I have seen every thing that is to be seen with a very diligent curiosity" (It 278); of her rambles about

Constantinople she writes, "I amuse my selfe with seeing all that is curious" (I, 405), and she goes so far as to claim that her curiosity has been "mors diligent than any other stranger's has ever yet been"

Cl, 387-8).

Besides frequently asserting that ahe is writing about interesting novelties and curiosities, Lady Mary gives a further and negative kind 66

o£ emphasis to the value of her information by making brief references

to thlnge she Is not writing about because, like Wortley's audience with

the Grand Vizier or the principal facts about Constantinople, they have

been treated before (I, 359; I, 405) or because, like "Popish miracles"

and gossip about the local aristocracy, they are unworthy of attention

(I, 293).

Lady Mary's frequently avowed purpose of amusing or entertaining

her audience, her continual emphasis on the novelty of her Information, her stressing that her audience has all the pleasure and none of the

fatigue, are all features that are reminiscent of remarks in Joseph

Addison's famous Spectator series, "The Pleasures of the Imagination"

(Nos. 411-421). There, the stimulation of the Imagination Is an innocent pleasure that awakens us from Idleness without putting us to labor;

"Novelty" Is one of the three major sources of delight to the imagination and the one that has the Important function of encouraging the pursuit of knowledge. Further, Imagination Is baaed on the sense of sight, and the artist proceeds by presenting those ideas his imagination has received directly from Nature to the imagination of his audience through des­ cription, ideas which then, because of the (Lockean) structure of the mind, have many ramifications. Addison specifically mentions travellers among those writers who follow Nature closely In giving pleasure to the

Imagination. Lady Mary was, of course, a Spectator reader (and minor anonymous contributor), and It would not be surprising If, when engaged

In an enterprise In which representing visual Images to the Imaginations of her readers was of such fundamental Importance, she should recall 67

Addison's well-known essay and, whether fully consciously or not, allude

to sone of its main ideas as a kind of Informal esthetic or supporting

authority for what she is doing.

Though Lady Mary's principal purpose is to give pleasure to the

imagination by describing novelties, she assumes that the well-ordered

mind requires a conviction of faithfulness to reality before it will

consent to be entertained! "Perhaps it would be more entertaining to

add a few surprising customs of my own Invention, but nothing seems to

me so agreable as truth, and I belelve nothing so acceptable to you"

(I, 3 3 0 ) . Hence before Lady Mary can achieve her principal purpose,

she must convince her audience of the truth of her information. This

problem is, of course, a more specific case of the general rhetorical

problem of all writers, to persuade the audience to accept the offered

work, whatever kind of acceptance the nature of the work requires. For

Lady Mary, the problem of inducing conviction of the truth of her infor­

mation is compounded by several factors. First, her information is novel

and curious in the extreme, being for the most part quite outside the

experience of her audience; second, her information is in many cases her

correction of the erroneous reports of other travellers and travel writers, so she must combat error; third, lying is commonly assumed to

be Mthe privilege of a Traveller" (I, 256), so all travellers are auto­ matically suspect. Lady Mary has a serious problem of credibility, but

5 This was apparently a basic esthetic canon for Lady Mary, for other literary genres as well. See Robert Halsband, "Lady Mary and Eighteenth- Century Fiction," Phldlogical Quarterly. 45 (1966), 145-56. 68

one that she. la veil aware o£ and that ahe meets vigorously through a

variety of means.

One such strategy ve have already noted, her frequent remarks to

the effect that her diligent curiosity has led her to see everything of

interest wherever she goes. The reader then assumes that everything she

describes she has experienced for herself. Her many slighting and often

sarcastic remarks about other travellers and travel-vrlters for their

Inventions of wonders or their laziness in merely repeating hearsay serve

further to Imply that she, unlike these Irresponsible colleagues, speaks

only from her own knowledge*6 (On occasion Lady Mary gives almost comical demonstration of her truthfulness, for example, when the guardian of a certain huge palace tells her it had eight hundred rooms, she declares

that she will not vouch for that number because she did not count them herself (I, 413-4].) Sometimes Lady Mary becomes explicit in contrasting herself to lying travellers: "Upon my word, Madam, 'tis my regard to

Truth and not Lazynesse that I do not entertain you with an many prodlgys as other Travellers use to divert their Readers with. I might easily pick up wonders in every Town I pass through" (I, 292-3). On the other hand, she defends herself against readers who might find that her own accounts are "fabulous and Romantic*" the product of "many Embellishments from my hand" (I, 385). Another way Lady Mary meets the credibility problem is simply to state that she is telling the truth: "My whole

^Lady Mary18 references to lying travellers and/or their Incorrect reports are conspicuously numerous; I tallied seventeen such references: X, 254, 256, 292, 296, 315, 318, 328, 330, 338, 341, 343, 351, 383, 396, 401, 405, 413. 69 account Is writ with . . . plain Sincerity of Heart" (I, 256).7 a related device is to appeal to the reader's knowledge of her good character: "But I depend upon your knowing me enough to believe whatever

I seriously assert for truth" (I, 386).

Perhaps the least obtrusive, most persuasive, and most frequently employed of Lady Mary's methods for Inducing conviction of her truthful­ ness is the presentation of her descriptions in the framework of the occasions during which she encountered what she Is writing about. The reader sees the author in the process of experiencing the exotic people, places, and thlngB she describes and receives the further convincing , impression of an eyewitness immediacy.^ Finally, the epistolary form itself contributes to the impression of credibility, particularly on the members of the third audience, who see that the author is writing to real people who knew her well and to whom she is therefore personally accountable in a way she would not be to an unknown general public.

Lady Mary's employment of means to convince the reader of the truth * of what she is saying is so constantly noticeable throughout the work that it could almost be said that she has three equally Important

^By "Sincerity" here Lady Mary means "veracity" in the literal sense of accurate reporting of fact. The letter with which she ends this remark is concerned with sights she has Been in the Rhineland. Q Chaim Perelman and L. Oldbrechts-Tyteca speak of the impression of reality given when the speaker shows how he gained his knowledge and when hs appears to be participating in what he is describing. See The New Rhetoric, tmsl. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (Notre Dames Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1969), p. 145, p. 158, 70 purposes, to entertain, to Inform, and to correct. However, Lady Mary herself speaks as if her ultimate purpose were to entertain (amuse, divert), and the three purposes form a hierarchic order culminating in

"entertainment,” for she must correct in order to inform and inform in order to entertain.

In the letter describing the bath at Sophia ve will note features similar to the methods described above to convince the reader of the truthfulness of the account. However, a conviction of veracity, though a sine qua non for the high-level entertainment Lady Mary seeks to pro­ vide her readers, is by no means all that is necessary in order to entertain* She must also make the unfamiliar things she is writing about present, vivid, and pleasing to the imaginations of her readers. In the course of discussing the letter we will discover those features that are directly addressed to Lady Mary's primary purpose, to delight the imagin­ ation. The complete text of the letter follows (I, 312-15t

To Lady 1 April [1717]

Adrlanople, Ap. 1. O.S.

I am now got into a new World where every thing I see appears to me a change of Scene, and I write to your Ladyship with some content of mind, hoping at least that you will find the charm of Hoveity in my Letters and no longer reproach me that I tell you nothing extrodlnary. 1 won't trouble you with a Halation of our tedious Journey, but I must not omit what £ saw remarkable at Sophia, one of the most beautifull Towns in the Turkish Empire and famous for its Hot Baths that are resorted to both for diversion and health. I stop'd here one day on purpose to see them. Designing to go incog­ nito, I hir'd a Turkish Coach. These Voitures are not at all like ours, but much more convenient for the Country, the heat being so great that Glasses would be very troublesome. They are made a good deal in the manner of the Dutch Coaches, haveing wooden Lattices painted and gilded, the inside being painted with baskets and nosegays of Flowers, extermlx'd conmonly with little poetical mottos. They are cover'd all over with scarlet doth, lin'd with silk and very often richly embrodier'd and fring'd. This covering entirely hides the persons in them, but may be throvn back at pleasure and the Ladys peep through the Lattices, They hold A people very conveniently, seated on cushions, but not rais'd.

In one of these cover'd Waggons I vent to the Bagnio about 10 a dock. It vas allready full of Women, It Is built of Stone in the shape of a Dome vith no Windows but in the Roofe, which gives Light enough. There vas 5 of these domes joyn'd together, the outmost being less than the rest and serving only as a hall where the portress Btood at the door, Ladys of Quality gennerally give this Woman the value of a crown or 10 shillings, and I did not forget that ceremony. The next room is a very large one, pav'd with Marble, and all round it rais'd 2 Sofas of marble, one above another. There were A fountains of cold Water in this room, falling first Into marble Basins and then running on the floor in little channels made for that purpose, which carry'd the streams Into the next room, something less than this, with the same sort of marble sofas, but so hot with steams of sulphur proceeding from the baths joyning to it, twas impossible to stay there with one's Cloths on. The 2 other domes were the hot baths, one of which had cocks of cold Water turning into it to temper It to what degree of warmth the bathers have a mind to,

I was in my travelling Habit, which is a rideing dress, and certainly appear'd very extrodlnary to them, yet there was not one of 'em that shev'd the least surprize or imper­ tinent Curiosity, but receiv'd me with all the obliging civlllity possible. I know no European Court where the Ladys would have behav'd them selves In so polite a manner to a stranger, I beleive in the whole there were 200 Women and yet none of those disdainfull smiles or satyric whispers that never fail in our assemblys when any body appears that is not dress'd exactly in fashion. They repeated over and over to me, Uzelle, pek uzelle, which is nothing but, charming, very charming. The first sofas were cover'd with Cushions and rich Carpets, on which sat the Ladys, and on the 2nd their slaves behind 'em, but without any distinction of rank by their dress, all being in the state of nature, that is, in plain English, stark naked, without any Beauty or deffect conceal'd, yet there vas not the least wanton smile or Immodest Gesture amongst 'em. They Walk'd and mov'd vith the same majestic Grace which Milton describes of our General Mother. There were many amongst them as exactly proportion'd as ever any 72

Goddess was drawn, by the pencil of Guido or Titian, and most of their skins shinelngly white, only adorn'd by their Beautifull Hair divided into many tresses hanging on their shoulders, braided either with pearl or riband, perfectly representing the figures of the Graces* I was here con­ vinc'd of the Truth of a Refflexion that I had often made, that if twas the fashion to go naked, the face would be hardly observ'd* t perceiv'd that the Ladys with the finest skins and most delicate shapes had the greatest share of my admiration, tho their faces were sometimes less beautifull than those of their companions* To tell you the truth, 1 had wickedness enough to wish secretly that Mr* Gervase could have been there invisible* 1 fancy it would have very much inprov'd his art to see so many fine Women naked in different postures, some in conversation, some working, others drinking Coffee or sherbet, and many negligently lying on their Cushions while their slaves (generally pritty Girls of 17 or 18) were employ'd in braiding their hair in several pritty manners. In short, tie the Women's coffee house, where all the news of the Town is told, Scandal invented, etc* They gennerally take this Diversion once a week, and stay there at least A or 5 hours without getlng cold by immediate coming out of the hot bath into the cool room, which was very surprizing to me* The Lady that seem'd the most considerable amongst them entreated me to sit by her and would fain have un­ dress'd me for the bath* 1 excus'd my selfe with some difficulty, they being all so earnest in persuading me* I vas at last forc'd to open my skirt and shew them my stays, which satisfy'd 'em very well, for I saw they beleiv'd I was so lock'd up in that machine that it was not in my own power to open it, which contrivance they attributed to my Husband* I was charm'd vith their Civil- lity and Beauty and should have been very glad to pasa more time vith them, but Mr* W[ortley] resolving to persue his Journey the next morning early, I vas in haste to see the ruins of Juatlnian's church, which did not afford me so agreable a prospect as I had left, being little more than a heap of stonea*

Adeiu, Madam* I am sure I have now entertaind you vith an Account of such a sight as you never saw in your Life and what no book of travells could inform you of. 'Tia no leas than Death for a Man to be found in one of these places*

The opening sentence and the closing paragraph consist of Lady Mary's comments on the letter itself; she remarks on her Intent in writing it, on the expectations of her audience, and on her own accomplishment. 73

Lady Mary phrases her Intent of entertaining her audience vith something

new and extraordinary in terms of fulfilling the desires of her audience:

Adrianolpe, Ap. 1* O.S.

1 am nov got Into a new World vhere everything I see appears to me a change of Scene, and 1 write to your Lady-shlp with some content of mind, hoping at least that you will find the charm of Novelty in my Letters and no longer reproach me that I tell you nothing extrodinary.

Whether or not the actual correspondent was eagerly awaiting a report of

something extraordinary from Lady Mary's pen, Lady Mary's Implication

that this Is the case serves to heighten (or create) the anticipation of

the wider audience for what Is to come. Lady Mary's first words, showing

herself engaged in writing the letter from Adrianople, give the audience

to understand that what she is going to say Is true: I am here, I see

new things, I am writing to you about them. Although she puts it modestly

enough ("some content of mind," "hoping"), Lady Mary expresses confidence

in her power to please her correspondent, further predisposing her audience

toward a favorable judgment. Through her opening statement, then, Lady

Mary conveys several self-serving points In a graceful manner.

In the final praragrph, nov that she has demonstrated her powers in

the body of the letter, Lady Mary abandons the modesty of the opening for

the confident assertion that she has accomplished what she set out to do,

to entertain, by giving an account of a "Novelty" that has never been seen

by her audience or written about by anyone else:

Adeiu, Madam, X an sure X have nov entertalnd you vith an Account of such a sight as you never saw in your Life and what no book, of travells could inform you of« Tia no leas than Death for a Man to be found in one of these places.

This bald, straightforward assertion of the unique value of her contri- 74

bution to the literature of travel reads almost like a demand that the

audience properly appreciate and credit the author for her accomplishment,

and the final sentence adds a bit of information that dramatizes the

remarkable nature of that accomplishment while providing a memorable close

for the letter.

The opening and closing of the letter may be seen as an outer frame

that places the core of the letter, the scene at the bath, in the broad context of Lady Mary's purposes in writing the letter (and the Letters as a whole). We may also identify an inner frame that places the central scene in the Immediate and concrete context of Lady Mary's journey in the

"new World." The inner frame consists of the passages immediately fol­ lowing the opening and immediately preceding the closing remarks just discussed, that is, of the material immediately within the outer frame.

The first section of the inner frame announces the subject of. the letter, the "Hot Baths," and locates the subject both temporally (during the journey to Adrianople, the heading of the letter) and spatially (at

Sophia)i

I won't trouble you with a Relation of our TediouB Journey, but 1 must not omit what I saw remarkable at Sophia, one of the most beautiful Towns in the Turkish Empire and famous for its Hot Baths that are resorted to both for diversion and health. X stop'd here one day on purpose to see them.

The passage shows Lady Mary at work aB traveller and writer. The diligence and curiosity that she claims throughout the Letters are here apparent in her halting the journey to see the sights, and as a writer she selects only the most interesting subjects from among her new experiences.

These implicit claims serve to create further audience anticipation 75

through promises of an account of something "remarkable" and "famous"

that the writer has especially stopped to see. The closing section of

the inner frame again shows Lady Mary'a diligence and curiosity as a

traveller)

I vas charm'd with their [the bathers'] Civillity and Beauty and should have been very glad to pass more time vith them, but Mr. Wortley resolving to persue his Journey the next morning early, I vas in haste to see the ruins of Justinian's church, which did not afford me so agreable a prospect as I had left, being little more than a heap of stones.

The reader sees Lady Mary hurrying off to the next sight to take full

advantage of the day her husband has allowed her, and the passage further underscores her selectiveness as a travel writer: some sights, like the

ruins, ore not worth writing about. The inner frame as a whole providos

a context that makes the scene at the bath shine out in contrast to its

setting in the "tedious Journey" and in comparison to that other famous sight at Sophia, the disappointing "heap of stones."

The core of the letter, the visit to the bath, is essentially a description of what Lady Mary saw there. Yet to present a description at all, a writer must follow some kind of order, preferably one that enhances the effectiveness of what he is describing; and for a description

to be of any interest, the writer must show that it has some sort of significance* In the following discussion of the description of the bath,

I will take up (insofar as these three considerations can be separated), first, the kinds of order Lady Mary imposes on her description, second, her techniques of description, and third, the kinds of significance she assigns to the description, keeping in mind Lady Mary's major rhetorical problems of establishing erddiblllty and entertaining her readers. 76

The most obvious order consists simply In the temporal sequence in which Lady Mary shows herself experiencing the aspects of the bath that she describes* The narrative outline of her visit to the bath reads as followsi I hired a Turkish coach and went to the baths at ten in the morning} I entered and tipped the portress} I quickly acquainted myself with the lay-out and facilities} I returned to the main room and was politely received by the bathers} I observed them and noted my reactions} one lady invited me to bathe and others also pressed me} I excused myself from bathing and left*

This first kind of order* in providing point of view In the most literal sense and in first person terms* unobtrusively Induces conviction of the truth of the whole account. Lady Mary's arrangement of her mater­ ial is also effective in terms of her other rhetorical problem (and primary purpose), to entertain her readers* for the order builds reader interest and may even be said to have a kind of suspence* We will next see how this second level of order works. * After announcing her topic, the "Hot Baths," Lady Mary postpones, her description of the bath by interjecting a long description of the kind of coach she took to the bath. If the reader performs the experi­ ment of omitting this passage* he la led by his sense of form to see the necessity or at least the desirability of some sort of transition from the inner frame to the central scene. Some aspect of getting to the bath seems a natural enough choice for a transition* but we may inquire why, among the possible aspects* Lady Mary chooses to describe the coach} for instance, she has just said that Sophia is a beautiful city, so views of the city as she rides by would seem just as "natural." . 77 llovever. Lady Mary has chosen an aspect that la in keeping with the

central scene, for in her description of the coach she emphasises the sequestration of the women passengers and the esthetic qualities of the coach, perceived largely from its Interior* These aspects of the des- cription give a faint foretaste of the bath scene with its sequestered women and the esthetic outlook Lady Mary adopts toward them; it is a « foretaste that would not be provided by descriptions of exterior views of the city.

Once at the bath, Lady Mary first notes, in a statement whose terseness commands attention, that it is full of women. However, she artfully defers the fact about the bathers that she judged would be most startling to her readers, that they are nude; instead, after her terse statement, she goes into a severely functional description of the both as a facility. It is a place of stone, marble, water, and sulphuric steam, with light filtering down from the domes. This lifeless and colorless stage is suddenly peopled with two hundred women, in whose bearing and speech an Image of perfect courtesy is manifest. Cushions and rich carpets appear on the marble sofas, which are further adorned with ladles and attending slaves. Although the women and the colorful furnishings were, of course, there all the time, Lady Mary's ignoring of these aspects of the scene while she described the bath-as-facllity lends a dramatic effect to their appearance.

Finally, about halfway through the central scene, Lady Mary divulges the most startling fact about the bath, the nudity of the bathers. She has held back this fact as long as possible, but now with her revelation 78

she reaches a high point of reader Interest where a new plateau of

description, the persona of the bathers, opens out. She describes a

scene of sensuous beauty (the passage "They Walk'd and mov'd ..."

through "... braiding their hair In several pritty manners*"), but

she does not allow It to cloy. Suddenly abandoning the esthetic realm

she has created, In which the bathers almost become works of art, Lady

Mary makes of the bath "the Women's coffee house," a place where women

meet to gossip and tone up their physiques and that Is recognizable as

belonging to the everyday world. Through this switch In context, the

women are no longer esthetic objects but real people at the bath for

quite ordinary purposes.

But having thus brought the bathers down to earth by relating their

activities to activities familiar to her English readers, Lady Mary does

not allow interest to flag. Having just shown that universal forms of

behavior underlie the extraordinary scene at the bath, Lady Mary changes

ground and, in an amusing anecdote, shows that the ladles are still

foreigners whose different customs lead to amusing misunderstandings.

In a purely formal sense, the anecdote is well placed at the end of the visit* Several features make It a second high point of Interest: it

is a direct personal encounter (unlike the ladles' general reception of

Lady Mary earlier), It centers on opposing wills, it la slightly tiltil­ ia ting (will Lady Mary undress?), and It touches on sexual mores; further,

the ladles' misinterpretation of Lady Mary's stays is amusing In itself and Ironic to the English reader, who sees Turkish women assuming that

English husbands are tyrannical* 79

Thu*i viewed as an artful arrangement o£ material, the letter has features which contribute to the entertainment of the reader. It hae variety and contrast between contiguous sections and an overall pace and development that build up to a first high point which is followed by a brief denouement that still maintains Interest by introducing a new context, and the letter concludes In a second high point, a lively, memorable anecdote.

The most striking of Lady Mary's techniques of description are

(1) the sentence structures through which she presents her sense data;

(2) her use of comparison as a further aid to visualization and a tool for evaluation; and (3) her recourse to a negative-affirmative pattern to remove her readers' possible misconceptions before presenting her

Information.

The descriptive passages are marked by loosely concatenated gram­ matical structures, which, though formally dependent on a main clause, have an independent or "additional information" quality that makes them essentially a form of compounding rather than dependent and limiting modifiers. The non-restrlctlve relative clause with its variants (to be identified through examples) and the absolute construction are the most important of these structures, and the formal signal that most readily distinguishes them from the dependent modifiers they formally resemble la that they are set off by commas. Grammarians have long recognized the general similarity and independent quality of these structures, terming them sentence modifiers or predicate appositlves, and modern grammarians of the transformational school have devised a theoretical base for their origin in independent sentences and have systematically 80

worked out the details of their derivations. The transformational

analysis reveals unlike functions in structures that are superficially

similar or identical and like functions in structures that are super­

ficially dissimilar. Such a capacity makes apparent the available alter­ natives to the structures a writer has chosen, thus aiding in an assess­ ment of the effect the writer has intended and achieved through his

choice from among the possibilities. I base the following discussion of

Lady Mary's sentence structures on the insights and analyses of Carlota

A. Smith,® Arthur Schwartz,1® and Roderick A. Jacobs and Peter S.

Rosenbaum.11

The following sentence contains three of the "independent"

structures described abovet

They are made a good deal in the manner of the Dutch Coaches, (1) havelng wooden Lattices painted and gilded, (2) the inside being painted with baskets and nosegays of Flowers, (3) entermlx'd commonly with little poetical mottos.

The kind of present participial phrase exemplified by (1) and the absolute construction exemplified by (2) differ formally only in the appearance of a subject in the latter, and they are alike in having one of two possible functions, to stand in an explanatory relationship to the main clause, or

to indicate a neutral relationship of "accompaniment" of "simultaneity" between the main clause and the structure. The participial phrase (1)

Q In "Determiners and Relative Clauses," Language. 40 (1964), 37-52.

*®In "Derivative Functions in Syntax," Language. 44 (1969), 747-783.

^Co-authorsj In English Transformational Grammar (Waltham, Mass.: Blaisdell, 1968), Chapter 29, "Conjunction and Hon-restrictlve Clauses." 8 1 . serves the first function, "havelng" being the equivalent of "for they

have." The absolute construction (2) has the second function, being simply

an additional piece of Information that could Just as well be presented

in the form "and the Inside Is painted . . The past participial phrase (3) is a reduced non-restrlctlve relative clause, serving for

"which are entermix'd." We note about this manner of sentence construc­

tion, first, that it is more concise than the "spelled out" equivalents mentioned above, and second, that both in this "rapidity" and in consis­

ting of essentially independent structures that are yet formally dependent, it is well suited to represent a succession of distinct sense impressions which yet pertain to a single object.

The kind of "independent-but-dependent" construction typified by the sentence Just under discussion (and, as we will see, by other import­ ant sentences in this letter) has been termed "cumulative sentence" by

Francis Christensen in his famous essay, "A Generative Rhetoric of the

Sentence,"^ where he introduces the interesting concept of "levels of generality" as one way of considering the relationship of the formally dependent structures to the main clause. Professor Christensen's finding that the main clause of the cumulative sentence is likely to be stated in relatively general terms, with the additional "clusters" going over the same ground at lower levels of generality, seems to be exempli- vied in the sentence we are now looking at. The main clause is at a high

(first) level of generality, with structures (1) and (2) operating at a

12 CCC, 14 (Oct. 1963), 155-61. 82 second level (adding concrete detail) and structure (3) at a third level, elaborating second level detail. However, In this case the relationship of the taaln clause to the following structures Is not entirely that of generalization to supporting detail. The main clause asserts the similarity of Turkish and Dutch coaches, and It Is my sense of the sentence that at some point, probably very early In the structures that present the concrete detail, Lady Mary Is simply describing the Turkish coach and no longer demonstrating Its similarity to Dutch coaches: that

Is, the main verb "are made" (- "are built"?) refers only to the structur­ al feature of the wooden lattices. The rhetoric of Lady Mary's cumulative sentence structure, then, does not work entirely like the rhetoric of the typical cumulative sentence that Professor Christensen examines, but her structure does have Its own kind of rhetoric: the main clause gives the reader a first general Impression of the appearance of the Turkish coach In terms of an object he 1b presumably familiar with, an Impression that can then be followed by features characteristic only of the un­ familiar object.

The rhetoric of the following cumulative sentence takes a different direction. The main clause has only the function of being the starting point, and a semantically equal member, of a series of distinct sense

Impressions:

There were A fountains of cold Water In this room, (1) falling first Into marble Basins (2) and then running on the floor In little channels made for that purpose, (3) which carry'd the streams Into the next room, (A) something less than this, (5) with the same sort of marble sofas, (6) but so hot with steams of sulphur proceeding from the baths joynlng to it, twas Impossible to stay there with one's ClothB on. 83

The structure# In (1) and (2) represent a common reduced form of the non-restrlctlve relative clause, the full forms "which fell" and "which ran" having undergone the standard replacement by the present participles

"falling" and "running"; these verbals are "lnformatlonaly" equivalent to the full form but are particularly appropriate in the present case, suggesting as they do the continuous action of the water. Structure (3) is a fully realized non-restrictive clause, the change In form coinciding with the change In referent from "water" to "channels," thus avoiding the confusion of seeming to continue the parallel series "falling . . . and running," a kind of aid which, as we will see. Lady Mary does not always provide her readers. The last three structures, recording quick, distinct impressions of the "hot room," are again reduced non-restrlctlve relative clauses, but of notably compressed kindB, "Which was" is removed from structure (A), the "with" of structure (5) is a replacement for "which had," and (6) omits either "it was" or "which was." The quickening of tempo brought about by this compression suggests the

r’ hastiness of Lady Mary's viewing of the "too hot" room.

Although the grammatical and semantic control exerted by the main clause is virtually non-existent, the sentence is justified as a unit: while she Is In the large "cool room," Lady Mary's attention is caught by the motion of the water and she follows Its course into the "too hot" room, where she is able to stay for only a quick glimpse, and apparently she returns to the cool room. This completes what she observes for her­ self about the bath as a facility. She did not enter "the other 2 domes" from which the steam issued, so she places the second-hand Information in a separate sentence. Although Lady Mary does not explicitly mention B4 herself, the reader senses, through the grammatical choices she made in the single structures and through her ordering of the members, that he is seeing the bath through the eyes and motions of the exploring observer, following tier while she discovers the physical features of the bath. The rhetoric, or purpose, of the structure of this cumulative sentence seems to be to give this sense of exploration.

By contrast, Lady Mary uses the structure of the following cumulative sentence for emphasis. Focussing on one feature, the description becomes increasingly explicit as, member by member, the viewer's increas­ ingly close observation produces an unfolding revelation:

The first sofas were cover'd vith Cushions and rich Carpets, (1) on which sat the Ladys, (2) and on the 2nd their slaves behond 'em, (3) but without any distinction of rank by their dress, (4) all being in the state of nature, (5) that is, in plain English, stark naked, (6) without any Beauty or deffeet conceal'd, (7) yet there vas not the least wanton smile or Immodest Gesture amongst 'em.

The effect of emphasis is highly appropriate here, for Lady Mary is revealing the most startling fact about the bath and a fact that marks a turning point in the letter, for the rest of the account all hinges on the bathers' nudity. But further, the movement we noted in the sentence suggests that the structure follows the writer's own reaction of growing surprise, as, in successive impressions, she gradually takes in the fact that the persons of the bathers are indeed fully exposed.

On the basis of what we have seen so far, we may say that the cumulative sentence as employed by Lady Mary is a flexible and effective vehicle for rapidly conveying successions of quick, vivid sense percep­ tions; and in the ordering of the members of her strung-together 85 sentences, Lady Mary haa a tool for achieving specific minor rhetorical purposes and for giving the reader the pleasurable sense of experlenceing the scene with the writer, a sense that also contributes to the reader's conviction of the reality of what Is being described. As we saw, Lady

Mary has often chosen those grammatical alternatives that omit relative pronouns, copulas, and auxiliaries, thus throwing Into relief the nouns, adjectives, and root verbs that are the essence of the sense perceptions.

But however desirable the vividness thus gained, this practice occasion­ ally causes minor inconveniences to the reader.

For example, in the following sentence, because Lady Mary uses the abbreviated form "lin'd" instead of the full form "which is lined," the reader Is at first apt to Interpret "lin'd" os a compound with "cover'd," with "they" (Turkish coaches) as the common subject, a supposition that is not corrected by an obvious semantic incompatibility, for Turkish coaches, for all the reader knows, might be lined with silk:

They are cover'd all over with scarlet cloth, lin'd with silk and very often richly embroider'd and fring'd.

Only as the sentence continues does the reader come to suspect that

"lin'd" is more likely the first term in the series that has "cloth" as its head (lined, embroidered, fringed), and even then (if he really wants to have a clear picture) he needs to go over the sentence again.

The following sentence is grammatically the most interesting of the purely descriptive passages in the lettert

There were many amongst them as exactly proportion'd as ever any Goddess was drawn by the pencil of Guido or Titian, (1) and most of their skins shinelngly white, (2) only adorn'd by their Beautifull Hair (3) divided into many tresses hanging on their shoulders, (4) braided elthec vith pearl or riband, (5) perfectly representing the figures of the Graces.

Structure (1) is detached from the preceding long main clause, so the reader assumes that he is headed into a new construction where he will eventually encounter a new main clause with a subject to which to attach the adjectival phrase. However, the reader finds only more reduced non- restrictive relative clauses^ to the end of the sentence. The successive images are striking, but at the end the reader wonders fleetingly where he lost track of the grammar. Perhaps, then, structure (1) was intended as a new main clause with "were" omitted after "skins" on the basis of the

"were" in the preceding main clause. Usually, though, a parallelism between the two main clauses is necessary before the verb can be safely omitted from the second. In the present case, the construction of the two main clauses is very dissimilar, and the reader would not readily posit "there were most of their skins ahineingly white" to read the second as a parallel construction with the first. However, on second thought the reader can manage somehow to understand a "were" on the basis of the preceding main clause, thus providing a new main clause and solving the problem of structure (1) and giving a formal grammatical basis for the emergence of structure (2) and then of (3) and (4).

Structure (3) remains a problem. It is the kind of structure that we earlier saw may function in an explanatory relationship to the clause it modifies, and the semantic content of (5) suggests that it is making

J-JLady Mary’s punctuation of relative clauses is not entirely con­ sistent. "Divided," of course, because of the determiner "their," Initiates a reduced non-restrlctlve ("which are divided"), which In standard usage requires a preceding comma. 87 a consent on some preceding assertion, a comment having the quality of a

thereby" or "thus'* relationship. The unstated subject of "representing" is then understood to be identical with the subject of the assertion it modifies (comments on)• Me need here to add to our previous discussion of these modifying structures that the structure modified need not be a main clause and need not even be a structure containing its own stated subject, though the subject must be stated somewhere in the sentence,

"sentence" being defined as a main clause plus all its formally dependent structures; that is, the participial predicate modifier (5), itself an

"included sentence," may refer to the main clause or to any other

"included sentence," whatever form that sentence may have taken in being incorporated into the matrix sentence. In such a potentially ambiguous situation, proximity is the test of application: the reader automatically understands the closest assertion to be the modified assertion unless that application results in a noticeable semantic incompatibility that is removed by application of the modifier to another dose~by assertion.

Thus in the present case, the reader first automatically assumes that structure (5) comments on structure (A) and has the subject "hair," but he quickly senses an incompatibility between the specific detail of

(4) end the relatively high-level generality of (5); "hair braided vith pearl and ribbon" is not sufficient to perfectly represent the Graces, and the reader looks further for an application. He at last concludes

(probably after only the work of a split second, but still a distraction) that structure (5) must be intended to refer to everything that has been said about the bathers in the entire long, disjointed sentence, to their proportions, to their skin, to their hair and its adornmenta. But there 88 is still no stated subject for "representing"; even at a stretch the

"many amongst them"- of the first main clause does not qualify, for structure (5), being an explanatory predicate modifier, would then have reference only to the initial assertion, that the bathers were well- proportioned*

The purpose of the above discussion is not to convict Lady Mary of some trivial ungrammatically but to see that her handling of the cumula­ tive sentence can be momentarily perplexing to the reader accustomed to expect and rely on precise formal signals for an immediately unequivocal picture of what is being imparted. Lady Mary's manner of construction in the last two examples does not make it impossible for such a reader to find the connections apparently intended, but finding them requires second thoughts that detract from the effect of a succession of quick, clear visual images that the style seems especially designed to deliver.

However, it may well be that other kinds of readers might be so carried along by the rapidity of the style that they perceive no grammatical problems, and yet others, while spotting the problems, might be capable of Instantaneously and accurately making the syntactic assignments that

Lady Mary probably intends*

The grammatical problems noted above are not unique to this one

Embassy letter. In reviewing the Embassy Letters when they were first published in 1763, the Monthly Review took note of the errors:

[That the letters were not written for the press] may, in some measure be presumed, from the Incorrectness of the language, in some few instances; for, had the writer originally designed these papers for the public eye, there is no doubt but she, who was very capable 89

of it, would have retouched them, and removed such little flaws, as appear like freckles on a fine,face: which, not withstanding, Is a fine face still,14

But, as we saw earlier, Lady Mary did Intend the Letters for publication,

probably from the time she first made the collection. She had forty

years to "retouch,'* years during which she had the letters with her and

In circulation. Since her failure to retouch may be a manifestation of

certain aspects of her concept of “the letter" and of her style, it is worth considering a little further.

According to the letter-writing esthetic of Lady Mary's day, the

familiar letter was to be a spontaneous mlnd-to-paper production, not to

be further tampered with. For example, Sir Peter Pett wrote In 1693:

. • the first draughts of the thoughts of an Author, and such as at

once finished up, are to pass from him in a Letter . . .m 15; Alexander

Pope, a notorious polisher of his own letters for publication, expressed

the accepted notion of what a letter should be when he tells John Caryll

in a letter of 1712 that he is sending “thoughts Just warm from the brain without any polishing or dress";1*’ and Lady Mary herself, in a letter of

1758, compares a letter to a “friendly breakfast" at which the guest is not to “view too nicely all the disorder" he sees (III, 182), a statement

that reveals considerable consciousness of the effect of the “disorder."

Lady Mary's strung-together descriptive sentences have an unpremeditated

^Monthly Review. 28 (1763), 385.

^Quoted by George Williamson, The Senecan Amble (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1966), p. 351.

^Selected Letters of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1960), p. 33. 90 air, as if following Che immediate motiona of her mind (and we have juet seen the rhetorical value of that effect), and her occasional incorrect­ nesses would suggest that she has not polished or "dressed." Hence it is possible that Lady Mary would let any errors stand in passages she vas otherwise pleased with, for they would make the epistolary form appear more genuine, an appearance which, we noted in the first section, is rhetorically effective with the wider audience. And, of course, it is this effect of "genuine letters" that the Incorrectnesses had on the reviewer just quoted. As George Salntsbuty put it, successful letter- writing has "the greatest negative virtue of not being obviously written for publication."^

The notion of what a letter should be has much in common with assumptions about the loose Senecan style, of which Lady Mary's descrip­ tive sentence structure is an off-shoot.*® This style was commonly believed to reflect the natural, unpremeditated motions of the mind, so on stylistic grounds too these particular incorrectnesses would not be really objectionable, for Lady Mary haB Ignored standard syntactic requirements in favor of conveying a seeming rush of Impressions. That

Lady Mary had considerable stylistic awareness is apparent from remarks in her later correspondence expressing dislike of certain styles which

^Quoted by Robert Halsband, "Lady Mary Uortley Montagu as Letter-Vrlter," PMLA. 80 (1965), 160.

*®It is interesting that Professor Christensen finds that the cumulative sentence is the typical sentence of contemporary writing and traces its ancestry to the loose Senecan style. 91 are the antithesis o£ her manner of writing In the passages ve have been discussing*

Of course, another possible explanation for Lady Mary's failure to correct Is (the reviewer not-withstending) that she was not "very capable" of removing the "little flaws"; she may simply not have recog­ nized them. The types of errors exemplified in the foregoing passages were all criticized by grammarians and rhetoricians of the later eigh­ teenth century, a period much concerned with "correctness" when the

"rules" of English grammar still taught in the schools were first syste­ matically formulated on a full scale.20 However, a very conscious educated awareness of these types of errors may not have existed In the

1720's, and Lady Mary may not have been nurtured on enough examples of styles like her radical version of the loose Senecan for her to have incorporated all of its requirements into her own intuitive grammatical capability.

Lady Mary dislikes the "smooth lines" of Pope's letters (III, 58), the "flowing style" of Sevlgne (III, 62), the "French Eloquence" and "Florid" style of Bolingbroke (II, 433; III, 76-7), It is necessary to compare these general remarks with the writing in question to arrive at some understanding of what she means by them. For example, Bolingbroke abounds in elaborate periodic sentences and highly patterned construc­ tions where the smallest members are tortured into parallelisms or antitheses* See hla "Reflections upon Exile," The Works of the Late Right Honourable Henry St. John. Viscount Bolingbroke (London, 1809Y, Vol. I, the work Lady Mary was commenting on.

20See Sterling Andrus Leonard, The Doctrine of Correctness in English Usaget 1700-1800. Univ. of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, No, 25 (Reis, New York; Russell and Russell, 1962), especially Chapter VI, "Sentence Structure and Word Order." 92

Besides the cumulative sentence structure, another characteristic of Lady Mary's descriptive passages is her frequent resort to comparison, of explaining her “new World" to her readers in terms of things they are familiar vith. Just as she employed the sentence structure for a variety of minor rhetorical purposes, so Lady Mary employs comparison for several purposes. One purpose is simply to give information, the case in her comparison of the Turkish coaches to Dutch coaches to aid visualization*

In a more complex kind of comparison, differences between the items are noted or implied, but each is placed in its own proper context, thus expressing a kind of neutral cultural relativity* Such a purpose is visible in the comparison of the bath to a coffee house to explain its social function, or in the comparison of Turkish coaches to English coaches, where the latticed windows of the former are suited to the heat of the country, whereas glassed windows are suited (it is implied) to the

English climate*

In a third kind of comparison, the purpose is to praise the unfamil­ iar item by comparing It favorably to a familiar and accepted standard of excellence, as Lady Mary does in the comparisons of the persons of the bathers to Milton's Eve and to the drawings and paintings of the masters.

A fourth type of comparison is still more strongly evaluative. Differences between the unfamiliar and the familiar are noted, as in the second type, but both are judged by an implied standard to which one measures up and the other does not* This is the case in the comparison of the behavior of the Turkish ladies toward Lady Mary with the behavior of European court ladles toward strangers and with the behavior of English ladles toward unfa8hionably dressed women, a case in which both a social standard of 93 good manners and a moral standard of kindness apply*

All of the kinds of comparison give purely descriptive information, and they are an efficient means of presenting that new Information, employing os they do the time-honored pedagogical technique of working with what the pupil already knows. But In conveying the information,

Lady Mary's techniques of comparison also assign functional, social, esthetic, and moral meanings. As Addison pointed out, a single sense perception will immediately produce a whole body of ramifications, and

Lady Mary, by presenting the ramifications that her original sense perceptions aroused in her own mind, supplies firm guidance for her readers' further thoughts. The result Is a livelier and more intellectu­ ally absorbing account than any attempt at a "scientific" conveying of sense images could be. In short, the comparative techniques inform and entertain.

The last category of Lady Mary's descriptive techniques that we will note is a negative-affirmative pattern that consists of beginning a description by stating what the subject under discussion is not like and then going on to say what it is like, a pattern that runs through some of the comparative passages already discussed. In employing this pattern

Lady Mary seems to be making a point of anticipating and clearing away incorrect expectations of her readers before engaging in a positive description. Thus, apparently anticipating that on seeing the word

"coach" her readers will immediately visualize the kind of coach they are most familiar vith, Lady Mary first tella them that Turkish coaches are not like English coaches (and why) before telling them what the coaches 94

ace like. Similarly, anticipating that her readers will assume that

Turkish ladies vould treat a stranger as badly as European ladies do,

she first tells her readers that this vas not the case before going on

to say that the Turkish ladies were most obligingly civil, The pattern

is immediately repeated vhen Lady Mary first tells her readers In what

manner the Turkish ladies did not respond to her extraordinary riding

dress before saying that they told her that it was charming.

Again, Lady Mary anticipates an incorrect expectation on the part of

her readers vhen she first describes the demeanor of the ladles to each

other in negative terms: (although nude) they did not smile wantonly or make immodest gestures. The affirmative counterpart to this negative

description at first seems to be missing, but it is contained in the

sentence that follows, in which Lady Mary says that the bathers "Walk'd

and mov'd with the same majestic Grace which Milton describes of our

General Mother." Robert Halsband cites Paradise Lost. IV. 304-18 as the

source of this comparison, but not all of these lines are pertinent to

Lady Mary's purpose of bringing to mind a majestic grace of movement.

Eve's hair Is described in 11. 304-7, and not only is the hair very different from Lady Mary's description of the bathers' hair, but the attitudes toward Adam of "subjection • . ., coy submission, modest pride,

And sweet reluctant amorous delay" (11* 308-11) that the hair implies are scarcely to Lady Mary's purpose in describing the way the women moved and walked among other women. More pertinent are lines 288-93 and 319-20 describing Adam and Eve jointly:

Two of far nobler shape erect and tall, Godlike erect, with native Honour clad In naked Majestie seemed Lords of all. And vorthie seemd, for in thir looks Divine 95

The image o£ thir glorious Maker shon, Truth, Wisdom, Sanctltude severe and pure.

So pass'd they naked on, nor shund the sight 0£ God or Angel, for they thought no 111.

From these passages It Is clear that Eve's "majestic grace" is the product

of a pure and Innocent unselfconsciousness, and it Is this moral quality

that Lady Mary projects in her likening of the bathers' movements to

Eve'ss it is the "thinking no ill" that forms an obvious if implicit

contrast to the wantonness and immodesty that was not manifested in the bathers' demeanor. Perhaps though, Lady Mary's memory of lines 312-18 prompted her to follow her negative description with the reference to

Eve, for in those lines Milton explidty contrasts post-and prelapsarian attitudes toward nudity.

The negative-affirmative pattern has several interesting effects.

First, it gives the impression that the writer knows what the readers' misconceptions will be because she entered the situation vlth the same misconceptions; both a dynamic of discovery on the writer's part and an identification with the audience are at work. Second, the pattern has an argumentative quality: error is conquered and truth set up in its place as the pattern moves from refutation to confirmation; the writer is exerting herself to convince her readers of what she is imparting.

Third, the number of instances of the pattern suggest that Lady Mary was consciously acting on a principle, and she may have become convinced of the desirability of employing the pattern through John Locke's dis­ cussion of the dangers of the association of ideas in the Essay 96

concerning Hunan, Understanding. a work she owned and admired,Locke

states that the appearance of one idea in the mind will always bring with

it "the whole gang" of associated ideas built up by custom and habit,

whether or not the accompanying ideas are relevant to the given situation.

Hence Lady Mary applies herself to breaking down common associations that

are inapplicable to her "new World" before building up the associations

that do apply.

On the most general level, Lady Mary finds two principal kinds of

significance in her visit to the bath. The first is the significance she expected to find, for she states it in her first announcement of the subject of the letter as if It were what she had already learned about the famous "Hot Baths that are resorted to both for diversion and health."

The reader thus expects that the bath will be discussed as an institution of a foreign land having the functions of diversion and health in the lives of the natives. Lady Mary fulfills these expectations first in describing the bath as a health facility and later commenting on the bathers' ability to tolerate the great changes in temperature, and in showing the activities of the bathers that make the bath a social institution comparable to a coffee house. This first significance, then, is what the bath means to the Turkish women, and in displaying it Lady Mary

2*See "The Dangers of the Association of Ideas" in Locket Selections, ed. Sterling P. Lamprecht (New York; Scribners, 1928), pp. 221-4.

22The work is listed in the catalogue of her library made in 1739; in 1754 she said of Locke that he "has made a more exact disection of the Human mind than any Man before him." (Ill, 48). These dates are well after 1717, but a Spectator reader would have at least some second-hand Locke. 97 fulfills her rhetotlcal purpose of informing her readers of something

they did not know before.

The second kind of significance is what the bath means to Lady Mary

as a personal esthetic experience, a significance suggested by her comment when she reluctantly leaves the bath, "I was charm'd with [the bathers']

Clvllllty and Beauty." Although the passages displaying this kind of significance continue to give information, Lady Mary has shifted from a

"real world" atmosphere to an esthetic realm, a shift that begins with her description of the perfect courtesy of the bathers toward herself and the perfect innocence of their bearing among themselves and that reaches its full development when she describes the bathers in terms of artists and their works, of her own admiring reaction to those favored in figure, of the lessons a painter could learn from observing them.^3 Lady Mary suggests a reciprocating cycle between nature and art, in which nature is viewed in terms of art and art takes Inspiration from nature, while she herself is both the observer who takes esthetic pleasure directly from nature and the artist who transmutes the whole experience into the written word. In conveying these charming ImageB to entertain her reader,

Lady Mary stimulates rather than dictates to the receiving imagination.

The bathers are described either in toto or in groups, and an adjective like "beautiful" leaves much to individual Interpretation. A painter

Z3Lady Mary admirably avoids the pitfall of the cliche thought "1 wish an artist had been there to paint it," which is so often expressed in speaking of a beautiful scene; she substitutes in effect, "1 wish Charles Jervas the famous portrait painter could have been there to be instructed by the scene." Lady Mary is the capturing artist, and one with no need of assistance from a painter. * 98 working from her letter would haye considerable freedom.24 In emphasi­

zing the beauty of the scene in addition to its novelty, Lady Mary works with another of Addison's three causes of delight to the imagination.

We remember that in Novelty Addison saw the encouragement of the pursuit

of knowledge| and in Beauty he found the Incentive to love and enjoy the works of Creation* Lady Mary thus entertains her readers by informing

them of "real world" fact and by conveying impressions of beauty, fact and beauty found in a scene "such as you never saw in your Life."

In this descriptive letter, Lady Mary employs a variety of rhetorical strategies to fulfill her purposes. Her kinds of order induce in the reader a conviction that she has actually seen what she writes about and entertain the reader by skilfully building up and maintaining his inter­ est. Her rapid style entertains with its liveliness and suggests the eyewitness immediacy of successive sense-perceptlons. Her use of compari­ son relates the unfamiliar aspects of her new world to her readers' experience, thus aiding their assimilation of the new information and inducing conviction of its reality, while the same ends are achieved by

^ L a d y Mary's letter did, in fact, inspire two known pictorial representations. The earlier, an engraving by the Berlin artist Daniel Chodoviecki, entitled "Lady Montague Visiting Women's Bath in Sofia" and made for a 1781 edition of her Letters, is literal and uninspired. The other, Ingres's well-known painting, wThe Turkish Bath" (1862), is aptly described by Robert Roaenblum, editor of Jean-Auguate-Dominlque Ingres (The Library of Great Painters, Mew York: Harry to. Abrams,1968), as "an erotic daydream of an elderly painter." The spirit breathed by Ingres's bathers Is far removed from the moral quality Lady Mary saw. her entering the workings of her readers1 minds to anticipate and correct misconceptions before building up the proper associations of ideas. The kinds of significance she sees inform her readers of a custom of a foreign land and convey to them a scene which delights and stimulates the imagination. In the outer and inner frames she locates her subject temporally and spatially in a way that adds to the impression of veracity and that makes her subject stand out as particularly worthy of attention: she shows the personal qualities of diligence, curiosity, and Judgment that are basic to her success as a travel-writer; and she makes the reader fully aware of what she is doing by explicitly asserting the truth, novelty, and charm of her account. The reader carries away the conviction that Lady Mary is mistress of the rhetoric of description. CHAPTER III

GENERALIZATIONS AND PARTICULARS t "This Is the general state of affairs"

Letter of 31 October 1723, to Lady Mar

As I stated In the Introduction, I have Included a chapter exploring

Lady Mary*s manner of relating her generalizations to the particulars on

which they are based in order to allow consideration of Lady Mary's

gossipy news-letters, a type of letter that la important in her corres­

pondence both in terms of quantity and in terms of Interest but that is

not adequately represented by the focusses on forms of discourse In the

other four chapters. Of course, the making of generalizations on the

basis of particulars and the viewing of particulars in terms of

previously arrived-at generalizations are basic mental activities that

are manifested in many kinds of writing, and they are of such importance

that the success of any piece that even informally manifests a pattern

(or patterns) of generalization and associated particulars^ will depend

%here is, of course, no hard-and-fast line between generalizations and particulars but only gradations. By a pattern of generalization and particulars, I mean a more or less general statement and the less general observations that are covered by the higher-level generalization. The relationship between the generalization and its "particulars" can be of many different kinds, though there is probably no such thing as a totally non-evaluatlve generalization.

100 I

101

to a large extent on tha writer'a management of the pattern.

In the letters we have already looked at, patterns of generalization

and associated particulars were present and important, though not

emphasized as such in the discussions. For example, Lady Mary's major

thesis in the argumentative letter can be seen as the highest-level

generalization in the piece and everything else as less general supporting

evidence, and, to give an Instance of a smaller-scale pattern, Lady Mary

gives the generalizing Interpretation "the women's coffee house" to the

specific activities of the bathers. It would have been very difficult

if not Impossible to discuss the letters of Chapter I and II (as it will

be to discuss those of Chapters IV and V) without dealing to some extent

and in some way (albeit ^under a different label) with Lady Mary's various

ways of relating generalizations to their particulars, even though that

consideration did not constitute the focus of those chapters.

Since the generalization/particular pattern is of such large and

basic importance, we should at least suggest why approaching Lady Mary's

gossipy news-letters in those terms is especially suited to display the

set of rhetorical strategies that is distinctive of these letters. The

letters are typically made up of brief narrative or descriptive news

items liberally interspersed with pithy comment, the usually satiric

intent of which la often reflected In Lady Mary'a manner of recounting

the Items themselves. To consider such letters as under-developed

instances of narrative or descriptive discourse would obviously be to

misrepresent their nature. The generalizing commentary in these letters

is notably obtrusive; it calls attention to itself by its quantity or

lengthiness in relation to the news items, or by being patently humorous 102

or ironic, or by having an oblique or ''tricky" connection with its

associated particulars* Lady Mary Intends to amuse her correspondents

by her witty manner of transmitting the news, and much of the wittiness

is attributable to the nature of the generalizations and the kinds of

relationships she establishes between her general assertions and her

particular news.

Lady Mary wrote this kind of witty news-letter to her women friends.

Early attempts at the type appear among her letters to her girlhood

friends, for example, the letters of 4 August 1711 to Anne Justice

(I, 107-8) and 6 February 1712 to Philippa Mundy (I, 115-6). She brings

the type to full development in her correspondence with her sister,

Lady Mar, which contains the largest number and the most entertaining of

these letters; the letters of May 1723 (II, 22-5), 31 October 1723

(II, 31-3), March 1724 (I, 36-40), September 1725 (II, 56-7), and

October 1727 (I, 85-8) show Lady Mary at her best in this vein. In the next decade, Lady Mary continued her witty conveying of the news of the

town in her correspondence with Lady Pomfret, the dose friend of her middle age, for example, in the letters of October 1738 (II, 125-6) and

January 1739 (II, 132-4).

To display the strategies that Lady Mary employs to produce her witty reports, I have selected the letter of 31 October 1723 to Lady Mar.

This letter contains various kinds of generalizations that have varying relationships to their associated particulars, the whole making up an especially subtle and amusing report on the social scene, through which

Lady Mary's attitude toward her milieu is discernible. The Mar correspondence conslsta of the fifty-two letters Lady Mary

wrote to her sister Frances, the Countess of Mar, between March 1721 and

October 1727.2 Lady Mar (1690-1761) waB the sibling to whom Lady Mary

was closest in age, association, and attachment. In 1714, Lady Frances 3 married Lord Mar, a Scottish Jacobite. Disaffected at being dismissed

from his high government posts by the new King, Lord Mar returned to

Scotland in 1715 to lead an army of Jacobite rebels. In 1716, his army was defeated, and he fled to France. Lady Mar chose to share her

husband's exile and Joined him in 1718 for ten years' residence on the

Continent. Except for a troubled stay of about a year with the Pre­

tender's court at Rome, Lady Mar and her husband and daughter lived in

Paris and environs. During her exile. Lady Mar "struggled with an

insecure income and mental depression."^ Her condition steadily deter­ iorated, and early In 1728 she returned to England In an advanced state of mental illness. In July of that year, she was declared a lunatic and placed in the custody of Lady Mary.

The main body of the Mar correspondence, the letters beginning in

1722 and continuing to the end of the correspondence in 1727, is the product of Lady Mary's desire to divert Lady Mar from her melancholy and

to assure her sister of her affection and concern. The distinctive

2These are not the only letters Lady Mary wrote to Lady Mar, but they are the only significant group of personal letters to her. Thirteen of the Embassy Letters are addressed to Lady Mar, and four short letters from the 1740's are extant.

3Thia and the immediately following facts about Lord and Lady Mar are based on Life, pp. 38, 47-8, 91, 133-5. 4 104

aspect of these letters is Lady Mary's witty reporting of the current

happenings In the social milieu the sisters had experienced together.

However, promptings other than a response to Lady Mar's condition were

also behind the writing of the witty reports. The first ejleven letters,

those of 1721, are of a very different nature, and they constitute another back-ground for the subsequent letters. In the 17:11 letters,

the roles of the sisters are reversed: Lady Mary is in a difficult situation that threatens her mental and physical well-belnj;, and she implores Lady Mar for help.

Lady Mary was being blackmailed from Paris by Nicolas«Francois

Rlmond, a French intellectual with whom she had corresponded while in

Constantinople and whom she later encountered in Paris and London.

R^mond had made extravagant protestations of love to Lady Jary, which, she later confessed, she received with "too much credulity" and allowed to constitute a claim on her, for, as she explained to her sister, "tie natural for any body that is good natur'd to pity and be gl ad to serve a person they beleive unhappy upon their account" (II, 1). As a substl- tute for accepting his amorous advances, Lady Mary had agreed, on

R&sond'a Insistence, to invest his money for him, having already given him profitable financial advice.5 Unfortunately, she chose the ill-fated

South Sea stocks, just before the bursting of the famous Bu >ble. At the time of the earliest Mar letters, R&qond was pretending to believe that

5Lady Mary fully explains her entanglement with R&aond to Lady Mar in her letter of March 1721 (II, 1-4). 105 * Lady Mary had stolen the sum represented by the sinking of the stocks; he was threatening to publish her letters to him, to glye out that she had borrowed the original sum from him and refused to repay it, and to inform Wortley of their financial dealings, all this unless she returned the entire original sum.^ Lady Mary's frame of mind during this period is seen in her letter of July 1721:

'Tls Impossible to tell you (Dear Sister) what agonys 1 suffer every post day* My Health realy suffers so much from my Fears that I have reason to apprehend the worst Consequences .... I am come hither [to Twickenham] In hope of benefit from the Air, but I carry my distemper about me, In an Anguish of Mind that visibly decays my body every Day .... Let me beg you, Dear Sister, to take some Care of this Affair, and think you have it in your power to do more than save the Life of a sister that loves you. (II, 7, 8)

By more than saving her life, Lady Mary means, of course, saving her reputation. Her letters to RlSaond are not extant, but his to her show, according to Robert Halsband, that he was never her lover and that her t 7 account of their financial transactions was accurate* However, she knew that "the most groundless accusation Is always of ill consequence to a woman" (II, 14), and she dreaded the scandal-mongerlng that would follow

R^mond's "exposure" and Wortley's displeasure over her having engaged in financial dealings with a person like R&und. Since both Lady Mar and

3ft£mond was notoriously experienced, according to Saint-Simon, In extracting pecuniary benefits from friends, and used any means he could." Life, p. 108. Uls means with Lady Mary was, of course, to pretend a devastating passion for her,

7Life, p. 108. Kemond were In Pads, Lady Mary imploded her sister to dissuade him from his threatened course*

Lady Mary was quite aware that her exiled sister would have pre­ ferred news from home to these "dismal lamentations and frights,"® for

In June she promises, "For God's sake do something to set my Mind at ease from this busyness, and then I will not fail to write you regular accounts of all your Acquaintance" (II, 6). In July, she Is still "too melancholy to talk of any other Subject" (II, 8), and in August, she experiences no improvement in her state of mind: "I had rather talk to you of any thing else, but [this execrable affair] fills my whole head"

(II, 12)* There is a quid pro quo spirit of bargaining in Lady Mary's outcries: you stop Rtnnond and I will write you the news from home*

Lady Mary's last letter to Lady Mar about the Rtsmond affair

(December, 1721) contains both an accusation and a dignified appeal for more effectual help:

I cannot forbear (Dear Sister) accusing you of undlnd- ness that you take so little care of a business of the last consequence to me * . . « I think (to say nothing either of blood or affection) your Humanity and Chris­ tianity are interested in my preservation* I am sure I can answer for my hearty Gratitude and ever-lasting Acknowledgement of a service much more important than that of saving my Life. (II, 14)

Of Lady Mary's resolution of the R&nond affair nothing is known except that by early 1722 "she hod somehow placated him"® In her letter

g So described by Horace Ualpole. See his Correspondence with Sir Horace Mann, ed* V* S* Lewis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), IV, 181. 107 of April 1722, the next extant letter In the Mar series after the one just quoted, Lady Mary la already keeping her promise to supply her sister with the news from home, and in her next surviving letter (June 1722), she tells her sister why she continues to vrlte in spite of the unreliable mailst

I have writ you so many Letters vhlch you say you have not receiv'd, that I suppose you won't receive this; however, I will acquit my selfe to my own Conscience as a good Christian ought to do* I am sure I can never be realy wanting in any Expression of affection to you, to whom I can never forget what I owe in many Respects* (II, 16)

This statement is so strongly reminiscent of Lady Mary's plea for help of the past December that It seem an acknowledgement of Lady Mar's efforts

(whatever their success) to be of help with Fcmond, and Lady Mary writes her sister the latest news out of duty, love, and gratitude*

Around this time, Lady Mary became aware that all was not well with

Lady Mar, for in the letter just quoted, she also writes, "Dear Sister,

I should be glad to contribute any way to your Entertainment, and an sorry you seem to stand in so much need of it" (II, 18-19)* Her own recent experience of mental anguiBh would no doubt make her especially sympathetic with Lady Mar's sufferings, and after the last mention of

Rfemond (December 1721), Lady Mary frequently expresses her concern, her affection, and her desire to raise Lady Mar's spirits with entertaining letters* We find her writing in July 1722t "I wish I had some better way [than this letter] of shewing how sincerely I am yours. I am sure

I never will slip any Occasion of convlncelng you of it" (II, 19).In

October 1723 she speaks of "your Complaints of uneasyness, which I wish with all my soul I was capable of relieving either by my Letters or any 108 other way" (II, 29)* In response to.such remarks, Lady Mar describes her stste o£ mind and encourages Lady Mary to sritei

You think me a strange creature I'm sure for being so long without wrltelng to you. All I can say is Lazyness, Stupidity and ill humour have taken such hold upon me that I write to nobody nor have Splrrlts to go any where. Perhaps a letter from you may contribute to my Cure. (10 Hov./30 Oct. 1724, II, 41, n. 8)

Lady Mary continues her reassurances of affection and concern to the end of the correspondence. In March 1725, she writesr "If my Letters could be any Consolation to you I should think my time best spent In wrltelng"

(II, 48); and In May 1727: "I am never better pleas'd than when I am endeavoring to amuse my Dear Sister" (II, 77); and again In July of that year she writest "You see, Dear Sister, that I answer your Letters as soon as I receive them, and if mine can give you any Consolation or

Amusement you need never want 'em" (II, 81). It Bhould be noted that though Lady Mary speaks of her letters as consolation, there is very little direct consolation in the correspondence: she consoles her sister through the gift of her entertaining letters.

But Lady Mar is not only an afflicted sister in need of help. She la also a life-long Intimate with whom Lady Mary is accustomed to talk things over, and Lady Mary misses her. This theme makes its appearance in the only one of the first eleven letters In which the R&oond affair, though mentioned, is not the principal subject. Writing on 15 July 1721,

Lady Mary had said:

I wish.to see you, Dear Sister, more than ever I did in my Life. A thousand things pass before my Eyes that would afford me Infinite pleasure In your Conversation and that are lost for want of such a Freind to talk 'em over. (II, 8) However, not ell the "thousand things" ere lost, for Lady Mery immedi­ ately goes into a witty eccount of some newly-weds of their acquaintance; she stakes of her letter a substitute for the wished-for conversation and gives a foretaste of the kind of letter she was to write once her mind was free of the R&iond affair. The twin themes of missing the conver­ sation of her sister- and of viewing her own letters as a substitute for one side of that conversation continue to appear In the correspondence.

For example, In March 1725 Lady Mary says, "I wish you here ev'ry day, and see In the mean time Lady Stafford, the Duchess of Montagu and Miss

Skerrett, and realy apeak to allmost no body else" (II, 48), Later in the same year, she tells Lady Mar, "1 writ to you lately (my dear Sister) but ridiculous things happening, I cannot help (as far as In me lies) sharing all my Pleasures with you" (II, 56), Although Lady Mary speaks of the purpose of the correspondence more often In terms of diverting

Lady Mar from her melancholy than In terms of her own needs, It Is apparent that the correspondence is also Important to Lady Mary as an outlet for her observations of her social milieu.

Lady Mar was a challenging audience to write for. Lady Mary would need to exert herself to penetrate her sister's lassitude, to arouse an

Interest In outside events in a person far sunk in her own troubles* At the same time, Lady Mar, once reached, would be a congenial audience, sharing or at least having sympathy with Lady Mary's outlook on the social scene; Lady Mary could give herself full rein. Knowing the people

(or those kinds of people). Lady Mar could fully appreciate witty comments and clever sketches that caught them just right* Finally, lady

Mar would probably expect her best effort from the gifted and devoted 110 sister who so often proclaimed her great desire to entertain her* That

Lady Mary did consciously exert herself is implied in her complaint to

Lady Mar for not acknowledging a number of her letterst "'Tis an uncomfortable thing to have precious time spent and one's wit neglected in this manner" (II, 36)* This is not the casual letter-writer"s usual chiding of a dilatory correspondent.

The aspects of the social scene that Lady Mary takes for the subject of her witty reports and her attitude toward that scene are suggested by comments in the correspondence as well as by the nature of the reports themselves* Thus Lady Mary tells her sister that she has kept up her own spirits by laughing at "the farcical actions" of the "Fools and Coxcombs" whom Nature always abundantly supplies and "who are the greatest preserva­ tives against the Spleen that I ever could find out" (II, 82). The "Grand

Monde," she claims, has "allways had my hearty contempt" (II, 15), but, un­ like Lady Mar, she docs not withdraw: "You see my Philosophy is not alto­ gether so Lugubre as yours. I am so far from avoiding Company, I resolve *■ never to live without" (II, 82). While preferring the company of "the elected Few," she still maintains enough contact with the Grand Monde for her own purposes: "I own I enjoy vast delight in the Folly of Mankind, and

God be prais'd that it is an inexhaustible Source of Entertainment" (11,56).

Hence Lady Mary applies to Lady Mar's depression the same antidote she applies against her own "Spleen," sending her sister reports of the doings of "all Indiscreet people" (II, 58), or of "the whole state" and "progress" of Love and Wit (II, 66); she writes her "the freshest news in Town" (II,

20), or "a full and true account of the affairs of this Island (11,76) and promises to describe "the general state of the Nation" (II, 66), Ill formulations whoso comic exaggeration, suggests the flavor of the reports.

Lady Mary's attitude of laughing at the follies of mankind suggests that she sees herself as a satirist in the Horatlan mode, a role she had already adopted with publicly acknowledged success In her Town Eclogues. written in 1715-16,*° Mow, to entertain her sister, she writes in the same mode, though in a different genre*

I have defined Lady Mary's intent In writing the letters and the general nature of the letters in terms of her relationship to her cor­ respondent. However, certain remarks in the correspondence raise the possibility that Lady Mary had a larger ultimate audience in mind. In her letter of June 1726, she sayst

The last pleasure that fell my way was Madam Sevlgny's Letters; very pretty they are, but I assert without the least vanity that mine will be full as entertaining 40 years hence. I advise you therefore to put none of 'em to the use of Wast paper. (II, 66)

In May 1727 she again compares herself to Madame de sdvigrfe:

I writ you some time ago a Long letter which I perceive never came to your hands— very provokeing— It was certainly a chef d'ocvre of a Letter and worth any of the Sevlgny's or the Grlgnan's, cramm'd with news. (II, 75)

*°A set of six poems composed in partial collaboration with John Gay snd Alexander-Pope, -Of the first three, which were published by Cur11 In 1716 as Court Poems, the first was mostly Gay's, and the second snd third principally the work of Lady Mary, Lady Mary alone composed three more eclogues, which were first published by Horace Walpole through Dodsley in 1748. The complete text is available in the Wharndiffe edition of Lady Mary's Letters and Works (Philadelphia: Carey, 1837), -Vol. -II,-pp. 344-58, See George Paston, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her Times (London: Methuen, 1907), pp. 206-13, and Hatstand, Life, pp. 49-55,- for discussions of the authorship and publication of the Eclogues, which are considered Lady Mary's most important verse works. While there Is s humorous touch In both these remarks, they seem to be seriously Intended. I£ so, they reveal a high opinion of her own product and Imply the thought of eventual publication. Hovever, Lady

Kary did not copy, gather In, or taka any other direct steps to assure the preservation of the Mar letters. In any case. Lady Mary's reading of the de Sdvigrie letters occurred toward the end of the Mar correspond-

t ence, so there was scarcely opportunity for any thought of a larger audience to manifest itself. Further, there is no perceptible change

In the nature of the letters before and after her acquaintance with

Madam de S^vigne. The encounter with the work of the French letter-writer seems only to have Increased Lady Mary's awareness of her own powers by giving her a relevant and publicly successful standard for assessing her own accomplishment. It la, of course, possible that Lady Mary had thoughts of publication for the Mar letters before reading Madame de

Sdvlgne, but If so, there is no such Indication In the letters.

Not forty but twenty-eight years later, the Mar letters did reach an outside audience, and one that found them almost "full as entertaining* as those of Madame de S^vigtfe. Horace Walpole borrowed the letters from a distant relation of Lady Mary's who had come into possession of them through a circuitous route. Writing to Horace Mann in 1751, Walpole said,

"In most of them, the wit and style are superior to any letters I ever read but Madame Sevigne*s"{ further, "they are charmingI have more spirit and vivacity than you can conceive, and as much the spirit of debauchery in them as you will conceive In her writing."1'*' if Lady Hary did write

*~*Mann Correspondence. IV, 281, 282. 113 in a "spirit of debauchery," that note would undercut the stance of the satirist noted above, for the satirist, at least in theory, is a moralist. In looking at Lady Mary's generalizations and particulars in the letter of 31 October 1723, we will consider whether any serious moral view underlies the play of Lady Mary's wit. The text of the letter follows!

To Lady Mar 31 Oct. [1723]

Oct. 31

I write to you at this time piping hot from the Birth night, my Brain warm'd with all the Agreable Ideas that fine Cloths, fins Gentlemen, brisk Tunes and lively dances can raise thera. 'Tie to be hop'd that my Letter will entertain you; at least you will certainly have the freshest Account of all passages on that Glorious day. First, you must know that I led up the ball, which you'll stare at; but what's more, I think In my Conscience I made one of the best figures there. To say truth, people are grown so extravagantly ugly that we old Beautys are force'd to come out on show days to keep the Court in Countenance. I saw Mrs Murray there, through whose hands this Epistle is to be convey'd. I don't know whither she'll make the same Complaint to you that I do, Mrs. West was with her, who is a great Prude, having but 2 lovers at a Time; I think those are Lord Heddlngtoun and Mr. Lindsay, the one for use, the one for show.

The World improves in one virtue to a violent degree— I mean plain dealing. Hipocricy being (as the Scripture declares) a damnable Sin, I hope our publicans and Sinners will be sav'd by the open profession of the contrary virtue. I was told by a very good Author, who is deep in the secret, that at this very minute there is a bill cooking up at a Hunting Seat in Norfolk to have Not taken out of the Com­ mandments and clap'd into tlie Creed the Ensuing session of Parliament, This bold attempt for the Liberty of the subject la wholly projected by Mr, Walpole, who propos'd it to the Secret Committee in his Parlor, Willi Yonge seconded it, end answered for all his Acquaintance votelng right to a man, Doddlngton very gravely objected that the obstinancy of Hunan Nature was such that he fear'd when they had posaitive Commandments so to do, perhaps people would not commit adultery and bear False Wittness against their Neighbours with the readyness and Cheerfullness they do at present. Thia Objection seem'd to sink deep into the 114

minds of the greatest Politicians at the Board; and 1 don't know whither the bill won't be dropped, tho tie certain It might be carry'd with great Ease, the world being lntlrely revenue du bagatelle, and Honnour, Virtue, Reputation etc., which we used to hear of in our Nursery, is as much laid aside and forgotten as crumple'd Riband, To speak plainly, I am very sorry for the forlorn state of Matrimony, which Is as much ridicul'd by our Young Ladys as it us'd to be by young fellows; in short, both Sexes have found the Inconveniencys of it, and the Apellatlon of Rake is as genteel In a Woman as a Man of Quality, 'Tie no Scandal to say, Miaae the maid of Honnour looks very well now she's up again, and poor Biddy Noel has never been quite well since her last Flux* You may Imagine we marry'd Women look very silly; we have nothing to excuse our selves but that twas done a great while ago and we were very young when we did it* -

This is the General state of Affairs; as to particulars, if you have any Curiosity for things of that kind, you have nothing to do but to ask me Questions and they shall be answer'd to the best of my understanding, my Tine never being pass'd more agreably than when I am doing something obliging to you. This Is Truth in spite of all the Beaux, Wits, and witlings in Great Brittain.

The purposes that impelled the writing of the Mar letters are clearly represented in several passages of the letter. Toward the beginning, Lady Mary says, "'Tis to be hop'd that my Letter will enter­ tain you," explicitly stating what we earlier saw was the principal effect she wished to have on Lady Mar. At the end of the letter, Lady

Mary expresses the attitudes that underlie her desire to entertain. In saying "you have nothing to do but to ask me Questions and they shall be answer'd to the beat of my understanding," she plainly Bhows her desire to serve her slater through her letters and at the same time she encourages Lady Mar to take an active interest in the news from home as a further distraction from her own dismal condition. In the phrase "my

Time never being passed more agreably than when I am doing something obliging to you," she assures Lady Mar of her continuing affection. She 115 shows her affection more implicitly early In Che letter by letting her sister know Chat her first action upon returning from an enjoyable occasion has been to share It with her* Indeed, In the opening sentence with its zestful images of warmth, motion, and pleasure, it is as if

Lady Mary, breathless from the ball, has just swept into Lady Mar's parlor, determined to shake her sister from her apathy* Present too is an indication of Lady Mary's own need to talk to a confidante after a big occasion.

Detween the introduction and the conclusion, the letter falls into three main sections, and before looking at these more closely, we should note several features of the entire main body of the letter* The first feature is that each section consists of at least one generalization and the specific news items associated with it* While this is, to say the least, no unusual situation in expository prose, the prominence of the generalizations in striking in what, from Lady Mary's opening description

("the freshest Account of all passages"), promises to be a "newsy" letter.

In fact, there 1b surprisingly little specific news; Lady Mary devotes almost as much space to the general assertions that place the news items in a larger context as to the specific news. Evidently she intends the general assertions to be a major part of her entertainment. We may see in the prominence and nature of the generalizations another strategy to stimulate Lady Mar's interest In the news from homes the generalizations seem to be based on, or could "take in," a lot more specifics than Lady

Mary has given, and Lady Mar should Inquire further. Lady Mary explicitly emphasizes the generalizing nature of her letter, for she 116

summarizes Ito contents by saying, "This is the General state of Affairs."

The second feature of the letter as a whole is that the general

statements carry through a basic theme, which might be formulated "things

here at home have changed." Lady Mary brings her sister up to datet .

people have become extravagantly ugly; the world is improving in plain

dealing to. a violent degree; the world is now completely given over to

trifles; matrimony is now as much ridiculed by young women as it used to

be by young men* Because of the obvious elements of irony and exagger­

ation in the generalizations, the reader might legitimately question whether Lady Mary means them to be taken seriously or whether she is

instead deliberately creating a comic and "fake" larger significance for

her news items for Lady liar's greater entertainment. A closer view of

each section will suggest answers to these questions*

A third feature of the whole letter needs brief attention. Lady

Mary promises an account of "all passages" that occurred on the birthnlght, but after a few remarks, she seems to change the subject* However, the ball probably still plays a part in the following sections. The story

told in the second section is taking place "at this very minute," which

suggests that Lady Mary heard it at the occasion she has just returned

from* As for the news about Misse _____ and Biddy Noel, these young women may have been gossiped about at the ball, where Lady Mary was

struck by the unscandalized attitude of the gosslpers* Thus it is likely

that throughout the letter Lady Mary is giving an account of the ball in

some sense; and this fact and the relationship among the generalizations noted above give the letter unity.

Lady Mary presents her first news Item in a way that maximizes its 117

Interest. That she "led up the Ball" Is a fact that Lady Mar must be

told about and the fact is so surprising that Lady Mar will "stare."

Lady Mary's phrase "but what's sore" promises Lady Mar a yet greater

surprise, this time that Lady Mary "made one of the best figures there."

To the outside reader, it is not apparent why Lady Mary's triumphs at

the ball should be so surprising, and he might think that Lady Mary is

merely being coy. However, Lady Mar would probably agree that Lady Mary's

triumphs were surprising, for she would scarcely expect that Lady Mary,

thirty-four years old and her face severely marred by smallpox,^ would

show up so well in comparison with the younger and unmarred women pre­

sumably present at the brilliant assemblage. If Lady Mar would recognize

that these bits of information were surprising, it seems odd that Lady

Mary so points up this quality, but Lady Mary accomplishes several things

in doing so. The strategy engages the attention of her apathetic sister and provokes a response. Then too, Lady Mary's own admission that the

information is surprising anticipates and instantly answers a doubting * reaction to the Information itself, while her prefatory "I think in my

Conscience" implies the objectivity of her assessment of her appearance.

And perhaps most Important, Lady Mary is giving her explanatory generali­ zation a "build-up." That is, she has so emphasized the surprising nature of her news that it requires an explanation, and she proceeds to offer what seems to be an explanation! "To say truth, people are grown

19 "She was left without eyelashasf and with a deeply pitted skin" after a case of smallpox In 1715) Life, p. 51. 118

bo extravagantly ugly that we old Beautys are forc’d to cone out on ahow

days to keep the Court in Countenance."

Her generalizing explanation is bo patently and amusingly exaggerated

that the outside reader hesitates to take it as seriously Intended, al­

though only some such explanation as a falling off of the pulchritude

properly expected in the younger generation would account for Lady Mary's

successes at the ball.13 j^jy mAC( however, would doubtless remenber

that Lady Mary had made an assertion similar to "people are grown extra­ vagantly ugly" in a recent letter, but had there given it a more specific

and less exaggerated formulation: "There never was such a parcel of ugly Girls as reign at present" (II, 29). This formulation is recogniz­ able as a conclusion that an experienced observer of the social scene might credibly come to about a particular group of girls. Lady Mar would no doubt understand that the main clause of the generalization represented an actual conviction of Lady Mary's and at the same time would be entertained by the amusing exaggeration.

Lady Mar would also be able to sort out the fact from the fiction in the subordinate clause and appreciate the clever blending of the two that make up the wlttlneaa of the clause. Lady Mary had been considered a beauty in her youth and before her illness^ and in the sense of

"former beauty” was in fact an "old Beauty." Also, her Court appearances, as implied in "come out on show days," had become infrequent, as she had

3-3that is, in her generalization, Lady Mary obviously means that people as a race have grown ugly, not that once-handsome individuals have lost their looks.

^ S o much so that her disfigurement was counted a major disadvantage to her husband's hope of Court advancement; Life, p. 52. 119 explained to Lady Mar In her moat recent letter, because of the dullness of the Court.^ However, as the outside reader would suspect, the terms

"force'd" and "to keep the Court In Countenance" are comic fictions whose main purpose Is to support the exaggeration of the main clause, and Lady

Mar would recognize them as such, again from the earlier letter, where

Lady Mary had also said, "I Intend, however, to shine and be fine on the blrthnlght and review the Figures there" (II, 29). Clearly, she went to the ball for her own personal pleasure and not because she felt compelled to rescue a bad situation. Lady Mary supplies a final comic touch with the phrase "in Countenance," which In this context becomes a pun, carrying both the usual meaning of "composed" or "approving" and a meaning something like "supplied with good-looking countenances."^

In her remarks about Mrs, Murray, Lady Mary characterizes her explanatory generalization as a "Complaint," Since the things she tellB about the ball, after promising an account of the events of "that

Clorlous day," lead up to that "Complaint," Lady Mar would sense a comic contradiction between "Glorious" and "Complaint." We have already seen

15II, 30.

^"To keep the Court In Countenance" la amusing In another way, too. Courtiers were expected to wear the newest and finest of clothes at the birthday (see John M, Beattie, The English Court In the Reign of George I [Cambridge; Uolv, Press, 1967], p, 206), and the Court judged Its ~ popularity from the dress worn In Its honor (see W. M, Thackeray, The Four Georges [London; Black, 1910], p. 65), Natural endowments are, of course, required to complete the picture of personal appearance, and Lady Mary's wit here swings on the fact that of the two elements in personal appearance, the one, dress, is in the discretion of the court ladles, and the other, natural endowments, is not. The thought of Their Highnesses becoming petulant over deficiencies In natural endowments as they understandably would over deficiencies In dress presents an amusing picture of royal silliness. 120 that the complaint is pact fact and pact fiction. The gloriousnesB too is not all it appears. Considering lady Mary’s view of her milieu noted in the first section her viev of the Court noted Just above, and the nature of the news she picked up at the celebration (Mrs. West, the

Bill, Miss _____ and Biddy Hoel), describing the Birthday as "that

Glorious Day" is at least an ironic exaggeration if not a total irony.

At the same tine, it Is apparent from the animation and pleasure the opening sentence exudes that lady Mary has enjoyed the occasion, and the fact that she launches into an account of her triumphs right after characterizing the day as "Glorious" suggests that her triumphs are part of the (doubtful) glory. In short, there Is an element of subtle self­ mockery In the first section, something to the effect "I had a good time, but of course that sort of occasion and triumph does not mean much to me} besides, I am quite aware that my triumphs are not due to my superior attributes but to the deficiencies of the girls." While viewing the Grand Monde with an objective eye, she takes what pleasure she can from it; lady Mar would see lady Mary's "philosophy" in action.

The first section, then, conveys a subtle mockery of a grand occasion of the Grand Monde and of lady Mary's paradoxical enjoyment

* of it. In the large sense, the effect is projected through the interplay of the particular news items with the explanatory generalisation and in the smaller sense through the variety of devices that are described abovet pretended surprise, build-up, exaggeration, comic fiction, contradiction between key terms, and reliance on the correspondent's knowledge of the writer and her attitudes. 121

After her account of the ball. Lady Mary opene her account of the mock Parliamentary bill with a generalization vhich, in manner of formulation! haa some resemblance to the central generalization of the flrat section; the two statements are equally sweeping ("people*"

"the World") and equally exaggerated ("grown so extravagantly ugly,"

"Improves • • . to a violent degree"), and both are obviously Intended to be amusing* On an abstract level, the two statements ere related in content, for both remark on changes in the general state of affairs and the changes form a contrasting pair* one is for the worse, one for the better* The gossip about Mrs* West provides another kind of link between the two sections* Lady Mary's emphasis on the vast Improvement in one virtue in the second generalization ("The World improves in one virtue to a violent degree") suggests an unarticulated contrast with several virtues in which the world has not improved (or has grown worse), a contrast for which the physical ugliness dealt with in the first general­ ization is a bit "off," since that condition, however regrettable, is not a moral matter. It is as if the tidbit about Mrs* West, initially introduced by the moat circumstantial kind of association (she happened to be with Mrs* Murray), was, once down on paper, transformed in Lady

Mary's mind into an illustration for an unarticulated generalization* the world has fallen away from the several virtues of chastity, temper­ ance, and decorum (the virtues obviously lacked by a married woman who is publicly known to have two lovers at the same time).

Thus the item about Mrs* West that seems like a stray bit of information in the first section serves as a transition from the first to the second section on a level of implicit and perhaps subliminal 122 association of thought* The remarks about Mrs* Vest also mark the introduction of the new subject that trill occupy the rest of the letter, the general state of morality, and in characterizing Mrs. Vest as a

"great Prude," Lady Mary begins the Ironic pretence of adopting the standards of "the World" that will prevail for much of the rest of the letter; the society is so profligate that in its eyes Mrs. Vest is a prude*

In the second section, Lady Mary's wit becomes more Ironic and complex than in the first section. Unlike the first generalization, the generalization that opens the second section is, os we will shortly see, thoroughly ironic, os is the next sentence, vhich continues and further develops ltt

The World improves in one virtue to a violent degree— I mean plain dealing. Hlpocrlcy being (as the Scripture declares) a damnable Sin, I hope our publicans and Sinners will be sav'd by the open profession of the contrary virtue*

The generalization as a whole (the opening sentences taken together) is supported by a story, which* though true in the sense that the politicians 17 actually did and said what Lady Mary reports, is false in the sense that the politicians were engaged in a spoof. To compound these compli­ cations, Lady Mary maintains, throughout the account, the pretence of believing the spoof to be seriously intended by the politicians.

Prom the empirical unlikeliness of the world Improving drastically

^ A t least. Sir Robert Walpole was entertaining his political cronies at his hunting seat in Norfolk at the time of the ball (II, 32, n. 1). Lady Mary apparently accepts the story on the authority of her informant. In any virtue, from the Inherent conflict between the terns "violent"

and "vlrtuei" end from the pious hopefulness and Scripture-quoting, Lady

Mary's correspondent would suspect that she Is being "sat up" In the

opening generalization! but since she could not yet tell for what end,

she would give an amused but vary consent. Lady Mary's strategy in her

•opening statements is to gain her reader's tentative agreement to the

desirability of "plain dealing" by presenting plain dealing as the

contrary virtue to the damnable vice of hypocrisy and as the salvation

of the publicans and sinners. In the third sentence. Lady Mary, by

describing Mr, Walpole's bill, springs her trap and reveals the true nature and the consequences of the plain dealing she has just extolled.

From the story, the reader discovers that by "plain dealing" is meant

the abandoning of any pretence of virtue, and the reader then sees that

Lady Mary's setting up an opposition between hypocrisy and plain dealing

as contrary vice and virtue is a casuistic trick, for plain dealing in

this case turns out to be not a virtue but another vice, shamelessness*

That is, Lady Mary's correspondent would realize that the truly moral opposite of hypocrisy is not giving up all pretence of virtue but be­ coming genuinely virtuous, and she would recall that the publicans and sinners Lady Mary alludes to (Matthew 9, x-xil) were to be saved by repentance and the amendment of their lives according to traditional morality and not by changing the definition of sin and renouncing belief in God, as the politicians propose in their revisions of the Commandments and the Creed.

Since the story of the Bill is not Lady Mary's own, only those embellishments that are not essential to its substance can reasonably be credited to her and hence counted among her strategies. The character­

ization of the bill as "this bold attempt for the Liberty of the subject"

and her comment "1 don't know whither the bill won't be dropped, tho tls

certain it might be carry'd with great Ease" are probably Lady Mary's

own touches, and she works out a minor irony through the relationship of

% these remarks to the generalization (which is surely her own). The

"violent improvement" is, fittingly, to be brought about by the "bold

attempt," but, it ironically turns out, there is nothing courageous

in proposing a bill that would certainly pasB. In addition, Lady Mary

is playing on other connotations of "bold," vhich, besides meaning

"courageous," also means "brazen" or "Impudent," senses which can cer­

tainly be applied to Walpole's attempt to dethrone traditional morality

and vhich, like "violent," are Inherently at odds with "virtue," if

Lady Mar knew her Paradise Lost, she would see an allusion to Milton's

Satan in a figure who makes a "bold attempt for the Liberty of the

subject" by throwing over God and morality, and Lady Mary herself, by quoting Scripture to advocate "plain dealing," is wittily playing the devil's advocate. As a final point of irony made by the relationship of the story to the generalization, we might note that one of the pro­ ducts of "plain dealing'* would be to permit the open bearing of false witness.

To consider whether Lady Mary has any serious Intent in her witty generalization and the amusing story she attaches it to, some attempt at a straight-forward statement of her ironic statement needs to be made.

Lady Mary is saying that the world has gotten worse ("improved") by replacing hypocrisy with shamelessness ("plain dealing"). Hypocrisy is so universally contemned that Lady Mary's irony In calling it a

"damnable sin" probably does not consist in meaning that hypocrisy is not a sin but In meaning that the "virtue" of "plain dealing" Is a still more damnable sin. By "the World" Lady Mary means the society as a whole

(or that part of it that "counts"), consisting largely of the latter-day publicans and sinners who cannot be saved by the traditional methods, that is, who are Incapable of virtuous living and who are the equivalents of the people-ln-general of the story who sin readily and cheerfully.

Thus Lady Mary is ultimately saying that since the society is incapable of true morality, it can only choose between the two evils of hypocrisy and shamelessness, and that the back-handed tribute to virtue that Is hypocrisy Is preferable to the abandonment of even the pretence to virtue that Is shamelessness. Interestingly, Lady Mary Is not giving voice to the conventional plaint of the moralist, that people are now sinning more than they used to; rather, she is criticizing the society for tailoring its "standards" to fit its behavior. The hopes of Lady-Mary-as-devll*s- advocate for saving the sinners ironically turn out to be the giving over of all such hopes.

In the story she heard at the ball, Lady Mary apparently found an amusing and exaggerated but highly appropriate illustration of a convic­ tion she already held* She formulated her conviction in an ironic generalization to suit the spoof of the story. But just as Lady Mary's irony would not be nearly so amusing or Interesting if it did not make a serious point, so the spoof would not be really amusing if it did not come close to hitting the truth about both the politicians and the society. 126

That Lady Ma,ry does believe that the society no longer pays even lip-service to traditional morality is further indicated in the rela­ tively straightforward generalization that both concludes the second section and leads into the thirdi ", • , the world being intirely revenue du bagatelle, and Honnour, Virtue, Reputation etc., which we used to hear of In our Nursery, is as much laid aside and forgotten as crumple*d Riband," Lady Mary is here moving away from the thorough-going ironic pose of credulity of the second section, though it may still be operating weakly to indicate that in the view of the World, the nursery is the right place for the listed qualities. The generalization leads on to the lower-level generalization that opens the third section, but it has its own specific illustration in Mrs. West, who has transgressed all standards of honor, virtue, and reputation, only to have the present- day World account her a prude; and the people in Doddington's objection who cheerfully and readily commit adultery and bear false witness provide a more general illustration.

The third section continues Lady Mary's criticism of her society, but it is marked off by its more subdued tone. Compared to the general­ ization that opened the second section, the corresponding statement in this third section is not so sweeping, so exaggerated, or so ironic, but it still has these qualities to some extent, It is a middle-level rather than a high-level generalization, concentrating on one moral area,

"Matrimony," rather than taking in the World's attitude toward the whole moral system} it begins with the attitude of one part of the World,

"young Ladys," toward matrimony, but as the generalisation continues it 127 apparently expand# to Include the attitude of the whole society toward that particular Institution:

To apeak, plainly, 1 an very sorry for the forlorn state of Matrimony, which Is as much ridicul’d by our Young Ladys as It us’d to be by young fellows; In short, both Sexes have found the Inconvenlencys of It, and the Appellation of Rake Is as genteel in a Woman as a Kan of Quality.

The statement la somewhat exaggerated, for Lady Mar or any other reader would probably not believe that the double standard had been so completely abandoned as Lady Mary claims; and the statement is slightly ironic where

Lady Mary momentarily adopts the "modern" attitude by speaking of the

"Inconvenlencys" of matrimony and the gentility of being a rake. She Is

Indeed speaking more plainly but not entirely so.

Lady Mary's emphasis continues to be not on Immoral behavior per se but on the way people think and talk about it ("ridicul'd," "the

Apellation of Rake"), and the two news items of this section are not presented as illustrations of immoral conduct but as examples of the kind of gossip that the World no longer considers scandalous: "'Tls no

Scandal to say, Misse _____ the maid of Honnour looks very well now she's up again, and poor Biddy Noel has never been quite well since her last

Flux." Again^ Lady Mary gives the impression that she is placing her particulars into the context of a conviction she has already arrived at from paet experience and observation: the bits of gossip she has just heard at the ball have stimulated her to express to her sister her observations on the changes In attitude toward immoral conduct, and they provide further but minor corroboration of her opinion. But besides furnishing examples of the kind of gossip that is no longer considered 128

scandalous, these specific examples of rakish behavior also make a vltty

comment on the foregoing generalisation in their own right, for Lady Mar would suspect that these two unmarried young ladies, one of whom has

apparently recently given birth and the other of whoa is pregnant, would have changed their minds about the Inconveniences of matrimony.

Although Lady Mary’s explicit point is not to criticise these young ladles for their misconduct but to criticise the society for its loss of moral judgment, her attitude toward the misconduct itself is

Implied in the clever turn of phrase with which she describes it. The patterned antithesis pointed up by the repetition of "well" (looks very well/has never been quite well), the whole expressing the "after" and

"before" of the illegitimate births, has an urbane wittiness that sug­ gests an attitude of amused contempt, with perhaps a dash of pity ("poor"

Biddy Noel)., Similarly, Lady Mary resorted to a patterned formulation of Mrs. West's misconduct with her two lovers, "the one for use, the one for show," an amusing sing-song formulation suggesting a casual contempt for Mrs. West's lustfulness and vanity. We remember that in the generalization that concludes the second section. Lady Mary opposed

"bagatelle" (trifle) to her list of prestigious moral values (honor, virtue, reputation), Since the bagatelles the world is given over to are the sins mentioned in Doddlngton'a objection— adultery and bearing false witness— ve see Lady Mary taking the attitude that sin is behavior that is trifling and silly, something for the sensible few to be contemptuously amused by. Behind this attitude is the traditional concept of Virtue as Reason, and Lady Mary, as she put it in a later letter, hoped for the after-life in "some more happy sphere, where 129

VicCue will be natural and custom reasonable, that Is, In short, where

common Sense will reign" (II, 83), Clearly, common sense did not reign with Miase _____ and Biddy Noel,

Having presented the modem view o£ unmarried girls who presently

indulge in rakish behavior, Lady Mary logically rounds out her picture

of the forlorn state of matrimony by stating, in two middle-level generalisations, the m o d e m view of women who married some time ago:

You may Imagine we marry'd Women look very silly; we have nothing to excuse ourselves but that twas done a great while ago and we were very young when we did it.

Her picture of the society's loss of moral judgment is here completed in her feigned acceptance of the bizarre modern notion that the excuse of extenuating circumstances is required for having entered the vlrtuouB

(ridiculous) state of matrimony. For a final irony, the excuse is such a one that Miss . the maid of (dis)honor, and Biddy Noel might well make in their later years for the immoral behavior of their youth: it was what was done in Che old days, and we were too young then to know any better. Thus the news items contribute obliquely to the wit of the

final generalizations* Nov that we haye noted in some detail the interplay between Lady

Mary's generalizations and particulars, we can consider in broad terms the nature of her satiric vein. The letter is satiric throughout, in intent and in strategies, though, as we have seen, at varying levels of intensity: Lady Mary intends to ridicule her society and individual members of it, and she mounts her attack from a secure moral base; she employs the typical satiric strategies of irony, exaggeration, and masks of credulity and acceptance of false values* But though her Intent is 130

to ridicule, lady Mary does not have.the instructive intent of some kinds of satire, to display and correct the moral errors of its audience

by attacking targets in vhich the audience is supposed to see Itself.

Instead, Lady Mary is writing to a like-minded audience of one, and the purpose of her ridicule is to entertain her sister and to reach a

sympathetic audience for her own thoughts and talents. Lady Mary's effects are subtle and witty; she is more in the lloratian mode of laughing at the follies of mankind than in the Juvenalian mode of lashing vices; her weapon Is the rapier, not the bludgeon. To her, most people are composed of a Mcertaln mixture of Fool and Knave"; their follies are ever-recurring and uncorrectable facts of human nature that provide con­ temptuous amusement for the sensible few like herself. It is even possible to say that for Lady Mary vices are follies, foolish departures from that traditional morality whose essence is reason and common sense.

It seems curious, then, that Horace Walpole described the Mar letters as written in a "spirit of debauchery." Perhaps Walpole read the letters casually, and if so, he would note that in this letter LAdy Mary has boasted about her personal appearance, told a blasphemous story, and passed along scandalous gossip about three women and two men, all in a witty manner. Further, Walpole for any other casual reader) would easily see that the ironic and exaggerated generalizations were somehow amusing but would not see just how they work and hence would not perceive the moral stance behind them; he would thus have the impression that

Lady Mary takes an approving attitude toward her news, Walpole's urbanity would lead him to delight in the witty, charming, spirited, vivacious letters (his adjectives), but some moral taint would attach 131 to a person who habitually passed on such news with such an attitude.

Throughout the letter we have explored the different kinds and degrees of generalizations and particulars and the resulting complexities of the relationships between those two types of statement. The product of Lady Mary*a manipulation of these elements Is an amusing letter in which the wit is not a mere facetiousness tacked on to trifling bits of gossip, a kind of effort at cleverness that quickly palls. Instead, Lady

Mary*s wit deals with important values and real convictions, the expres­ sion of which is triggered by bits of news she has recently heard. The highly noticeable generalization/particulars patterns in the letter were found to be its distinctive rhetorical feature, supported by the typically satiric larger-scale strategies noted above and by a number of smaller devices: word-play, sentence-patterning, allusion, contradiction in terms, comic fiction, exchange of identities. A comparison with two other well-known women letter-wrlters who, like Lady Mary, report on the

Boclal scene to other women, may indicate that her prominent generali­ zation/particulars patterning is a quality that is distinctive of (though not necessarily unique to) Lady Mary as a writer of this type of letter.

We recall that in the Mar correspondence Lady Mary compared her letters to those of Madam de sCvlgne in respect to their entertaining quality. Space does not allow me to establish the traits that character­ ize Madame de Sfevigrife's letters, a usual preliminary step toward a comparison. However, some rough indication of how Lady Mary's letters differ from the Frenchwoman's can be seen in Lady Mary's attitude toward her and in a Judgment passed on Lady Mary by a French scholar in a tacit 132 comparison with de Sfeylgnfe* Lady Mary's description in 1726 of the

Sevigne letters as 'Very pretty" has a condescending ring, suggesting that she thought her own letters not only "full as entertaining" but somehow superior. Thirty years later Lady Mary summed up the Stvigtfe letters as "tittle tattle . • • allwales tittle tattle . . . gilt over by airy expressions and a Flowing Style" (III, 62), a description which may explain the quality in the Sfevlgnfe letters she earlier reacted to in that faintly condescending manner. Madame de S6vlgn£'s letters do in fact consist largely of simple recountings of who did or said what. What­ ever their positive charms may be, her letters lack that constant implicit or explicit assessment of significance and passing of judgment that Lady Mary accomplishes through the variety of means described in the 18 foregoing analysis,* and especially through her generalizations.

Ulppolyte Adolphe Talne, the nineteenth-century French philosopher, historian, and literary scholar, had a sense of such a cast of mind in

Lady Mary, and he formulated it this way:

Lady Mary Wortley Montague • . ., who is compared to Madame Slvlgrti, has such a serious mind, such a decided style, such a precise judgment, and such harsh sarcasm, that we would take her for a man. In reality, the English, even Lord Chesterfield and Horace Walpole, never mastered the true tone of the salon.^

Madame de S£vlgrie was, of course, the epitome of the salon tone, and it seems clear from the above quotation that Taine judged the qualities he

*8I refer my reader to Letters of Madame de Slvlgrfe. 2 vole., ed Richard Aldington (London t RouVledge, 1937!) • 19 Hippolyte Adolphe Talne. History of English Literature, transl. H. VanLaun (New Yorki Holt, 1875), III, 13. 133

ascribed to Lady Mary to be Inimical to that tone. Obviously, the

French scholar preferred his country-woman to Lady Mary, and probably

for much the same qualities that Talne enumerates, Lady Mary dust as

obviously preferred herself.

Lady MAry*s distinctive qualities can be thrown Into' relief In a more specific way by comparing the letter we have just analyzed with a

letter of another well-known letter-writer, this time an Englishwoman

and a contemporary. Mrs. Deleny (1700-1788) was an acquaintance of

Lady Mary and moved In the same circles. In a letter of March 4, 1729,

she wrote an account of the ball celebrating Queen Caroline's birthday

to her sister in the provinces. Mrs. Delany expands on a topic that

Lady Mary quickly summed up as "fine Cloths, fine Gentlemen," leaving It

to Lady Mar's imagination and past experience of such affairs to fill in

the details. Here is Mrs. Delany:

The King was in blue velvet, with diamond buttons; the hat was buttoned up with prodigious fine diamonds. The Queen was in black velvet, the Court being out of mourning only for that day. Princess Royal had white poudesoy, embroidered with gold, and a few colours intermixed; the petticoat was very handsome, but the gown looked poor, it being only faced and robed with embroidery. 0

The passage continues In this vein for twice again the length of the above. Compared to Lady Mary's concise rendering of her triumphs, Mrs.

Delany expands on hera:

The Queen came up to Lady Carteret, and thanked her for bringing me forward, and she told me she was obliged to

20Hrs. Delany at Court and among the Wits, ed. R, Brimley Johnson, (London: fc’aut, W237, pp. 59-(»0. me for my pretty clothes, And admired my Lady Carteret's extremely; aha told the Queen that they were my fancy, and that I drew the pattern. Her Majesty said she had heard that I could draw very well (I can't think, who could tell her such & story); she took notice of my jewels . • .2* “ and then goes on to tell about a compliment from a gentleman admirer. dearly, Mrs. Delany is Interested In particulars for their own sake, whereas Lady Mary Is primarily Interested in interpreting particulars,

Mrs. Delany*a coyness (of which the above quotation contains but one of several examples In the letter) is a symptom of her being personally immersed in the details of her world, just as Lady Mary's objectivity in presenting her triumphs is a symptom of her ability to take the broader view.

The contrasts with Madame de S€vigt& and Mrs. Delany point up qualities in Lady Mary's letter that may be questioned as suitable enter­ tainment for a person sunk in melancholy* The turn of mind that placed particular news items in a framework of wider significance produced what was an essentially uncheerlng report on the present state of affairs, even though it was presented in a witty manner. But on the other hand, a running Account of the surface events of the social scene has its own deficiencies as entertainment, even when presented in a sprightly or elegant manner. Lady Mar would have expected her sister to write as she did, particularly since she knew that the letters also represented to Lady Mary a substitute for their accustomed conversation. Any 135 deviation from Lady Mary's habitual cast of mind might well have seemed somehow offensive, perhaps belittling, to her correspondent.

Finally, ve should note that In her satire Lady Mary did have an

Indirect Instructive Intent toward Lady Mar even though she did not have the Intent to correct In Lady Mar the same errors she criticized In her society* During the period of the Mar letters, Lady Mary too had problems that brought her to a somber assessment of Life: the Rfemond affair, the beginning of the eccentric behavior of her son, the failure of her marriage, her direct experience of the unpleasantness attending the death 22 of their father, and the affecting death of their slater. However, unlike herself, Lady Mar had allowed life to overshelm her, and late in the correspondence, Lady Mary obliquely criticized her sister, character­ istically seeing her deviation from reason and common sense as "silly":

"'Tho after all I am still of Opinion that 'tis extreamly silly to submit to ill Fortune; one should pluck up a Spirit, and live upon Cordials when one can have no other Nourishment," Lady Mary's witty letter to her sister is a piece of implicit instruction in how to deal with the world: not to shut oneself off from it, nor yet to ignore its depressing larger Implications, but to gain the maximum amusement from its parti­ cular events and its general states of affairs*

22Chapter V I H , Life. CHAPTER IV

EXPLANATION: "Telling you that I love you"

Letter of 10 September 1736, to Francesco Algsrottl

Very feu of Lady Mary's letters consist entirely of sustained explanation of one subject, but explanatory passages, some of consider­ able length, appear throughout the correspondence. Four broad topics of

Lady Mary's explanatory discourse may be Identified* First, she explained the customs and manners of the foreign countries she visited and resided

In, sotting forth her observations of typical behavior and commenting on its causes, benefits, or disadvantages* This type of explanation occurs In the some series of letters in which her descriptions were concentrated, and these explanations are, of course, another part of her effort to entertain and inform her correspondents about life In the foreign parts she come to know. From her travels from 1716 through 1718,

Lady Mary explains (to give a sampling) party factions In Regensburg <1,

257-8), sub-marriages In Vienna (I, 270-2), the lack of noble country houses In Germany (I, 286-7), and, In regard to Turkey, the doctrines and schisms of Mohammedanism (I, 317-20, 363-4), the vomen^s method of conducting amorous Intrigues (X, 327-30) and their excessive breeding (X, / 372), the custom of adopting and favoring the adopted children (X, 409-10), innoculation against smallpox (I, 338-9), the power relationship of ruler, '

136 137

ministers, and people (1, 322-3), the similarity o£ the Turkish poetic

Sublime to the Song o£ Solomon (I, 333-7)* From her later residence in

Italy, she explains the lavs on inheritance and divorce (II, 495-6),

sumptuary lavs and display of wealth (II, 247-8), and methods of

regulating physicians (II, 423),

A second broad area in which Lady Mary's explanatory powers may be

seen at work is in her setting forth of her thoughts on authors and their works, chiefly on the books and periodicals her daughter sent her during her residence In Italy* For example, Lady Mary explains her opinions of

Bollngbroke (III, 61-5), Richardson (III, 94-8), Henry Fielding and Sarah

Fielding (III, 65-8), Dr. Johnson (III, 65-6), Madame de S£vlgn6 (III,

62), Pope (II, 100; III, 158), and Swift (II, 71-2; III, 57). Further comments on style are found in her letters to Sir James Steuart (III,

236-8), written in response to his request for her criticism of his work,

Political Economy.

A third broad topic of explanatory discourse appears in those passages in vhich Lady Mary sets forth thoughts that we might call

"philosophical" in the everyday sense. On the basis of her life exper­ ience, but usually prompted by some Immediate event or comment from her correspondent, Lady Mary explains her ideas on motherhood (II, 491-2), on grief (XI, 480), on the progress of the human race (III, 16), on the social status quo (III, 35-6), on happiness and personal liberty (III,

80), on friendship and open-handedneas (III, 108), on the vanity of wealth and fame (III, 131-2), on old age (III, 173-4), on knowledge and the limits of education (III, 237-8). As we might expect, these passages typically appear in the correspondence of her later years. 138

The fourth broad topic of explanation consists of Lady Mary's

setting forth the state of her feelings toward another person, Apart

from the courtship letters, letters dealing to any extent with this topic

are found almost exclusively In her correspondence with Francesco

Algarotti, which, however, Is very different In nature from the courtship

correspondence. The letters to Algarotti, a young Italian with whom

Lady Mary fell In love, are, as Robert Halsband says, "unique for her In

their extravagant passion and rhetoric." In volume, the Algarotti letters

(1736-1741) are Insignificant, numbering only twenty-six and many of those very brief. However, they display striking rhetorical strategies that

are not found elsewhere In her letters*

The above discussion of the kinds of explanatory discourse Lady Mary

engages In suggests that in her letters, explanation as a form of dis­

course Is a category with considerable latitude. Hence It is first necessary to choose among the enumerated sub-types before choosing an

Individual letter. I have decided, first, on the "personal feeling"

* sub-type, and then on the longest and best-developed letter from the

Algarotti series, the letter of 10 September 1736, for dealing with this kind of letter adds more to an understanding of the range of Lady Mary's rhetorical resources than dealing with one of the other sub-types would.

Of those, the first has points of similarity with the rhetorical situation already represented by the letter of description; the second area will receive some attention in the discussion of the narrative letter in Chapter V, and this area has been admirably treated by Robert

Halsband in his article, "Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Eighteenth- 139

Century Fiction" (PQ, 45 [1966], 145-56)j the third type tends to consist of expressions of traditional wisdom, and although Lady Mary probably derived the substance from her own experience, and although she often formulates the thoughts with a characteristic touch and applies them to appropriate situations, these philosophic reflections are usually not themselves impelled by sufficiently strong motivation to call forth rhetorical strategies as interesting as those of the Algarotti letters.

The obvious objection to choosing the Algarotti letter as an example of explanatory discourse is that, on first thought, "extravagant passion" and "explanation" make an odd combination: we ordinarily think of

"explanation" as an enterprise undertaken in a calm state of mind with the purpose of informing the listener about some objective situation.

However, in private life it is not at all unusual for a person to feel compelled under conditions of emotional stress to explain his emotions about a person with whom he is deeply involved to that person* To rep­ resent the explanatory discourse of a letter-wrlter, whose intimate personal life is a legitimate topic of his genre, with this kind of expression is thus quite permissible,

Francesco Algarotti^ was a young Italian savant who was seeking patronage and preferment in the capitals of Europe. After studying natural science and French and English belles lettres at the University of Bologna, he began a nontechnical rendering of Newton's theories of

*The biographical Information In the following discussion is based on Chapter IX-XIt of Robert Halsband*s Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and on Chapters 11-15 of Professor Halsband'a recent work, Lord Harvey, Eighteenth-Century Courtier (New York: Oxford University Press,"'19^0. 140 light and colov In Italian vcrae In dialogue form. At Rome he net

Martin Folkes, a prominent member of the Royal Society, who, discovering

his interest in Newton, encouraged Algarotti to go to England. From

Rome, Algarotti proceeded to Faria, where he met Madame du Ch&telet,

Voltaire's mistress, who invited him to visit Voltaire at Clrey.

Voltaire was delighted and Impressed with the young man and gave him a

letter of introduction to Lord Hervey, a close friend of Lady Mary.

Brilliant, learned, charming, and handsome, the twenty-four-year- old opportunist made rapid headway In the highest scientific and social circles after arriving in London in March 1736. Uithln weeks he was elected to the Society of Antiquaries and nominated to the Royal Society, which elected him a fellow in July. Lord Hervey introduced him in Court circles, and the Queen took great pleasure in his conversation. Lady

Mary and Hervey were profoundly affected by Algarotti and rapidly became rivals for his affection, a competition in which Hervey had the advantage, for Algarotti*s tastes were, like Hervey'a, predominantly homosexual, and

Lady Mary, then forty-seven years old, was twice Algarotti's age and well past the prime of her physical attractiveness.

Lady Mary was particularly susceptible to a man of Algarotti's charms at this time, for she had been through a long period of unhappiness and disappointment. Her reputation as a wit, a learned traveller, and medical reformer had been degraded by Pope's systematic vilification, beginning with hla slurs on her in the 1728 Dunciad and continuing in the

Epistles and Satires he published through 1735, slurs which sometimes included Vortley* Her marriage with Wortley had long ceased to interest either of them, Vortley's main concerns having become his coal business 141

and his health; further, the couple disagreed strongly over the Walpole

ministry, and Wortley felt that Lady Mary was to some extent to blame

for the public scandal and Insult brought on them both by Pope and by

the lampoon warfare between Pope and the victims of his sarltlc attacks,

In which Lady Mary's reputation was bandied about by both sides. Pope's degradation of her reputation had also, Lady Mary believed, Injured her

social life. Wortley, Jr. was an acute disappointment, and though he was ftfr the time being settled In Holland with a tutor, his moral insta­ bility was a source of constant worry. Lady Mary's custody of Lady Mar had brought her into conflict with Lord Mar's relatives, who wanted the custody for its financial benefits and who, In their attempts to gain It, publicly slandered Lady Mary's motives and character. Even her heretofore gratifying daughter had become difficult, persisting in an attachment to the penurious Lord Bute and turning down more eligible suitors. In the absence of legitimate emotional satisfactions from her own accomplishments and her family, Lady Mary became Infatuated with the extraordinarily attractive Algarotti within fifteen days, as she later recalled.

Lady Mary was aware of the absurdity of her passion for the young man and told him aa much In her first letter to him (August 1736), written while he was still in London} MI see all my folly without being able to correct myself"; ''folly," "stupidity," "absurdity," are the terms Lady

Mary uses to describe her uncontrollable feelings In her first letters to Algarotti. But perhaps not wanting to correct herself was an important element In her inability to do so, for she continues, "If that passion is healed I foresee nothing except mortal ennui." Feeling for him a passion 142 she had never before experienced, Lady Mary saw In Algarotti her only chance for liapplneaa, and ehe meant to puraue It.

Also In her first letter, Lady Mary says of her feelings, "I could not possibly explain them," yet In her letter of 10 September 1736, written just after Algarottl^a departure from England on 6 September, she engages In such an explanation, and that letter Is In fact an example of the "kind of Pleasure" that Lady Mary promises Algarotti

(20 September 1736) he would be rewarded with if he exchanged letters with her:

Philosophically, an exchange of letters with me ought to give you a kind of Pleasure. You will see (what has never been seen till now) the faithful picture of a woman's Heart without evasion or disguises, drawn to the life, who presents herself for what she Is, and who neither hides nor glosses over anything from you. My weaknesses and my outbursts ought at least to attract your Curiosity, In presenting to you the accurate dissection of a female Soul.

This remarkable statement well expresses what Lady Mary has already accomplished In her 10 September letter.

Algarotti returned to Italy to see hiB work on Newton's optics through publication and left behind him the two Infatuated English aristocrats. He responded seldom enough to Lord Hervey's letters, even less often to Lady MAry's, Hervey's sense of rivalry led him to ridicule

Lady Mary to Algarotti, and the tone of his letters suggests that he

^lost of Lady Mary's letters to Algarotti are in French, Including the letter of 10 September 1736 that is analyzed In this chapter* In the page references for these letters, the first number refers to the French original, the second to the English translation in the Appendix to Vol. II of the Complete Letters: hence, for the above quotation, II, 106-7, 503. 143 expected that his ridicule vould find an appreciative audience; evidently Algarotti looked on the passion of the middle-aged woman with a derisive eye. In her 10 September letter, Lady Mary hints at the lengths she will go to be with Algarotti:

Thee I might follow, thee my Lovely Guide,/charm'd with thy voice, and ever by thy side,/faor Land,/nor sea, our common way divide.

That this was no mere poetic effusiveness becomes obvious from her later behavior.

In December 1736, Lady Mary wrote to Algarotti proposing to meet him

In Italy If he was not able to return to England soon. In her 15 June

1738 letter, she repeats the proposal:

Seriously, If your affairs prevented your plan of coming to England, and If I were fully persuaded that I should truly please you In retiring to Venice, I would not hesitate to settle in the States of the Signory for the rest of my life, I assure you In good faith. This tells you well enough that I am entirely yours. (II, 115-6, 503-4)

Instead of hastening to her or jumping at her proposal, Algarotti embarked on a tour of southern France with a young man he was then in love with.

He finally returned to England in March 1739, but only after Lady Mary sent him a bill of exchange to finance his trip from Parisj while in

London, he promised Lady Mary to retire with her to the Venetian States.

However, in May he left for Russia on the invitation of Lord Baltimore, another admirer, who was representing the Court at the marriage of the heiress to the Russian throne. Lady Mary made plans to leave England, and she departed on 25 July 1739, expecting a rendevouz with Algarotti when he returned from Russia.

On his way back from Russia, Algarotti stopped by the Court of the Crown Prince of Prussia, who Immediately became yet another admirer. He

returned to England In October and was frequently in Hervey's company,

apparently hoping for some kind of preferment In the English diplomatic

service from his aristocratic connections. In December 1739, he wrote to

Lady Mary, still awaiting him In Venice, to propose that they settle elsewhere on the Continent. In her reply, Lady Mary first remonstrates

angrily, then rejects the places he suggests as too much frequented by

English, and ends abjectly by agreeing to dislocate a second time and

Join him in some provincial town In France:

. . . I still have one of your letters, in which you assure me that whatever town I establish myself In you will not fall to go there yourself, and I chose Venice as that which suited you most .... I should certainly leave all the conveniences of ray life a second time to make the happiness of yours if I were persuaded I was necessary to it. Be honourable enough to think about this seriously. . • . Your Friendship and your conver­ sation will make the delights of my life. It is not possible for us to live In the same house, but you could lodge d o s e to mine, and see me every day if you should want to. Tell me your thoughts frankly. If it is true that your Inclination persuades you to choose this plan, I would return to France and settle In some provincial town where we could live in Tranquillity. (II, 175-6, 509)

Obviously, Algarotti's subtle effort to bring Lady Mary to break off did not uork; she refused to give up short of an outright rejection, and evidently Algarotti refused to give that offence.

Prince Frederick ascended the throne of Prussia upon the death of his father In Hay 1760 and soon summoned Algarotti to his court.

Algarotti was disappointed In the financial rewards of his friend­ ship with the King, but Frederick made him a Count and Bent him on a secret diplomatic mission to Turin. Algarotti arrived there In January 145

1741, and Lady Mary arrived In March, During the two months they vere

In the same city, the two saw each other frequently, Algarotti's behavior toward her ended Lady Mary's dream of happiness with him.

In her letter of May 1741 (II, 237, 513-4), Lady Mary tells

Algarotti, "I have studied you, and studied so well, that Sir Newton did not dissect the rays of the sun with more exactness than I have deciphered the sentiments of your soul." She still finds there the qualities that had drawn her to him in the first place, "the most lively taste, the most refined sentiments, the most delicate imagination," which he manifests in regard to "manuscripts, statues, Pictures, poetry, wine, conversation."

However, in his relationship to her, he shows only "churlishness and indifference," and she ends the letter with a renunciation of further efforts to reach him; "I see so clearly the nature of your soul thnt I am as much in Despair of touching it as Mr. Newton was of enlarging his discoveries by means of Telescopes, which by their own Powers dissipate and change the Light rays." Lady Mary and Algarotti both left Turin in

•» May; of the past two months, Lady Mary confided to Harvey that it was

"a very disagreeable epoch" in her life, and Algarotti confided to his brother that it was one of the more curious epochs in his, Algarotti and Lady Mary never met again, although they briefly carried on a grace­ ful literary correspondence in the late 1750'a.

The history of Lady Mary's relationship with Algarotti clearly shows her strong desire to possess him, and her correspondence with him repre­ sents her efforts to Induce him to return her love and to take the steps that would bring them together, tier awareness of his indifference and of .146

the absurdity o£ her paaalon sets her a difficult rhetorical problem,

and In her letters, Lady Mary makes several kinds of appeal to Algarotti.

For one, she attempts to arouse In him a sense of obligation tovard her, both for her willingness to do anything he wishes so they can be

# together and for the steps she actually takes tovard that end. For example, In sending him the funds to travel from Paris to London, she

« tells him, "You owe me gratitude," not for the funds but for the "Weak­ nesses" that lead her to do what he wishes (II, 137, 507). Just before leaving for Italy, she writes, "If you want to repay me for all I am sacrificing, hurry to me in Venice" (II, 140, 508), and a few days later,

"it is for you to grant my prayers and to make me forget all my fatigues and chagrins" (II, 139, 507). When she established herself in Venice and

Algarotti did not hurry to her there, she calls him "on lngrate who has forgotten me in an Exile which he caused" (II, 164, 509), and a few months later she tells him, "I shall wait with so much patience and submission that they should deserve extraordinary rewards" (II, 198, 510). In addition to letting him know that he "owes" her and chiding him when he does not accept the obligation, Lady Mary lays on Algarotti the general responsibility for her entire happiness, telling him, "You are the only object in the world which pleases me" (II, 129, 506) and envisioning

"the Elysian. Fields, and Happiness beyond Imagining" (II, 140, 508) that she will enjoy with him. However, such Is the complexity of her feelings, that at the same time that she endeavors to make him feel responsible for her happiness and obliged to reward her sacrifices, she la able to tell him, "I do not intend to constrain you" (II, 164, 509) and to speak of her "unselfish tenderness" (II, 115, 504). 147

Although Lady Mary does not directly mention the great difference in their ages, she acknowledges this factor as an obstacle when she speaks of "the charms you will not find" (II, 134, 506), and she appeals to

Algarotti to respond Instead to compensatory qualities that ''take the place of charms and graces" (II, 117, 505), Thus she tells him that he would be charmed with the delicate, Sylph-like tenderness she feels for him (II, 115, 504), Unlike persons who might attract him for other reasons, she has the capacity to understand and appreciate his work:

I have read, I have re-read, and I shall re-read your book, I shall always find new beauties; none of its charms excapes me. You would be too fortunate if you could find my taste and my sentiments in a person who would appeal to your Fancy. (II, 116, 504)

She worries that he will be attracted to "some Idol of a Parislenne, painted and gilded" (II, 132, 506), who, unlike herself, could not appreciate his homage. To make up still more for the lacking charms and graces, Lady Mary also possesses "constancy" and "integrity" (II, 117,

505) and "the rarest and most perfect good faith" (II, 134, 506). She has the further merit of "that naturalness which reveals even faults"

(II, 106, 503), and Algarotti must surely be interested in the unusual phenomenon of a woman who honestly reveals her whole soul.

Lady Mary also appeals to Algarotti's effeminate qualities. Robert

Halaband says of the ink portrait done of Algarotti by Jonathan Richard­ son, Sr, that it presents "the face of a lover who is passive, accustomed to being pursued and wooed,and Lady Mary, in her letters as well as in

3Life, p. 155, 148

her actions, assumed the masculine role of pursuer and wooer. Her

feelings are "too ardent" for expression, and she is affected by "an

enthusiasm" (religious fervor) that makes her letters endurable only to

a person similarly affected (II, 103, 500-1). She leaves for Italy with

"the Resolutions of a man well persuaded of his Religion and happy in

his conscience, filled with faith and hope" (II, 140,508). At the foot

of the Alps, she is the indomitable lover: "I commend myself to you in all perils like Don Quixote to his Dulclnca, and I have an imagination as inflamed as his. Nothing frightens me, nothing diverts me for a moment" (II, 147, 508). But Lady Mary is also Penelope, enduring "cruel uncertainties," with Algarottl's "dear remembrance" the only pleasure of her life (II, 116, 504), and she expresses a feminine subjection to his wishes: "I await your orders to regulate my life" (II, 206, 510).

Whether she is adopting a masculine or a feminine role, the extra­ vagant style Lady Mary employs in writing to Algarotti, as Robert llalsband observes, "owes something to the tradition of epistolary gal­ lantry";^ Lady Mary was "to some extent Indulging her imagination in the same kind of language which her own admirers had once lavished on her

The most illustrious practitioner and model of this epistolary style was

Cues de Balzac (1594-1654), on whom Pope, one of the chief of Lady Mary's early admirers, modelled the "verbal extravangance" and "elaborate compliments"^ of his letters to Lady Mary. The hallmarks of Balzac's

^Life, p. 158,

5Life, p. 178.

'’Life, p. 173. Pope's "epistolary homage to her, then and later, owed much to his reading of the French masters of the art" (Life, p. 58). style that appear in Lady Mary's letters to Algarotti are, as George

Williamson formulates those features, "a bold comparison, a giddy hyper­

bole, an unexpected opposition of terms,features vhlch, according to

William Walsh writing to John Dryden in 1691, sometimes lapse into "too

bold Metaphors and too strong Hyperboles."^ By the early eighteenth

century, the style was considered old-fashioned,9 but Lady Mary evidently

found it suited to the extravagance of her emotions. The bold literary,

religious, and scientific comparisons in the letters perhaps seemed to

her suitable in writing to a fellow bel esprit, while her hyperbolic praises of him might have seemed to her necessary to Impress the univer­

sally courted charmer.

All of the rhetorical elements discussed above are found in some degree in the letter of 10 September! the opposition of passion and

reason, the claim that the extravagance of her love entitles her to a return and the claim of her own non-constraining selflessness, the substitution of other qualities for the lack of youthful charms and

^Tha Senscan Amble (Chicago! University of Chicago Press, 1951), p. 245-6. a Quoted in Amble, p. 349. The criticism is the usual one made of Balxac; for example, Lleiuri van Laun, in History of French Literature (New Yorkt Putnam's, 1877), 11, 248, says that lie is ''occasionally strained in thought and extravagant in the use of figures." Van Laun gives an English translation of a Baleac letter to illustrate his comment. 9 Amble, p, 350. ISO

graces, the alternation o£ the agreaeive masculine role and the sub­

missive feminine role, the extravagances of the tradition of epistolary

gallantry* Lady Mary is indeed "torn by a thousand conflicting feelings"

(II, 103, 501), and ve will now see how these elements come together in

her 10 September letter, and to what purpose. The text follows*!-0

To Francesco Algarotti [10 Sept* 1736]

Friday, past midnight

Nox erst; et placldum carpebant fessa soporem corpora per terras, sylvaeque et saeva qulerant AEquora: cum medio volvuntur sldera lapsu: cum tacet omnls ager: percudes [sic], plctaeque volucreo, Quaeque lacus late liquldos, quaeque aspera dumis Rura tenent, somno positae sub nocte allenti, Lenlbant cures, et corda obllta laborura. At non infelix animi Phoenlssa, nec unqusm solvltur in somnos, oculisve aut pectore noctem acclplt. Ingemlnant curae, rursuque resurgent saevit amor

I am a thousand times more to be pitied than the sad Dido, and I have a thousand more reasons to kill myself* But since until now I have not imitated her conduct, I believe that I shall live either by cowardice or by strength of character. I hove thrown myself at the head of a foreigner just as she did, but instead of crying perjurer and villain when my little AEneas shows that he wants to leave me, I consent to it through a feeling of Generosity which Virgil did not think women capable of. In truth I admire myself for such extraordinary disinterestedness, and you should be happy to be loved in so singular a manner* The pure love which M[onsleu]r de Cambral speaks of so eloquently is not so perfect as mine, and I have a devotion for you more sealous than any of the adorers of the Virgin has ever had for her. 1 believe that all these men have had a little vanity in their devotion, ot they hoped for great rewards for their

!-°The following text represents a collation of Halsband's English translation (given in the Appendix, II, 501-2) of the body of Lady Mary's French letter with two passages that Halsband presents only with the original French letter (II, 104-6)I the Latin motto from Virgil with which Lady Mary prefaces the letter and Lady Mary's own verse, which is in English in the original letter. prayers* Here am I praying to you without hope that you will give me any credit at all for it, and I spend whole hours In my Study absorbed In the contemplation of your perfections. I remember the least of your words, your puerilities, your follies, even your very impertinences; I like everything In you, and I find you so different from the rest of mankind (who yet have the Insolence to think themselves of the same species) that it does not surprise me that you have Inspired sentiments which until now have not been Inspired in anybody*

Perhaps it Is bad French that I write, but as my letters are in your hands to burn the moment that they bore you, I write whatever comes Into my head* I haven't the vanity to dare hope I please you; I have no purpose except to satisfy myself by telling you that I love you, — and who will not love you? I invited Mademoiselle to supper last night. We drank to your health, and she said naively that she had never seen anybody so attractive as you. I did not answer, but these few words made her conversation so charming to me that I kept the poor girl until two o'clock in the morning, without speaking further of you, but happy to be with some­ body who had seen you— what a bizarre pleasure1 One must have a Heart filled with a strong passion, to be touched by trifles which seem of such little importance to others. My reason makes me see all its absurdity, and my Heart makes me feel all its importance. Feeble ReasonI which battles with my passion and does not destroy it, and which vainly makes me see all the folly of loving to the degree that I love without hope of return* Yet you were sorry to leave; 1 saw it in your eyes, and there was no pretence at all in the chagrin which showed in your manner. I do not delude myself about the impossible; it was not me that you were sorry to leave, but surely you were sorry to leave London. So 1 could have held on to you, and it was a false delicacy which prevented me from making the proposal to you, and so I lost, through false shame, fear, and misplaced nobility, all the pleasure of my life.

I don't know whether you understand anything of this Gibberish, but you must believe that you possess in me the most perfect friend and the moat passionate lover. I should have been delighted if nature permitted me to limit myself to the first title; X am enraged at having been formed to wear skirts. Why was my haughty Soul to Wotaqti joyn'd? Why this soft a ex impos'd upon my Mind? Even this extravagance which now I send Were meritorious in the name of Freind, Thee I might follow, thee my Lovely Guide, Charm'd with thy voice, and ever by thy side, Nor Land, nor sea, our coranon way divide. How much these golden Wishes are in Vain! I dream to pleasure, but 1 wake to pain.

This is the 2nd letter that 1 write. It is the only pleasure which is left to me. How mixed with bitterness that sad pleasure is!

About halfway through the letter, Lady Mary states, "I have no purpose [in writing this letter] except to satisfy myself by telling you that I love you." One important aspect of this statement of purpose is unquestionably carried out: the letter is an exposition of the state of

Lady Mary's feelings tovard Algarotti. On first view, Lady Mary's formulation seems to imply that self-expression ("to satisfy myself") is her main Intent, rather than the working of some definite effect on her correspondent. However, the content of the letter indicates that, while

Lady Mary no doubt has the purpose she states, that purpose Itself is impelled by a deeper purpose: she wants to tell Algarotti that she loves him in order to Induce in him a favorable response to her love. Toward the end of the letter, Lady Mary berates herself for failing to do all she could to keep Algarotti in London, and it is apparent from her verse that she wants a lasting, intimate relationship with him, Uer statement of purpose, then, can be amplified to read, "X am writing this letter to satisfy myself that I am doing all I can do at this time (now that you have left) to bring you to accept my love and to be willing to live close to me."

Of course, the Intense tone of the letter also implies that Lady Mary 153

Intended to affect her correspondent forcefully; and considering her

awareness of the unreasonableness of the passion that she shows through­

out the letter. Lady Mary must have been aware of the risk she took in writing to Algarotti with such Intensity: the letter would thoroughly

alarm, completely repel, or Incur the ridicule of a recipient who had no

Inclination to return her feeling. Apparently, Lady Mary Instinctively

felt that the best way to overcome the absurdity of her passion in

Algarottl's eyes was to show him how thoroughly she understood it, per­ haps the only tactic that had any chance of success, for Ignoring or attempting to gloss over the absurdity would only make her appear more absurd. Thus throughout the letter Lady Mary works with the strong contrasts and disparities inherent In her situation, successively view­ ing her passion against Algarotti's indifference, against her own reason, against the reticence typical of her sex. In analyzing the letter, I will proceed by examining the strategies Lady Mary employs to develop these major contrasts.

Lady Mary develops the first contrast In two extended similes, comparing herself first to Dido and then to devotees of the Virgin.

While these analogies are hackneyed enough, we will see that Lady Mary's handling of them has Interesting peculiarities. She prefaces the letter with a Quotation from the Aeneid in which Virgil describes the emotions of Dido on Aeneas's determination to leave her: f Vendredl, mlnult passe

Nox erat; et pladdum carpebant feasa soporem corpora per terras, sylvaeque et saeva qulerant 154

AEquora; cum medio volyuntur sldera lapsu: cum tacet omnia agert percudea laic], plctaeque volucrca, Quaeque lacua late liquidoa, quaeque aapera dumia Rura tenent, aomno poaitae aub nocte ailenti, Lenibant curaa, et cocda oblita laborum. At non infellx anitai Phoeniaaa, nec unquam aolvltur in aomnoa, oculiave aut pectore noctem accipit* Ingeminant curae, rursusque reaurgens aaevit amor

[It was night, and over the earth weary creatures were taatlng peaceful slumber; the wooda and wild seas had sunk to rest— the hour when atars roll midway in their gliding courae, when all the land la still, and beasts and gay birds, both they that far and near haunt the limpid lakea, and they that dwell in fields of tangled brakes, couched in sleep beneath the silent night, [and with hearts forgetful of toil, laid aside their troubles]. But not so the soul-racked Phoenician queen; she never sinks to sleep, nor draws the night into eyes or heart* Her pangs redouble, and her love, swelling up, surges afresh']

By quoting this passage instead of relying solely on the allusion to Dido

in her letter, Lady Mary is stimulating in Algarotti an iomedlate and reliable response to an affecting deserted heroine: she cannot rely on her own plight to move Algarotti, but she can expect the literatus

to respond to the genius of Virgil. Lady Mary must then transform the esthetic emotion into a real-life emotion through her development of her conceit.

Lady Mary compares herself with Dido to make two points: the intensity of her own feeling and the absence of self-interest in her love for Algarotti*

I am a thousand times more to be pitied than the sad Dido, and X have a thousand more reasons to kill myself. But since until now X have not imitated her conduct, X believe that X shall live either by cowardice or by strength of character. X have thrown myself at the head of a foreigner just as she did, but Instead of crying perjurer and villain when my little AEneas 155

shows that he wants to leave me, I consent to it through a feeling of Generosity which Virgil did not think women capable of, In truth I admire myself for such extraordinary disinterestedness, and you should be happy to be loved in so singular a manner.

The tone of this passage can be sensed in two ways. The passage can be taken quite literally, in which case it turns into a series of soulfully melodramatic and blatantly self-praising expressions. Or we can see the passage in a way that is perhaps only slightly but still significantly different, as an attempt at a play of wit that is Intended to project on intensity of emotion but in a graceful, clever way that would appeal to a fellow bel esprit, an attempt that, however, goes somewhat awry because of the writer's distraught state.

This second way of sensing the passage seems to me the correct one.

This passage (and the religious simile that follows) contains the exag­ gerated metaphors and hyperboles typical of the style of epistolary gallantry; that Lady Mary is conscious of employing the style is suggest­ ed by her comment following the high-flown Dido and Virgin comparisons:

Perhaps it la bad French that I write, but as my letters are in your hands to burn the moment that they bore you, I write whatever comes into my head, I haven't the vanity to dare hope I please you.

By "bad French" Lady Mary unquestionably means something more than the instances of incorrect grammar in the letter, for such elementary consid­ erations of language use would scarcely qualify to "bore" Algarotti, and she would probably not speak of dating to hope she pleased him, even negatively, unless she were making some attempt to do so. A much later letter in which Lady Mary looks back at her state of mind during this period expresses more directly this attitude of greatly desiring to 156 pleasa and feeling inadequate to do so:

In the time (of foolish memory) vhen l had a frantic passion for you, the desire to please you (although I understood Its entire Impossibility) and the fear of boring you almost stifled my voice when I spoke to you, and all the more stopped my hand five hundred times a day when I took up my pen to write to you. (May 1761, II, 513-4)

The letter of 10 September 1736 Is obviously one of the rare times she broke through her fear. Lady Mary would no doubt aspire to please by some qulalty In her writing beyond getting her French endings right, and the most likely reference for her term "bad French" is her attempt at the style of (French) epistolary gallantry; Indeed, as Robert Halsband surmises, her desire to employ the "graceful extravagances" of this style inspired Lady Mary to carry on her correspondence with Algarotti mostly

In French (Life, p. 156).

But although Lady Mary found the style appropriate to the extra­ vagances of her passion, the extravagance of the style itself makes it a difficult one to handle, and even more difficult for a person in an agitated state of mind. Thus Lady Mary suspects that In her turbulent emotional state, brought on by Algarotti*s departure, she is not managing the style well, a fear that is compounded by her general fear of not pleasing the discriminating Algarotti* But Lady Mary is a talented writer and a woman of intelligence and quick wit, and these characteristic qualities do not suddenly vanish because she is in a dis­ traught condition; even though she is not in complete control and writes

"whatever comes into my head," what cornea out is not complete "Gibberish."

Aa we will now see, there is in Lady Mary's attempt at the gallant style a curious and Interesting mixture of wit, self-awareness, intense emotion, 157

and unintentional self-revelation.

Lady Mary launches her comparison of herself and Dido with the

extreme exaggeration of claiming a thousand-fold stronger emotion than

the devastated Dido* a claim that sets up a demand for an explanation

for the fact that she, unlike Dido, has not killed herself. But this

fact, apart from the Invocation of Dido, really needs no explanation,

for most people do not commit suicide when their lovers desert them, however common the thought of suicide may be tinder those circumstances.

However, Lady Mary's initial claim provides the Impetus for the direction she wants her conceit to take, and she continues by offering two contrary motives for her failure to commit suicide, but she chooses neither. She is working with the familiar turn of wit in which someone's behavior is explained in terms of contradictory motives, with the listener left to decide which is closer to the truth or to decide that each is true in its own way, "Cowardice" in this case means fear of death and hence this motive would not have any bearing on Algarotti, but Lady Mary's "strength of character" would concern him very much, for it means a determination to pick up the pieces and persevere, which Lady Mary is showing by writing to Algarotti, Hence Lady Mary's comparison of her plight with

Dido's so far tells Algarotti that though he has left her, she is still very much in existence and very much infatuated and that she has not given up on him.

Lady Mary begins her second point of the Dido comparison with a surprisingly blunt formulation of her behavior with Algarotti, for the clichfe she threw herself at his head is usually reserved for immodest and foolish behavior. Since, from what we know, this is a fair assessment 158 of what she did, this proof of objective seli'-awareness enhances the credibility of her following claims of feelings of generosity* Through her analogy Lady Mary makes extraordinary claims about the unusualness of those feelings, for by bringing In Virgil, she takes Dido not merely as a famous and affecting heroine who behaves In a certain way but as the reflection of a great poet's Insight Into the way women typically react on being deserted (heaping recriminations on the departed lover).

But she Is different* She underscores the uniqueness of her feeling In the exaggeration of the comment that follows: "In truth I admire myself for such extraordinary dlslnteredness, and you should be happy to be loved in so singular a manner*" The play of vit is again of a fairly familiar kind: a person praises himself in such exaggerated terms that he gives the hearer to understand that he could not possibly mean to be token seriously; he seems to be making fun of his own pretensions. The final twist comes when the hearer realizes that while the speaker seems to mock himself through his extravagance, he means the essence of what he says. Obviously, Lady Mary Is presenting n heightened form one of those admirable compensatory qualities that at e sets forth plainly in other letters. Uovever, Lady Mary has worked tiersclf Into a corner, for

In tier insistence on the lack of self-interest In her love for Algarotti, she calls attention to that quality for the self-interested purpose of attracting him* The artificiality of her whole procedure on the point of her generosity becomes even more clear later In the letter, where it comes out that she does not "consent" to his leaving but bitterly regrets not having prevented it.

Lady Mary has compared herself to Dido to her own great advantage, 159 but when Algarotti becomes Aeneas, he is "my little Aeneas," an epithet

that by itself would make crying "perjurer and villain" after him seen

faintly ridiculous; there is a ring of patronizing Indulgence in the term that Is appropriate to a spoiled child or a petted woman. Clearly,

Algarotti is not up to the Aeneas role, and there is more than a hint of unbecoming servility in the picture of the super-Dldo with her noble generosity stooping to instruct a toy Aeneas in a proper appreciation for herself. In engaging in a leu d*csprit to project her profound feelings in a charming manner that will engage Algarotti'a interest, Lady Mary is revealing more to her correspondent than she perhaps intends: the gener­ ous consent to his departure threatens to turn into a slavish clinging, and Instead of feeling that he could safely return because she would let him leave again when he wished, Algarotti might reflect that he was fortunate to have escaped.

In her religious metaphor, Lady Mary becomes even more extravagant than in her Dido comparison:

The pure love which M[onsleu]r de Cambrel speaks of so eloquently is not so perfect as mine, and I have a devotion for you more zealous than any of the adorers of the Virgin has ever had for her. I believe that all these men have had a little vanity in their devotion, or they hoped for great rewards for their prayers. Here am I praying to you without hope that you will give me any credit at all for it, and I spend whole hours in my Study absorbed In the contemplation of your perfections. I remember the least of your words, your puerilities, your follies, even your very impertinences; I like everything in you, and I find you so different from the rest of mankind (who yet have the insolence to think themselves of the same species) that it does not surprise me that you have inspired sentiments which until now have not been inspired in anybody. The "pure love" Is the love of God unmixed with self-interest propounded

by Fenelon, Archbishop of Cambrel (II, 105, n. 1), Since In the first

pert of the metaphor Lady Mary keeps the focus on herself as worshipper

« and does not mention the object of the "pure love," it is not Immediately

* noticeable that the other leg of the analogy has to be Algarottl/God,

but Lady Mary has no compunctions about naming the Virgin, and as the deity becomes less exalted, Lady Mary's diction changes from the cool,

lofty "pure" and "perfect" to the warmer "zealous," with its implication of readiness to take vehement action, and "adorer," with its strong lover/mistress overtones. In the Dido comparison, where Lady Mary was much more than Dido and Algarotti a good deal less than Aeneas, it was evident that Lady Mary did not perceive her relationship to Algarotti os the traditional man-woman type. Now an actual inversion of sex roles occurs; Algarotti becomes the Virgin, and Lady Mary becomes "all those men," though Virgin-adorers need not be exclusively male.** In the first analogy the aspect of her lack of self-interest that Lady Mary emphasized was her own positive quality of generosity; now the aspect she brings out is that she worships with no hope of return, thus overtly turning her attention to Algarotti's negative quality of Indifference; she is beginning to complain.

The servility implicit in the Dido comparison now becomes more apparent. By the "little vanity" of the Virgin-adorers, Lady Mary means that they feel they are somewhat deserving of favor; Lady Mary means that

^However, Lady Mary may be comparing herself to writers of devotion­ al works, who would be preponderantly male. 161 her own humility is complete, end fee from hoping for rewerds from her worship, she does not even expect acknowledgement. However, the diction required by her high-flown analogy presents her devotion in such extreme terms ("whole hours," "absorbed," "perfections") and her deity's indif­ ference so absolutely ("without hope," "any credit at all") that it implies both a rebuke to Algarotti and a bid for the credit she says she does not hope for; as in the Dido analogy, the extravagant metaphorical style permits her to make a strong point while seeming only to be carrying through the requirements of the style. Her declaration of her devotion is followed by what at first looks like a list of Algarotti's "perfec­ tions." for "I remember the least of your words . • . etc" starts off reading like an expansion of "absorbed in the contemplation of your perfections." However, the list continues with "Puerilities, follies, and impertinences." The effect is jarring, drawing even more attention to what are obviously imperfections*than if Lady Mary had, with more stylistic precision, written, "I remember even your Imperfections, the least of your words . . . etc." Further, by listing Algarotti's imper­ fections, Lady Mary has called much more attention to the former; she is strongly emphasizing to Algarotti that he is childish, foolish, and rude. She takes out some of the sting by making the list part of the larger and seemingly flattering point that her Love knows no reservations

("1 like everything in you"). However, she has toppled her deity, and there begins to be something unsavory about her unshaken worship* The analogy has broken down*

Lady Mary's whole procedure here, though overtly highly complimentary to Algarotti, goes out of control and conveys messages that would scarcely be welcome Co him. First, she lets him know that she will

persist in her passion no matter how badly he behaves; it will be very

hard £or him to get rid o£ her* Second, the widely-courted young man

would simply not like to be told his fallings, especially such belit­

tling ones (we remember "my little Aeneas"), no matter how flattering

the larger point they are incorporated in* Third, the list itsel£, again

no matter what the larger point, represents a complaint, a welllng-up of

resentment at his behavior tovard her; and last, since the crux of the

religious analogy is Lady Mary's extreme devotion and Algarotti's total

indifference, she seems to be telling him that his lack of response Is due to these failings in him; If he weren't so immature and superficial, he would appreciate her. Lady Mary is exposing more of her state of mind

than she perhaps intends.

In the last sentence of the first paragraph, the metaphor of the religious devotee loses whatever vividness and clarity it had. Just what species Algarotti now Is is not specified, and it Is not clear whether the statement "you have Inspired sentiments which until now have not been inspired in anybody" is meant to apply to everyone who knows Algarotti or just to herself, though considering that she earlier claimed that her manner of loving was "singular," she probably means "you have inspired sentiments in me * . etc* The hyperbole of the Insolence of the rest of mankind thinking itself of the same species as Algarotti is merely fulsome and ridiculous after Lady Mary's bill of particulars against him.

Lady Mary's turbulent emotions have affected her Judgment, and she does well to have doubts about her "bad French" and to break off this mode of expression, which, even if competently handled, would have become 163

wearisome by now*

Lady Mary makes a graceful recovery, though, and moves smoothly

into the second major section o£ the letter, following "by telling you

that I love you: with "— and who will not love you?" However, the trans­

ition is somewhat misleading, for Algarotti's universal lovableness as

exemplified by Mile. *s opinion of him is not Lady Mary's next

subject. Rather, the subject is the conflict between heart and reason

in Lady Mary herself, exemplified by the "bizarre pleasure" she takes in

the company of the young lady:

and who will not love you? I Invited Mademoiselle _____ to supper last night. We drank to your health, and she said naively that she hsd never seen anybody so attractive' as you. I did not answer, but these few words made her conversation so charming to me that I kept the poor girl until two o'clock in the morning, without speaking further of you, but happy to be with somebody who had seen you— what a bizarre pleasure! One must hove a Heart filled with a strong passion, to be touched by trifles which seem of such little Importance to others* My reason makes me see all its absurdity, and my Heart makes me feel all its importance. Feeble Reason! which battles with my passion and does not destroy it, and which vainly makes me see all the folly of loving to the degree that 1 love without hope of return.

Though something of a bathetic plunge, the descent from the regions of poetry and religion to Lady Mary's dining room is welcome, but In spite of the "real world" locua, Lady Mary's theme is still the extravagance of her passion, now manifested in an example of exaggerated social behavior, rather chan in exaggerated metaphors, and the letter continues

to work in terms of strong contrasts. "Trifles . . . of little impor­

tance" are, paradoxically, made proof of "a Heart filled with a strong passion," and Lady Mary is fully aware of the "absurdity" of a passion

that reduces her to seeking out bizarre pleasures. The "folly of loving" 164 that she next comments on Is somewhat different, for It refers rather to the misdirection of her love tovard a person who does not respond.

Thus while Lady Meryls emphasis in this section is on the contrast "my reason versus my passion," this contrast is made to include the earlier dichotomy of "ay passion versus your indifference," and the "without hope" in this section ("I love without hope of return") echoes the

"without hope" of the religious metaphor ("praying to you without hope that you will give me any credit").

Lady Mary's presentation of the substance of this second section of the letter is perfectly straight-forward, but it is enlivened by a variety of stylistic devices. The passage is introduced by a rhetorical question, which, by seeming to promise to tell Algarotti about other people's opinion of him, should gain his attention. A brief, concise narrative follows, ending with on exclamation that characterizes the episode with a striking epithet, which is then elaborated on. Next, the reason/passion antithesis is presented in two perfectly balanced clauses, suggesting the equality of the contending forces* The exclamation

"Feeble Reason!" at first suggests that paaslon has won out, but, as the following explanation makes dear, the two forces remain in balanced tension, with neither enjoying a happy victory: reason la "feeble" only because reason is supposed to prevail over passion and has not; Lady

Mary has not lost her reason, but that faculty has been reduced to the function of providing a futile and miserable self-awareness. The devices in the passage lead the correspondent on to seek out the substance, and

Lady Mary's points, though finely discriminated, are not repetitious. 165

The real-life example and the straight-forward tone of the above

passage would bring home to Algarotti that Lady Mary In In dead earnest

about what she Is saying, whereas he could possibly have taken the first

section, with its occasional witty overtones, its fanciful excesses, its

manipulation of a convention, as something less than serious, a kind of

high-flown playing with the sublime. To the unwilling "partner" in the

one-sided love affair, the turn the tone has taken might be somewhat

alarming. Next, the subject also becomes threatening. The bizarre

nature of Lady Mary*a pleasure was evidently not visible to Mile. .

and the conflict between Lady Mary's reason and her passion has been

contained within herself, but in the next section of the letter she begins

to talk in terms of action, of holding on to Algarotti, though in the negative terms of having failed to take effective steps:

Yet you were sorry to leave; I saw it in your eyes, and there was no pretence at all in the chagrin which showed in your manner. I do not delude myself about the impos­ sible; it was not me that you were sorry to leave, but surely you were sorry to leave London. So I could have held on to you, and it was a false delicacy which pre­ vented me from making the proposal to you, and so I lost, through false shame, fear, and misplaced nobility, all the pleasure of my life.

The pose of lack of self-interest that Lady Mary affected in the first section began to droop when she later described loving without hope of return as "folly" instead of the earlier "generosity." The pose is now dropped altogether as she bitterly blames herself for having done nothing to keep Algarotti in London. The "generosity of feeling" with which she consented to the departure of her little Aeneas now turns out to be

"false shame, fear, and misplaced nobility." Far from consenting to his 166 departure because it is what he wishes, she wants him to stay for her own pleasure! although she knows it is "impossible" for him to want to stay on her account. Lady Mary is now explicitly writing as she promised she would in her 20 September letter, neither hiding nor glossing over anything, whereas earlier, part of what she was revealing was probably unintentional. Algarotti would learn from this section of the letter that Lady Mary's passion will no longer be held in check by the reticence and self-sacrifice expected of her sex, and we remember that when he returned to London, she extracted from him a promise to live with her in

Italy.

The whole issue of sex role that has permeated the letter now emerges explicitly in the final section of the letter:

I don't know whether you understand anything of this Gibberish, but you must believe that you possess in me the most perfect friend and the most passionate lover. I should have been delighted if nature per­ mitted me to limit myself to the first title; I am enraged at having been formed to wear skirts.

Why was my haughty Soul to Woman joyn'd? Why this soft sex impos'd upon my Mind? Even this extravagance which now I send Were meritorious in the name of Freind. Thee I might follow, thee my Lovely Guide, Charm'd with thy voice, and ever by thy side, Nor Land, nor sea, our common way divide. How much these golden Wishes are in VainI I dream to pleasure, but I wake to pain.

This is the 2nd letter that I write. It is the only pleasure which is left to me. How mixed with bitter­ ness that sad pleasure isI

In the prose before the verse and in the third and fourth lines of the verse, Lady Mary regrets her sex because it interferes with her relation­ ship with Algarotti since he will not accept her as a lover. It is 167

unlikely that Lady Mary 1b implying that it 1b impossible for a man and

a woman to be only friends; rather, Algarotti has affected her in such

a manner that she must be lover to him as well as friend* We see in

Lady Mary's ardent determination to impress upon Algarotti that she is

* his lover at the same time that she tells him she wishes she could be

only his friend yet another Instance of her conflicting feelings* But

even if her protest at her sex is but another extravagantly expressive

ploy in the total "extravagance which now I send" and not to be taken

entirely literally, it is still significant that Lady Mary adopts a

tactic that would be unthinkable in a usual man-woman relationship*

Furthermore* Lady Mary pushes her protest against her sex to its limits.

In the prose, Lady Mary is saying that she wishes she were a man so that

she would not feel passionate love for Algarotti (which he will not

accept from her) but only friendship,^ but in the first and second lines

of the verse, she states in effect that she 1b the wrong sex in terms of

her own essential qualities: her "haughty Soul" and her "mind" (pre-

^■ It is, of course, a complicating irony, and one that Algarotti may well have taken amused note of, that if Lady Mary were a man, she still might not escape feeling passionate love for him. Lady Mary was perhaps too distraught to note how thoroughly Algarotti's homosexual preferences confuse her desired sex*change, and we need go no further In exploring all the possible complications. It is probably best to confine ourselves to seeing Lady Mary's wish as a metaphoric modifier of degree: I love you so much that I desire any condition that will result in a relationship with you that you will accept. He should keep in mind, however, that Lady Mary chooses this particular metaphor because masculine aspects of her nature are responding (on whatever layer of consciousness) to his essentially effeminate nature. eumably a "hard" mind, for inappropriate to a "eoft sex") do not belong

in a woman1* body. She is asserting that her nature is essentially

masculine. Conversely, in her dream of bliss, she seems to perceive

Algarotti as feminine. While "Guide" has masculine overtones, "Lovely

Guide" has a feminine ring, especially after Lady Mary's masculine soul

and mind, and the phrase readily brings to mind the persistent literary

convention in which the hero is led or advised by a female guide—

Telemachus by Fallas Athena, Aeneas by Venus, Boethius by Lady Philosophy, or Dante by Beatrice* Whether or not Lady Mary is fully conscious of doing so, she is appealing to Algarotti's homosexual nature; and it should be remembered that it was Algarotti's "lively taste," "refined sentiments," and "delicate imagination," qualities traditionally more feminine than masculine, that attracted Lady Mary to him* However, it is by no means certain that such an appeal would meet with s u c c o s b ;

Algarotti might still prefer effeminate men or feminine women to a masculine woman (or at least a woman presenting herself as such in response to her sense of his nature)*

The final important aspect of the relationship that comes out explicitly tovard the end of the letter is that to Lady Mary the essen­ tial quality of the relationship la "pleasure," a term she uses four times, Algarotti represents "all the pleasure of my life," though, slightly contradictorily, she still has the one, but sad, pleasure of writing to him. In her verse, the pleasure she "dreams to" consists of her "golden Wishes," which are to be ever at Algarotti's side and to be guided by him, presumably in the realms of taste, sentiment, and 169

imagination, a guidance which he will express in his charming conversa­

tion ("charm'd with thy voice"), lady Mary’s emphasis on her own pleasure is very different from her emphasis In the Courtship letter, where she attempted to bring Wortley to a course of action by keeping the focus on the pleasure it would bring him. In the present letter,

Lady Mary shows very little interest In what will provide Algarotti's pleasure. The "beloved" correspondent might take Interested note of this omission. He might note too that in spite of the servility of the pleading for his love that underlies the whole letter, the letter is an almost aggressively egocentric document.

The final paragraph of the letter continues to evidence efforts at artful writing: the balanced phrases "most perfect friend" and "most passionate lover," the antithesis of "delighted" and "enraged," with the full clauses representing the poles of the same basic thought (I wish 1 were a man). The verse, though not distinguished, is gracefully enough worked out, with agreeable variety in the lengths of the thought patterns.

And the oxymoron that concludes the letter is well prepared for in the preceding sentence.

Before attempting a final assessment of the rhetorical success of the letter, a quick overview of the rhetorical features that have been identified will be useful. The basic intent of the letter is to move

Algarotti's emotions so that he will accede to the relationship Lady

Mary desires. In her verse, she tells him what she wants: to be with him constantly to enjoy his illuminating conversation. Her stated purpose, to tell him that she loves him, is an Important contributing element in effectuating the basic intent. But Lady Mary must also 170 attempt to overcome the two formidable obstacles to Algarottl accepting the relationship, the yast difference in age and Algarotti's preference for male lovers. Lady Mary does not directly confront either of these obstacles, as if by giving them explicit recognition, she vould be forced to admit the impossibility of the relationship. Although on a rational level she does admit that Algarottl does not care for her, on an emotional level she has not given up.

To meet the age obstacle, Lady Mary vould need to persuade

Algarottl that she has attractive qualities to compensate for the "charms and graces" she lacks. Her manner of expression throughout the letter calls attention to the letter as a literary production; it is an attempt at a display of intellectual charms, though marred by lapses of control, evidently due to the intense emotion that grips the writer* Nevertheless, the letter lias pace and variety: the quotation that sets the stage, the ornate metaphors, the descent to the real-life example and a straight­ forward seriousness, the forceful diction, the use of question, excla­ mation, of sentence structure to echo or emphasize sense, the original verse, the concluding oxymoron. Lady Mary means to write as one bel esprit to another; they have things of the mind and spirit in common.

As another attraction, Lady Mary vould have Algarottl think of her passion as a phenomenon that is interesting for its remarkable intensity and its singular lack of self-interest, as if to dim his perception that her middle-aged passion for his youthful person is merely remarkably and singularly bizarre. Further, as Lady Mary suggests in comeats in her next letter that she obviously means to reflect back on this one, 171

Algarottl should derive a philosophical pleasure from her dissection of her soul; he will not find her kind of interesting self-revelation elsewhere. And in a negative vein that bears on his perception of her attractions, Lady Mary suggests to Algarottl through her list of his

Imperfections that his failure to appreciate her is due to these failings

In him, not to deficiencies In herself.

To meet the sex obstacle, Lady Mary displays masculine qualities in response to Algarottl's effeminate qualities* She is the wooer, he the pursued. She inverts sex roles through metaphor, direct statement, and allusion. Though she Is also the pleading, deserted woman, there is a curiously patronizing air about her attitude toward her departed "lover," as toward a woman (or a young person). The actual writing of the letter, for all the servility expressed it It, is in Itself a bold, aggressive act.

To fulfill In explicit terms her stated purpose of telling Algarottl that she loves him, Lady Mary emphasizes the power of her passion by showing that it persists in spite of formidable opposing forces:

Algarottl's total indifference, (the obstacles she does not directly confront are, of course, those that are responsible for this Indiffer­ ence) , her own reason, and conventional restraints on women.

We have seen, however, that some of the strategies reviewed above, as well as the whole tone of the letter, would be likely to provoke an unfavorable response In Algarottl, and we might exclaim with Robert

Kalsband, "If only she had treated him as casually as his other admirers dldl" (Life, p. 173). Lord Kervey, for example, "playfully scolded him for not writing," and Mae. du Ch&telet was merely pleased to see 172

Algarottl when he happened to be around. Evidently, Lady Mary could

not treat Algarottl casually because she did not feel casual; she vented

an intimate, lasting relationship vlth him, to live with him (or next

door, for propriety's sake) In a blissful retirement, and writing

playfully, or cheerfully accepting his comings and goings, was not going

to achieve this relationship* On the whole, her letter reads like an

honest exposition of her state of mind, Its internal contradictions and

lapses of judgment being evidence of the thousand conflicting thoughts

about Algarottl that she elsewhere admitted to; she did not choose to

play a dishonestly casual game where she believed that her future happi­

ness was at stake and that only a "mortal ennui" awaited her for the

rest of her life if she failed.

Lady Mary may have been too distraught to write In a more guarded manner, or she may have consciously decided to exhibit her desperate

state of mind In an unrestrained way (her 20 September letter suggests

the latter). Whichever is the case, It Is certain that a casual approach would bring her no closer to achieving her goal than the Intense approach

she adopted, and it Is possible that her approach, which is In the nature of an all-or-nothing risk, was the only one that had any chance at all of success. Perhaps it is not that the rhetoric of the letter is mis­

guided but that the situation It addresses was, as Lady Mary later claimed she always knew, "entirely Impossible," CHAPTER V

NARRATION* "An Adventure exactly resembling and, I believe, copy'd from Pamela"

Letter of 8 December 1754, To Lady Bute

Lady Mary's use of the narrative mode of discourse in her letters

ranges from very brief news items, to short accounts extending over one or two long paragraphs, to sustained narratives taking up most or all of a long letter. Examples of the first type occur frequently throughout the correspondence. The second type, though encountered less frequently, is still fairly common, and instances may be seen in Lady Mary's accounts of the marriage of a Christian woman to a Turk (May, 1718, II,

408), of her clash with Mrs. Murray over her supposed authorship of a scurrilous poem (22 April 1726, II, 63-4), of the scandalous attempted marriage of Lady Harriet Herbert to an actor (November 1738, II, 127-8), of the remarkable youthfulness of the Old Woman of Loverc (10 November

1751, II 493-4), and of the charming visit of some Italian friends (21

August 1758, III, 166-7). In such long accounts as the following, Lady

Mary is able to display her full narrative powers on a vide range of subjects) her confrontation with her relatives over a suitor not to her liking (26 July 1712, I, 133-5); Lord Edgcumbe's love-making to harpsi- cord accompaniment (23 June 1727, II,' 78-80); Lady Mary's meeting with her detested son (10 June 1742, II, 285-8); the storming of the House of

173 Lords by a group of ladies (March 1739, II, 135-7); Che adultery of

Signora Bono (30 November 1753, III, 43-96); the adventures of a real- life Italian Pamela (8 December 1754); the supposed poisoning of the haughty Marchioness Bentlvoglla (22 March 1756, III, 100-3); and her encounter with taunting adversaries at the British Residency In Venice

(19 July 1754, III, 216-9).

I have chosen the letter of 8 December 1754 for an Investigation of

Lady Mary's rhetorical resources In the narrative mode. Her skill In handling the elements of plot, character, point of view, tone, and style to project an inter-related complex of personal feeling, social, moral, and literary values, and opinions on education, make this story of a real-life Pamela of particular Interest. Lady Mary's correspondent In this letter is her daughter Mary, Lady Bute, at that time a woman of thirty-seven years, married to a Scottish Lord whose fortunes were rapidly rising owing to his influence over the future George III. Since

Lady Mary had for many years been estranged from her only other child,

Edward Wortley, Jr. (of whom she wrote to Lady Bute in 1760 [III, 230],

"I have long wept the misfortune of being Mother to such an Animal"), her maternal affections had long been centered on her daughter. As Lady

Mary wrote of her daughter to Wortley in 1739, "She has been the passion of my life" (II, 163), a sentiment she repeated to Lady Bute eighteen years latert "You have been the PaBslon of my Life. You need thank me for nothing; I gratify my selfe whenever I can oblige you" (III, 130).

When she wrote the Pamela letter, Lady Mary had not Been Lady Bute for fifteen years, having left England in July 1739 for a self-imposed exile on the Continent that lasted almost until her death in 1762. The letter 175

Is but one from the voluminous correspondence Lady Mary carried on with

her daughter to sustain their relationship, Of the quality of their

earlier and present relationship, Lady Mary wrote to Lady Bute on 1

November 1750t

Your Happiness was my first wish and the persult of all my Actions, divested of all selfe interest. So far I think you ought, and bclelve you do, remember me as your real Frelnd. Absence and Distance have not the power to lessen any part of my tenderness for you, which extends to all yours. (II, 492)

Lady Mary's purpose In some of her letters was principally to show

this affectionate tenderness and to please by writing entertaining

letters, apparently much In the spirit that another mother might send

some piece of handicraft in which she was skilled. Thus on telling the

story of Signora Bono, she wrltest

You please me extremely In saying my Letters are of any Entertainment to you. I vould contribute to your Happiness in every shape I can, but In my solitude there are so few subjects present themselves, it Is not easy to find one that would amuse you, tho as I beleive you have some leisure hours at Canewood, when anything new is welcome, I will venture to tell you a small History In which I had some share. (Ill, 42)

And after writing the story of the Marchioness Bentlvoglia, Lady Mary

concludes with a remark expressing her desire to entertain her daughter and containing the same slight self-deprecationt "I am afraid that I have tir'd you with my long story, I thought it singular enough to

amuse you" (III, 100), Lady Mary concludes her Pamela story with the

same sort of apology ("I am afraid you are heartily tir'd with this

tedious tale11), but she does not speak of her desire to entertain.

However, the startling and amusing opening of this letter tacitly promises a highly entertaining storyt 176

This Town is at present in a General Stare, to use their own expression, Sotto Sopra, and not only this Town but the Capital Bergamo, the whole province, the neighboring Brescian, and perhaps all the Venetian Dominion * * * . (Ill, 70)

Although the letter has, as we will see, more serious dimensions, there is no doubt that on the simplest level it was Lady Mary's intent to amuse her daughter and that the manner in which Lady Mary tells the story makes

It a considerable success merely on this level*

But besides sending her daughter entertaining stories as a token of affection, Lady Mary sought to establish a communion with her on a deeper level* Thus she writes on 23 July 1753:

I take a pleasure In telling you my real thoughts* I vould willingly establish the most Intimate Frelndshlp between us, and I am sure no proofe of it shall ever be wanting on my Side* (111,36)

The subject of these particular "real thoughts" is Lady Mary's opinion on class distinctions, and In the same letter we see that her social attitudes (the proper structure of society) have moral Implications

(how one should view and treat other people) and that both are founded on her own experience. After attacking the "Levelling Principle" she sees at work in "the confounding of all Ranks and making a Jest of order," Lady Mary goes on:

You will think I am influenc'd by living under an Aristocratic Government, where Distinction of Rank is carry'd to a very great height; But I can assure you my Opinion is founded on Refflection and Experience, and I wish to God I had allvales thought in the same manner, Tho I had ever the utmost contempt for mis­ alliances, yet the silly prejudices of my Education had taught me to beleive I was to treat no body as an Inferior, and that poverty was a degree of Merit* This Imaginary Humility has made me admit many Familiar 177

Acquaintance of vhlch I have heartily repented every one; and the greatest examples 1 have known of Honor and Integrity has been amongst those of the highest Birth and Fortunes, There are many reasons why it should be so, which I will not trouble you with.

The tone of the Pamela letter Is largely controlled by the social and moral values that are apparent In the quotations above. But unlike her stance in the letter quoted above, In the Pamela letter Lady Mary assumes that Lady Bute shares her values and only comments, "I will not lengthen

(this letter] with Refflections; 1 fancy yours will be the same with mine."^

Lady Mary established a further intellectual communion with her daughter through the commentaries she made on the books and periodicals

Lady Bute frequently sent her from London, Samuel Richardson was the subject of both extended criticism and brief allusions in Lady Mary's letters of the 1750's, When she wrote her real-life Pamela story, Lady

Mary had read Pamela and Clarissa,and she read Grandlaon the next year.

Lady Mary's opinions of the author as a whole and not only of Pamela come into play in the letter; hence her remarks on both of the novels she had read before writing the letter contribute to the explicit and implicit criticism of Richardson found there. Even the remarks provoked by her later reading of Grandison have relevance, for some of these later remarks are about the author in general, and the tenor of her criticism of Ctandison la familiar from her earlier comments. Therefore,

^Actually, Lady Mary does go on to make a few comments; whether she Is adding other thoughts to the assumed shared reflections or going on to state them anyway (occupatio) is not clear from her formulation. 178 to give a rounded picture o£ the view Lady Mary held of Richardson when she wrote the Pamela letter, I have drawn on her remarks on all three novels, for the remarks that post-date the Pamela letter are explicit statements of views that are latent in her earlier remarks.

Lady Mary found Richardson*s work long and dull, low, Ignorant of upperdaBB life, and Immoral. On one occasion she writes, "This Letter is as Long and as Dull as any of Richardson's" (III, 244). He Is "low" both in his works and In the readers he appeals to. Thus Clarissa Is

"on the whole . . . most miserable stuff" (III, 9), and Pamela is "the

Joy of the Chambermaids of all Nations" (II, 470). As for his Ignorance,

"Richardson should confine his Pen to the Amours of Housemaids and the conversation at the Steward's Table, where I imagine he has sometimes

Intruded, the oftner In the Servants' Hall .... He has no Idea of the manners of high Life" (III, 96-7). Richardson Is immoral In two ways: in Incorrectly assessing the behavior he presents In his char­ acters and in the effect of hlB books on the reading public:

Miss How [In Clarissa], who is call'd a young Lady of sense and Honor, la not only extremely silly, but a more vicious character than Sally Martin [who encourages Lovelace to seduce Clarissa], . • . while this virtuous Damsel, without any reason Insults her mother at home and ridicules her abroad, abuses the man she marrys, and la Impertinent and Impudent with great applause. Even that model of Perfection, Clarissa, is so faulty in her behaviour as to deserve little Compassion. . . . Yet the circumstances are so laid as to inspire tender­ ness, notwithstanding the low style and absurd incidents, and I look upon this and Pamela to be two Books that will do more general mlschelf than the Works of Lord Rochester. (1 March 1752, III, 9)

In her own Pamela story, we will find Lady Mary remarking on Richardson's prolixity and telling her own tale with conciseness. We will find her 179 own perspicacious direct observation of upperclass characters and her subtly hostile and Ironic observation of the superficially exemplary

Octavla, the real-life Pamela. Lady Mary believes that Octavia was inspired by reading Pamela. and another real-life character in Lady

Mary's story shares this belief. As for Richardson's lowness, what she sees as his perverse pathos, Lady Mary confesses to a susceptibility to it: "1 was such an old Fool as to weep over Clarissa Harlowe like any milk maid of sixteen over the Ballad of the Ladle's Fall," an opinion she later generalizes: "This Richardson is a strange Fellow. 1 heartily despise him and eagerly read him, nay, sob over his works in a most scandalous manner" (111, 90).2 But though Lady Mary falls un­ willing victim to Richardson's power to inspire tenderness, she handles her own story as differently from him in this respect as in the aspects mentioned above: her subtly satiric tone inspires tenderness for none of the characters.

Yet another contributory theme that appears frequently in Lady * Mary's letters to her daughter around the period of the Pamela letter is the education of Lady Bute's daughters.3 Lady Mary's interest in

2 Dr. Johnson spoke of Richardson as having "absolute command of the passions, so as to be able to affect his readers as he himself is affected, and to Interest them in the successes and disappointments, the-joys and sorrows of his characters," See Sir John Hawkins, The Life of Saraiel Johnson. 2nd ed, (London, 1787), p, 217, Lady Mary could not help" but t'e affected, but she was still contemptuous of taking an interest in what she saw as low and false characters. 3 The most important of these "education" letters are those of January 1750 (II, 449-50), 19 February 1750 (II, 450-2), 28 January 1753 (III, 20-4), 6 March 1753 (III, 25-7), and 10 October 1753 (III, 39-40). 180 thia subject represented an Intensification of her life-long concern with the education of girls, a concern which began with her own efforts at self-education in the face of her father's indifference and the ignorant influence of her governess. This concern was now focussed on giving advice about educating the granddaughters, an attempt by the aging and distant grandparent to play some part in the lives of the children who did not know her personally and to give their mother the benefit of her thinking and experience.

Lady Mary recommended what she called a "learned Education" for the girls, provided their own inclination naturally tended that way,* Her reasons were two-fold. She believed that virtuous conduct was to be achieved only through such an education ("Ignorance is as much the

Fountain of Vice as Idleness, and indeed generally produces it" [II,

499]), and she believed that the enjoyment of books was the surest way to contentment in the life of straitened circumstances she thought her granddaughters destined for ("No Entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting" [III, 21]), She recommended the study of history, geography, philosophy, and languages, but she realized that once a taste for reading has been cultivated in a child, the child will be reading less desirable books also, and on 23 July 1754, she writes:

I can't forbear saying something In relation to my Grand Daughters, who are very near my Heart, If any of them are fond of reading, I vould not advise you to hinder them (cheiffly because it is impossible) seeing Poetry, Plays, or Romances; but accustom them

*Thia was, of course, a radical recommendation for the time. 181

to talk, over what they read, and point to then, as you are very capable o£ doing, the Absurdity often conceal1d under fine expressions, where the Sound la apt to engage the Admiration of young People, [She discusses the example of Matthew Prior’s "Henry and Emma"] • , , This senseless Tale la, however, so well varnish’d with melody of Words and pomp of Sentiments, 1 am convince’d it has hurt more Girls than ever were injur’d by' the lewdest Poems extant, (III, 68)

Lady Mary may have been using the work by Matthew Prior as an

4 example of the kind of thing Lady Bute should point out to her daughters,

or she may have also Intended to guide her in what to tell the girls in

case they should read this particular work. However that may bo, Lady

Mary was certain that they vould read Richardson, and she specifically

gave Lady Bute some pointers for the instruction of the children when

they talked over that author with their mother* Thus after some remarks

on Grandison, Lady Mary writes in her letter of 20 October 1755, "You will laugh at my making any (criticism] on a Work below Examination,

It may be of use to my Grandaughters." She continues in a more general vein about Richardson, echoing earlier remarks on his influence!

I am perswaded it is a favorite Author in all the Nurserys in England, and has done much harm in the Boarding Schools, therefore ought to have his Absurditya detected, (III, 94)

It seems likely that one of Lady Mary’s Intentions in her Pamela story, as in earlier comments.on Richardson, was to be of use to her grand­ daughters by helping Lady Bute to counter the influence of this author.

We will see that besides the implicit detection of Richardson's

"absurdities" in her story itself, Lady Mary explicitly uses the story to exemplify broader and somewhat different thoughts on the education of girls. 182

From the discussion so far, it is clear that Lady Mary's social

and moral values, her opinion of Richardson, and the education of her

granddaughters vere topics of great and related concern in her corres­

pondence with Lady Bute* A story that brought into play all these

interests and also gave her the opportunity to entertain her beloved

daughter while furnishing scope for a deeper level of communion must

have greatly appealed to Lady Mary*

Lady Mary heard the story she related in her letter of 8 December

1754 while living in Lovere, at that time a small resort town of two

thousand inhabitants at the northern end of the Lago d'lseo in the

northern Italian province of Bergamo.^ She first visited the town in

the summer of 1747 on the advice of her physician after suffering

attacks of fever at her main residence of this period, her country

retreat at Gottolongo, a Brendan village some sixty miles distant*

The mineral waters and healthful air so Improved her condition that

she returned for extended stays for several years* In 1754 she returned

in the late spring, bought a house, and remained through October 1755.

During her time in Lovere, Lady Mary became well acquainted in the town and entertained hospitably, and her Pamela letter shows consider-

* able knowledge of the town's inhabitants, their views, and their gossip*

In addition to reflecting all the interests described earlier, the

Pamela letter illustrates Lady Mary's Interest in the life around her; and, like many literary people, Lady Mary was alert to the similarities

5This and the following biographical data are based on Life. Chapter XIV. 183 between charactera In books and the people she observed. An interesting parallel to her seeing Pamela in the Lovere servant girl Octavia is her earlier comparison o£ her chambermaid Chechlna to the Fanny of Henry

Fielding's Joseph Andrews.6 Interest is added to this parallel by the well-known connection between Pamela and Joseph Andrews, and by the facts that, in contrast to her view of Richardson, Lady Mary enjoyed and approved of the work of her cousin and one-time protege Fielding and that she found no fault in Fanny/Chechina and a great deal in Tamela/

Octavia.

Now that the most Important components of the frame of mind that produced the Pamela letter have been identified, we will look at the letter as on example of Lady Mary's abilities in the narrative mode of discourse. The complete text (III, 70-6) follows:

To Lady Bute 8 Dec. [1754]

Louvere, Dec. 8. N.S.

My dear Child,

This Town is at present in a General Stare, to use their own expression, Sotto Sopra, and not only this Town but the Capital Bergamo, the whole province, the neighbouring Brescian, and perhaps all the Venetian Dominion, occasion'd by an Adven­ ture exactly rassembling and, I beleive, copy'd from Pamela. I know not under what constellation that Foolish stuff was wrote, but it has been translated into more Languages than any modern performance I ever heard of. No proofe of its Influence was ever stronger than this present story, which in Richardson's hands vould serve very well to furnish out 7 or 8 Volumes. I shall make it as short as I can.

Here is a Gentleman's Family [Ardenghi] consisting of an old Batchelor and his Sister, who have fortune enough to live

®In her letter of 1 October 1749, II, 443. with great elegance, tho without any Magnificence, possess'd of the Esteem of all their Acquaintance, he being distin­ guish'd by his Probity, and she by her virtue* They are not only suffer'd but sought by all the best Company, and indeed are the most conversable reasonable people in the place* She is an excellent Huswife, and particularly remarkable for keeping her pretty House as neat as any in Holland* She appears no longer in public, being past SO, and passes her time cheiffly at Home with her Work, receiving few visitants.

This Signora Diana, about ten years since, saw at a Monastery a Girl of 8 years old who came thither to beg Alms for her Mother. Her Beauty, tho cover'd with Rags, was very observable, and gave great compassion to the Charitable Lady, who thought it meritorious to rescue such a modest sweetness as appear'd in her Face from the rulne to which her wretched circumstances expos'd her. She ask'd her some Questions, to which she answer'd with a natural Civility that seem'd sur­ prizing, and finding the head of her Family (her Brother) to be a Cobler who could hardly live by that trade, and her Mother too old to work for her.maintenance, she bid the child follow her Home, and sending for her Parent, propos'd to her to breed the little Octavia for her servant. This was joyfully accepted, the old Woman dismiss'd with a piece of money, and the Girl remain'd with the Signora Diana, who bought her decent cloaths, and took pleasure in teaching her whatever she was capable of learning. She learn'd to read, write, and cast accompts, with uncommon Facility, and had such a Genius for Work that she excell*d her mistriss in Erabrodlery, point, and every operation of the needle. She grew perfectly skill'd in Confectionary, had a good insight into Cookery, and was a great proficient in Distillery. To these accomplishments, she was so handy, well Bred, humble and modest, that not only her master and mistrisse but every body that frequented the House took notice of her.

She liv'd thus near 9 years, never soing out but to church* However, Beauty is as difficult to conceal as Light; hers begun to make a great noise. Signora Diana told me she observ'd an unusual concourse of pedling Women that came on pretext to sell pen'norths of Lace, china etc., and several young Gentlemen, very well powder'd, that were perpetually walking before her door and looking up at the Windows. These prognostics alarm'd her prudence, and she listen'd very will­ ingly to some honourable proposals that were made by many honest thriving Trademen, She communicated them to Octavia, and told her that tho she was sorry to lose so good a Servant, yet she thought it right to advise her to choose a Husband. The Girl answer'd modestly, that it was her Duty to obey all her commands, but she found no Inclination to marriage, and i£ she would permit her to llye.single she should think it e greater obligation than any other she could bestow. Signora Diana was too Conscientious to force her into a state from which she could not free her, and left her to her own Disposal.

Uowever, they parted soon after. Whither (as the neighbours say) Signor Aurelio Ardinghl, her Brother, look'd with too much attention on the young Woman, or that she her selfe (as Diana says) deslr*d to seek a place of more profit, she remov'd to Bergamo, where she soon found preferment, being strongly recomaended by the Ardinghl Family. She was advanc'd to be first waiting Woman to an Old Countess, who was bo well pleas'd with her service, she desir'd on her Death Bed Count Jeronimo Sosl, her Son, to be kind to her. He found no repugnance to this Act of Obedience, having distinguish'd the beautifull Octavia from his first sight of her, and during the six months that she had serv'd in the House had try'd every Art of a fine Gentleman accustom'd to Vletorys of that sort, to vanquish the virtue of this fair virgin. He has a handsome Figure and has had an Education uncommon in this Country, having made the Tour of Europe and brought from Paris all the improvements that are to be pick'd up there, being cele­ brated for his Grace in Dancing and skill in Fencing and rldelng, by which he is a favourite amongst the Ladles and respected by the Men. Thus Quslify'd for Conquest, you may judge of his surprize at the firm yet modest resistance of this Country Girl, who was neither to be mov'd by address, nor gain'd by Liberality, nor on any Terms would be prevail'd on to stay as his Housekeeper after the Death of his Mother.

She took that post in the House of an old Judge, where she continu'd to be solicited by the Emissaries of the Count's passion, and found a new Persecutor in her Master, who, after 3 months endeavor to corrupt her, offer'd her marriage. She chose to return to her former Obscurity, and escap'd from his persuit without asking any wages, and privately return'd to the Signora 'Diana. She threw her selfe at her Feet, and kissing her hands begg'd her with Tears to conceal her at least some time, if she vould not accept of her service. She protested she had never been happy since she left it.

While she was making these submissions, Signor Aurelio enter'd. She intreated his intercession on her knees, who was easily persuaded to consent she should stay with them, tho his sister blam'd her highly for her precipitate Flight, having no reason from the Age and Character of her Master to fear any violence, and wonder'd at her declining the Honor he offer'd her. Octavia confess'd that perhaps she had been too rash in her proceedings, but said that he seem’d to resent her Refusal in such a manner as frighted her, she hop’d that after a few days search he would think no more of her, and that she scrupul’d entering into the Holy Bands of Matrimony where her Heart did not sincerely accompany all the words of the Ceremony, Signora Diana had nothing to say in Contra­ diction to this pious Sentiment, and her Brother applauded the Honesty which could not be perverted by any Interest whatever* She remain’d conceal’d in their House, where she help’d in the Kitchln, clean’d the rooms, and redouble'd her usual Diligence and officiousness* Her old Master came to Louvere on pretence of adjusting a law suit 3 days after, and made private enquiry after her, but hearing from her mother and Brother (who knew nothing of her being here) that they had never heard of her, he concluded Bhe had taken another Route, and return'd to Bergamo; and she continu'd in this Retirement near a fortnight.

Last Sunday, as soon as the day was clos'd, arriv'd at Signor Aurelio's door a Handsome Equipage in a large Bark attended by A well arm'd servants on Horseback. An old Priest stepp'd out of it, and desiring to speak with Signora Diana, inform'd her he came from the Count Jeronimo So b I to demand Octavia, that the Count waited for her at a Village A mile from hence, where he intended to marry her, and had sent him, who was engag'd to perform that Divine Rite, that Signora Diana might resign her to his Care without any Difficulty. The Young Damsel was call'd for, who lntreated she might be permitted the company of another Priest with whom she was acquainted. This was readily granted, and she sent for a young Man that visits me very often, being remark­ able for his Sobriety and learning. Mean while a valet de chambre presented her with a Box in which was a compleat gentile undress for a Lady* Her lac'd Llnnen and fine Nightgown were soon put on, and away they march'd, leaving the Family in a Surprise not to be describ'd.

Signor Aurelio came to drink coffee with me next morning His first words were, he had brought me the History of Pamela I said, laughing, I had been tir'd with it long since. He explain’d himselfe by relating this story, mix'd with great Resentment for Octavia's Conduct, Count Jeronimo’s Father had been his ancient Frelnd and Patron, and this escape from hie House (he said) would lay him under a Suspicion of having abetted the young Man's Folly, and perhaps expose him to the anger of all his Relations for contriving an Action he vould rather have dy’d than suffer'd if he had known how to prevent it. I easily beleiv’d him, there appearing a latent Jealousy under his affliction, that shev’d me he envy’d the Bridegroom Happiness at the same time he condemn'd his Extravagance. 187

Yesterday noon, being Saturday, Don Joseph return'd (who has got the name of Parson Williams by this Expedition), He relates that when the Bark which carryfd the Coach and train arriv'd, they found the Amorous Count waiting his Bride on the Bank of the Lake, He would have proceeded immediately to the Church, but she utterly refus'd it till they had each of them been at Confession, after which the happy Knot was ty'd by the Parish Prelst, They continu'd their Journey and came to their Palace at Bergamo in a Few Hours, where every thing was prepar'd for their Reception, They receiv'd the Communion next morning, and the Count declares that the Lovely Octavia has brought him an inestimable Portion, since he owes to her the Salvation of his Soul, He has renounce'd Play, at which he had lost a great deal of Time and money* She has already retrench'd several superfluous Servants and put his Family into an exact method of Oeconomy, preserving all the Splendor necessary to his Rank, He has sent a Letter in his own Hand to her mother, lnviteing her to reside with them, and subscribing himselfe her Dutyfull Son; but the Countess has sent another privately by Don Joseph, in which she advises the old Woman to stay at Louvere, promising to take care she shall want nothing, accompany'd with a Token of 20 sequins, which is at least 19 more than ever she saw in her Life, I forgot to tell you that from Octavia's first serving the old Lady, there came frequent charitys in her name to her poor Parent, which no body was surpris'd at, the Lady being celebrated for Pious Works, and Octavia known to be a great Favourite with her. It is now discover'd that they were all sent by the Generous Lover, who has pre­ sented Don Joseph very handsomly, but he has brought neither Letter nor message to the House of Ardinghl, which affords much Speculation*

I am afraid you are heartily tir'd with this tedious Tale, I will not lengthen it with Refflections; I fancy yours will be [the] same with mine. All these adventures proceed from Artifice on one side and weakness on the other. An Honest, open, tender mind is betraid to Ruin by the charms that make the Fortune of a designing Head, which when join'd with a Beautifull Face can never fall of advancement, except borr'd by a Wise Mother who locks up her Daughters from view till no body cares to look, on 'em, My poor Freind the D[uche]sa of Bolton was educated In Solitude, with some choice Books, by a Saint-like Governess, Crammed with virtue and good Quailtys. she thought it impossible not to find Gratitude, tho she failed to give Passion, and upon this plan threw away her Estate, was despis'd by her Husband, and laugh'd at by the Public, Polly, bred in an Alehouse and produc'd on the stage, has obtain'd Wealth and Title and found the way to esteem'd. So useful is early Experi­ ence; without it halfe of Life is dlslpated in correcting the Errors that we have been taught to receive an indisputable Truths, Make my Complements to Lord Bute* I am out of Humour with Lady Mary fo* neglecting to answer my Letters. How­ ever, she shares my Blessing with her Brothers and Sisters. 1 have a little Ring for Lady Jane, but God knows when 1 shall have an oppertunlty to send It. I am ever Your truly affectionate mother.

M. Wortley

It is a long time since I have heard from your Father, tho I have wrote several times.

(I do not discuss this closing at all. All references to the final paragraph are to the last paragraph on p. 75.)

Though they are not part of the narrative, the first and last para­ graphs of the letter are important to an understanding of Lady Mary's purposes in telling the story and of her attitude toward the events she recounts. In the opening paragraph, Lady Mary makes five assertions, which may be paraphrased thus:

(1) An adventure has astounded the whole region.

(2) The adventure exactly resembles the Immensely popular novel

Pamela.

(3) The adventure was copied (by someone) from the novel.

(A) The novel is foolish stuff.

(5) The letter recounting the adventure will, unlike the novel,

be short.

Taking these assertions as points Lady Mary thinks of particular signi­ ficance to her story, as a kind of miniature author's preface, let us quickly examine each for its implications regarding the author's intent and the problems of narrative technique entailed.

On the first count, Lady Mary captures her reader's attention by promising a Btory that will be highly entertaining in the essentials of 189

its characters and plot* real life has handed her a constellation of

people and events that a vhole region agrees to be fascinating, llence

Lady Mary's most general and elementary problem as a narrator is to

retain In her account that already present Interest of the natural "good

story," to be an entertaining story-teller. On the technical level,

being entertaining means above all being concise: ve recall that Lady

Mary criticized Richardson for being "long and dull," as If these

qualities were inseparable, and in her letter she fears tiring her

reader with the length of the Btory.^ Implications of her conciseness

beyond Its entertainment value will be discussed under her fifth asser­

tion.

The second point seems to pose no problem of narrative technique:

the plot and characters of the adventure either do or do not have an

obvious correspondence to the plot and characters of Pamela, and there

is little that a narrator can do, short of falsifying the adventure, to

make It conform to the novel. However, a different sort of problem does

arise from Lady Mary's second assertion, and this Is the problem of

convincing the reader that the adventure really happened. While It Is not likely that Lady Bute vould consciously question her mother's veracity In presenting her account as a true story, a good story-teller would build Into her story features that unobtrusively bolster its

credibility. One Important way Lady Mary supplies this credibility

factor is through her handling of point of view, assuming the roles of

"I am afraid you are heartily tir'd with this tedious Tale." As we will see, the story is remarkably concise. 190

omniscient narrator, first person peripheral participant, listener to

a primary participant, and gatherer and transmitter of neighborhood

gossip.

The third assertion implies that someone in the story Is deliber­

ately causing things to happen the vay they do. Hence Lady Mary must

somehow convey the "why" and "how" of a conscious design to convince

the reader that one exists; character motivation and the necessity of

the course of events brought about by that motivation must be shown.

The fourth assertion Implies that since the novel is foolish stuff,

its influence on the^ real-life persons and events must be pernicious and

the adventure must somehow offend against good sense. The reader then

expects that Lady Mary will show in her narrative in what respects the

adventure offends, that she will make moral judgments.** Since the course

of her narrative is free of explicit interpretive statement, the reador must look for Lady Mary's attitude toward her subject in the narrative

itself. Her judgments must be implicit in her selection and arrangement of story material, in those stylistic details of diction and sentence structure that can control the tone of a narrative.

Lady Mary's fifth point shows her assumption that conciseness is a

literary virtue, and she obviously views the demonstration in the letter of her own conciseness as a criticism of Richardson's lengthiness. Lady

Mary could achieve conciseness by eliminating all but the most essential

characters and incidents and/or by economy of expression in what she does

O As we discovered in Chapter III, Lady Mary defines immorality as departure from good sense. 191

Include. We can surmise that Lady Mary sees her conciseness consisting more in the former than the latter, for the difference In length between

the seven or eight volumes she claims (with some comic exaggeration) that

Richardson would produce and the few pages of her letter could not be achieved only by paring down a verbose style. Conciseness has been achieved only if everything Lady Mary does include is essential to the reader's understanding of character and incident, and conciseness Is a virtue only if the brevity of the story is appropriate to the author's intent. However, much can also be achieved through economy of expres­ sion and not only in the sense of giving Information in as tight a form as possible* Even more can be achieved if the author simultaneously gives the Information in such a manner that through insinuation, sug­ gestion, or implication, she gives the reader to understand a good deal more than she explicitly states. Thus we chould look at the story for several kinds of conciseness.

From Lady Mary's generalising habit of mind (noted particularly in

Chapter III), we might expect that she has found some broader signi­ ficance in her story. Although her prefatory assertions prepare her correspondent for the story in the ways noted above, none gives any i ' specific notion of what the significance of the story (if any) might be.

At most, a plot synopsis can be Inferred from Lady Mary's statement that the adventure resembles and is copied from Pamela: the reader expects the action to consist in the marriage of a servant girl to a man of high social class as a result of her maintaining her virtue In the face 192

of his campaign of seduction. However, In the last paragraph9 of the

letter, Lady Mary says that the adventures she has just narrated proceed

from "Artifice on the one side and weakness on the other," that "charms"

will “stake the Fortune of a designing Head," and, further, that the

combination of a designing head and a beautiful face "can never fall of

advancement," These post-narrative comments constitute a statement of

the significance (or "moral") of the story which can be succinctly para­

phrased thus: a designing, artful, beautiful girl, exploiting the

weaknesses of others, can never fail to advance her fortunes.

A casual modern reader, progressing through the story for the first

time, Is nonplussed at this final adverse judgment on Octavio, for In

the course of the story she Is seen to be beautiful, accomplished,

diligent, humble, modest, well-bred, high-minded, proper, and efficient.

But Lady Mary apparently assumes that by theend of the story her

daughter has reached the same conclusion shehast "I fancy [your reflections] will be the same with mine." Ordinarily, a reader would expect of a narrative artist that the artist has so written his story

that the significance he means It to project can be discovered from the story itself. Even when representing true events, as Lady Mary does in her story, the writer has to make significant choicest what episodes

and characters to Include, what details to note, how to arrange all

these elements, what words to express them witht and the whole would

q Actually, the next-to-last paragraph, I do not discuss the closing on p. 76, 193 result in an interpretation (or revelation of the significance) of the events that would be at least slightly different from that which any other writer vould project.^

However, we should remain aware that Lady Mary's story is not a free-standing piece of narrative art but a personal letter that contains a story and that is addressed to a correspondent who very likely shares the basic values of the writer. In such a situation, it may be that

Lady Mary's strategies for projecting her interpretation would be of a more private or subtle nature than if she were writing for a wider audience, assuming that Lady Mary has some talent or skill as a narrator that would naturally be brought into play when she tells any story.

Making this assumption for the time being, we shall first look closely at the story for evidences of such strategies* Since Lady Mary states the broader significance she sees in the story in terms of the character­ istics she perceives in the real-life persons she portrays, the follow­ ing analysis will be organized around the principal figures in succession.

Thus as the first and major step in assessing the rhetorical effective­ ness of Lady Mary's story, we will consider how (and whether) in the course of the story Lady Mary shows her correspondent that Octavia is designing and artful, that the Count, Diana, and Aurelio are weak, and

*°Lady Mary's task in narrating a real-life story is thus essen­ tially that of the biographer outlined by Philip B,Daghllan in his "Introduction" to Essays in Eighteenth-Century Biography (Bloomingtoni Indiana University Press,~T968), p,‘ xii " the d lograpKer ^must select details, just the way any artist does, In order to bring out the particular image of biographical truth he perceives." 194 that given these characteristics of the principal figures, the outcome must have been vhat it was.3,3.

Focussing first on Octavia, we note that Lady Mary precedes the main action of the story with a sketch of Octavia's past history. This section lends itself to a consideration of skillful selection of detail, for a great deal of ground is covered quickly, and, if Lady Mary has told her story so that the outcome strikes the reader as inevitable

("can never fail of advancement"), her selection of facts here should contribute to showing a convincing motivation for Octavia. To be successful, the selection of facts at this point in the story need not explicitly reveal that Octavia is artful and designing, but, by the end of the story, on the basis of these facts the reader should feel that

Octavia*s ambition had a believable source and that she had the personal qualities to achieve her goal. That is, though most servant girls probably daydream about marrying a nobleman, not many vould (as Octavia did) regard attaining that "happy" state as a realistic ambition, and not many would possess (as Octavia did) the confidence to set about achieving it and the abilities required to succeed.

Lady Mary lets the reader know that early in life, but at an age she could remember, Octavia was elevated from beautiful beggar child most likely destined for prostitution (probably the only "rulne" left for a girl already In such desperate circumstances) to favored servant in a

^Since Lady Mary, as Robert Halsband stated, "expected the plot of a novel to follow (in Aristotelean terms) a probable and necessary sequence" (In "Lady Mary and Eighteenth-Century Fiction," P£, 45 (1966), 145-56) and since her "moral" hints at inevitability, this consideration seems doubly appropriate. 195

tasteful, orderly, respected household of middling means. Looking back,

the reader would see that to a person with this experience of e. sudden

dramatic rise of fortune in her background, further upward mobility

would not seem Impossible. The reader would also realize that a further

source of ambition was shown in the relationship between servant and

mistress. Lady Mary excludes mention of other servants, and the mis*

' tress, apparently an unmarried woman, personally Instructed Octavla in

all areas of domestic duties and management; it must have been an

Intimate relationship. Further, the mistress was renowned and esteemed

as an "excellent Huswife," and the servant came to equal or excel her

In accomplishments that were proper to that lady|s position. The

reader would see at the end of the story how readily the servant would

have aspired above the mistress's position. In the episode that forms

the bridge between the background narration and the launching of

Octavla's fortune*huntlng adventures, Lady Mary gives still more facts

that build up a convincing basis for Octavla's ambition. Octavla, age

seventeen, has blossomed into a young woman of extraordinary beauty.

The concourse of bordello madams and the parade of well*to*do would-be

seducers that so alarm Signora Diana would suggest to Octavla the market

value of her beauty, while the large number of honorable suitors would

suggest to her that if marriage Into the thriving middle class was so

easy, she might well aspire higher; she would be foolish to accept one

of Diana's tradesmen.

However much it becomes evident by the end of the story that Lady

Mary has selected facts that show believable sources for Octavla's

ambition, the story would surely be more entertainingly written if I

196

Lady Mary cast soma slight suspicion, on Octavla even here, thus enabling

the correspondent to enjoy a growing avarenesB of the disparity between

Octavla’s true motives and the way she presents herself and is accepted

to be. In fact, Lady Mary, by combining another strategy with her

skillful selection of facts, particularly the facts about Octavla's

accomplishments and demeanor, does suggest that there is more to Octavla

than meets the eye.

This strategy 1b her stylistic allusion to the g e t u eof the fairy

tale. Lady Mary had a long-standing interest in the closely related

seventeenth-century French fictional modes of the romantic tale and the

fairy tale.^ Her library contained seven volumes of these tales, and

she herself sporadically experimented with the forms throughout her life,

including the period of the Pamela letter. Both genres were familiar to

adult English readers, and Lady Bute was probably acquainted with the 1 5 literary forms and with her mother's interest in them. In the hands

of the master contours, the seeming simplicity of the fairy tale was the

product of a highly polished style, and the seeming naivete often masked

a cynical view of life. Lady Mary experimented with the form in the

same veins. For example, her fairy tale "Carabosse," an adaptation of

^See Robert Halsband, "An Imitation of Perrault in Englandt Lady Mary tfortley Montagu's 'Carabosse',11 Coop. Lit.. 3 (1951), 174-5; also, Life, p. 6, p. 55, pp. 174-7, p. 268. " 13 Some small evidence may be seen in Lady Mary's comment to Lady Bute regarding a palace on the Lago dl Gardai "You must turn to the Fairy Tales to give you any Idea of the real charms of this Enchanting Palace" (Letter of 17 October 1750, II, 468). 197

Charles Perrault's "La Belle au Bola Dormant" (Sleeping Beauty), is

actually a subtle and sophisticated self-portrait tinged with cynicism,

and around the time of the Pamela letter, she was composing a long fairy

tale in French, full of Intrigue, love, and adventure, in which she took

a cynical view of some of the characters. The fairy tale style is most

noticeable in the second paragraph of Lady Mary's Pamela story, the

quick summation of Octavla'a history up to the main action* Such

summations are typical of tale openings, and Octavla invites this

treatment, for she appears to be a fairy-tale heroine, raised mlracu*

lously from rags to respectability, a model of perfection in looks,

accomplishments, and deportment*

In the following brief description of Lady Mary's artificially

patterned prose, her faintly and "naively" exaggerated diction, and her

relentless praising of Octavla*s qualities (features that, in addition

to the quick "once upon a time" kind of background sketch, hint at the

fairy talc genre), my suggestion is not that Lady Mary la caBtlng doubt

on the solidity of Octavla*s accomplishments and the pleaslngneas of

her deportment; rather, the effect of these devices is diffuse. By

alluding to the fairy tale genre through her manner of writing the passage, Lady Mary is insinuating that behind the Perfect Servant

(fairy tale heroine) that Octavla on one level unquestionably is and

that everyone perceives her to be, there is another reality at work, a

reality that would be obvious to Lady Mary's correspondent (as I will

soon BUggest).

The seemingly simple but rather elegant prose that opens the sketch becomes conspicuously patterned when Octavla's accomplishments are 198

described* Since noticeable sentence-patterning is unusual in Lady

Mary's letters, this feature, like any departure from a customary style,

seems intended for a special effect, and the effect here la one of deliberate artificiality* Octavla*s accomplishments come in threes, and the first "accomplishment" sentence also has a certain symmetry:

read embroidery write (Facility)— (genius) point cast accounts every operation

The accomplishment-triplets continue, becoming more noticeable still as the members become longer and arc constructed of terms that correspond closely but are grammatically slightly varied:

grew perfectly skilled in confectionary had good Insight into cookery was great proficient in distillery

The style suggest that there is something not quite natural about the whole Octavia-as-servant situation. Besides this structural exagger­ ation, the diction that here describes the degree of Octavia's mastery is faintly exaggerated, considering the area of accomplishment, and the effect here is that of a naive admiration on the part of the observers of the girl.

The catalogue of Octavla1 b r.luirable qualities continues with the description of her deportment, and after the threesomes of the accom­ plishments, Lady Mary surprises the reader by the number of terms.

There are four: "handy, well Bred, humble and modest," and the reader, accustomed to a triple rhythm, is made to take special note of "humble and modest*" The semantic similarity of the two terms and the expecta­ tion of one term, make them seen like a single but highly emphasised term. Although the accomplishments and the deportment superficially 199 make a harmonious whole, the correspondent might question the image of the Perfect Servant and wonder fleetingly how well the'quick, facile intelligence apparent in the accomplishments sorts with the humble, modest manner. The that-clause which completes the "deportment" sentence ia also subtly questioning of Octavla's motives. The not only/ but also construction throws a natural emphasis on "everybody" taking note of Octavla. Her humble, modest manner is too conspicuous; an element of display is faintly suggested.

We may aurmise that a person of Lady Bute's upperdass breeding would quickly recognize in Lady Mary's portrait of the too-perfect fairy-tale Octavla a type familiar and automatically suspect to the astute person born to privilege: the very real clever person born to inferior station who, having mastered everything her situation offers, has chosen the road of advancement through ingratiation. The fairy tale genre, with its naive surface and cynical undercurrent, is a fitting vehicle to project both the naivete of the total acceptance of Octavla by everyone in the Lovere milieu and Lady Mary's "cynical" insinuation of the girl's incipient ambition and duplicity.

Having looked at strategies Lady Mary employs to Introduce Octavla, let us look, at a strategy in the final revelation of this character

(from "Re has sent a Letter" to the end of the narrative). In this passage. Lady Mary recounts Octavla*a behavior toward her mother and the Ardinghl without interpretive comment, and her correspondent would pass judgment on the basis of the story so far and of her own values; but, through her juxtaposition of the contrasting behavior of the Count toward the mother and Don Joseph, Lady Mary further emphasizes the 200

nature of Octavla*a behavior. The strategy nay then be labelled

"emphasis through contrast," and ve will also note minor contributions

nade through strategic diction and placement.

In Itself, Octavla*s treatment of her mother is not blatantly

blameworthy. In effect, she has "bought off" the old woman, but she is

seeing that she is well taken care of, and mother and daughter have

apparently had no important relationship for ten years. However, it

is worth noting that Lady Mary here calls Octavla "the Countess,"

indicating that it is Octavla*s new, high rank that causes her to keep

her mother at a distance. Though Octavla is behaving dutifully (for

the wrong reasons), she is not behaving generously. This judgment is

emphasized by the Count*s generous invitation to the mother to live with

them. Even though the correspondent may reflect that the Count is thuB

initiating a situation that will fall principally on Octavla to cope

with and may find that Octavla*s handling of the mother is more sensible

than the Count's, still the Count's generosity in the first flush of

* happiness makes Octavla seem calculating and selfish.

More serious is Octavla*s treatment of the Ardinghl: Don Joseph

"has brought neither Letter nor message to the House of Ardinghi, which affords much Speculation." The correspondent, joining in the speculation,

infers that Octavla, in the immemorial manner of the arriviste, intends

to cut her old friends. Since, unlike the mother, the Ardinghi are

socially presentable, the correspondent speculates further that Octavla's embarrassment at having been their servant, her resentment at Aurelio's attentions, her guilt at having used Diana and Aurello in a plot she knew they would disapprove, might be reasons for her failure to 201 communicate. Dut however understandable these reactions, Octavla*s cutting of the Ardinghi Is a black mark agalnat her, for she owes these benefactors the station and upbringing that saved her from ruin and made her marriage to a Count possible. Again, the contrast with the

Count's generosity emphasizes Octavla*s moral failure. He sent gifts to Octavla*s mother from the time Octavla first entered his mother's service ("the old Lady" and "the Lady" refer to the old Countess, not to Diana). Since these gifts were anonymous, they were not part of his campaign of seduction but rather an expansive gesture toward the mother of the girl he was in love with; also, the Count has very handsomely rewarded Don Joseph, surely a very peripheral contributor to his happi­ ness. By contrast, Octavla does not even send a word to those who have made her happiness possible. Further, the reader assumes that since the

Count's generosity would otherwise extend to the Ardinghi as well o b the others he thinks have played a part In his happiness, Octavla must have poisoned his mind against them. He should note here Lady Mary's effec­ tive placement of material. With "1 forgot to tell you" she Interjects the only piece of information that is not In chronological sequence.

The Information about the anonymous gifts Is much more effective here, where it points up Octavia's behavior, than it would have been in its proper chronological position in the episode of Octavla*s service In the Sosi household.

To convince the reader completely that Octavla is designing, that she is moving toward a definite goal according to a plan, Lady Mary must arrange her story material so that a design is apparent to the reader; the way she deploys all of her material can be considered as 202 her largeat-scale strategy £or revealing Octavla. The method of this strategy seems so "natural" that it Is easily overlooked: Lady Mary lays out the episodes In straightforward chronology and in a balanced way; there is no "meanwhile back in Lovere" type of regression, and there is no dwelling on any one episode so that the pattern of the whole becomes faint. The design stands out clearly, and the reader can readily infer Octavla's reasons for her large-scale movements. Further, the reader is thus enabled to note suspicion-arousing discrepancies between the way Octavla presents herself at any given moment and the grand design.

The other side of the coin of convincing the reader of Octavio's designs and artfulness is convincing the reader of the weaknesses in the other major characters that kept them from seeing through her.

Though in referring to "weakness on the other side" Lady Mary perhaps has only the Count in mind at the moment, Octavla could not have succeeded in her plan if she had not also been able to dupe the Ardinghi, for, as Signor Aurello makes d e a r in his interview with Lady Mary, he would have stopped Octavla if he had known what she was up to.

In introducing the young Count, Lady Mary first resorts to open mockery. Double-entendre is employed in the phrase "be kind to her," which the old Countess of course intends as "behave in a benevolent manner" but which Lady Mary turns to the connotative sense of "make sexual advances" on the part of the Count, Both the common device and its content are well suited to the tiresome ordinariness of the Count's behavior. Another heavy-handed device follows immediately in the "v" alliteration, further emphasized by the cliche quality of the diction: 203

"ha , • , had try'd every Arc of a fine Gentleman accustom'd to Victorys

of that eort| to vanquish the virtue of t h l s ^ l r virgin," Again, the

device Is veil suited to and further expressive of the banality of the

"fine Gentleman" who routinely seduces servant girls.

Lady Mary next employs the device of allusion coupled with irony:

in the course of giving seemingly favorable information about the Count,

she makes allusions that undercut the favorable impression. The

allusions are to opinions on education that she had expressed in earlier

letters to her daughter; hence this strategy depends to a eertaln extent

on the special knowledge of the particular correspondent, though the

outside reader probably has a generalized sense of a deriding undertone.

The first allusion is "the Tour of Europe," more commonly known as the

Grand Tour. Lady Mary had a very low opinion of the Grand Tour as an

instrument of education, having observed it to consist chiefly of picking up superficial social accomplishments, buying over-priced, useless objects, becoming obsessed with clothes, seducing servants, neglecting to learn the languages, and never opening a book.^ Thus when she says that the Count "has had an Education uncommon in this Country" because he has made "the Tour of Europe," she is ironically undercutting the surface implication that he had had some excellent advantage. Further, in making the "improvements" the Count has brought from Paris a more specific part of the unconmon education, Lady Mary is alluding ironically to her own straightforward use of the term in regard to education, for

to her "improvement" means "improvement of the understanding." She had

^ S e e especially II, 177 and 495. developed thie subject In hec letter of 6 March 1753, likening the

education of women to the education of princes (both "educations"

consisted In being "taught to dance and the exterior part of what Is

called good breeding") and contrasting both to true education, the

education of the understanding through learned studies and great litera­

ture. Mockery of the young Count continues In "thus Quallfy'd for

Conquest," which the reader, alerted by the heavy-handed "v" allitera­

tion, takes as a recurrence of that device and hence as further sardonic

comment on both the Count's light-weight accomplishments and the use he puts them to. In the Count, Lady Mary thus presents a character who seems made to be the dupe of the sharp-witted Octavla: a young man who counts on easy admiration and success with the fair sex, but who by any significant standards is very ordinary and essentially ignorant. Octavla can count on a person with such characteristics to react predictably and unsuspectingly as she plays out her part.

Lady Mary brings out the predictability stensnlng from the Count's ordinariness through a large-scale strategy that we might paradoxically label "contrastive analogy." Both the old judge and the young Count have been trying to seduce Octavla; she flees, escaping both; both then come to find her. Lady Mary explicitly lets the reader know that Octavla does not want to marry the judge; she asks specifically to be concealed from him, and he is unable to find her; further, Octavla has predicted that the judge will look for her for a few days, then give up and forget about her, and this is exactly what happens. Thus when the Count's entourage suddenly appears at the Ardinghi house demanding Octavla and obviously, from the extensive arrangements, knowing exactly where she is, 205 the reader surmise* several things from the judge's experience: if the

judge failed to find Octavia because she contrived that he vould not,

the Count found her because she contrived that he vouldj1® if Octavia

could so shrewdly calculate the judge's behavior, she has also antici­

pated the Count's behavior; if Octavia has intended not to marry the

judge, she has very much Intended to marry the Count, Neither Lady Mary

nor her informants know what pre-elopement arrangements the Count and

Octavia might have made, but by keeping the old Judge in the story after

Octavia's flight from his house, Lady Mary indicates through the techni­

que of contrastive analogy that Octavia has brought the Count to do

exactly what she wants him to do and without tipping her hand to him.

The reader then sees more clearly both Octavia's design in all her

earlier actions of capturing the Count and his predictable response in each case.

Lady Mary shows Signora Diana's weakness in a familiar large-scale narrative technique that we may call "recurrence." She presents two scenes in which Diana and Octavla confront each other over the issue of

Octavia's marrying. Both times Octavia carries the day, playing on what at least in her hands is a weakness. Lady Mary has so constructed the two scenes that certain correspondences of maneuver and reactions are noticeable, thus making the second and more intense scene seen like

^The Count's knowledge of Octavia's connection with the Ardinghi gives him no advantage over the judge. If the judge did not already know it, he could find out from anyone in Lovere. Apparently the Ardinghi guarded the secret of her presence in their house. The failure of the judge strongly suggests that Octavia herself contrived to let the Count know she was there. 206

a heightened version of the first* The two scenes together are needed

to reveal Diana; it takes the more stressful situation to show her

weakness up plainly, but the weakness would not appear there as an

essential trait of the character unless signs of it had also been seen

in the calmer situation*

In the first scene, Diana has no cause to suspect Octavia's real

reason for not wishing to marry one of the tradesmen. Her yielding to

Octavia's disinclination in spite of the good reason she has for wanting

to see the girl safely married seems well explained in terms of the

admirable character Lady Mary has so far assigned her (compassionate,

charitable, conscientious). Nevertheless, judging from Lady Mary's

abrupt "However, they parted soon after," some element of doubt seems

to have hovered over this resolution of the conflict, casting a chill over the relationship.^ By the time the second scene comes round,

Octavia's behavior begins to look odd. For a girl who left home "to seek a place of more profit" (as Diana with unknowing irony had put it earlier), she seems not to have done very well and because of her own bad judgment: she has quit three good jobs in less than a year, turned down yet another and even more advantageous marriage, and now comes back in tears to where she started from. Diana's challenging of Octavia's actions seems well Justified, both on general grounds and in the specific

^This would add a third reason for Octavia's departure to those Lady Mary mentions (Aurelio's attentions and Octavia's desire to better her position); also, she would want to escape any further pressure to marry beneath her ambition. 207

remark* she makes about the judge* Yet once again Diana yields.

Several correspondences between the two scenes lead to an explan­

ation for Diana's yielding. Octavia's protestation in the second scene

that "she had never been happy since she left" seems to confirm her

earlier assertion chat permitting her to live single In her service would be the greatest favor Diana could bestow* In answering Diana

In both cases, Octavia begins by making concesions to the opposition,

in the first scene acknowledging that "It was her duty to obey all

Diana's ommands" and In the second conceding that "she had been too

rash In her proceedings." In both cases, the mollifying first clause

is followed by a "but" clause giving her excuse: "but she found no

Inclination to marriage," and later, "but said , . . that she scrupl'd entering Into the Holy Bands of Matrimony where her Heart did not sincerely accompany all the words of the Ceremony." The two statements differ in intensity, but the first, though rather neutral and low-key, still has a tincture of the hlgh-mlndedness that characterizes the second: whatever the reason for her disinclination, Octavia will not marry just to gain the obvious advantages Diana wants for her. Octavia has well gauged the level of response the first situation calls for; she does not protest too much. The second time, responding to Diana's active displeasure| she sticks to the pattern of response that was successful the first time, but Intensifies and makes It explicit, becoming assertively lofty on the topic of Holy Matrimony*

In both cases, Octavia is exploiting what Lady Mary pinpointed at the beginning of the story as Diana's distinguishing trait, her virtue*

In the first scene, Diana made no difficulties about Octavia not marrying because her conscience vould not allow her to force the girl

Into an irreversible situation that might turn out badly. Diana Is caught between her virtuous concern to preserve Octavia's "virtue" and the virtue of her scrupulousness, and Octavla knows it. In the second scene, Octavla silences Diana by explicitly outdoing her in scrupulous­ ness. After all, Diana has been finding fault with Octavia for not marrying, for worldly advantage; even if her primary concern is the preservation of Octavia's virtue (In the narrow sense), she finds It difficult to understand that Octavia would turn down the "old Judge," with all the present and near-future advantages a person of that descrip­ tion promises. In Diana, Lady Mary is showing her correspondent a familiar kind of consciously and publicly good person (she has a local reputation for virtue, and she thought it "meritorious" to rescue

Octavia In the first place) who almost by definition has to accept the appearance of virtue In others and who would find It particularly dif­ ficult to counter a claim to an order of virtue so obviously superior to what she has been urging. That is, Octavia has maintained a stance of a kind of idealistic virtue that scorns worldly self-interest (an attitude implicit, as we saw, in her flrat-Bcene "disinclination" reason and explicit in her Matrimony speech). Compared to this, Diana's practical kind of virtue (preserve Octavia, whether eight or eighteen, from "rulne" by whatever respectable means society sanctions) is made to seem limited and of a lower order. Octavia has caught Diana in the trap of her own regard for virtue,

But though Diana is silenced by Octavia's "pious Sentiment," Lady Mary implies by her formulation "Signora Diana had nothing to say in

Contraditlon" that Diana (as at the end of the firat scene) has been more out-maneuvered than completely convinced; something is not quite right but she does not nee what or how to get at it. This impression

Is heightened by a subsidiary device, a kind of parallelism. Two char­ acters with much in common (here Diana and Aurello) are placed in the same scene and confronted with the same problem (Octavia's return) and the response of each throws the other character into stronger relief and makes each comment tacitly on the other. Lady Mary places the two contrasting responses to both Octavia's return and to her Matrimony speech in the some sentence, thus further inviting comparison. Hence

Aurelio's enthusiastic applause of Octavia's "honesty" for not marrying the Judge has the effect of making Diana's response seen even more un­ convinced than it would by Itself. Further, the contrast between

Aurelio's response to Octavia's return and Diana's response serves as an additional explanation for Diana's failure to probe more deeply into

Octavia's questionable behaviort Aurelio's generous and immediate acceptance of Octavia as Beauty in Distress makes Diana's fault-finding look mean-spirited, an impression that must be as obvlouB to all the actors in the scene as it is to the reader. A virtuous woman who had for years done all she could for Octavia would not care to remain in such an unjust light. Diana emerges as a complex and believable char­ acter; though her kind of virtue is a weakness in the hands of an

Octavia, it is perfectly genuine; also, Diana Is dearly no fool, although she is neither perspicacious nor courageous enough to penetrate

Octavia's facade completely and openly. 210

The weakness In Aurello that Octayla exploits is, of course, that

he Is attracted to her. The way Lady Mary goes about revealing Aurello

la closely bound up with her manipulation of that very basic narrative

technique, point of view. "Point of view" Is here Interpreted not only

in the strict sense of "voice of person narrating" but also in the

broader and (in this story) more interesting sense of the Interaction

between narrator and source of information and the effect on the reader

of this Interaction. In each of the passages In which Aurello figures,

he Is seen through different eyes and in ever-closer focus.

In the opening passage of the story, in which the Ardinghi are

introduced, Lady Mary establishes herself as an omniscient third person narrator, and the facts and opinions about the Ardinghi presented here are evidently commonly known and agreed on in Lovere. The passage also projects the spirit of a first person narratort "... and indeed are

the most conversable reasonable people in the place ..." reads like

a personal Interjection, corroborating testimony from the writer's own experience. The correspondent learns that Aurello is an old bachelor of comfortable means, well-liked and respected, and that his distinguish­

ing trait is his probity. He seems the ideal gentleman.

The next thing the reader learns about Aurello is that the neighbors say that he paid so much attention to his beautiful servant that she left the house. Here is a different view of Aurello, from a source closer than general public knowledge. The correspondent would note the discrepancy between Aurelio's attentions to Octavia and his probity and would think that the gossip might well be true, that an aging but not aged bachelor (perhaps, like Diana, something over fifty) living in the same house with a beautiful young servant could easily be paying her that sort of attention. Lady Mary's handling of point of view has stimulated curiosity; the gossip may or may not be true, and everybody thinks Aurello to be a man of probity, Aurello begins to look like a more interesting character than the ideal gentleman of the opening, provided he does not turn out to be merely a lecherous hypocrite.

Aurello next appears in the return scene. Since this Is an

Intimate family scene, Lady Mary's Informant must have been either

Diana or Aurello (both of whom confide in her at other times), Diana seems more likely, for she was the informant for the first Diana-Octavla scene ("Diana told me"), and the scene begins before Aurello enters.

The source is thus closer to Aurello than the last source (the neigh­ bors), and the Information gained Is still more intimate. This scene throws light on the earlier speculations about Aurello, First, there evidently was something to the neighbor's gossip. The same technique of parallelism that revealed Diana also reveals Aurello. Next to Diana's patently sensible objections to Octavia's behavior, the reader sees that

Aurello Is much too "easily persuaded to consent she should stay with them." Similarly, alongside Diana's unconvinced silence, Aurelio's applause of "the honesty that could not be perverted by any Interest whatever" appears too enthusiastic to be only an altruistic delight In virtue. The reader is led to suspect that Aurello Is Instead (or In addition) applauding the return to his house of the beautiful girl he is attracted to. Yet the correspondent also feels that Aurello really thinks that he Is only aiding a poor misused creature who needs refuge and that he is applauding Octavia's virtue for its own sake. That is, 212

Lady Maty has put nothing In the scene to suggest that Aurello Is speaking as a conscious hypocrite, gloating In a veiled, sardonic manner over the return of a girl he has designs onf Furthermore, Lady

Mary vouched earlier for Aurelio's probity. Thus Aurelio's behavior emerges as that of a man of conscious honor who keeps his attraction to the beautiful servant at such a submerged level that he Is not aware that It has affected his judgment of her*

Aurello dominates the final scene In which he appears, his morning visit to Lady Mary after the elopement. Here he Is under Lady Mary's direct observation, and she speaks In the first person, the first and only time In the entire narrative she Intervenes at any length In this way* One reason Lady Mary enters the story here seems to be to give her first-hand testimony about Aurelio's state of mind and particularly about the hidden motive behind his resentment over the elopement. This testi­ mony explicitly confirms what Lady Mary indicated indirectly through other narrative techniques in the return scene: Aurello Is attracted to Octavia, and he Is not fully aware of his feelings and how they affect him. Specifically, Aurello says that he "would rather have dy'd than suffer'd" the elopement if he "had known how to prevent it" and gives the anger of the Count^e relatives, a family to which he has ties of friendship and obligation, as the reason for these feelings. But Lady

Mary attributes his resentment also to his "latent Jealousy" of the bridegroom, the adjective clearly Indicating something not fully realized.

Lady Mary does not let the reader see how she Is able to perceive this latent emotion; as far as the scene Itself is concerned, the reader must take her word simply on the basis of the fact that she Is observing 213

Aurello* However, the reader does accept her statement. Considering

Aurelio's present position vis-a-vis the Sosl clan, Lady Mary's analysis is psychologically convincing! Aurello could not now admit to hlmBelf that he is attracted to Octavia, for he would then have to admit that his feelings had influenced his decision to let her return to his house; he would have to blame himself as well as Octavia for his predicament with the Count's relatives. Considering Aurelio's general relationship with Octavia, the reader finds LadyMary's statement of his latent jealousy further convincing. It is natural that Aurello, like all other males in the story, is attracted to the beautiful Octavia, but clearly,

Aurello can neither seduce nor marry her. She Is the protfegfe of his virtuous sister, who brought the girl into the house to save her from ruin and who watches over her carefully, and it would be out of the question for him to raise her through marriage to be mistress of the house over the woman who took her in out of charity* Under these cir­ cumstances, the man of conscious probity suppresses but cannot extinguish his attraction and subsequent jealousy. Hence the correspondent accepts

Lady Mary's assertion, on the basis of her first person testimony and the Information she has already given. Aurello has learned nothing about himself from Octavia's adventures. He talks only about the act of the elopement and his awkward external situation, while his good friend sees through his conscious concerns to his unacknowledged emotions and the important part they have played in permitting things to come to the pass he deplores. Aurelio's weakness is part of his character.

Lady Mary, then, has employed strategies of arrangement, selection of fact, point of view, recurrence of scenes, parallelism and contrastive 214 analogy among characters, exploitation of another genre, and, on a smaller scale, allusion, irony, and alliteration, to show her corres­ pondent (whom we consider to be a woman possessing values and capable of social perceptions similar to those of the writer) that Octavia was an artful and designing girl and that the Count, Diana, and Aurello were persons with weaknesses that Octavla could manipulate to achieve her goal. There remains now to consider how well Lady Mary has fulfilled those intentions that we earlier found represented or implied in her pre- and post-narrative remarks and how these intentions and the story as a whole (the sum of the strategies) bear on those related Interests and concerns discussed in the first section of this chapter.

Lady Mary came across a real-life story which, in the broad outlines of its main action and in some of its details, bears a close enough resemblance to the novel Pamela for Lady Mary to believe that a real-life servant girl, inspired by her reading of Pamela, deliberately embarked on a campaign to capture the "catch" of the region for her husband. ¥ Lady Mary Intended her story to be a criticism of the moral of Pamela, which may be paraphrased from Richardson's subtitle as "virtue will be rewarded," to which any reader of Pamela would immediately add,

"materially and handsomely." Lady Mary has countered in effect with

"the appearance of virtue will be rewarded," a corollary of the moral of her story, which we earlier formulated as "a designing, artful, beautiful girl, exploiting the weaknesses of other, can never fall to advance her fortunes." In stating that Octavia has copied Pamela. Lady Mary la pointing up the flaw in Richardson's moralt any girl who sets out to copy Richardson's heroins is automatically no longer a virtuous innocent like Pamela but a designing Octavia. Thus Richardson's novel is inevitably immoral In its effect on young readers, a criticism which, we remember, Lady Mary levelled against him in other letters. Lady

Mary's successful demonstration of her moral through her strategies also criticizes Richardson in another way that she dealt with earlier in general terms: Richardson falsifies life when he shows the marriage of the servant and the gentleman to be a result of virtue converting wicked­ ness. The way that result Is brought about in real life is through deceit manipulating weakness. Of course, charges similar to these had been brought by Pamela's earliest critics.^ Lady Mary's distinctive contribution is that she has produced convincing real-life "proof."

Lady Mary intended to be concise, and she meant her ability to tell a Pamela-like story briefly to be a further criticism of Richardson.

The nature of most of the strategies Lady Mary employed was to produce maximum effect from minimum means; it would be difficult to tell the story and still project any understanding of character in fewer words.

We remember too that Lady Mary also deplored Richardson's power to affect the emotions of his readers, and her disapproval is related to the issue of conciseness, or, more broadly, to the question of the relationship of length to artistic purpose. Lady Mary was able to tell her story so

17 Discussion of contemporary criticisms of Pamela are to be found in the editors' introductions to the following works: Pamela, ed. T. C, Duncan Eaves and Ben D, Klmpel (Boston: Houghton Mifllln, 1971); Henry Fielding, An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, ed. Sheridan W. Baker, Jr. (Berkeley: University of California, 1953); and in the "Introduction" of The Moral Basis of Fielding's Art bv Martin C, Battestin (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1959). 216 briefly| not only because of the condensing nature of the strategies, but also because she omitted all detail that was not directly to her purpose. Richardson, with a very different purpose, would have needed vastly more detail for this story. For example, to Lady Mary, Octavia's six months at the Sosi palace was but one step in the girl's plot, and a few sentences sufficed to show what she accomplished there. Richardson, on the other hand, vould want to show virtue steadfast under constant attack, to build reader sympathy for all the poor servant is subjected to. These are necessarily cumulative effects and would require a number of scenes. Disapproving what she believed to be Richardson's prudential morality and his falsification of life, Lady Mary naturally deplored his necessarily lengthy means of arousing the reader's emotions on behalf of these meretricious ends.

Lady Mary's own attitude toward her characters is objective; she makes no attempt to work directly on the reader's emotional suscepti­ bilities. Again, her purpose is the controlling factor. She wishes to show how the marriage of a Count and a servant could have come about, and whatever sympathies she might have had for her injured friends (the natural direction of sympathy in her story), those sentiments have little place in her story. For example, the lack of insight on Diana's part that contributed to Octavia's success is what is Important to Lady

Mary's purpose, not Diana's feelings on discovering that she has been used and discarded by the girl she adopted, educated, and attempted to settle comfortably in life (Burely a potentially pathetic subject).

Lady Mary.does point directions for moral judgments and sympathies, but 217 neither indignation nor pathoe is actively aroused.

Lady Mary* in asserting in her preface that Octavia^s adventures were copied from those of Pamela, needs to impress on her reader that she is indeed telling a true story; otherwise, her intention of shoving that Richardson has a bad effect on the conduct of his readers is lost.

Through her manipulation of point of view, Lady Mary appears in three capacitiest as a narrator well known to thecorrespondent, as listener and gatherer of information from persons in the story (Diana, Aurello, and Don Joseph) and from public opinion in a small town that her corres­ pondent knows she knows mil, and finally as a participant who adds a piece of information from her own observation. Thus the story has an air of being thoroughly documented.

Lady Mary Intended to be entertaining, and as we saw earlier, her notion of being entertaining is closely bound up with conciseness.

Through her conciseness she entertains in the particularly stimulating way of engaging the active participation of the reader, for her strate­ gies invite or even cotnsand the reader to make interpretive connections between juxtaposed facts, to supply through analogy information not given, to draw conclusions from similarities and differences in situation and behavior that are only quickly sketched, to recall past Information and bring it to bear on present information, to look for hidden meaning under surface meaning. Perhaps Lady Mary carried this kind of enter­ tainment to what seems an extreme because she believed she could rely on her daughter to play the game correctly} the outside reader might have to rely more heavily on her non-narrative comments for a full 218

underscanding of what she is about.

Lady Mary’s class prejudice so permeates the whole story that It is

as difficult to say exactly what projects It as it Is easy to say with

conviction that Lady Mary believes that a Count and a servant should

not marry. Probably only a very general basis for this conviction can

be presented: Lady Mary does not "expose" any of her characters for

their class attitudes, while all of her strategies have the purpose of

"exposing" traits In the characters that produced the outcome. Another

way to see how fundamentally Lady Mary's views on class distinctions

have affected, her handling of the story Is to consider in how different

a light the characters would have to be presented if the author started

from some other basic assumption, for example, that inherited wealth

and position are unjust, that It is the duty of every individual to

better hlm(her)self, or that the most intelligent and enterprising people

deserve the greatest material rewards.

We saw In other letters that Lady Mary was concerned that her

granddaughters not fall under the Influence of Richardson* Thus she also

Intended her story to be an aid to Lady Bute In the education of her daughters, for the story "detects" the "absurdities" of an author they

are sure to read. In her final comment of the letter, Lady Mary makes

a further educational uae of her stofyf:thls time giving advice on a more general aspect of the girls1 upbringing. At first, the connection

between the story and Lady Mary’s comparison of the Duchess of Bolton

and Polly seems confused, Octavia 1b like Polly in having obtained wealth, title, and esteem from low beginnings, but Signora Diana'b 219

household Is very different from the Alehouse and the stage. As far as

"early Experience" Is concerned, Octavla seems more like the Duchess,

who was "educated In Solitt1e" by a "Saint-like Governess," for Octavla

was educated by the virtuous Diana and kept close to home, "never going

out but to church." nevertheless, the intended correspondence seems

to be between Octavla and Polly; Octavla did have "early experience"

in the unprotected environment of her first family, and a servant, even

a favored one, does well to study the nAtures of those above her.

Obviously, Octavla had a remarkable understanding of the people around her.

Of course, Lady Mary does not Intend to recommend to Lady Bute

that she place her daughters In a low environment or an Inferior station

In order for them to gain an understanding of people. Rather, Lady Mary

Is using the pedagogic technique of presenting extremes. Lady Bute should avoid the extreme over-protectlveness of the Duchess's mother, with Its wretched results, and should see to it that her girls have appropriate experiences to acquaint them directly with human nature.

Lady Mary has probably replaced Octavla with Polly here to bring the message closer to home, giving two English examples, both of them known to Lady Bute, and to separate that aspect of Octavla she wants to recommend (her knowledge of people) from other aspects (her ambition and duplicity) that she disapproves of.

^Lady Mary's letter of 19 May 1756 (III, 106) comments on the educational importance of social life in learning about "Mankind." Thus Lady Mary ends her narrative letter with her concern £or t her granddaughters, perhaps an indication that o£ all the Interests attitudes, and concerns that have come together to a£fect her story this one is central. Her communion with her daughter, the basic purpose of her extensive correspondence with Lady Bute, Is thus strengthened. As everyone knows, the way to a woman's heart 1b to show Interest in her children. LIST OF WORKS CONSULTED

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