Lola Montez : $b An adventuress of the 'fortiesD'Auvergne, Edmund B. (Edmund Basil)
History
Lola Montez : $b An adventuress of the 'forties
D'Auvergne, Edmund B. (Edmund Basil)
Montez, Lola, 1818-1861
The New York pressman was more easily pleased than is the modern reader.
Lola's lectures were published that same year in book form, together with
her autobiography, and they may be pronounced very poor stuff. They are
respectively headed, "Beautiful Women," "Gallantry," "Heroines of
History," "The Comic Aspect of Love," "Wits and Women of Paris," and
"Romanism." Here and there their dullness is enlivened by a flash of
Lola's own native wit, or a shrewd observation that only her experience
could have supplied. Sometimes she begins by what is evidently an
exposition of her own views, winding up with some trite moralisings
calculated to appease her audience. Speaking, for instance, of the
heroines of history, she dwells with enthusiasm on the valour of Margaret
of Anjou, the sagacity of Isabel the Catholic, the administrative ability
of Elizabeth, the diplomatic skill of Catharine II., and recollects
herself in time to impress on her hearers that one
"who is qualified to be a happy wife and a good mother, need never
look with envy upon the woman of genius, whose mental powers, by
fitting her for the stormy arena of politics, may have unfitted her
for the quiet walks of domestic life."
As might have been expected, Lola spoke somewhat disdainfully of women who
preferred to vote rather than to cajole the men who voted. The lecturer
forgot, perhaps, that all her sisters were not as well equipped as she for
the business of fascination, and that to some of them the personal
exercise of the franchise might seem less unwomanly and objectionable than
the arts of blandishment and intimidation.
Lola was bold enough to tell her American audience that the palm of beauty
must be awarded to Englishwomen, and that the Yankees were too mercantile
and practical to entertain the old spirit of gallantry. She mollified her
hearers by adding that, after all, in America, "love dived the deepest
and came out dryest"--a dark saying, from which she derived the conclusion
that love in the United States was as brave, honest, and sincere a passion
as elsewhere. The lecture on Romanism will not be regarded as a very
formidable instrument of attack upon the Catholic Church. It concludes:
"America does not yet recognise how much she owes to the Protestant
principle. It has given the world the four greatest facts of modern
times--steam-boats, railroads, telegraphs, and the American Republic!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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