Courts and palaces, as well as convents and churches, and galleries of
all sorts, fly open at his approach: he is caressed in every capital--he
is _fêté_ in every château. But though he appears amidst such
accompaniments with all the airiness of a Juan, he has a thread of the
blackest of Harold in his texture; and every now and then seems willing
to draw a veil between him and the world of vanities. He is a poet, and
a great one too, though we know not that he ever wrote a line of verse.
His rapture amidst the sublime scenery of mountains and forests--in the
Tyrol especially, and in Spain--is that of a spirit cast originally in
one of nature's finest moulds; and he fixes it in language which can
scarcely be praised beyond its deserts--simple, massive, nervous,
apparently little laboured, yet revealing, in its effect, the perfection
of art. Some immortal passages in Gray's letters and Byron's diaries,
are the only things, in our tongue, that seem to us to come near the
profound melancholy, blended with a picturesqueness of description at
once true and startling, of many of these extraordinary pages. Nor is
his sense for the _highest_ beauty of art less exquisite. He seems to
describe classical architecture, and the pictures of the great Italian
schools, with a most passionate feeling of the grand, and with an
inimitable grace of expression. On the other hand, he betrays, in a
thousand places, a settled voluptuousness of temperament, and a
capricious recklessness of self-indulgence, which will lead the world to
identify him henceforth with his _Vathek_, as inextricably as it has
long since connected Harold with the poet that drew him; and then, that
there may be no limit to the inconsistencies of such a strange genius,
this spirit, at once so capable of the noblest enthusiasm, and so dashed
with the gloom of over-pampered luxury, can stoop to chairs and china,
ever and anon, with the zeal of an auctioneer--revel in the design of a
clock or a candlestick, and be as ecstatic about a fiddler or a soprano
as the fools in Hogarth's _concert_. On such occasions he reminds us,
and will, we think, remind everyone, of the Lord of Strawberry Hill. But
even here all we have is on a grander scale. The oriental prodigality of
his magnificence shines out even in trifles. He buys a library where the
other would have cheapened a missal. He is at least a male Horace
Walpole; as superior to the "silken Baron," as Fonthill, with its
York-like tower embosomed among hoary forests, was to that silly band-box
which may still be admired on the road to Twickenham ...
We have no discussions of any consequence in these volumes: even the
ultra-aristocratical opinions and feelings of the author--who is, we
presume, a Whig--are rather hinted than avowed. From a thousand passing
sneers, we may doubt whether he has any religion at all; but still he
_may_ be only thinking of the outward and visible absurdities of
popery--therefore we have hardly a pretext for treating these matters
seriously. In short, this is meant to be, as he says in his preface,
nothing but a "book of light reading"; and though no one can read it
without having many grave enough feelings roused and agitated within
him, there are really no passages to provoke or justify any detailed
criticism either as to morals or politics ...
We risk nothing in predicting that Mr. Beckford's _Travels_ will
henceforth be classed among the most elegant productions of modern
literature: they will be forthwith translated into every language of the
Continent--and will keep his name alive, centuries after all the brass
and marble he ever piled together have ceased to vibrate with the echoes
of _Modenhas_.