Tamerlane and Genghiz Khan: as much very likely as we know of Napoleon.
He has no physical attributes and no material accoutrements which
might lend him adventitious aid as the centre of a pageant of power,
struggle, or woe: a short, bowed man in a black coat, vivacious, hedged
by no formalities of ceremonial. Yet to the imagination--and it must
surely be so when he is seen backward--this little fanatic, who for
twenty years was hunted from exile to exile, and returned to overthrow
a government and enthrone himself on the ruins of a great Empire, is
the centre of Russia, seated in the middle of that enormous web of
conflict and suffering like an impassive and implacable spider. We
hear this and that of him. He is genial in conversation. He is not
personally cruel. He is willing to slaughter thousands at a blow to
realise his ideas, for he looks at human affairs historically, if with
but one eye. He is a poor speaker, but his words whip audiences into
enthusiasm. He thought he would be overturned in three weeks, but
adapted himself with instant decision when a longer lease was offered.
This man and that is jealous of him and has tried to upset him; he has
said this or that about his success and his failure; he will fly; or
he knows he will be executed. The reports contradict each other, but
the picture remains and strengthens, the picture of a man in the grip
of an idea, with one of the strongest wills in the world, indifferent
to the pains and pleasures of ordinary people. That ugly little face,
with its swollen bald forehead, its slanting lids closing on straight
penetrating eyes, its squat nose, its fleshy mouth between moustache
and goatee, its smile mechanical as a mask's, will be more familiar to
our descendants than to us. They will see in reverie the revolution,
with vast ancient Russia as its background, and this doctrinaire tyrant
as its centre, with his ragged armies, his spies and Chinamen, his
motley gang of clever Jews, brigands, and mild, bearded, spectacled
professors around him. They will feel his magnetism, and, whether as
"hero of legend" or devil of legend, they will celebrate him.
Of these things perhaps men will write two hundred or two thousand
years hence. But the duration of human life on our planet is measured,
as we suppose, in tens of thousands of years.
We go to the grave. The sunlight comes into this room; it shines on
the table and the books and the papers. I listen to the twittering of
the birds, shorter lived than ourselves, and the intermittent rushing
of the wind, which, while life lasts, goes on always the same. A car
moans past; its noise begins, swells, and dies away. The trees wave
about; a horse's feet plod by; the sunlight sparkles on the river
and glorifies the mud. Clouds come over. The sun, unseen, sets; the
evening grows bluer and lamps twinkle out over the misty river. So,
noiselessly, proceeds time, and the earth revolves and revolves through
its alternations of sun and shade. These airs, these lights and sounds,
will be the same; but we, alive and immortal as we feel, shall have
gone and the clamour that we made will recede. To an epoch we shall
be the coloured strutters of history and of legend; to a later age,
however remote and whatever the accumulation of our records, we must
become august shadows like the dim kings and fabulous empires that
passed before Babylon and Egypt. "Truly ye are the people, and wisdom
shall die with you." The sentence was written more than two thousand
years ago; the author is unknown and receding. Yet, obliterated in the
end though all remembrance of us may be, we shall not even on this
earth die with our bodies, and for some interval, not to be computed,
certain actions at this moment in progress will endure in a sublimated
state, and certain men with whom we may even have spoken will enlarge
to a more than human stature and communicate, as they could never do in
life, their essence to the enduring tradition of men. Are they those
whom we have mentioned; or are they, as they may be, others who to us
are insignificant and obscured?
HORACE WALPOLE[1]
[1] _Letters of Horace Walpole; Oxford University Press,
16 vols., 96s. Supplementary Letters, 1919; Oxford
University Press, 2 vols., 17s._
By ROBERT LYND
Horace Walpole was a dainty rogue in porcelain who walked badly. In
his best days, as he records in one of his letters, it was said of
him that he "tripped like a pewit." "If I do not flatter myself," he
wrote when he was just under sixty, "my march at present is more like
a dabchick's." A lady has left a description of him entering a room,
"knees bent, and feet on tiptoe as if afraid of a wet floor." When his
feet were not swollen with the gout, they were so slender, he said,
that he "could dance a minuet on a silver penny." He was ridiculously
lean, and his hands were crooked with his unmerited disease. An
invalid, a caricature of the birds, and not particularly well dressed
in spite of his lavender suit and partridge silk stockings, he has
nevertheless contrived to leave in his letters an impression of almost
perfect grace and dandyism. He had all the airs of a beau. He affected
coolness, disdain, amateurishness, triviality. He was a china figure of
insolence. He lived on the mantelpiece, and regarded everything that
happened on the floor as a rather low joke that could not be helped.
He warmed into humanity in his friendships and in his defence of the
house of Walpole; but if he descended from his mantelpiece, it was more
likely to be in order to feed a squirrel than to save an Empire. His
most common image of the world was a puppet-show. He saw kings, prime
ministers, and men of genius alike about the size of dolls. When George
II. died, he wrote a brief note to Thomas Brand: "Dear Brand--You love
laughing; there is a king dead; can you help coming to town?" That
represents his measure of things. Those who love laughing will laugh
all the more when they discover that, a week earlier, Walpole had
written a letter, rotund, fulsome, and in the language of the bended
knee, begging Lord Bute to be allowed to kiss the Prince of Wales's
hand. His attitude to the Court he described to George Montagu as
"mixing extreme politeness with extreme indifference." His politeness,
like his indifference, was but play at the expense of a solemn world.
"I wrote to Lord Bute," he informed Montagu; "thrust in all the
_unexpecteds, want of ambition, disinterestedness, etc._, that I could
amass, gilded with as much duty, affection, zeal, etc., as possible."
He frankly professed relief that he had not after all to go to Court
and act out the extravagant compliments he had written. "Was ever so
agreeable a man as King George the Second," he wrote, "to die the very
day it was necessary to save me from ridicule?" "For my part," he adds
later in the same spirit, "my man Harry will always be a favourite; he
tells me all the amusing news; he first told me of the late Prince of
Wales's death, and to-day of the King's." It is not that Walpole was
a republican of the school of Plutarch. He was merely a toy republican
who enjoyed being insolent at the expense of kings, and behind their
backs. He was scarcely capable of open rudeness in the fashion of Beau
Brummell's "Who's your fat friend?" His ridicule was never a public
display; it was a secret treasured for his friends. He was the greatest
private entertainer of the eighteenth century, and he ridiculed the
great, as people say, for the love of diversion. "I always write the
thoughts of the moment," he told the dearest of his friends, Conway,
"and even laugh to divert the person I am writing to, without any ill
will on the subjects I mention." His letters are for the most part
those of a good-natured man.
It is not that he was above the foible--it was barely more than
that--of hatred. He did not trouble greatly about enemies of his own,
but he never could forgive the enemies of Sir Robert Walpole. His
ridicule of the Duke of Newcastle goes far beyond diversion. It is the
baiting of a mean and treacherous animal, whose teeth were "tumbling
out," and whose mouth was "tumbling in." He rejoices in the exposure of
the dribbling indignity of the Duke, as when he describes him going to
Court on becoming Prime Minister in 1754:
On Friday this august remnant of the Pelhams went to Court for the
first time. At the foot of the stairs he cried and sunk down; the
yeomen of the guard were forced to drag him up under the arms. When
the closet-door opened, he flung himself at his length at the King's
feet, sobbed, and cried, "God bless your Majesty God preserve your
Majesty!" and lay there howling and embracing the King's knees, with
one foot so extended that my Lord Coventry, who was _luckily_ in
waiting, and begged the standers-by to retire, with, "For God's sake,
gentlemen, don't look at a great man in distress!" endeavouring to
shut the door, caught his grace's foot, and made him roar with pain.
The caricature of the Duke is equally merciless in the description of
George II.'s funeral in the Abbey, in which the "burlesque Duke" is
introduced as comic relief into the solemn picture:
He fell into a fit of crying the moment he came into the chapel, and
flung himself back in a stall, the Archbishop hovering over him with
a smelling-bottle; but in two minutes his curiosity got the better of
his hypocrisy, and he ran about the chapel with his glass to spy who
was or was not there, spying with one hand and mopping his eyes with
the other. Then returned the fear of catching cold; and the Duke of
Cumberland, who was sinking with heat, felt himself weighed down, and
turning round found it was the Duke of Newcastle standing upon his
train to avoid the chill of the marble.
Walpole, indeed, broke through his habit of public decorum in his
persecution of the Duke; and he tells how on one occasion at a ball
at Bedford House he and Brand and George Selwyn plagued the pitiful
old creature, who "wriggled, and shuffled, and lisped, and winked, and
spied" his way through the company, with a conversation at his expense
carried on in stage whispers. There was never a more loyal son than
Horace Walpole. He offered up a Prime Minister daily as a sacrifice at
Sir Robert's tomb.
At the same time, his aversions were not always assumed as part of a
family inheritance. He had by temperament a small opinion of men and
women outside the circle of his affections. It was his first instinct
to disparage. He even described his great friend Madame du Deffand, at
the first time of meeting her, as "an old blind debauchée of wit." His
comments on the men of genius of his time are almost all written in a
vein of satirical intolerance. He spoke ill of Sterne and Dr. Johnson,
of Fielding and Richardson, of Boswell and Goldsmith. Goldsmith he
found "silly"; he was "an idiot with once or twice a fit of parts."
Boswell's _Tour of the Hebrides_ was "the story of a mountebank and
his zany." Walpole felt doubly justified in disliking Johnson owing
to the criticism of Gray in the _Lives of the Poets_. He would not
even, when Johnson died, subscribe to a monument. A circular letter
asking for a subscription was sent to him, signed by Burke, Boswell,
and Reynolds. "I would not deign to write an answer," Walpole told the
Miss Berrys, "but sent down word by my footman, as I would have done
to parish officers with a brief, that I would not subscribe." Walpole
does not appear in this incident the "sweet-tempered creature" he had
earlier claimed to be. His pose is that of a school-girl in a cutting
mood. At the same time his judgment of Johnson has an element of truth
in it. "Though he was good-natured at bottom," he said of him, "he was
very ill-natured at top." It has often been said of Walpole that, in
his attitude to contemporary men of genius, he was influenced mainly
by their position in society--that he regarded an author who was not a
gentleman as being necessarily an inferior author. This is hardly fair.
The contemporary of whom he thought most highly was Gray, the son of a
money broker. He did not spare Lady Mary Wortley Montagu any more than
Richardson. If he found an author offensive, it was more likely to be
owing to a fastidious distaste for low life than to an aristocratic
distaste for low birth; and to him Bohemianism was the lowest of low
life. It was certainly Fielding's Bohemianism that disgusted him. He
relates how two of his friends called on Fielding one evening and found
him "banqueting with a blind man, a woman, and three Irishmen, on some
cold mutton and a bone of ham, both in one dish, and the dirtiest
cloth." Horace Walpole's daintiness recoiled from the spirit of an
author who did not know how to sup decently. If he found Boswell's
_Johnson_ tedious, it was no doubt partly due to his inability to
reconcile himself to Johnson's table manners. It can hardly be denied
that he was unnaturally sensitive to surface impressions. He was a
great observer of manners, but not a great portrayer of character. He
knew men in their absurd actions rather than in their motives--even
their absurd motives. He never admits us into the springs of action in
his portraits as Saint-Simon does. He was too studied a believer in
the puppetry of men and women to make them more than ridiculous. And
unquestionably the vain race of authors lent itself admirably to his
love of caricature. His account of the vanity of Gibbon, whose history
he admired this side enthusiasm, shows how he delighted in playing with
an egoistic author as with a trout.
"So much," he concludes, "for literature and its fops." The comic
spirit leans to an under-estimate rather than an over-estimate of
human nature, and the airs the authors gave themselves were not only
a breach of his code, but an invitation to his contempt. "You know,"
he once wrote, "I shun authors, and would never have been one myself
if it obliged me to keep such bad company. They are always in earnest
and think their profession serious, and will dwell upon trifles and
reverence learning. I laugh at all these things, and write only
to laugh at them and divert myself. None of us are authors of any
consequence, and it is the most ridiculous of all vanities to be vain
of being _mediocre_." He followed the Chinese school of manners and
made light of his own writings. "What have I written," he asks, "that
was worth remembering, even by myself?" "It would be affected," he
tells Gray, "to say I am indifferent to fame. I certainly am not, but
I am indifferent to almost anything I have done to acquire it. The
greater part are mere compilations; and no wonder they are, as you say,
incorrect when they were commonly written with people in the room."
It is generally assumed that, in speaking lightly of himself, Walpole
was merely posturing. To me it seems that he was sincere enough. He
had a sense of greatness in literature, as is shown by his reverence
of Shakespeare, and he was too much of a realist not to see that his
own writings at their best were trifles beside the monuments of the
poets. He felt that he was doing little things in a little age. He was
diffident both for his times and for himself. So difficult do some
writers find it to believe that there was any deep genuineness in him
that they ask us to regard even his enthusiasm for great literature as
a pretence. They do not realise that the secret of his attraction for
us is that he was an enthusiast disguised as an eighteenth-century man
of fashion. His airs and graces were not the result of languor, but of
his pleasure in wearing a mask. He was quick, responsive, excitable,
and only withdrew into the similitude of a china figure, as Diogenes
into his tub, through philosophy. The truth is, the only dandies who
are tolerable are those whose dandyism is a cloak of reserve. Our
interest in character is largely an interest in contradictions of
this kind. The beau capable of breaking into excitement awakens our
curiosity, as does the conqueror stooping to a humane action, the
Puritan caught in the net of the senses, or the pacifist in a rage of
violence. The average man, whom one knows superficially, is a formula,
or seems to live the life of a formula. That is why we find him dull.
The characters who interest us in history and literature, on the other
hand, are perpetually giving the lie to the formulæ we invent, and are
bound to invent, for them. They give us pleasure not by confirming us,
but by surprising us. It seems to me absurd, then, to regard Walpole's
air of indifference as the only real thing about him and to question
his raptures. From his first travels among the Alps with Gray down to
his senile letters to Hannah More about the French Revolution, we see
him as a man almost hysterical in the intensity of his sensations,
whether of joy or of horror. He lived for his sensations like an
æsthete. He wrote of himself as "I, who am as constant at a fire as
George Selwyn at an execution." If he cared for the crownings of kings
and such occasions, it was because he took a childish delight in the
fireworks and illuminations.
He had the keen spirit of a masquerader. Masquerades, he declared,
were "one of my ancient passions," and we find him as an elderly man
dressing out "a thousand young Conways and Cholmondeleys" for an
entertainment of the kind, and going "with more pleasure to see them
pleased than when I formerly delighted in that diversion myself." He
was equally an enthusiast in his hobbies and his tastes. He rejoiced
to get back in May to Strawberry Hill, "where my two passions,
lilacs and nightingales, are in bloom." He could not have made his
collections or built his battlements in a mood of indifference. In
his love of mediæval ruins he showed himself a Goth-intoxicated man.
As for Strawberry Hill itself, the result may have been a ridiculous
mouse, but it took a mountain of enthusiasm to produce it. Walpole's
own description of his house and its surroundings has an exquisite
charm that almost makes one love the place as he did. "It is a little
plaything house," he told Conway, "that I got out of Mrs. Chenevix's
shop, and is the prettiest bauble you ever saw. It is set in enamelled
meadows, with filigree hedges:
A small Euphrates through the piece is roll'd,
And little finches wave their wings in gold."
He goes on to decorate the theme with comic and fanciful properties:
Two delightful roads that you would call dusty supply me continually
with coaches and chaises; barges as solemn as barons of the exchequer
move under my window; Richmond Hill and Ham-walks bound my prospect;
but, thank God, the Thames is between me and the Duchess of
Queensberry. Dowagers as plenty as flounders inhabit all around, and
Pope's ghost is just now skimming under my window by a most poetical
moonlight. I have about land enough to keep such a farm as Noah's
when he set up in the Ark with a pair of each kind.
It is in the spirit of a child throwing its whole imagination into
playing with a Noah's Ark that he describes his queer house. It is
in this spirit that he sees the fields around his house "speckled
with cows, horses, and sheep." The very phrase suggests toy animals.
Walpole himself declared at the age of seventy-three: "My best wisdom
has consisted in forming a baby-house full of playthings for my second
childhood." That explains why one almost loves the creature. Macaulay
has severely censured him for devoting himself to the collection of
knick-knacks, such as King William III.'s spurs, and it is apparently
impossible to defend Walpole as a collector to be taken seriously.
Walpole, however, collected things in a mood of fantasy as much as
of connoisseurship. He did not take himself quite seriously. It was
fancy, not connoisseurship, that made him hang up Magna Charta beside
his bed and, opposite it, the Warrant for the execution of King
Charles I., on which he had written "Major Charta." Who can question
the fantastic quality of the mind that wrote to Conway: "Remember,
neither Lady Salisbury nor you, nor Mrs. Damer, have seen my new divine
closet, nor the billiard-sticks with which the Countess of Pembroke
and Arcadia used to play with her brother, Sir Philip," and ended: "I
never did see Cotchel, and am sorry. Is not the old wardrobe there
still? There was one from the time of Cain, but Adam's breeches and
Eve's under-petticoat were eaten by a goat in the ark. Good night." He
laughed over the knick-knacks he collected for himself and his friends.
"As to snuff-boxes and tooth-pick cases," he wrote to the Countess of
Ossory from Paris in 1771, "the vintage has entirely failed this year."
Everything that he turned his mind to in Strawberry Hill he regarded
in the same spirit of comic delight. He stood outside himself, like a
spectator, and nothing gave him more pleasure than to figure himself
as a master of the ceremonies among the bantams, and the squirrels and
the goldfish. In one of his letters he describes himself and Bentley
fishing in the pond for goldfish with "nothing but a pail and a basin
and a tea-strainer, which I persuade my neighbours is the Chinese
method." This was in order to capture some of the fish for Bentley, who
"carried a dozen to town t'other day in a decanter."
Among the various creatures with which he loved to surround himself,
it is impossible to forget either the little black spaniel, Tony, that
the wolf carried off near a wood in the Alps during his first travels,
or the more imperious little dog, Tonton, which he has constantly to
prevent from biting people at Madame du Deffand's, but which with
Madame du Deffand herself "grows the greater favourite the more people
he devours." "T'other night," writes Walpole, to whom Madame du Deffand
afterwards bequeathed the dog in her will, "he flew at Lady Barrymore's
face, and I thought would have torn her eye out, but it ended in biting
her finger. She was terrified; she fell into tears. Madame du Deffand,
who has too much parts not to see everything in its true light,
perceiving that she had not beaten Tonton half enough, immediately
told us a story of a lady whose dog having bitten a piece out of a
gentleman's leg, the tender dame, in a great fright, cried out, 'Won't
it make him sick?'" In the most attractive accounts we possess of
Walpole in his old age, we see him seated at the breakfast-table,
drinking tea out of "most rare and precious ancient porcelain of
Japan," and sharing the loaf and butter with Tonton (now grown almost
too fat to move, and spread on a sofa beside him), and afterwards going
to the window with a basin of bread and milk to throw to the squirrels
in the garden.