I must place the author of "The Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors,"
who himself now ornaments that roll, among those who have participated
in the misfortunes of literature.
HORACE WALPOLE was the inheritor of a name the most popular in
Europe;[31] he moved in the higher circles of society; and fortune had
never denied him the ample gratification of his lively tastes in the
elegant arts, and in curious knowledge. These were particular
advantages. But Horace Walpole panted with a secret desire for
literary celebrity; a full sense of his distinguished rank long
suppressed the desire of venturing the name he bore to the uncertain
fame of an author, and the caprice of vulgar critics. At length he
pretended to shun authors, and to slight the honours of authorship.
The cause of this contempt has been attributed to the perpetual
consideration of his rank. But was this bitter contempt of so early a
date? Was Horace Walpole a Socrates before his time? was he born that
prodigy of indifference, to despise the secret object he languished to
possess? His early associates were not only noblemen, but literary
noblemen; and need he have been so petulantly fastidious at bearing
the venerable title of author, when he saw Lyttleton, Chesterfield,
and other peers, proud of wearing the blue riband of literature? No!
it was after he had become an author that he contemned authorship: and
it was not the precocity of his sagacity, but the maturity of his
experience, that made him willing enough to undervalue literary
honours, which were not sufficient to satisfy his desires.
Let us estimate the genius of Horace Walpole by analysing his talents,
and inquiring into the nature of his works.
His taste was highly polished; his vivacity attained to brilliancy;[32]
and his picturesque fancy, easily excited, was soon extinguished; his
playful wit and keen irony were perpetually exercised in his
observations on life, and his memory was stored with the most
amusing knowledge, but much too lively to be accurate; for his
studies were but his sports. But other qualities of genius must
distinguish the great author, and even him who would occupy that
leading rank in the literary republic our author aspired to fill. He
lived too much in that class of society which is little favourable to
genius; he exerted neither profound thinking, nor profound feeling;
and too volatile to attain to the pathetic, that higher quality of
genius, he was so imbued with the petty elegancies of society that
every impression of grandeur in the human character was deadened in
the breast of the polished cynic.
Horace Walpole was not a man of genius,--his most pleasing, if not his
great talent, lay in letter-writing; here he was without a rival;[33]
but he probably divined, when he condescended to become an author,
that something more was required than the talents he exactly
possessed. In his latter days he felt this more sensibly, which will
appear in those confessions which I have extracted from an unpublished
correspondence.
Conscious of possessing the talent which amuses, yet feeling his
deficient energies, he resolved to provide various substitutes for
genius itself; and to acquire reputation, if he could not grasp at
celebrity. He raised a printing-press at his Gothic castle, by which
means he rendered small editions of his works valuable from their
rarity, and much talked of, because seldom seen. That this is true,
appears from the following extract from his unpublished correspondence
with a literary friend. It alludes to his "Anecdotes of Painting in
England," of which the first edition only consisted of 300 copies.
"Of my new fourth volume I printed 600; but, as they can be had, I
believe not a third part is sold. This is a very plain lesson to me,
that my editions sell for their curiosity, and not for any merit in
them--and so they would if I printed Mother Goose's Tales, and but a
few. If I am humbled as an author, I may be vain as a printer; and
when one has nothing else to be vain of, it is certainly very little
worth while to be proud of that."
There is a distinction between the author of great connexions and the
mere author. In the one case, the man may give a temporary existence
to his books; but in the other, it is the book which gives existence
to the man.
Walpole's writings seem to be constructed on a certain principle, by
which he gave them a sudden, rather than a lasting existence. In
historical research our adventurer startled the world by maintaining
paradoxes which attacked the opinions, or changed the characters,
established for centuries. Singularity of opinion, vivacity of
ridicule, and polished epigrams in prose, were the means by which
Horace Walpole sought distinction.
In his works of imagination, he felt he could not trust to himself--the
natural pathetic was utterly denied him. But he had fancy and
ingenuity; he had recourse to the _marvellous_ in imagination on the
principle he had adopted the _paradoxical_ in history. Thus, "The
Castle of Otranto," and "The Mysterious Mother," are the productions
of ingenuity rather than genius; and display the miracles of art,
rather than the spontaneous creations of nature.
All his literary works, like the ornamented edifice he inhabited,
were constructed on the same artificial principle; an old paper
lodging-house, converted by the magician of taste into a Gothic
castle, full of scenic effects.[34]
"A Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors" was itself a classification
which only an idle amateur could have projected, and only the most
agreeable narrator of anecdotes could have seasoned. These splendid
scribblers are for the greater part no authors at all.[35]
His attack on our peerless Sidney, whose fame was more mature than
his life, was formed on the same principle as his "Historic Doubts" on
Richard III. Horace Walpole was as willing to vilify the truly great,
as to beautify deformity; when he imagined that the fame he was
destroying or conferring, reflected back on himself. All these works
were plants of sickly delicacy, which could never endure the open air,
and only lived in the artificial atmosphere of a private collection.
Yet at times the flowers, and the planter of the flowers, were roughly
shaken by an uncivil breeze.
His "Anecdotes of Painting in England" is a most entertaining
catalogue. He gives the feelings of the distinct eras with regard to
the arts; yet his pride was never gratified when he reflected that he
had been writing the work of Vertue, who had collected the materials,
but could not have given the philosophy. His great age and his good
sense opened his eyes on himself; and Horace Walpole seems to have
judged too contemptuously of Horace Walpole. The truth is, he was
mortified he had not and never could obtain a literary peerage; and he
never respected the commoner's seat. At these moments, too frequent in
his life, he contemns authors, and returns to sink back into all the
self-complacency of aristocratic indifference.
This cold unfeeling disposition for literary men, this disguised malice
of envy, and this eternal vexation at his own disappointments,--break
forth in his correspondence with one of those literary characters
with whom he kept on terms while they were kneeling to him in the
humility of worship, or moved about to fetch or to carry his little
quests of curiosity in town or country.[36]