(October 1833)
_Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford, to Sir Horace Mann, British
Envoy at the Court of Tuscany. Now first published from the Originals in
the Possession of the EARL OF WALDEGRAVE. Edited by LORD DOVER 2 vols.
8vo. London: 1833._
WE cannot transcribe this title-page without strong feelings of regret.
The editing of these volumes was the last of the useful and modest
services rendered to literature by a nobleman of amiable manners, of
untarnished public and private character, and of cultivated mind. On
this, as on other occasions, Lord Dover performed his part diligently,
judiciously, and without the slightest ostentation. He had two merits
which are rarely found together in a commentator, he was content to
be merely a commentator, to keep in the background, and to leave the
foreground to the author whom he had undertaken to illustrate. Yet,
though willing to be an attendant, he was by no means a slave; nor did
he consider it as part of his duty to see no faults in the writer
to whom he faithfully and assiduously rendered the humblest literary
offices.
The faults of Horace Walpole’s head and heart are indeed sufficiently
glaring. His writings, it is true, rank as high among the delicacies of
intellectual epicures as the Strasburg pies among the dishes described
in the Almanach des Gourmands. But as the pate-de-foie-gras owes its
excellence to the diseases of the wretched animal which furnishes
it, and would be good for nothing if it were not made of livers
preternaturally swollen, so none but an unhealthy and disorganised mind
could have produced such literary luxuries as the works of Walpole.
He was, unless we have formed a very erroneous judgment of his
character, the most eccentric, the most artificial, the most fastidious,
the most capricious of men. His mind was a bundle of inconsistent whims
and affectations. His features were covered by mask within mask. When
the outer disguise of obvious affectation was removed, you were still
as far as ever from seeing the real man. He played innumerable parts and
over-acted them all. When he talked misanthropy, he out-Timoned Timon.
When he talked philanthropy, he left Howard at an immeasurable distance.
He scoffed at courts, and kept a chronicle of their most trifling
scandal; at society, and was blown about by its slightest veerings of
opinion; at literary fame, and left fair copies of his private letters,
with copious notes, to be published after his decease; at rank, and
never for a moment forgot that he was an Honourable; at the practice of
entail, and tasked the ingenuity of conveyancers to tie up his villa in
the strictest settlement.
The conformation of his mind was such that whatever was little seemed to
him great, and whatever was great seemed to him little. Serious business
was a trifle to him, and trifles were his serious business. To chat with
blue-stockings, to write little copies of complimentary verses on little
occasions, to superintend a private press, to preserve from natural
decay the perishable topics of Ranelagh and White’s, to record divorces
and bets, Miss Chudleigh’s absurdities and George Selwyn’s good sayings,
to decorate a grotesque house with pie-crust battlements, to procure
rare engravings and antique chimney-boards, to match odd gauntlets,
to lay out a maze of walks within five acres of ground, these were the
grave employments of his long life. From these he turned to politics
as to an amusement. After the labours of the print-shop and the
auction-room, he unbent his mind in the House of Commons. And, having
indulged in the recreation of making laws and voting millions, he
returned to more important pursuits, to researches after Queen Mary’s
comb, Wolsey’s red hat, the pipe which Van Tromp smoked during his last
sea-fight, and the spur which King William struck into the flank of
Sorrel.
In everything in which Walpole busied himself, in the fine arts, in
literature, in public affairs, he was drawn by some strange attraction
from the great to the little, and from the useful to the odd. The
politics in which he took the keenest interests, were politics
scarcely deserving of the name. The growlings of George the Second, the
flirtations of Princess Emily with the Duke of Grafton, the amours of
Prince Frederic and Lady Middlesex, the squabbles between Gold Stick in
waiting and the Master of the Buckhounds, the disagreements between the
tutors of Prince George, these matters engaged almost all the attention
which Walpole could spare from matters more important still, from
bidding for Zinckes and Petitots, from cheapening fragments of tapestry
and handles of old lances, from joining bits of painted glass, and from
setting up memorials of departed cats and dogs. While he was fetching
and carrying the gossip of Kensington Palace and Carlton House, he
fancied that he was engaged in politics, and when he recorded that
gossip, he fancied that he was writing history.
He was, as he has himself told us, fond of faction as an amusement. He
loved mischief: but he loved quiet; and he was constantly on the watch
for opportunities of gratifying both his tastes at once. He sometimes
contrived, without showing himself, to disturb the course of ministerial
negotiations, and to spread confusion through the political circles. He
does not himself pretend that, on these occasions, he was actuated by
public spirit; nor does he appear to have had any private advantage in
view. He thought it a good practical joke to set public men together
by the ears; and he enjoyed their perplexities, their accusations, and
their recriminations, as a malicious boy enjoys the embarrassment of a
misdirected traveller.
About politics, in the high sense of the word, he knew nothing, and
cared nothing. He called himself a Whig. His father’s son could scarcely
assume any other name. It pleased him also to affect a foolish dislike
of kings as kings, and a foolish love and admiration of rebels as
rebels; and perhaps, while kings were not in danger, and while rebels
were not in being, he really believed that he held the doctrines which
he professed. To go no further than the letters now before us, he is
perpetually boasting to his friend Mann of his aversion to royalty
and to royal persons. He calls the crime of Damien “that least bad of
murders, the murder of a king.” He hung up in his villa an engraving of
the death-warrant of Charles, with the inscription “Major Charta.” Yet
the most superficial knowledge of history might have taught him that the
Restoration, and the crimes and follies of the twenty-eight years which
followed the Restoration, were the effects of this Greater Charter. Nor
was there much in the means by which that instrument was obtained that
could gratify a judicious lover of liberty. A man must hate kings very
bitterly, before he can think it desirable that the representatives of
the people should be turned out of doors by dragoons, in order to get at
a king’s head. Walpole’s Whiggism, however, was of a very harmless kind.
He kept it, as he kept the old spears and helmets at Strawberry Hill,
merely for show. He would just as soon have thought of taking down the
arms of the ancient Templars and Hospitallers from the walls of his
hall, and setting off on a crusade to the Holy Land, as of acting in
the spirit of those daring warriors and statesmen, great even in their
errors, whose names and seals were affixed to the warrant which he
prized so highly. He liked revolution and regicide only when they were
a hundred years old. His republicanism, like the courage of a bully, or
the love of a fribble, was strong and ardent when there was no occasion
for it, and subsided when he had an opportunity of bringing it to the
proof. As soon as the revolutionary spirit really began to stir in
Europe, as soon as the hatred of kings became something more than a
sonorous phrase, he was frightened into a fanatical royalist, and became
one of the most extravagant alarmists of those wretched times. In
truth, his talk about liberty, whether he knew it or not, was from the
beginning a mere cant, the remains of a phraseology which had meant
something in the mouths of those from whom he had learned it, but which,
in his mouth, meant about as much as the oath by which the Knights of
some modern orders bind themselves to redress the wrongs of all injured
ladies. He had been fed in his boyhood with Whig speculations on
government. He must often have seen, at Houghton or in Downing Street,
men who had been Whigs when it was as dangerous to be a Whig as to be
a highwayman, men who had voted for the Exclusion Bill, who had been
concealed in garrets and cellars after the battle of Sedgemoor, and who
had set their names to the declaration that they would live and die with
the Prince of Orange. He had acquired the language of these men, and he
repeated it by rote, though it was at variance with all his tastes and
feelings; just as some old Jacobite families persisted in praying for
the Pretender, and in passing their glasses over the water decanter
when they drank the King’s health, long after they had become loyal
supporters of the government of George the Third. He was a Whig by the
accident of hereditary connection; but he was essentially a courtier;
and not the less a courtier because he pretended to sneer at the objects
which excited his admiration and envy. His real tastes perpetually show
themselves through the thin disguise. While professing all the contempt
of Bradshaw or Ludlow for crowned heads, he took the trouble to write a
book concerning Royal Authors. He pryed with the utmost anxiety into
the most minute particulars relating to the Royal family. When, he was
a child, he was haunted with a longing to see George the First, and
gave his mother no peace till she had found a way of gratifying his
curiosity. The same feeling, covered with a thousand disguises, attended
him to the grave. No observation that dropped from the lips of Majesty
seemed to him too trifling to be recorded. The French songs of Prince
Frederic, compositions certainly not deserving of preservation on
account of their intrinsic merit, have been carefully preserved for us
by this contemner of royalty. In truth, every page of Walpole’s works
betrays him. This Diogenes, who would be thought to prefer his tub to
a palace, and who has nothing to ask of the masters of Windsor
and Versailles but that they will stand out of his light, is a
gentleman-usher at heart.
He had, it is plain, an uneasy consciousness of the frivolity of his
favourite pursuits; and this consciousness produced one of the most
diverting of his ten thousand affectations. His busy idleness, his
indifference to matters which the world generally regards as important,
his passion for trifles, he thought fit to dignify with the name of
philosophy. He spoke of himself as of a man whose equanimity was proof
to ambitious hopes and fears, who had learned to rate power, wealth, and
fame at their true value, and whom the conflict of parties, the rise and
fall of statesmen, the ebb and flow of public opinion, moved only to a
smile of mingled compassion and disdain. It was owing to the peculiar
elevation of his character that he cared about a pinnacle of lath and
plaster more than about the Middlesex election, and about a miniature of
Grammont more than about the American Revolution. Pitt and Murray might
talk themselves hoarse about trifles. But questions of government
and war were too insignificant to detain a mind which was occupied in
recording the scandal of club-rooms and the whispers of the back-stairs,
and which was even capable of selecting and disposing chairs of ebony
and shields of rhinoceros-skin.
One of his innumerable whims was an extreme unwillingness to be
considered a man of letters. Not that he was indifferent to literary
fame. Far from it. Scarcely any writer has ever troubled himself so much
about the appearance which his works were to make before posterity.
But he had set his heart on incompatible objects. He wished to be a
celebrated author, and yet to be a mere idle gentleman, one of those
Epicurean gods of the earth who do nothing at all, and who pass their
existence in the contemplation of their own perfections. He did not like
to have anything in common with the wretches who lodged in the little
courts behind St. Martin’s Church, and stole out on Sundays to dine
with their bookseller. He avoided the society of authors. He spoke with
lordly contempt of the most distinguished among them. He tried to find
out some way of writing books, as M. Jourdain’s father sold cloth,
without derogating from his character of Gentilhomme. “Lui, marchand?
C’est pure médisance: il ne l’a jamais été. Tout ce qu’il faisait, c’est
qu’il était fort obligeant, fort officieux; et comme il se connaissait
fort bien en étoffes, il en allait choisir de tons les cotes, les
faisait apporter chez lui, et en donnait a ses amis pour de l’argent.”
There are several amusing instances of Walpole’s feeling on this subject
in the letters now before us. Mann had complimented him on the learning
which appeared in the Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors; and it is
curious to see how impatiently Walpole bore the imputation of having
attended to anything so unfashionable as the improvement of his mind.
“I know nothing. How should I? I who have always lived in the big busy
world; who lie a-bed all the morning, calling it morning as long as you
please; who sup in company; who have played at faro half my life, and
now at loo till two and three in the morning; who have always loved
pleasure; haunted auctions.... How I have laughed when some of the
Magazines have called me the learned gentleman. Pray don’t be like the
Magazines.” This folly might be pardoned in a boy. But a man between
forty and fifty years old, as Walpole then was, ought to be quite as
much ashamed of playing at loo till three every morning as of being that
vulgar thing, a learned gentleman.
The literary character has undoubtedly its full share of faults, and of
very serious and offensive faults. If Walpole had avoided those faults,
we could have pardoned the fastidiousness with which he declined all
fellowship with men of learning. But from those faults Walpole was not
one jot more free than the garreteers from whose contact he shrank. Of
literary meannesses and literary vices, his life and his works contain
as many instances as the life and the works of any member of Johnson’s
club. The fact is, that Walpole had the faults of Grub Street, with a
large addition from St. James’s Street, the vanity, the jealousy, and
the irritability of a man of letters, the affected superciliousness and
apathy of a man of ton.
His judgment of literature, of contemporary literature especially, was
altogether perverted by his aristocratical feelings. No writer surely
was ever guilty of so much false and absurd criticism. He almost
invariably speaks with contempt of those books which are now universally
allowed to be the best that appeared in his time; and, on the other
hand, he speaks of writers of rank and fashion as if they were entitled
to the same precedence in literature which would have been allowed to
them in a drawing-room. In these letters, for example, he says that he
would rather have written the most absurd lines in Lee than Thomson’s
Seasons. The periodical paper called The World, on the other hand, was
by “our first writers.” Who, then, were the first writers of England in
the year 1750? Walpole has told us in a note. Our readers will probably
guess that Hume, Fielding, Smollett, Richardson, Johnson, Warburton,
Collins, Akenside, Gray, Dyer, Young, Warton, Mason, or some of those
distinguished men, were in the list. Not one of them. Our first writers,
it seems, were Lord Chesterfield, Lord Bath, Mr. W. Whithed, Sir Charles
Williams, Mr. Soame Jenyns, Mr. Cambridge, Mr. Coventry. Of these
seven personages, Whithed was the lowest in station, but was the most
accomplished tuft-hunter of his time. Coventry was of a noble family.
The other five had among them two seats in the House of Lords, two seats
in the House of Commons, three seats in the Privy Council, a baronetcy,
a blue riband, a red riband, about a hundred thousand pounds a year,
and not ten pages that are worth reading. The writings of Whithed,
Cambridge, Coventry, and Lord Bath are forgotten. Soame Jenyns is
remembered chiefly by Johnson’s review of the foolish Essay on the
Origin of Evil. Lord Chesterfield stands much lower in the estimation
of posterity than he would have done if his letters had never been
published. The lampoons of Sir Charles Williams are now read only by the
curious, and, though not without occasional flashes of wit, have always
seemed to us, we must own, very poor performances.
Walpole judged of French literature after the same fashion. He
understood and loved the French language. Indeed, he loved it too well.
His style is more deeply tainted with Gallicism than that of any other
English writer with whom we are acquainted. His composition often reads,
for a page together, like a rude translation from the French. We meet
every minute with such sentences as these, “One knows what temperaments
Annibal Caracci painted.” “The impertinent personage!” “She is dead
rich.” “Lord Dalkeith is dead of the small-pox in three days.” “It will
now be seen whether he or they are most patriot.”
His love of the French language was of a peculiar kind. He loved it
as having been for a century the vehicle of all the polite nothings of
Europe, as the sign by which the freemasons of fashion recognised each
other in every capital from Petersburgh to Naples, as the language of
raillery, as the language of anecdote, as the language of memoirs,
as the language of correspondence. Its higher uses he altogether
disregarded. The literature of France has been to ours what Aaron was to
Moses, the expositor of great truths which would else have perished
for want of a voice to utter them with distinctness. The relation which
existed between Mr. Bentham and M. Dumont is an exact illustration
of the intellectual relation in which the two countries stand to each
other. The great discoveries in physics, in metaphysics, in political
science, are ours. But scarcely any foreign nation except France
has received them from us by direct communication. Isolated by our
situation, isolated by our manners, we found truth, but we did not
impart it. France has been the interpreter between England and mankind.
In the time of Walpole, this process of interpretation was in full
activity. The great French writers were busy in proclaiming through
Europe the names of Bacon, of Newton, and of Locke. The English
principles of toleration, the English respect for personal liberty, the
English doctrine that all power is a trust for the public good,
were making rapid progress. There is scarcely anything in history
so interesting as that great stirring up of the mind of France, that
shaking of the foundations of all established opinions, that uprooting
of old truth and old error. It was plain that mighty principles were at
work whether for evil or for good. It was plain that a great change
in the whole social system was at hand. Fanatics of one kind might
anticipate a golden age, in which men should live under the simple
dominion of reason, in perfect equality and perfect amity, without
property, or marriage, or king, or God. A fanatic of another kind
might see nothing in the doctrines of the philosophers but anarchy and
atheism, might cling more closely to every old abuse, and might regret
the good old days when St. Dominic and Simon de Montfort put down the
growing heresies of Provence. A wise man would have seen with regret the
excesses into which the reformers were running; but he would have
done justice to their genius and to their philanthropy. He would have
censured their errors; but he would have remembered that, as Milton
has said, error is but opinion in the making. While he condemned their
hostility to religion, he would have acknowledged that it was the
natural effect of a system under which religion had been constantly
exhibited to them in forms which common sense rejected and at which
humanity shuddered. While he condemned some of their political doctrines
as incompatible with all law, all property, and all civilisation, he
would have acknowledged that the subjects of Lewis the Fifteenth had
every excuse which men could have for being eager to pull down, and for
being ignorant of the far higher art of setting up. While anticipating a
fierce conflict, a great and wide-wasting destruction, he would yet have
looked forward to the final close with a good hope for France and for
mankind.
Walpole had neither hopes nor fears. Though the most Frenchified English
writer of the eighteenth century, he troubled himself little about the
portents which were daily to be discerned in the French literature
of his time. While the most eminent Frenchmen were studying with
enthusiastic delight English politics and English philosophy, he was
studying as intently the gossip of the old court of France. The fashions
and scandal of Versailles and Marli, fashions and scandal a hundred
years old, occupied him infinitely more than a great moral revolution
which was taking place in his sight. He took a prodigious interest in
every noble sharper whose vast volume of wig and infinite length of
riband had figured at the dressing or at the tucking up of Lewis the
Fourteenth, and of every profligate woman of quality who had carried her
train of lovers backward and forward from king to parliament, and from
parliament to king, during the wars of the Fronde. These were the people
of whom he treasured up the smallest memorial, of whom he loved to hear
the most trifling anecdote, and for whose likenesses he would have given
any price. Of the great French writers of his own time, Montesquieu is
the only one of whom he speaks with enthusiasm. And even of Montesquieu
he speaks with less enthusiasm than of that abject thing, Crebillon the
younger, a scribbler as licentious as Louvet and as dull as Rapin. A man
must be strangely constituted who can take interest in pedantic journals
of the blockades laid by the Duke of A. to the hearts of the Marquise
de B. and the Comtesse de C. This trash Walpole extols in language
sufficiently high for the merits of Don Quixote. He wished to possess a
likeness of Crebillon; and Liotard, the first painter of miniatures then
living, was employed to preserve the features of the profligate dunce.
The admirer of the Sopha and of the Lettres Atheniennes had little
respect to spare for the men who were then at the head of French
literature. He kept carefully out of their way. He tried to keep other
people from paying them any attention. He could not deny that Voltaire
and Rousseau were clever men; but he took every opportunity of
depreciating them. Of D’Alembert he spoke with a contempt which, when
the intellectual powers of the two men are compared, seems exquisitely
ridiculous. D’Alembert complained that he was accused of having written
Walpole’s squib against Rousseau. “I hope,” says Walpole, “that nobody
will attribute D’Alembert’s works to me.” He was in little danger.
It is impossible to deny, however, that Walpole’s writings have real
merit, and merit of a very rare, though not of a very high kind. Sir
Joshua Reynolds used to say that, though nobody would for a moment
compare Claude to Raphael, there would be another Raphael before there
was another Claude. And we own that we expect to see fresh Humes and
fresh Burkes before we again fall in with that peculiar combination of
moral and intellectual qualities to which the writings of Walpole owe
their extraordinary popularity.
It is easy to describe him by negatives. He had not a creative
imagination. He had not a pure taste. He was not a great reasoner. There
is indeed scarcely any writer in whose works it would be possible to
find so many contradictory judgments, so many sentences of extravagant
nonsense. Nor was it only in his familiar correspondence that he wrote
in this flighty and inconsistent manner, but in long and elaborate
books, in books repeatedly transcribed and intended for the public eye.
We will give an instance or two; for without instances readers not very
familiar with his works will scarcely understand our meaning. In the
Anecdotes of Painting, he states, very truly, that the art declined
after the commencement of the civil wars. He proceeds to inquire why
this happened. The explanation, we should have thought, would have been
easily found. He might have mentioned the loss of a king who was the
most munificent and judicious patron that the fine arts have ever had in
England, the troubled state of the country, the distressed condition of
many of the aristocracy, perhaps also the austerity of the victorious
party. These circumstances, we conceive, fully account for the
phaenomenon. But this solution was not odd enough to satisfy Walpole. He
discovers another cause for the decline of the art, the want of models.
Nothing worth painting, it seems, was left to paint. “How picturesque,”
he exclaims, “was the figure of an Anabaptist!”--as if puritanism had
put out the sun and withered the trees; as if the civil wars had blotted
out the expression of character and passion from the human lip and brow;
as if many of the men whom Vandyke painted had not been living in the
time of the Commonwealth, with faces little the worse for wear; as if
many of the beauties afterwards portrayed by Lely were not in their
prime before the Restoration; as if the garb or the features of Cromwell
and Milton were less picturesque than those of the round-faced peers,
as like each other as eggs to eggs, who look out from the middle of the
periwigs of Kneller. In the Memoirs, again, Walpole sneers at the Prince
of Wales, afterwards George the Third, for presenting a collection of
books to one of the American colleges during the Seven Years’ War, and
says that, instead of books, his Royal Highness ought to have sent
arms and ammunition, as if a war ought to suspend all study and all
education; or as if it were the business of the Prince of Wales to
supply the colonies with military stores out of his own pocket. We have
perhaps dwelt too long on these passages; but we have done so because
they are specimens of Walpole’s manner. Everybody who reads his
works with attention will find that they swarm with loose and foolish
observations like those which we have cited; observations which might
pass in conversation or in a hasty letter, but which are unpardonable in
books deliberately written and repeatedly corrected.
He appears to have thought that he saw very far into men; but we are
under the necessity of altogether dissenting from his opinion. We do
not conceive that he had any power of discerning the finer shades of
character. He practised an art, however, which, though easy and even
vulgar, obtains for those who practise it the reputation of discernment
with ninety-nine people out of a hundred. He sneered at everybody, put
on every action the worst construction which it would bear, “spelt every
man backward,” to borrow the Lady Hero’s phrase,
“Turned every man the wrong side out,