eighteenth century, is simply a synonym for the works of Horace Walpole.
There are, indeed, some other books upon the subject. Some good stories
are scattered up and down the 'Annual Register,' the 'Gentleman's
Magazine,' and Nichols' 'Anecdotes.' There is a speech or two of Burke's
not without merit, and a readable letter may be disinterred every now
and then from beneath the piles of contemporary correspondence. When the
history of the times comes to be finally written in the fashion now
prevalent, in which some six portly octavos are allotted to a year, and
an event takes longer to describe than to occur, the industrious will
find ample mines of waste paper in which they may quarry to their
heart's content. Though Hansard was not, and newspapers were in their
infancy, the shelves of the British Museum and other repositories groan
beneath mountains of State papers, law reports, pamphlets, and chaotic
raw materials, from which some precious ore may be smelted down. But
these amorphous masses are attractive chiefly to the philosophers who
are too profound to care for individual character, or to those
praiseworthy students who would think the labour of a year well rewarded
by the discovery of a single fact tending to throw a shade of additional
perplexity upon the secret of Junius. Walpole's writings belong to the
good old-fashioned type of history, which aspires to be nothing more
than the quintessence of contemporary gossip. If the opinion be
pardonable in these days, history of that kind has not only its charm,
but its serious value. If not very profound or comprehensive, it
impresses upon us the fact--so often forgotten--that our grandfathers
were human beings. The ordinary historian reduces them to mere
mechanical mummies; in Walpole's pages they are still living flesh and
blood. Turn over any of the proper decorous history books, mark every
passage where, for a moment, we seem to be transported to the past--to
the thunders of Chatham, the drivellings of Newcastle, or the prosings
of George Grenville, as they sounded in contemporary ears--and it will
be safe to say that, on counting them up, a good half will turn out to
be reflections from the illuminating flashes of Walpole. Excise all that
comes from him, and the history sinks towards the level of the solid
Archdeacon Coxe; add his keen touches, and, as in the 'Castle of
Otranto,' the portraits of our respectable old ancestors, which have
been hanging in gloomy repose upon the wall, suddenly step from their
frames, and, for some brief space, assume a spectral vitality.
It is only according to rule that a writer who has been so useful should
have been a good deal abused. No one is so amusing and so generally
unpopular as a clever retailer of gossip. Yet it does seem rather hard
that Walpole should have received such hard measure from Macaulay,
through whose pages so much of his light has been transfused. The
explanation, perhaps, is easy. Macaulay dearly loved the paradox that a
man wrote admirably precisely because he was a fool, and applied it to
the two greatest portrait painters of the times--Walpole and Boswell.
There is something which hurts our best feelings in the success of a
man whom we heartily despise. It seems to imply, which is intolerable,
that our penetration has been at fault, or that merit--that is to say,
our own conspicuous quality--is liable to be out-stripped in this world
by imposture. It is consoling if we can wrap ourselves in the belief
that good work can be extracted from bad brains, and that shallowness,
affectation, and levity can, by some strange chemistry, be transmuted
into a substitute for genius. Do we not all, if we have reached middle
age, remember some idiot (of course he was an idiot!) at school or
college who has somehow managed to slip past us in the race of life, and
revenge ourselves by swearing that he is an idiot still, and that idiocy
is a qualification for good fortune? Swift somewhere says that a
paper-cutter does its work all the better when it is blunt, and converts
the fact into an allegory of human affairs showing that decorous dulness
is an over-match for genius. Macaulay was incapable, both in a good and
bad sense, of Swift's trenchant misanthropy. His dislike to Walpole was
founded not so such upon posthumous jealousy--though that passion is not
so rare as absurd--as on the singular contrast between the character and
intellect of the two men. The typical Englishman, with his rough, strong
sense, passing at times into the narrowest insular prejudice, detested
the Frenchified fine gentleman who minced his mother tongue and piqued
himself on cosmopolitan indifference to patriotic sentiment: the
ambitious historian was irritated by the contempt which the dilettante
dabbler in literature affected for their common art; and the
thoroughgoing Whig was scandalised by the man who, whilst claiming that
sacred name, and living face to face with Chatham and Burke and the
great Revolution families in all their glory, ventured to intimate his
opinion that they, like other idols, had a fair share of clay and
rubbish in their composition, and who, after professing a kind of sham
republicanism, was frightened by the French Revolution into a paroxysm
of ultra-Toryism. 'You wretched fribble!' exclaims Macaulay; 'you
shallow scorner of all that is noble! You are nothing but a heap of
silly whims and conceited airs! Strip off one mask of affectation from
your mind, and we are still as far as ever from the real man. The very
highest faculty that can be conceded to you is a keen eye for oddities,
whether in old curiosity shops or in Parliament; and to that you owe
whatever just reputation you have acquired.' Macaulay's fervour of
rebuke is amusing, though, by righteous Nemesis, it includes a species
of blindness as gross as any that he attributes to Walpole. The summary
decision that the chief use of France is to interpret England to Europe,
is a typical example of that insular arrogance for which Matthew Arnold
popularised the name of Philistinism.
Yet criticism of this one-sided kind has its value. At least it suggests
a problem. What is the element left out of account? Folly is never the
real secret of a literary reputation, or what noble harvests of genius
we should produce! If we patiently take off all the masks we must come
at last to the animating principle beneath. Even the great clothes
philosophers did not hold that a mere Chinese puzzle of mask within mask
could enclose sheer vacancy; there must be some kernel within, which may
be discovered by sufficient patience. And in the first place, it may be
asked, why did poor Walpole wear a mask at all? The answer seems to be
obvious. The men of that age may be divided by a line which, to the
philosophic eye, is of far more importance than that which separated
Jacobites from loyal Whigs or Dissenters from High Churchmen. It
separated the men who could drink two bottles of port after dinner from
the men who could not. To men of delicate digestions the test imposed by
the jovial party in ascendency must have been severer than those due to
political or ecclesiastical bigotry. They had to choose between social
disabilities on the one side, and on the other indigestion for
themselves and gout for their descendants. Thackeray, in a truly
pathetic passage, partly draws the veil from their sufferings. Almost
all the wits of Queen Anne's reign, he observes, were fat: 'Swift was
fat; Addison was fat; Gay and Thomson were preposterously fat; all that
fuddling and punch-drinking, that club and coffee-house boosing,
shortened the lives and enlarged the waistcoats of men of that age.'
Think of the dinner described, though with intentional exaggeration, in
Swift's 'Polite Conversation,' and compare the bill of fare with the
_menu_ of a modern London dinner. The very report of such
conviviality--before which Christopher North's performances in the
'Noctes Ambrosianæ' sink into insignificance--is enough to produce
nightmares in the men of our degenerate times, and may help us to
understand the peevishness of feeble invalids such as Pope and Lord
Hervey in the elder generation, or Walpole in that which was rising.
Amongst these Gargantuan consumers, who combined in one the attributes
of 'gorging Jack and guzzling Jemmy,' Sir Robert Walpole was celebrated
for his powers, and seems to have owed to them no small share of his
popularity. Horace writes piteously from the paternal mansion, to which
he had returned in 1743, not long after his tour in Italy, to one of his
artistic friends: 'Only imagine,' he exclaims, 'that I here every day
see men who are mountains of roast beef, and only seem just roughly
hewn out into outlines of human form, like the giant rock at Pratolino!
I shudder when I see them brandish their knives in act to carve, and
look on them as savages that devour one another. I should not stare at
all more than I do if yonder alderman at the lower end of the table were
to stick his fork into his neighbour's jolly cheek, and cut a brave
slice of brown and fat. Why, I'll swear I see no difference between a
country gentleman and a sirloin; whenever the first laughs or the second
is cut, there run out just the same streams of gravy! Indeed, the
sirloin does not ask quite so many questions.' What was the style of
conversation at these tremendous entertainments had better be left to
the imagination. Sir R. Walpole's theory on that subject is upon record;
and we can dimly guess at the feelings of a delicate young gentleman who
had just learnt to talk about Domenichinos and Guidos, and to buy
ancient bronzes, when plunged into the coarse society of these mountains
of roast beef. As he grew up manners became a trifle more refined, and
the customs described so faithfully by Fielding and Smollett belonged to
a lower social stratum. Yet we can fancy Walpole's occasional visit to
his constituents, and imagine him forced to preside at one of those
election feasts which still survive on Hogarth's canvas. Substitute him
for the luckless fine gentleman in a laced coat, who represents the
successful candidate in the first picture of the series. A drunken voter
is dropping lighted pipe ashes upon his wig; a hideous old hag is
picking his pockets; a boy is brewing oceans of punch in a mash-tub; a
man is blowing bagpipes in his ear; a fat parson close by is gorging the
remains of a haunch of venison; a butcher is pouring gin on his
neighbour's broken head; an alderman--a very mountain of roast beef--is
sinking back in a fit, whilst a barber is trying to bleed him; brickbats
are flying in at the windows; the room reeks with the stale smell of
heavy viands and the fresh vapours of punch and gin, whilst the very air
is laden with discordant howls and thick with oaths and ribald songs.
Only think of the smart young candidate's headache next morning in the
days when soda-water was not invented! And remember too that the
representatives were not entirely free from sympathy with the coarseness
of their constituents. Just at the period of Hogarth's painting,
Walpole, when speaking of the feeling excited by a Westminster election,
has occasion to use this pleasing 'new fashionable proverb'--'We spit in
his hat on Thursday, and wiped it off on Friday.' It owed its origin to
a feat performed by Lord Cobham at an assembly given at his own house.
For a bet of a guinea he came behind Lord Hervey, who was talking to
some ladies, and made use of his hat as a spittoon. The point of the
joke was that Lord Hervey--son of Pope's 'mere white curd of asses'
milk,' and related, as the scandal went, rather too closely to Horace
Walpole himself--was a person of effeminate appearance, and therefore
considered unlikely--wrongly, as it turned out--to resent the insult. We
may charitably hope that the assailants, who thus practically
exemplified the proper mode of treating milksops, were drunk. The
two-bottle men who lingered till our day were surviving relics of the
type which then gave the tone to society. Within a short period there
was a prime minister who always consoled himself under defeats and
celebrated triumphs with his bottle; a chancellor who abolished evening
sittings on the ground that he was always drunk in the evening; and even
an archbishop--an Irish archbishop, it is true--whose jovial habits
broke down his constitution. Scratch those jovial toping aristocrats,
and you everywhere find the Squire Western. A man of squeamish tastes
and excessive sensibility jostled amongst that thick-skinned,
iron-nerved generation, was in a position with which anyone may
sympathise who knows the sufferings of a delicate lad at a public school
in the old (and not so very old) brutal days. The victim of that tyranny
slunk away from the rough horseplay of his companions to muse, like
Dobbin, over the 'Arabian Nights' in a corner, or find some amusement
which his tormentors held to be only fit for girls. So Horace Walpole
retired to Strawberry Hill and made toys of Gothic architecture, or
heraldry, or dilettante antiquarianism. The great discovery had not then
been made, we must remember, that excellence in field-sports deserved to
be placed on a level with the Christian virtues. The fine gentlemen of
the Chesterfield era speak of fox-hunting pretty much as we speak of
prize-fighting and bull-baiting. When all manly exercises had an
inseparable taint of coarseness, delicate people naturally mistook
effeminacy for refinement. When you can only join in male society on
pain of drinking yourself under the table, the safest plan is to retire
to tea-tables and small talk. For many years, Walpole's greatest
pleasure seems to have been drinking tea with Lady Suffolk, and
carefully piecing together bits of scandal about the Courts of the first
two Georges. He tells us, with all the triumph of a philosopher
describing a brilliant scientific induction, how he was sometimes able,
by adding his bits of gossip to hers, to unravel the secret of some
wretched intrigue which had puzzled two generations of quidnuncs. The
social triumphs on which he most piqued himself were of a congenial
order. He sits down to write elaborate letters to Sir Horace Mann, at
Florence, brimming over with irrepressible triumph when he has
persuaded some titled ladies to visit his pet toy, the printing-press,
at Strawberry Hill, and there, of course to their unspeakable surprise,
his printer draws off a copy of verses composed in their honour in the
most faded style of old-fashioned gallantry. He is intoxicated by his
appointment to act as poet-laureate on the occasion of a visit of the
Princess Amelia to Stowe. She is solemnly conducted to a temple of the
Muses and Apollo, and there finds one of his admirable effusions,--
T'other day with a beautiful frown on her brow,
To the rest of the gods said the Venus of Stowe:
and so on. 'She was really in Elysium,' he declares, and visited the
arch erected in her honour three or four times a day.