squires laughed horse-laughs at this mincing dandy, and tried in their
clumsy fashion to avenge themselves for the sarcasms which, as they
instinctively felt, lay hid beneath this mask of affectation. The enmity
between the lapdog and the mastiff is an old story. Nor, as we must
confess again, were these tastes redeemed by very amiable qualities
beneath the smooth external surface. There was plenty of feminine spite
as well as feminine delicacy. To the marked fear of ridicule natural to
a sensitive man Walpole joined a very happy knack of quarrelling. He
could protrude a feline set of claws from his velvet glove. He was a
touchy companion and an intolerable superior. He set out by quarrelling
with Gray, who, as it seems, could not stand his dandified airs of
social impertinence, though it must be added in fairness that the bond
which unites fellow travellers is, perhaps, the most trying known to
humanity. He quarrelled with Mason after twelve years of intimate
correspondence; he quarrelled with Montagu after a friendship of some
forty years; he always thought that his dependants, such as Bentley,
were angels for six months, and made their lives a burden to them
afterwards; he had a long and complex series of quarrels with all his
near relations. Sir Horace Mann escaped any quarrel during forty-five
years of correspondence; but Sir Horace never left Florence and Walpole
never reached it. Conway alone remained intimate and immaculate to the
end, though there is a bitter remark or two in the Memoirs against the
perfect Conway. With ladies, indeed, Walpole succeeded better; and
perhaps we may accept, with due allowance for the artist's point of
view, his own portrait of himself. He pronounces himself to be a
'boundless friend, a bitter but placable enemy.' Making the necessary
corrections, we should translate this into 'a bitter enemy, a warm but
irritable friend.' Tread on his toes, and he would let you feel his
claws, though you were his oldest friend; but so long as you avoided his
numerous tender points, he showed a genuine capacity for kindliness and
even affection; and in his later years he mellowed down into an amiable
purring old gentleman, responding with eager gratitude to the caresses
of the charming Miss Berrys. Such a man, skinless and bilious, was ill
qualified to join in the rough game of politics. He kept out of the
arena where the hardest blows were given and taken, and confined his
activity to lobbies and backstairs, where scandal was to be gathered and
the hidden wires of intrigue to be delicately manipulated. He chuckles
irrepressibly when he has confided a secret to a friend, who has let it
out to a minister, who communicates it to a great personage, who
explodes into inextinguishable wrath, and blows a whole elaborate plot
into a thousand fragments. To expect deep and settled political
principle from such a man would be to look for grapes from thorns and
figs from thistles; but to do Walpole justice, we must add that it would
be equally absurd to exact settled principle from any politician of that
age. We are beginning to regard our ancestors with a strange mixture of
contempt and envy. We despise them because they cared nothing for the
thoughts which for the last century have been upheaving society into
strange convulsions; we envy them because they enjoyed the delicious
calm which was the product of that indifference. Wearied by the
incessant tossing and boiling of the torrent which carries us away, we
look back with fond regret to the little backwater so far above Niagara,
where scarcely a ripple marks the approaching rapids. There is a charm
in the great solid old eighteenth-century mansions, which London is so
rapidly engulfing, and even about the old red brick churches with
'sleep-compelling' pews. We take imaginary naps amongst our grandfathers
with no railways, no telegraphs, no mobs in Trafalgar Square, no
discussions about ritualism or Dr. Colenso, and no reports of
parliamentary debates. It is to our fancies an 'island valley of
Avilion,' or, less magniloquently, a pleasant land of Cockaine, where we
may sleep away the disturbance of battle, and even read through
'Clarissa Harlow.' We could put up with an occasional highwayman in Hyde
Park, and perhaps do not think that our comfort would be seriously
disturbed by a dozen executions in a morning at Tyburn. In such
visionary glances through the centuries we have always the advantage of
selecting our own position in life, and perhaps there are few that for
such purposes we should prefer to Walpole's. We should lap ourselves
against eating cares in the warm folds of a sinecure of 6,000_l._ a year
bestowed because our father was a Prime Minister. There are many
immaculate persons at the present day to whom truth would be truth even
when seen through such a medium. There are--we have their own authority
for believing it--men who would be republicans, though their niece was
married to a royal duke. Walpole, we must admit, was not of the number.
He was an aristocrat to the backbone. He was a gossip by nature and
education, and had lived from infancy in the sacred atmosphere of court
intrigue; every friend he possessed in his own rank either had a place,
or had lost a place, or was in want of a place, and generally combined
all three characters; professed indifference to place was only a cunning
mode of angling for a place, and politics was a series of
ingeniously-contrived manoeuvres in which the moving power of the
machinery was the desire of sharing the spoils. Walpole's talk about
Magna Charta and the execution of Charles I. could, it is plain, imply
but a skin-deep republicanism. He could not be seriously displeased with
a state of things of which his own position was the natural out-growth.
His republicanism was about as genuine as his boasted indifference to
money--a virtue which is not rare in bachelors who have more than they
can spend. So long as he could buy as much bric-a-brac, as many
knicknacks, and old books and bronzes and curious portraits and odd
gloves of celebrated characters as he pleased; add a new tower and a set
of battlements to Strawberry Hill every few years; keep a comfortable
house in London, and have a sufficiency of carriages and horses; treat
himself to an occasional tour, and keep his press steadily at work; he
was not the man to complain of poverty. He was a republican, too, as
long as that word implied that he and his father and uncles and cousins
and connections by marriage and their intimate friends were to have
everything precisely their own way; but if a vision could have shown him
the reformers of a coming generation who would inquire into civil lists
and object to sinecures--to say nothing of cutting off the heads of the
first families--he would have prayed to be removed before the evil day.
Republicanism in his sense was a word exclusive of revolution. Was it,
then, a mere meaningless mask intended only to conceal the real man?
Before passing such a judgment we should remember that the names by
which people classify their opinions are generally little more than
arbitrary badges; and even in these days, when practice treads so
closely on the heels of theory, some persons profess to know extreme
radicals who could be converted very speedily by a bit of riband.
Walpole has explained himself with unmistakable frankness, and his
opinion was at least intelligible. He was not a republican after the
fashion of Robespierre, or Jefferson, or M. Gambetta; but he had some
meaning. When a duke in those days proposed annual parliaments and
universal suffrage, we may assume that he did not realise the probable
effect of those institutions upon dukes; and when Walpole applauded the
regicides, he was not anxious to send George III. to the block. He
meant, however, that he considered George III. to be a narrow-minded and
obstinate fool. He meant, too, that the great Revolution families ought
to distribute the plunder and the power without interference from the
Elector of Hanover. He meant, again, that as a quick and cynical
observer, he found the names of Brutus and Algernon Sidney very
convenient covers for attacking the Duke of Newcastle and the Earl of
Bute. But beyond all this, he meant something more, which gives the
real spice to his writings. It was something not quite easy to put into
formulas; but characteristic of the vague discomfort of the holders of
sinecures in those halcyon days arising from the perception that the
ground was hollow under their feet. To understand him we must remember
that the period of his activity marks precisely the lowest ebb of
political principle. Old issues had been settled, and the new ones were
only just coming to the surface. He saw the end of the Jacobites and the
rise of the demagogues. His early letters describe the advance of the
Pretender to Derby; they tell us how the British public was on the whole
inclined to look on and cry, 'Fight dog, fight bear;' how the Jacobites
who had anything to lose left their battle to be fought by half-starved
cattle-stealers, and contented themselves with drinking to the success
of the cause; and how the Whig magnates, with admirable presence of
mind, raised regiments, appointed officers, and got the expenses paid by
the Crown. His later letters describe the amazing series of blunders by
which we lost America in spite of the clearest warnings from almost
every man of sense in the kingdom. The interval between these
disgraceful epochs is filled--if we except the brief episode of
Chatham--by a series of struggles between different connections--one
cannot call them parties--which separate and combine, and fight and make
peace, till the plot of the drama becomes too complicated for human
ingenuity to unravel. Lads just crammed for a civil service examination
might possibly bear in mind all the shifting combinations which resulted
from the endless intrigues of Pelhams and Grenvilles and Bedfords and
Rockinghams; yet even those omniscient persons could hardly give a
plausible account of the principles which each party conceived itself
to be maintaining. What, for example, were the politics of a Rigby, or a
Bubb Dodington? The diary in which the last of these eminent persons
reveals his inmost soul is perhaps the most curious specimen of
unconscious self-analysis extant. His utter baseness and venality, his
disgust at the 'low venal wretches' to whom he had to give bribes; his
creeping and crawling before those from whom he sought to extract
bribes; his utter incapacity to explain a great man except on the
hypothesis of insanity; or to understand that there is such a thing as
political morality, derive double piquancy from the profound conviction
that he is an ornament to society, and from the pious aspirations which
he utters with the utmost simplicity. Bubb wriggled himself into a
peerage, and differed from innumerable competitors only by superior
frankness. He is the fitting representative of an era from which
political faith has disappeared, as Walpole is its fitting satirist. All
political virtue, it is said, was confined, in Walpole's opinion, to
Conway and the Marquis of Hertford. Was he wrong? or, if he was wrong,
was it not rather in the exception than the rule? The dialect in which
his sarcasms are expressed is affected, but the substance is hard to
dispute. The world, he is fond of saying, is a tragedy to those who
feel, a comedy to those who think. He preferred the comedy view. 'I have
never yet seen or heard,' he says, 'anything serious that was not
ridiculous. Jesuits, Methodists, philosophers, politicians, the
hypocrite Rousseau, the scoffer Voltaire, the encyclopædists, the Humes,
the Lytteltons, the Grenvilles, the atheist tyrant of Prussia, and the
mountebank of history, Mr. Pitt, are all to me but impostors in their
various ways. Fame or interest is their object, and after all their
parade, I think a ploughman who sows, reads his almanack, and believes
that the stars are so many farthing candles created to prevent his
falling into a ditch as he goes home at night, a wiser and more rational
being, and I am sure an honester, than any of them. Oh! I am sick of
visions and systems that shove one another aside, and come again like
figures in a moving picture.' Probably Walpole's belief in the ploughman
lasted till he saw the next smock-frock; but the bitterness clothed in
the old-fashioned cant is serious and is justifiable enough. Here is a
picture of English politics in the time of Wilkes. 'No government, no
police, London and Middlesex distracted, the colonies in rebellion,
Ireland ready to be so, and France arrogant and on the point of being
hostile! Lord Bute accused of all, and dying in a panic; George
Grenville wanting to make rage desperate; Lord Rockingham and the
Cavendishes thinking we have no enemies but Lord Bute, and that five
mutes and an epigram can set everything to rights; the Duke of Grafton
(then Prime Minister) like an apprentice, thinking the world should be
postponed to a horse-race; and the Bedfords not caring what disgraces we
undergo while each of them has 3,000_l._ a year and three thousand
bottles of claret and champagne!' And every word of this is true--at
least, so far as epigrams need be true. It is difficult to put into more
graphic language the symptoms of an era just ripe for revolution. If
frivolous himself, Walpole can condemn the frivolity of others. 'Can one
repeat common news with indifference,' he asks, just after the surrender
of Yorktown, 'while our shame is writing for future history by the pens
of all our numerous enemies? When did England see two whole armies lay
down their arms and surrender themselves prisoners?... These are
thoughts I cannot stifle at the moment that expresses them; and, though
I do not doubt that the same dissipation that has swallowed up all our
principles will reign again in ten days with its wonted sovereignty, I
had rather be silent than vent my indignation. Yet I cannot talk, for I
cannot think, on any other subject. It was not six days ago that, in the
height of four raging wars (with America, France, Spain, and Holland), I
saw in the papers an account of the opera and of the dresses of the
company, and hence the town, and thence, of course, the whole nation,
were informed that Mr. Fitzpatrick had very little powder in his hair.'
Walpole sheltered himself behind the corner of a pension to sneer at the
tragi-comedy of life; but if his feelings were not profound, they were
quick and genuine, and, affectation for affectation, his cynical
coxcombry seems preferable to the solemn coxcombry of the men who
shamelessly wrangled for plunder, while they talked solemn platitudes
about sacred Whig principles and the thrice blessed British
Constitution.
Walpole, in fact, represents a common creed amongst comfortable but
clear-headed men of his time. It was the strange mixture of scepticism
and conservatism which is exemplified in such men as Hume and Gibbon. He
was at heart a Voltairian, and, like his teacher, confounded all
religions and political beliefs under the name of superstition. Voltaire
himself did not anticipate the Revolution to which he, more than any
man, had contributed. Walpole, with stronger personal reasons than
Voltaire for disliking a catastrophe, was as furious as Burke when the
volcano burst forth. He was a republican so far as he disbelieved in the
divine right of kings, and hated enthusiasm and loyalty generally. He
wished the form to survive and the spirit to disappear. Things were
rotten, and he wished them to stay rotten. The ideal to which he is
constantly recurring was the pleasant reign of his father, when nobody
made a fuss or went to war, or kept principles except for sale. He
foresaw, however, far better than most men, the coming crash. If
political sagacity be fairly tested by a prophetic vision of the French
Revolution, Walpole's name should stand high. He visited Paris in 1765,
and remarks that laughing is out of fashion. 'Good folks, they have no
time to laugh. There is God and the King to be pulled down first, and
men and women, one and all, are devoutly employed in the demolition.
They think me quite profane for having any belief left.' Do you know, he
asks presently, who are the philosophers? 'In the first place, it
comprehends almost everybody, and in the next it means men who, avowing
war against Papacy, aim, many of them, at the destruction of regal
power. The philosophers,' he goes on, 'are insupportable, superficial,
overbearing, and fanatic. They preach incessantly, and their avowed
doctrine is atheism--you could not believe how openly. Don't wonder,
therefore, if I should return a Jesuit. Voltaire himself does not
satisfy them. One of their lady devotees said of him, "_Il est bigot,
c'est un déiste!_"' French politics, he professes a few years
afterwards, must end in 'despotism, a civil war, or assassination,' and
he remarks that the age will not, as he had always thought, be an age of
abortion, but rather 'the age of seeds that are to produce strange crops
hereafter.' The next century, he says at a later period, 'will probably
exhibit a very new era, which the close of this has been, and is,
preparing.' If these sentences had been uttered by Burke, they would
have been quoted as proofs of remarkable sagacity. As it is, we may
surely call them shrewd glances for a frivolous coxcomb.
Walpole regarded these symptoms in the true epicurean spirit, and would
have joined in the sentiment, _après moi le déluge_. He was on the whole
for remedying grievances, and is put rather out of temper by cruelties
which cannot be kept out of his sight. He talks with disgust of the old
habit of stringing up criminals by the dozen; he denounces the
slave-trade with genuine fervour; there is apparent sincerity in his
platitudes against war; and he never took so active a part in politics
as in the endeavour to prevent the judicial murder of Byng. His
conscience generally discharged itself more easily by a few pungent
epigrams, and though he wished the reign of reason and humanity to dawn,
he would rather that it should not come at all than be ushered in by a
tempest. His whole theory is given forcibly and compactly in an answer
which he once made to the republican Mrs. Macaulay, and was fond of
repeating:--'Madam, if I had been Luther, and could have known that for
the _chance_ of saving a million of souls I should be the cause of a
million of lives, at least, being sacrificed before my doctrines could
be established, it must have been a most palpable angel, and in a most
heavenly livery, before he should have set me at work.' We will not ask
what angel would have induced him to make the minor sacrifice of six
thousand a year to establish any conceivable doctrine. Whatever may be
the merit of these opinions, they contain Walpole's whole theory of
life. I know, he seems to have said to himself, that loyalty is folly,
that rank is contemptible, that the old society in which I live is
rotten to the core, and that explosive matter is accumulating beneath
our feet. Well! I am not made of the stuff for a reformer: I am a bit of
a snob, though, like other snobs, I despise both parties to the bargain.
I will take the sinecures the gods provide me, amuse myself with my
toys at Strawberry Hill, despise kings and ministers, without
endangering my head by attacking them, and be over-polite to a royal
duke when he visits me on condition of laughing at him behind his back
when he is gone. Walpole does not deserve a statue; he was not a
Wilberforce or a Howard, and as little of a Burke or a Chatham. But his
faults, as well as his virtues, qualified him to be the keenest of all
observers of a society unconsciously approaching a period of tremendous
convulsions.
To claim for him that, even at his best, he is a profound observer of
character, or that he gives any consistent account of his greatest
contemporaries, would be too much. He is full of whims, and moreover,
full of spite. He cannot be decently fair to anyone who deserted his
father, or stood in Conway's light. He reflects at all times the
irreverent gossip current behind the scenes. To know the best and the
worst that can be said of any great man, the best plan is to read the
leading article of his party newspaper, and then to converse in private
with its writer. The eulogy and the sarcasm may both be sincere enough;
only it is pleasant, after puffing one's wares to the public, to glance
at their seamy side in private. Walpole has a decided taste for that
last point of view. The littleness of the great, the hypocrisy of the
virtuous, and the selfishness of statesmen in general, is his ruling
theme, illustrated by an infinite variety of brilliant caricatures
struck off at the moment with a quick eye and a sure hand. Though he
elaborates no grand historical portrait, like Burke or Clarendon, he has
a whole gallery of telling vignettes which are often as significant as
far more pretentious works. Nowhere, for example, can we find more
graphic sketches of the great man who stands a head and shoulders above
the whole generation of dealers in power and place. Most of Chatham's
contemporaries repaid his contempt with intense dislike. Some of them
pronounced him mad, and others thought him a knave. Walpole, who at
times calls him a mountebank and an impostor, does not go further than
Burke, who, in a curious comment, speaks of him as the 'grand artificer
of fraud,' who never conversed but with 'a parcel of low toad-eaters;'
and asks whether all this 'theatrical stuffing' and these 'raised heels'
could be necessary to the character of a great man. Walpole, of course,
has a keen eye to the theatrical stuffing. He takes the least
complimentary view of the grand problem, which still puzzles some
historians, as to the genuineness of Chatham's gout. He smiles
complacently when the great actor forgets that his right arm ought to be
lying helpless in a sling and flourishes it with his accustomed vigour.
But Walpole, in spite of his sneers and sarcasms, can recognise the
genuine power of the man. He is the describer of the striking scene
which occurred when the House of Commons was giggling over some
delicious story of bribery and corruption--the House of Commons was
frivolous in those benighted days; he tells how Pitt suddenly stalked
down from the gallery and administered his thundering reproof; how
Murray, then Attorney-General, 'crouched, silent and terrified,' and the
Chancellor of the Exchequer faltered out an humble apology for the
unseemly levity. It is Walpole who best describes the great debate when
Pitt, 'haughty, defiant, conscious of injury and supreme abilities,'
burst out in that tremendous speech--tremendous if we may believe the
contemporary reports, of which the only tolerably preserved fragment is
the celebrated metaphor about the confluence of the Rhône and the
Saône. Alas! Chatham's eloquence has all gone to rags and tatters;
though, to say the truth, it has only gone the way of nine-tenths of our
contemporary eloquence. We have, indeed, what are called accurate
reports of spoken pamphlets, dried specimens of rhetoric from which the
life has departed as completely as it is strained out of the specimens
in a botanical collection. If there is no Walpole amongst us, we shall
know what our greatest living orator has said; but how he said it, and
how it moved his audience, will be as obscure as if the reporters'
gallery were still unknown. Walpole--when he was not affecting
philosophy, or smarting from the failure of an intrigue, or worried by
the gout, or disappointed of a bargain at a sale--could throw electric
flashes of light on the figure he describes which reveal the true man.
He errs from petulancy, but not from stupidity. He can appreciate great
qualities by fits, though he cannot be steadily loyal to their
possessor. And if he wrote down most of our rulers as knaves and fools,
we have only to lower those epithets to selfish and blundering, to get a
very fair estimate of their characters. To the picturesque historian his
services are invaluable; though no single statement can be accepted
without careful correction.
Walpole's social, as distinguished from his political, anecdotes do in
one sense what Leech's drawings have done for this generation. But the
keen old man of the world puts a far bitterer and deeper meaning into
his apparently superficial scratches than the kindly modern artist,
whose satire was narrowed, if purified, by the decencies of modern
manners. Walpole reflects in a thousand places that strange combination
of brutality and polish which marked the little circle of fine ladies
and gentlemen who then constituted society, and played such queer
pranks in quiet unconsciousness of the revolutionary elements that were
seething below. He is the best of commentators on Hogarth, and gives us
'Gin Lane' on one side and the 'Marriage à la mode' on the other. As we
turn over the well-known pages we come at every turn upon characteristic
scenes of the great tragi-comedy that was being played out. In one page
a highwayman puts a bullet through his hat, and on the next we read how
three thousand ladies and gentlemen visited the criminal in his cell, on
the Sunday before his execution, till he fainted away twice from the
heat; then we hear how Lord Lovat's buffooneries made the whole
brilliant circle laugh as he was being sentenced to death; and how
Balmerino pleaded 'not guilty,' in order that the ladies might not be
deprived of their sport; how the House of Commons adjourned to see a
play acted by persons of quality, and the gallery was hung round with
blue ribands; how the Gunnings had a guard to protect them in the park;
what strange pranks were played by the bigamous Miss Chudleigh; what
jokes--now, alas! very faded and dreary--were made by George Selwyn, and
how that amiable favourite of society went to Paris in order to see the
cruel tortures inflicted upon Damiens, and was introduced to the chief
performer on the scaffold as a distinguished amateur in executions. One
of the best of all these vignettes portrays the funeral of George II.,
and is a worthy pendant to Lord Hervey's classic account of the Queen's
death. It opens with the solemn procession to the torch-lighted Abbey,
whose 'long-drawn aisles and fretted vault' excite the imagination of
the author of the 'Castle of Otranto.' Then the comic element begins to
intrude; the procession jostles and falls into disorder at the entrance
of Henry the Seventh's Chapel; the bearers stagger under the heavy
coffin and cry for help; the bishop blunders in the prayers, and the
anthem, as fit, says Walpole, for a wedding as a funeral, becomes
immeasurably tedious. Against this tragi-comic background are relieved
two characteristic figures. The 'butcher' Duke of Cumberland, the hero
of Culloden, stands with the obstinate courage of his race gazing into
the vault where his father is being buried, and into which he is soon to
descend. His face is distorted by a recent stroke of paralysis, and he
is forced to stand for two hours on a bad leg. To him enters the
burlesque Duke of Newcastle, who begins by bursting into tears and
throwing himself back in a stall whilst the Archbishop 'hovers over him
with a smelling-bottle.' Then curiosity overcomes him, and he runs about
the chapel with a spyglass in one hand to peer into the faces of the
company, 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.'
What a perch to select! Imagine the contrast of the two men, and
remember that the Duke of Newcastle was for an unprecedented time the
great dispenser of patronage, and so far the most important personage in
the government. Walpole had reason for some of his sneers.