and even if Walpole's style is more Gallicised than is evident to me, it
must be confessed that with a few French idioms he has caught something
of that unrivalled dexterity and neatness of touch in which the French
are our undisputed masters. His literary character is of course marked
by an affectation analogous to that which debases his politics. Walpole
was always declaring with doubtful sincerity--(that is one of the
matters in which a man is scarcely bound to be quite sincere)--that he
has no ambition for literary fame, and that he utterly repudiates the
title of 'learned gentleman.' There is too much truth in his disavowals
to allow us to write them down as mere mock-modesty; but doubtless his
principal motive was a dislike to entering the arena of open criticism.
He has much of the feeling which drove Pope into paroxysms of unworthy
fury on every mention of Grub Street. The anxiety of men in that day to
disavow the character of professional authors must be taken with the
fact that professional authors were then an unscrupulous, scurrilous,
and venal race. Walpole feared collision with them as he feared
collision with the 'mountains of roast beef.' Though literature was
emerging from the back lanes and alleys, the two greatest potentates of
the day, Johnson and Warburton, had both a decided cross of the bear in
their composition. Walpole was nervously anxious to keep out of their
jurisdiction, and to sit at the feet of such refined lawgivers as Mason
and Gray, or the feebler critics of polite society. In such courts there
naturally passes a good deal of very flimsy flattery between persons who
are alternately at the bar or on the bench. We do not quite believe that
Lady Di Beauclerk's drawings were unsurpassable by 'Salvator Rosa and
Guido,' or that Lady Ailesbury's 'landscape in worsteds' was a work of
high art; and we doubt whether Walpole believed it; nor do we fancy that
he expected Sir Horace Mann to believe that when sitting in his room at
Strawberry Hill, he was in the habit of apostrophising the setting sun
in such terms as these: 'Look at yon sinking beams! His gaudy reign is
over; but the silver moon above that elm succeeds to a tranquil
horizon,' &c. Sweeping aside all this superficial rubbish, as a mere
concession to the faded taste of the age of hoops and wigs, Walpole has
something to say for himself. He has been condemned for the absurdity of
his criticisms, and it is undeniable that he sometimes blunders
strangely. It would, indeed, be easy to show, were it worth while, that
he is by no means so silly in his contemporary verdicts as might be
supposed from scattered passages in his letters. But what are we to say
to a man who compares Dante to 'a Methodist parson in Bedlam'? The first
answer is that, in this instance, Walpole was countenanced by greater
men. Voltaire, with all his faults the most consummate literary artist
of the century, says with obvious disgust that there are people to be
found who force themselves to admire 'feats of imagination as stupidly
extravagant and barbarous' as those of the 'Divina Commedia.' Walpole
must be reckoned as belonging both in his faults and his merits to the
Voltairian school of literature, and amongst other peculiarities common
to the master and his disciple, may be counted an incapacity for
reverence and an intense dislike to being bored. For these reasons he
hates all epic poets, from Dante to Blackmore; he detests all didactic
poems, including those of Thomson and Akenside; and he is utterly
scandalised by the French enthusiasm for Richardson. In these last
judgments, at least nine-tenths of the existing race of mankind agree
with him; though few people have the courage to express their agreement
in print. We may be thankful that Walpole is as incapable of boring as
of enduring bores. He is one of the few Englishmen who share the quality
sometimes ascribed to the French as a nation, and certainly enjoyed by
his teacher, Voltaire; namely, that though they may be frivolous,
blasphemous, indecent, and faulty in every other way, they can never
for a single moment be dull. His letters show that crisp, sparkling
quality of style which accompanies this power, and which is so
unattainable to most of his countrymen. The quality is less conspicuous
in the rest of his works, and the light verses and essays in which we
might expect him to succeed are disappointingly weak. Xoho's letter to
his countrymen is now as dull as the work of most imaginary travellers,
and the essays in 'The World' are remarkably inferior to the
'Spectator,' to say nothing of the 'Rambler.'[11] Yet Walpole's place in
literature is unmistakable, if of equivocal merit. Byron called him the
author of the last tragedy and the first romance in our language. The
tragedy, with Byron's leave, is revolting (perhaps the reason why Byron
admired it), and the romance passes the borders of the burlesque. And
yet the remark hits off a singular point in Walpole's history. A
thorough child of the eighteenth century, we might have expected him to
share Voltaire's indiscriminating contempt for the Middle Ages. One
would have supposed that in his lips, as in those of all his generation,
Gothic would have been synonymous with barbaric, and the admiration of
an ancient abbey as ridiculous as admiration of Dante. So far from
which, Walpole is almost the first modern Englishman who found out that
our old cathedrals were really beautiful. He discovered that a most
charming toy might be made of mediævalism. Strawberry Hill, with all its
gimcracks, its pasteboard battlements, and stained-paper carvings, was
the lineal ancestor of the new law-courts. The restorers of churches,
the manufacturers of stained glass, the modern decorators and
architects of all vanities, the Ritualists and the High Church party,
should think of him with kindness. It cannot be said that they should
give him a place in their calendar, for he was not of the stuff of which
saints are made. It was a very thin veneering of mediævalism which
covered his modern creed; and the mixture is not particularly edifying.
Still he undoubtedly found out that charming plaything which, in other
hands, has been elaborated and industriously constructed till it is all
but indistinguishable from the genuine article. We must hold, indeed,
that it is merely a plaything, when all has been said and done, and
maintain that when the root has once been severed, the tree can never
again be made to grow. Walpole is so far better than some of his
successors, that he did not make a religion out of these flimsy
materials. However that may be, Walpole's trifling was the first
forerunner of much that has occupied the minds of much greater artists
ever since. And thus his initiative in literature has been as fruitful
as his initiative in art. The 'Castle of Otranto' and the 'Mysterious
Mother' were the progenitors of Mrs. Radcliffe's romances, and probably
had a strong influence upon the author of 'Ivanhoe.' Frowning castles
and gloomy monasteries, knights in armour, and ladies in distress, and
monks and nuns and hermits, all the scenery and the characters that have
peopled the imagination of the romantic school, may be said to have had
their origin on the night when Walpole lay down to sleep, his head
crammed full of Wardour Street curiosities, and dreamt that he saw a
gigantic hand in armour resting on the banister of his staircase. In
three months from that time he had elaborated a story, the object of
which, as defined by himself, was to combine the charms of the old
romance and the modern novel, and which, to say the least, strikes us
now like an exaggerated caricature of the later school. Scott criticises
'The Castle of Otranto' seriously, and even Macaulay speaks of it with a
certain respect. Absurd as the burlesque seems, our ancestors found it
amusing, and, what is stranger, awe-inspiring. Excitable readers
shuddered when a helmet of more than gigantic size fell from the clouds,
in the first chapter, and crushed the young baron to atoms on the eve of
his wedding, as a trap smashes a mouse. This, however, was merely a
foretaste of a series of unprecedented phenomena. At one moment the
portrait of Manfred's grandfather, without the least premonitory
warning, utters a deep sigh, and heaves its breast, after which it
descends to the floor with a grave and melancholy air. Presently the
menials catch sight of a leg and foot in armour to match the helmet, and
apparently belonging to a ghost which has lain down promiscuously in the
picture gallery. Most appalling, however, of all is the adventure which
happened to Count Frederick in the oratory. Kneeling before the altar
was a tall figure in a long cloak. As he approached it rose, and,
turning round, disclosed to him the fleshless jaws and empty eye-sockets
of a skeleton. The ghost disappeared, as ghosts generally do, after
giving a perfectly unnecessary warning and the catastrophe is soon
reached by the final appearance of the whole suit of armour with the
ghost inside it, who bursts the castle to bits like an egg-shell, and,
towering towards the sky, exclaims, 'Theodore is the true heir of
Alphonso!' This proceeding fortunately made a lawsuit unnecessary, and
if the castle was ruined at once, it is not quite impossible that the
same result might have been attained more slowly by litigation. The
whole machinery strikes us as simply babyish, unless we charitably
assume the whole to be intentionally burlesque. The intention is pretty
evident in the solemn scene in the chapel, which closes thus:--'As he
spake these words, three drops of blood fell from the nose of Alphonso's
statue' (Alphonso is the spectre in armour). 'Manfred turned pale, and
the princess sank on her knees. "Behold!" said the friar, "mark this
miraculous indication that the blood of Alphonso will never mix with
that of Manfred!"' Nor can we think that the story is rendered much more
interesting by Walpole's simple expedient of introducing into the midst
of these portents a set of waiting-maids and peasants, who talk in the
familiar style of the smart valets in Congreve's or Sheridan's comedies.
Yet, babyish as this mass of nursery tales may appear to us, it is
curious that the theory which Walpole advocated has been exactly carried
out. He wished to relieve the prosaic realism of the school of Fielding
and Smollett by making use of romantic associations, without altogether
taking leave of the language of common life. He sought to make real men
and women out of mediæval knights and ladies, or, in other words, he
made a first experimental trip into the province afterwards occupied by
Scott. The 'Mysterious Mother' is in the same taste; and his interest in
Ossian, in Chatterton, and in Percy's Relics, is another proof of his
anticipation of the coming change of sentiment. He was an arrant
trifler, it is true; too delicately constituted for real work in
literature and politics, and inclined to take a cynical view of his
contemporaries generally, he turned for amusement to antiquarianism, and
was the first to set modern art and literature masquerading in the
antique dresses. That he was quite conscious of the necessity for more
serious study, appears in his letters, in one of which, for example, he
proposes a systematic history of Gothic architecture, such as has since
been often enough executed. It does not, it may be said, require any
great intellect, or even any exquisite taste, for a fine gentleman to
strike out a new line of dilettante amusement. In truth Walpole has no
pretensions whatever to be regarded as a great original creator, or even
as one of the few infallible critics. The only man of his time who had
some claim to that last title was his friend Gray, who shared his Gothic
tastes with greatly superior knowledge. But he was indefinitely superior
to the great mass of commonplace writers, who attain a kind of bastard
infallibility by always accepting the average verdict of the time;
which, on the principle of the _vox populi_, is more often right than
that of any dissenter. There is an intermediate class of men who are
useful as sensitive barometers to foretell coming changes of opinion.
Their intellects are mobile if shallow; and, perhaps, their want of
serious interest in contemporary intellects renders them more accessible
to the earliest symptoms of superficial shiftings of taste. They are
anxious to be at the head of the fashions in thought as well as in
dress, and pure love of novelty serves to some extent in place of
genuine originality. Amongst such men Walpole deserves a high place; and
it is not easy to obtain a high place even amongst such men. The people
who succeed best at trifles are those who are capable of something
better. In spite of Johnson's aphorism, it is the colossus who, when he
tries, can cut the best heads upon cherry-stones, as well as hew statues
out of rock. Walpole was no colossus; but his peevish anxiety to affect
even more frivolity than was really natural to him, has blinded his
critics to the real power of a remarkably acute, versatile, and original
intellect. We cannot regard him with much respect, and still less with
much affection; but the more we examine his work, the more we shall
admire his extreme cleverness.
FOOTNOTES:
[11] It is odd that in one of these papers Walpole proposes, in jest,
precisely our modern system of postage cards, only charging a penny
instead of a halfpenny.
END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.
PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
LONDON
* * * * *
+------------------------------------------------------------+
| Transcriber's Notes: |
| |
| Page 8: Closing quote added |
| Page 145: Shakspeare amended to Shakespeare |
| Page 181: Mismatched single and double quotes amended |
| Page 215: orgie _sic_ |
| Page 295: Shakspeares amended to Shakespeares |
| Page 301: comtemporary amended to contemporary |
| Page 333: Full stop added after parentheses (vol. viii., |
| sermon xxvii.) |
| Page 349: boosing _sic_ |
| Page 373: helmit amended to helmet |
| |
| Italicisation and hyphenation have been standardised. |
| However, where there is an equal number of instances of |
| a hyphenated and unhyphenated word, both have been |
| retained: back-stairs/backstairs; life-like/lifelike; |
| note-book/notebook; now-a-days/nowadays. |
| |
+------------------------------------------------------------+
* * * * *