It is creditable to our English nobility, and a feature in their
character that distinguishes them from their fellows of most other
nations, that, from the first revival of learning, the study of
literature has been extensively cultivated by men of high birth, even by
many who did not require literary fame to secure them a lasting
remembrance; and they have not contented themselves with showing their
appreciation of intellectual excellence by their patronage of humbler
scholars, but have themselves afforded examples to other labourers in
the hive, taking upon themselves the toils, and earning no small nor
undeserved share of the honours of authorship. The very earliest of our
poets, Chaucer, must have been a man of gentle birth, since he was
employed on embassies of importance, and was married to the daughter of
a French knight of distinction, and sister of the Duchess of Lancaster.
The long civil wars of the fifteenth century prevented his having any
immediate followers; but the sixteenth opened more propitiously. The
conqueror of Flodden was also "Surrey of the deathless lay";[1] and from
his time to the present day there is hardly a break in the long line of
authors who have shown their feeling that noble birth and high position
are no excuses for idleness, but that the highest rank gains additional
illustration when it is shown to be united with brilliant talents
worthily exercised. The earliest of our tragic poets was Sackville Earl
of Dorset. The preux chevalier of Elizabeth's Court, the accomplished
and high-minded Sidney, took up the lyre of Surrey: Lord St. Albans,
more generally known by his family name of Bacon, "took all learning for
his province"; and, though peaceful studies were again for a while
rudely interrupted by the "dark deeds of horrid war," the restoration of
peace was, as it had been before, a signal for the resumption of their
studies by many of the best-born of the land. Another Earl of Dorset
displayed his hereditary talent not less than his martial gallantry.
Lord Roscommon well deserved the praises which Dryden and Pope, after
his death, liberally bestowed. The great Lord Chancellor Clarendon
devoted his declining years to a work of a grander class, leaving us a
History which will endure as long as the language itself; while ladies
of the very highest rank, the Duchess of Newcastle and Lady Mary Wortley
Montague, vindicated the claims of their sex to share with their
brethren the honours of poetical fame.
[Footnote 1: "Lay of the Last Minstrel," vi. 14.]
Among this noble and accomplished brotherhood the author of these
letters is by general consent allowed to be entitled to no low place.
Horace Walpole, born in the autumn of 1717, was the youngest son of that
wise minister, Sir Robert Walpole, who, though, as Burke afterwards
described him, "not a genius of the first class," yet by his adoption
of, and resolute adherence to a policy of peace throughout the greater
part of his administration, in which he was fortunately assisted by the
concurrence of Fleury of France, contributed in no slight degree to the
permanent establishment of the present dynasty on the throne. He
received his education at the greatest of English schools, Eton, to
which throughout his life he preserved a warm attachment; and where he
gave a strong indication of his preference for peaceful studies and his
judicious appreciation of intellectual ability, by selecting as his most
intimate friend Thomas Gray, hereafter to achieve a poetical immortality
by the Bard and the Elegy. From Eton they both went to Cambridge, and,
when they quitted the University, in 1738, joined in a travelling tour
through France and Italy. They continued companions for something more
than two years; but at the end of that time they separated, and in the
spring of 1741 Gray returned to England. The cause of their parting was
never distinctly avowed; Walpole took the blame, if blame there was, on
himself; but, in fact, it probably lay in an innate difference of
disposition, and consequently of object. Walpole being fond of society,
and, from his position as the Minister's son, naturally courted by many
of the chief men in the different cities which they visited; while Gray
was of a reserved character shunning the notice of strangers, and fixing
his attention on more serious subjects than Walpole found attractive.
In the autumn of the same year Walpole himself returned home. He had
become a member of Parliament at the General Election in the summer, and
took his seat just in time to bear a part in the fierce contest which
terminated in the dissolution of his father's Ministry. His maiden
speech, almost the only one he ever made, was in defence of the
character and policy of his father, who was no longer in the House of
Commons to defend himself.[1] And the result of the conflict made no
slight impression on his mind; but gave a colour to all his political
views.
He began almost immediately to come forward as an author: not, however,
as--
Obliged by hunger and request of friends;
for in his circumstances he was independent, and even opulent; but
seeking to avenge his father by squibs on Mr. Pulteney (now Lord Bath),
as having been the leader of the attacks on him, and on the new Ministry
which had succeeded him. In one respect that age was a happy one for
ministers and all connected with them. Pensions and preferments were
distributed with a lavish hand; and, even while he was a schoolboy, he
had received more than one "patent place," as such were called, in the
Exchequer, to which before his father's resignation others were added,
which after a time raised his income to above £5,000 a year, a fortune
which in those times was exceeded by comparatively few, even of those
regarded as wealthy. So rich, indeed, was he, that before he was thirty
he was able to buy Strawberry Hill, "a small house near Twickenham," as
he describes it at first, but which he gradually enlarged and
embellished till it grew into something of a baronial castle on a small
scale, somewhat as, under the affectionate diligence of a greater man,
Abbotsford in the present century became one of the lions of the Tweed.
[Footnote 1: The speech was made March 23, 1742; but Sir Robert had
resigned office, and been created Earl of Orford in the February
preceding.]
From this time forth literary composition, with the acquisition of
antiques and curiosities for the decoration of "Strawberry" occupied the
greater part of his life. He erected a printing press, publishing not
only most of his own writings, but some also of other authors, such as
poems of Gray, with whom he kept up uninterrupted intercourse. But, in
fact, his own works were sufficiently numerous to keep his printers
fully employed. He was among the most voluminous writers of a voluminous
age. In the course of the next twenty years he published seven volumes
of memoirs of the last ten years of the reign of George II. and the
first ten of George III.; five volumes of a work entitled "Royal and
Noble Authors;" several more of "Anecdotes of Painting;" "The Mysterious
Mother," a tragedy; "The Castle of Otranto," a romance; and a small
volume to which he gave the name of "Historic Doubts on Richard III." Of
all these not one is devoid of merit. He more than once explains that
the "Memoirs" have no claim to the more respectable title of "History";
and he apologises for introducing anecdotes which might be thought
inconsistent with what Macaulay brands as "a vile phrase," the dignity
of history. He excuses this, which he looked on as a new feature in
historical composition, on the ground that, if trifles, "they are
trifles relating to considerable people; such as all curious people have
ever loved to read." "Such trifles," he says, "are valued, if relating
to any reign one hundred and fifty years ago; and, if his book should
live so long, these too might become acceptable." Readers of the present
day will not think such apology was needed. The value of his "trifles"
has been proved in a much shorter time; for there is no subsequent
historian of that period who has not been indebted to him for many
particulars of which no other trustworthy record existed. Walpole had in
a great degree a historical mind; and perhaps there are few works which
show a keener critical insight into the value of old traditions than the
"Historic Doubts," directed to establish, not, indeed, Richard's
innocence of the crimes charged against him, but the fact that, with
respect to many of them, his guilt has never been proved by any evidence
which is not open to the gravest impeachment. His "Royal and Noble
Authors," and his "Anecdotes of Painting" are full of entertainment, not
unmixed with instruction. "The Mysterious Mother" was never performed on
the stage, nor is it calculated for representation; since he himself
admits that the subject is disgusting. But dramas not intended for
representation, and which therefore should perhaps be more fitly called
dramatic poems, were a species of composition to which more than one
writer of reputation had lately begun to turn their attention; though
dramas not designed for the stage seem to most readers defective in
their very conception, as lacking the stimulus which the intention of
submitting them to the extemporaneous ocular judgement of the public can
alone impart. Among such works, however, "The Mysterious Mother" is
admitted to rank high for vigorous description and poetic imagery. A
greater popularity, which even at the present day has not wholly passed
away, since it is still occasionally reprinted, was achieved by "The
Castle of Otranto," which, as he explains it in one of his letters, owed
its origin to a dream. Novels had been a branch of literature which had
slumbered for several years after the death of Defoe, but which the
genius of Fielding and Smollett had again brought into fashion. But
their tales purported to be pictures of the manners of the day. This was
rather the forerunner of Mrs. Radcliffe's[1] weird tales of supernatural
mystery, which for a time so engrossed the public attention as to lead
that "wicked wag," Mr. George Coleman, to regard them as representatives
of the class, and to describe how--
A novel now is nothing more
Than an old castle and a creaking door;
A distant hovel;
Clanking of chains, a gallery, a light,
Old armour, and a phantom all in white,
And there's a novel.
[Footnote 1: "'The Castle of Otranto' was the father of that marvellous
series which once overstocked the circulating library, and closed with
Mrs. Radcliffe."--D'Israeli, "Curiosities of Literature," ii. 115.]
He had published it anonymously as a tale that had been found in the
library of an ancient family in the North of England; but it was not
indebted solely to the mystery of its authorship for its favourable
reception--since, after he acknowledged it as his own work in a second
edition, the sale did not fall off. And it deserved success, for, though
the day had passed when even the most credulous could place any faith in
swords that required a hundred men to lift, and helmets which could only
fit the champion whose single strength could wield such a weapon, the
style was lively and attractive, and the dialogue was eminently dramatic
and sparkling.
But the interest of all these works has passed away. The "Memoirs" have
served their turn as a guide and aid to more regular historians, and the
composition which still keeps its author's fame alive is his
Correspondence with some of his numerous friends, male and female, in
England or abroad, which he maintained with an assiduity which showed
how pleasurable he found the task, while the care with which he secured
the preservation of his letters, begging his correspondents to retain
them, in case at any future time he should desire their return, proves
that he anticipated the possibility that they might hereafter be found
interesting by other readers than to those to whom they were addressed.
But he did not suffer either his writings or the enrichment of
"Strawberry" with antiquarian treasures to engross the whole of his
attention. For the first thirty years and more of his public life he was
a zealous politician. And it is no slight proof how high was the
reputation for sagacity and soundness of judgement which he enjoyed,
that in the ministerial difficulties caused by Lord Chatham's illness,
he was consulted by the leaders of more than one section of the Whig
party, by Conway, the Duke of Bedford, the Duke of Grafton, Lord
Holland, and others; that his advice more than once influenced their
determinations; and that he himself drew more than one of the letters
which passed between them. Even the King himself was not ignorant of the
weight he had in their counsels, and, on one occasion at least,
condescended to avail himself of it for a solution of some of the
embarrassments with which their negotiations were beset.
But after a time his attendance in Parliament, which had never been very
regular, grew wearisome and distasteful to him. At the General Election
of 1768 he declined to offer himself again as a candidate for Lynn,
which he had represented for several years. And henceforth his mornings
were chiefly occupied with literature; the continuation of his Memoirs;
discussion of literary subjects with Gibbon, Voltaire, Mason, and
others, while his evenings were passed in the society of his friends, a
mode of enjoying his time in which he was eminently calculated to shine,
since abundant testimony has come down to us from many competent judges
of the charm of his conversation; the liveliness of his disposition
acting as a most attractive frame to the extent and variety of his
information.
Among his distractions were his visits to France, which for some time
were frequent. He had formed a somewhat singular intimacy with a blind
old lady, the Marquise du Deffand, a lady whose character in her youth
had been something less than doubtful, since she had been one of the
Regent Duc d'Orléans's numerous mistresses; but who had retained in her
old age much of the worldly acuteness and lively wit with which she had
borne her part in that clever, shameless society. Her _salon_ was now
the resort of many personages of the highest distinction, even of ladies
themselves of the most unstained reputation, such as the Duchesse de
Choiseul; and the rumours or opinions which he heard in their company
enabled him to enrich his letters to his friends at home with comments
on the conduct of the French Parliament, of Maupéon, Maurepas, Turgot,
and the King himself, which, in many instances, attest the shrewdness
with which he estimated the real bearing of the events which were taking
place, and anticipated the possible character of some of those which
were not unlikely to ensue.
Thus, with a mind which, to the end, was so active and so happily
constituted as to be able to take an interest in everything around him,
and, even when more than seventy years old, to make new friends to
replace those who had dropped off, he passed a long, a happy, and far
from an useless life. When he was seventy-four he succeeded to his
father's peerage, on the death of his elder brother; but he did not long
enjoy the title, by which, indeed, he was not very careful to be
distinguished, and in the spring of 1797 he died, within a few months
of his eightieth birthday.
A great writer of the last generation, whose studies were of a severer
cast, and who, conscious perhaps of his own unfitness to shine at the
tea-table of fashionable ladies, was led by that feeling to undervalue
the lighter social gifts which formed conspicuous ingredients in
Walpole's character, has denounced him not only as frivolous in his
tastes, but scarcely above mediocrity in his abilities (a sentence to
which Scott's description of him as "a man of great genius" may be
successfully opposed); and is especially severe on what he terms his
affectation in disclaiming the compliments bestowed on his learning by
some of his friends. The expressed estimate of his acquirements and
works which so offended Lord Macaulay was that "there is nobody so
superficial, that, except a little history, a little poetry, a little
painting, and some divinity, he knew nothing; he had always lived in the
busy world; had always loved pleasure; played loo till two or three in
the morning; haunted auctions--in short, did not know so much astronomy
as would carry him to Knightsbridge; not more physic than a physician;
nor, in short, anything that is called science. If it were not that he
laid up a little provision in summer, like the ant, he should be as
ignorant as the people he lived with."[1] In Lord Macaulay's view,
Walpole was never less sincere than when pronouncing such a judgement on
his works. He sees in it nothing but an affectation, fishing for
further praises; and, fastening on his account of his ordinary
occupations, he pronounces that a man of fifty should be ashamed of
playing loo till after midnight.
[Footnote 1: Letter to Mann, Feb. 6, 1760.]
In spite, however, of Lord Macaulay's reproof, something may be said in
favour of a man who, after giving his mornings to works which display no
little industry as well as talent, unbent his bow in the evening at
lively supper-parties, or even at the card-table with fair friends,
where the play never degenerated into gambling. And his disparagement of
his learning, which Lord Macaulay ridicules as affectation, a more
candid judgement may fairly ascribe to sincere modesty. For it is plain
from many other passages in his letters, that he really did undervalue
his own writings; and that the feeling which he thus expressed was
genuine is to a great extent proved by the patience, if not
thankfulness, with which he allowed his friend Mann to alter passages in
"The Mysterious Mother," and confessed the alterations to be
improvements. It may be added that Lord Macaulay's disparagement of his
judgement and his taste is not altogether consistent with his admission
that Walpole's writings possessed an "irresistible charm" that "no man
who has written so much is so seldom tiresome;" that, even in "The
Castle of Otranto," which he ridicules, "the story never flags for a
moment," and, what is more to our present purpose, he adds that "his
letters are with reason considered his best performance;" and that those
to his friend at Florence, Sir H. Mann, "contain much information
concerning the history of that time: the portion of English History of
which common readers know the least."
Of these letters it remains for us now to speak. The value of such _pour
servir_, to borrow a French expression, that is to say, to serve as
materials to supply the historian of a nation or an age with an
acquaintance with events, or persons, or manners, which would be sought
for in vain among Parliamentary records, or ministerial despatches, has
long been recognised.[1] Two thousand years ago, those of the greatest
of Roman orators and statesmen were carefully preserved; and modern
editors do not fear to claim for them a place "among the most valuable
of all the remains of Roman literature; the specimens which they give of
familiar intercourse, and of the public and private manners of society,
drawing up for us the curtain from scenes of immense historical
interest, and laying open the secret workings, the complications, and
schemes of a great revolution period."[2] Such a description is
singularly applicable to the letters of Walpole; and the care which he
took for their preservation shows that he was not without a hope that
they also would be regarded as interesting and valuable by future
generations. He praises one of his correspondents for his diligence in
collecting and publishing a volume of letters belonging to the reigns of
James I. and Charles I., on the express ground that "nothing gives so
just an idea of an age as genuine letters; nay, history waits for its
last seal from them." And it is not too much to say that they are
superior to journals and diaries as a mine to be worked by the judicious
historian; while to the general public they will always be more
attractive, from the scope they afford to elegance of style, at which
the diary-keeper does not aim; and likewise from their frequently
recording curious incidents, fashions, good sayings, and other things
which, from their apparently trifling character, the grave diarist would
not think worth preserving.
[Footnote 1: D'Israeli has remarked that "the _gossiping_ of a profound
politician, or a vivacious observer, in one of their letters, often by a
spontaneous stroke reveals the individual, or by a simple incident
unriddles a mysterious event;" and proceeds to quote Bolingbroke's
estimate of the importance, from this point of view, of "that valuable
collection of Cardinal d'Ossat's Memoirs" ("Curiosities of Literature,"
iii. p. 381).]
[Footnote 2: The Rev. J.E. Yonge, Preface to an edition of "Cicero's
Letters."]
He, however, was not the first among the moderns to achieve a reputation
by his correspondence. In the generation before his birth, a French
lady, Madame de Sévigné, had, with an affectionate industry, found her
chief occupation and pleasure in keeping her daughters in the provinces
fully acquainted with every event which interested or entertained Louis
XIV. and his obsequious Court; and in the first years of the eighteenth
century a noble English lady, whom we have already mentioned, did in
like manner devote no small portion of her time to recording, for the
amusement and information of her daughter, her sister, and her other
friends at home, the various scenes and occurrences that came under her
own notice in the foreign countries in which for many years her lot was
cast, as the wife of an ambassador. In liveliness of style, Lady Mary
Montague is little if at all inferior to her French prototype; while,
since she was endowed with far more brilliant talents, and, from her
foreign travels, had a wider range of observation, her letters have a
far greater interest than could attach to those of a writer, however
accomplished and sagacious, whose world was Paris, with bounds scarcely
extending beyond Versailles on one side, and Compiègne on the other. To
these fair and lively ladies Walpole was now to succeed as a third
candidate for epistolary fame; though, with his habit of underrating his
own talents, he never aspired to equal the gay Frenchwoman; (the English
lady's correspondence was as yet unknown). There is evident sincerity in
his reproof of one of his correspondents who had expressed a most
flattering opinion: "You say such extravagant things of my letters,
which are nothing but gossiping gazettes, that I cannot bear it; you
have undone yourself with me, for you compare them to Madame de
Sévigné's. Absolute treason! Do you know there is scarcely a book in the
world I love so much as her letters?"
Yet critics who should place him on an equality with her would not be
without plausible grounds for their judgement. Many circumstances
contributed to qualify him in a very special degree for the task which,
looking at his letters in that light, he may be said to have undertaken.
His birth, as the son of a great minister; his comparative opulence;
even the indolent insignificance of his elder brothers, which caused him
to be looked upon as his father's representative, and as such to be
consulted by those who considered themselves as the heirs of his policy,
while the leader of that party in the House of Commons, General Conway,
was his cousin, and the man for whom he ever felt the strongest personal
attachment,--were all advantages which fell to the lot of but few. And
to these may be added the variety of his tastes, as attested by the
variety of his published works. He was a man who observed everything,
who took an interest in everything. His correspondents, too, were so
various and different as to ensure a variety in his letters. Some were
politicians, ministers at home, or envoys abroad; some were female
leaders of fashion, planning balls and masquerades, summoning him to
join an expedition to Ranelagh or Vauxhall; others were scholars, poets,
or critics, inviting comments on Gray's poems, on Robertson's style, on
Gibbon's boundless learning; or on the impostures of Macpherson and
Chatterton; others, again, were antiquarians, to whom the helmet of
Francis, or a pouncet-box of the fair Diana, were objects of far greater
interest than the intrigues of a Secretary of State, or the expedients
of a Chancellor of the Exchequer; and all such subjects are discussed by
him with evidently equal willingness, equal clearness, and liveliness.
It would not be fair to regard as a deduction from the value of those
letters which bear on the politics of the day the necessity of
confessing that they are not devoid of partiality--that they are
coloured with his own views, both of measures and persons. Not only were
political prejudices forced upon him by the peculiarities of his
position, but it may be doubted whether any one ever has written, or can
write, of transactions of national importance which are passing under
his own eyes, as it were, with absolute impartiality. It may even be a
question whether, if any one did so, it would not detract from his own
character, at least as much as it might add to the value of his
writings. In one of his letters, Byron enumerates among the merits of
Mitford's "History of Greece," "wrath and partiality," explaining that
such ingredients make a man write "in earnest." And, in Walpole's case,
the dislike which he naturally felt towards those who had overthrown his
father's administration by what, at a later day, they themselves
admitted to have been a factious and blamable opposition, was sharpened
by his friendship for his cousin Conway. At the same time we may remark
in passing that his opinions and prejudices were not so invincible as to
blind him to real genius and eminent public services; and the admirers
of Lord Chatham may fairly draw an argument in favour of his policy from
Walpole's admission of its value in raising the spirit of the people; an
admission which, it may be supposed, it must have gone against his grain
to make in favour of a follower of Pulteney.
But from his letters on other topics, on literature and art, no such
deduction has to be made. His judgement was generally sound and
discriminating. He could appreciate the vast learning and stately
grandiloquence of Gibbon, and the widely different style of Robertson.
Nor is it greatly to his discredit that his disgust at what he considers
Hume's needless parade of scepticism and infidelity, which did honour
to his heart, blinded him in a great degree to the historian's
unsurpassed acuteness and insight, and (to borrow the eulogy of Gibbon)
"the careless inimitable felicities" of his narrative. He was among the
first to recognize the peculiar genius of Crabbe, and to detect the
impostures of Macpherson and Chatterton, while doing full justice to
"the astonishing prematurity" of the latter's genius. And in matters of
art, so independent as well as correct was his taste, that he not only,
in one instance, ventured to differ from Reynolds, but also proved to be
right in his opinion that a work extolled by Sir Joshua, was but a copy,
and a poor one.
On his qualifications to be a painter of the way of life, habits, and
manners (_quorum pars magna fuit_) of the higher classes in his day, it
would be superfluous to dwell. Scott, who was by no means a warm admirer
of his character, does not hesitate to pronounce him "certainly the best
letter-writer in the English language;" and the great poet who, next to
Scott, holds the highest place in the literary history of the last two
centuries, adds his testimony not only to the excellence of his letters,
but also to his general ability as that of a high order. "It is the
fashion to underrate Horace Walpole, firstly, because he was a nobleman,
and, secondly, because he was a gentleman; but, to say nothing of the
composition of his incomparable letters and of 'The Castle of Otranto,'
he is the 'Ultimus Romanorum,' the author of 'The Mysterious Mother,' a
tragedy of the highest order, and not a puling love-play. He is the
father of the first romance, and the last tragedy in our language; and
surely worthy of a higher place than any living writer, be he who he
may."[1]
[Footnote 1: Byron, Preface to "Marino Faliere." But in the last
sentence the poet certainly exaggerated his admiration for Walpole;
since it is sufficiently notorious from his own letters, and from more
than one passage in his works, as where he ranks Scott as second to
Shakespeare alone, that he deservedly admired him more than all their
contemporaries put together.]
And it seems not unnatural to entertain a hope that a selection from a
correspondence which extorted such an eulogy from men whose own letters
form no small part of the attraction of Lockhart's and Moore's
biographies, will be acceptable to many who, while lacking courage, or
perhaps leisure, to grapple with publications in many volumes, may
welcome the opportunity thus here afforded them of forming an
acquaintance, however partial, with works which, in their entire body,
are deservedly reckoned among the masterpieces of our literature.[1]
[Footnote 1: It may be proper to point out that, in some few instances,
a letter is not given in its entirety; but, as in familiar
correspondence, it must constantly happen that, while the incidents
mentioned in one portion of a letter are full of interest, of
others--such as marriages, deaths, &c.--the importance is of the most
temporary and transitory character. It may be hoped that the liberty
taken of leaving out such portions will be regarded as, if not
commendable, at the least excusable.]