[1] _Letters of Horace Walpole_; Oxford University Press, 16 vols.,
96s. _Supplementary Letters_, 1919; Oxford University Press, 2
vols., 17s.
Horace Walpole was "a dainty rogue in porcelain" who walked badly. In his
best days, as he records in one of his letters, it was said of him that he
"tripped like a pewit." "If I do not flatter myself," he wrote when he was
just under sixty, "my march at present is more like a dab-chick's." A lady
has left a description of him entering a room, "knees bent, and feet on
tiptoe as if afraid of a wet floor." When his feet were not swollen with
the gout, they were so slender, he said, that he "could dance a minuet on
a silver penny." He was ridiculously lean, and his hands were crooked with
his unmerited disease. An invalid, a caricature of the birds, and not
particularly well dressed in spite of his lavender suit and partridge silk
stockings, he has nevertheless contrived to leave in his letters an
impression of almost perfect grace and dandyism. He had all the airs of a
beau. He affected coolness, disdain, amateurishness, triviality. He was a
china figure of insolence. He lived on the mantelpiece, and regarded
everything that happened on the floor as a rather low joke that could not
be helped. He warmed into humanity in his friendships and in his defence
of the house of Walpole; but if he descended from his mantelpiece, it was
more likely to be in order to feed a squirrel than to save an empire. His
most common image of the world was a puppet-show. He saw kings, prime
ministers, and men of genius alike about the size of dolls. When George
II. died, he wrote a brief note to Thomas Brand: "Dear Brand--You love
laughing; there is a king dead; can you help coming to town?" That
represents his measure of things. Those who love laughing will laugh all
the more when they discover that, a week earlier, Walpole had written a
letter, rotund, fulsome, and in the language of the bended knee, begging
Lord Bute to be allowed to kiss the Prince of Wales's hand. His attitude
to the Court he described to George Montagu as "mixing extreme politeness
with extreme indifference." His politeness, like his indifference, was but
play at the expense of a solemn world. "I wrote to Lord Bute," he informed
Montagu; "thrust all the _unexpecteds, want of ambition,
disinterestedness, etc._, that I could amass, gilded with as much duty,
affection, zeal, etc., as possible." He frankly professed relief that he
had not after all to go to Court and act out the extravagant compliments
he had written. "Was ever so agreeable a man as King George the Second,"
he wrote, "to die the very day it was necessary to save me from ridicule?"
"For my part," he adds later in the same spirit, "my man Harry will always
be a favourite; he tells me all the amusing news; he first told me of the
late Prince of Wales's death, and to-day of the King's." It is not that
Walpole was a republican of the school of Plutarch. He was merely a toy
republican who enjoyed being insolent at the expense of kings, and behind
their backs. He was scarcely capable of open rudeness in the fashion of
Beau Brummell's "Who's your fat friend?" His ridicule was never a public
display; it was a secret treasured for his friends. He was the greatest
private entertainer of the eighteenth century, and he ridiculed the great,
as people say, for the love of diversion. "I always write the thoughts of
the moment," he told the dearest of his friends, Conway, "and even laugh
to divert the person I am writing to, without any ill will on the subjects
I mention." His letters are for the most part those of a good-natured man.
It is not that he was above the foible--it was barely more than that--of
hatred. He did not trouble greatly about enemies of his own, but he never
could forgive the enemies of Sir Robert Walpole. His ridicule of the Duke
of Newcastle goes far beyond diversion. It is the baiting of a mean and
treacherous animal, whose teeth were "tumbling out," and whose mouth was
"tumbling in." He rejoices in the exposure of the dribbling indignity of
the Duke, as when he describes him going to Court on becoming Prime
Minister in 1754:
On Friday this august remnant of the Pelhams went to Court for the
first time. At the foot of the stairs he cried and sunk down; the
yeomen of the guard were forced to drag him up under the arms. When
the closet-door opened, he flung himself at his length at the
King's feet, sobbed, and cried, "God bless your Majesty! God
preserve your Majesty!" and lay there howling, embracing the King's
knees, with one foot so extended that my Lord Coventry, who was
_luckily_ in waiting, and begged the standers-by to retire, with,
"For God's sake, gentlemen, don't look at a great man in distress!"
endeavouring to shut the door, caught his grace's foot, and made
him roar with pain.
The caricature of the Duke is equally merciless in the description of
George II.'s funeral in the Abbey, in which the "burlesque Duke" is
introduced as comic relief into the solemn picture:
He fell into a fit of crying the moment he came into the chapel,
and flung himself back in a stall, the Archbishop hovering over him
with a smelling-bottle; but in two minutes his curiosity got the
better of his hypocrisy, and he ran about the chapel with his glass
to spy who was or was not there, spying with one hand 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.
Walpole, indeed, broke through his habit of public decorum in his
persecution of the Duke; and he tells how on one occasion at a ball at
Bedford House he and Brand and George Selwyn plagued the pitiful old
creature, who "wriggled, and shuffled, and lisped, and winked, and spied"
his way through the company, with a conversation at his expense carried on
in stage whispers. There was never a more loyal son than Horace Walpole.
He offered up a Prime Minister daily as a sacrifice at Sir Robert's tomb.
At the same time, his aversions were not always assumed as part of a
family inheritance. He had by temperament a small opinion of men and women
outside the circle of his affections. It was his first instinct to
disparage. He even described his great friend Madame du Deffand, at the
first time of meeting her, as "an old blind débauchée of wit." His
comments on the men of genius of his time are almost all written in a vein
of satirical intolerance. He spoke ill of Sterne and Dr. Johnson, of
Fielding and Richardson, of Boswell and Goldsmith. Goldsmith he found
"silly"; he was "an idiot with once or twice a fit of parts." Boswell's
_Tour of the Hebrides_ was "the story of a mountebank and his zany."
Walpole felt doubly justified in disliking Johnson owing to the criticism
of Gray in the _Lives of the Poets_. He would not even, when Johnson
died, subscribe to a monument. A circular letter asking for a subscription
was sent to him, signed by Burke, Boswell, and Reynolds. "I would not
deign to write an answer," Walpole told the Miss Berrys, "but sent down
word by my footman, as I would have done to parish officers with a brief,
that I would not subscribe." Walpole does not appear in this incident the
"sweet-tempered creature" he had earlier claimed to be. His pose is that
of a schoolgirl in a cutting mood. At the same time his judgment of
Johnson has an element of truth in it. "Though he was good-natured at
bottom," he said of him, "he was very ill-natured at top." It has often
been said of Walpole that, in his attitude to contemporary men of genius,
he was influenced mainly by their position in Society--that he regarded an
author who was not a gentleman as being necessarily an inferior author.
This is hardly fair. The contemporary of whom he thought most highly was
Gray, the son of a money broker. He did not spare Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu any more than Richardson. If he found an author offensive, it was
more likely to be owing to a fastidious distaste for low life than to an
aristocratic distaste for low birth; and to him Bohemianism was the lowest
of low life. It was certainly Fielding's Bohemianism that disgusted him.
He relates how two of his friends called on Fielding one evening and found
him "banqueting with a blind man, a woman, and three Irishmen, on some
cold mutton and a bone of ham, both in one dish, and the dirtiest cloth."
Horace Walpole's daintiness recoiled from the spirit of an author who did
not know how to sup decently. If he found Boswell's _Johnson_ tedious, it
was no doubt partly due to his inability to reconcile himself to Johnson's
table manners. It can hardly be denied that he was unnaturally sensitive
to surface impressions. He was a great observer of manners, but not a
great portrayer of character. He knew men in their absurd actions rather
than in their motives--even their absurd motives. He never admits us into
the springs of action in his portraits as Saint-Simon does. He was too
studied a believer in the puppetry of men and women to make them more than
ridiculous. And unquestionably the vain race of authors lent itself
admirably to his love of caricature. His account of the vanity of Gibbon,
whose history he admired this side enthusiasm, shows how he delighted in
playing with an egoistic author as with a trout:
You will be diverted to hear that Mr. Gibbon has quarrelled with
me. He lent me his second volume in the middle of November. I
returned it with a most civil panegyric. He came for more incense.
I gave it, but, alas, with too much sincerity! I added, "Mr.
Gibbon, I am sorry _you_ should have pitched on so disgusting a
subject as the Constantinopolitan History. There is so much of the
Arians and Eumonians, and semi-Pelagians; and there is such a
strange contrast between Roman and Gothic manners, and so little
harmony between a Consul Sabinus and a Ricimer, Duke of the palace,
that though you have written the story as well as it could be
written, I fear few will have patience to read it." He coloured;
all his round features squeezed themselves into sharp angles; he
screwed up his button mouth, and rapping his snuff-box, said, "It
had never been put together before"--_so well_ he meant to add--but
gulped it. He meant _so well_ certainly, for Tillemont, whom he
quotes in every page, has done the very thing. Well, from that hour
to this I have never seen him, though he used to call once or twice
a week; nor has he sent me the third volume, as he promised. I well
knew his vanity, even about his ridiculous face and person, but
thought he had too much sense to avow it so palpably.
"So much," he concludes, "for literature and its fops." The comic spirit
leans to an under-estimate rather than an over-estimate of human nature,
and the airs the authors gave themselves were not only a breach of his
code, but an invitation to his contempt. "You know," he once wrote, "I
shun authors, and would never have been one myself if it obliged me to
keep such bad company. They are always in earnest and think their
profession serious, and will dwell upon trifles and reverence learning. I
laugh at all these things, and write only to laugh at them and divert
myself. None of us are authors of any consequence, and it is the most
ridiculous of all vanities to be vain of being _mediocre."_ He followed
the Chinese school of manners and made light of his own writings. "What
have I written," he asks, "that was worth remembering, even by myself?"
"It would be affected," he tells Gray, "to say I am indifferent to fame. I
certainly am not, but I am indifferent to almost anything I have done to
acquire it. The greater part are mere compilations; and no wonder they
are, as you say, incorrect when they were commonly written with people in
the room."
It is generally assumed that, in speaking lightly of himself, Walpole was
merely posturing. To me it seems that he was sincere enough. He had a
sense of greatness in literature, as is shown by his reverence of
Shakespeare, and he was too much of a realist not to see that his own
writings at their best were trifles beside the monuments of the poets. He
felt that he was doing little things in a little age. He was diffident
both for his times and for himself. So difficult do some writers find it
to believe that there was any deep genuineness in him that they ask us to
regard even his enthusiasm for great literature as a pretence. They do not
realize that the secret of his attraction for us is that he was an
enthusiast disguised as an eighteenth-century man of fashion. His airs and
graces were not the result of languor, but of his pleasure in wearing a
mask. He was quick, responsive, excitable, and only withdrew into, the
similitude of a china figure, as Diogenes into his tub, through
philosophy. The truth is, the only dandies who are tolerable are those
whose dandyism is a cloak of reserve. Our interest in character is largely
an interest in contradictions of this kind. The beau capable of breaking
into excitement awakens our curiosity, as does the conqueror stooping to a
humane action, the Puritan caught in the net of the senses, or the
pacifist in a rage of violence. The average man, whom one knows
superficially, is a formula, or seems to live the life of a formula. That
is why we find him dull. The characters who interest us in history and
literature, on the other hand, are perpetually giving the lie to the
formulae we invent, and are bound to invent, for them. They give us
pleasure not by confirming us, but by surprising us. It seems to me
absurd, then, to regard Walpole's air of indifference as the only real
thing about him and to question his raptures. From his first travels among
the Alps with Gray down to his senile letters to Hannah More about the
French Revolution, we see him as a man almost hysterical in the intensity
of his sensations, whether of joy or of horror. He lived for his
sensations like an æsthete. He wrote of himself as "I, who am as constant
at a fire as George Selwyn at an execution." If he cared for the crownings
of kings and such occasions, it was because he took a childish delight in
the fireworks and illuminations.
He had the keen spirit of a masquerader. Masquerades, he declared, were
"one of my ancient passions," and we find him as an elderly man dressing
out "a thousand young Conways and Cholmondeleys" for an entertainment of
the kind, and going "with more pleasure to see them pleased than when I
formerly delighted in that diversion myself." He was equally an enthusiast
in his hobbies and his tastes. He rejoiced to get back in May to
Strawberry Hill, "where my two passions, lilacs and nightingales, are in
bloom." He could not have made his collections or built his battlements in
a mood of indifference. In his love of mediæval ruins he showed himself a
Goth-intoxicated man. As for Strawberry Hill itself, the result may have
been a ridiculous mouse, but it took a mountain of enthusiasm to produce
it. Walpole's own description of his house and its surroundings has an
exquisite charm that almost makes one love the place as he did. "It is a
little plaything house," he told Conway, "that I got out of Mrs.
Chenevix's shop, and is the prettiest bauble you ever saw. It is set in
enamelled meadows, with filigree hedges:
"A small Euphrates through the piece is roll'd,
And little finches wave their wings in gold."
He goes on to decorate the theme with comic and fanciful properties:
Two delightful roads that you would call dusty supply me continually
with coaches and chaises; barges as solemn as barons of the exchequer
move under my window; Richmond Hill and Ham-walks bound my prospect;
but, thank God, the Thames is between me and the Duchess of
Queensberry. Dowagers as plenty as flounders inhabit all around, and
Pope's ghost is just now skimming under my window by a most poetical
moonlight. I have about land enough to keep such a farm as Noah's
when he set up in the Ark with a pair of each kind.
It is in the spirit of a child throwing its whole imagination into playing
with a Noah's Ark that he describes his queer house. It is in this spirit
that he sees the fields around his house "speckled with cows, horses and
sheep." The very phrase suggests toy animals. Walpole himself declared at
the age of seventy-three: "My best wisdom has consisted in forming a
baby-house full of playthings for my second childhood." That explains why
one almost loves the creature. Macaulay has severely censured him for
devoting himself to the collection of knick-knacks, such as King William
III.'s spurs, and it is apparently impossible to defend Walpole as a
collector to be taken seriously. Walpole, however, collected things in a
mood of fantasy as much as of connoisseurship. He did not take himself
quite seriously. It was fancy, not connoisseurship, that made him hang up
Magna Charta beside his bed and, opposite it, the warrant for the
execution of King Charles I., on which he had written "Major Charta." Who
can question the fantastic quality of the mind that wrote to Conway:
"Remember, neither Lady Salisbury nor you, nor Mrs. Damer, have seen my
new divine closet, nor the billiard-sticks with which the Countess of
Pembroke and Arcadia used to play with her brother, Sir Philip," and
ended: "I never did see Cotchel, and am sorry. Is not the old ward-robe
there still? There was one from the time of Cain, but Adam's breeches and
Eve's under-petticoat were eaten by a goat in the ark. Good-night." He
laughed over the knick-knacks he collected for himself and his friends.
"As to snuff-boxes and toothpick cases," he wrote to the Countess of
Ossory from Paris in 1771, "the vintage has entirely failed this year."
Everything that he turned his mind to in Strawberry Hill he regarded in
the same spirit of comic delight. He stood outside himself, like a
spectator, and nothing gave him more pleasure than to figure himself as a
master of the ceremonies among the bantams, and the squirrels and the
goldfish. In one of his letters he describes himself and Bentley fishing
in the pond for goldfish with "nothing but a pail and a basin and a
tea-strainer, which I persuade my neighbours is the Chinese method." This
was in order to capture some of the fish for Bentley, who "carried a dozen
to town t'other day in a decanter." Walpole is similarly amused by the
spectacle of himself as a planter and gardener. "I have made great
progress," he boasts, "and talk very learnedly with the nursery-men,
except that now and then a lettuce runs to seed, overturns all my botany,
and I have more than once taken it for a curious West Indian flowering
shrub. Then the deliberation with which trees grow is extremely
inconvenient to my natural impatience." He goes on enviously to imagine
the discovery by posterity of a means of transplanting oaks of a hundred
and fifty years as easily as tulip-bulbs. This leads him to enlarge upon
the wonders that the Horace Walpole of posterity will be able to possess
when the miraculous discoveries have been made.
Then the delightfulness of having whole groves of humming-birds,
tatne tigers taught to fetch and carry, pocket spying-glasses to
see all that is doing in China, and a thousand other toys, which we
now look upon as impracticable, and which pert posterity would
laugh in our face for staring at.
Among the various creatures with which he loved to surround himself, it is
impossible to forget either the little black spaniel, Tony, that the wolf
carried off near a wood in the Alps during his first travels, or the more
imperious little dog, Tonton, which he has constantly to prevent from
biting people at Madame du Deffand's, but which with Madame du Deffand
herself "grows the greater favourite the more people he devours." "T'other
night," writes Walpole, to whom Madame du Deffand afterwards bequeathed
the dog in her will, "he flew at Lady Barrymore's face, and I thought
would have torn her eye out, but it ended in biting her finger. She was
terrified; she fell into tears. Madame du Deffand, who has too much parts
not to see everything in its true light, perceiving that she had not
beaten Tonton half enough, immediately told us a story of a lady whose dog
having bitten a piece out of a gentleman's leg, the tender dame, in a
great fright, cried out, 'Won't it make him sick?'" In the most attractive
accounts we possess of Walpole in his old age, we see him seated at the
breakfast-table, drinking tea out of "most rare and precious ancient
porcelain of Japan," and sharing the loaf and butter with Tonton (now
grown almost too fat to move, and spread on a sofa beside him), and
afterwards going to the window with a basin of bread and milk to throw to
the squirrels in the garden.
Many people would be willing to admit, however, that Walpole was an
excitable creature where small things were concerned--a parroquet or the
prospect of being able to print original letters of Ninon de l'Enclos at
Strawberry, or the discovery of a poem by the brother of Anne Boleyn, or
Ranelagh, where "the floor is all of beaten princes." What is not
generally realized is that he was also a high-strung and eager spectator
of the greater things. I have already spoken of his enthusiasm for wild
nature as shown in his letters from the Alps. It is true he grew weary of
them. "Such uncouth rocks," he wrote, "and such uncomely inhabitants." "I
am as surfeited with mountains and inns as if I had eat them," he groaned
in a later letter. But the enthusiasm was at least as genuine as the
fatigue. His tergiversation of mood proves only that there were two
Walpoles, not that the Walpole of the romantic enthusiasms was insincere.
He was a devotee of romance, but it was romance under the control of the
comic spirit. He was always amused to have romance brought down to
reality, as when, writing of Mary Queen of Scots, he said: "I believe I
have told you that, in a very old trial of her, which I bought for Lord
Oxford's collection, it is said that she was a large lame woman. Take
sentiments out of their _pantaufles_, and reduce them to the infirmities
of mortality, what a falling off there is!" But see him in the
picture-gallery in his father's old house at Houghton, after an absence of
sixteen years, and the romantic mood is upper-most. "In one respect," he
writes, speaking of the pictures, "I am very young; I cannot satiate
myself with looking," and he adds, "Not a picture here but calls a
history; not one but I remember in Downing Street or Chelsea, where queens
and crowds admired them." And, if he could not "satiate himself with
looking" at the Italian and Flemish masters, he similarly preserved the
heat of youth in his enthusiasm for Shakespeare. "When," he wrote, during
his dispute with Voltaire on the point, "I think over all the great
authors of the Greeks, Romans, Italians, French and English (and I know no
other languages), I set Shakespeare first and alone and then begin anew."
One is astonished to find that he was contemptuous of Montaigne. "What
signifies what a man thought," he wrote, "who never thought of anything
but himself, and what signifies what a man did who never did anything?"
This sentence might have served as a condemnation of Walpole himself, and
indeed he meant it so. Walpole, however, was an egoist of an opposite kind
to Montaigne. Walpole lived for his eyes, and saw the world as a masque of
bright and amusing creatures. Montaigne studied the map of himself rather
than the map of his neighbours' vanities. Walpole was a social being, and
not finally self-centred. His chief purpose in life was not to know
himself, but to give pleasure to his friends. If he was bored by
Montaigne, it was because he had little introspective curiosity. Like
Montaigne himself, however, he was much the servant of whim in his
literary tastes. That he was no sceptic but a disciple as regards
Shakespeare and Milton and Pope and Gray suggests, on the other hand, how
foolish it is to regard him as being critically a fashionable trifler.
Not that it is possible to represent him as a man with anything Dionysiac
in his temperament. The furthest that one can go is to say that he was a
man of sincere strong sentiment with quivering nerves. Capricious in
little things, he was faithful in great. His warmth of nature as a son, as
a friend, as a humanitarian, as a believer in tolerance and liberty, is so
unfailing that it is curious it should ever have been brought in question
by any reader of the letters. His quarrels are negligible when put beside
his ceaseless extravagance of good humour to his friends. His letters
alone were golden gifts, but we also find him offering his fortune to
Conway when the latter was in difficulties. "I have sense enough," he
wrote, "to have real pleasure in denying myself baubles, and in saving a
very good income to make a man happy for whom I have a just esteem and
most sincere friendship." "Blameable in ten thousand other respects," he
wrote to Conway seventeen years later, "may not I almost say I am perfect
with regard to you? Since I was fifteen have I not loved you unalterably?"
"I am," he claimed towards the end of his life, "very constant and sincere
to friends of above forty years." In his friendships he was more eager to
give than to receive. Madame du Deffand was only dissuaded from making him
her heir by his threat that if she did so he would never visit her again.
Ever since his boyhood he was noted for his love of giving pleasure and
for his thoughtfulness regarding those he loved. The earliest of his
published letters was until recently one written at the age of fourteen.
But Dr. Paget Toynbee, in his supplementary volumes of Walpole letters,
recently published, has been able to print one to Lady Walpole written at
the age of eight, which suggests that Walpole was a delightful sort of
child, incapable of forgetting a parent, a friend, or a pet:
Dear mama, I hop you are wall, and I am very wall, and I hop papa
is wal, and I begin to slaap, and I hop al wall and my cosens like
there pla things vary wall
and I hop Doly phillips is wall and pray
give my Duty to papa.
HORACE WALPOLE.
and I am very glad to hear by Tom that all my cruatuars are all
wall. and Mrs. Selwyn has sprand her Fot and givs her Sarves to you
and I dind ther yester Day.
At Eton later on he was a member of two leagues of friendship--the
"Triumvirate," as it was called, which included the two Montagus, and the
"Quadruple Alliance," in which one of his fellows was Gray. The truth is,
Walpole was always a person who depended greatly on being loved. "One
loves to find people care for one," he wrote to Conway, "when they can
have no view in it." His friendship in his old age for the Miss
Berrys--his "twin wifes," his "dear Both"--to each of whom he left an
annuity of £4,000, was but a continuation of that kindliness which ran
like a stream (ruffled and sparkling with malice, no doubt) through his
long life. And his kindness was not limited to his friends, but was at the
call of children and, as we have seen, of animals. "You know," he explains
to Conway, apologizing for not being able to visit him on account of the
presence of a "poor little sick girl" at Strawberry Hill, "how courteous a
knight I am to distrest virgins of five years old, and that my castle
gates are always open to them." One does not think of Walpole primarily as
a squire of children, and certainly, though he loved on occasion to romp
with the young, there was little in him of a Dickens character. But he was
what is called "sympathetic." He was sufficient of a man of imagination to
wish to see an end put to the sufferings of "those poor victims,
chimney-sweepers." So far from being a heartless person, as he has been at
times portrayed, he had a heart as sensitive as an anti-vivisectionist.
This was shown in his attitude to animals. In 1760, when there was a great
terror of mad dogs in London, and an order was issued that all dogs found
in the streets were to be killed, he wrote to the Earl of Strafford:
In London there is a more cruel campaign than that waged by the
Russians: the streets are a very picture of the murder of the
innocents--one drives over nothing but poor dead dogs! The dear,
good-natured, honest, sensible creatures! Christ! how can anybody
hurt them? Nobody could but those Cherokees the English, who desire
no better than to be halloo'd to blood--one day Samuel Byng, the
next Lord George Sackville, and to-day the poor dogs!
As for Walpole's interest in politics, we are told by writer after writer
that he never took them seriously, but was interested in them mainly for
gossip's sake. It cannot be denied that he made no great fight for good
causes while he sat in the House of Commons. Nor had he the temper of a
ruler of men. But as a commentator on politics and a spreader of opinion
in private, he showed himself to be a politician at once sagacious,
humane, and sensitive to the meaning of events. His detestation of the
arbitrary use of power had almost the heat of a passion. He detested it
alike in a government and in a mob. He loathed the violence that compassed
the death of Admiral Byng and the violence that made war on America. He
raged against a public world that he believed was going to the devil. "I
am not surprised," he wrote in 1776, "at the idea of the devil being
always at our elbows. They who invented him no doubt could not conceive
how men could be so atrocious to one another, without the intervention of
a fiend. Don't you think, if he had never been heard of before, that he
would have been invented on the late partition of Poland?" "Philosophy has
a poor chance with me," he wrote a little later in regard to America,
"when my warmth is stirred--and yet I know that an angry old man out of
Parliament, and that can do nothing but be angry, is a ridiculous animal."
The war against America he described as "a wretched farce of fear daubed
over with airs of bullying." War at any time was, in his eyes, all but the
unforgivable sin. In 1781, however, his hatred had lightened into
contempt. "The Dutch fleet is hovering about," he wrote, "but it is a
pickpocket war, and not a martial one, and I never attend to petty
larceny." As for mobs, his attitude to them is to be seen in his comment
on the Wilkes riots, when he declares:
I cannot bear to have the name of Liberty profaned to the
destruction of the cause; for frantic tumults only lead to that
terrible corrective, Arbitrary Power--which cowards call out for as
protection, and knaves are so ready to grant.
Not that he feared mobs as he feared governments. He regarded them with an
aristocrat's scorn. The only mob that almost won his tolerance was that
which celebrated the acquittal of Admiral Keppel in 1779. It was of the
mob at this time that he wrote to the Countess of Ossory: "They were, as
George Montagu said of our earthquakes, _so tame you might have stroked
them_." When near the end of his life the September massacres broke out in
Paris, his mob-hatred revived again, and he denounced the French with the
hysterical violence with which many people to-day denounce the
Bolshevists. He called them "_inferno-human_ beings," "that atrocious and
detestable nation," and declared that "France must be abhorred to latest
posterity." His letters on the subject to "Holy Hannah," whatever else may
be said against them, are not those of a cold and dilettante gossip. They
are the letters of the same excitable Horace Walpole who, at an earlier
age, when a row had broken out between the manager and the audience in
Drury Lane Theatre, had not been able to restrain himself, but had cried
angrily from his box, "He is an impudent rascal!" But his politics never
got beyond an angry cry. His conduct in Drury Lane was characteristic of
him:
The whole pit huzzaed, and repeated the words. Only think of my
being a popular orator! But what was still better, while my shadow
of a person was dilating to the consistence of a hero, one of the
chief ringleaders of the riot, coming under the box where I sat,
and pulling off his hat, said, "Mr. Walpole, what would you please
to have us do next?" It is impossible to describe to you the
confusion into which this apostrophe threw me. I sank down into the
box, and have never since ventured to set my foot into the playhouse.
There you have the fable of Walpole's life. He always in the end sank down
into his box or clambered back to his mantelpiece. Other men might save
the situation. As for him, he had to look after his squirrels and his
friends.
This means no more than that he was not a statesman, but an artist. He was
a connoisseur of great actions, not a practicer of them. At Strawberry
Hill he could at least keep himself in sufficient health with the aid of
iced water and by not wearing a hat when out of doors to compose the
greatest works of art of their kind that have appeared in English. Had he
written his letters for money we should have praised him as one of the
busiest and most devoted of authors, and never have thought of blaming him
for abstaining from statesmanship as he did from wine. Possibly he had the
constitution for neither. His genius was a genius, not of Westminster, but
of Strawberry Hill. It is in Strawberry Hill that one finally prefers to
see him framed, an extraordinarily likeable, charming, and whimsical
figure. He himself has suggested his kingdom entrancingly for us in a
letter describing his return to Strawberry after a visit to Paris in 1769:
I feel myself here like a swan, that after living six weeks in a
nasty pool upon a common, is got back into its own Thames. I do
nothing but plume and clean myself, and enjoy the verdure and
silent waves. Neatness and greenth are so essential in my opinion
to the country, that in France, where I see nothing but chalk and
dirty peasants, I seem in a terrestrial purgatory that is neither
town or country. The face of England is so beautiful, that I do not
believe Tempe or Arcadia were half so rural; for both lying in hot
climates, must have wanted the turf of our lawns. It is unfortunate
to have so pastoral a taste, when I want a cane more than a crook.
We are absurd creatures; at twenty I loved nothing but London.
Back in Strawberry Hill, he is the Prince Charming among correspondents.
One cannot love him as one loves Charles Lamb and men of a deeper and more
imaginative tenderness. But how incomparable he is as an acquaintance! How
exquisite a specimen--hand-painted--for the collector of the choice
creatures of the human race!