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Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford, to Sir Horace Mann, British Envoy at
the Court of Tuscany. Now first published from the Originals in the Possession
of the Earl of Waldegrave. Edited by LORD DOVER 2 vols. 8vo. London: 1833.
We cannot transcribe this title-page without strong feelings of regret. The
editing of these volumes was the last of the useful and modest services rendered
to literature by a nobleman of amiable manners, of untarnished public and
private character, and of cultivated mind. On this, as on other occasions, Lord
Dover performed his part diligently, judiciously, and without the slightest
ostentation. He had two merits which are rarely found together in a commentator,
he was content to be merely a commentator, to keep in the background, and to
leave the foreground to the author whom he had undertaken to illustrate. Yet,
though willing to be an attendant, he was by no means a slave; nor did he
consider it as part of his duty to see no faults in the writer to whom he
faithfully and assiduously rendered the humblest literary offices.
The faults of Horace Walpole's head and heart are indeed sufficiently glaring.
His writings, it is true, rank as high among the delicacies of intellectual
epicures as the Strasburg pies among the dishes described in the Almanach des
Gourmands. But as the pate-de-foie-gras owes its excellence to the diseases of
the wretched animal which furnishes it, and would be good for nothing if it were
not made of livers preternaturally swollen, so none but an unhealthy and
disorganized mind could have produced such literary luxuries as the works of
Walpole.
He was, unless we have formed a very erroneous judgment of his character, the
most eccentric, the most artificial, the most fastidious, the most capricious of
men. His mind was a bundle of inconsistent whims and affectations. His features
were covered by mask within mask. When the outer disguise of obvious affectation
was removed, you were still as far as ever from seeing the real man. He played
innumerable parts and over-acted them all. When he talked misanthropy, he
out-Timoned Timon. When he talked philanthropy, he left Howard at an
immeasurable distance. He scoffed at courts, and kept a chronicle of their most
trifling scandal; at society, and was blown about by its slightest veerings of
opinion; at literary fame, and left fair copies of his private letters, with
copious notes, to be published after his decease; at rank, and never for a
moment forgot that he was an Honorable; at the practice of entail, and tasked
the ingenuity of conveyancers to tie up his villa in the strictest settlement.
The conformation of his mind was such that whatever was little seemed to him
great, and whatever was great seemed to him little. Serious business was a
trifle to him, and trifles were his serious business. To chat with
blue-stockings, to write little copies of complimentary verses on little
occasions, to superintend a private press, to preserve from natural decay the
perishable topics of Ranelagh and White's, to record divorces and bets, Miss
Chudleigh's absurdities and George Selwyn's good sayings, to decorate a
grotesque house with pie-crust battlements, to procure rare engravings and
antique chimney-boards, to match odd gauntlets, to lay out a maze of walks
within five acres of ground, these were the grave employments of his long life.
From these he turned to politics as to an amusement. After the labors of the
print-shop and the auction-room, he unbent his mind in the House of Commons.
And, having indulged in the recreation of making laws and voting millions, he
returned to more important pursuits, to researches after Queen Mary's comb,
Wolsey's red hat, the pipe which Van Tromp smoked during his last sea-fight, and
the spur which King William struck into the flank of Sorrel.
In everything in which Walpole busied himself, in the fine arts, in literature,
in public affairs, he was drawn by some strange attraction from the great to the
little, and from the useful to the odd. The politics in which he took the
keenest interests, were politics scarcely deserving of the name. The growlings
of George the Second, the flirtations of Princess Emily with the Duke of
Grafton, the amours of Prince Frederic and Lady Middlesex, the squabbles between
Gold Stick in waiting and the Master of the Buckhounds, the disagreements
between the tutors of Prince George, these matters engaged almost all the
attention which Walpole could spare from matters more important still, from
bidding for Zinckes and Petitots, from cheapening fragments of tapestry and
handles of old lances, from joining bits of painted glass, and from setting up
memorials of departed cats and dogs. While he was fetching and carrying the
gossip of Kensington Palace and Carlton House, he fancied that he was engaged in
politics, and when he recorded that gossip, he fancied that he was writing
history.
He was, as he has himself told us, fond of faction as an amusement. He loved
mischief: but he loved quiet; and he was constantly on the watch for
opportunities of gratifying both his tastes at once. He sometimes contrived,
without showing himself, to disturb the course of ministerial negotiations, and
to spread confusion through the political circles. He does not himself pretend
that, on these occasions, he was actuated by public spirit; nor does he appear
to have had any private advantage in view. He thought it a good practical joke
to set public men together by the ears; and he enjoyed their perplexities, their
accusations, and their recriminations, as a malicious boy enjoys the
embarrassment of a misdirected traveler.
About politics, in the high sense of the word, he knew nothing, and cared
nothing. He called himself a Whig. His father's son could scarcely assume any
other name. It pleased him also to affect a foolish dislike of kings as kings,
and a foolish love and admiration of rebels as rebels; and perhaps, while kings
were not in danger, and while rebels were not in being, he really believed that
he held the doctrines which he professed. To go no further than the letters now
before us, he is perpetually boasting to his friend Mann of his aversion to
royalty and to royal persons. He calls the crime of Damien "that least bad of
murders, the murder of a king." He hung up in his villa an engraving of the
death-warrant of Charles, with the inscription "Major Charta." Yet the most
superficial knowledge of history might have taught him that the Restoration, and
the crimes and follies of the twenty-eight years which followed the Restoration,
were the effects of this Greater Charter. Nor was there much in the means by
which that instrument was obtained that could gratify a judicious lover of
liberty. A man must hate kings very bitterly, before he can think it desirable
that the representatives of the people should be turned out of doors by
dragoons, in order to get at a king's head. Walpole's Whiggism, however, was of
a very harmless kind. He kept it, as he kept the old spears and helmets at
Strawberry Hill, merely for show. He would just as soon have thought of taking
down the arms of the ancient Templars and Hospitalers from the walls of his
hall, and setting off on a crusade to the Holy Land, as of acting in the spirit
of those daring warriors and statesmen, great even in their errors, whose names
and seals were affixed to the warrant which he prized so highly. He liked
revolution and regicide only when they were a hundred years old. His
republicanism, like the courage of a bully, or the love of a fribble, was strong
and ardent when there was no occasion for it, and subsided when he had an
opportunity of bringing it to the proof. As soon as the revolutionary spirit
really began to stir in Europe, as soon as the hatred of kings became something
more than a sonorous phrase, he was frightened into a fanatical royalist, and
became one of the most extravagant alarmists of those wretched times. In truth,
his talk about liberty, whether he knew it or not, was from the beginning a mere
cant, the remains of a phraseology which had meant something in the mouths of
those from whom he had learned it, but which, in his mouth, meant about as much
as the oath by which the Knights of some modern orders bind themselves to
redress the wrongs of all injured ladies. He had been fed in his boyhood with
Whig speculations on government. He must often have seen, at Houghton or in
Downing Street, men who had been Whigs when it was as dangerous to be a Whig as
to be a highwayman, men who had voted for the Exclusion Bill, who had been
concealed in garrets and cellars after the battle of Sedgemoor, and who had set
their names to the declaration that they would live and die with the Prince of
Orange. He had acquired the language of these men, and he repeated it by rote,
though it was at variance with all his tastes and feelings; just as some old
Jacobite families persisted in praying for the Pretender, and in passing their
glasses over the water decanter when they drank the King's health, long after
they had become loyal supporters of the government of George the Third. He was a
Whig by the accident of hereditary connection; but he was essentially a
courtier; and not the less a courtier because he pretended to sneer at the
objects which excited his admiration and envy. His real tastes perpetually show
themselves through the thin disguise. While professing all the contempt of
Bradshaw or Ludlow for crowned heads, he took the trouble to write a book
concerning Royal Authors. He pried with the utmost anxiety into the most minute
particulars relating to the Royal family. When, he was a child, he was haunted
with a longing to see George the First, and gave his mother no peace till she
had found a way of gratifying his curiosity. The same feeling, covered with a
thousand disguises, attended him to the grave. No observation that dropped from
the lips of Majesty seemed to him too trifling to be recorded. The French songs
of Prince Frederic, compositions certainly not deserving of preservation on
account of their intrinsic merit, have been carefully preserved for us by this
contemner of royalty. In truth, every page of Walpole's works betrays him. This
Diogenes, who would be thought to prefer his tub to a palace, and who has
nothing to ask of the masters of Windsor and Versailles but that they will stand
out of his light, is a gentleman-usher at heart.
He had, it is plain, an uneasy consciousness of the frivolity of his favorite
pursuits; and this consciousness produced one of the most diverting of his ten
thousand affectations. His busy idleness, his indifference to matters which the
world generally regards as important, his passion for trifles, he thought fit to
dignify with the name of philosophy. He spoke of himself as of a man whose
equanimity was proof to ambitious hopes and fears, who had learned to rate
power, wealth, and fame at their true value, and whom the conflict of parties,
the rise and fall of statesmen, the ebb and flow of public opinion, moved only
to a smile of mingled compassion and disdain. It was owing to the peculiar
elevation of his character that he cared about a pinnacle of lath and plaster
more than about the Middlesex election, and about a miniature of Grammont more
than about the American Revolution. Pitt and Murray might talk themselves hoarse
about trifles. But questions of government and war were too insignificant to
detain a mind which was occupied in recording the scandal of club-rooms and the
whispers of the back-stairs, and which was even capable of selecting and
disposing chairs of ebony and shields of rhinoceros-skin.
One of his innumerable whims was an extreme unwillingness to be considered a man
of letters. Not that he was indifferent to literary fame. Far from it. Scarcely
any writer has ever troubled himself so much about the appearance which his
works were to make before posterity. But he had set his heart on incompatible
objects. He wished to be a celebrated author, and yet to be a mere idle
gentleman, one of those Epicurean gods of the earth who do nothing at all, and
who pass their existence in the contemplation of their own perfections. He did
not like to have anything in common with the wretches who lodged in the little
courts behind St. Martin's Church, and stole out on Sundays to dine with their
bookseller. He avoided the society of authors. He spoke with lordly contempt of
the most distinguished among them. He tried to find out some way of writing
books, as M. Jourdain's father sold cloth, without derogating from his character
of Gentilhomme. "Lui, marchand? C'est pure medisance: il ne l'a jamais ete. Tout
ce qu'il faisait, c'est qu'il etait fort obligeant, fort officieux; et comme il
se connaissait fort bien en etoffes, il en allait choisir de tons les cotes, les
faisait apporter chez lui, et en donnait a ses amis pour de l'argent." There are
several amusing instances of Walpole's feeling on this subject in the letters
now before us. Mann had complimented him on the learning which appeared in the
Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors; and it is curious to see how impatiently
Walpole bore the imputation of having attended to anything so unfashionable as
the improvement of his mind. "I know nothing. How should I? I who have always
lived in the big busy world; who lie a-bed all the morning, calling it morning
as long as you please; who sup in company; who have played at faro half my life,
and now at loo till two and three in the morning; who have always loved
pleasure; haunted auctions. . . . How I have laughed when some of the Magazines
have called me the learned gentleman. Pray don't be like the Magazines." This
folly might be pardoned in a boy. But a man between forty and fifty years old,
as Walpole then was, ought to be quite as much ashamed of playing at loo till
three every morning as of being that vulgar thing, a learned gentleman.
The literary character has undoubtedly its full share of faults, and of very
serious and offensive faults. If Walpole had avoided those faults, we could have
pardoned the fastidiousness with which he declined all fellowship with men of
learning. But from those faults Walpole was not one jot more free than the
garreteers from whose contact he shrank. Of literary meanness and literary
vices, his life and his works contain as many instances as the life and the
works of any member of Johnson's club. The fact is, that Walpole had the faults
of Grub Street, with a large addition from St. James's Street, the vanity, the
jealousy, and the irritability of a man of letters, the affected
superciliousness and apathy of a man of ton.
His judgment of literature, of contemporary literature especially, was
altogether perverted by his aristocratical feelings. No writer surely was ever
guilty of so much false and absurd criticism. He almost invariably speaks with
contempt of those books which are now universally allowed to be the best that
appeared in his time; and, on the other hand, he speaks of writers of rank and
fashion as if they were entitled to the same precedence in literature which
would have been allowed to them in a drawing-room. In these letters, for
example, he says that he would rather have written the most absurd lines in Lee
than Thomson's Seasons. The periodical paper called The World, on the other
hand, was by "our first writers." Who, then, were the first writers of England
in the year 1750? Walpole has told us in a note. Our readers will probably guess
that Hume, Fielding, Smollett, Richardson, Johnson, Warburton, Collins,
Akenside, Gray, Dyer, Young, Warton, Mason, or some of those distinguished men,
were in the list. Not one of them. Our first writers, it seems, were Lord
Chesterfield, Lord Bath, Mr. W. Whithed, Sir Charles Williams, Mr. Soame Jenyns,
Mr. Cambridge, Mr. Coventry. Of these seven personages, Whithed was the lowest
in station, but was the most accomplished tuft-hunter of his time. Coventry was
of a noble family. The other five had among them two seats in the House of
Lords, two seats in the House of Commons, three seats in the Privy Council, a
baronetcy, a blue riband, a red riband, about a hundred thousand pounds a year,
and not ten pages that are worth reading. The writings of Whithed, Cambridge,
Coventry, and Lord Bath are forgotten. Soame Jenyns is remembered chiefly by
Johnson's review of the foolish Essay on the Origin of Evil. Lord Chesterfield
stands much lower in the estimation of posterity than he would have done if his
letters had never been published. The lampoons of Sir Charles Williams are now
read only by the curious, and, though not without occasional flashes of wit,
have always seemed to us, we must own, very poor performances.
Walpole judged of French literature after the same fashion. He understood and
loved the French language. Indeed, he loved it too well. His style is more
deeply tainted with Gallicism than that of any other English writer with whom we
are acquainted. His composition often reads, for a page together, like a rude
translation from the French. We meet every minute with such sentences as these,
"One knows what temperaments Annibal Caracci painted." "The impertinent
personage!" "She is dead rich." "Lord Dalkeith is dead of the small-pox in three
days." "It will now be seen whether he or they are most patriot."
His love of the French language was of a peculiar kind. He loved it as having
been for a century the vehicle of all the polite nothings of Europe, as the sign
by which the freemasons of fashion recognized each other in every capital from
Petersburgh to Naples, as the language of raillery, as the language of anecdote,
as the language of memoirs, as the language of correspondence. Its higher uses
he altogether disregarded. The literature of France has been to ours what Aaron
was to Moses, the expositor of great truths which would else have perished for
want of a voice to utter them with distinctness. The relation which existed
between Mr. Bentham and M. Dumont is an exact illustration of the intellectual
relation in which the two countries stand to each other. The great discoveries
in physics, in metaphysics, in political science, are ours. But scarcely any
foreign nation except France has received them from us by direct communication.
Isolated by our situation, isolated by our manners, we found truth, but we did
not impart it. France has been the interpreter between England and mankind.
In the time of Walpole, this process of interpretation was in full activity. The
great French writers were busy in proclaiming through Europe the names of Bacon,
of Newton, and of Locke. The English principles of toleration, the English
respect for personal liberty, the English doctrine that all power is a trust for
the public good, were making rapid progress. There is scarcely anything in
history so interesting as that great stirring up of the mind of France, that
shaking of the foundations of all established opinions, that uprooting of old
truth and old error. It was plain that mighty principles were at work whether
for evil or for good. It was plain that a great change in the whole social
system was at hand. Fanatics of one kind might anticipate a golden age, in which
men should live under the simple dominion of reason, in perfect equality and
perfect amity, without property, or marriage, or king, or God. A fanatic of
another kind might see nothing in the doctrines of the philosophers but anarchy
and atheism, might cling more closely to every old abuse, and might regret the
good old days when St. Dominic and Simon de Montfort put down the growing
heresies of Provence. A wise man would have seen with regret the excesses into
which the reformers were running; but he would have done justice to their genius
and to their philanthropy. He would have censured their errors; but he would
have remembered that, as Milton has said, error is but opinion in the making.
While he condemned their hostility to religion, he would have acknowledged that
it was the natural effect of a system under which religion had been constantly
exhibited to them in forms which common sense rejected and at which humanity
shuddered. While he condemned some of their political doctrines as incompatible
with all law, all property, and all civilization, he would have acknowledged
that the subjects of Lewis the Fifteenth had every excuse which men could have
for being eager to pull down, and for being ignorant of the far higher art of
setting up. While anticipating a fierce conflict, a great and wide-wasting
destruction, he would yet have looked forward to the final close with a good
hope for France and for mankind.
Walpole had neither hopes nor fears. Though the most Frenchified English writer
of the eighteenth century, he troubled himself little about the portents which
were daily to be discerned in the French literature of his time. While the most
eminent Frenchmen were studying with enthusiastic delight English politics and
English philosophy, he was studying as intently the gossip of the old court of
France. The fashions and scandal of Versailles and Marli, fashions and scandal a
hundred years old, occupied him infinitely more than a great moral revolution
which was taking place in his sight. He took a prodigious interest in every
noble sharper whose vast volume of wig and infinite length of riband had figured
at the dressing or at the tucking up of Lewis the Fourteenth, and of every
profligate woman of quality who had carried her train of lovers backward and
forward from king to parliament, and from parliament to king, during the wars of
the Fronde. These were the people of whom he treasured up the smallest memorial,
of whom he loved to hear the most trifling anecdote, and for whose likenesses he
would have given any price. Of the great French writers of his own time,
Montesquieu is the only one of whom he speaks with enthusiasm. And even of
Montesquieu he speaks with less enthusiasm than of that abject thing, Crebillon
the younger, a scribbler as licentious as Louvet and as dull as Rapin. A man
must be strangely constituted who can take interest in pedantic journals of the
blockades laid by the Duke of A. to the hearts of the Marquise de B. and the
Comtesse de C. This trash Walpole extols in language sufficiently high for the
merits of Don Quixote. He wished to possess a likeness of Crebillon; and
Liotard, the first painter of miniatures then living, was employed to preserve
the features of the profligate dunce. The admirer of the Sopha and of the
Lettres Atheniennes had little respect to spare for the men who were then at the
head of French literature. He kept carefully out of their way. He tried to keep
other People from paying them any attention. He could not deny that Voltaire and
Rousseau were clever men; but he took every opportunity of depreciating them. Of
D'Alembert he spoke with a contempt which, when the intellectual powers of the
two men are compared, seems exquisitely ridiculous. D'Alembert complained that
he was accused of having written Walpole's squib against Rousseau. "I hope,"
says Walpole, "that nobody will attribute D'Alembert's works to me." He was in
little danger.
It is impossible to deny, however, that Walpole's writings have real merit, and
merit of a very rare, though not of a very high kind. Sir Joshua Reynolds used
to say that, though nobody would for a moment compare Claude to Raphael, there
would be another Raphael before there was another Claude. And we own that we
expect to see fresh Humes and fresh Burkes before we again fall in with that
peculiar combination of moral and intellectual qualities to which the writings
of Walpole owe their extraordinary popularity.
It is easy to describe him by negatives. He had not a creative imagination. He
had not a pure taste. He was not a great reasoner. There is indeed scarcely any
writer in whose works it would be possible to find so many contradictory
judgments, so many sentences of extravagant nonsense. Nor was it only in his
familiar correspondence that he wrote in this flighty and inconsistent manner,
but in long and elaborate books, in books repeatedly transcribed and intended
for the public eye. We will give an instance or two; for without instances
readers not very familiar with his works will scarcely understand our meaning.
In the Anecdotes of Painting, he states, very truly, that the art declined after
the commencement of the civil wars. He proceeds to inquire why this happened.
The explanation, we should have thought, would have been easily found. He might
have mentioned the loss of a king who was the most munificent and judicious
patron that the fine arts have ever had in England, the troubled state of the
country, the distressed condition of many of the aristocracy, perhaps also the
austerity of the victorious party. These circumstances, we conceive, fully
account for the phenomenon. But this solution was not odd enough to satisfy
Walpole. He discovers another cause for the decline of the art, the want of
models. Nothing worth painting, it seems, was left to paint. "How picturesque,"
he exclaims, "was the figure of an Anabaptist!"--as if Puritanism had put out
the sun and withered the trees; as if the civil wars had blotted out the
expression of character and passion from the human lip and brow; as if many of
the men whom Vandyke painted had not been living in the time of the
Commonwealth, with faces little the worse for wear; as if many of the beauties
afterwards portrayed by Lely were not in their prime before the Restoration; as
if the garb or the features of Cromwell and Milton were less picturesque than
those of the round-faced peers, as like each other as eggs to eggs, who look out
from the middle of the periwigs of Kneller. In the Memoirs, again, Walpole
sneers at the Prince of Wales, afterwards George the Third, for presenting a
collection of books to one of the American colleges during the Seven Years' War,
and says that, instead of books, his Royal Highness ought to have sent arms and
ammunition, as if a war ought to suspend all study and all education; or as if
it were the business of the Prince of Wales to supply the colonies with military
stores out of his own pocket. We have perhaps dwelt too long on these passages;
but we have done so because they are specimens of Walpole's manner. Everybody
who reads his works with attention will find that they swarm with loose and
foolish observations like those which we have cited; observations which might
pass in conversation or in a hasty letter, but which are unpardonable in books
deliberately written and repeatedly corrected.
He appears to have thought that he saw very far into men; but we are under the
necessity of altogether dissenting from his opinion. We do not conceive that he
had any power of discerning the finer shades of character. He practiced an art,
however, which, though easy and even vulgar, obtains for those who practice it
the reputation of discernment with ninety-nine people out of a hundred. He
sneered at everybody, put on every action the worst construction which it would
bear, "spelt every man backward," to borrow the Lady Hero's phrase,
"Turned every man the wrong side out, And never gave to truth and virtue that
Which simpleness and merit purchaseth."
In this way any man may, with little sagacity and little trouble, be considered
by those whose good opinion is not worth having as a great judge of character.
It is said that the hasty and rapacious Kneller used to send away the ladies who
sate to him as soon as he had sketched their faces, and to paint the figure and
hands from his housemaid. It was in much the same way that Walpole portrayed the
minds oft others. He copied from the life only those glaring and obvious
peculiarities which could not escape the most superficial observation. The rest
of the canvas he filled up, in a careless dashing way, with knave and fool,
mixed in such proportions as pleased Heaven. What a difference between these
daubs and the masterly portraits of Clarendon!
There are contradictions without end in the sketches of character which abound
in Walpole's works. But if we were to form our opinion of his eminent
contemporaries from a general survey of what he has written concerning them, we
should say that Pitt was a strutting, ranting, mouthing actor, Charles Townshend
an impudent and voluble jack-pudding, Murray a demure, cold-blooded, cowardly
hypocrite, Hardwicke an insolent upstart, with the understanding of a
pettifogger and the heart of a hangman, Temple an impertinent poltroon, Egmont a
solemn coxcomb, Lyttelton a poor creature whose only wish was to go to heaven in
a coronet, Onslow a pompous proser, Washington a braggart, Lord Camden sullen,
Lord Townshend malevolent, Secker an atheist who had shammed Christian for a
miter, Whitefield an impostor who swindled his converts out of their watches.
The Walpoles fare little better than their neighbors. Old Horace is constantly
represented as a coarse, brutal, niggardly buffoon, and his son as worthy of
such a father. In short, if we are to trust this discerning judge of human
nature, England in his time contained little sense and no virtue, except what
was distributed between himself, Lord Waldegrave, and Marshal Conway.
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