Art of Letters — Horace Walpole Part II from "It is generally assumed" through "fashionable trifler"

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.