Art of Letters — Horace Walpole Part III from "Not that it is possible to represent him" to end

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!