Austin Dobson

“ The qualities which are his defects in more serious productions become merits in his correspondence; or, rather, they cease to be defects. No one looks for prolonged effort in a gossipping epistle; a weighty reasoning is less important than a light hand; and variety pleases more surely than symmetry of structure. Among the little band of those who have distinguished themselves in this way, Walpole is in the foremost rank,—nay, if wit and brilliancy, without gravity or pathos, are to rank highest, he is first. ”

“ But it is obviously one of those works to which the verdict of Goldsmith's critic, that it would have been better if the author had taken more pains, may judiciously be applied. It is more like a sketch for a farce than a farce itself; and it is not finished enough for a proverbe. Yet the dialogue is in parts so good that one almost regrets the inability of the author to nerve himself for an enterprise de longue haleine.
Between 1774 and 1780 the Strawberry Hill Press still now and then showed signs of vitality. ”

“ A generation like the present, for whom fiction has unravelled so many intricate combinations, and whose Gothicism and Mediævalism are better instructed than Walpole's, no longer feels its soul harrowed up in the same way as did his hushed and awe-struck readers of the days of the third George. To the critic the book is interesting as the first of a school of romances which had the honour of influencing even the mighty 'Wizard of the North,' who, no doubt in gratitude, wrote for Ballantyne's Novelist's Library a most appreciative study of the story. ”

“ There is, however, one from Rheims to Gray's mother which gives a vivid idea of the ancient French Cathedral city, slumbering in its vast vine-clad plain, with its picturesque old houses and lonely streets, its long walks under the ramparts, and its monotonous frog-haunted moat. They have no want of society, for Henry Conway procured them introductions everywhere ”

“ Loo at Princess Amelie's, loo at Lady Hertford's, are the capital events of my history, and a Sunday alone, at Strawberry, my chief entertainment. All this is far from gay; but as it neither gives me ennui, nor lowers my spirits, it is not uncomfortable, and I prefer it to being déplacé in younger company.' Such is his account of his life in 1774-5, when he is nearing sixty, and it probably represents it with sufficient accuracy. But a trifling incident easily stirs him into unwonted vivacity. ”

“ I dined to-day with half-a-dozen savans, and though all the servants were waiting, the conversation was much more unrestrained, even on the Old Testament, than I would suffer at my own table in England if a single footman was present. For literature, it is very amusing when one has nothing else to do. ”

“ As a virtuoso and amateur, his position is a mixed one. He was certainly widely different from that typical art connoisseur of his day,—the butt of Goldsmith and of Reynolds,—who travelled the Grand Tour to litter a gallery at home with broken-nosed busts and the rubbish of the Roman picture-factories. As the preface to the Ædes Walpolianæ showed, he really knew something about painting, in fact was a capable draughtsman himself; and besides, through Mann and others, had enjoyed exceptional opportunities for procuring genuine antiques. ”

“ There was a library, and—what must have had even stronger attractions for Horace Walpole—that magnificent and almost unique collection of pictures which under a later member of the family, the third Earl of Orford, passed to Catherine of Russia. For years Lord Orford, with unwearied diligence and exceptional opportunities, had been accumulating these treasures. Mann in Florence, Vertue in England, and a host of industrious foragers had helped to bring together the priceless canvases which crowded the rooms of the Minister's house next the Treasury at Whitehall. ”

“ Theatres, however, are not the only amusements which the two travellers chronicle to the home-keeping West. A great part of their time is spent in seeing churches and palaces full of pictures. Then there is the inevitable visit to Versailles, which, in sum, [33] they concur in condemning. 'The great front,' says Walpole, 'is a lumber of littleness, composed of black brick, stuck full of bad old busts, and fringed with gold rails.' Gray (he says) likes it; but Gray is scarcely more complimentary,—at all events is quite as hard upon the façade, using almost the same phrases of depreciation. ”

“ Although, during his stay in Italy, Walpole had neglected to accumulate the store of erudition which his friend Gray had been so industriously hiving for home consumption, he can scarcely be said to have learned nothing, especially at an age when much is learned unconsciously. His epistolary style, which, with its peculiar graces and pseudo-graces, had been already formed before he left England, had now acquired a fresh vivacity from his increased familiarity with the French and Italian languages ”

“ If he had behaved less like an ordinary man of the world; if he had obtained Chatterton's confidence, instead of lecturing him; if he had aided and counselled and protected him,—Walpole would have been different, and things might have been otherwise. As they were, upon the principle that 'two of a trade can ne'er agree,' it is difficult to conceive of any abiding alliance between the author of the fabricated Tragedy of Ælla and the author of the fabricated Castle of Otranto. ”

“ Both at Strawberry and Arlington Street, his increasing years and his persistent malady condemn him more and more to seclusion and retirement. He is most at Strawberry, despite its dampness, for in the country he holds 'old, useless people ought to live.' 'If you were not to be in London,' he tells Lady Ossory in April, 1774, 'the spring advances so charmingly, I think I should scarce go thither. One is frightened with the inundation of breakfasts and balls that are coming on. ”

“ Every one is engaged to everybody for the next three weeks, and if one must hunt for a needle, I had rather look for it in a bottle of hay in the country than in a crowd.' 'By age and situation,' he writes from Strawberry in September, 'at this time of the year I live with nothing but old women. They do very well for me, who have little choice left, and who rather prefer common nonsense to wise nonsense,—the only difference I know between old women and old men. ”

“ A year later he pays a second visit to Houghton, and he is still unreconciled to his environment. 'Only imagine that I here every day see men, who are mountains of roast beef, and only just seem roughly hewn out into the outlines of human form, like the giant-rock at Pratolino! I shudder when I see them brandish their knives in act to carve, and look on them as savages that devour one another.' Then there are the enforced civilities to entirely uninteresting people,—the intolerable female relative, who is curious about her cousins to the fortieth remove. ”

“ They continued to reside with Mann at Florence until May in the following year. Upon Gray the 'violent delights' of the Tuscan capital had already begun to pall. It is, he says, 'an excellent place to employ all one's animal sensations in, but utterly contrary to one's rational powers.' Walpole, on the other hand, is in his element. 'I am so well within and without,' he says in the same letter which sketches Lady Mary, 'that you would scarce know me: I am younger than ever, think of nothing but diverting myself, and live in a round of pleasures. ”

“ Even the performances of Pulteney, Earl of Bath, and the English rondeaus of Charles of Orleans are more worthy of a chronicler than the lives of physicians who had been poets, of men who had died laughing, or of Frenchmen who had studied Hebrew. Walpole took considerable pains in obtaining information, and his book was exceedingly well received,—indeed, far more favourably than he had any reason to expect. A second edition, which was not printed at Strawberry Hill, speedily followed the first, with no diminution of its prosperity. ”

“ Nevertheless, in the Gothic romance which was suggested by his Gothic castle—for, to speak paradoxically, Strawberry Hill is almost as much as Walpole the author of the Castle of Otranto—he managed to initiate a [295] new form of fiction; and by decorating 'with gay strings the gatherings of Vertue' he preserved serviceably, in the Anecdotes of Painting, a mass of curious, if sometimes uncritical, information which, in other circumstances, must have been hopelessly lost. ”

“ I am out of all politics, and never think of elections, which I think I should hate even if I loved politics,—just as, if I loved tapestry I do not think I could talk over the manufacture of worsteds. ”

“ Early in 1753, Edward Moore, the author of some Fables for the Female Sex, once popular enough to figure, between Thomson and Prior, in Goldsmith's Beauties of English Poesy, established the periodical paper called The World, which, to quote a latter-day definition, might fairly claim to be 'written by gentlemen for gentlemen.' Soame Jenyns, Cambridge of the Scribleriad (Walpole's Twickenham neighbour) , Hamilton Boyle, Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, and Lord Chesterfield were all contributors. ”

“ The room on the ground floor nearest to you is a bedchamber, hung with yellow paper and prints, framed in a new manner, invented by Lord Cardigan; that is, with black and white borders printed. Over this is Mr. Chute's bed-chamber, hung with red in the same manner. The bow-window room one pair of stairs is not yet finished; but in the tower beyond it is the charming closet where I am now writing to you. It is hung with green paper and water-colour pictures; has two windows: the one in the drawing looks to the garden, the other to the beautiful prospect ”

“ But he is enraptured with the treillage and fountains, 'and will prove it at Strawberry.' He detests the French opera, though he loves the French opéra-comique, with its Italian comedy and his passion,—'his dear favourite harlequin.' Upon the whole, in these first impressions he is disappointed. Society is duller than he expected, and with the staple topics of its conversation,—philosophy, literature, and freethinking,—he is (or says he is) out of sympathy. 'Freethinking is for one's self, surely not for society.... ”

“ With Gray he had been at school and college, which made a difference; but he no doubt regarded Fielding and Hogarth and Goldsmith and Johnson, apart from their confessed hostility to 'high life' and his beloved 'genteel comedy,' as gifted but undesirable outsiders,—'horn-handed breakers of the glebe' in Art and Letters,—with whom it [286] would be impossible to be as intimately familiar as one could be with such glorified amateurs as Bunbury and Lady Lucan and Lady Di. ”

“ The company is universal: there is from his Grace of Grafton down to children out of the Foundling Hospital; from my Lady Townshend to the kitten; from my Lord Sandys to your humble cousin and sincere friend.' [57]
After Lord Orford's death, the next landmark in Horace Walpole's life is his removal to the house at Twickenham, subsequently known as Strawberry Hill. ”

“ My abbey is a perfect college or academy. I keep a painter [Müntz] in the house, and a printer,—not to mention Mr. Bentley, who is an academy himself.' William Robinson, the printer, an Irishman with noticeable eyes which Garrick envied ('they are more Richard the Third's than Garrick's own,' says Walpole) , must have been a rather original personage, to judge by a copy of one of his letters which his patron incloses to Mann. ”

“ Indeed, between préciosité and 'Platonic love,' her life does not appear to have been a particularly worshipful one, and her long sojourn under Italian skies had not improved her. At present she was Lady Orford, her husband, who is seldom mentioned, and from whom she had been living apart, having succeeded to the title at his father's death. From Walpole's letters to Mann, it seems that in April, 1745, she was, much to the dismay of her relatives, already preening her wings for England. ”

“ Louis-Jules-Barbon Mancini-Mazarini, Duc de Nivernais (1716-98) , who had visited Twickenham three years earlier, when he was Ambassador to England. He was a man of fine manners, and tastes so literary that his works fill eight volumes. They include a translation of Walpole's Essay on Modern Gardening (see appendix at end) . In his letters to Miss Ann Pitt at this date, Walpole speaks of the Duke's clever fables, by which he is now best remembered. Lord Chesterfield told his son in 1749 that Nivernais was 'one of the prettiest men he had ever known,' and in 1762 his opinion was unaltered. ”

“ From a melancholy turn, from living reclusely, and from a little too much dignity, he never converses easily; all his words are measured and chosen, and formed into sentences; his [135] writings are admirable; he himself is not agreeable.' Meantime, however, the revived connection went on pleasantly. Gray made flying visits to Strawberry and Arlington Street, and prattled to Walpole from Pembroke between whiles. And certainly, in a measure, it is to Walpole that we owe Gray. ”

“ Good folks, they have no time to laugh. There is God and the King to be pulled down first; and men and women, one and all, are devoutly employed in the demolition.' How that enterprise eventuated, history has recorded.
It is needless, however, to rehearse the origins of the French Revolution, in order to make a [168] background for the visit of an English gentleman to Paris in 1765. Walpole had been meditating this journey for two or three years; but the state of his health, among other things (he suffered much from gout) , had from time to time postponed it. ”

“ Concerning the second performance above referred to, The Mysterious Mother, most of Walpole's biographers are content to abide in [192] generalities. That the proprietor of Gothic Strawberry should have produced The Castle of Otranto has a certain congruity; but one scarcely expects to find the same person indulging in a blank-verse tragedy sombre enough to have taxed the powers of Ford or Webster. It is a curious example of literary reaction, and his own words respecting it are doubtful-voiced. To Montagu and to Madame du Deffand he writes apologetically. ”