Born, in London, 24 Sept. 1717. Educated at Eton, April 1727 to Sept. 1734. Entered at Lincoln’s Inn, 27 May 1731. To King’s Coll., Camb., March 1735. Inspector of Imports and Exports, 1737–38; Usher of the Exchequer, 1738; Comptroller of the Pipe, 1738; Clerk of the Estreats, 1738. Left Cambridge, March 1739. Travelled on Continent, 1739–41. M.P. for Callington, 1741–44. Settled at Strawberry Hill, 1747. M.P. for Castle Rising, 1754–57; for King’s Lynn, 1757–68. Succeeded to Earldom of Orford, Dec. 1791. Unmarried. Died, in London, 2 March 1797. Buried at Houghton. Works: “Lessons for the Day” (anon.), 1742; “Epilogue to Tamerlane” (1746); “Ædes Walpolianæ,” 1747; “Letter from Xo-Ho,” 1757 (5th edn. same year); “Fugitive Pieces in Verse and Prose,” 1758; “Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors of England” (2 vols.), 1758; “Observations on the Account given of the Catalogue … in … the Critical Review,” 1759; “Reflections on the Different Ideas of the French and English in regard to Cruelty” (anon.), 1759; “A Counter-Address to the Public” (anon.), 1764; “The Castle of Otranto” (anon.), 1765 (2nd edn. same year); “An Account of the Giants lately discovered,” 1766; “The Mysterious Mother” (priv. ptd.), 1768; “Historic Doubts of the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third,” 1768 (2nd edn. same year); “Miscellaneous Antiquities” (anon.), 1772; “Description of the Villa … at Strawberry Hill,” 1772; “Letter to the Editor of the Miscellanies of Thomas Chatterton,” 1779; “To Lady H. Waldegrave” (anon.) (1779); “Hieroglyphick Tales” (anon.), 1785; “Essay on Modern Gardening,” 1785; “The Press at Strawberry Hill to … the Duke of Clarence” (anon.) (1790?); “Hasty Productions,” 1791. Posthumous: “Letters to … Rev. W. Cole and others,” 1818; “Letters to G. Montagu,” 1819; “Private Correspondence” (4 vols.), 1820; “Memoirs of the Last Ten Years of the Reign of King George II.,” ed. by Lord Holland (2 vols.), 1822; “Letters to Sir H. Mann” (7 vols.), 1833–44; “Letters,” ed. by J. Wright (6 vols.), 1840; “Memoirs of the Reign of King George III.,” ed. by Sir D. Le Marchant (4 vols.), 1845; “Letters to the Countess of Ossory” (2 vols.), 1848; “Correspondence with W. Mason,” ed. by J. Mitford (2 vols.), 1851; “Letters,” ed. by P. Cunningham (9 vols.), 1857–58; “Journal of the Reign of King George the Third … being a Supplement to his Memoirs,” ed. by Dr. Doran (2 vols.), 1859; “Supplement to the Historic Doubts,” ed. by Dr. Hawtrey (priv. ptd.), 1860–61. He edited: P. Hentzner’s “A Journey into England,” 1757; G. Vertue’s “Anecdotes of Painting in England,” 1762; and “Catalogue of Engravers,” 1763, Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s Life, 1764; Count de Grammont’s “Mémoires,” 1772. Collected Works: in 9 vols., 1798–1825. Life: by Austin Dobson, 1890.
Personal
I find Mr. Walpole then made some mention of me to you; yes, we are together again. It is about a year, I believe, since he wrote to me, to offer it, and there has been (particularly of late), in appearance, the same kindness and confidence almost as of old. What were his motives, I cannot yet guess. What were mine, you will imagine and perhaps blame me. However as yet I neither repent, nor rejoice overmuch, but I am pleased.
I was well acquainted with Mr. Walpole at Florence, and indeed he was particularly civil to me. I am encouraged to ask a favor of him, if I did not know, that few people have so good memories as to remember, so many years backwards as have passed since I have seen him. If he has treated the character of Queen Elizabeth with disrespect, all the women should tear him in pieces, for abusing the glory of her sex.
I am certainly the greatest philosopher in the world, without ever having thought of being so: always employed, and never busy; eager about trifles, and indifferent to ever thing serious. Well, if it is not philosophy, at least it is content.
When Mr. Horace Walpole came from abroad about the year 1746, he was much of a Fribble in dress and manner. Mr. Colman, at that time a schoolboy, had some occasion to pay him a visit. He told me he has a strong recollection of the singularity of his manner; and that it was then said that Garrick had him in thought when he wrote the part of Fribble, in “Miss in her Teens.” But I doubt this much; for there is a character in a play called “Tunbridge Wells,” in which that of Fribble seems to be evidently formed. However, Garrick might have had Mr. Walpole in his thoughts. This gentleman (Mr. Walpole) is still somewhat singular in manner and appearance; but it seems only a singularity arising from a very delicate and weak constitution, and from living quite retired among his books, and much with ladies. He is always lively and ingenious; never very solid or energetic. He appears to be very fond of French manners, authors, &c., &c., and I believe keeps up to this day a correspondence with many of the people of fashion in Paris. His love of French manners, and his reading so much of their language, have I think infected his style a little, which is not always so entirely English as it ought to be. He is, I think, a very humane and amiable man.
The letter you sent me of Horace Walpole’s is brilliant, and, from its subject, inevitably interesting; but do not expect that I can learn to esteem that fastidious and unfeeling being, to whose insensibility we owe the extinction of the greatest poetic luminary Chatterton, if we may judge from the brightness of its dawn, that ever rose in our, or perhaps any other hemisphere. This fine wit of Strawberry Hill, is of that order of mortals who swarm, always swarmed, and always will swarm in refined states; whose eyes of admiration are in their backs, and who, consequently, see nothing worthy their attention before, or on either side of them; and who, therefore, weary, sicken, and disgust people whose sensibilities are strong and healthy, by their eternal cant about the great have beens, and the little are’s.
Poor Lord Orford! I could not help mourning for him as if I had not expected it. But twenty years’ unclouded kindness and pleasant correspondence cannot be given up without emotion. I am not sorry now that I never flinched from his ridicule or attacks, nor suffered them to pass without rebuke. At our last meeting I made him promise to buy Law’s “Serious Call.” His playful wit, his various knowledge, his polished manners, alas! what avail they now? The most serious thoughts are awakened. O that he had known and believed the things that belonged to his peace. My heart is much oppressed with this reflection.
When viewed from behind, he had somewhat of a boyish appearance, owing to the form of his person, and the simplicity of his dress…. His laugh was forced and uncouth, and even his smile not the most pleasing. His walk was enfeebled by the gout; which, if the editor’s memory do not deceive, he mentioned that he had been tormented with since the age of twenty-five; adding, at the same time, that it was no hereditary complaint, his father, Sir Robert Walpole, who always drank ale, never having known that disorder, and far less his other parent. This painful complaint not only affected his feet, but attacked his hands to such a degree that his fingers were always swelled and deformed, and discharged large chalk-stones once or twice a year: upon which occasions he would observe, with a smile, that he must set up an inn, for he could chalk up a score with more ease and rapidity than any man in England.
The whole spirit of this man was penury. Enjoying an affluent income he only appeared to patronise the arts which amused his tastes,—employing the meanest artists, at reduced prices, to ornament his own works, an economy which he bitterly reprehends in others who were compelled to practise it. He gratified his avarice at the expense of his vanity; the strongest passion must prevail. It was the simplicity of childhood in Chatterton to imagine Horace Walpole could be a patron—but it is melancholy to record that a slight protection might have saved such a youth. Gray abandoned this man of birth and rank in the midst of their journey through Europe; Mason broke with him; even his humble correspondent Cole, this “friend of forty years,” was often sent away in dudgeon; and he quarrelled with all the authors and artists he had ever been acquainted with. The Gothic castle at Strawberry-hill was rarely graced with living genius—there the greatest was Horace Walpole himself.
He certainly was proud of being considered as a sort of patron of literature, and a friend to literary men, but he did not choose to purchase the pre-eminence at a higher price than a little flattery and praise, and a pudding neither over large nor over solid…. On his first invitation to dinner with his Lordship, he accompanied Mr. K. There were no other guests. The Sexagenarian presumed that he should for once enjoy the luxury of a splendid dinner, and prepared himself accordingly. Dinner was served, when to the poor author’s astonishment, one dish only smoked upon the noble board, and that too, as ill luck would have it, was a species of fish not very agreeable to the palate of the guest. He waited, however, in patience, and the fish was succeeded by a leg of mutton. Wae worth the man, who, in the pride and haughtiness of his heart, presumes to say anything to the disparagement of a leg of mutton. The author, however, thought that he might have a leg of mutton at home, and taking it for granted, that at a nobleman’s table, a second course would succeed, where there would be some tit-bit to pamper his appetite, he was very sparingly helped. Alas! nothing else made its appearance. “Well then,” exclaimed the disappointed visitor, “I must make up with cheese.” His Lordship did not eat cheese. So to the great amusement of his companion, the poor author returned hungry, disconcerted, and half angry.
His figure was, as every one knows, not merely tall, but more properly long, and slender to excess; his complexion, and particularly his hands, of a most unhealthy paleness. I speak of him before the year 1772. His eyes were remarkably bright and penetrating, very dark and lively: his voice was not so strong; but his tones were extremely pleasant, and (if I may so say) highly gentlemanly. I do not remember his common gait: he always entered a room in that style of affected delicacy which fashion had then made almost natural; chapeau bras between his hands, as if he wished to compress it, or under his arm; knees bent; and feet on tiptoe, as if afraid of a wet floor. His dress in visiting was most usually (in summer when I most saw him) a lavender suit; the waistcoat embroidered with a little silver, or of white silk worked in the tambour; partridge silk stockings; and gold buckles; ruffles and frill, generally lace. I remember, when a child, thinking him very much under-dressed if at any time, except in mourning, he wore hemmed cambric. In summer, no powder; but his wig combed straight, and showing his smooth pale forehead, and queued behind; in winter, powder.
That cold and false-hearted Frenchified coxcomb, Horace 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 overacted 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 opinions; 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 honourable; 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 piecrust 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 labours 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.
Mr. Walpole’s affection for his mother was so much the most amiable point in his character, and his expressions whenever he names or alludes to her are so touching, come so directly and evidently from the heart, that one would very fain think of her as he did, and believe she had every perfection his partiality assigns to her. But, in truth, there was a contrary version of the matter, not resting solely, nor yet principally, upon the authority of Lady Mary Wortley. It filled so prominent a place in the scandalous history of the time, that the world knew as well which way Captain Lemuel Gulliver was glancing when gravely vindicating the reputation of my Lord Treasurer Flimnap’s excellent lady, as what he meant by the red, green, and blue girdles of the Lilliputian grandees, or the said Flimnap’s feats of agility on the tight-rope. Those ironical lines also, where Pope says that Sir Robert Walpole
| “Had never made a friend in private life, | |
| And was besides a tyrant to his wife.” |
A vile, malignant, and unnatural wretch, though a very clever writer of Letters.
The affections of his heart were bestowed on few; for in early life they had never been cultivated, but they were singularly warm, pure, and constant; characterised not by the ardour of passion, but by the constant preoccupation of real affection. He had lost his mother, to whom he was fondly attached, early in life; and with his father, a man of coarse feelings and boisterous manners, he had few sentiments in common. Always feeble in constitution, he was unequal to the sports of the field, and to the drinking which then accompanied them; so that during his father’s retreat at Houghton, however much he respected his abilities and was devoted to his fame, he had little sympathy in his tastes, or pleasure in his society. To the friends of his own selection his devotion was not confined to professions or words: on all occasions of difficulty, of whatever nature, his active affection came forward in defence of their character, or assistance in their affairs.
A wit he was of the first water; effeminate too, no doubt, though he prided himself on his open-breasted waistcoats in his old age, and possessed exquisite good sense and discernment, where party-feelings did not blind him. But of the charge of heartlessness, his zeal and painstaking in behalf of a hundred people, and his beautiful letter to his friend Conway in particular, offering, in a way not to be doubted, to share his fortune with him, ought to acquit him by acclamation.
It is said that, latterly, Sir Robert Walpole and his wife did not live happily together, and that Horace, the youngest, was not the son of the great Prime Minister of England, but of Carr, Lord Hervey, elder brother of Pope’s antagonist, and reckoned, as Walpole records, of superior parts to his celebrated brother, John. The story rests on the authority of Lady Louisa Stuart, daughter of the minister Earl of Bute, and grand-daughter of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. She has related it in print in the Introductory Anecdotes to Lady Mary’s Works; and there is too much reason to believe that what she says is true.
As for Horace Walpole, he was only a link in the chain of ignoble circumstances that led up to the suicide [of Chatterton]—for which act, however, it is absurd to make any one so responsible as the boy himself. Why should this conceited literary sybarite have been so very forward to befriend a sucking author who had hoaxed him? It is all fair for a nobleman to amuse himself by elaborately concocting a series of gossipy letters to be passed off as the offspring of unpremeditated friendly intercourse—and to tell lies about a trumpery “Otranto,” writing when he is detected, “the author flatters himself he shall appear excusable”—but when a poor attorney’s clerk plays similar pranks in a work of stupendous genius, then the noble “forger” bethinks him that “all of the house of forgery are relations,” and that his younger brother in “Forgery” “must be a consummate villain.”
“The Autocrat of Strawberry Hill.” “The Frenchified Coxcomb.” “Lying Old Fox.” “A Parasite of Genius.” “The Puck in Literature.” “Trifler in Great Things.” “Tydeus.” “Ultimus Romanorum.”
The student of English literature can neither overlook Walpole nor treat him as a person of little consequence. He has a marked individuality. If not a great man in the strict sense of the term, he had lived among those who were in the first rank, and he reflected some of their light. His was a complex character which it is easier to criticise than to comprehend. He exhibited in his person a strange compound of foppery and shrewdness, of excessive vanity and of indubitable good sense. He ridiculed and sneered at the follies of his countrymen, and he was the most affected and conceited Englishman of note in his day.
Here, at last, we have the prince of letter-writers drawn for us with a sure and graceful touch. Here is the petted child, who, humored in a foolish whim, was carried privately to court at night, to kiss King George’s hand. Here is the clever schoolboy, who preferred reading to fighting; whose friends were lads as precocious as himself, and who, in most unboyish fashion, dubbed his play-fellows Oromasdes and Plato instead of plain Ashton and Gray. Here is the one undergraduate of Cambridge who frankly confesses (for which we love him much) that he never mastered even his multiplication table. Here is the young gentleman of leisure who drew a handsome income from sinecures, and who was of real service to his country by traveling abroad, and writing admirable letters home. Here is the valued friend of so many brilliant and distinguished people, who has left us in his vivacious pages those matchless portraits that time can never fade. Here, in a word, is Horace Walpole, whom some loved and not a few hated, whose critics have dealt him heavy censure and faint praise, and who now, from a snug corner in the Elysian fields, must secretly rejoice at finding himself in hands at once sympathetic, tolerant and impartial.
He was eleven years younger than the rest of his father’s children, a circumstance which, taken in connection with his dissimilarity, both personally and mentally, to the other members of the family, has been held to lend some countenance to the contemporary suggestion, first revived by Lady Louisa Stuart (Introduction to Lord Wharncliffe’s edition of the “Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu”), that he was the son not of Sir Robert Walpole, but of Carr, lord Hervey, the “Sporus” of Pope. His attachment to his mother and his life-long reverence for Sir Robert Walpole, of whom he was invariably the strenuous defender, added to the fact that there is nowhere the slightest hint in his writings of any suspicion on his own part as to his parentage, must be held to discredit this ancient scandal.
Strawberry Hill
Whether Horace Walpole conferred a benefit upon the public by setting of applying the Gothic style of architecture to domestic purposes, may be doubtful; so greatly has the example he gave been abused in practice since. But, at all events, he thus led the professors of architecture to study with accuracy the principle of the art, which has occasioned the restoration and preservation in such an admirable manner of so many of our finest cathedrals, colleges, and ancient Gothic and conventual buildings. This, it must be at least allowed, was the fortunate result of the rage for Gothic, which succeeded the building at Strawberry Hill. For a good many years after that event, every new building was pinnacled and turreted on all sides, however little its situation, its size, or its uses might seem to fit it for such ornaments. Then, as fashion is never constant for any great length of time, the taste of the public rushed at once upon castles; and loop-holes, and battlements, and heavy arches, and buttresses appeared in every direction. Now the fancy of the time has turned as madly to that bastard kind of architecture, possessing, however, many beauties, which, compounded of the Gothic, Castellated, and Grecian or Roman, is called the Elizabethan, or Old English. No villa, no country-house, no lodge in the outskirts of London, no box of a retired tradesman, is now built, except in some modification of this style.
In his multitudinous collection nothing was incongruous, nothing out of place; every thing was well arranged, every thing was complete in its way. Some things might be finical, some trifling; yet all gave evidence of good taste, of refined intellect, and of a range of thought, of occupation, of amusement, far, far higher than could be challenged by any other votarist of fashion of that time. Horace Walpole was himself a living specimen of the rarity which he prized. Strawberry Hill and its master were alike unique.
The fate of Strawberry was still more lamentable. For four and twenty days the apartments, sacred to the Horatian pleasantries, echoed with the hammer of the auctioneer. Circumstances, that need not be more particularly alluded to, rendered this degradation unavoidable, and it was only with difficulty that the most sacred of the family possessions could be preserved from the relentless ordeal of “a public sale!” The shrine which had been visited with so much interest and veneration, was now overrun by a well dressed mob, who glanced at its treasures, and at the copious catalogue in which they were enumerated, apparently with a like indifference. But at the sale this indifference, whether feigned or real, changed to the most anxious desire to obtain possession of some relic of the man whose name was invested with so many pleasant associations; and the more interesting portion of “the thousand trifles” created a degree of excitement which would almost have reconciled their proprietor to such a distribution.
If in the history of British art there is one period more distinguished than another for its neglect of Gothic, it was certainly the middle of the eighteenth century…. An author appeared … to whose writings and to whose influence as an admirer of Gothic art we believe may be ascribed one of the chief causes which induced its present revival…. It is impossible to peruse either the letters or the romances of this remarkable man without being struck by the unmistakable evidence which they contain of his Mediæval predilections…. The position which he occupies with regard to art resembles in many respects that in which he stands as a man of letters. His labours were not profound in either field. But their result was presented to the public in a form which gained him rapid popularity both as an author and a dilettante. As a collector of curiosities he was probably influenced more by a love of old world associations than by any sound appreciation of artistic design.
Strawberry Hill … stands on a gentle elevation about three hundred yards from, and overlooking, the Thames immediately above Twickenham… When Walpole rented the house it was little more than a cottage, and the grounds were of narrow compass. As soon as he became its owner, he began to enlarge the house and extend the grounds. The cottage grew into a villa, the villa into a mansion…. Strawberry Hill, when completed, was a Gothic building, but Gothic of no particular period, class, or style. Windows, doorways, and mouldings of the thirteenth century stood side by side with others of the fifteenth and sixteenth. Ecclesiastical were co-mingled with secular features, collegiate with baronial or military. Next to an Abbey Entrance was the oriel of an Elizabethan Manor-house, or the keep of a Norman Castle, while battlements and machicolation frowned over the wide bay windows that opened on to the lawn…. Walpole was in his thirtieth year when he took Strawberry Hill; and he spent fifty summers in it, improving the house, adding to his collections, and enjoying the lilacs and nightingales in his grounds…. As it now stands, Strawberry Hill is a renewal of Walpole’s house, with modern sumptuousness superadded. All the old rooms are there, though the uses of many have been changed…. The grounds and gardens are as beautiful and attractive as of old, the trees as verdant, the rosary as bright, the lawn as green, and in their season Walpole’s “two passions, lilacs and nightingales,” in as full bloom and abundance as ever.
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. But his collection was not so rich in this way as might have been anticipated; and his portraits, his china, and his miniatures were probably his best possessions. For the rest, he was an indiscriminate rather than an eclectic collector; and there was also considerable truth in that strange “attraction from the great to the little, and from the useful to the odd” which Macaulay has noted. Many of the marvels at Strawberry would never have found a place in the treasure-houses—say of Beckford or Samuel Rogers.
He grew old there in his gim-crack of a palace, cultivating his flowers and his complexion; tiptoeing while he could over his waxed floors in lavender suit, with embroidered waistcoat and “partridge silk stockings,” with chapeau bas held before him—very reverent to any visitor of distinction—and afterward (he lived almost into this century), when gout seizes him, I seem to see still—as once before—the fastidious old man, shuffling up and down from the drawing-room to library—stopping here and there to admire some newly arrived bit of pottery—pulling out his golden snuff-box and whisking a delicate pinch into his old nostrils—then dusting his affluent shirt-frills with the tips of his dainty fingers, with an air of gratitude to Providence for having created so fine a gentleman as Horace Walpole, and of gratitude to Horace Walpole for having created so fine a place as Strawberry Hill.
Horace Walpole’s collections were sold at Strawberry Hill by George Robins in April and May 1842, during twenty-four days. The first six days were devoted to the sale of the library, which consisted of 1555 lots, and realised £3900. It was very badly catalogued, and the books and books of prints, collection of portraits, &c., forming the seventh and eight days’ sale, were withdrawn, re-catalogued, and extended to a ten days’ sale.
Royal and Noble Authors, 1758
My Catalogue I intended should have been exact enough in style: it has not been thought so by some; I tell you that you may not trust me too much. Mr. Gray, a very perfect judge, has sometimes censured me for parliamentary phrases, familiar to me as your Scotch law is to you.
A caprice sometimes mingled with affectation, and a prevalent desire of saying a witty thing rather than a wise one, will be obvious to the considerate reader: but his lordship had a liveliness in the manner of conveying his sentiments, an intelligent pertinence in his observations, and a brilliant smartness in his mode of passing critical judgment, which appear to have compensated for many defects, in the eye of the fashionable world.
I cannot leave the “Royal and Noble Authors” without exposing the extraordinary chain of errors which an examination of the subject has detected in that work.
Castle of Otranto, 1765
Shall I even confess to you, what was the origin of this romance? I waked one morning in the beginning of last June from a dream, of which all I could recover was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head filled, like mine, with Gothic story), and that, on the uppermost banister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour. In the evening I sat down, and began to write, without knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate. The work grew on my hands…. In short, I was so engrossed with my tale, which I completed in less than two months, that one evening I wrote from the time I had drunk my tea, about six o’clock, till half an hour after one in the morning.
How do you think he has employed that leisure which his political frenzy has allowed of? In writing a novel, entitled the “Castle of Otranto;” and such a novel that no boarding-school Miss of thirteen could get through with without yawning.
A series of supernatural appearances, put together under the most interesting form imaginable. Let one be ever so much of a philosopher, that enormous helmet, that monstrous sword, the portrait which starts from its frame and walks away, the skeleton of the hermit praying in the oratory, the vaults, the subterranean passages, the moonshine—all these things make the hair of the sage stand on end, as much as that of the child and his nurse: so much are the sources of the marvellous the same to all men. It is true that nothing very important results at least from all these wonders; but the aim of the author was to amuse, and he certainly cannot be reproached for having missed his aim.
Read the “Castle of Otranto,” which grievously disappointed my expectations.
Is, to my notion, dry, meagre, and without effect. It is done upon false principles of taste. The great hand and arm which are thrust into the court-yard, and remain there all day long, are the pasteboard machinery of a pantomime; they shock the senses, and have no purchase upon the imagination. They are a matter-of-fact impossibility; a fixture, and no longer a phantom.
The actors in the romance are strikingly drawn, with bold outlines becoming the age and nature of the story. Feudal tyranny was, perhaps, never better exemplified than in the character of Manfred…. The applause due to chastity and precision of style,—to a happy combination of supernatural agency with human interest,—to a tone of feudal manners and language sustained by characters strongly drawn and well discriminated,—and to unity of action, producing scenes alternately of interest and of grandeur;—the applause, in fine, which cannot be denied to him who can excite the passions of fear and of pity, must be awarded to the author of “The Castle of Otranto.”
By way of experiment, in reviving the more imaginative style of romance, Walpole had bethought himself of a mediæval story of an Italian castle, the human tenants of which should act naturally, but should be surrounded by supernatural circumstances and agencies leading them on to their fate. I confess that on reperusing the story the other day, I did not find my nerves affected as they were when I read it first. The mysterious knockings and voices, the pictures starting from the wainscot, the subterranean vaults, and even the great helmet with the nodding black plumes in the courtyard, had lost their horror; and Walpole seemed to me a very poor master of the Gothic business, or of poetic business of any kind. The attempt, however, is interesting as a hark-back to mediævalism, at a time when mediævalism was but little in fashion. As a virtuoso Walpole had acquired a certain artificial taste for the Gothic; and his “Gothic Story,” as he called it, did something to bring to the minds of British readers, on its first publication, the recollection that there had been a time in the world, when men lived in castles, believed in the devil, and did not take snuff, or wear powdered wigs.
There can, however, be no doubt that this story had a very powerful effect on the writers that followed; nay, that it led, amongst other things, to the study of architecture, mediævalism, the love of the Gothic, the writing of Sir Walter Scott’s great romances, and even to the revival of the love of colour, glitter, show, and pictorial decoration observable in the religious services of a large portion of the people of this land.
This story fills one of the conditions to be found in almost every form of writing that leaves its mark; its main merit is its novelty; it is itself commonplace and nearly unreadable.
Originality the work may safely claim. The mountainous helmet, with its waving sable plumes, which crashes down into the courtyard of the Castle of Otranto at the very beginning of the narrative, unheralded and unexplained, may be taken as a symbol and type of the suddenness with which supernatural terror was reintroduced into English fiction by Horace Walpole. Here, with a decisive hand, was struck the keynote of all those later romances which gave only too much ground for Goethe’s pithy maxim. “The classical is health; and the romance, disease.” The very violence and crudity of Walpole’s originality proved an invitation to his imitators to better the instruction he gave them.
It is impossible at this day to take “The Castle of Otranto” seriously, and hard to explain the respect with which it was once mentioned by writers of authority…. Walpole’s masterpiece can no longer make anyone cry even a little; and instead of keeping us out of bed, it sends us there—or would, if it were a trifle longer. For the only thing that is tolerable about the book is its brevity, and a certain rapidity in the action…. The book was not an historical romance, and the manners, sentiments, language, all were modern. Walpole knew little about the Middle Ages and was not in touch with their spirit. At bottom he was a trifler, a fribble; and his incurable superficiality, dilettantism, and want of seriousness, made all his real cleverness of no avail when applied to such a subject as “The Castle of Otranto.”
The Mysterious Mother, 1768
Though the subject of this last piece be singularly horrid and almost disgusting, yet the fable is conducted with such inimitable skill, that it may in this respect be considered as approximating nearer to perfection than any other drama extant, the Œdipus Tyrannus of Sophocles even not excepted.
He is the ultimus Romanorum, the author of the “Mysterious Mother,” a tragedy of the highest order, and not a puling love play. He is the father of the first romance, and of the last tragedy, in our language; and surely worthy of a higher place than any living writing, be he who he may.
“The Mysterious Mother,” is a production of higher talent and more powerful genius than any other which we owe to the pen of Horace Walpole.
Lord Byron, as quoted by Lord Dover, says, that the “Mysterious Mother” raises Horace Walpole above every author living in his, Lord Byron’s, time. Upon which I venture to remark, first, that I do not believe that Lord Byron spoke sincerely; for I suspect that he made a tacit exception in favour of himself at least; secondly, that it is a miserable mode of comparison which does not rest on difference of kind. It proceeds of envy and malice and detraction to say that A. is higher than B., unless you show that they are in pari materia;—thirdly, that the “Mysterious Mother” is the most disgusting, vile, detestable composition that ever came from the hand of man. No one with a spark of true manliness, of which Horace Walpole had none, could have written it. As to the blank verse, it is indeed better than Rowe’s and Thomson’s, which was execrably bad:—any approach, therefore, to the manner of the old dramatists was, of course, an improvement; but the loosest lines in Shirley are superior to Walpole’s best.
A clever buckram tragedy.
Letters
Incomparable letters.
Read, if you have not read, all Horace Walpole’s letters, wherever you can find them;—the best wit ever published in the shape of letters.
The best letter-writer in the English language.
The “Letters” of Mr. Walpole have already attained the highest rank in that department of English literature, and seem to deserve their popularity, whether they are regarded as objects of mere amusement, or as a collection of anecdotes illustrative of the politics, literature, and manners of an important and interesting period.
Walpole’s “Letters” are generally considered as his best performances, and we think, with reason. His faults are far less offensive to us in his correspondence than in his books. His wild, absurd, and ever changing opinions about men and things are easily pardoned in familiar letters. His bitter, scoffing, depreciating disposition does not show itself in so unmitigated a manner as in his “Memoirs.” A writer of letters must be civil and friendly to his correspondent, at least, if to no other person.
Read the new edition of “Horace Walpole’s Letters to Sir Horace Mann.” There is something I don’t like in his style; his letters don’t amuse me so much as they ought to do.
The twenty or thirty volumes of Voltaire’s correspondence have already furnished a signal example how much a distinguished man will sometimes repeat himself. Yet, as compared with Walpole, he appears to write rather from impulse than meditation, and with the characteristic vivacity of his country. His repeating seems, therefore, to be natural, and like that of a man in conversation upon the same general topics with the succession of individuals. It is not so with Walpole. His phrases are too nicely picked, his anecdotes too carefully told. When they are read the first time, they earn for him the credit of ready wit. But when seen to be transferred from place to place with no essential change, they smack something too much of study. Neither do we detect this solely in his letters. He often produces in his “Memoirs” the counterpart of what he writes to Lord Hertford, or Mann, or Montague. We find the same stories in even the same words. We must, then, already begin to deny him the greatest merit of epistolary composition, its natural and spontaneous flow. But besides this, the repetition of the same thing, however well told, when it is not connected with important events, soon becomes fatiguing.
Of letter-writers by profession we have, indeed few, although Horace Walpole, bright, fresh, quaint, and glittering as one of his most precious figures of Dresden china, is a host in himself.
I refrain to quote from Walpole regarding George, for those charming volumes are in the hands of all who love the gossip of the last century. Nothing can be more cheery than Horace’s “Letters.” Fiddles sing all through them; wax-lights, fine dresses, fine jokes, fine plates, fine equipages, glitter and sparkle there; never was such a brilliant, jigging, smirking Vanity Fair as that through which he leads us. Hervey, the next great authority, is a darker spirit.
One evergreen still flourishes among all the garlands of flowers which Mudie hourly scatters in our path. Horace Walpole is ours, and ours for ever. Who will ever cease now and then to dip into those numerous volumes, edited, and re-edited, and every now and then coming out with new notes and fresh portraits, and new prefaces and a new index?
As to the upper classes, I know few books that leave a more painful impression upon the reader than the volumes which contain the letters of Horace Walpole, in which we see all the froth and scum that floated to the surface of what is called Good Society, and can form a tolerable idea of what was fermenting in the mass below. With all his persiflage and cynicism, he at all events may be trusted as a witness who does not invent, but retails the current scandals of the day.
The affectations of Horace Walpole sit so gracefully upon him, and are so much a part of the man, that they lend a lustre and reality to the pictures he is drawing.
His forte lay in chronicling the gossip of Courts, or in transporting his readers behind the scenes when a political intrigue was in progress. He was more of a Saint-Simon than a Bayard. Although he counted a suit of Francis I.’s armour amongst his choicest treasures, he would have been more in his element handing Louis XIV. a shirt at Versailles than in helping Francis to a fresh horse at Pavia.
For variety of anecdote and scandal, malicious humour, pleasant cynicism, and lively tittle-tattle, couched in a style at once piquant and graceful, his epistles are quite incomparable. We must bear in mind however, that Walpole’s aim in life was to be amused, and that he gratified this propensity by playing the part of a fashionable critic and thoroughbred virtuoso. His social position, his wealth, his extensive connection with courtiers and aristocrats, littérateurs, and blue-stockings, and his great powers of observation, afforded him unequalled opportunities for gratifying his whim. But he was too unsparing a judge of the vanities and foibles of his own age to escape being placed in the stocks himself; and Macaulay has done it.
Due allowance made for the superiority of French idiom and French finesse in a department where they appear to most advantage, it may safely be affirmed that, if variety and interest of topics be regarded as well as style, Walpole’s letters are unrivalled. It was only by degrees that Horace attained to the perfection of easy engaging writing. His earlier letters betray signs of considerable labour. It is said that a summary prepared beforehand of one of his letters to Montagu was found in looking over some of his correspondence. In later days he wrote with the greatest facility, even carrying on a conversation the while. But he continued to the last the habit of putting down on the backs of letters or slips of paper, a note of facts, of news, of witticisms, or of anything he wished not to forget for the amusement of his correspondents.
These letters have always ranked high since Byron and Scott said they were classic. They are excellently written, and when the subject is good they are delightful, being vivid, amiable, quick, seasoned with allusion, point, and anecdote. But whether they will keep their rank may be questioned…. The defect in these letters, as classical compositions, is their lack of freshness. They are a chronicle of faded things—finery, ambitions, sentiments, gossip, criticisms, beaux, dames, and nephews, all musty, and dry, and rubbishy. They do not reveal a nature like Cowper’s, nor treasure up refinement, sense, and scholarly associations like Gray’s. Invaluable to the historian, and to lovers of old French memoirs, they are not classic in the sense that Cowper’s and Gray’s letters are—in the sense of being invaluable to the highly-cultivated man. So far as the society they picture is concerned, the candles were burnt out and the play was done long ago. They are the quintessential spirit of the worldliness—the form and feature of the world of which it was anciently said the fashion of it passeth away. They belong to the antiquary; they no longer touch life.
It is as a letter-writer that he survives; and it is upon the vast correspondence, of which, even now, we seem scarcely to have reached the limits, that is based his surest claim volitare per ora virum. The qualities which are his defects in more serious productions become merits in his correspondence; or, rather, they cease to be defects…. 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. It matters nothing whether he wrote easily or with difficulty; whether he did, or did not, make minutes of apt illustrations or descriptive incidents: the result is delightful. For diversity of interest and perpetual entertainment, for the constant surprises of an unique species of wit, for happy and unexpected turns of phrase, for graphic characterization and clever anecdote, for playfulness, pungency, irony, persiflage, there is nothing in English like his correspondence. And when one remembers that, in addition, this correspondence constitutes a sixty-years’ social chronicle of a specially picturesque epoch by one of the most picturesque of picturesque chroniclers, there can be no need to bespeak any further suffrage for Horace Walpole’s “incomparable letters.”
Walpole’s Letters delight each successive generation. Nor, indeed, can one imagine any abatement of their inextinguishable charm. No student of the eighteenth century, however perfunctorily he may take himself, can afford to neglect that wonderful canvas whereon are posed, in undress, so many great personages, such vital and terrible events. For that matter, the philosopher, the man of affairs, the politician, and the philanthropist—unless his philanthropy shall have deprived him of his natural vision,—may find grave instruction in these light pages. They are instinct with the lessons of other men’s experience.
Walpole’s most heinous literary fault was his absurd though not at all remarkable disposition to gauge his estimate of a book according to the rank or gentility of the author. He actually seemed to think a plebeian incapable of meritorious effort in literature, and his opinion as to any performance anonymously published was probably held in suspense until the fact of its authorship had been clearly established…. He makes few illusions to the writers contemporaneous with him who were making the real literature of the time; they were all too vulgar to engage his pen, except when he went out of his way to write adversely of them, when he perpetrated some precious bits of most nonsensical critical coxcombry.
Is sprightly, lively, intolerant, even to nervousness, of dulness or heaviness, speaking the opinion or impression of the hour, superficial, it is true, but yet sincere in his individuality, and with a certain freshness in his freedom from conventionality.
The title of coxcomb, which has been scornfully awarded and indignantly repudiated, is too surely his; he had the faults to which those born on the fringe of the purple, as he was, are more liable than those born in the purple itself; he was (chiefly through wilfulness) a bad critic of other men’s work, and for this or other reasons not too good a one of his own. But his work is delightful as literature and invaluable as history. Taken with Boswell’s “Johnson,” it supplies almost a complete view of the intellectual, social, and literary life of this period, certainly an indispensable companion to the due enjoyment and the due understanding of the “Ode on the Passions” and the “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” of “Tom Jones” and “Clarissa,” and “Humphry Clinker” and “Tristram Shandy,” of the “Rambler” and the “Decline and Fall,” of “She Stoops to Conquer” and the “School for Scandal.”
It was an out-patient of Bedlam who first suggested that Mr. Walpole’s were written with an eye on posterity…. He did not write his charming letters for posterity. He wrote them because he had parts and was good-natured, and wished to amuse his friends…. Horace Walpole is for every humor. If you are wise he confirms you with a pleasant philosophy, though he hated the name; if you are flippant, he tells you a comical, perhaps a wicked story; if you are complaisant, he charms you with agreeable courtesies; if you would rail at your age, he turns you many a contemptuous text from his.
General
An author who has illustrated many passages in the English History, and adorned more.
The lively and curious acuteness of Walpole.
I have my fribbles as well as you. In the “Anecdotes of Painting,” just published, the author, by the most unprovoked malice, has a fling at your friend obliquely, and puts him in company where you would not expect to find him, with Tom Hearne and Browne Willis. It is about Gothic edifices, for which I shall be about his pots, as Bentley said to Lord Halifax of Rowe. But I say it is better; I mean the galley-pots and washes of his toilet. I know he has a fribble-tutor at his elbow, as sicklied over with affectation as himself.
Walpole had by nature a propensity, and by constitution a plea, for being captious and querulential, for he was a martyr to the gout. He wrote prose and published it; he composed verses and circulated them, and was an author, who seemed to play at hide-and-seek with the public.—There was a mysterious air of consequence in his private establishment of a domestic printing press, that seemed to augur great things, but performed little.
His taste was highly polished; his vivacity attained to brilliancy; and his picturesque fancy, easily excited, was soon extinguished; his playful wit and keen irony were perpetually exercised in his observations on life, and his memory was stored with the most amusing knowledge, but much too lively to be accurate; for his studies were but his sports. But other qualities of genius must distinguish the great author, and even him who would occupy that leading rank in the literary republic our author aspired to fill. He lived too much in that class of society which is little favourable to genius; he exerted neither profound thinking, nor profound feeling; and too volatile to attain to the pathetic, that higher quality of genius, he was so imbued with the petty elegancies of society that every impression of grandeur in the human character was deadened in the breast of the polished cynic…. All his literary works, like the ornamented edifice he inhabited, were constructed on the same artificial principle; an old paper lodging-house, converted by the magician of taste into a Gothic castle, full of scenic effects.
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 wore entitled to the same precedence in literature which would have been allowed to them in a drawing-room…. 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.
I must guard you against the historical publications of the celebrated Horace Walpole. Look for entertainment in them if you please, and you will not be disappointed; but give him not your confidence: indeed you will soon see, from his lively and epigrammatic style of invective, that he cannot deserve it.
The affectation of his style has its roots in the affectation of his nature, and it is an admirable style for him.
Horace Walpole illustrates his knowledge of the world by anecdote and witticism, by the authority of his own empirical opinion, by a fancy so wanton and discursive that it cannot fail to be sometimes just; but he never fatigues himself by seeking, like Rochefoucauld, to dissect and analyse. He prides himself on being frivolous, and, if he is wise, he takes care to tell you that he is only so for his own amusement. We cannot dispute his knowledge of the world in breadth of surface, as we may do that of the French Court-philosophers; but he very rarely dives to the depth which they explore, though it be but the depth of a garden fountain.
Horace Walpole’s pungent prose.
Without a spark of genius, he has a taste, bright and intelligent, for the arts; he understands their principles, and dabbles in them all. He revives Gothic architecture in Strawberry Hill—a toy house; he makes an experiment in romance in “The Castle of Otranto”—a toy novel; he writes sketchy Lives of the Painters, and composes an ingenious “Essay on Landscape Gardening.”
“Unhealthy and disorganised mind,” “a bundle of whims and affectations,” “mask within mask;” these are the phrases that go to make up the popular estimate of a writer who was distinguished by the sincerity of his taste and judgment, and by the quickness and truth of his response to all impressions. Horace Walpole wrote and thought exactly as he pleased; his letters are the expression, direct and clear, of a mind that could not condescend to dull its reflections by any compromise about the values of things, or any concession to opinion. He never tampered with his instinctive appreciation of anything. Whether his judgments are sound in themselves is a question of small importance in comparison with his virtue of self-respect and self-restraint. It is because he had a mind of his own and would not pretend to like what he could not like, that he has been pointed out by the literary demagogue.
