Imagens das páginas
PDF
ePub

jovial habits broke down his constitution. | T'other day with a beautiful frown on her Scratch those jovial toping aristocrats and

brow,

"She was really in Elysium,"

you everywhere find the Squire Western. To the rest of the gods said the Venus of Stowe: A man of squeamish tastes and excessive sensibility jostled amongst that thick- and so on. skinned, iron-nerved generation, was in a he declares, and visited the arch erected in position with which any one may sympa- her honour three or four times a day. thize who knows the sufferings of a deli- It is not wonderful, we must confess, cate lad at a public school in the old (and that burly ministers and jovial squires not so very old) brutal days. The victim laughed horse-laughs at this mincing of that tyranny slunk away from the dandy, and tried in their clumsy fashion rough horseplay of his companions to to avenge themselves for the sarcasms muse, like Dobbin, over the Arabian which, as they instinctively felt, lay hid Nights in a corner, or find some amuse- beneath this mask of affectation. The enment which his tormentors held to be mity between the lapdog and the mastiff only fit for girls. So Horace Walpole re- is an old story. Nor, as we must confess tired to Strawberry Hill and made toys again, were these tastes redeemed by very of Gothic architecture, or heraldry, or amiable qualities beneath the smooth exdilettante antiquarianism. The great dis-ternal surface. There was plenty of femcovery had not then been made, we must inine spite as well as feminine delicacy. remember, that excellence in field-sports To the marked fear of ridicule natural to deserved to be placed on a level with the a sensitive man, Walpole joined a very Christian virtues. The fine gentlemen of happy knack of quarrelling. He could the Chesterfield era speak of fox-hunting protrude a feline set of claws from his velpretty much as we speak of prize-fighting vet glove. He was a touchy companion and bull-baiting. When all manly exer- and an intolerable superior. He set out cises had an inseparable taint of coarseness, by quarrelling with Gray, who, as it delicate people naturally mistook effemina- seems, could not stand his dandified airs cy for refinement. When you can only join of social impertinence, though it must be in male society on pain of drinking your- added in fairness that the bond which self under the table, the safest plan is to unites fellow travellers is, perhaps, the retire to tea-tables and small talk. For most trying known to humanity. He many years, Walpole's greatest pleasure quarrelled with Mason after twelve years seems to have been drinking tea with of intimate correspondence; he quarrelled Lady Suffolk, and carefully piecing to- with Montagu after a friendship of some gether bits of scandal about the courts of forty years; he always thought that his the first two Georges. He tells us, with dependants, such as Bentley, were angels all the triumph of a philosopher describ- for six months, and made their lives a buring a brilliant scientific induction, how he den to them afterwards; he had a long was sometimes able, by adding his bits of and complex series of quarrels with all his gossip to hers, to unravel the secret of near relations. Sir Horace Mann escaped some wretched intrigue which had puzzled any quarrel during forty-five years of cortwo generations of quidnuncs. The social respondence; but Sir Horace never left triumphs on which he most piqued him- Florence and Walpole never reached it. self were of a congenial order. He sits Conway alone remained intimate and imdown to write elaborate letters to Sir maculate to the end, though there is a bitHorace Mann, at Florence, brimming over ter remark or two in the Memoirs against with irrepressible triumph when he has the perfect Conway. With ladies indeed, persuaded some titled ladies to visit his Walpole succeeded better; and perhaps pet toy, the printing-press, at Strawberry we may accept, with due allowance for the Hill, and there, of course to their un-artist's point of view, his own portrait of speakable surprise, his printer draws off himself. He pronouuces himself to be a a copy of verses composed in their honour "boundless friend, a bitter but placable in the most faded style of old-fashioned enemy." Making the necessary correcgallantry. He is intoxicated by his ap- tions, we should translate this into " a bitpointment to act as poet-laureate on the ter enemy, a warm but irritable friend." occasion of a visit of the Princess Amelia Tread on his toes, and he would let you to Stowe. She is solemnly conducted to feel his claws, though you were his oldest a temple of the Muses and Apollo, and friend; but so long as you avoided his there finds one of his admirable effu- numerous tender points, he showed a gensions, uine capacity for kindliness and even affec

[ocr errors]

tion; and in his later years he mellowed in the warm folds of a sinecure of 6,0001. down into an amiable, purring old gentle-a-year bestowed because our father was a man, responding with eager gratitude to prime minister. There are many immacuthe caresses of the charming Miss Berrys. late persons at the present day to whom Such a man, skinless and bilious, was ill truth would be truth even when seen qualified to join in the rough game of pol- through such a medium. There are — we itics. He kept out of the arena while the have their own authority for believing it hardest blows were given and taken, and - men who would be republicans, though confined his activity to lobbies and back- their niece was married to a royal duke. stairs, where scandal was to be gathered Walpole, we must admit, was not of the and the hidden wires of intrigue to be deli- number. He was an aristocrat to the cately manipulated. He chuckles irrepressi- back-bone. He was a gossip by nature bly when he has confided a secret to a and education, and had lived from infancy friend, who has let it out to a minister, who in the sacred atmosphere of court intrigue; communicates it to a great personage, who every friend he possessed in his own rank explodes into inextinguishable wrath, and either had a place, or had lost a place, or blows a whole elaborate plot into a thou- was in want of a place, and generally comsand fragments. To expect deep and set- bined all three characters; indifference to tled political principle from such a man place was only a cunning mode of angling would be to look for grapes from thorns for a place, and politics was a series of and figs from thistles; but to do Walpole ingeniously contrived manoeuvres in which justice, we must add that it would be the moving power of the machinery was equally absurd to exact settled principle the desire of sharing the spoils. Walpole's from any politician of that age. We are talk about Magna Charta and the execubeginning to regard our ancestors with a tion of Charles I. could, it is plain, imply strange mixture of contempt and envy. but a skin-deep republicanism. He could We despise them because they cared noth-not be seriously displeased with a state of ing for the thoughts which for the last things of which his own position was the century have been upheaving society into natural outgrowth. His republicanism strange convulsions; we envy them because they enjoyed the delicious calm which was the product of that indifference. Wearied by the incessant tossing and boiling of the torrent which carries us away, we look back with fond regret to the little backwater so far above Niagara, where scarcely a ripple marks the approaching rapids. There is a charm in the great solid old eighteenth century mansions, which London is so rapidly engulphing, and even about the old red brick churches with "sleep-compelling" pews. We take imaginary naps amongst our grandfathers with no railways, no telegraphs, no mobs in Trafalgar Square, no discussions about ritualism or Dr. Colenso, and no reports of parliamentary debates. It is to our fancies an "island valley of Avilion," or, less magniloquently, a pleasant land of Cockaine, where we may sleep away the disturbance of battle, and even read through Clarissa Harlow. We could put up with an occasional highwayman in Hyde Park, and perhaps do not think that our comfort would be seriously disturbed by a dozen executions in a morning at Tyburn. In such visionary glances through the centuries we have always the advantage of selecting our own position in life, and perhaps there are few that for such purposes we should prefer to Walpole's. We should lap ourselves against eating cares

was about as genuine as his boasted indif-
ference to money-
-a virtue which is not
rare in bachelors who have more than they
can spend. So long as he could buy as
much bricabrac, as many knicknacks, and
odd books and bronzes and curious por-
traits and odd gloves of celebrated char-
acters, as he pleased; add a new tower
and a set of battlements to Strawberry
Hill every few years; keep a comfortable
house in London, and have a sufficiency
of carriages and horses; treat himself to
an occasional tour, and keep his press
steadily at work; he was not the man to
complain of poverty. He was a republi-
can, too, as long as that word implied that
he and his father and uncles and cousins
and connections by marriage and their
intimate friends were to have everything
precisely their own way; but if a vision
could have shown him the reformers of a
coming generation who would inquire into
civil lists and object to sinecures
to say
nothing of cutting off the heads of the first
families- he would have prayed to be re-
moved before the evil day. Republican-
ism in his sense was a word exclusive of
revolution. Was it, then, a mere mean-
ingless mask intended only to conceal
the real man? Before passing such a
judgment we should remember that the
names by which people classify their opin-
ions are generally a little more than arbi-

[ocr errors]

trary badges; and even in these days, | call them parties which separate and when practice treads so closely on the combine, and fight and make peace, till the heels of theory, some persons profess to plot of the drama becomes too compliknow extreme radicals who could be con- cated for human ingenuity to unravel. verted very speedily by a bit of riband. Lads just crammed for a civil service exWalpole has explained himself with unmis- amination might possibly bear in mind all takable frankness, and his opinion was at the shifting combinations which resulted least intelligible. He was not a republican from the endless intrigues of Pelhams and after the the fashion of Robespierre, or Grenvilles and Bedfords and RockingJefferson, or M. Gambetta; but he had hams; yet even those omniscient persons some meaning. When a duke in those could hardly give a plausible account of days proposed annual parliaments and uni- the princples which each party conceived versal suffrage, we may assume that he did itself to be maintaining. What, for examnot realize the probable effect of those in-ple, were the politics of a Rigby or a Bubb stitutions upon dukes; and when Walpole Dodington? The diary in which the last of applauded the regicides, he was not anx- these eminent persons reveals his inmost ious to send George III. to the block. He soul is perhaps the most curious specimen meant, however, that he considered George of unconscious self-analysis extant. His III. to be a narrow-minded and obstinate utter baseness and venality, his disgust at fool. He meant, too, that the great Revo- the "low venal wretches" to whom he had lution families ought to distribute the to give bribes; his creeping and crawling plunder and the power without the inter- before those from whom he sought to exference from the Elector of Hanover. tract bribes; his utter incapacity to explain He meant, again, that as a quick and cyni- a great man except on the hypothesis cal observer, he found the names of Brutus of insanity; or to understand that there is and Algernon Sydney very convenient covers for attacking the Duke of Newcastle and the Earl of Bute. But beyond all this, he meant something more, which gives the real spice to his writings. It was something not quite easy to put into formulas; but characteristic of the vague discomfort of the holders of sinecures in those halycon days arising from the perception that the ground was hollow under their feet. To understand him we must remember that the period of his activity marks precisely the lowest ebb of political principle. Old issues had been settled, and the new ones were only just coming to the surface. He saw the end of the Jacobites and the rise of the demagogues. His early letters describe the advance of the Pretender to Derby; they tell us how the British public was on the whole inclined to look on and cry, "Fight dog, fight bear;" how the Jacobites who had anything to lose left their battle to be fought by half-starved cattle-stealers, and contented themselves with drinking to the success of the cause; and how the Whig magnates, with admirable presence of mind, raised regiments, appointed officers, and got the expenses paid by the Crown. His later letters describe the amazing series of blunders by which we lost America in spite of the clearest warnings from almost every man of sense in the kingdom. The interval between these disgraceful epochs is filled-if we except the brief episode of Chatham-by a series of struggles between different connections - one cannot

such a thing as political morality, derive double piquancy from the profound conviction that he is an ornament to society, and from the pious aspiration which he utters with the utmost simplicity. Bubb wriggled himself into a peerage, and differed from innumerable competitors only by superior frankness. He is the fitting representative of an era from which political faith has disappeared, as Walpole is its fitting satirist. All political virtue, it is said, was confined in Walpole's opinion, to Conway and the Marquis of Hertford. Was he wrong? or, if he was wrong, was it not rather in the exception than the rule? The dialect in which his sarcasms are expressed is affected, but the substance is hard to dispute. The world, he is fond of saying, is a tragedy to those who feel, a comedy to those who think. He preferred the comedy view. "I have never yet seen or heard,' he says, "anything serious that was not ridiculous. Jesuits, Methodists, philosophers, politicians, the hypocrite Rousseau, the scoffer Voltaire, the encyclopedists, the Humes, the Lytteltons, the Grenvilles, the atheist tyrant of Prussia, and the mountebank of history, Mr. Pitt, are all to me but impostors in their various ways. Fame or interest is their object, and after all their parade, I think a ploughman who sows, reads his almanack, and believes that the stars are so many farthing candles created to prevent his falling into a ditch as he goes home at night, a wiser and more rational being, and I am sure an honester, than any of them. Oh! I am

sick of visions and systems that shove one | tudes about sacred Whig principles and the another aside, and come again like figures thrice blessed British Constitution.

in a moving picture." Probably Walpole's Walpole, in fact, represents a common belief in the ploughman lasted till he saw creed amongst the comfortable but clearthe next smock-frock; but the bitterness headed men of his time. It was the clothed in the old-fashioned cant is seri- strange mixture of scepticism and conserous and is justifiable enough. Here is a vatism which is exemplified in such men as picture of English politics in the time of Hume and Gibbon. He was at heart a of Wilkes. 66 No government, no police, Voltairian, and, like his teacher, confoundLondon and Middlesex distracted, the col- ed all religious and political beliefs under onies in rebellion, Ireland ready to be so, the name of superstition. Voltaire himand France arrogant and on the point of self did not anticipate the Revolution to being hostile! Lord Bute accused of all. which he, more than any man, had conand dying of a panic; George Grenville tributed. Walpole, with stronger perwanting to make rage desperate; Lord sonal reasons than Voltaire for disliking a Rockingham and the Cavendishes thinking catastrophe, was as furious as Burke when we have no enemies but Lord Bute, and the volcano burst forth. He was a repubthat five mutes and an epigram can set lican so far as he disbelieved in the divine everything to rights; the Duke of Graf- right of kings, and hated enthusiasm and ton (then Prime Minister) like an appren- loyalty generally. He wished the form to tice, thinking the world should be post- survive and the spirit to disappear. Things poned to a horse-race; and the Bedfords were rotten, and he wished them to stay not caring what disgraces we undergo rotten. The ideal to which he is constantwhile each of them has 3,000l. a year and ly recurring was the pleasant reign of his three thousand bottles of claret and cham- father, when nobody made a fuss, or went pagne!" And every word of this is true to war, or kept principles except for sale. at least, so far as epigrams need be true. He foresaw, however, far better than most It is difficult to put into more graphic men the coming crash. If political sagalanguage the symptoms of an era just ripe city be fairly tested by a prophetic vision for revolution. If frivolous himself, Wal- of the French Revolution, Walpole's name pole can condemn the frivolity of others. should stand high. He visited Paris in "Can one repeat common news with indif- 1765, and remarks that laughing is out of ference," he asks, just after the surrender fashion. "Good folks, they have no time of Yorktown, "while our shame is writing to laugh. There is God and the King to for future history by the pens of all our be pulled down first, and men and women, numerous enemies? When did England one and all, are devoutly employed in the see two whole armies lay down their arms demolition. They think me quite profane and surrender themselves prisoners?...for having my belief left." Do you know, These are thoughts I cannot stifle at the he asks presently, who are the philoso

66

moment that expresses them; and, though phers? "In the first place, it compreI do not doubt that the same dissipation hends almost everybody, and in the next that has swallowed up all our principles it means men who, avowing war against will reign again in ten days with its Papacy, aim, many of them, at the destrucwonted sovereignty, I had rather be silent tion of regal power. The philosophers," than vent my indignation. Yet I cannot he goes on, are insupportable, superficial, talk, for I canot think, on any other subject. overbearing, and fanatic. They preach It was not six days ago that, in the height of incessantly, and their avowed doctrine is four raging wars (with America, France, atheism-you could not believe how Spain, and Holland), I saw in the papers an openly. Don't wonder, therefore, if I account of the opera and of the dresses of should return a Jesuit. Voltaire himself the company, and hence the town, and does not satisfy them. One of their lady thence, of course, the whole nation, were devotees said of him, 'Il est bigot, c'est un informed that Mr. Fitzpatrick had very déiste!"" French politics, he professes a little powder in his hair." Walpole few years afterwards, must end in "dessheltered himself behind the corner of a potism, a civil war, or assassination," and pension to sneer at the tragi-comedy of he remarks that the age will not, as he had life; but if his feelings were not profound, always thought, be an age of abortion, but they were quick and genuine, and affecta- rather "the age of seeds that are to protion for affectation, his cynical coxcombry duce strange crops hereafter." The next seems preferable to the solemn coxcombry century, he says at a later period, "will of the men who shamelessly wrangled for probably exhibit a very new era, which the plunder, whilst they talked solemn plati- close of this has been, and is, preparing."

vulsions.

If these sentences had been uttered by approaching a period of tremendous conBurke, they would have been quoted as proofs of remarkable sagacity. As it is we may surely call them stern glances for a frivolous coxcomb.

·-

To claim for him that, even at his best, he is a profound observer of character, or that he gives any consistent account of his greatest contemporaries, would be too much. He is full of whims, and, moreover, fair to any one who deserted his father, or stood in Conway's light. He reflects at all times the irreverent gossip current behind the scenes. To know the best and the worst that can be said of any great man, the best plan is to read the leading article of his party newspaper, and then to converse in private with its writer. The eulogy and the sarcasm may both be sincere enough; only it is pleasant, after puffing ones wares to the public, to glance at their seamy side in private. Walpole has a decided taste for that last point of view. The littleness of the great, the hypocrisy of the virtuous, and the selfishness of statesmen in general, is his ruling theme, illustrated by an infinite variety of brilliant caricatures struck off at the moment with a quick eye and a sure hand. Though he elaborates no grand historical portrait, like Burke or Clarendon, he has a whole gallery of telling vignettes which are often as signiacant as far more pretentious works. Nowhere, for example, can we find more graphic sketches of the great man who stands a head and shoulders above the whole generation of dealers in power and place. Most of Chatham's contemporaries repaid his contempt with intense dislike. Some of them pronounced him mad, and others thought him a knave. Walpole, who at times calls him a mountebank and an impostor, does not go further than Burke, who, in a curious comment, speaks of him as the "grand artificer of fraud," who never conversed but with "a parcel of low toadeaters;" and asks whether all this "theatrical stuffing" and these “raised heels" could be necessary to the character of a great man. Walpole, of course, has a keen eye to the theatrical stuffing. He takes the least complimentary view of the grand problem, which still puzzles some historians, as to the genuineness of Chatham's gout. He smiles complacently when the great actor forgets that his right arm ought to be lying helpless in a sling and flourishes it with his accustomed vigour. But Walpole, in spite of his sneers and sarcasms, can recognize the genuine power of the man. He is the describer of the striking scene when the House of Commons was giggling over

Walpole regarded these symptoms in the true epicurean spirit, and would have joined in the sentiment, après moi le déluge, full of spite. He cannot be decently He was, on the whole, for remedying grievances, and is put rather out of temper by cruelties which cannot be kept out of sight. He talks with disgust of the old habit of stringing up criminals by the dozen; he denounces the slave-trade with genuine fervour; there is apparent sincerity in his platitudes against war; and he never took so active a part in politics as in the endeavour to prevent the judicial murder of Byng. His conscience generally discharged itself more easily by a few pungent epigrams, and though he wished the reign of reason and humanity to dawn, he would rather that it should not come at all than be ushered in by a tempest. His whole theory is given forcibly and compactly in an answer which he once made to the republican Mrs. Macaulay, and was fond of repeating: "Madam, if I had been Luther, and could have known that for the chance of saving a million of souls I should be the cause of a million of lives, at least, being sacrificed before my doctrines could be established, it must have been a most palpable angel, and in a most heavenly livery, before he should have set me at work." We will not ask what angel would have induced him to make the minor sacrifice of six thousand a year to establish any conceivable doctrine. Whatever may be the merit of these opinions, they contain Walpole's whole theory of life. I know, he seems to have said to himself, that loyalty is folly, that rank is contemptible, that the old society in which I live is rotten to the core, and that explosive matter is accumulating beneath our feet. Well! I am not made of the stuff for a reformer: I am a bit of a snob, though, like other snobs, I despise both parties to the bargain. I will take the sinecures the gods provide me, amuse myself with toys at Strawberry Hill, despise kings and ministers, without endangering my head by attacking them, and be over-polite to a royal duke when he visits me, on condition of laughing at him behind his back when he is gone. Walpole does not deserve a statue; he was not a Wilberforce or a Howard, and as little of a Burke or a Chatham. But his faults, as well as his virtues, qualified him to be the keenest of all observers, of a society unconsciously

« AnteriorContinuar »