A Strange Love Story

Horace Walpole and Madame du Deffand. By Anna de Koven. (D. Appleton and Co. 10s. 6d.) MRS. DE KOVEN has added one more volume to the already formidable - literature on Horace Walpole and Madame du Deffand. It would, indeed, be, a difficult task to add anything very .new to a story which has been told and retold so often.

But it is certainly a good story, even a great story, and those who do not already know it will find Mrs. de Koven's book of great. interest.

The theme is well known. Horace Walpole, comparatively young, brilliant, rich, gay, effeminate, is sent over to Paris

with a letter of introduction to the most famous sctlonniere

of her age, or, perhaps, of any age, Madame du Deffand. The lady whom he met was a woman of seventy and stone

blind. Their meeting was at first most fortunate. The warmest, friendship sprang up between them. And then, incredible as it may seem, the dying, shrivelled, cynical old woman began to .show that she had fallen in love with the cautious and self-indulgent Walpole. For years past (he was

fifty at the time) the love of women had ceased to play, if it ever had played, a part in his life. From flattered delight in the appreciation and attention of one of the greatest women of Europe his response transformed itself into cold- ness and withdrawal. He attempted, in Mrs. de !Coven's words, " to limit and define his idea of their friendship." He was, above all, terrified of that supreme menace which hangs over the heads of the wits, the menace of ridicule. He feared, above all things, what the world would say when it became knOwn that Horace Walpole's new love was a blind old woman

of seventy. The great correspondence between the two in which. all this was recorded is justly famous. Napoleon took

it with him, when newly published, in his travelling carriage on the way to Russia. Sainte-Beuve called it " a long mis- understanding." It is perhaps best left with little or no comment. Mrs. de Koven's remarks, however, are appropriate and sensible. She writes :—

" Walpole's apparently incomprehensible misunderstanding of the woman whose gifts he was uniquely able to appreciate, resulted not only from the difference in the English and the French idea of friendship and his fear of ridicule, but still more from his fear of emotion. The Walpole who could say that the `'world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those who feel,' was neither hard nor cold, but painfully sensitive."

Whether the trouble was wholly national, as Mrs. de Koven seems to suggest (" Never attempt to alter an Englishman," Walpole wrote to Madame du Deffand, " any more than you would try to change the nature of a cat—you will be scratched for your pains "), or whether it had deeper and more physical causes, it is, of course, impossible to say. The strangeness of the whole thing, the love of a blind woman of seventy and an effeminate aesthete of fifty, which happened a hundred and

fifty years ago, is certainly an obscure one. Yet, unquestion- ably, it is worth our study, for these persons, after all, were of

real and genuine intelligence, and had the power to express some part of what they felt. As Mrs. de Koven says, Madame

du Deffand remains " the most articulate of all the lovers

in old age, and for this reason the most memorable."

Mrs. de Koven adds to her book some chapters of historical

setting which- give a picture of Walpole's and Madame du Deffand's- " background." It must be said that from a historical point of view they are open to a good deal of criticism, and we feel that Mrs. de Koven is on-stronger ground when she writes on the more personal part of her theme.