A Neo-Gothic Prince of Darkness
The Travel-Diaries of William Beckford of Fonthill. Edited by Guy Chapman. 2 vols. (Constable. 42s.) WILLIAM BECHFORD, the author of Vathek, never felt quite at ease in his role of Lucifer. He wore the mantle of world- sorrow and tragic guilt with a grand air. His thoughts turned on madness and unnameable crimes ; on darkness, and chasms of fire, and everlasting perdition. He was personable and • immensely rich and elegant in his tastes. He had an excellent faculty of mimicry, a high fever of spirits, an odd erudition in mediaevalism and oriental literature. He could run like a hare ; an accomplishment of which he was very proud. He played with the vices until society Would have no more to do: with him and drove him from England.
Here, we might think, are all the elements for a great- Byronic or Faustian gesture. But Beckford missed fire. When he heard, after many years, that still no one in English. society was willing to receive him, he wept for self-pity. Some.hoWor Other he failed in the courage his pose demanded '; and, instead of being a world-figure, he became more and more of an eccentric. He returned at last and built himself an absurd and lavish Gothic Abbey : there he lived as a recluse, behind twelve-foot walls. He grew into a malicious old man, surrounding himself with treasures, bellowing at his servants; writing, up the pedigrees of noble families to prove thei. dubious or shameful descent.
-In his boyhood, when the Earl of Chatham contemplated this god-child and ward of his, it seemed that there were no hopes too great to be set upon him. " My young vivid friend," he wrote, " is as much compounded of fire and air as ever." His mother, a granddaughter of the .sixth Earl of Abercora, thought she had given birth (Mr. Chapnian says) to a new Phoenix. She was a proud and furious lady, with the vastest ambitions for her child. William was taught painting and architecture by the greatest artists of the' day : Mozart himself was engliged to teach him music. At ten years of age lie fell heir to " the handsomest fortune in the country," a
roitiihe which brought bird in, at its -beat, a lsundred and fifty thousand pounds a year.
With so many opportunities he never learned to limit himself to anything. He saw himself, with equal conceit, as musician, man of fashion," patron 'of the arts, novelist and diarist, scholar, patrician, and political intriguer. On the death of Edward Gibbon he bought his entire library and transported it to Switzerland ; sat down to read it and tired in a fortnight. At one amazing time he tried single-handed to engineer peace between England and revolutionary France.; - and might possibly have succeeded if the younger Pitt had not distrusted him and suddenly fought shy.
There was nothing flagrantly impossible in his ambitions. Even in his attempt to bring France and England together, he had some ground for confidence. He lived in Paris through the French Revolution, leaving it in 1793 ; and, though he was a millionaire, he kept on good terms with the Government. It is reported, indeed, that when he left Paris, the authorities added to his passport the comment, " Etranger que Paris VOit partir avec regret." But two things unfitted hint for diplo- macy—:and for lifeln general : he had no_ patience, no system, no steadiness ; and he could never bring himself down to understand his fellow human beings.
In his writings there are no men and women ; there are gigantic phantasms only. Even in his Travel-Diaries it is noticeable that there is no stuff to the people he met ; they are there for an anecdote they told or an absurdity they revealed, and, if he is given half a chance, Beckford is off into romance and dream. He will discourse on the sympathy he has observed between toads and old women ; but the old women are the old women of fable,,and we are left wondering, for all his heavily weighted descriptions, whether he ever looked around him with open eyes.
None the less he helped to bring into English literature a
new-way of conceiving the world of nature. He brooded upon 'himself, and was himself the colour of what he saw ; but his very moodiness brought out what was hot and languid, what was wild and gloomy, what was striking and impr&sive, in the landscapes aroi.ind him. He put too high a price on his Diaries, and for a long time refused to publish them because he could find no one to offer him the great stun he thought they merited: But they had their value and interest and the ROmintic Age owed nitich of its grandeur to theinfluence of
Beckford. . .
Mr. Guy Chapman has contributed an excellent biographical preface to his edition of the Diaries. Already in his lifetime Beckford was legendary, and it was a difficult task to dis- entangle facts from fable. He can be acquitted from the most startling crimes attributed to him—he was' even rumoured to have poisoned his wife—but it is obvious that society had grounds enough for refusing to entertain him. He challenged his own notoriety and found himself unable to hear it when it ensued.
The conflict in his character`was more than lie could resolve. He was at once atheist and damned soul, anxious for domes- ticity and for riotous passion, aristocrat and parvenu. The last antithesis, perhaps, explains the most. His father had been Lord Mayor of London and a good bourgeois, and Beckford's aspiration to the purple was always some few degrees too intense. He could be happy with Spanish and Portuguese grandees, but at home he was ostentatious and restless. His wealth never lay easily on him and when he died he had dis- sipated almost the whole of it. Everything conspired to make him ambitious and eccentric. He was crushed by the burden of this need to be unique, and at his back he heard the angry incitements of the tyrannical dowager, his mother.
At Ax POltfER.
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