Horace Walpole
No one should write a book about Horace Walpole who can neither love him nor laugh, not at, but with Min. Mr. Gwynn looks upon him as with the sad eye of the school-master who has outlived his dislikes as well as his enthusiasms—" That is the story. I feel no need to sit in judgement on the charac- ter it discloses." Beneath that chill regard the real Horace slips away.
It is curious that almost all the critics of this man who had a genius for UM communication of personality in friend- ship, should find him so unsympathetic. At one moment they sneer at him for a sentimentalist, at the next they despise him as a cynic, forgetting that a gentleman in eighteenth- century society can hardly escape being both. They point out that he was a bad literary critic. He was indeed : be was almost always wrong. It is one of the most refreshing contradictions about him, he is the perfect antithesis of all the Extension Lecturers. It was in creation, not in criticism, that he shone ; for, as Madame du Deffand realized, Horace Walpole was a man of action wasted—or saved, if you prefer it so. He made of his prose a fine weapon of precision, delicate as a rapier, modern as a machine-gun with a range over two centuries ; the exact weapon for that sniper, the letter-writer who sets out to convince you that he is aiming at you, and you alone. This is his art, and he is master of it, so that he, his. world, his failures and inconsistencies and charm are still to be possessed. But only by his friends. And so, even if the critics are ungrateful, there are some of us who know that, even in the next bout of influenza, there will always be Horace, in seventeen volumes, never bored, never really old, full of good stories about the best people, and bringing with him a bunch of fresh flowers from those water-meadows of Strawberry that cannot be defaced by model dwellings, nor lose their English green.
If, like his distant cousin, that other " poor little Horatio." he had been put early into one of the Set-vices, how much we should have missed, and with what delighted amusement he would have fulfilled his destiny. The man who worshipped Conway, the Field Marshal, who could laugh at his own long and horrid sufferings, and sit up all night for bliss of creating The Castle of Otranto would have put on some of the prettiest little battle-pieces imaginable. The acting-chest would have been ransacked for uniforms and ensigns, there would have been all the gestures proper to sea-charades, the drums and the dying speeches and the noises-off, with the tritons and cherubs in Westminster Abbey for the final curtain. We should return thanks that instead of some ponderous, dead monument, beloved of the critics, we have nothing left at all but the lively presence of a warm-hearted and quite unaccountable gentleman who has honoured us
Previous page
