Parnassian Fribbler
Horace Walpole. By Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis. (Hart-Davis, 63s.)
No. That must, I think after all, be the proper answer to Horace Walpole—a literary no, in spite of everything, in spite, too, of this most amiable, bland, balanced, informed, enjoyable and most elegantly produced book by Walpole's supreme devotee who edits the Yale collection of his letters. Here are six lectures on Walpole, delivered within sound of the fountains in the National Gallery at Washington, about his family, his friends, his politics, his Strawberry Hill, his works and his letters, united by a search for the connecting word in the complexity of Walpole's life. In the end Mr. Lewis decides that the connecting word must be 'fame,' the desire for fame, or 'the condition of being much read and talked about.'
Is it really fame, in a high sense, that Wal- pole has found since his death? I doubt it. I see in Walpole, as I read his letters, in this frail man who is so complex, who has such moments of clear outsight and insight, in the end, after all, only the monumental fribbler, only the monumental subject, as he has been and as he remains (though rather in the United States now than in England), of the literary gossip of scholars, scared of anything so active or danger- ous as living .works of art, new or old.
As an undergraduate at King's, Mr. Lewis remarks, Walpole spent much of the time with his mamma in London, the two of them copying Watteau and Parmigianino, in watercolours. In a sense he spends his life copying, in water- colours. He comes to terms with living, he sees into life, in a way, he drinks, or thinks that he drinks, cups of chocolate with the Muses, with- out realising—here's the trouble—the infinite exaltation of those same Muses above the sen- sitive son of a Prime Minister, above an Englishman of taste and breeding with an in- come of £70,000 a year and a gift for writing 'extempore conversations upon paper'; without realising that not a Muse was with him at all. He is an incomplete man, untouched, Mr. Lewis agrees, by any sexual passion (though the trouble is that he was untouched as well by any true intellectual passion).
His opinions, not on life within his own ex- perience, but on works of literature or art which should be strong, subtle vehicles of life carry- ing it above itself, are frequently trivial and ridiculous (e.g., that William Mason's poems were great, or that Otway and Southerne wrote the best tragic poetry after Shakespeare). He is entertained to discover in Pierre Bayle that an abbot of Leicester had seen at Jerusalem a thumb of the Holy Ghost; and we are enter- tained in turn by our discovery of his entertain- ment. But letters (like journals) are not works of art; they are only relations of works of art, possibly half-way towards art, which is still a long way off; and as far as literature goes, I see that Walpole-worship is a modern form (rather pleasanter, more civilised, more sophisti- cated, but still sentimental and epicene) of the Lamb-worship of the years of E. V. Lucas and Max Beerbohm.
In England, Walpole-worship (as apart from Walpole-gossip or serious historical use of Wal- pole) may still be conducted by those slightly pathetic figures we preserve in charge of cul- tural offices and institutions, those footmen of the Muses who poison them with their attentions and are happy only under the portico of a country house by the right architect, or in the right drawing-room. But that does not ennoble it. Really the vast literary all of this parasitical amateur of the arts isn't worth one strong stanza of a good poem. There are other things besides art; but they shouldn't be confused with art.
GEOFFREY GRIOSON
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