hodrace walpole and straweffy hill

HORACE W’ALPOLE AND STRAWBERRY HILL.

T is a common-place that, thanks to Boswell, we I know Dr. Johnson more intimately than any other Englishman who has ever lived. It is just as true that, thanks to himself and his wonderful gift for letter- writing, we know Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford, al- most as well. Moreover, beneath all Walpole’s affec- tation, his assumed cynicism, his mask of cold indiffer- ence, his anxiety never to be thought serious or in earnest, those who have read with understanding his Letters have found a heart as tender as that of the Sage of Fleet Street whom he always so frankly de- tested, and have recognized in him a like devoted love of country, a similar filial piety, the same wish to help the poor and the outcast, and an equally passionate devotion to those who showed that they cared for him. In the light of our fuller knowledge to-day, Macaulay’s harsh and bitter judgment on Walpole would be whole- heartedly endorsed by very few.

Walpole’s pseudo-Gothic castle of Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, was one of the show-places of the eighteenth century. No foreigner of distinction came to these shores without visiting it. From the Royal Family downwards, every member of English society had been received there. The art centres of Europe had been ransacked to provide its treasures. T h e pro- ductions of its printing-press were eagerly sought after. Contemporary literature is full of allusions to it. It has been admired or laughed at by each subsequent generation. Stripped of its collections these eighty years and more, it still stands lovingly tended and carefully restored by its successive possessors, as

456

Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill quaint, as odd, as grotesque as ever, but mellowed and softened by time. It has been preserved for a unique and unusual destiny. Within the last few months have arisen around and about it the stately buildings of a great Catholic Training College, into which it will be incorporated and of which it will form a wing-a small part yet one influencing the architectural style of the whole. Thus in the loved home of one of the princes of English literature, one who was the very embodi- ment of culture and refinement, delicate grace and ex- quisite wit, generations of Catholic students will be educated. The genius loci must perforce have on them the best and happiest effect.

Horace Walpole was the son of a celebrated Prime Minister, to whose memory he was most devoted, and whose twenty years of rule he regarded as one of the most brilliant and important epochs in our history. He did not suspect that he himself was in a sense a greater man than his father, or at all events that posterity would take more interest in him, and not only trace back to him two of the most far-reaching tendencies of modern times, but regard him as surpassing in his own especial literary province the art and the distinction even of Madame de SCvignC, his idol and his ‘patron saint.’ For, in truth, it is only the student of political history who much concerns himself to-day with Sir Robert Walpole, his strong sway, his common-sense, his sound finance, his safe but unheroic policy of p i e l a nun movere. Far more are interested in the founder of the Gothic revival, fore-runner of Pugin and his school ; or in the pioneer of that romantic movement which was later on to produce Sir Walter Scott and the Waverley Novels. And hundreds are daily grateful €or those wonderful Letters which, in spite of their number or whatever be their subject, never weary and invariably charm. For, if Boswell is the first of Bio-

457

Blac)u(riars

graphers, Horace Walpole is the first of Letter-writers ; he too ‘ has no second,’ for him also there can be no competitor. ‘ Eclipse is first, and the rest nowhere.’

In a way, a lonely one; essentially of the world, yet more than a little aloof from it. Born in the purple, in the very inner circle of greatness, knowing everyone worth knowing, cousin to half the peerage and on more than bowing terms with the rest, with wretched health and frail body yet living to extreme old age, blessed with abund- ant means-some ~ 6 , 0 0 0 to ,&7,000 a year, mainly the income of lucrative sinecures in the Custom and the Exchequer secured to him by his father before he fell from power, according to the bad but quite usual habit of the age), Walpole, after Eton, Cambridge, and the customary continental ‘ Grand Tour ’ (with the poet Gray for a companion), settled down to the mode of existence so well described in his letters. Long years of regular attendance and silent voting in the House of Commons, night turned into day for balls, levbes, receptions, card-playing, and the opera, lengthy visits to Paris and shorter ones to country houses at home, frequent bidding at auctions and picture sales, the edit- ing and printing of rare books, the writing of a tragedy, a romance, valuable political memoirs and journals, antiquarian papers, biographical works-above all , the building of Strawberry and the penning of his Letters.

A curious life was Walpole’s.

The villa at Strawberry, a store-house of curios and bric-a-brac, has been described as ‘ a building without parallel in Europe,’ a miniature Gothic palace in an age devoted to Classicism. It took many years to build, and every corner was gradually filled with pic- tures, altar-tombs, statues, miniatures, medals, rare books, tapestry and damask, lacquer and enamel. ‘Pinch-beck’ it may have been, but it has lasted well. Odd and bizarre were the collections it housed, but

458

Horace Walpole and strawberry Hill

when they came to be sold they realized enormous sums. Strawberry was beautifully situated, though the grounds acquired bit by bit around it were very small, not more in the end than fourteen acres. Its prospect commanded the river, the town or village of Twicken- ham, and Richmond Park. In its meadows were a few sheep and two cows, ‘all studied in their colours for becoming the view.’ I t had its Round Tower, i ts Cloisters, Library and Long Gallery, its Great Parlour and Green Closet, its State Bedroom and Round Drawing-room, its Yellow, Blue, Red and Holbein Chambers, its Chapel with ‘lean windows fattened with rich Saints,’ its painted ceilings and plastered fan-vaulting. I t was hung with ‘Gothic paper’ and furnished ‘with a thousand plump chairs and couches and luxurious settees,’ and darkened with painted glass in chiaroscuro.’ Armorial bearings were every- where, and on the walls lances, swords, and scimitars. Chimney-pieces, choir-screens, portraits, prints and water-colours, great oriental bowls, ancient oak chairs, state beds of purple cloth and white satin, Persian car- pets, cabinets of ebony and rosewood, ivory bas-relief s,. crystal mirrors, marble and granite slabs, ‘ commodes of old Japan,’ carvings by Grinling Gibbons, mosaic shrines, crucifixes of mother-0’-pearl-never was there such a strange dwelling, such a motley museum ! And for the exalted beings who crowded to see it all, there: would be good cheer in the Refectory, followed by coffee out of doors, and an English collation, a Sylla- bub milked under the cows that were brought to the brow of the terrace.’

At Strawberry Hill and in his London houses in Arlington Street and Berkeley Square were indited the celebrated Letters from which (if all other records perished) the social life of the eighteenth century could be largely reconstructed. Not quite the world of John-.

45.9

son and Boswell, though. Here Manners were de- picted rather than Minds. It is all more political, less literary. Not authors and booksellers, but statesmen, princes and ambassadors are the leading figurcs; and that untiring pen makes them live again for us, clothes the dead bones with warm flesh, invests with immor- tality many who but for it would be forgotten. While as to Walpole’s correspondents, we get to know them almost as well as he did himself. Sir Horace Mann, British Envoy at Florence, to whom he wrote un- flaggingly for six-and-forty years ; Marshal Conway, soldier and minister of state; the fair and frail Coun- tess of Upper Ossory ; the Berry Sisters, the ‘ twin- wives’ of his old age-they live like flies in amber, familiar figures to every reader of Lord Orford’s im- perishable pages. ‘ To have one’s name so mentioned a’s,’ to adapt a phrase of Thackeray’s, ‘like having it written on the dome of St. Peter’s : pilgrims from all the world admire and behold it.’

What is the secret charm of Horace Walpole’s Letters ? Macaulay, though he devoted whole columns to the dissection of Lord Orford’s style, is puzzled when he has to answer this question. In the end, he says that it consists ‘ in the art of amusing without ex- citing.’ Above all other men, Walpole, he thinks, was superior ‘ in writing what people will like to read.’ And assuredly that is so. Walpole’s Letters fill eighteen stout volumes of the Toynbee edition and number several thousand, yet the custodians of one of the greatest libraries in London assure us that of all books of the kind none are so frequently asked for, none so well thumbed. No one would dream of shipping Wal- pole. Even when he merely describes the weather, or descants on the gout, he is somehow interesting. BOS- well’s johmon, its greatest admirers would confess, is not all purple patches. It has its dull pages, and some of its editors have thought they did good service in

460

Horace Walpde and Strawberry Hill abridging it. But it is otherwise with Lord Orford. Yot a word can be spared, not a paragraph left out, and to abridge would be a sacrilege.

The world Aorace Walpole knew has long ago vanished. But were he to come back to us to-day, the new order of things political and social (of science and industry he never took any count) might not very greatly astonish him. Instinctivcly and by tempera- ment an aristocrat in every fibre of his being, he was by conviction a democrat and a liberal, with large, far- reaching views and intelligent anticipation of sweep- ing changes to come. He must have foreseen and recognized as inevitable much that has happened since his time.

But there was one present-day phenomenon of which he never dreamed nor could have conceived of as possible-and that is the Revival of ,Cathdlicism, Though he was singularly fascinated by the pic- turesqueness of the Catholic Church, its artistic and poetic side, and not insensible to its historic claims, he thought it a dying institution. Again and again he asserts his conviction that in a generation or two it would vanish away and be gone. The Popes of his day were to him the very last of their long line. And he died in the Revolutionary era, when indeed the outward structure of the Church appeared to be in dissolution, cracking and crashing to its doom. No- thing would amaze him more than to see the Resur- rection of the Church, her vigour renewed in every land, her youth revived, her re-organization in the Old WorId, her marvellous growth and extension in the New, her immense missionary activity, the enthusiasm of her adherents, the reverence and devotion inspired by her earthly Head. How astonished would he be at the place she has taken in his own land, how won- deringly would he gaze at the symbols of her advance

461

B 1actzft.iars

-the great Cathedral so near his old home in Berlie- ley Square, the splendid College that now enfolds in her stately grasp his ‘ Castle of Strawberry ’ !

May the students who will climb his Gothic stair- ways, pace his Cloisters, and scale his Tower think kindly and with interest of Strawberry’s first master, and in their spare moments find time to glance at those famous Letters, which must be read with delight so long as the English language shall endure !

ROBERT BRACEY, O.P.