|
Of such a writer it is scarcely necessary to say, that his works are destitute
of every charm which is derived from elevation, or from tenderness of sentiment.
When he chose to be humane and magnanimous,--for he sometimes, by way of
variety, tried this affectation,--he overdid his part most ludicrously. None of
his many disguises sat so awkwardly upon him. For example, he tells us that he
did not choose to be intimate with Mr. Pitt. And why? Because Mr. Pitt had been
among the persecutors of his father? Or because, as he repeatedly assures us,
Mr. Pitt was a disagreeable man in private? Not at all; but because Mr. Pitt was
too fond of war, and was great with too little reluctance. Strange that a
habitual scoffer like Walpole should imagine that this cant could impose on the
dullest reader! If Moliere had put such a speech into the mouth of Tartuffe, we
should have said that the fiction was unskillful, and that Orgon could not have
been such a fool as to be taken in by it. Of the twenty-six years during which
Walpole sat in Parliament, thirteen were years of war. Yet he did not, during
all those thirteen years, utter a single word or give a single vote tending to
peace. His most intimate friend, the only friend, indeed, to whom he appears to
have been sincerely attached, Conway, was a soldier, was fond of his profession,
and was perpetually entreating Mr. Pitt to give him employment. In this Walpole
saw nothing but what was admirable. Conway was a hero for soliciting the command
of expeditions which Mr. Pitt was a monster for sending out.
What then is the charm, the irresistible charm, of Walpole's writings? It
consists, we think, in the art of amusing without exciting. He never convinces
the reason or fills the imagination, or touches the heart; but he keeps the mind
of the reader constantly attentive and constantly entertained. He had a strange
ingenuity peculiarly his own, an ingenuity which appeared in all that he did, in
his building, in his gardening, in his upholstery, in the matter and in the
manner of his writings. If we were to adopt the classification, not a very
accurate classification, which Akenside has given of the pleasures of the
imagination, we should say that with the Sublime and the Beautiful Walpole had
nothing to do, but that the third province, the Odd, was his peculiar domain.
The motto which he prefixed to his Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors might
have been inscribed with perfect propriety over the door of every room in his
house, and on the title-page of every one of his books; "Dove Diavolo, Messer
Ludovico, avete pigliate tante coglionerie?" In his villa, every apartment is a
museum; every piece of furniture is a curiosity; there is something strange in
the form of the shovel; there is a long story belonging to the bell-rope. We
wander among a profusion of rarities, of trifling intrinsic value, but so quaint
in fashion, or connected with such remarkable names and events, that they may
well detain our attention for a moment. A moment is enough. Some new relic, some
new unique, some new carved work, some new enamel, is forthcoming in an instant.
One cabinet of trinkets is no sooner closed than another is opened. It is the
same with Walpole's writings. It is not in their utility, it is not in their
beauty, that their attraction lies. They are to the works of great historians
and poets, what Strawberry Hill is to the Museum of Sir Hans Sloane or to the
Gallery of Florence. Walpole is constantly showing us things, not of very great
value indeed, yet things which we are pleased to see, and which we can see
nowhere else. They are baubles; but they are made curiosities either by his
grotesque workmanship or by some association belonging to them. His style is one
of those peculiar styles by which everybody is attracted, and which nobody can
safely venture to imitate. He is a mannerist whose manner has become perfectly
easy to him, His affectation is so habitual and so universal that it can hardly
be called affectation. The affectation is the essence of the man. It pervades
all his thoughts and all his expressions. If it were taken away, nothing would
be left. He coins new words, distorts the senses of old words, and twists
sentences into forms which make grammarians stare. But all this he does, not
only with an air of ease, but as if he could not help doing it. His wit was, in
its essential properties, of the same kind with that of Cowley and Donne. Like
theirs, it consisted in an exquisite perception of points of analogy and points
of contrast too subtle for common observation. Like them, Walpole perpetually
startles us by the ease with which he yokes together ideas between which there
would seem, at first sight, to be no connection. But he did not, like them,
affect the gravity of a lecture, and draw his illustrations from the laboratory
and from the schools. His tone was light and fleering; his topics were the
topics of the club and the ballroom; and therefore his strange combinations and
far-fetched allusions, though very closely resembling those which tire us to
death in the poems of the time of Charles the First, are read with pleasure
constantly new.
No man who has written so much is so seldom tiresome. In his books there are
scarcely any of those passages which, in our school-days, we used to call skip.
Yet he often wrote on subjects which are generally considered as dull, on
subjects which men of great talents have in vain endeavored to render popular.
When we compare the Historic Doubts about Richard the Third with Whitaker's and
Chalmers's books on a far more interesting question, the character of Mary Queen
of Scots; when we compare the Anecdotes of Painting with the works of Anthony
Wood, of Nichols, of Granger, we at once see Walpole's superiority, not in
industry, not in learning, not in accuracy, not in logical power, but in the art
of writing what people will like to read. He rejects all but the attractive
parts of his subject. He keeps only what is in itself amusing or what can be
made so by the artifice of his diction. The coarser morsels of antiquarian
learning he abandons to others, and sets out an entertainment worthy of a Roman
epicure, an entertainment consisting of nothing but delicacies, the brains of
singing birds, the roe of mullets, the sunny halves of peaches. This, we think,
is the great merit of his romance. There is little skill in the delineation of
the characters. Manfred is as commonplace a tyrant, Jerome as commonplace a
confessor, Theodore as commonplace a young gentleman, Isabella and Matilda as
commonplace a pair of young ladies, as are to be found in any of the thousand
Italian castles in which condottieri have reveled or in which imprisoned
duchesses have pined. We cannot say that we much admire the big man whose sword
is dug up in one quarter of the globe, whose helmet drops from the clouds in
another, and who, after clattering and rustling for some days, ends by kicking
the house down. But the story, whatever its value may be, never flags for a
single moment. There are no digressions, or unseasonable descriptions, or long
speeches. Every sentence carries the action forward. The excitement is
constantly renewed. Absurd as is the machinery, insipid as are the human actors,
no reader probably ever thought the book dull.
Walpole's Letters are generally considered as his best performances, and, we
think, with reason. His faults are far less offensive to us in his
correspondence than in his books. His wild, absurd, and ever-changing opinions
about men and things are easily pardoned in familiar letters. His bitter,
scoffing, depreciating disposition does not show itself in so unmitigated a
manner as in his Memoirs. A writer of letters must in general be civil and
friendly to his correspondent at least, if to no other person.
He loved letter-writing, and had evidently, studied it as an art. It was, in
truth, the very kind of writing for such a man, for a man very ambitious to rank
among wits, yet nervously afraid that, while obtaining the reputation of a wit,
he might lose caste as a gentleman. There was nothing vulgar in writing a
letter. Not even Ensign Northerton, not even the Captain described in Hamilton's
Bawn,--and Walpole, though the author of many quartos, had some feelings in
common with those gallant officers,--would have denied that a gentleman might
sometimes correspond with a friend. Whether Walpole bestowed much labor on the
composition of his letters, it is impossible to judge from internal evidence.
There are passages which seem perfectly unstudied. But the appearance of ease
may be the effect of labor. There are passages which have a very artificial air.
But they may have been produced without effort by a mind of which the natural
ingenuity had been improved into morbid quickness by constant exercise. We are
never sure that we see him as he was. We are never sure that what appears to be
nature is not disguised art. We are never sure that what appears to be art is
not merely habit which has become second nature.
In wit and animation the present collection is not superior to those which have
preceded it. But it has one great advantage over them all. It forms a connected
whole, a regular journal of what appeared to Walpole the most important
transactions of the last twenty years of George the Second's reign. It furnishes
much new information concerning the history of that time, the portion of English
history of which common readers know the least.
The earlier letters contain the most lively and interesting account which we
possess of that "great Walpolean battle," to use the words of Junius, which
terminated in the retirement of Sir Robert. Horace entered the House of Commons
just in time to witness the last desperate struggle which his father, surrounded
by enemies and traitors, maintained, with a spirit as brave as that of the
column of Fontenoy, first for victory, and then for honorable retreat. Horace
was, of course, on the side of his family. Lord Dover seems to have been
enthusiastic on the same side, and goes so far as to call Sir Robert "the glory
of the Whigs."
Sir Robert deserved this high eulogium, we think, as little as he deserved the
abusive epithets which have often been coupled with his name. A fair character
of him still remains to be drawn; and, whenever it shall be drawn, it will be
equally unlike the portrait by Coxe and the portrait by Smollett.
He had, undoubtedly, great talents and great virtues. He was not, indeed, like
the leaders of the party which opposed his government, a brilliant orator. He
was not a profound scholar, like Carteret, or a wit and a fine gentleman, like
Chesterfield. In all these respects his deficiencies were remarkable. His
literature consisted of a scrap or two of Horace and an anecdote or two from the
end of the Dictionary. His knowledge of history was so limited that, in the
great debate on the Excise Bill, he was forced to ask Attorney-General Yorke who
Empson and Dudley were. His manners were a little too coarse and boisterous even
for that age of Westerns and Topehalls. When he ceased to talk of politics, he
could talk of nothing but women and he dilated on his favorite theme with a
freedom which shocked even that plain-spoken generation, and which was quite
unsuited to his age and station. The noisy revelry of his summer festivities at
Houghton gave much scandal to grave people, and annually drove his kinsman and
colleague, Lord Townshend, from the neighboring mansion of Rainham.
But, however ignorant Walpole might be of general history and of general
literature, he was better acquainted than any man of his day with what it
concerned him most to know, mankind, the English nation, the Court, the House of
Commons, and the Treasury. Of foreign affairs he knew little; but his judgment
was so good that his little knowledge went very far. He was an excellent
parliamentary debater, an excellent parliamentary tactician, an excellent man of
business. No man ever brought more industry or more method to the transacting of
affairs. No minister in his time did so much; yet no minister had so much
leisure.
He was a good-natured man who had during thirty years seen nothing but the worst
parts of human nature in other men. He was familiar with the malice of kind
people, and the perfidy of honorable people. Proud men had licked the dust
before him. Patriots had begged him to come up to the price of their puffed and
advertised integrity. He said after his fall that it was a dangerous thing to be
a minister, that there were few minds which would not be injured by the constant
spectacle of meanness and depravity. To his honor it must be confessed that few
minds have come out of such a trial so little damaged in the most important
parts. He retired, after more than twenty years of supreme power, with a temper
not soured, with a heart not hardened, with simple tastes, with frank manners,
and with a capacity for friendship. No stain of treachery, of ingratitude, or of
cruelty rests on his memory. Factious hatred, while flinging on his name every
other foul aspersion, was compelled to own that he was not a man of blood. This
would scarcely seem a high eulogium on a statesman of our times. It was then a
rare and honorable distinction. The contests of parties in England had long been
carried on with a ferocity unworthy of a civilized people. Sir Robert Walpole
was the minister who gave to our Government that character of lenity which it
has since generally preserved. It was perfectly known to him that many of his
opponents had dealings with the Pretender. The lives of some were at his mercy.
He wanted neither Whig nor Tory precedents for using his advantage unsparingly.
But with a clemency to which posterity has never done justice, he suffered
himself to be thwarted, vilified, and at last overthrown, by a party which
included many men whose necks were in his power.
That he practiced corruption on a large scale, is, we think, indisputable. But
whether he deserves all the invectives which have been uttered against him on
that account may be questioned. No man ought to be severely censured for not
being beyond his age in virtue. To buy the votes of constituents is as immoral
as to buy the votes of representatives. The candidate who gives five guineas to
the freeman is as culpable as the man who gives three hundred guineas to the
member. Yet we know that, in our own time, no man is thought wicked or
dishonorable, no man is cut, no man is black-balled, because, under the old
system of election, he was returned in the only way in which he could be
returned, for East Redford, for Liverpool, or for Stafford. Walpole governed by
corruption, because, in his time, it was impossible to govern otherwise.
Corruption was unnecessary to the Tudors, for their Parliaments were feeble. The
publicity which has of late years been given to parliamentary proceedings has
raised the standard of morality among public men. The power of public opinion is
so great that, even before the reform of the representation, a faint suspicion
that a minister had given pecuniary gratifications to Members of Parliament in
return for their votes would have been enough to ruin him. But, during the
century which followed the Restoration, the House of Commons was in that
situation in which assemblies must be managed by corruption, or cannot be
managed at all. It was not held in awe, as in the sixteenth century, by the
throne. It was not held in awe as in the nineteenth century, by the opinion of
the people. Its constitution was oligarchical. Its deliberations were secret.
Its power in the State was immense. The Government had every conceivable motive
to offer bribes. Many of the members, if they were not men of strict honor and
probity, had no conceivable motive to refuse what the Government offered. In the
reign of Charles the Second, accordingly, the practice of buying votes in the
House of Commons was commenced by the daring Clifford, and carried to a great
extent by the crafty and shameless Danby. The Revolution, great and manifold as
were the blessings of which it was directly or remotely the cause, at first
aggravated this evil. The importance of the House of Commons was now greater
than ever. The prerogatives of the Crown were more strictly limited than ever;
and those associations in which, more than in its legal prerogatives, its power
had consisted, were completely broken. No prince was ever in so helpless and
distressing a situation as William the Third. The party which defended his title
was, on general grounds, disposed to curtail his prerogative. The party which
was, on general grounds, friendly to prerogative, was adverse to his title.
There was no quarter in which both his office and his person could find favor.
But while the influence of the House of Commons in the Government was becoming
paramount, the influence of the people over the House of Commons was declining.
It mattered little in the time of Charles the First whether that House were or
were not chosen by the people; it was certain to act for the people, because it
would have been at the mercy of the Court but for the support of the people. Now
that the Court was at the mercy of the House of Commons, those members who were
not returned by popular election had nobody to please but themselves. Even those
who were returned by popular election did not live, as now, under a constant
sense of responsibility. The constituents were not, as now, daily apprised of
the votes and speeches of their representatives. The privileges which had in old
times been indispensably necessary to the security and efficiency of Parliaments
were now superfluous. But they were still carefully maintained, by honest
legislators from superstitious veneration, by dishonest legislators for their
own selfish ends. They had been an useful defense to the Commons during a long
and doubtful conflict with powerful sovereigns. They were now no longer
necessary for that purpose; and they became a defense to the members against
their constituents. That secrecy which had been absolutely necessary in times
when the Privy Council was in the habit of sending the leaders of Opposition to
the Tower was preserved in times when a vote of the House of Commons was
sufficient to hurl the most powerful minister from his post.
The Government could not go on unless the Parliament could be kept in order. And
how was the Parliament to be kept in order? Three hundred years ago it would
have been enough for the statesman to have the support of the Crown. It would
now, we hope and believe, be enough for him to enjoy the confidence and
approbation of the great body of the middle class. A hundred years ago it would
not have been enough to have both Crown and people on his side. The Parliament
had shaken off the control of the Royal prerogative. It had not yet fallen under
the control of public opinion. A large proportion of the members had absolutely
no motive to support any administration except their own interest, in the lowest
sense of the word. Under these circumstances, the country could be governed only
by corruption. Bolingbroke, who was the ablest and the most vehement of those
who raised the clamor against corruption, had no better remedy to propose than
that the Royal prerogative should be strengthened. The remedy would no doubt
have been efficient. The only question is, whether it would not have been worse
than the disease. The fault was in the constitution of the Legislature; and to
blame those ministers who managed the Legislature in the only way in which it
could be managed is gross injustice. They submitted to extortion because they
could not help themselves. We might as well accuse the poor Lowland farmers who
paid black-mail to Rob Roy of corrupting the virtue of the Highlanders, as
accuse Sir Robert Walpole of corrupting the virtue of Parliament. His crime was
merely this, that he employed his money more dexterously, and got more support
in return for it, than any of those who preceded or followed him.
He was himself incorruptible by money. His dominant passion was the love of
power: and the heaviest charge which can be brought against him is that to this
passion he never scrupled to sacrifice the interests of his country.
One of the maxims which, as his son tells us, he was most In the habit of
repeating, was quieta non movere. It was indeed the maxim by which he generally
regulated his public conduct. It is the maxim of a man more solicitous to hold
power long than to use it well. It is remarkable that, though he was at the head
of affairs during more than twenty years, not one great measure, not one
important change for the better or for the worse in any part of our
institutions, marks the period of his supremacy. Nor was this because he did not
clearly see that many changes were very desirable. He had been brought up in the
school of toleration, at the feet of Somers and of Burnet. He disliked the
shameful laws against Dissenters. But he never could be induced to bring forward
a proposition for repealing them. The sufferers represented to him the injustice
with which they were treated, boasted of their firm attachment to the House of
Brunswick and to the Whig party, and reminded him of his own repeated
declarations of goodwill to their cause. He listened, assented, promised, and
did nothing. At length, the question was brought forward by others, and the
Minister, after a hesitating and evasive speech, voted against it. The truth was
that he remembered to the latest day of his life that terrible explosion of
high-church feeling which the foolish prosecution of a foolish parson had
occasioned in the days of Queen Anne. If the Dissenters had been turbulent he
would probably have relieved them; but while he apprehended no danger from them,
he would not run the slightest risk for their sake. He acted in the same manner
with respect to other questions. He knew the state of the Scotch Highlands. He
was constantly predicting another insurrection in that part of the empire. Yet,
during his long tenure of power, he never attempted to perform what was then the
most obvious and pressing duty of a British Statesman, to break the power of the
Chiefs, and to establish the authority of law through the furthest corners of
the Island. Nobody knew better than he that, if this were not done, great
mischiefs would follow. But the Highlands were tolerably quiet in his time. He
was content to meet daily emergencies by daily expedients; and he left the rest
to his successors. They had to conquer the Highlands in the midst of a war with
France and Spain, because he had not regulated the Highlands in a time of
profound peace.
Sometimes, in spite of all his caution, he found that measures which he had
hoped to carry through quietly had caused great agitation. When this was the
case he generally modified or withdrew them. It was thus that he cancelled
Wood's patent in compliance with the absurd outcry of the Irish. It was thus
that he frittered away the Porteous Bill to nothing, for fear of exasperating
the Scotch. It was thus that he abandoned the Excise Bill, as soon as he found
that it was offensive to all the great towns of England. The language which he
held about that measure in a subsequent session is strikingly characteristic.
Pulteney had insinuated that the scheme would be again brought forward. "As to
the wicked scheme," said Walpole, "as the gentleman is pleased to call it, which
he would persuade gentlemen is not yet laid aside, I for my part assure this
House I am not so mad as ever again to engage in anything that looks like an
Excise; though, in my private opinion, I still think it was a scheme that would
have tended very much to the interest of the nation."
The conduct of Walpole with regard to the Spanish war is the great blemish of
his public life. Archdeacon Coxe imagined that he had discovered one grand
principle of action to which the whole public conduct of his hero ought to be
referred.
"Did the administration of Walpole," says the biographer, "present any uniform
principle which may be traced in every part, and which gave combination and
consistency to the whole? Yes, and that principle was, THE LOVE OF PEACE." It
would be difficult, we think, to bestow a higher eulogium on any statesman. But
the eulogium is far too high for the merits of Walpole. The great ruling
principle of his public conduct was indeed a love of peace, but not in the sense
in which Archdeacon Coxe uses the phrase. The peace which Walpole sought was not
the peace of the country, but the peace of his own administration. During the
greater part of his public life, indeed, the two objects were inseparably
connected. At length he was reduced to the necessity of choosing between them,
of plunging the State into hostilities for which there was no just ground, and
by which nothing was to be got, or of facing a violent opposition in the
country, in Parliament, and even in the royal closet. No person was more
thoroughly convinced than he of the absurdity of the cry against Spain. But his
darling power was at stake, and his choice was soon made. He preferred an unjust
war to a stormy session. It is impossible to say of a Minister who acted thus
that the love of peace was the one grand principle to which all his conduct is
to be referred. The governing principle of his conduct was neither love of peace
nor love of war, but love of power.
The praise to which he is fairly entitled is this, that he understood the true
interest of his country better than any of his contemporaries, and that he
pursued that interest whenever it was not incompatible with the interest of his
own intense and grasping ambition. It was only in matters of public moment that
he shrank from agitation and had recourse to compromise. In his contests for
personal influence there was no timidity, no flinching. He would have all or
none. Every member of the Government who would not submit to his ascendancy was
turned out or forced to resign. Liberal of everything else, he was avaricious of
power. Cautious everywhere else, when power was at stake he had all the boldness
of Richelieu or Chatham. He might easily have secured his authority if he could
have been induced to divide it with others. But he would not part with one
fragment of it to purchase defenders for all the rest. The effect of this policy
was that he had able enemies and feeble allies. His most distinguished
coadjutors left him one by one, and joined the ranks of the Opposition. He faced
the increasing array of his enemies with unbroken spirit, and thought it far
better that they should attack his power than that they should share it.
The Opposition was in every sense formidable. At its head were two royal
personages, the exiled head of the House of Stuart, the disgraced heir of the
House of Brunswick. One set of members received directions from Avignon. Another
set held their consultations and banquets at Norfolk House. The majority of the
landed gentry, the majority of the parochial clergy, one of the universities,
and a strong party in the City of London and in the other great towns, were
decidedly adverse to the Government. Of the men of letters, some were
exasperated by the neglect with which the Minister treated them, a neglect which
was the more remarkable, because his predecessors, both Whig and Tory, had paid
court with emulous munificence to the wits and poets; others were honestly
inflamed by party zeal; almost all lent their aid to the Opposition. In truth,
all that was alluring to ardent and imaginative minds was on that side; old
associations, new visions of political improvement, high-flown theories of
loyalty, high-flown theories of liberty, the enthusiasm of the Cavalier, the
enthusiasm of the Roundhead. The Tory gentleman, fed in the common-rooms of
Oxford with the doctrines of Filmer and Sacheverell, and proud of the exploits
of his great-grandfather, who had charged with Rupert at Marston, who had held
out the old manor-house against Fairfax, and who, after the King's return, had
been set down for a Knight of the Royal Oak, flew to that section of the
Opposition which, under pretence of assailing the existing administration, was
in truth assailing the reigning dynasty. The young republican, fresh from his
Livy and his Lucan, and glowing with admiration of Hampden, of Russell, and of
Sydney, hastened with equal eagerness to those benches from which eloquent
voices thundered nightly against the tyranny and perfidy of courts. So many
young politicians were caught by these declamations that Sir Robert, in one of
his best speeches, observed that the Opposition consisted of three bodies, the
Tories, the discontented Whigs, who were known by the name of the Patriots, and
the Boys. In fact almost every young man of warm temper and lively imagination,
whatever his political bias might be, was drawn into the party adverse to the
Government; and some of the most distinguished among them, Pitt, for example,
among public men, and Johnson, among men of letters, afterwards openly
acknowledged their mistake.
The aspect of the Opposition, even while it was still a minority in the House of
Commons, was very imposing. Among those who, in Parliament or out of Parliament,
assailed the administration of Walpole, were Bolingbroke, Carteret,
Chesterfield, Argyle, Pulteney, Wyndham, Doddington, Pitt, Lyttelton, Barnard,
Pope, Swift, Gay, Arbuthnot, Fielding, Johnson, Thomson, Akenside, Glover.
Previous |
Critical and Historical Essays, Volume I
| Next
Critical And Historical Essays, Volume I, Thomas Babbington Macaulay,
1843 |
|
Add/Correct a Link