Part 32

the hidden wires of intrigue to be delicately manipulated. He chuckles irrepressibly when he has confided a secret to a friend, who has let it out to a minister, who communicates it to a great personage, who explodes into inextinguishable wrath, and blows a whole elaborate plot into a thousand fragments. To expect deep and settled political principle from such a man would be to look for grapes from thorns and figs from thistles; but to do Walpole justice, we must add that it would be equally absurd to exact settled principle from any politician of that age. We are beginning to regard our ancestors with a strange mixture of contempt and envy. We despise them because they cared nothing for the thoughts which for the last century have been upheaving society into strange convulsions; we envy them because they enjoyed the delicious calm which was the product of that indifference. Wearied by the incessant tossing and boiling of the torrent which carries us away, we look back with fond regret to the little backwater so far above Niagara, where scarcely a ripple marks the approaching rapids. There is a charm in the great solid old eighteenth-century mansions, which London is so rapidly engulfing, and even about the old red brick churches with 'sleep-compelling' pews. We take imaginary naps amongst our grandfathers with no railways, no telegraphs, no mobs in Trafalgar Square, no discussions about ritualism or Dr. Colenso, and no reports of parliamentary debates. It is to our fancies an 'island valley of Avilion,' or, less magniloquently, a pleasant land of Cockaine, where we may sleep away the disturbance of battle, and even read through 'Clarissa Harlow.' We could put up with an occasional highwayman in Hyde Park, and perhaps do not think that our comfort would be seriously disturbed by a dozen executions in a morning at Tyburn. In such visionary glances through the centuries we have always the advantage of selecting our own position in life, and perhaps there are few that for such purposes we should prefer to Walpole's. We should lap ourselves against eating cares in the warm folds of a sinecure of 6,000_l._ a year bestowed because our father was a Prime Minister. There are many immaculate persons at the present day to whom truth would be truth even when seen through such a medium. There are--we have their own authority for believing it--men who would be republicans, though their niece was married to a royal duke. Walpole, we must admit, was not of the number. He was an aristocrat to the backbone. He was a gossip by nature and education, and had lived from infancy in the sacred atmosphere of court intrigue; every friend he possessed in his own rank either had a place, or had lost a place, or was in want of a place, and generally combined all three characters; professed indifference to place was only a cunning mode of angling for a place, and politics was a series of ingeniously-contrived manoeuvres in which the moving power of the machinery was the desire of sharing the spoils. Walpole's talk about Magna Charta and the execution of Charles I. could, it is plain, imply but a skin-deep republicanism. He could not be seriously displeased with a state of things of which his own position was the natural out-growth. His republicanism was about as genuine as his boasted indifference to money--a virtue which is not rare in bachelors who have more than they can spend. So long as he could buy as much bric-a-brac, as many knicknacks, and old books and bronzes and curious portraits and odd gloves of celebrated characters as he pleased; add a new tower and a set of battlements to Strawberry Hill every few years; keep a comfortable house in London, and have a sufficiency of carriages and horses; treat himself to an occasional tour, and keep his press steadily at work; he was not the man to complain of poverty. He was a republican, too, as long as that word implied that he and his father and uncles and cousins and connections by marriage and their intimate friends were to have everything precisely their own way; but if a vision could have shown him the reformers of a coming generation who would inquire into civil lists and object to sinecures--to say nothing of cutting off the heads of the first families--he would have prayed to be removed before the evil day. Republicanism in his sense was a word exclusive of revolution. Was it, then, a mere meaningless mask intended only to conceal the real man? Before passing such a judgment we should remember that the names by which people classify their opinions are generally little more than arbitrary badges; and even in these days, when practice treads so closely on the heels of theory, some persons profess to know extreme radicals who could be converted very speedily by a bit of riband. Walpole has explained himself with unmistakable frankness, and his opinion was at least intelligible. He was not a republican after the fashion of Robespierre, or Jefferson, or M. Gambetta; but he had some meaning. When a duke in those days proposed annual parliaments and universal suffrage, we may assume that he did not realise the probable effect of those institutions upon dukes; and when Walpole applauded the regicides, he was not anxious to send George III. to the block. He meant, however, that he considered George III. to be a narrow-minded and obstinate fool. He meant, too, that the great Revolution families ought to distribute the plunder and the power without interference from the Elector of Hanover. He meant, again, that as a quick and cynical observer, he found the names of Brutus and Algernon Sidney very convenient covers for attacking the Duke of Newcastle and the Earl of Bute. But beyond all this, he meant something more, which gives the real spice to his writings. It was something not quite easy to put into formulas; but characteristic of the vague discomfort of the holders of sinecures in those halcyon days arising from the perception that the ground was hollow under their feet. To understand him we must remember that the period of his activity marks precisely the lowest ebb of political principle. Old issues had been settled, and the new ones were only just coming to the surface. He saw the end of the Jacobites and the rise of the demagogues. His early letters describe the advance of the Pretender to Derby; they tell us how the British public was on the whole inclined to look on and cry, 'Fight dog, fight bear;' how the Jacobites who had anything to lose left their battle to be fought by half-starved cattle-stealers, and contented themselves with drinking to the success of the cause; and how the Whig magnates, with admirable presence of mind, raised regiments, appointed officers, and got the expenses paid by the Crown. His later letters describe the amazing series of blunders by which we lost America in spite of the clearest warnings from almost every man of sense in the kingdom. The interval between these disgraceful epochs is filled--if we except the brief episode of Chatham--by a series of struggles between different connections--one cannot call them parties--which separate and combine, and fight and make peace, till the plot of the drama becomes too complicated for human ingenuity to unravel. Lads just crammed for a civil service examination might possibly bear in mind all the shifting combinations which resulted from the endless intrigues of Pelhams and Grenvilles and Bedfords and Rockinghams; yet even those omniscient persons could hardly give a plausible account of the principles which each party conceived itself to be maintaining. What, for example, were the politics of a Rigby, or a Bubb Dodington? The diary in which the last of these eminent persons reveals his inmost soul is perhaps the most curious specimen of unconscious self-analysis extant. His utter baseness and venality, his disgust at the 'low venal wretches' to whom he had to give bribes; his creeping and crawling before those from whom he sought to extract bribes; his utter incapacity to explain a great man except on the hypothesis of insanity; or to understand that there is such a thing as political morality, derive double piquancy from the profound conviction that he is an ornament to society, and from the pious aspirations which he utters with the utmost simplicity. Bubb wriggled himself into a peerage, and differed from innumerable competitors only by superior frankness. He is the fitting representative of an era from which political faith has disappeared, as Walpole is its fitting satirist. All political virtue, it is said, was confined, in Walpole's opinion, to Conway and the Marquis of Hertford. Was he wrong? or, if he was wrong, was it not rather in the exception than the rule? The dialect in which his sarcasms are expressed is affected, but the substance is hard to dispute. The world, he is fond of saying, is a tragedy to those who feel, a comedy to those who think. He preferred the comedy view. 'I have never yet seen or heard,' he says, 'anything serious that was not ridiculous. Jesuits, Methodists, philosophers, politicians, the hypocrite Rousseau, the scoffer Voltaire, the encyclopædists, the Humes, the Lytteltons, the Grenvilles, the atheist tyrant of Prussia, and the mountebank of history, Mr. Pitt, are all to me but impostors in their various ways. Fame or interest is their object, and after all their parade, I think a ploughman who sows, reads his almanack, and believes that the stars are so many farthing candles created to prevent his falling into a ditch as he goes home at night, a wiser and more rational being, and I am sure an honester, than any of them. Oh! I am sick of visions and systems that shove one another aside, and come again like figures in a moving picture.' Probably Walpole's belief in the ploughman lasted till he saw the next smock-frock; but the bitterness clothed in the old-fashioned cant is serious and is justifiable enough. Here is a picture of English politics in the time of Wilkes. 'No government, no police, London and Middlesex distracted, the colonies in rebellion, Ireland ready to be so, and France arrogant and on the point of being hostile! Lord Bute accused of all, and dying in a panic; George Grenville wanting to make rage desperate; Lord Rockingham and the Cavendishes thinking we have no enemies but Lord Bute, and that five mutes and an epigram can set everything to rights; the Duke of Grafton (then Prime Minister) like an apprentice, thinking the world should be postponed to a horse-race; and the Bedfords not caring what disgraces we undergo while each of them has 3,000_l._ a year and three thousand bottles of claret and champagne!' And every word of this is true--at least, so far as epigrams need be true. It is difficult to put into more graphic language the symptoms of an era just ripe for revolution. If frivolous himself, Walpole can condemn the frivolity of others. 'Can one repeat common news with indifference,' he asks, just after the surrender of Yorktown, 'while our shame is writing for future history by the pens of all our numerous enemies? When did England see two whole armies lay down their arms and surrender themselves prisoners?... These are thoughts I cannot stifle at the moment that expresses them; and, though I do not doubt that the same dissipation that has swallowed up all our principles will reign again in ten days with its wonted sovereignty, I had rather be silent than vent my indignation. Yet I cannot talk, for I cannot think, on any other subject. It was not six days ago that, in the height of four raging wars (with America, France, Spain, and Holland), I saw in the papers an account of the opera and of the dresses of the company, and hence the town, and thence, of course, the whole nation, were informed that Mr. Fitzpatrick had very little powder in his hair.' Walpole sheltered himself behind the corner of a pension to sneer at the tragi-comedy of life; but if his feelings were not profound, they were quick and genuine, and, affectation for affectation, his cynical coxcombry seems preferable to the solemn coxcombry of the men who shamelessly wrangled for plunder, while they talked solemn platitudes about sacred Whig principles and the thrice blessed British Constitution.

Walpole, in fact, represents a common creed amongst comfortable but clear-headed men of his time. It was the strange mixture of scepticism and conservatism which is exemplified in such men as Hume and Gibbon. He was at heart a Voltairian, and, like his teacher, confounded all religions and political beliefs under the name of superstition. Voltaire himself did not anticipate the Revolution to which he, more than any man, had contributed. Walpole, with stronger personal reasons than Voltaire for disliking a catastrophe, was as furious as Burke when the volcano burst forth. He was a republican so far as he disbelieved in the divine right of kings, and hated enthusiasm and loyalty generally. He wished the form to survive and the spirit to disappear. Things were rotten, and he wished them to stay rotten. The ideal to which he is constantly recurring was the pleasant reign of his father, when nobody made a fuss or went to war, or kept principles except for sale. He foresaw, however, far better than most men, the coming crash. If political sagacity be fairly tested by a prophetic vision of the French Revolution, Walpole's name should stand high. He visited Paris in 1765, and remarks that laughing is out of fashion. 'Good folks, they have no time to laugh. There is God and the King to be pulled down first, and men and women, one and all, are devoutly employed in the demolition. They think me quite profane for having any belief left.' Do you know, he asks presently, who are the philosophers? 'In the first place, it comprehends almost everybody, and in the next it means men who, avowing war against Papacy, aim, many of them, at the destruction of regal power. The philosophers,' he goes on, 'are insupportable, superficial, overbearing, and fanatic. They preach incessantly, and their avowed doctrine is atheism--you could not believe how openly. Don't wonder, therefore, if I should return a Jesuit. Voltaire himself does not satisfy them. One of their lady devotees said of him, "_Il est bigot, c'est un déiste!_"' French politics, he professes a few years afterwards, must end in 'despotism, a civil war, or assassination,' and he remarks that the age will not, as he had always thought, be an age of abortion, but rather 'the age of seeds that are to produce strange crops hereafter.' The next century, he says at a later period, 'will probably exhibit a very new era, which the close of this has been, and is, preparing.' If these sentences had been uttered by Burke, they would have been quoted as proofs of remarkable sagacity. As it is, we may surely call them shrewd glances for a frivolous coxcomb.

Walpole regarded these symptoms in the true epicurean spirit, and would have joined in the sentiment, _après moi le déluge_. He was on the whole for remedying grievances, and is put rather out of temper by cruelties which cannot be kept out of his sight. He talks with disgust of the old habit of stringing up criminals by the dozen; he denounces the slave-trade with genuine fervour; there is apparent sincerity in his platitudes against war; and he never took so active a part in politics as in the endeavour to prevent the judicial murder of Byng. His conscience generally discharged itself more easily by a few pungent epigrams, and though he wished the reign of reason and humanity to dawn, he would rather that it should not come at all than be ushered in by a tempest. His whole theory is given forcibly and compactly in an answer which he once made to the republican Mrs. Macaulay, and was fond of repeating:--'Madam, if I had been Luther, and could have known that for the _chance_ of saving a million of souls I should be the cause of a million of lives, at least, being sacrificed before my doctrines could be established, it must have been a most palpable angel, and in a most heavenly livery, before he should have set me at work.' We will not ask what angel would have induced him to make the minor sacrifice of six thousand a year to establish any conceivable doctrine. Whatever may be the merit of these opinions, they contain Walpole's whole theory of life. I know, he seems to have said to himself, that loyalty is folly, that rank is contemptible, that the old society in which I live is rotten to the core, and that explosive matter is accumulating beneath our feet. Well! I am not made of the stuff for a reformer: I am a bit of a snob, though, like other snobs, I despise both parties to the bargain. I will take the sinecures the gods provide me, amuse myself with my toys at Strawberry Hill, despise kings and ministers, without endangering my head by attacking them, and be over-polite to a royal duke when he visits me on condition of laughing at him behind his back when he is gone. Walpole does not deserve a statue; he was not a Wilberforce or a Howard, and as little of a Burke or a Chatham. But his faults, as well as his virtues, qualified him to be the keenest of all observers of a society unconsciously approaching a period of tremendous convulsions.

To claim for him that, even at his best, he is a profound observer of character, or that he gives any consistent account of his greatest contemporaries, would be too much. He is full of whims, and moreover, full of spite. He cannot be decently fair to anyone who deserted his father, or stood in Conway's light. He reflects at all times the irreverent gossip current behind the scenes. To know the best and the worst that can be said of any great man, the best plan is to read the leading article of his party newspaper, and then to converse in private with its writer. The eulogy and the sarcasm may both be sincere enough; only it is pleasant, after puffing one's wares to the public, to glance at their seamy side in private. Walpole has a decided taste for that last point of view. The littleness of the great, the hypocrisy of the virtuous, and the selfishness of statesmen in general, is his ruling theme, illustrated by an infinite variety of brilliant caricatures struck off at the moment with a quick eye and a sure hand. Though he elaborates no grand historical portrait, like Burke or Clarendon, he has a whole gallery of telling vignettes which are often as significant as far more pretentious works. Nowhere, for example, can we find more graphic sketches of the great man who stands a head and shoulders above the whole generation of dealers in power and place. Most of Chatham's contemporaries repaid his contempt with intense dislike. Some of them pronounced him mad, and others thought him a knave. Walpole, who at times calls him a mountebank and an impostor, does not go further than Burke, who, in a curious comment, speaks of him as the 'grand artificer of fraud,' who never conversed but with 'a parcel of low toad-eaters;' and asks whether all this 'theatrical stuffing' and these 'raised heels' could be necessary to the character of a great man. Walpole, of course, has a keen eye to the theatrical stuffing. He takes the least complimentary view of the grand problem, which still puzzles some historians, as to the genuineness of Chatham's gout. He smiles complacently when the great actor forgets that his right arm ought to be lying helpless in a sling and flourishes it with his accustomed vigour. But Walpole, in spite of his sneers and sarcasms, can recognise the genuine power of the man. He is the describer of the striking scene which occurred when the House of Commons was giggling over some delicious story of bribery and corruption--the House of Commons was frivolous in those benighted days; he tells how Pitt suddenly stalked down from the gallery and administered his thundering reproof; how Murray, then Attorney-General, 'crouched, silent and terrified,' and the Chancellor of the Exchequer faltered out an humble apology for the unseemly levity. It is Walpole who best describes the great debate when Pitt, 'haughty, defiant, conscious of injury and supreme abilities,' burst out in that tremendous speech--tremendous if we may believe the contemporary reports, of which the only tolerably preserved fragment is the celebrated metaphor about the confluence of the Rhône and the Saône. Alas! Chatham's eloquence has all gone to rags and tatters; though, to say the truth, it has only gone the way of nine-tenths of our contemporary eloquence. We have, indeed, what are called accurate reports of spoken pamphlets, dried specimens of rhetoric from which the life has departed as completely as it is strained out of the specimens in a botanical collection. If there is no Walpole amongst us, we shall know what our greatest living orator has said; but how he said it, and how it moved his audience, will be as obscure as if the reporters' gallery were still unknown. Walpole--when he was not affecting philosophy, or smarting from the failure of an intrigue, or worried by the gout, or disappointed of a bargain at a sale--could throw electric flashes of light on the figure he describes which reveal the true man. He errs from petulancy, but not from stupidity. He can appreciate great qualities by fits, though he cannot be steadily loyal to their possessor. And if he wrote down most of our rulers as knaves and fools, we have only to lower those epithets to selfish and blundering, to get a very fair estimate of their characters. To the picturesque historian his services are invaluable; though no single statement can be accepted without careful correction.