Shall the last trifler of the throng
Enroll his own such names among?
—Oh! no—Enough if I consign
To lasting types their notes divine:
Enough, if Strawberry's humble hill
The title-page of fame shall fill.'[98]
In 1784, Walpole added a few lines to celebrate a new resident and a new favourite, Lady Di. Beauclerk, the widow of Johnson's famous friend.[99] Most of the other names which occur in the Twickenham Register are easily identified. 'Fanny, "ever-blooming fair,"' was the beautiful Lady Fanny Shirley of Phillips' ballad and Pope's epistle, aunt of that fourth Earl Ferrers who in 1760 was hanged at Tyburn for murdering his steward. Miss Hawkins remembered her as residing at a house now called Heath Lane Lodge, with her mother, 'a very ancient Countess Ferrers,' widow of the first Earl. Henry Fielding, to whom Walpole gives a quatrain, the second couplet of which must excuse the insolence of the first, had for some time lodgings in Back Lane, whence was baptised in February, 1748, the elder of his sons by his second wife, the William Fielding who, like his father, became a Westminster magistrate. It is more likely that Tom Jones was written at Twickenham than at any of the dozen other places for which that honour is claimed, since the author quitted Twickenham late in 1748, and his great novel was published early in the following year. Walpole had only been resident for a short time when Fielding left, but even had this been otherwise, it is not likely that, between the master of the Comic Epos (who was also Lady Mary's cousin!) and the dilettante proprietor of Strawberry, there could ever have been much cordiality. Indeed, for some of the robuster spirits of his age Walpole shows an extraordinary distaste, which with him generally implies unsympathetic, if not absolutely illiberal, comment. Almost the only important anecdote of Fielding in his correspondence is one of which the distorting bias is demonstrable;[100] and to Fielding's contemporary, Hogarth, although as a connoisseur he was shrewd enough to collect his works, he scarcely ever refers but to place him in a ridiculous aspect,—a course which contrasts curiously with the extravagant praise he gives to Bentley, Bunbury, Lady Di. Beauclerk, and some other of the very minor artistic lights in his own circle.
It is, however, possible to write too long an excursus upon the Twickenham Parish Register, and the last paragraphs of this chapter belong of right to another and more important work,—The Castle of Otranto. According to the Short Notes, this 'Gothic romance' was begun in June, 1764, and finished on the 6th August following. From another account we learn that it occupied eight nights of this period from ten o'clock at night until two in the morning, to the accompaniment of coffee. In a letter to Cole, the Cambridge antiquary, with whom Walpole commenced to correspond in 1762, he gives some further particulars, which, because they have been so often quoted, can scarcely be omitted here: 'Shall I even confess to you what was the origin of this romance? I waked one morning, in the beginning of last June, from a dream, of which all I could recover was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head filled, like mine, with Gothic story), and that on the uppermost bannister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour. In the evening I sat down and began to write, without knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate. The work grew on my hands, and I grew fond of it,—add that I was very glad to think of anything, rather than politics. In short, I was so engrossed with my tale, which I completed in less than two months, that one evening I wrote from the time I had drunk my tea, about six o'clock, till half an hour after one in the morning, when my hand and fingers were so weary that I could not hold the pen to finish the sentence, but left Matilda and Isabella talking, in the middle of a paragraph.'[101]
The work of which the origin is thus described was published in a limited edition on the 24th December, 1764, with the title of The Castle of Otranto, a Story, translated by William Marshal, Gent., from the original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto, Canon of the Church of St. Nicholas at Otranto. The name of the alleged Italian author is sometimes described as an anagram from Horace Walpole,—a misconception which is easily demonstrated by counting the letters. The book was printed, not for Walpole, but for Lownds, of Fleet Street, and it was prefaced by an introduction in which the author described and criticised the supposed original, which he declared to be a black-letter printed at Naples in 1529. Its success was considerable. It seems at first to have excited no suspicion as to its authenticity, and it is not clear that even Gray, to whom a copy was sent immediately after publication, was in the secret. 'I have received the Castle of Otranto,' he says, 'and return you my thanks for it. It engages our attention here [at Cambridge], makes some of us cry a little, and all in general afraid to go to bed o' nights.' In the second edition, which followed in April, 1765, Walpole dropped the mask, disclosing his authorship in a second preface of great ability, which, among other things, contains a vindication of Shakespeare's mingling of comedy and tragedy against the strictures of Voltaire,—a piece of temerity which some of his French friends feared might prejudice him with that formidable critic. But what is even more interesting is his own account of what he had attempted. He had endeavoured to blend ancient and modern romance,—to employ the old supernatural agencies of Scudéry and La Calprenède as the background to the adventures of personages modelled as closely upon ordinary life as the personages of Tom Jones. These are not his actual illustrations, but they express his meaning. 'The actions, sentiments, conversations, of the heroes and heroines of ancient days were as unnatural as the machines employed to put them in motion.' He would make his heroes and heroines natural in all these things, only borrowing from the older school some of that imagination, invention, and fancy which, in the literal reproduction of life, he thought too much neglected.
His idea was novel, and the moment a favourable one for its development. Fluently and lucidly written, the Castle of Otranto set a fashion in literature. But, like many other works produced under similar conditions, it had its day. To the pioneer of a movement which has exhausted itself, there comes often what is almost worse than oblivion,—discredit and neglect. A generation like the present, for whom fiction has unravelled so many intricate combinations, and whose Gothicism and Mediævalism are better instructed than Walpole's, no longer feels its soul harrowed up in the same way as did his hushed and awe-struck readers of the days of the third George. To the critic the book is interesting as the first of a school of romances which had the honour of influencing even the mighty 'Wizard of the North,' who, no doubt in gratitude, wrote for Ballantyne's Novelist's Library a most appreciative study of the story. But we doubt if that many-plumed and monstrous helmet, which crashes through stone walls and cellars, could now give a single shiver to the most timorous Cambridge don, while we suspect that the majority of modern students would, like the author, leave Matilda and Isabella talking, in the middle of a paragraph, but from a different kind of weariness. Autres temps, autres mœurs,—especially in the matter of Gothic romance.