Of these things perhaps men will write two hundred or two thousand years hence. But the duration of human life on our planet is measured, as we suppose, in tens of thousands of years.
We go to the grave. The sunlight comes into this room; it shines on the table and the books and the papers. I listen to the twittering of the birds, shorter lived than ourselves, and the intermittent rushing of the wind, which, while life lasts, goes on always the same. A car moans past; its noise begins, swells, and dies away. The trees wave about; a horse's feet plod by; the sunlight sparkles on the river and glorifies the mud. Clouds come over. The sun, unseen, sets; the evening grows bluer and lamps twinkle out over the misty river. So, noiselessly, proceeds time, and the earth revolves and revolves through its alternations of sun and shade. These airs, these lights and sounds, will be the same; but we, alive and immortal as we feel, shall have gone and the clamour that we made will recede. To an epoch we shall be the coloured strutters of history and of legend; to a later age, however remote and whatever the accumulation of our records, we must become august shadows like the dim kings and fabulous empires that passed before Babylon and Egypt. "Truly ye are the people, and wisdom shall die with you." The sentence was written more than two thousand years ago; the author is unknown and receding. Yet, obliterated in the end though all remembrance of us may be, we shall not even on this earth die with our bodies, and for some interval, not to be computed, certain actions at this moment in progress will endure in a sublimated state, and certain men with whom we may even have spoken will enlarge to a more than human stature and communicate, as they could never do in life, their essence to the enduring tradition of men. Are they those whom we have mentioned; or are they, as they may be, others who to us are insignificant and obscured?
HORACE WALPOLE[1]
[1] Letters of Horace Walpole; Oxford University Press, 16 vols., 96s. Supplementary Letters, 1919; Oxford University Press, 2 vols., 17s.
By ROBERT LYND
HORACE Walpole was a dainty rogue in porcelain who walked badly. In his best days, as he records in one of his letters, it was said of him that he "tripped like a pewit." "If I do not flatter myself," he wrote when he was just under sixty, "my march at present is more like a dabchick's." A lady has left a description of him entering a room, "knees bent, and feet on tiptoe as if afraid of a wet floor." When his feet were not swollen with the gout, they were so slender, he said, that he "could dance a minuet on a silver penny." He was ridiculously lean, and his hands were crooked with his unmerited disease. An invalid, a caricature of the birds, and not particularly well dressed in spite of his lavender suit and partridge silk stockings, he has nevertheless contrived to leave in his letters an impression of almost perfect grace and dandyism. He had all the airs of a beau. He affected coolness, disdain, amateurishness, triviality. He was a china figure of insolence. He lived on the mantelpiece, and regarded everything that happened on the floor as a rather low joke that could not be helped. He warmed into humanity in his friendships and in his defence of the house of Walpole; but if he descended from his mantelpiece, it was more likely to be in order to feed a squirrel than to save an Empire. His most common image of the world was a puppet-show. He saw kings, prime ministers, and men of genius alike about the size of dolls. When George II. died, he wrote a brief note to Thomas Brand: "Dear Brand—You love laughing; there is a king dead; can you help coming to town?" That represents his measure of things. Those who love laughing will laugh all the more when they discover that, a week earlier, Walpole had written a letter, rotund, fulsome, and in the language of the bended knee, begging Lord Bute to be allowed to kiss the Prince of Wales's hand. His attitude to the Court he described to George Montagu as "mixing extreme politeness with extreme indifference." His politeness, like his indifference, was but play at the expense of a solemn world. "I wrote to Lord Bute," he informed Montagu; "thrust in all the unexpecteds, want of ambition, disinterestedness, etc., that I could amass, gilded with as much duty, affection, zeal, etc., as possible." He frankly professed relief that he had not after all to go to Court and act out the extravagant compliments he had written. "Was ever so agreeable a man as King George the Second," he wrote, "to die the very day it was necessary to save me from ridicule?" "For my part," he adds later in the same spirit, "my man Harry will always be a favourite; he tells me all the amusing news; he first told me of the late Prince of Wales's death, and to-day of the King's." It is not that Walpole was a republican of the school of Plutarch. He was merely a toy republican who enjoyed being insolent at the expense of kings, and behind their backs. He was scarcely capable of open rudeness in the fashion of Beau Brummell's "Who's your fat friend?" His ridicule was never a public display; it was a secret treasured for his friends. He was the greatest private entertainer of the eighteenth century, and he ridiculed the great, as people say, for the love of diversion. "I always write the thoughts of the moment," he told the dearest of his friends, Conway, "and even laugh to divert the person I am writing to, without any ill will on the subjects I mention." His letters are for the most part those of a good-natured man.
It is not that he was above the foible—it was barely more than that—of hatred. He did not trouble greatly about enemies of his own, but he never could forgive the enemies of Sir Robert Walpole. His ridicule of the Duke of Newcastle goes far beyond diversion. It is the baiting of a mean and treacherous animal, whose teeth were "tumbling out," and whose mouth was "tumbling in." He rejoices in the exposure of the dribbling indignity of the Duke, as when he describes him going to Court on becoming Prime Minister in 1754:
On Friday this august remnant of the Pelhams went to Court for the first time. At the foot of the stairs he cried and sunk down; the yeomen of the guard were forced to drag him up under the arms. When the closet-door opened, he flung himself at his length at the King's feet, sobbed, and cried, "God bless your Majesty God preserve your Majesty!" and lay there howling and embracing the King's knees, with one foot so extended that my Lord Coventry, who was luckily in waiting, and begged the standers-by to retire, with, "For God's sake, gentlemen, don't look at a great man in distress!" endeavouring to shut the door, caught his grace's foot, and made him roar with pain.