The letters of eminent men make, to our taste, very choice and curious reading; and, except when their publication becomes a breach of honour or decorum, we are always rejoiced to meet with them in print. We should except, perhaps, the letters of celebrated warriors; which, for the most part, should only be published in the Gazette. But, setting these heroes aside, whose wits, Pope has informed us, ‘are kept in ponderous vases,’ letters are certainly the honestest records of great minds, that we can become acquainted with; and we like them the more, for letting us into the follies and treacheries of high life, the secrets of the gay and the learned world, and the mysteries of authorship. We are ushered, as it were, behind the scenes of life; and see gay ladies and learned men, the wise, the witty, and the ambitious, in all the nakedness, or undress at least, of their spirits. A poet, in his private letters, seldom thinks it necessary to keep up the farce of feeling; but casts off the trickery of sentiment, and glides into the unaffected wit, or sobers quietly into the honest man. By his published works, we know that an author becomes a ‘Sir John with all Europe;’ and it can only be by his letters that we discover him to be ‘Jack with his brothers and sisters, and John with his familiars.’ This it is that makes the private letters of a literary person so generally entertaining. He is glad to escape from the austerity of composition, and the orthodoxy of thought; and feels a relief in easy speculations or ludicrous expressions. The finest, perhaps, in our language, are eminently of this description—we mean those of Gray to his friends or literary associates. His poetry is too scholastic and elaborate, and is too visibly the result of laborious and anxious study. But, in his letters, he at once becomes an easy, and graceful, and feeling writer. The composition of familiar letters just suited his indolence, his taste, and his humour. His remarks on poetry are nearly as good as poetry itself;—his observations on life are full of sagacity and fine understanding;—and his descriptions of natural scenery, or Gothic antiquities, are worth their weight in gold. Pope’s letters, though extremely elegant, are failures as letters. He wrote them to the world, not to his friends; and they have therefore very much the air of universal secrets. Swift has recorded his own sour mind in many a bitter epistle; and his correspondence remains a stern and brief chronicle of the time in which he lived. Cowper hath unwittingly beguiled us of many a long hour, by his letters to Lady Hesketh; and in them we see the fluctuations of his melancholy nature more plainly, than in all the biographical dissertations of his affectionate editor.——But we must not make catalogues,—nor indulge longer in this eulogy on letter-writing. We take a particular interest, we confess, in what is thus spoken aside, as it were, and without a consciousness of being overheard;—and think there is a spirit and freedom in the tone of works written for the post, which is scarcely ever to be found in those written for the press. We are much more edified by one letter of Cowper, than we should be by a week’s confinement and hard labour in the metaphysical Bridewell of Mr. Coleridge; and a single letter from the pen of Gray, is worth all the pedlar-reasoning of Mr. Wordsworth’s Eternal Recluse, from the hour he first squats himself down in the sun to the end of his preaching. In the first we have the light unstudied pleasantries of a wit, and a man of feeling;—in the last we are talked to death by an arrogant old proser, and buried in a heap of the most perilous stuff and the most dusty philosophy.
But to come back to the work before us.—Walpole evidently formed his style upon that of Gray, with whom he travelled; and, with his own fund of pleasantry and sarcasm, we know of no other writer whom he could so successfully have studied. There are some odd passages on Gray, scattered up and down the present volume, which speak more for the poet than for the justice or friendship of Walpole. In one letter he says,
‘The first volume of Spencer is published with prints designed by Kent;—but the most execrable performance you ever beheld. The graving not worse than the drawing; awkward knights, scrambling Unas, hills tumbling down themselves, no variety of prospect, and three or four perpetual spruce firs.—Our charming Mr. Bentley is doing Mr. Gray as much more honour as he deserves than Spencer!’ This is indeed a lordly criticism. We really never saw so much bad taste condensed into so small a portion of prose. But he next shows us what ladies of the court think of men of letters, and how lords defend them.
‘My Lady Ailesbury has been much diverted, and so will you too. Gray is in their neighbourhood. My Lady Carlisle says he is extremely like me in his manner. They went a party to dine on a cold loaf, and passed the day. Lady A. protests he never opened his lips but once, and then only said, “Yes, my Lady, I believe so.”
‘I agree with you most absolutely in your opinion about Gray; he is the worst company in the world. From a melancholy turn, from living reclusely, and from a little too much dignity, he never converses easily. All his words are measured and chosen, and formed into sentences. His writings are admirable. He himself is not agreeable.’
But it is not only to his particular friends that he is thus amiably candid. Two other great names are dealt with in the same spirit in the following short sentence.
‘Dr. Young has published a new book, on purpose, he says himself, to have an opportunity of telling a story that he has known these forty years. Mr. Addison sent for the young Lord Warwick, as he was dying, to show him in what peace a Christian could die. Unluckily he died of brandy. Nothing makes a Christian die in peace like being a maudlin! But don’t say this in Gath, where you are.’
It is worthy of remark, indeed, that Walpole never speaks with respect of any man of genius or talent, and, least of all, of those master spirits who ‘have got the start of this majestic world.’ He envied all great minds; and shrunk from encountering them, lest his own should suffer by the comparison. He contrived indeed to quarrel with all his better-spirited friends. Even the gentleman to whom these epistles were addressed, a correspondent of three score years’ standing, fell at last under his displeasure, and was dismissed his friendship. He turned out the domestics of the heart as easily as those of the house; with little or no notice, and with threats of giving them a bad character as a return for their past services. He wished to have genius to wait upon him; but was always surprised that it would not submit to be a servant of all work. Poor Bentley, of whom we hear praises ‘high fantastical’ in the early letters, meets with but scurvy treatment the moment he gets out of fashion with his half-patron and half-friend. He is all spirit, goodness and genius, till it falls to his turn to be disliked; and then the altered patron sneers at his domestic misfortunes, depreciates his talents, and even chuckles at the failure of a play which the artist’s necessities required should be successful. The following is the ill-natured passage to which we allude.
‘No, I shall never cease being a dupe, till I have been undeceived round by every thing that calls itself a virtue. I came to town yesterday, through clouds of dust, to see The Wishes, and went actually feeling for Mr. Bentley, and full of the emotions he must be suffering. What do you think, in a house crowded, was the first thing I saw? Mr. and Madame Bentley perched up in the front boxes, and acting audience at his own play! No, all the impudence of false patriotism never came up to it. Did one ever hear of an author that had courage to see his own first night in public? I don’t believe Fielding or Foote himself ever did; and this was the modest, bashful Mr. Bentley, that died at the thought of being known for an author even by his own acquaintance! In the stage-box was Lady Bute, Lord Halifax, and Lord Melcombe. I must say, the two last entertained the house as much as the play. Your King was prompter, and called out to the actors every minute to speak louder. The other went backwards and forwards behind the scenes, fetched the actors into the box, and was busier than Harlequin. The curious prologue was not spoken—the whole very ill acted. It turned out just what I remembered it: the good parts extremely good; the rest very flat and vulgar, &c.’
A poor painter of the name of Müntz is worse off even than Bentley; and is abused in a very ungenerous way for want of gratitude, and unmerciful extortion. There is a sad want of feeling and dignity in all this; but the key to it is, that Walpole was a miser. He loved the arts after a fashion; but his avarice pinched his affections. He would have had ‘that which he esteemed the ornament of life,’ but that he ‘lived a coward in his own esteem.’ The following haggling passage in one of his letters would disgrace a petty merchant in Duke’s Place, in a bargain for the reversion of an old pair of trowsers.