BOOKS AND WRITERS T HE Castle of Otranto was " the
only one of my works I've really enjoyed," Walpole wrote to Madame du Deffand, " t unique oft je me soil plu," though we wonder whether he may not have got a similar pleasure from the Hieroglyphic Tales, which " were undoubtedly written a little before the creation
of the world." For here we touch the really serious part of Horace Walpole, the realm where he could let himself go, where the sub- conscious. could be released from the padlock of the censor which being a man of the world imposed upon him. Walpole, the hard- working scholar (did he not have to go three times through Venue's " forty volumes of miniature manuscripts " to make the index for his Painters?), the industrious compiler of records, the man whose " untiring perseverance " astonished Harrison Ainsworth, the historian, the typographer, the Trustee of the British Museum, had to hide his scholarly being under a mask of light-hearted flippancy : " I know nothing. How should I 7 I who have always lived in the big busy world ; who lie abed all the morning, calling it morning as long as you please ; who sups in company ; who have played at faro half my life, and now at loo till two or three in the morning, who have always loved pleasure, haunted auctions. . . . How I have laughed when some of the Magazines have called me the learned gentleman." Macaulay, with his " inexperiencing mind," has made the passage famous, using it as an Aunt Sally for some of his most boisterous coconut shying. This, of course, was Walpole's protective pose, his fancy dress, like the domino he wore when at Florence, which he took off only to get into bed, and got out of bed merely to put on.
The truth is he was a minor visionary, a dreamer, who had somehow to maintain himself in the hard-hitting and drinking, vociferous and very shrewd company he was brought up in at Houghton and Downing Street. Gray, in the early days, understood this very well. " You are in a confusion of wine and roaring and hunting and tobacco. . . . I imagine, however, you will . . .
prefer the picture of still life to the realities of a noisy one." In his Eton days he had tended visionary flocks and sighed " some pastoral name to the echo of the cascade under the bridge " ; in 1736 he had been rapturous about Alpine scenery (Blackmore and Thomson as well as Salvator Rosa had made this permissible) ; but it was not until 1779 that he was assured enough to be able to write, " I hold visions to be wisdom." Strawberry Hill itself he declared to be " a plaything, a vision, that has amused a poor transitory mortal for a few hours, and will pass away like its master."
Strawberry Hill has almost passed away, but—and this would perhaps surprise Walpole—The Castle of Otranto has not ; it goes on being republished, now in an attractive edition illustrated by suitably gruesome, delicately coloured lithographs by Mr. Gordon Noel Fish.* But how surrealistically it came into being !
" I woke one morning in the beginning of last June [he wrote to Cole on March 8th, 1765] 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." If that isn't the passion of the artist, what is ? The artist in the manufacture of bibelots if you like, a kind of Strawberry Hill in literature. But when you think of what flowed from both Straw- berry Hill and Otranto, you tremble at the power of these inspired * Grey Walls Press. (I2s. 6d.) toys. The power is there because their maker gave himself to them.
But he was always in control—of himself and his material— and in his writing, moreover, possessed of that sense of his audience which was the mark of eighteenth-century civilisation, an awareness which demanded sincerity, and prevented you from fooling your- self. So in this book, which still charms if only because of this complexity of awareness, you feel Walpole letting himself go, then looking at himself doing so, pretending it was all foolery, and yet respecting his audience. It is a book which may strike the callow reader as ridiculous, but the fact that it goes on being reprinted suggests there is something more in it than the rapid reader will notice. It will no longer make the denizens of Cambridge cry a little or woo night fears, but it will give pleasure to anyone with the taste for a lesser kind of art, perfectly done, for its own sake— that is, for the pleasure it gave its fabricator.
And Otranto is beautifully done ; the machinery works with a rapid smoothness which makes one wonder how much Walpole revised. It is astonishing how soon we accept the values of this world ; sooner even than Manfred himself we become " almost hardened to preternatural appearances." Indeed, as early as the first chapter we note without a tremor that: " At that instant the portrait of his grandfather, which hung over the bench where they had been sitting, uttered a deep sigh, and heaved its breast ; " but though in a sense we take all this " seriously," we are not allowed to be too serious. We have got to feel it, and we do feel it ; but at the same time we have to realise that it is all nonsense: "' It is done,' replied Manfred ; ' Frederic accepts Matilda's hand, and is content to waive his claim, unless I have no male issue '—as he spoke those words, three drops of blood fell from the nose of Alfonso's statue."
The whole thing is saved from being ridiculous by a sense of situation, of the situation of this supposedly Gothic romance in polite society. When Theodore wants to hide Matilda from her pursuers, " beyond the reach of danger," in the recesses of the labyrinthine cave, Matilda protests: "Alas! what mean you, sir ? . . . Though all your actions are noble, though your sentiments speak the purity of your soul, is it fitting that I should accompany you into these perplexed retreats ? Should we be found together, what would a censorious world think of my conduct ? "
But it is the unity of texture of the surface that keeps the whole thing together. That Walpole thought deeply about his style the preface to the first edition, here reprinted, makes plain. That he thought about form and presentation the preface to the second edition, not given here, also makes plain, as when he says he modelled his servant characters on Shakespeare's. And if their parentage does not force itself on the attention, we see what he means ; he is thinking of Pompey and Lancelot Gobbo. He worked hard at the book, as his prefaces prove, since as a good dilettante he knew that a man had no business to do a thing at all unless he did it as well as he possibly could.
Walpole always looked back with nostalgia on those two months ; they were those in which, perhaps, he most really lived. In 1773 he wrote to Madame du Deffand in the midst of looking after the affairs of his mentally deranged nephew: " I desert the trade of author for that of bailiff. Never again will my dreams give me a Castle of Otranto. It's a dreary thing to trade dreams for bills. I had made myself a world in every way unlike the world of business. Alas! I shall have to set to, to learn utilitarian things."
It is as sad as the Castle of Otranto itself ; for it is, oddly, a sad book, so long, that is, as you can accept Walpole's plea to Lady Mary Coke, and keep the marvels related by Onuphrio Muralto, and translated by William Marshall, Gent., " free from reason's peevish blame." In short, accept what the gods give you, be thankful, and something profounder than seems likely will colour
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