But neither dog nor guinea fowl seriously distracted him. The hundred and fourteen folio volumes left by him to the British Museum testify to his professional industry. And it was precisely that quality — his professional industry — that brought the two so dissimilar men together. For Horace Walpole was by temperament an amateur. He was not, Cole admitted, “a true, genuine antiquary”; nor did he think himself one. “Then I have a wicked quality in an antiquary, nay one that annihilates the essence; that is, I cannot bring myself to a habit of minute accuracy about very indifferent points,” Horace admitted. “...I bequeath free leave of correction to the microscopic intellects of my continuators.” But he had what Cole lacked — imagination, taste, style, in addition to a passion for the romantic past, so long as that romantic past was also a civilized past, for mere “bumps in the ground” or “barrows and tumuli and Roman camps” bored him to death. Above all, he had a purse long enough to give visible and tangible expression — in prints, in gates, in Gothic temples, in bowers, in old manuscripts, in a thousand gimcracks and “brittle transitory relics” to the smouldering and inarticulate passion that drove the professional antiquary to delve like some indefatigable mole underground in the darkness of the past. Horace liked his brittle relics to be pretty, and to be authentic, and he was always eager to be put on the track of more.
The greater part of the correspondence thus is concerned with antiquaries’ gossip; with parish registers and cartularies; with coats of arms and the Christian names of bishops; with the marriages of kings’ daughters; skeletons and prints; old gold rings found in a field; dates and genealogies; antique chairs in Fen farmhouses; bits of stained glass and old Apostle spoons. For Horace was furnishing Strawberry Hill; and Cole was prodigiously adept at stuffing it, until there was scarcely room to stick another knife or fork, and the gorged owner of all this priceless lumber had to cry out: “I shudder when the bell rings at the gate. It is as bad as keeping an inn.” All the week he was plagued with staring crowds.
Were this all it would be, and indeed it sometimes is, a little monotonous. But they were two very different men. They struck unexpected sparks in one another. Cole’s Walpole was not Conway’s Walpole; nor was Walpole’s Cole the good-natured old parson of the diary. Cole, of course, stressed the antiquary in Walpole; but he also brought out very clearly the limits of the antiquary in Walpole. Against Cole’s monolithic passion his own appears frivolous and flimsy. On the other hand, in contrast with Cole’s slow-plodding pen, his own shows its mettle. He cannot flash, it is true — the subject, say, the names of Edward the Fourth’s daughters, forbids it — yet how sweetly English sings on his side of the page, now in a colloquialism— “a more flannel climate” — that Cole would never have ventured; now in a strain of natural music— “Methinks as we grow old, our only business here is to adorn the graves of our friends or to dig our own.” That strain was called forth by the death of their common friend, Thomas Gray. It was a death that struck at Cole’s heart, too, but produced no such echo in that robust organ. At the mere threat of Conway’s death, Horace was all of a twitter — his nerves were “so aspen.” It was a threat only; “Still has it operated such a revolution in my mind, as no time, at my age, can efface. I have had dreams in which I thought I wished for fame — ...I feel, I feel it was confined to the memory of those I love” — to which Cole replies: “For both your sakes I hope he will soon get well again. It is a misfortune to have so much sensibility in one’s nature as you are endued with: sufficient are one’s own distresses without the additional encumbrance of those of one’s friends.”
Nevertheless, Cole was by no means without distresses of his own. There was that terrible occasion when the horses ran away and his hat blew off and he sat with his legs in the air anticipating either death at the tollgate or a bad cold. Mercifully both were spared him. Again, he suffered tortures when, showing Dr. Gulston his prints, he begged him, as a matter of form, to take any he liked; whereupon Gulston— “that Algerine hog” — filled his portfolio with the most priceless. It is true that Cole made him pay for them in the end, but it was a most distressing business. And then what an agony it was when some fellow antiquaries dined with him, and, confined with the gout, he had to let them visit his study alone, to find next morning that an octavo volume, and a borrowed volume at that, was missing! “The Master is too honourable to take such a step,” but — he had his suspicions. And what was he to do? To confess the loss or to conceal it? To conceal it seemed better, and yet, if the owner found out, “I am undone.” Horace was all sympathy. He loathed the whole tribe of antiquaries— “numskulls” he called them mumbling manuscripts with their toothless jaws. “Their understandings seem as much in ruins as the things they describe,” he wrote. “I love antiquities, but I scarce ever knew an antiquary who knew how to write upon them.”
He had all the aristocrat’s contempt for the professional drudge, and no desire whatsoever to be included among the sacred band of professional authors. “They are always in earnest, and think their profession serious, and dwell upon trifles, and reverence learning,” he snapped out. And yet, when writing to Cole he could confess what to a man of his own class he would have concealed — that he, too, reverenced learning when it was real, and admired no one more than a poet if he were genuine. “A page in a great author humbles me to the dust,” he wrote. And after deriding his contemporaries added, “Don’t think me scornful. Recollect that I have seen Pope, and lived with Gray.”
Certainly Cole’s obscure but bulky form revealed a side of Horace Walpole that was lost in the glitter of the great world. With that solid man of no social gift but prodigious erudition Horace showed himself not an antiquary, not a poet, not an historian, but what he was — the aristocrat of letters, the born expert who knew the sham intellect from the genuine as surely as the antiquary knew the faked genealogy from the authentic. When Horace Walpole praised Pope and Gray he knew what he was saying and meant it; and his shame at being hoisted into such high society as theirs rings true. “I know not how others feel on such occasions, but if anyone happens to praise me, all my faults gush into my face, and make me turn my eyes inward and outward with horror. What am I but a poor old skeleton, tottering towards the grave, and conscious of ten thousand weaknesses, follies, and worse! And for talents, what are mine, but trifling and superficial; and, compared with those of men of real genius, most diminutive!...Does it become us, at past threescore each, to be saying fine things to one another? Consider how soon we shall both be nothing!” That is a tone of voice that he does not use in speaking — for his writing voice was a speaking voice — to his friends in the great world.
Again, Cole’s High Church and Tory convictions when they touched a very different vein in Walpole sometimes caused explosions. Once or twice the friends almost came to blows over religion. The Church of England had a substantial place in Cole’s esteem. But to Walpole, “Church and presbytery are human nonsense invented by knaves to govern fools. Exalted notions of church matters are contradictions in terms to the lowliness and humility of the gospel. There is nothing sublime but the Divinity. Nothing is sacred but as His work. A tree or a brute stone is more respectable as such, than a mortal called an archbishop, or an edifice called a church, which are the puny and perishable productions of men...A Gothic church or convent fill one with romantic dreams — but for the mysterious, the Church in the abstract, it is a jargon that means nothing or a great deal too much, and I reject it and its apostles from Athanasius to Bishop Keene.” Those were outspoken words to a friend who wore a black coat. Yet they were not suffered to break up an intimacy of forty years. Cole, to whom Walpole’s little weaknesses were not unknown, contented himself by commenting sardonically at the end of the letter upon the lowliness and humility of the aristocracy, observed that “Mr. Walpole is piqued, I can see, at my reflections on Abbot’s flattery”; but in his reply to Mr. Walpole he referred only to the weather, Mr. Tyson, and the gout.
Horace’s politics were equal
ly detestable to Cole. He was, in writing at least, a red-hot republican, the bitter enemy of all those Tory principles that Cole revered. That, again, was a difference that sometimes raised the temperature of the letters to fever heat — happily for us, for it allows us, reading over their shoulders, to see Horace Walpole roused — the dilettante become a man of action, chafing at his own inactivity “sitting with one’s arms folded” in a chair; deploring his country’s danger; remembering that if Cole is a country clergyman, he is a Walpole; the son of a Prime Minister; that his father’s son might have done more than fill Strawberry Hill with Gothic ornaments; and that his father’s reputation is extremely dear to him. And yet did not gossip whisper that he was not his father’s son, and was there not, somewhere deep within him, an uneasy suspicion that there was a blot on his scutcheon, a freakish strain in his clear Norfolk blood?
Whoever his father may have been, his mother nature had somehow queered the pitch of that very complex human being who was called Horace Walpole. He was not simple; he was not single. As Cole noted with antiquarian particularity, Mr. Walpole’s letter of Friday, May 21St, 1762, was sealed with a “seal of red wax, a cupid with a large mask of a monkey’s face. An antique. Oval.” The cupid and the monkey had each set their stamp on Horace Walpole’s wax. He was mischievous and obscene; he gibbered and mocked and pelted the holy shrines with nutshells. And yet with what a grace he did it — with what ease and brilliancy and wit! In body, too, he was a contradiction — lean as a grasshopper, yet tough as steel. He was lapped in luxury, yet never wore a great-coat, ate and drank as little as a fasting friar, and walked on wet grass in slippers. He fribbled away his time collecting bric-a-brac and drinking tea with old ladies; yet wrote the best letters in the language in the midst of the chatter; knew everyone; went everywhere; and, as he said, “lived post.” He seemed sometimes as heartless as a monkey; drove Chatterton, so people said, to suicide, and allowed old Madame du Deffand to die alone in despair. And yet who but Cupid wrote when Gray was dead, “I treated him insolently; he loved me and I did not think he did”? Or again, “One loves to find people care for one, when they can have no view in it”? But it is futile to make such contradictions clash. There were a thousand subtler impressions stamped on the wax of Horace Walpole, and it is only posterity, for whom he had a great affection, who will be able, when they have read all that he wrote to Mann and Conway and Gray and the sisters Berry and Madame du Deffand and a score of others; and what they wrote to him; and the innumerable notes at the bottom of the page about cooks and scullions and gardeners and old women in inns — it is only they who will be able, when Mr. Lewis has brought his magnificent work to an end, to say what indeed Horace Walpole was. Meanwhile, we, who only catch a fleeting glimpse and set down hastily what we make of it, can testify that he is the best company in the world — the most amusing, the most intriguing — the strangest mixture of ape and Cupid that ever was.
The Rev William Cole. A Letter
[Written in 1932.]
My Dear William,
In my opinion you are keeping something back. Last year when you went to Paris and did not see Madame du Deffand but measured the exact length of every nose on every tombstone — I can assure you they have grown no longer or shorter since — I was annoyed, I admit. But I had the sense to see that, after all, you were alive, and a clergyman, and from Bletchley — in fact, you were as much out of place in Paris as a cowslip impaled upon the diamond horns of a duchess’s tiara. Put him back in Bletchley, I said, plant him in his own soil, let him burble on in his own fashion, and the miracle will happen. The cows will low; the church bells will ring; all Bletchley will come alive; and, reading over William’s shoulder, we shall see deep, deep into the hearts of Mrs. Willis and Mr. Robinson.
I regret to tell you that I was wrong. You are not a cowslip. You do not bloom. The hearts of Mrs. Willis and Mr. Robinson remain sealed books to us. You write January 16th, 1766, and it is precisely as if I had written January 16th, 1932. In other words, you have rubbed all the bloom off two hundred years and that is so rare a feat — it implies something so queer in the writer — that I am intrigued and puzzled and cannot help asking you to enlighten me. Are you simply a bore, William? No that is out of the question. In the first place, Horace Walpole did not tolerate bores, or write to them, or go for country jaunts with them; in the second, Miss Waddell loves you. You shed all round you, in the eyes of Miss Waddell, that mysterious charm which those we love impart to their meanest belongings. She loves your parrot; she commiserates your cat. Every room in your house is familiar to her. She knows about your Gothic chamber and your neat arched bed; she knows how many steps led up to the pantry and down to the summer house; she knows, she approves, how you spent every hour of your day. She sees the neighbours through the light of your eyes. She laughs at some; she likes others; she knows who was fat and who was thin, and who told lies, who had a bad leg, and who was no better than she should have been. Mr. and Mrs. Barton, Thomas Tansley, Mr. and Mrs. Lord of Mursley, the Diceys, and Dr. Pettingal are all real and alive to her: so are your roses, your horses, your nectarines and your knats.
Would that I could see through her eyes! Alas, wherever I look I see blight and mildew. The moss never grows upon your walls. Your nectarines never ripen. The blackbird sings, but out of tune. The knats — and you say “I hardly know a place so pestered with that vermin as Bletchley” — bite, just like our gnats. As for the human beings they pass through the same disenchantment. Not that I have any fault to find with your friends or with Bletchley either. Nobody is very good, but then nobody is very bad. Tom sometimes hits a hare, oftener he misses; the fish sometimes bite, but not always; if it freezes it also thaws, and though the harvest was not bad it might have been better. But now, William, confess. We know in our hearts, you and I, that England in the eighteenth century was not like this. We know from Woodforde, from Walpole, from Thomas Turner, from Skinner, from Gray, from Fielding, from Jane Austen, from scores of memoirs and letters, from a thousand forgotten stone masons, bricklayers and cabinet makers, from a myriad sources, that I have not learning to name or space to quote, that England was a substantial, beautiful country in the eighteenth century; aristocratic and common; hand-made and horse-ploughed; an eating, drinking, bastard-begetting, laughing, cursing, humorous, eccentric, lovable land. If with your pen in your hand and the dates facing you, January 16th, 1766, you see none of all this, then the fault is yours. Some spite has drawn a veil across your eyes. Indeed, there are pouches under them I could swear. You slouch as you walk. You switch at thistles half-heartedly with your stick. You do not much enjoy your food. Gossip has no relish for you. You mention the “scandalous story of Mr. Felton Hervey, his two daughters and a favourite footman” and add, “I hope it is not true.” So do I, but I cannot put much life into my hoping when you withhold the facts. You stop Pettingal in the middle of his boasting — you cut him short with a sarcasm — just as he was proving that the Greeks liked toasted cheese and was deriving the word Bergamy from the Arabic. As for Madame Geoffrin, you never lose a chance of saying something disobliging about that lady; a coffee-pot has only to be reputed French for you to defame it. Then look how touchy you are — you grumble, the servants are late with the papers, you complain, Mr. Pitt never thanked you for the pigeons (yet Horace Walpole thought you a philosopher); then how you suspect people’s motives; how you bid fathers thrash their little boys; how you are sure the servant steals the onions. All these are marks of a thin-blooded poverty-stricken disposition. And yet — you are a good man; you visit the poor; you bury the infected; you have been educated at Cambridge; you venerate antiquity. The truth is that you are concealing something, even from Miss Waddell.
Why, I ask, did you write this diary and lock it in a chest with iron hoops and insist that no one was to read it or publish it for twenty years after your death unless it were that you had something on your mind, something that you wished to confess and get rid of? You are not one of those people wh
o love life so well that they cherish even the memory of roast mutton, like Woodforde; you did not hate life so much that you must shriek out your curse on it, Eke poor Skinner. You write and write, ramblingly, listlessly, like a person who is trying to bring himself to say the thing that will explain to himself what is wrong with himself. And you find it very hard. You would rather mention anything but that — Miss Chester, I mean, and the boat on the Avon. You cannot force yourself to admit that you have kept that lock of hair in your drawer these thirty years. When Mrs. Robinson, her daughter, asked you for it (March 19th 1766) you said you could not find it. But you were not easy under that concealment. You did at length go to your private drawer (November 26th, 1766) and there it was, as you well knew. But even so, with the lock of hair in your hand, you still seek to put us off the scent. You ramble on about giving Mrs. Robinson a barrel of oysters; about potted rabbits; about the weather, until suddenly out it comes, “Gave Mrs. Robinson a braided Lock of Lady Robinson’s Mother’s hair (and Sister to Mrs. Robinson of Cransley), which I cut off in a Boat on the River Avon at Bath about 30 years ago when my Sister Jane and myself were much acquainted with her, then Miss Chester.” There we have it. The poisoned tooth is out. You were once young and ardent and very much in love. Passion overcame you. You were alone. The wind blew a lock of Miss Chester’s hair from beneath her hat. You reached forward. You cut it. And then? Nothing. That is your tragedy — you yourself failed yourself. You think of that scene twenty times a day, I believe, as you saunter, rather heavily; along the damp paths at Bletchley. That is the dreary little tune that you hum as you stoop over your parments measuring noses, deciphering dates— “I failed, failed, failed on the boat on the Avon.” That is why your nectarines are blighted; and the parrot dies; and the parlour cat is scalded; and you love nobody except, perhaps, your little dun-coloured horse. That is why you “always had a mind to live retired in Glamorganshire.” That is why Mr. Pitt never thanked you for the pigeons. That is why Mr. Stonehewer became His Majesty’s Historiographer, while you visited paupers in Fenny Stratford. That is why he never came to see you, and why you observed so bitterly, that “people suffer themselves to forget their old friends when they are surrounded by the great and are got above the world.” You see, William, if you hoard a failure, if you come to grudge even the sun for shining — and that, I think, is what you did — fruit does not ripen; a blight falls upon parrots and cats; people would actually rather that you did not give them pigeons.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 384
