The Prime Minister of Taste: A Portrait of Horace Walpole
Morris Brownell
352pp, Yale, £35
A prime minister, even of taste, was what Horace Walpole never wanted to be. When his father, Robert, England's first modern premier, left Downing Street in 1742, young Horace had lately returned from Italy. There he had been coveting classical relics and Renaissance oils of dodgy provenance, and beginning his lifetime as a... a what exactly? "Trifler" was what he called himself, among other self-deprecations, by which he meant Not a Professional, Nothing So Vulgar. Morris Brownell sees Walpole as devoted to Lord Chesterfield's advice that a gentleman should never be caught taking anything artistic seriously. True, wracked by a father-dominated nightmare, Walpole had written the first gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto. This scary parent of horror stories and movies is owed dues by everything up to and including Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And he goth'ed up a nondescript villa near the Thames into Strawberry Hill, sole progenitor of two centuries of pastiche decor in papier-mché, so deserves at least a credit in each edition of Wallpaper magazine.
His real genius, though, expressed in 40 volumes-plus of letters and memoirs, was for gossip. In service of his thesis, Brownell dignifies the gift, calling Walpole a collector of portraits, both artworks and his own written descriptions; but it was gossip really, and there is no need for euphemism when it is practised at so inspired a level. Walpole's was an outsider's soul with an insider's access: as "a rag of quality" he had entry to the court, to parliament, to authors and artists. Showing some of the earliest interest in the personal trivia of previous generations, he was a seeker of manuscript memoirs and a proto-traipser around stately homes. He called this "memorialising", matching anecdotes about the departed with their portraits and tombs; "old pictures," he wrote, "make one live back into centuries that cannot disappoint". At Strawberry Hill, he displayed paintings and miniatures of notorious noblewomen and mistresses of past monarchs, as a gay fan might cherish photographs of Judy Garland at her most disintegrated. (Brownell avoids Walpole's sexuality, which his last major biographer decided was probably gay.)
Walpole's dispatches come from that era of repeated Georges when English public life first seems familiar. He had a most modern sensibility, especially for a conjunction of image and celebrity storyline. He evaluated appearances keenly: Lord Sandwich at the Admiralty wore such "a first-rate tie-wig that nothing without the lungs of a boatswain can ever hope to penetrate the thickness of the curls". He perceived immediately the crucial mistake of a life: "Have you heard of a young Earl, married to the most beautiful woman in the world and with a great estate... embarking in a packet boat with a Miss?" He had patience with the slow pace of personal misery, writing of Fanny Pelham, unwanted by the man of her family's choice and later denied her own preferences, passing, single, beyond 35 into a "gaming rakehelly" life, "losing hundreds every night and her temper".
Brownell quotes Walpole mostly to the purpose of proving him a serious historian of taste. However, the effect of the juxtapositions of handsome pix and text formatted as extended caption stories is that of an antiquarian Hello! . Ooh, so that's what they looked like: Lady Coventry, who expired of consumption at 27 with no light in her room but the lamp of a tea-kettle; or the Duchess of Kingston, who defended herself against bigamy charges at so advanced an age that most of the wedding witnesses were dead. Brownell is not persuasive about Walpole's judgments, whether balanced or unbalanced (he reacted sulkily to literary talent - Johnson, Pope, Gibbon - more ambitious than his own).
Brownell approaches the sublime gossip's powers when he quotes from Walpole's accounts of social events; few have written more candidly about absurdity and melancholy arriving, unwelcome, at the best of parties. The Duchess of Kingston, when possessed of just the one husband, entertained in the garrets of her Mayfair house on a sultry night, with "pyramids and troughs of strawberries and cherries... on all the sideboards, and even on the chairs": that last detail reduces an enviable soirée to mere stain and squidge.
Even when it was better than all right on the night, as at Lady Northumberland's pompous do for a prince, sadness pervades Walpole's "fairy scene lit by a diamond necklace of lamps" and gatecrashed by "the lovely moon, who came without a card". It is usually a little past midnight in the Walpole account of a ball, and the serotonin of anticipation has evaporated some damp hours before.
Brownell's scholarship is at its most acute in his sympathetic coda. This is partly about Walpole's "masquerade of self-portraits" - he signed himself with a dozen distancing pseudonyms - and more about his denials of talent, his pose of amateurism as both defence against his fear of mediocrity and as an inverted boast. Walpole's non-career as an observer was long (from the 1740s almost to 1800), and his professions of marginality intensified over that time. His father's fall had frightened him away from politics - he never wanted to be anybody, he wrote, and "persisted in my nothinghood" until he had seen "the vanity of everything serious, and the falsehood of everything".
Brownell's tender and apt last visual image is "The Embarkation for Cythera", the Watteau fête galante with its pretty people waiting for their boat to the realm of Venus. Although its landscape trees are in leaf, the tones are sere, as if caught on a late summer's day that presages autumn; a season for which the satin-clad courtiers and commedia dell'arte entertainers hardly possess the necessary greatcoats. Walpole had painted watercolour copies of Watteau's works when he was a young frivoler, and compared himself often to the commedia's Harlequin: ubiquitous, confident in all social situations, yet masked into unknowability. "My dear favourite Harlequin, my passion," he wrote, "makes me more melancholy than cheerful."
