Читать книгу The Age of Scandal - T. H. White - Страница 7

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W ell, we have lived to see the end of civilization in England. I was once a gentleman myself. When I was an undergraduate at Cambridge, the Master of a college was a fabulous being, who lived in a Lodge of breath-taking beauty and incalculable antiquity, tended by housemaids, footmen and a butler. There he consumed vintage port, wrote abstruse treatises if the spirit moved him, and lived the life of an impressive, cultivated gentleman. Such posts were among the few and noble rewards rightly offered to scholarship by the civilization which then existed.

When I last stayed in Cambridge, I lunched with two Masters of colleges. Both of them had to help with the washing-up after luncheon.

There was a comic story current shortly after the Hitler war—one tried to think that it was comic. It said that there was some conference or other at Lambeth, thronged with Archbishops, Cardinals, Patriarchs, Moderators and so forth. The Archbishops of Canterbury and York were seen to be in earnest consultation in one corner of the room. Were they discussing a reunion with Rome or a revision of the Prayer Book? Thrilled with the ecclesiastical possibilities of such a meeting, one of the stripling curates managed to edge himself within earshot of these Princes of the Church. They were discussing whether it was worse to wash-up or to dry-up.

The Earl of Shrewsbury—the 21st and premier earl of Great Britain—whose ancestors have served the crown, and thus the nation, in one way or another, for about 800 years, has become a ‘barrow-boy’. He sells fruit in the open air at a stall by the roadside.

A deceased female labour Minister has given an interview to an American journalist, after driving the Earl Marshal of England out of his own home. The family pictures have been sold, she said with glee, and I can assure you that the Duke of Norfolk will never again be able to live in this house. ‘We had our revolution during the war. We did not cut off their heads, we only cut off their incomes.’ Yet the family of the Duke of Norfolk had served the crown on the battlefield, in the cabinet, and in the precursor of Miss Bondfield’s ‘Civil Service’, for many and many generations.

They were generations of statesmen and proconsuls, who gave their sons in war more lavishly than any other class. Yet we have lived to see a labour Minister of War stating that he does not give a tinker’s curse for people of that sort, and the Minister of Health describes them indiscriminately as ‘vermin’.

It is useless to whine. It has happened. It is the logical result of our half-baked Victorian humanitarianism. All men are not equal. That ridiculous idea of English democracy was invented in the reign of Queen Victoria, and it has now become bureaucracy.

So, now that it is no longer possible to be a gentleman, now that there is no longer enough time or money to be cultured, now that civilization has vanished along with the Word which gentlemen once kept. Now that glorious palaces like Knowle, Stowe, Wentworth Woodhouse, Bodiam, Montacute, Stourhead, Polesdon Lacey, Blenheim and the rest of them, are, or are likely to be, ‘nationalized’ for the wonderful proletariat, while the owners who gave their ancestors to make them lovely crouch in a couple of rooms in one wing, I have been looking back along the corridors of history, taking stock of that venture which once brought England to the leadership of the world. I believe that the peak of British culture was reached in the latter years of George III: that the rot began to set in with the ‘Romantics’: that the apparent prosperity of Victoria’s reign was autumnal, not vernal: and that now we are done for.

I have been consoling my old age by running away from the Bondfields and the Shinwells and the Bevans, by going back to the grand old days of Horace Walpole, and I have written this book in the effort to give one last, loving and living picture of an aristocratic civilization which we shall never see again.

***

dr. johnson Mason is a Whig, Sir.

mrs. knowles (not hearing quite distinctly) A prig, Sir, did you say?

johnson No, madam, a Whig, but he is that too.

The old rhinoceros was right, for the Rev. William Mason was a prig to the backbone; though he was a harmless one. But he did invent—or he did adapt from Middleton’s Cicero—a new kind of biography which led to the greatest Life in the English language.

Before Mason, a biographer had been content to write about the subject in his own words. Mason invented the idea of letting the subject speak for himself. In his Life of Gray, he strung together a selection of the poet’s letters—and sometimes even forged them—supplying the necessary links in a running commentary. Horace Walpole was delighted with it.

Were I to judge from my own feelings [he wrote] I should say there never was so entertaining or interesting a work: that it is the most perfect model of biography; and must make Tacitus, and Agricola too, detest you.

Later, when Dr. Johnson published a Life of the same poet, Horry was furious.

Somebody asked Johnson if he was not afraid that you would resent the freedoms he has taken with Gray, ‘No, no, Sir; Mr. Mason does not like rough handling’ ... The saucy Caliban!

There was another contemporary who agreed with Walpole that this new kind of Life was a ‘perfect model of biography’, and who thought that, by adding conversations to the letters which he reported verbatim, the idea might be improved.

Instead of melting down my materials into one mass [wrote Boswell in the Introduction to his immortal work] and constantly speaking in my own person ... I have resolved to adopt and enlarge upon the excellent plan of Mr. Mason, in his Memoirs of Gray. Wherever narrative is necessary to explain, connect, and supply, I furnish it to the best of my abilities; but in the chronological series of Johnson’s life, which I trace as distinctly as I can, year by year, I produce, wherever it is in my power, his own minutes, letters or conversation, being convinced that this mode is more lively, and will make my readers better acquainted with him ... Indeed, I cannot conceive a more perfect mode of writing any man’s life.

***

In this little scrap-book of a nostalgic Tory, I have tried to extend Mason’s kind of biography to an Age, attempting rather to string together a series of quotations from the people themselves, than to speak ‘in my own person’—‘by which’, as Boswell added with self-sacrifice and some regret, ‘I might have appeared to have more merit in the execution of the work’.

In short, I have here tried to picture the nature and history of a minor period in its own words rather than in mine.

***

People are inclined to write as if the Age of Reason continued until the Romantic Revival, or as if the Augustan period were an unbroken whole. But the eighteenth century was split by a remarkable line of cleavage.

In the first half of the century, the authors became rulers: in the second, the rulers became authors.

If we look at the authors and the rulers before 1750, the difference is striking. On the one hand stand the omnipotent Popes and Swifts, courted or bribed or feared by servile lords, whom they bullied with a will; on the other hand lie the wincing upper classes, who had to buy their peace of mind by preferments or by actual money payment, prostrate before the bitter ink. The wicked old Duchess of Marlborough in the first half had to pay Pope £1000, now worth perhaps ten times that sum, to suppress a satire on herself. He took the money, but did not suppress the satire. Swift bullied the cabinet itself till they did not know whether they were on their heads or their heels. He made the Princess of Wales invite him nine times before he would call at her house.

That was in the true Age of Reason, when Goldsmith could complain that he had been slighted by a mere lord. ‘I met him’, he said indignantly, ‘at Lord Clare’s in the country, and he took no more notice of me than if I had been an ordinary man.’ ‘A nobleman’, agreed the Johnson of that period, ‘ought to have made up to such a man as Goldsmith, and I think it is much against Lord Camden that he neglected him.’ It was thought ‘foolish’ of Pope to give his friendship to ordinary peers, although he always kindly assured them that he did not value them as such.

The writers, in fact, were then full and complex characters. We may still puzzle about the relationship between Stella and her gloomy Dean, still argue about his persecution mania, his crooked personality and the diseases from which he suffered. Pope, with his bent body, stays, deceitful stratagems and delusions of grandeur, is a person whom we would recognize if we met him now—where we should find some difficulty in distinguishing between Lords Marlborough and Chesterfield, except by the eyebrows of the latter.

In short, during the real Age of Reason, it was the Grub Street authors who were articulate, powerful and able to stamp themselves on posterity as people. It was to them that the fluttering cabinet ministers had to act as toad-eaters, and it was the literary standard of culture, dictated from below, which dominated a largely illiterate peerage.

I must tell you [wrote Lord Chesterfield to his son in 1750], that orthography, in the true sense of the word, is so absolutely necessary for a man of letters, or a gentleman, that one false spelling may fix a ridicule upon him for the rest of his life. And I know a man of quality who never recovered the ridicule of having spelled wholesome without the w.

The last fifty years of the century were directly the reverse of this. It was then the fourth Earl of Orford (Horace Walpole) who terrified the leaders of Grub Street and who drove young poets to suicide: it was the kings and the lords who were remembered, not the scribbling commons. George II, suffering from piles, lecturing the royal family, or standing with his sword advanced like a fencing master, after his horse had run away with him at Dettingen: George III with his ‘What, what?’: the fat and rather touching Florizel (George IV): the garrulous Clarence (William IV): these were real people seen in the round. It was the upper classes who now held the stage with their articulacy, the Walpoles, Herveys, Selwyns, Hollands, Boswells or even Brummells. Literature had passed to the aristocracy, and the poets were disregarded people like the clergyman Mason, or like Blake, who was unknown, or like the rusticated Cowper with his pet hares. Toward the end of the new period, Moore was boasting that Sir Walter Scott had called him ‘a truly gentleman poet’, while the plebeian Wordsworth was ‘too much of the poet’. Professional writers, by some strange fatality, had even begun to have ridiculous names, like Crabbe, Hogg, etc. By then the miserable bard was a lank, bony figure, with short black hair, who writhed and showed his teeth in a grin of earnestness while his verses were being criticized, exclaiming: ‘Is that poetry, Sir? Is it Pindar?’

‘Here is an error, Sir; you have made Genius feminine.’—‘Palpable, Sir,’ cried the enthusiast; ‘I knew it. But (in a lower tone) it was to pay a compliment to the Duchess of Devonshire, with which her Grace was pleased. She is walking across Coxheath, in the military uniform, and I suppose her to be the Genius of Britain!’

By 1780, Johnson himself, when flattered by Lord Newhaven, was bowing ‘his head almost as low as the table, to a complimenting nobleman’.

Naturally the division between the two ages was not a hard and fast one. Life was inclined to proceed by stages, and there were exceptions to everything. There were many bridges between the two halves. Dr. Johnson was such a bridge; he was the last of the great Moguls of Grub Street, who lived into the patrician period. In the same way, Horace Walpole was a bridge. He was perhaps the first of the great Moguls of aristocracy, born within the Age of Reason. They lay parallel. The last writer and the first lord bound the banks together—as did Chesterfield, Hervey and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu—but it remains true, none the less, that the century began with power to the writers, and ended with power to the lords. It was literary power.

The atmosphere of the second epoch was different from the Age of Reason’s: so different that the period seems to require a label of its own. One might suggest, the Age of Scandal.

Between the Classical and the Romantic movements, as they are recognized at present, there existed this other age, which was one of peculiar flavour. It filled the hiatus between Pope and Wordsworth with a distinct and unique culture, none the less real because it is seldom recognized now. It could be roughly dated between the death of Pope and the publication of the Lyrical Ballads, except that such dates are confusing. Periods do not exist between fixed years. They have forerunners in the previous age and laggards in the subsequent one. Although the Age of Scandal was at its height in the seventeen-eighties, under its greatest product, Horace Walpole, yet, between forerunner and laggard, it may be said to have stretched from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to Croker or to Creevey.

The people of the late eighteenth century and of the Regency were different from the Augustans. They were not cold and formal like a heroic couplet but, on the contrary, eccentric, individual, sentimental, dramatic, tearful, even doggy. For that matter, they were a good deal more ‘romantic’, in the exact sense of that term, than the unsmiling crocodile of Rydal. Their heiresses frequently ran away with the footmen.

Few people seem to realize how charming and peculiar the Age of Scandal was. We have to dismiss so much from our minds before we can crawl inside theirs: before we can picture the powdered gentlemen in silks and laces, with their jewellery and the swords which they were ready to draw, with their sedan chairs and lap-dogs and immense bets and deep potations. One of the commonest words about male clothes, in the letters of the reprobate Duke of Queensberry, was ‘pretty’. One of his presents to the Prince Regent was a muff. Among the commonest reactions from readers and playgoers was that of tears. They adored their dogs and sent them tender messages in their letters. They were emotional about their friends, catty about their enemies, unusual in their hobbies and singular in themselves. They were perhaps the first people in English literature to be real enough for gossip.

Gossip must be about character. It is useless to gossip about an unknown character, impossible to tell a good story about a person without foibles; for it is the foible which gives the story point. These people had characters, were among the first people in England who were sufficiently peculiar, in a modern way, to be apprehended by us as personalities. They did extraordinary things: puffed and blew like Dr. Johnson, or went to executions like the sinister Selwyn, or constructed the astonishing tower of Fonthill like Beckford, or said that they were about to give birth to the Messiah like Joanna Southcott—or to a litter of rabbits like Mary Tofts. They fought duels in balloons like M. le Pique in 1808—the first human being ever to be shot down in aerial combat—or directed their farm labourers with a megaphone and a telescope like Sydney Smith in his ‘rheumatic armour’. Sometimes they could never be sure whether they were men or women, like the Chevalier d’Eon, and sometimes they dislocated London’s milk supply, as was the case with the fourth Duke of Queensberry—who was supposed to take his early bath in this liquid before it was retailed—with the consequence that for many years nobody in London felt secure about the morning tea.

The Age of Scandal was the reverse of being a pompous one. Gossip is not pompous. It was inevitably an age of intimacy and of nicknames. Creevey was a product of it, and, as Lytton Strachey has pointed out:

There are no great names in his vocabulary—only nicknames: George III is ‘old Nobs’, the Regent ‘Prinney’, Wellington ‘the Beau’, Lord John Russell ‘Pie and Thimble’, Brougham, with whom he was on very friendly terms, is sometimes ‘Bruffam’, sometimes ‘Beelzebub’, and sometimes ‘Old Wickedshifts’; and Lord Durham, who once remarked that one could ‘jog along on £40,000 a year’, is ‘King Jog’.

It was because these people were aristocrats. The gossips lived in a small society which scarcely touched the middle classes of Wesley, nor the peasantry, nor the Mob. Literature had for the first time since Elizabeth become the medium instead of the plaything of the gentry. They moved in the tight world of the Drawing-rooms and of the Birthdays, knew each other as well as the boys at a public school in England might know each other today, chatted about the latest scandal, and, because they had learned to be literate, they wrote it down. So they remain in literature, even in the days of Attlee, mainly in the literature of letters and memoirs, as individual and as well preserved as they were in life. They were as real as Pepys. There is nothing so false as to suppose that they were a tired remainder from the era of Pope, waiting for the revival of Wordsworth. They were far from being classically cold. Indeed, to the reader of the Newgate Calendar or of Walpole’s news-of-the-day or of the Gentleman’s Magazine, it sometimes seems that there can have been no period so Elizabethan in its drama and tragedy and eccentricity as the end of the so-called Age of Reason.

Perhaps no set of men and women [said Trevelyan] since the world began, enjoyed so many different sides of life, with so much zest, as the English upper class at this period.