A queer sort of imagination haunted the seemingly prosaic edifice of Walpole’s mind. What but imagination gone astray and vagrant over pots and pans instead of firmly held in place was his love of knick-knacks and antiquities, Strawberry hills and decomposing royalties? And once at least Walpole made a little confession to Madame du Deffand. Of all his works he preferred The Castle of Otranto, for there he said ‘j’ai laissé courir mon imagination; les visions et les passions m’échauffaient’. Vision and passion are not the gifts that we should ascribe offhand to Horace Walpole; and yet as we lose ourselves in the enormous variety and entertainment of his letters we must allow that somehow from his own angle he saw truly, he judged independently. Somehow he was not only the wittiest of men, but the most observant and not the least kindly. And among the writers of English prose he wears for ever and with a peculiar grace a coronet of his own earning.
A Friend of Johnson
GREAT book, like a great nature, may have disastrous effects upon other people. It robs them of their character and substitutes its own. No one, for instance, who has read what Carlyle has to say about Lamb ever rids his mind completely of the impression, in spite of the fact that we judge the writer of it far more than his victim. Some deposit remains with us. It is strange to reflect what numbers of men and women live in our minds merely because Boswell took a note of their talk. Two or three such lines have a generating power; a body grows from the seed. The ordinary English reader knows Baretti solely through Johnson. ‘ His account of Italy’, said Johnson, ‘is a very entertaining book; and, Sir, I know no man who carries his head higher in conversation than Baretti. There are strong powers in his mind. He has not, indeed, many hooks, but with what hooks he has he grapples very forcibly.’ This may be, as Mr. Collison-Morley says, ‘a very good summary’, and yet his character is scarcely to be summarized thus; his vitality is too great for that. Mr. Collison-Morley, further, has the advantage of knowing the Italian side of the story.
The Barettis came from Piedmont, and Giuseppe boasted romantically of his noble birth. He could not live at home, where they wished to train him for a lawyer, but ran away to see the world. He lived at Milan, Venice, and Turin by his pen, turning out ceremonial verses to order. His qualities, however, were not those that bring success. He was susceptible, but so importunate that a certain Mrs. Paradise had to snub him with boiling water from her tea urn. Great animal vigour and a powerful mind made him insolent and overbearing in manner before his fame authorized it. Thus he took it upon himself as a young writer to denounce Goldoni, the Arcadians, and Italian blank verse, when they were in fashion; later, when archaeology was the rage, he declared that antiquaries should be clapped into lunatic asylums, seeing merely the pedantic side of the pursuit and failing from some lack of imagination to foretell its future. To succeed in letters needed in that age the utmost tact. Then as now France supplied Italy with her reading to a great extent, for every province had its own dialect; authors were miserably paid, and their manuscripts had to be passed by two censors. Italy afforded no place for a man whose intellect led him to despise mere grace and scholarship, and whose temper urged him to speak out.
He decided to try his fortune in England. He was amazed by London: Lincoln’s Inn, he wrote home, was three times the size of St. Mark’s Square; ‘a great street, hung with painted signs and clamourous with droves of oxen and of sheep, carriages and foot passengers, ran right through the city; the wheels splash you with mud black as ink; there are women of “perfect beauty” mixing with horrid cripples’; Fielding told him that a thousand or even two thousand die every year from want and hunger, ‘but London is so large it is hardly noticed’; a din of whips and curses lasts all day long, and at night the watchmen cry the hours hoarsely, ‘vile hounds’ ring bells as they collect the letters; sweeps, milk-women, oyster-sellers vociferate perpetually. In spite of this London gradually ousted all other places in his affections. To begin with he found that the Italian language was in fashion, for an Italian tour was essential; and the Italian opera was so popular that the audience followed the words by the light of private candles. He could thus keep himself by teaching — one of his pupils being the famous Mrs. Lennox, by whom he was introduced to Johnson. The merits of the society which Johnson ruled were precisely to the taste of Baretti. He loved to stretch his legs, to talk enormously, to mix with men of all callings, to ramble the streets at night with a companion, and the booksellers with their vast and indiscriminate greed for copy suited his powers admirably. His mind, we know, had strong hooks, and having set himself to learn English he made extraordinary progress in ‘that strange and most irregular tongue’. He could speak street slang even, and soon could carry on a controversy in vigorous English prose. It is typical of him that he could acquire any living language with enthusiasm, but the dead languages bored him. He turned out dictionaries, and translations and travels, with the printer’s devil waiting at the door, until a lump grew on his finger where the pen rested. His struggle to live by his brains is, for us, full of picturesque adventures. A dissertation upon the Italian poets introduced him to a wealthy English gentleman who had been engaged on a translation of Ariosto for twenty years. For the sake of Baretti’s advice and conversation he offered him a house and garden in his park, a gold watch worth forty guineas, and a wife. But the friendship ended in bitterness; it was said that the watch was only lent. Whether it was that Baretti had a drop of hot Southern blood in him, or whether the society of scholars was in truth a rough and hasty world, we certainly find matter, even in a slight memoir like the present, for comparisons between that age and this. One cannot imagine, for instance, that writers then retired to their studies or worked by the clock. They seem to have learnt by talk; their friendships thus were important and outspoken. Conversation was a kind of strife, and the jealousies and contradictions which attended the display gave it at least an eager excitement. Goldsmith found Baretti ‘insolent and overbearing’, Baretti thought Goldsmith ‘an unpolished man, and an absurd companion’. Mrs. Lennox, having complained that Baretti paid more attention to her child than to herself, he retorted: ‘You are a child in stature and a child in understanding’, being generally provoking, where opportunity offered. Indeed a society of clever people whose witticisms, jealousies, and emotions circulate is much like a society of children. Reticence and ceremony seem to mark middle age.
The life of Baretti reminds us, too, in a singular way of the rudeness that lay outside the coffee-houses and the clubs.
One afternoon in October, 1769, he walked from Soho to the Orange coffee-house in the Haymarket. On his way back a woman sitting on a doorstep jumped up and struck him. In the darkness he returned the blow, whereupon three bullies set upon him, and he was chased along Oxenden Street, shouting ‘Murder’ with a crowd at his heels, who reviled him for a Frenchman. One man made dashes for his pigtail, and to save himself Baretti drew a silver-bladed fruit knife, and stabbed him twice. As the only means of escape, for he was stout, near-sighted, and the road swam with puddles, he burst into a shop and gave himself up to the police. Goldsmith, we notice, drove with him to the prison and offered him ‘every shilling’ in his purse. The man died from the blow; Baretti was acquitted, and the fruit knife used to be shown at dessert. The same kind of roughness marks the famous friendship with the Thrales, of which Mr. Collison-Morley gives a very lively account. He lived in the family, not as a regular tutor with a salary, but as a hired friend who must talk in return for board and lodging, and might hope for an occasional present. The good-natured Mrs. Thrale stood it for nearly three years, and then, finding him intolerable with his airs and arrogances, treated him ‘ with some coldness ‘; whereupon he set down his dish of tea, ‘not half drank’, went ‘for my hat and stick that lay in the corner of the room’, and walked off to London without saying goodbye. Johnson pleaded for him. ‘ Forgive him, dearest lady, the rather because of his misbehaviour; I am afraid he has learned part of me.’ It was true, no doubt, that he traded upon a c
ertain likeness to the doctor, and expected the same consideration, but he learnt much from him that was wholly admirable. When he went back to Italy in 1763 he found that the old abuses at which he had tilted as a boy were still rampant. He decided to bring out a review, on the model of the Rambler, in which he could lash the Arcadians freely. In the person of Aristarco he delivered himself of his views upon the state of Italian literature, upon blank verse, Goldoni and the antiquaries, retailing at the same time some of Johnson’s peculiarities — that the Scotch are inferior, and that Milton is sometimes dull. Nevertheless, his satire told, and his controversies raised such an outcry that the Frusta letteraria was suspended. But ‘no such criticism had as yet appeared in Italy’ and it is to-day a classic among his countrymen. But he ‘could not enjoy his own country’. England rewarded him with a Secretaryship at the Royal Academy, and added a pension in his later years. For, industrious as he was, and in receipt sometimes of huge profits, his earnings never stuck to him. A strange kind of clumsiness united to a passionate nature seemed to make a child of him. What, for instance, could be more childish than the quarrel with Johnson as to whether Omai, an Otaheitan, had beaten him at chess or not? ‘Do you think I should be conquered at chess by a savage? “ I know you were’, says Johnson. The two men, who respected each other, parted and never met again. English people now scarcely read his books, unless it be the Italian dictionary, but his life is worth reading, because he exhibits so curious a mixture of power and weakness; he is in many ways so true a type of the man who lived by his pen in the eighteenth century; and Mr. Collison-Morley fills in the old story as Boswell and Mrs. Thrale told it with new matter from Italian sources. His life was full and vigorous; as for his works, he wished that every page lay at the bottom of the sea.
Fanny Burney’s Half-Sister
SINCE a copy of Evelina was lately sold for the enormous sum of four thousand pounds; since the Clarendon Press has lately bestowed the magnificent compliment of a new edition upon Evelina; since Maria Allen was the half-sister of the authoress of Evelina; since the story of Evelina owed much to the story of Maria Allen, it may not be impertinent to consider what is still to be collected of the history of that misguided and unfortunate girl.
As is well known, Dr. Burney was twice married. He took for his second wife a Mrs. Allen of Lynn, the widow of a substantial citizen who left her with a fortune which she promptly lost, and with three children, of whom one, Maria, was almost the same age as Fanny Burney when Dr. Burney’s second marriage made them half-sisters. And half-sisters they might have remained with none but a formal tie between them, had not the differences between the two families brought about a much closer relationship. The Burneys were the gifted children of gifted parents. They had enjoyed all the stimulus that comes from running in and out of rooms where grown-up people are talking about books and music, where the piano is always open, and somebody — it may be David Garrick, it may be Mrs. Thrale — is always dropping in to dinner. Maria, on the other hand, had been bred in the provinces. The great figures of Lynn were well known to her, but the great figures of Lynn were merely Miss Dolly Young — who was so ugly — or Mr. Richard Warren, who was so handsome. The talk she heard was the talk of squires and merchants. Her greatest excitement was a dance at the Assembly Rooms or a scandal in the town.
Thus she was rustic and unsophisticated where the Burneys were metropolitan and cultivated. But she was bold and dashing where they were timid and reserved. She was all agog for life and adventure where they were always running away in agonies of shyness to commit their innumerable observations to reams of paper. Unrefined, but generous and unaffected, she brought to Poland Street that whiff of fresh air, that contact with ordinary life and ease in the presence of ordinary things, which the precocious family lacked themselves and found most refreshing in others. Sometimes she visited them in London; sometimes they stayed with her at Lynn. Soon she came to feel for them all, but for Fanny in particular, a warm, a genuine, a surprised admiration. They were so learned and so innocent; they knew so many things, and yet they did not know half as much about life as she did. It was to them, naturally, that she confided her own peccadilloes and adventures, wishing perhaps for counsel, wishing perhaps to impress. Fanny was one of those shy people—’ I am not near so squeamish as you are’, Maria observed — who draw out the confidences of their bolder friends and delight in accounts of actions which they could not possibly commit themselves. Thus in 1770 Fanny was imparting to her diary certain confidences that Maria had made her of such a nature that when she read the book later she judged it best to tear out twelve pages and burn them. Happily, a packet of letters survives which, though rather meagrely doled out by an editor in the eighties, who thought them too full of dashes to be worthy of the dignity of print, allow us to guess pretty clearly what kind of secret Maria confided and Fanny recorded, and Fanny, grown mature, then tore up.
For example, there was an Assembly at Lynn some time in 1770 to which Maria did not want to go. Bet Dickens, however, overcame her scruples, and she went. However, she was determined not to dance. However, she did dance. Martin was there. She broke her earring. She danced a minuet à quatre. She got into the chariot to come home. She came home. ‘Was I alone? — guess — well, all is vanity and vexations of spirit.’ It needs little ingenuity to interpret these nods and winks and innuendoes. Maria danced with Martin. She came home with Martin. She sat alone with Martin, and she had been strictly forbidden by her mother to meet Martin. That is obvious. But what is not, after all these years, quite so clear is for what reason Mrs. Allen disapproved. On the face of it Martin Rishton was a very good match for Maria Allen. He was well born, he had been educated at Oxford, he was the heir of his uncle Sir Richard Bettenson, and Sir Richard Bettenson had five thousand a year and no children. Nevertheless, Maria’s mother warmly opposed the match. She said rather vaguely that Martin ‘had been extravagant at Oxford, and that she had heard some story that he had done something unworthy of a gentleman’. But her ostensible objections were based perhaps upon others which were less easy to state. There was her daughter’s character, for example. Maria was ‘a droll girl with a very great love of sport and mirth’. Her temper was lively and warm. She was extremely outspoken. ‘If possible,’ Fanny said, ‘she is too sincere. She pays too little regard to the world; and indulges herself with too much freedom of raillery and pride of disdain towards those whose vices and follies offend her.’ When Mrs. Allen looked from Maria to Martin she saw, there can be no doubt, something that made her uneasy. But what? Perhaps it was nothing more than that Martin was particular about appearances and Maria rather slack; that Martin was conventional by nature and Maria the very opposite; that Martin liked dress and decorum and that Maria was one of those heedless girls who say the first thing that comes into their heads and never reflect, if they are amused themselves, what people will say if they have holes in their stockings. Whatever the reason, Mrs. Allen forbade the match; and Sir Richard Bettenson, whether to meet her views or for educational purposes, sent his nephew in the beginning of 1771 to travel for two years abroad. Maria remained at Lynn.
Five months, however, had not passed before Martin burst in unexpectedly at a dinner party of relations in Welbeck Street. He looked very well, but when he was asked why he had come back in such a hurry, ‘he smiled, but said nothing to the question’. Maria, although still at Lynn, at once got wind of his arrival. Soon she saw him at a dance, but she did not dance with him and the ban was evidently enforced, for her letters become plaintive and agitated and hint at secrets that she cannot reveal, even to her dear toads the Burneys. It was now her turn to be sent abroad, partly to be out of Martin’s way, partly to finish her education. She was dispatched to Geneva. But the Burneys soon received a packet from her. In the first place, she had some little commissions that she must ask them to discharge. Would they send her a pianoforte, some music, Fordyce’s sermons, a tea cadet, an ebony inkstand with silver-plated tops, and a very pretty naked wax
doll with blue eyes to be had in Fleet-street for half a crown — all of which, if well wrapped up, could travel safely in the case of the pianoforte. She had no money to pay with at the moment, for she had been persuaded and indeed was sure that it was true economy if one passed through Paris to spend all one’s money on clothes. But she could always sell her diamonds or she would give them ‘a bill on somebody in London’. These trifling matters dispatched, she turned to something of far greater importance. Indeed, what she had to say was so important that it must be burnt at once. Indeed, it was only her great distress and being alone in a foreign land that led her to tell them at all. But the truth was — so far as can now be ascertained among the fragments and the dashes — the truth was that she had gone much farther with Martin than anybody knew. She had in fact confessed her love to him. And he had proposed something which had made her very angry. She had refused to do it. She had written him a very angry letter. She had had indeed to write it three times over before she got it right. When he read it he was furious. ‘ Did my character’, he wrote, ‘ever give you reason to imagine I should expose you because you loved me? ’Tis thoroughly unnatural — I defy the world to bring an instance of my behaving unworthy the Character of a Gentleman.’ These were his very words. And, Maria wrote, ‘I think such the sentiments of a Man of Honour, and such I hope to find him’, she concluded; for although she knew very well that Hetty Burney and Mr. Crisp disliked him, he was — here she came out with it — the man ‘on whom all my happiness in this Life depends and in whom I wish to see no faults’. The Burneys hid the letters, breathed not a word to their parents, and waited in suspense. Nor did they have to wait long. Before the spring was over Maria was back again in Poland Street and in circumstances so romantic, so exciting and above all so secret that ‘I dare not,’ Fanny exclaimed, ‘commit particulars to paper.’ This much (and one would have thought it enough) only could be said: ‘Miss Allen — for the last time I shall call her so, — came home on Monday last... she — was married last Saturday! ‘ It was true. Martin Rishton had gone out secretly to join her abroad. They had been married at Ypres on May 16, 1772. On the 18th Maria reached England and confided the grand secret to Fanny and Susan Burney, but she told no one else. They were afraid to tell her mother. They were afraid to tell Dr. Burney. In their dilemma they turned to the strange man who was always their confidant — to Samuel Crisp of Chesington.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 490