e affected for their common art; and the
thoroughgoing Whig was scandalised by the man who, whilst claiming that
sacred name, and living face to face with Chatham and Burke and the
great Revolution families in all their glory, ventured to intimate his
opinion that they, like other idols, had a fair share of clay and
rubbish in their composition, and who, after professing a kind of sham
republicanism, was frightened by the French Revolution into a paroxysm
of ultra-Toryism. 'You wretched fribble!' exclaims Macaulay; 'you
shallow scorner of all that is noble! You are nothing but a heap of
silly whims and conceited airs! Strip off one mask of affectation from
your mind, and we are still as far as ever from the real man. The very
highest faculty that can be conceded to you is a keen eye for oddities,
whether in old curiosity shops or in Parliament; and to that you owe
whatever just reputation you have acquired.' Macaulay's fervour of
rebuke is amusing, though, by righteous Nemesis, it includes a species
of blindness as gross as any that he attributes to Walpole. The summary
decision that the chief use of France is to interpret England to Europe,
is a typical example of that insular arrogance for which Matthew Arnold
popularised the name of Philistinism.

Yet criticism of this one-sided kind has its value. At least it suggests
a problem. What is the element left out of account? Folly is never the
real secret of a literary reputation, or what noble harvests of genius
we should produce! If we patiently take off all the masks we must come
at last to the animating principle beneath. Even the great clothes
philosophers did not hold that a mere Chinese puzzle of mask within mask
could enclose sheer vacancy; there must be some kernel within, which may
be discovered by sufficient patience. And in the first place, it may be
asked, why did poor Walpole wear a mask at all? The answer seems to be
obvious. The men of that age may be divided by a line which, to the
philosophic eye, is of far more importance than that which separated
Jacobites from loyal Whigs or Dissenters from High Churchmen. It
separated the men who could drink two bottles of port after dinner from
the men who could not. To men of delicate digestions the test imposed by
the jovial party in ascendency must have been severer than those due to
political or ecclesiastical bigotry. They had to choose between social
disabilities on the one side, and on the other indigestion fo