The Age of Scandal

T. H. White

Description

This amusing foray into eighteenth century literature is an entertaining tabloid biography of an age not unlike our own; men and women of fashion led their lives under the avid scrutiny of a public with a sharp appetite for scandal and sensation. In the period between the so-called Age of Reason and the Romantic Revival - that which the author calls the Age of Scandal - aristocratic and privileged eccentrics flourished. Here we meet notorious persons such as the libertine Marquis de Sade, and the Countess of Kingston who journeyed to Rome in the hope of seducing the Pope.

Sujets

• Europe
• History
• Great Britain
• Histoire

Informations

• Publié par: Rare Treasure Editions
• Date de parution: 05 novembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781774643068
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Age of Scandal: An Amusing Foray into Literature
by T. H. White

First published in 1950
This edition published by Rare Treasures
Victoria, BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except in the case of excerpts by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

The Age of Scandal





by T. H. WHITE

CHAPTER ONE
The Age of Scandal
W ell, we have lived to see the end ofcivilization in England. I was once a gentlemanmyself. When I was an undergraduateat Cambridge, the Master of a college was a fabulousbeing, who lived in a Lodge of breath-taking beautyand incalculable antiquity, tended by housemaids,footmen and a butler. There he consumed vintageport, wrote abstruse treatises if the spirit moved him,and lived the life of an impressive, cultivated gentleman.Such posts were among the few and noblerewards rightly offered to scholarship by thecivilization which then existed.
When I last stayed in Cambridge, I lunched withtwo Masters of colleges. Both of them had to help withthe washing-up after luncheon.
There was a comic story current shortly after theHitler war—one tried to think that it was comic. Itsaid that there was some conference or other atLambeth, thronged with Archbishops, Cardinals,Patriarchs, Moderators and so forth. The Archbishopsof Canterbury and York were seen to be in earnestconsultation in one corner of the room. Were theydiscussing a reunion with Rome or a revision of thePrayer Book? Thrilled with the ecclesiastical possibilitiesof such a meeting, one of the striplingcurates managed to edge himself within earshot ofthese Princes of the Church. They were discussingwhether it was worse to wash-up or to dry-up.
The Earl of Shrewsbury—the 21st and premierearl of Great Britain—whose ancestors have servedthe crown, and thus the nation, in one way or another,for about 800 years, has become a ‘barrow-boy’. Hesells fruit in the open air at a stall by the roadside.
A deceased female labour Minister has given aninterview to an American journalist, after driving theEarl Marshal of England out of his own home. Thefamily pictures have been sold, she said with glee, andI can assure you that the Duke of Norfolk will neveragain be able to live in this house. ‘We had ourrevolution during the war. We did not cut off theirheads, we only cut off their incomes.’ Yet the family ofthe Duke of Norfolk had served the crown on thebattlefield, in the cabinet, and in the precursor ofMiss Bondfield’s ‘Civil Service’, for many and manygenerations.
They were generations of statesmen and proconsuls,who gave their sons in war more lavishly than anyother class. Yet we have lived to see a labour Ministerof War stating that he does not give a tinker’s cursefor people of that sort, and the Minister of Healthdescribes them indiscriminately as ‘vermin’.
It is useless to whine. It has happened. It is thelogical result of our half-baked Victorian humanitarianism.All men are not equal. That ridiculous ideaof English democracy was invented in the reign ofQueen 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 ormoney to be cultured, now that civilization hasvanished along with the Word which gentlemen oncekept. 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 wonderfulproletariat, while the owners who gave their ancestorsto make them lovely crouch in a couple of rooms inone wing, I have been looking back along the corridorsof history, taking stock of that venture which oncebrought England to the leadership of the world. Ibelieve that the peak of British culture was reached inthe latter years of George III: that the rot began toset in with the ‘Romantics’: that the apparent prosperityof Victoria’s reign was autumnal, not vernal:and that now we are done for.
I have been consoling my old age by running awayfrom 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 giveone last, loving and living picture of an aristocraticcivilization 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. WilliamMason was a prig to the backbone; though he wasa harmless one. But he did invent—or he didadapt from Middleton’s Cicero —a new kind ofbiography which led to the greatest Life in theEnglish language.
Before Mason, a biographer had been content towrite about the subject in his own words. Masoninvented the idea of letting the subject speak for himself.In his Life of Gray, he strung together a selectionof the poet’s letters—and sometimes even forgedthem—supplying the necessary links in a runningcommentary. Horace Walpole was delighted with it.

Were I to judge from my own feelings [he wrote] Ishould say there never was so entertaining or interestinga work: that it is the most perfect model ofbiography; and must make Tacitus, and Agricola too,detest you.
Later, when Dr. Johnson published a Life of thesame 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 withWalpole that this new kind of Life was a ‘perfectmodel of biography’, and who thought that, by addingconversations 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 immortalwork] and constantly speaking in my own person . . .I have resolved to adopt and enlarge upon the excellentplan of Mr. Mason, in his Memoirs of Gray. Wherevernarrative is necessary to explain, connect, andsupply, I furnish it to the best of my abilities; but inthe chronological series of Johnson’s life, which I traceas distinctly as I can, year by year, I produce, whereverit 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 ofwriting any man’s life.
* * *
In this little scrap-book of a nostalgic Tory, I havetried to extend Mason’s kind of biography to an Age,attempting rather to string together a series of quotationsfrom the people themselves, than to speak ‘in myown person’—‘by which’, as Boswell added with self-sacrificeand some regret, ‘I might have appeared tohave more merit in the execution of the work’.
In short, I have here tried to picture the nature andhistory of a minor period in its own words rather thanin mine.
* * *
People are inclined to write as if the Age of Reasoncontinued until the Romantic Revival, or as if theAugustan period were an unbroken whole. But theeighteenth century was split by a remarkable line ofcleavage.
In the first half of the century, the authors becamerulers: 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 theomnipotent Popes and Swifts, courted or bribed orfeared by servile lords, whom they bullied with awill; on the other hand lie the wincing upper classes,who had to buy their peace of mind by prefermentsor by actual money payment, prostrate before thebitter ink. The wicked old Duchess of Marlboroughin the first half had to pay Pope £1000, now worthperhaps ten times that sum, to suppress a satire onherself. He took the money, but did not suppress thesatire. Swift bullied the cabinet itself till they did notknow whether they were on their heads or their heels.He made the Princess of Wales invite him nine timesbefore he would call at her house.
That was in the true Age of Reason, when Goldsmithcould complain that he had been slighted by amere lord. ‘I met him’, he said indignantly, ‘at LordClare’s in the country, and he took no more notice ofme than if I had been an ordinary man.’ ‘A nobleman’,agreed the Johnson of that period, ‘ought tohave made up to such a man as Goldsmith, and Ithink it is much against Lord Camden that heneglected him.’ It was thought ‘foolish’ of Pope to givehis friendship to ordinary peers, although he alwayskindly assured them that he did not value them as such.
The writers, in fact, were then full and complexcharacters. We may still puzzle about the relationshipbetween Stella and her gloomy Dean, still argue abouthis persecution mania, his crooked personality and thediseases from which he suffered. Pope, with his bentbody, stays, deceitful stratagems and delusions ofgrandeur, is a person whom we would recognize if wemet him now—where we should find some difficultyin distinguishing between Lords Marlborough andChesterfield, except by the eyebrows of the latter.
In short, during the real Age of Reason, it was theGrub Street authors who were articulate, powerfuland able to stamp themsel