-and
accommodating it to the actual facts, one finds it hardly necessary to
go beyond the obvious and almost commonplace solution that _The Castle
of Otranto_ was simply the castle of Strawberry Hill itself with paper
for lath and ink for plaster--in other words, an effort to imitate
something which the imitator more than half misunderstood. Of mediaeval
literature proper, apart from chronicles and genealogies, Walpole knew
nothing: and for its more precious features he had the dislike which
sometimes accompanies ignorance. But he undoubtedly had positive
literary genius--flawed, alloyed, incomplete, uncritical of itself, but
existing: and this genius showed itself here. His paper-and-ink
"Strawberry" is quite another guess structure from his lath-and-plaster
one. For itself in itself--for what it _is_--the present writer, though
he has striven earnestly and often for the sake of the great things that
it _did_, has never been able to get up any affection or admiration. It
is preposterous, desultory, tedious, clumsy, dull. But it made people
(we know it on such excellent authority as Gray's) shudder: and the
shudder was exactly what they wanted--in every sense of the verb "to
want." Moreover, quite independently of this shudder, it pointed the way
to a wide, fertile, and delightful province of historical, social,
literary, and other matter which had long been neglected, and which
people had been assured was not worth exploring. Blair was just using,
or about to use, "any romance of chivalry" as a hyperbolical
exemplification of the contemptible in literature. Hume had been arguing
against, and Voltaire was still sneering at, all sorts of superstition
and supernaturalism. The common cant of criticism for generations had
been that "sense" and "reason" were to be the only criteria. Walpole's
egregious helmet dropped from no one knew (or knows) where on all these
Philistinisms: and squelched them. How it did this, why it did it, and
so forth, one knows not much more than one knows why and how all the
things happened in the novel itself. _Apres coup_, the author talked
about "Shakespeare" (of whom, by the way, he was anything but a fervent
or thorough admirer) and the like. Shakespeare had, as Sir Walter
Raleigh has well pointed out, uncommonly little to do with it. But
Shakespeare at least supplies us with an appropriate phrase for the
occasion. _The Castle of Otranto_ "lay in" Horace's "way, and he found
it." And with it, th