his contempt. "You know," he once wrote, "I
shun authors, and would never have been one myself if it obliged me to
keep such bad company. They are always in earnest and think their
profession serious, and will dwell upon trifles and reverence learning. I
laugh at all these things, and write only to laugh at them and divert
myself. None of us are authors of any consequence, and it is the most
ridiculous of all vanities to be vain of being _mediocre."_ He followed
the Chinese school of manners and made light of his own writings. "What
have I written," he asks, "that was worth remembering, even by myself?"
"It would be affected," he tells Gray, "to say I am indifferent to fame. I
certainly am not, but I am indifferent to almost anything I have done to
acquire it. The greater part are mere compilations; and no wonder they
are, as you say, incorrect when they were commonly written with people in
the room."

It is generally assumed that, in speaking lightly of himself, Walpole was
merely posturing. To me it seems that he was sincere enough. He had a
sense of greatness in literature, as is shown by his reverence of
Shakespeare, and he was too much of a realist not to see that his own
writings at their best were trifles beside the monuments of the poets. He
felt that he was doing little things in a little age. He was diffident
both for his times and for himself. So difficult do some writers find it
to believe that there was any deep genuineness in him that they ask us to
regard even his enthusiasm for great literature as a pretence. They do not
realize that the secret of his attraction for us is that he was an
enthusiast disguised as an eighteenth-century man of fashion. His airs and
graces were not the result of languor, but of his pleasure in wearing a
mask. He was quick, responsive, excitable, and only withdrew into, the
similitude of a china figure, as Diogenes into his tub, through
philosophy. The truth is, the only dandies who are tolerable are those
whose dandyism is a cloak of reserve. Our interest in character is largely
an interest in contradictions of this kind. The beau capable of breaking
into excitement awakens our curiosity, as does the conqueror stooping to a
humane action, the Puritan caught in the net of the senses, or the
pacifist in a rage of violence. The average man, whom one knows
superficially, is a formula, or seems to live the life of a formula. That
is why we find him dull. The characters who interest