A Letter Book
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Title: A Letter Book
Author: George Saintsbury
Release date: January 25, 2010 [eBook #31072]
Language: English
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| Obvious typographical errors have been corrected in |
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| Text printed using the Greek alphabet in the original book |
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A LETTER BOOK
A LETTER BOOK
SELECTED WITH AN INTRODUCTION
ON THE HISTORY AND ART OF
LETTER-WRITING
BY
GEORGE SAINTSBURY
LONDON
G. BELL AND SONS, LTD.
NEW YORK: HARCOURT, BRACE AND CO.
1922
PREFACE
When my publishers were good enough to propose that I should undertake
this book, they were also good enough to suggest that the Introduction
should be of a character somewhat different from that of a
school-anthology, and should attempt to deal with the Art of
Letter-writing, and the nature of the Letter, as such. I formed a plan
accordingly, by which the letters, and their separate Prefatory Notes,
might be as it were illustrations to the Introduction, which was
intended in turn to be a guide to them. Having done this with a proper
_Pourvu que Dieu lui prête vie_ referring to both book and author, I
thought it well to look up next what had been done in the way before me,
at least to the extent of what the London Library could provide me in
circumstances of enforced abstinence from the Museum and from "Bodley."
From its catalogue I selected a curious eighteenth-century _Art of
Letter Writing_, and four nineteenth and earliest twentieth century
books--Roberts's _History of Letter Writing_ (1843) with Pickering's
ever-beloved title-page and his beautiful clear print; the _Littérature
Epistolaire_ of Barbey d'Aurevilly--a critic never to be neglected
though always to be consulted with eyes wide open and brain alert;
finally, two Essays in Dr. Jessopp's _Studies by a Recluse_ and in the
_Men and Letters_ of Mr. Herbert Paul, once a very frequent associate of
mine. The title of the first mentioned book speaks it pretty
thoroughly. "The Art of Letter Writing: Divided into Two Parts. The
First: Containing Rules and Directions for writing letters on all sorts
of subjects [_this line as well as several others is Rubricked_] with a
variety of examples equally elegant and instructive. The Second: a
Collection of Letters on the Most interesting occasions of life in which
are inserted--The proper method of Addressing Persons of all ranks; some
necessary orthographical directions, the right forms of message for
cards; and thoughts upon a multiplicity of subjects; the whole composed
upon an entirely new plan--chiefly calculated for the instruction of
youth, but may be [_sic_] of singular service to Gentlemen, Ladies and
all others who are desirous to attain the true style and manner of a
polite epistolary intercourse." May our own little book have no worse
fortune! Mr. Roberts's avowedly restricts itself to the fifth century as
a _terminus ad quem_, though it professes to start "from the earliest
times," and its seven hundred pages deal very honestly and fully with
their subjects. The essays of Dr. Jessopp and Mr. Paul are of course
merely Essays, of a score or two of pages: though the first is pretty
wide in its scope. There would be nothing but good to be said of either,
if both had not been, not perhaps blasphemous but parsimonious of
praise, towards "Our Lady of the Rocks." It cannot be too often or too
solemnly laid down that an adoration of Madame de Sévigné as a
letter-writer is not crotchet or fashion or affectation--is no result of
merely taking authority on trust. The more one reads her, and the more
one reads others, the more convinced should one be of her absolute
non-pareility in almost every kind of genuine letter (as apart from
letters that are really pamphlets or speeches or sermons) except pure
love-letters, of which we have none from her. As for _Littérature
Epistolaire_, it is a collection of some two dozen reviews of various
modern reprints of letters by distinguished writers--mostly but not all
French. The author has throughout used the letters he is considering
almost wholly as tell-tales of character, not as examples of art: and
therefore he does not, except in possible glances, require further
attention, though the book is full of interesting things. Its judgment
of one of our greatest, and one of the greatest of all,
letter-writers--Horace Walpole--is too severe, but not, like Macaulay's,
superficially insistent on superficial defects, and ought not to be
neglected by anyone who studies the subject.
If, however, there was no need to rely on any of these books, they did
nothing to hinder in the peculiar way in which I had feared some
hindrance. For it is a nuisance to find that somebody else has done
something in the precise way in which you have planned doing it. I have
not yet encountered that nuisance here. Dr. Jessopp's general plan is
most like mine--indeed some similarity was unavoidable: but the two are
not identical, and I had planned mine before I knew anything about his.
So with this prelude let us go to business, only premising further that
the object, unlike that of the anonymous Augustan, is not to "give rules
and instructions for writing good letters," except in the way (which far
excels all rules and instructions) of showing how good letters have been
written. Let us also modestly trust that the collection may deal with
some "interesting occasions of life" and contain "thoughts on a [fair]
multiplicity of subjects." Having been, as above observed, unable during
the composition of this book to visit London or Oxford, I have had to
rely occasionally on friendly assistance. I owe particular thanks (as
indeed I have owed them at almost any time these forty years) to the
Rev. William Hunt, D.Litt., Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford:
and I am also indebted to Miss Elsie Hitchcock for some kind aid at the
Museum given me through the intermediation of Professor Ker.
Besides the thanks given to Mr. Lloyd Osbourne, Mr. Kipling and Dr.
Williamson in the text in reference to certain new or almost new
letters, we owe very sincere gratitude for permission to reprint the
following important matters:
_His Honour Judge Parry._ Two letters from "Letters from
Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple."
_Messrs. Douglas & Foulis._ A letter to Joanna Baillie, from
"Familiar Letters of Sir Walter Scott."
_Messrs. Longmans, Green & Co._ Two letters from Mrs.
Carlyle's "Letters and Memorials," and one letter from Sir
G. O. Trevelyan's "Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay."
_Messrs. Macmillan & Co., Ltd._ Three letters from "The
Letters of Charles Dickens"; one letter by FitzGerald and
one by Thomas Carlyle, from "Letters and Literary Remains of
Edward FitzGerald"; one letter from "Charles Kingsley: his
Letters and Memories of his Life"; and two extracts from
"Further Records, 1848-1883," by Frances Anne Kemble.
_Mr. John Murray._ One letter from "The Letters of Elizabeth
Barrett Browning."
GEORGE SAINTSBURY.
1 ROYAL CRESCENT, BATH,
_October, 1921_.
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE v
INTRODUCTION ON THE HISTORY AND ART OF LETTER-WRITING 1
I. Ancient History. II. Letters in English--before
1700. III. The Eighteenth Century. IV. Nineteenth
Century Letters--Early. V. Nineteenth
Century Letters--Later. VI. Some Special Kinds
of Letter. VII. Conclusion.
APPENDIX TO INTRODUCTION:
GREEK LETTERS--SYNESIUS 100
(i) To his Brother--Preparations to meet Raiders.
(ii) To Hypatia--Longing but unable to come
to her.
LATIN LETTERS--PLINY 102
Accepts a Brief for a Lady.
LETTERS OF THE "DARK" AGES--SIDONIUS APOLLINARIS 105
The exploits of Ecdicius.
EARLY MEDIAEVAL (TWELFTH CENTURY) LETTER 108
Duchess of Burgundy to King Louis VII.--Matchmaking.
ENGLISH LETTERS
THE "PASTON" LETTERS 111
1. A Channel Fight.
2. Margery is Willing.
ROGER ASCHAM 116
3. "Up the Rhine."
4. Nostalgia for Cambridge.
LADY MARY SIDNEY 122
5. Have you no room at Court?
GEORGE CLIFFORD, EARL OF CUMBERLAND 125
6. A Death-bed letter.
JOHN DONNE 129
7-10. Letters to Magdalen Lady Herbert.
JAMES HOWELL 135
11. "Long Melford for Ever."
12. The White Bird.
JOHN EVELYN 139
13. How to take care of ears, eyes and brains.
DOROTHY OSBORNE 146
14. A discourse of Flying, and several other things.
15. Some testimonies of kindness.
JONATHAN SWIFT 154
16. Letter-hunger.
LADY MARY WORTLEY-MONTAGU 159
17. Directions for running away with her.
PHILIP DORMER STANHOPE, EARL OF CHESTERFIELD 164
18. Some manners that make a gentleman.
GEORGE BALLARD 173
19. The wickedness of Reviewers.
THOMAS GRAY 180
20. Romanities and Plain English.
21. Kent, Rousseau, Lord Chatham, etc.
HORACE WALPOLE (AND W. M. THACKERAY) 187
22. What Horace wrote.
23. What Horace might have written.
TOBIAS GEORGE SMOLLETT 195
24. Of Johnson, and Johnson's Frank--To Wilkes.
WILLIAM COWPER 197
25. About a Greenhouse.
SYDNEY SMITH 201
26. Vegetation, stagnation, and assassination.
27. His "hotel." Hasty judgments deprecated.
SIR WALTER SCOTT 206
28. Authors and Morals.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 212
29. From Spinosa to Go_b_win through things in general.
ROBERT SOUTHEY 217
30-33. The _Lingo Grande_.
CHARLES LAMB 221
34. A Sigh for Solitude.
GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON 228
35. Of Pictures, and Sepulture, and his Daughters.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 233
36. Of Pictures only.
JOHN KEATS 239
37. A Voyage, and the _Quarterly_ and Charmian.
THE CARLYLES 244
38. Thomas on _Latrappism_.
39. Jane Welsh on her Travels.
40. Jane Welsh on the blessings of Photography.
THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY 253
41. Outfits, and Election Dinners. Miss Berry and
Lady Holland.
THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES 258
42. Stage-coach tricks, and stage-play ghosts.
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING 263
43. An extended Honey-moon.
EDWARD FITZGERALD 270
44. Of Bath, and Oxford, and some Immortals.
FRANCIS ANNE KEMBLE 275
45. A Ghost in Flannel.
46. Bakespearism.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 279
47. As himself.
48. In character.
CHARLES DICKENS 286
49. Straight dealing with the personages of _Nicholas
Nickleby_.
50. Advice to an Innocent in London.
51. Mr. and Mrs. Harris.
CHARLES KINGSLEY 292
52. _Tom Brown's Schooldays_; Pike fishing; and a
pretty thing with Garth's.
JOHN RUSKIN 296
53. The Servant question.
ROBERT LOUIS BALFOUR STEVENSON 303
54. John Gibson Lockhart, and an Umbrella.
INTRODUCTION
THE HISTORY AND ART OF LETTER
WRITING
I
ANCIENT HISTORY
On letter-writing, as on most things that can themselves be written and
talked about, there are current many _clichés_--stock and banal sayings
that express, or have at some time expressed, a certain amount of truth.
The most familiar of these for a good many years past has been that the
penny post has killed it. Whether revival of the twopenny has caused it
to exhibit any kind of corresponding resurrectionary symptoms is a
matter which cannot yet be pronounced upon. But it may be possible to
avoid these _clichés_, or at any rate to make no more than necessary
glances at them, in composing this little paper, which aims at being a
discussion of the Letter as a branch of Literature, no less than an
introduction to the specimens of the kind which follow.
If, according to a famous dictum, "Everything has been said," it follows
that every definition must have been already made. Therefore, no doubt,
somebody has, or many bodies have, before now defined or at least
described the Letter as that kind of communication of thought or fact to
another person which most immediately succeeds the oral, and supplies
the claims of absence. You want to tell somebody something; but he or
she is not, as they used to say "by," or perhaps there are circumstances
(and circum_standers_) which or who make speech undesirable; so you
"write." At first no doubt, you used signs or symbols like the feather
with which Wildrake let Cromwell's advent be known in _Woodstock_--a
most ingenious device for which, by the way, the recipients were scantly
grateful. But when reading and writing came by nature, you availed
yourself of these Nature's gifts, not always, it is to be feared,
regarding the interconnection of the two sufficiently. There is probably
more than one person living who has received a reply beginning "Dear
So-and-So, Thanks for your interesting and _partially legible_ epistle,"
or words to that effect. But that is a part of the matter which lies
outside our range.
On the probable general fact, however, some observations may be less
frivolously based. If this were a sentimental age, as some ages in the
past have been, one might assume that, as the first portrait is supposed
to have been a silhouette of the present beloved, drawn on her shadow
with a charcoaled stick, so the same, or another implement may have
served (on what substitute for paper anybody pleases) to communicate
with her when absent. But the silliness of this age--though far be it
from us to dispute its possession of so prevailing a quality--does not
take the form--at least _this_ form--of sentiment.
[Sidenote: THE BEGINNINGS]
There is, moreover, nothing silly or sentimental, though of course there
is something that may be controverted, in saying that except for purely
"business" purposes (which are as such alien from Art and have nothing
to do with any but a part, and a rather sophisticated part, of Nature)
the less the letter-writer forgets that he is merely substituting pen
for tongue the better. Of course, the instruments and the circumstances
being different, the methods and canons of the proceedings will be
different too. In the letter there is no interlocutor; and there is no
possibility of what we may call accompanying it with personal
illustrations[1] and demonstrations, if necessary or agreeable. But
still it may be laid down, with some confidence, that the more the
spoken word is heard in a letter the better, and the less that word is
heard--the more it gives way to "book"-talk--the worse. Indeed this is
not likely to be denied, though there remain as usual almost infinite
possibilities of differences in personal opinion as to what constitutes
the desirable mixture of variation and similarity between a conversation
and a letter. Let us, before discussing this or saying anything more
about the principles, say something about the history of this, at best
so delightful, at worst so undelightful art. For if History, in the
transferred sense of particular books called "histories," is rather apt
to be false: nothing but History in the wider and higher sense will ever
lead us to truth. The Future is unknown and unknowable. The Present is
turning to Past even as we are trying to know it. Only the Past itself
abides our knowledge.
[Sidenote: BIBLICAL EXAMPLES]
Of the oldest existing examples of epistolary correspondence, except
those contained in the Bible, the present writer knows little or
nothing. For, except a vanished smattering of Hebrew, he "has" no
Oriental tongue; he has never been much addicted to reading
translations, and even if he had been so has had little occasion to draw
him to such studies, and much to draw him away from them. There
certainly appear to be some beautiful specimens of the more passionate
letter writing in ancient if not exactly pre-Christian Chinese, and
probably in other tongues--but it is ill talking of what one does not
know. In the Scriptures themselves letters do not come early, and the
"token" period probably lasted long. Isaac does not even send a token
with Jacob to validate his suit for a daughter of Laban. But one would
have enjoyed a letter from Ishmael to his half-brother, when his
daughter was married to Esau, who was so much more like a son of Ishmael
himself than of the amiable husband of Rebekah. She, by the way, had
herself been fetched in an equally unlettered transaction. It would of
course be impossible, and might be regarded as improper, to devote much
space here to the sacred epistolographers. But one may wonder whether
many people have appreciated the humour of the two epistles of the great
King Ahasuerus-Artaxerxes, the first commanding and the second
countermanding the massacre of the Jews--epistles contained in the
Septuagint "Rest of the Book of Esther" (see our Apocrypha), instead of
the mere dry summaries which had sufficed for "the Hebrew and the
Chaldee." The exact authenticity of these fuller texts is a matter of no
importance, but their substance, whether it was the work of a Persian
civil servant or of a Greek-Jew rhetorician, is most curious. Whosoever
it was, he knew King's Speeches and communications from "My lords" and
such like things, very well indeed; and the contrast of the mention in
the first letter of "Aman who excelled in wisdom among us and was
approved for his constant good will and steadfast fidelity" with "the
wicked wretch Aman--a stranger received of us ... his falsehood and
cunning"--the whole of both letters being carefully attuned to the
respective key-notes--is worthy of any one of the best ironists from
Aristophanes to the late Mr. Traill.
Between these two extremes of the Pentateuch and the Apocrypha there is,
as has been remarked by divers commentators, not much about letters in
the Bible. It is not auspicious that among the exceptions come David's
letter commanding the betrayal of Uriah, and a little later Jezebel's
similar prescription for the judicial murder of Naboth. There is,
however, some hint of that curious attractiveness which some have seen
in "the King's daughter all glorious within--" and without (as the
Higher Criticism interprets the Forty-Fifth Psalm) in the bland way with
which she herself stipulates that the false witnesses shall be "sons of
Belial."
There is a book (once much utilised as a school prize) entitled _The
History of Inventions_. I do not know whether there is a "Dictionary of
Attributed Inventors." If there were it would contain some queer
examples. One of the queerest is fathered (for we only have it at second
hand) on Hellanicus, a Greek writer of respectable antiquity--the
Peloponnesian war-time--and respectable repute for book-making in
history, chronology, etc. It attributes the invention of letters--_i.e._
"epistolary correspondence"--to Atossa--not Mr. Matthew Arnold's Persian
cat but--the Persian Queen, daughter of Cyrus, wife of Cambyses and
Darius, mother of Xerxes, and in more than her queenly status a sister
to Jezebel. Atossa had not a wholly amiable reputation, but she was
assuredly no fool: and if, to borrow a famous phrase, it had been
necessary to invent letters, there is no known reason why she might not
have done it. But it is perfectly certain that she did not, and no one
who combines, as all true scholars should endeavour to combine, an
unquenchable curiosity to know what can be known and is worth knowing
with a placid resignation to ignorance of what cannot be known and would
not be worth knowing--need in the least regret the fact that we do not
know who did.
There are said to be Egyptian letters of immense antiquity and high
development; but once more, I do not profess direct knowledge of them,
and once more I hold that of what a man does not possess direct
knowledge, of that he should not write. Besides, for practical purposes,
all our literature begins with Greek: so to Greek let us turn. We have a
fair bulk of letters in that language. Hercher's _Epistolographi Graeci_
is a big volume, and would not be a small one, if you cut out the Latin
translations. But it is unfortunate that nearly the whole, like the
majority of later Greek literature, is the work of that special class
called rhetoricians--a class for which, though our term "book-makers"
may be a little too derogatory, "men of letters" is rarely (it is
sometimes) applicable, as we use it when we mean to be complimentary.
These letters are still close to "speech," thus meeting in a fashion our
initial requirement, but they are close to the speech of the
"orator"--of the sophisticated speaker to the public--not to that of
genuine conversation. In fact in some cases it would require only the
very slightest change to make those exercitations of the rhetors which
are not called "epistles" definite letters in form, while some of the
best known and characteristic of their works are so entitled.
[Sidenote: THE RHETORICIANS]
It was unfortunate for the Greeks, as it would seem, and for us more
certainly, that letter-writing was so much affected by these
"rhetoricians." This curious class of persons has perhaps been too much
abused: and there is no doubt that very great writers came out of
them--to mention one only in each division--Lucian among the extremely
profane, and St. Augustine among the greatest and most intellectual of
divines. But though their habitual defects are to be found abundantly
enough in modern society, these defects are, with us, as a rule
distributed among different classes; while anciently they were united in
this one. We have our journalists, our book-makers (literary, not
sporting), our platform and parliamentary palaverers, our popular
entertainers; and we also have our pedagogues, scholastic and
collegiate, our scientific and other lecturers, etc. But the Rhetorician
of old was a Jack of all these trades; and he too frequently combined
the triviality, unreality, sophistry and catch-pennyism of the one
division with the priggishness, the lack of tact and humour, and above
all the pseudo-scientific tendency to generalisation, classification
and, to use a familiar word, "pottering" of the other. In particular he
had a mania in his more serious moods for defining and sub-defining
things and putting them into pigeon-holes under the sub-definitions.
Thus the so-called Demetrius Phalereus, who (or a false namesake of his)
has left us a capital _general_ remark (to be given presently) on
letter-writing, elaborately divides its kinds, with prescriptions for
writing each, into "friendly," "commendatory," "reproving,"
"objurgatory," "consolatory," "castigatory," "admonishing,"
"threatening," "vituperatory," "laudatory," "persuasive," "begging,"
"questioning," "answering," "allegorical," "explanatory," "accusing,"
"defending," "congratulatory," "ironic" and "thankful," while the
neo-Platonist, Proclus, is responsible for, or at least has attributed
to him, a list of nearly double the length, including most of those
given above and adding many. Of these last, "love-letters" is the most
important, and "mixed" the _canniest_, for it practically lets in
everything.
This way, of course, except for purely business purposes--where
established forms save time, trouble and possible litigation--no
possible good lies; and indeed the impossibility thereof is clearly
enough indicated in the above-glanced-at general remark of Demetrius (or
whoever it was) himself. In fact the principle of this remark and its
context in the work called "Of Interpretation," which it is more usual
now to call, perhaps a little rashly, "Of Style," is so different from
the catalogue of types that they can hardly come from the same author.
"You _can_ from this, as well as from all other kinds of writing,
discern the character of the writer; indeed from none other can you
discern it so well." Those who know a little of the history of Criticism
will see how this anticipates the most famous and best definitions of
Style itself, as being "the very man," and they may perhaps also think
worthy of notice another passage in the same context where the author
finds fault with a rather "fine" piece of an epistle as "not the way a
man would talk to his friend," and even goes on to use the most familiar
Greek word for talking--[Greek: lalein]--in the same connection.
[Sidenote: ALCIPHRON. JULIAN]
Of such "talking with a friend" we have unfortunately very few
examples--hardly any at all--from older Greek. The greater
collections--not much used in schools or colleges now but well enough
known to those who really know Greek Literature--of Alciphron,
Aristaenetus, Philostratus and (once most famous of all) Phalaris
are--one must not perhaps say obvious, since men of no little worth were
once taken in by them but--pretty easily discoverable counterfeits. They
are sometimes, more particularly those of Philostratus, interesting and
even beautiful;[2] they have been again sometimes at least supposed,
particularly those of Alciphron, to give us, from the fact that they
were largely based upon lost comedies, etc., information which we should
otherwise lack; and in many instances (Aristaenetus is perhaps here the
chief) they must have helped towards that late Greek creation of the
Romance to which we owe so much. Nor have we here much if anything to do
with such questions as the morality of personating dead authors, or that
of laying traps for historians. It is enough that they do not give us,
except very rarely, good letters: and that even these exceptions are not
in any probability _real_ letters, real written "confabulations of
friends" at all. Almost the first we have deserving such a description
are those of the Emperor Julian in the fourth century of that Christ for
whom he had such an unfortunate hatred; the most copious and thoroughly
genuine perhaps those of Bishop Synesius a little later. Of these
Julian's are a good deal affected by the influence of Rhetoric, of which
he was a great cultivator: and the peculiar later Platonism of Synesius
fills a larger proportion of his than some frivolous persons might
wish. Julian is even thought to have "written for publication," as Latin
epistolers of distinction had undoubtedly done before him. Nevertheless
it is pleasant to read the Apostate when he is not talking Imperial or
anti-Christian "shop," but writing to his tutor, the famous sophist and
rhetorician Libanius, about his travels and his books and what not, in a
fashion by no means very unlike that in which a young Oxford graduate
might write to an undonnish don. It is still pleasanter to find Synesius
telling his friends about the very thin wine and very thick honey of
Cyrenaica; making love ("camouflaged," as they say to-day, under
philosophy) to Hypatia, and condescending to mention dogs, horses and
hunting now and then. But it is unfortunately undeniable that the bulk
of this department of Greek literature is spurious to begin with, and
uninteresting, even if spuriousness be permitted to pass. The Letters of
Phalaris--once famous in themselves, again so as furnishing one of the
chief battle-grounds in the "Ancient and Modern" quarrel, and never to
be forgotten because of their connection with Swift's _Battle of the
Books_--are as dull as ditchwater in matter, and utterly destitute of
literary distinction in style.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: ROMAN LETTER-WRITING]
It is a rule, general and almost universal, that every branch of Latin
literature is founded on, and more or less directly imitative of Greek.
Even the Satire, which the Romans relied upon to prove that they could
originate, is more apparently than really an invention. Also, though
this may be more disputable, because much more a matter of personal
taste, there were very few such branches in which the pupils equalled,
much fewer in which they surpassed, their masters. But in both respects
letter-writing may be said to be an exception. Unless we have been
singularly unlucky in losing better Greek letters than we have, and
extraordinarily fortunate in Fate's selection of the Latin letters that
have come down to us, the Romans, though they were eager students of
Rhetoric, and almost outwent their teachers in composing the empty
things called Declamations, seem to have allowed this very practice to
drain off mere verbosity, and to have written letters about matters
which were worth pen, ink, paper and (as we should say) postage. We have
in Greek absolutely no such letters from the flourishing time of the
literature as those of Cicero, of Pliny[3] and even of Seneca--while as
we approach the "Dark" Ages Julian and Synesius in the older language
cannot touch Sidonius Apollinaris or perhaps Cassiodorus[4] in the
younger. Of course all these are beyond reasonable doubt genuine, while
the Greek letters attributed to Plato, Socrates and other great men are
almost without doubt and without exception spurious. But there is very
little likelihood that the Greeks of the great times wrote many
"matter-ful" letters at all. They lived in small communities, where they
saw each other daily and almost hourly; they took little interest in the
affairs of other communities unless they were at war with them, and
when they did travel there were very few means of international
communication.
Women write the best letters, and get the best letters written to them:
but it is doubtful whether Greek women, save persons of a certain class
and other exceptions in different ways like Sappho and Diotima,[5] ever
wrote at all. The Romans, after their early period, were not merely a
larger and ever larger community full of the most various business, and
constantly extending their presence and their sway; but, by their unique
faculty of organisation, they put every part of their huge world in
communication with every other part. Here also we lack women's letters;
but we are, as above remarked, by no means badly off for those of men.
There have even been some audacious heretics who have preferred Cicero's
letters to his speeches and treatises; Seneca, the least attractive of
those before mentioned, put well what the poet Wordsworth called in his
own poems "extremely va_loo_able thoughts"; one of the keenest of
mathematicians and best of academic and general business men known to
the present writer, the late Professor Chrystal of Edinburgh, made a
special favourite of Pliny; and if people can find nothing worse to say
against Sidonius than that he wrote in contemporary, and not in what was
for his time archaic, Latin, his case will not look bad in the eyes of
sensible men.
[Sidenote: SIDONIUS]
Sidonius, like Synesius, was a Christian, and, though the observation
may seem no more logical than Fluellen's about Macedon and Monmouth,
besides being in more doubtful taste, there would seem to be some
connection between the spread of Christianity and that of
letter-writing. At any rate they synchronise, despite or perhaps because
of the deficiency of formal literature during the "Dark" Ages. It is not
really futile to point out that a very large part of the New Testament
consists of "Epistles," and that by no means the whole of these epistles
is occupied by doctrinal or hortatory matter. Even that which is so,
often if not always, partakes of the character of a "live" letter to an
extent which makes the so-called letters of the Greek Rhetoricians mere
school exercises. And St. Paul's allusions to his journeys, his
salutations, his acknowledgment of presents, his reference to the cloak
and the books with its anxious "but especially the parchments," and his
excellent advice to Timothy about beverages, are all the purest and most
genuine matter for mail-bags. So is St. Peter's very gentleman-like (as
it has been termed) retort to his brother Apostle; and so are both the
Second and the Third of St. John. Indeed it is not fanciful to suggest
that the account of the voyage which finishes the "Acts," and other
parts of that very delightful book, are narratives much more of the kind
one finds in letters than of the formally historical sort.
However this may be, it is worth pointing out that the distrust of other
pagan kinds of literature which the Fathers manifested so strongly, and
which was inherited from them by the clergy of the "Dark," and to some
extent the Middle Ages, clearly could not extend to the practice of the
Apostles. If from the Dark Ages themselves we have not very many, it
must be remembered that from them we have little literature at all:
while from the close of that period and the beginning of the next we
have one of the most famous of all correspondences, the Letters of
Abelard and Heloise. Of the intrinsic merit of these long-and far-famed
compositions, as displaying character, there have been different
opinions--one of the most damaging attacks on them may be found in
Barbey d'Aurevilly's already mentioned book. But their influence has
been lasting and enormous: and even if it were to turn out that they are
forgeries, they are certainly early forgeries, and the person who forged
them knew extremely well what he was about. There is no room here to
survey, even in selection, the letter-crop of the Middle Ages; and from
henceforward we must speak mainly, if not wholly (for some glances
abroad may be permitted), of _English_ letters.[6] But the
ever-increasing bonds of union--even of such union in disunion as
war--between different European nations, and the developments of more
complex civilisation, of more general education and the like--all tended
and wrought in the same direction.
II
LETTERS IN ENGLISH--BEFORE 1700
Exceptions have sometimes been taken to the earliest collection of
genuine private letters, not official communications written in or
inspired by Latin--which we possess in English. "The Paston Letters"
have been, from opposite sides, accused of want of literary form and of
not giving us interesting enough details in substance. The objections in
either case[7] are untenable, and in both rather silly. In the first
place "literary form" in the fifteenth century was exceedingly likely to
be bad literary form, and we are much better off without it. Unless Sir
Thomas Malory had happened to be chaplain at Oxnead, or Sir John
Fortescue had occupied there something like the position of Mr.
Tulkinghorn in _Bleak House_, we should not have got much "literature"
from any known prose-writer of the period. Nor was it wanted. As for
interestingness of matter, the people who expect newspaper-correspondent
fine writing about the Wars of the Roses may be disappointed; but some
of us who have had experience of that dialect from the Russells of the
Crimea through the Forbeses of 1870 to the chroniclers of Armageddon the
other day will probably not be very unhappy. The Paston Letters are
simply genuine family correspondence--of a genuineness all the more
certain because of their commonplaceness. It is impossible to conceive
anything further from the initial type of the Greek rhetorical "letter"
of which we have just been saying something. They are not, to any but an
excessively "high-browed" and high-flying person, uninteresting: but the
chief point about them is their solidity and their satisfaction, in
their own straightforward unvarnished way, of the test we started with.
When Margaret Paston and the rest write, it is because they have
something to say to somebody who cannot be actually spoken to. And that
something is said.
[Sidenote: ASCHAM]
The next body of letters--Ascham's--which seems to call for notice here
is of the next century. It has not a few points of appeal, more than one
of which concern us very nearly. Most of the writers of the Paston
Letters were, though in some cases of good rank and fairly educated,
persons entirely unacademic in character, and their society was that of
the last trouble and convulsion through which the Early Middle Ages
struggled into the Renaissance, so long delayed with us. Ascham was one
of our chief representatives of the Renaissance itself--that is to say,
of a type at once scholarly and man-of-the-worldly, a courtier and a
diplomatist as well as a "don" and a man of letters; a sportsman as well
as a schoolmaster. And while from all these points of view his letters
have interest, there is one thing about them which is perhaps more
interesting to us than any other: and that is the fact that while he
begins to write in Latin--the all but mother-tongue of all scholars of
the time, and the universal language of the educated, even when not
definitely scholarly, throughout Europe--he exchanges this for English
latterly, in the same spirit which prompted his famous expression of
reasons for writing the _Toxophilus_ in our own and his own tongue.
There is indeed a double attraction, which has not been always or often
noticed, in this change of practice. Everybody has seen how important it
is, not merely as resisting the general delusion of contemporary
scholars that the vernaculars were things unsafe, "like to play the
bankrupt with books," but as protesting by anticipation against the
continuance of this error which affected Bacon and Hobbes, and was not
entirely without hold even on such a magician in English as Browne. But
perhaps everybody has not seen how by implication it acknowledges the
peculiar character of the genuine letter--that, though it may be a work
of art, it should not be one of artifice--that it is a matter of
"business _or_ bosoms," not of study or display.
Contemporary with these letters of Ascham, and going on to the end of
the century and the closely coincident end of the reign of Elizabeth, we
have a considerable bulk of letter-writing of more or less varied kinds.
The greatest men of letters of the time--to the disgust of one, but not
wholly so to that of another, class of "scholar"--give us little.
Spenser is the most considerable exception: and his correspondence with
Gabriel Harvey, though it is personal to a certain extent and on
Gabriel's side sufficiently character-revealing, is really of the hybrid
kind, partaking rather more of pamphlet or essay than of letter proper.
Indeed a good part of that very remarkable pamphlet-literature of this
time, which has perhaps scarcely yet received its due share of
attention, takes the letter-form: but is mostly even farther from
genuine letter-writing than the correspondence of "Immerito" and
"Master G. H." We have of course more of Harvey's; we have laments from
others, such as Lyly and Googe, about their disappointments as
courtiers; we have a good deal of State correspondence. There are some,
not very many, agreeable letters of strictly private character in whole
or part, the pleasantest of all perhaps being some of Sir Philip
Sydney's mother, Lady Mary Dudley. Others are from time to time being
made public, such as those in Dr. Williamson's recent book on the
Admiral-Earl of Cumberland. As far as mere bulk goes, Elizabethan
epistolography would take no small place, just as it would claim no mean
one in point of interest. But in an even greater degree than its
successor (_v. inf._) this _corpus_ would expose itself to the criticism
that the time for perfect letter-writing was not quite yet, in this day
of so much that was perfect, that the style was not quite the right
style, the knack not yet quite achieved. And if the present writer--who
swore fealty to Elizabethan literature a full third of a century ago
after informal allegiance for nearly as long a time earlier--admits some
truth in this, there probably is some. The letters included in it
attract us more for the matter they contain than for the manner in which
they contain it: and when this is the case no branch of literature has
perfected itself in art.
[Sidenote: THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY]
The position of the seventeenth century in England with regard to
letter-writing has been the subject of rather different opinions. The
bulk of its contributions is of course very considerable: and some of
the groups are of prominent importance, the most singular, if not the
most excellent, being Cromwell's, again to be mentioned. As in other
cases and departments this century offers a curious "split" between its
earlier part which declines--not in goodness but like human life in
vitality--from, but still preserves the character of, the pure
Elizabethan, and its later, which grows up again--not in goodness but
simply in the same vitality--towards the Augustan. This relationship is
sufficiently illustrated in the actual letters. The great political
importance of the Civil War of course reflects itself in them. Indeed it
may almost be said that for some time letters are wholly concerned with
such things, though of course there are partial exceptions, such as
those of Dorothy Osborne--"mild Dorothea" as she afterwards became,
though there is no mere mildness of the contemptuous meaning in her
correspondence. In most remarkable contrast to these stand the somewhat
earlier letters of James Howell--our first examples perhaps of letters
"written for publication" in the fullest sense, very agreeably varied in
subject and great favourites with a good many people, notably
Thackeray--but only in part (if at all) genuine private correspondence.
Not a few men otherwise distinguished in literature wrote
letters--sometimes in curious contrast with other productions of theirs.
The most remarkable instance of this, but an instance easily
comprehensible, is that of Samuel Pepys. Only a part of Pepys' immense
correspondence has ever been printed, but there is no reason to expect
from the remainder--whether actually extant, mislaid or lost--anything
better than the examples which are now accessible, and which are for the
most part the very opposite in every respect of the famous and
delectable Diary. They are perfectly "proper," and for the most part
extremely dull; while propriety is certainly not the most salient
characteristic of the Diary; and the diarist manages, in the most
eccentric manner, to communicate interest not merely to things more
specially regarded as "interesting," but to his accounts and his
ailments, his business and his political history. His contemporary and
rather patronising friend Evelyn keeps his performances less far apart
from each other: but is certainly, though a representative, not a great
letter-writer, and the few that we have of Pepys' patronised
fellow-Cantabrigian Dryden are of no great mark, though not superfluous.
In the earlier part of the century Latin had not wholly shaken off its
control as the epistolary language; and it was not till quite the other
end that English itself became supple and docile enough for the purposes
of the letter-writer proper. It was excellent for such things as formal
Dedications, semi-historical narratives, and the like. And it could, as
in Sir Thomas Browne's, supply another contrast, much more pleasing than
that referred to above, of domestic familiarity with a most poetical
transcendence of style in published work. Yet, as was the case with the
novel, the letter, to gain perfection, still wanted something easier
than the grand style of the seventeenth century and more polished than
its familiar style.
III
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
[Sidenote: THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY]
But whatever may be the position of the seventeenth in respect of
letter-writing it is impossible for anything but sheer ignorance,
hopeless want of critical discernment, or idle paradox to mistake, in
the direction of belittlement, that of the eighteenth. By common consent
of all opinion worth attention that century was, in the two European
literatures which were equally free from crudity and decadence--French
and English--the very palmiest day of the art. Everybody wrote letters:
and a surprising number of people wrote letters well. Our own three most
famous epistolers of the male sex, Horace Walpole, Gray and
Cowper--belong wholly to it; and "Lady Mary"--our most famous
she-ditto--belongs to it by all but her childhood; as does Chesterfield,
whom some not bad judges would put not far if at all below the three men
just mentioned. The rise of the novel in this century is hardly more
remarkable than the way in which that novel almost wedded
itself--certainly joined itself in the most frequent friendship--to the
letter-form. But perhaps the excellence of the choicer examples in this
time is not really more important than the abundance, variety and
popularity of its letters, whether good, indifferent, or bad. To use one
of the informal superlatives sanctioned by familiar custom it was the
"letterwritingest" of ages from almost every point of view. In its least
as in its most dignified moods it even overflowed into verse if not into
poetry as a medium. Serious epistles had--of course on classical
models--been written in verse for a long time. But now in England more
modern patterns, and especially Anstey's _New Bath Guide_, started the
fashion of actual correspondence in doggerel verse with no thought of
print--a practice in which persons as different as Madame d'Arblay's
good-natured but rather foolish father, and a poet and historian like
Southey indulged; and which did not become obsolete till Victorian
times, if then. At the present moment one does not remember an exact
equivalent in England to the story of two good writers in French if not
French writers[8] living in the same house, meeting constantly during
the day, yet exchanging letters, and not short ones, before breakfast.
But very likely there is or was one, and more than one.
For those no doubt estimable persons who are not content with facts but
must have some explanations of them, it is less difficult to supply such
things than is sometimes the case. One--the attainment at last of a
"middle" style neither grand nor vulgar--has already been glanced at. It
has been often and quite truly observed that there are sentences,
passages, paragraphs, almost whole letters in Horace Walpole and Lady
Mary Wortley Montagu, in Fanny Burney and in Cowper, which no one would
think old-fashioned at the present day in any context where modern slang
did not suggest itself as natural. But this was by no means the only
predisposing cause, though perhaps most of the others were, in this way
or that, connected with it. Both in France and in England literature
and social matters generally were in something like what political
economists call "the stationary state" till (as rather frequently
happens with such apparently stationary states) the smoothness changed
to the Niagara of the French Revolution, and the rapids of the
quarter-century War. There were no great poets:[9] and even
verse-writers were rarely grand: but there was a greater diffusion of
competent writing faculty than had been seen before or perhaps--for all
the time, talk, trouble, and money spent on "education,"--has been
since. New divisions and departments of interest were accumulating--not
merely in Literature itself[10] (as to which, if people's ideas were
rather limited, they _had_ ideas), but in the arts which were in some
cases practised almost for the first time and in all taken more
seriously, in foreign and home politics, commerce, manufactures, all
manner of things. People were by no means so apt to stay in the same
place as they had been: and when friends were in different places they
had much easier means of communicating with each other. Nor should it be
forgotten that the more elaborate system of ceremonial manners which
then prevailed, but which has been at first gradually, and latterly with
a run, breaking down for the last hundred years, had an important
influence on letter-writing. One does not of course refer merely to
elaborate formulas of beginning and ending--such as make even the
greatest praisers of times past among us smile a little when they find
Dr. Johnson addressing his own step-daughter as "Dear Madam," and being
her "most humble servant" though in the course of the letter he may use
the most affectionate and intimate expressions. But the manners of
yester-year made it obligatory to make your letters--unless they were
merely what were called "cards" of invitation, message, etc.--to some
extent _substantive_. You gave the news of the day, if your
correspondent was not likely to know it; the news of the place,
especially if you were living in a University town or a Cathedral city.
If you had read a book you very often criticised it: if you had been to
any kind of entertainment you reported on it, etc. etc. Of course all
this is still done by people who really do write real letters: but it is
certainly done by a much smaller proportion of letter-writers than was
the case two hundred, one hundred, or even fifty years ago. The
newspaper has probably done more to kill letters than any penny post,
halfpenny postcard or even sixpenny telegram could do. Nor perhaps have
we yet mentioned the most powerful destructive agent of all, and that is
the ever increasing want of leisure. The dulness of modern Jack, in
letters as elsewhere, arises from the fact that when he is not at work
he is too desperately set on playing to have time for anything else. The
Augustans are not usually thought God-like: but they have this of Gods,
that they "lived _easily_."
There is perhaps still something to be said as to the apparently almost
pre-established harmony between the eighteenth century and
letter-writing. It concerns what has been called the "_Peace_ of the
Augustans"; the at least comparative freedom alike from the turmoil of
passion and the most riotous kinds of fun. Tragedy may be very fine in
letters, as it may be anywhere: but it is in them the most
dangerous,[11] most rarely successful and most frequently failed-in of
all motives--again as it is everywhere. Comedy in letters is good: but
it should be fairly "genteel" comedy, such as this age excelled in--not
roaring Farce. An "excruciatingly funny" letter runs the risk of being
excruciating in a sadly literal sense. Now the men of good Queen Anne
and the first three Georges were not given to excess, in these ways at
any rate; and there are few better examples of the happy mean than the
best of their letters. The person who is bored by any one of those sets
which have been mentioned must bring the boredom with him--as, by the
way, complainers of that state of suffering do much oftener than they
wot of. Nor is much less to be said of scores of less famous epistolers
of the time, from the generation of Berkeley and Byrom to that of Scott
and Southey.
[Sidenote: SWIFT]
To begin with Swift, it is a scarcely disputable fact that opinions
about this giant of English literature--not merely as to his personal
character, though perhaps this has had more to do with the matter than
appears on the surface, but as to his exact literary value--have
differed almost incomprehensibly. Johnson thought, or at least
affected to think, that _A Tale of a Tub_ could not be Swift's,
because it was too good for him, and that "Tom Davies might have
written _The Conduct of the Allies_": while on the other hand
Thackeray, indulging in the most extravagant denunciation of Swift as
a man, did the very fullest, though not in the least too full, homage
to his genius. But one does not know many things more surprising in
the long list of contradictory criticisms of man and genius alike,
than Mr. Herbert Paul's disapproval of the _Journal to Stella_ as
letters while admitting its excellence as "narrative."[12] To other
judges these are some of the most perfect letters in existence, some
of the most absolutely genuine and free from the slightest taint of
writing for publication; some of the most extraordinarily blended of
intense intimacy which is neither ridiculous nor productive of the
shame-faced feeling that you ought not to have heard it; and full of
that dealing with matters less intimate but still interesting to both
correspondents which displays the "narrative" excellence conceded by
this acute critic. It must of course be remembered that these
"Journal-letters" are by no means Swift's only proofs of his
epistolary expertness. The Vanessa ones perhaps display a little of
the hopelessly enigmatic character which spreads like a mist over the
whole of that ill-starred relationship: but they make all the more
useful contrast to the "wholeheartedness"--one may even use that word
in reference to the little bit of what we may call constructive
deception as to "the other person"--of those to her rival.[13] Those
to Pope (of which so shabby a use was made by their strangely
constituted recipient), to Bolingbroke and others are among the best
of friendly letters: and the curious batch to the Duchess of
Queensberry might be classed with those "court-paying" letters of man
to woman which are elsewhere more particularly noted. But the "Stella"
or "Stella-cum-Dingley" division (if that most singular of
value-completing zeros is to be brought in) is a thing by itself.
Perhaps appreciating or not appreciating the "little language" is a
matter very largely of personal constitution, and the failure to
appreciate is (like colour-blindness or other physical deficiencies) a
thing to be sorry for, not to condemn. But one might have thought that
even if what we may call "feeling" of this were absent there would be
an intellectual understanding of the way in which it completes the
whole-heartedness just mentioned--the manner in which the writer deals
with politics, society, letters, the common ways of life, and his own
passion--this last sometimes in the fore-sometimes in the background,
but never far off. Other letters, from Horace Walpole's downwards, may
contain a panorama of life as brilliant as these give, or more
brilliant. Yet it is too frequently a panorama or a puppet show, or at
the best a marvellously acted but somewhat bloodless drama. On the
other hand, the pure passion-letters lack as a rule this
many-sidedness. With Swift we get both. Seldom has any collection
shown us more varied interests. But through it all there is an
anticipation of the knell of this commerce of his--"Only a woman's
hair"--and that hair threads, in subtle fashion, the whole of the
Journal, turning the panorama to something felt as well as seen, and
the puppet-show to realities of flesh and blood.
That this magical transforming element is wanting in a most remarkable
pair of contemporaries, Chesterfield and "Lady Mary," has been generally
allowed; though a strong fight has been made by some of her sisters for
"my lady" and though the soundest criticism allows that "my lord" did
not so much lack as dissemble heart and even sometimes showed the heart
he had. It would be out of our proper line to discuss such questions
here at any length. It may be enough to warn readers who have not yet
had time to look into the matter for themselves that Pope's coarse
attacks on Lady Mary and Johnson's fine rhetorical rebuff of
Chesterfield were unquestionably outbursts of hurt personal pride.
Horace Walpole made hits at both for reasons which we may call personal
at second-hand, because the one was a friend of his sister-in-law and
the other an enemy of his father. As for Dickens' caricature of "Sir
John Chester" in _Barnaby Rudge_ it is not so much a caricature as a
sheer and inexcusable libel. Anyhow, the letters of the Earl and the
Lady are exceedingly good reading. Persons of no advanced years who have
been introduced to them in the twentieth century have been known to find
them positively captivating: and their attractions are, not merely as
between the two but even in each case by itself, singularly various.
Lady Mary's forte--perhaps in direct following of her great forerunner
and part namesake, Marie de Sévigné, though she spoke inadvisedly of
her--lies in description of places and manners, and in literary
criticism.[14] Her accounts of her Turkish journey in earlier days, and
of some scenes in Italy later, of her court and other experiences, etc.,
rank among the best things of the kind in English; and her critical
acuteness, assisted as it was by no small possession of what might
almost be called scholarship, was most remarkable for her time. Also,
she does all these things naturally--with that naturalness at
which--when they possess it at all--women are so much better than men.
People say a lady can never pass a glass without looking at herself.
(One thinks by the way one has seen men do that.) But after all what the
glass gives is a reflection and record of nature: and women learn to see
it in others as well as in themselves.
[Sidenote: CHESTERFIELD]
Few English writers have suffered more injustice in popular estimation
than Chesterfield. Even putting aside the abuse by which, as above
mentioned, Johnson showed (on Fluellen's principles convincingly) that
he had more in common with the Goddess Juno than the J in both their
names--that is to say an _insanabile vulnus_ of vanity--there remain
sources of mistakes and prejudice which have been all too freely tapped.
The miscellaneous letters--which show sides of him quite different from
those most in evidence throughout the "Letters to his Son"--are rarely
read: these latter have been, at least once and probably oftener, made
into a schoolbook for translation into other languages--an office by no
means likely to conciliate affection. And even when they are not
suspected of positive immorality there is a too general idea that they
are frivolously and trivially didactic--the sort of thing that Mr.
Turveydrop the elder might have written on Deportment--if he had had
brains enough. Yet again, unbiassed appreciation of them has been
hampered by all sorts of idle controversies as to the kind of man that
young Stanhope actually turned out to be--a point of merely gossiping
importance in any case, and, whatever be the facts of this one, having
no more to do with the merit of the letters than the other fact that
some people make mistakes in their accounts after having learnt the
multiplication table has to do with the value of that composition. As a
matter of relevant fact the letters--except (and even here the
accusations against them are much exaggerated) from the point of view of
very severe morality in regard to one or two points--perhaps no more
than one--are full of sound advice, clear common-sense, and ripe
experience of the world. The manners they recommend are not those of any
but a very exceptional "dancing master," they are those of a gentleman.
The temper that they inculcate and that they exhibit in the inculcator
is positively kindly and relatively correct. Both these and the other
batch of "Letters to his Godson" and successor in the Earldom (the Lord
Chesterfield for forging whose name Dr. Dodd was hanged) show the most
curious and unusual pains on the part of a man admitted to be in the
highest degree a man of the world, and sometimes accused of being
nothing else, to make himself intelligible and agreeable to young--at
first very young--boys. In his letters to older folk, both men and
women, qualities for which there was no room in the others arise--the
thoughts of a statesman and a philosopher, the feelings of a being quite
different from the callous, frivolous, sometimes "insolent"[15]
worldling who has been so often put in the place of the real
Chesterfield. And independently of all this there is present in all
these letters--though most attractively in those to his son--a power of
literary expression which would have made the fortune of any
professional writer of the time. If Chesterfield's literary taste was
too often decided by the fashionable limitations of this time, it was,
within those limitations, accomplished: and it was accompanied, as mere
taste very often is not, by no small command of literary production. He
could and did write admirable light verse; his wit in conversation is
attested in the most final fashion by his enemy Horace Walpole, and some
of the passages in the letters where he indulges in description or even
dialogue are by no means unworthy of the best genteel comedy of the
time. But he could also, as was said of someone else, be "nobly
serious," as in his "character" writing and elsewhere. His few
contributions to the half-developed periodical literature of his day
show how valuable he would have been to the more advanced Review or
Magazine of the nineteenth century: and if he had chosen to write
Memoirs they would probably have been among the best in English.[16] Now
the Memoir and the Letter are perhaps the most straitly and intimately
connected forms of literature.
[Sidenote: HORACE WALPOLE]
Horace Walpole--like his two contemporaries, fellow-members of English
aristocratic society, acquaintances and objects of aversion just
discussed--has been the subject of very various opinions. Johnson (of
whom he himself spoke with ignorant contempt and who did not know his
letters, but did know some of his now half-forgotten published works)
dismissed him with good-natured belittlement. Macaulay made him the
subject of some of the most unfortunately exaggerated of those
antitheses of blame and praise which, in the long run, have done the
writer more harm than his subjects. To take one example less likely to
be known to English readers, the wayward and prejudiced, but often very
acute French critic already mentioned, Barbey d'Aurevilly, though he
admits Horace's _esprit_ pronounces it _un fruit brillant, amer, et
glacé_. There are undoubtedly many things to be said against him as a
man--if you take the "Letters-a-telltale-of-character" view, especially
so. He was certainly spiteful, and he had the particularly
awkward--though from one point of view not wholly unamiable--peculiarity
of being what may be called spiteful at second hand. To stand up for
your friends at the proper time and in the proper place is the duty, and
should be the pleasure, of every gentleman. But to bite and for the most
part, if not almost always, to _back_-bite your friends' supposed
enemies--often when they have done nothing adverse to those friends on
the particular occasion--is the act at the best of an intempestively
officious person, at the worst of a cur. And Horace was always doing
this in regard to all sorts of people--his abuse of Johnson himself, of
Chesterfield and Lady Mary, of Fielding and others, having no personal
excuse or reason whatsoever.
His taste in collecting, building, etc., is not a matter in which men of
other times should be too ready to throw stones, for taste in all such
matters at almost all times, however sure a stronghold it may seem to
those who occupy it, is the most brittle of glass-houses to others. He
had also a considerable touch of almost original genius in important
kinds of literature, as _The Mysterious Mother_ and _The Castle of
Otranto_ showed--a touch which undoubtedly helped him in his letters.
But of critical power he had nothing at all; and his knowledge (save,
perhaps in Art) was anything but extensive and still less accurate.
Politically he was a mere baby, all the eighty years of his life; though
he passed many of them in the House of Commons and might have passed
several in the House of Lords, had he chosen to attend it. When he was
young he was a theoretical republican rejoicing in the execution of
Charles I.: when he was old the French Revolution was to him anathema
and he was horrified at the execution of Louis XVI. He was incapable of
sustaining, perhaps of understanding, an argument: everything with him
was a matter, as the defamers of women say it is with them, of personal
and arbitrary fancy, prejudice, or whim.
But all this does not prevent him from being one of the best
letter-writers in the English language: and if you take bulk of work
along with variety of subject; maintenance of interest and craftsmanship
as well as bulk, perhaps the very best of all. The latest standard
edition of his letters, to which additions are still being made, is in
sixteen well-filled volumes, and there are probably few readers of good
taste and fair knowledge who would object if it could be extended to
sixty. There is perhaps no body of epistles except Madame de Sévigné's
own--which Horace fervently admired and, assisted perhaps by the
feminine element in his own nature, copied assiduously--exhibiting the
possible charm of letter-writing more distinctly or more copiously.
To examine the nature of this charm a little cannot be irrelevant in
such an Introduction as this: and from what has just been said it would
seem that these letters will form as good a specimen for examination as
any. They are not very much "mannerised": indeed, nobody but Thackeray,
in the wonderful chapter of _The Virginians_ where Horace is made to
describe his first interview with one of the heroes, has ever quite
imitated them. Their style, though recognisable at once, is not a matter
so much of phrase as of attitude. His revelations of character--his own
that is to say, for Horace was no conjuror with any one else's--are
constant but not deeply drawn. He cannot, or at least does not, give a
plot of any kind: every letter is a sort of _review_ of the
subject--larger or smaller--from the really masterly accounts of the
trial of the Jacobite Lords after the "Forty-five" to the most trivial
notices of people going to see "Strawberry"; of remarkable hands at
cards; of Patty Blount (Pope's Patty) in her autumn years passing his
windows with her gown tucked up because of the rain. Art and letters
appear; travelling and visiting; friendship and society; curious belated
love-making with the Miss Berrys; scandal (a great deal of it); charity
(a little, but more than the popular conception of Horace allows for);
the court-calendar, club life, almost all manner of things except
religion (though it is said Horace had an early touch of Methodism) and
really serious thought of any kind, form the budget of his letter-bag.
And it is all handled with the most unexpected equality of success.
There is of course nothing very "arresting." Cooking chickens in a sort
of picnic with madcap ladies, and expecting "the dish to fly about our
ears" is perhaps the most exciting incident[17] of the sixteen volumes
and seven or eight thousand pages. But everywhere there is interest; and
that of a kind that does not stale itself.
The fact would seem to be that the art of letter-writing is a sort of
mosaic or macédoine of nearly all departments of the general Art of
Literature. You want constant touches of the art narrative, and not very
seldom some of the art dramatic. Always you want that of
conversation--subtly differentiated. Occasionally, though in the
ordinary letter not very often, you want argument: much oftener
description. Pathos, tenderness, etc., are more exceptionally required:
and it is, in modern times at least, generally accepted that in the
letter consolatory, that almost greatest of Shakespearian magic phrases,
"the rest is silence" should never be forgotten and very quickly
applied. Wit is welcome, if it be well managed: but that is a pretty
constant proviso in regard to the particular element. Perhaps the
greatest negative caution of all is that the letter should not be
_obviously_ "written for publication."
Now the curious thing about Walpole is that his letters were, pretty
certainly in some cases (those to Mann) and not improbably in nearly
all, written with some view to publication if only of a limited sort,
and yet that the intention is rarely prominent to an offensive degree.
Even if we did not know the curious and disgusting tricks that Pope
played with his, we should be certain that he was always thinking of the
possibility of somebody else than the reader to whom they were
addressed reading them. With nearly an equal presumption as to the fact
in the case of Horace (though to do him justice he did not indulge in
any ignoble tricks with them) this fact rarely occurs and never offends.
An unkind critic with a turn for rather obvious epigram might say that
the man's nature was so artificial that his artifice seems natural. If
so, all the more credit to him as an artificer. And another feather in
his cap is that, although you can hardly ever mistake the writer, his
letters take a slight but sufficient colour of difference according to
the personality of the recipient. He does not write to Montagu exactly
as he writes to Mann; to Gray as to Mason; to Lady Upper-Ossory as to
earlier she-correspondents. So once more, though there are large and
important possible subjects for letters on which "Horry" does not write
at all, it is questionable whether, everything being counted in that he
has, and no unfair offsets allowed for what he does not attempt, we have
in English any superior to him as a letter-writer.
[Sidenote: GRAY]
The case of another famous eighteenth-century epistoler--Walpole's
schoolfellow and except for the time of a quarrel (the blame of which
Horace rather generously took upon himself but in which there were
doubtless faults on both sides)[18] life-long friend--is curiously
different. Gray was a poet, while Walpole, save for a touch of fantastic
imagination, had nothing of poetry in him and could not, as some who
are not poets can, even appreciate it. In more than one other
intellectual gift he soared above Horace. He was essentially a scholar,
while his friend was as essentially a sciolist. He even combined the
scientific with the literary temperament to a considerable extent: and
thus was enabled to display an orderliness of thought by no means
universal in men of letters, and (at least according to common
estimation) positively rare in poets. His tastes were as various as his
friend's: but instead of being a mere bundle of casual likings and
dislikings, they were aesthetically conceived and connected. He was not
exactly an amiable person: indeed, though there was less spitefulness in
him than in Horace there was, perhaps, more positive "bad blood." As for
the feature in his character, or at least conduct, that impressed itself
so much on Mr. Matthew Arnold--that he "never spoke out"--it might be
thought, if it really existed, to have been rather fatal to
letter-writing, in which a sense of constraint and "keeping back" is one
of the very last things to be desired. And some of the positive
characteristics and accomplishments above enumerated (not the
poetry--poets have usually been good epistolers) might not seem much
more suitable.
As a matter of fact, however, Gray _is_ a good letter-writer--a very
good letter-writer indeed. His letters, as might be expected from what
has been said, carry much heavier metal than Horace's; but in another
sense they are not in the least heavy. They are very much less in bulk
than those of the longer lived and more "scriblative" though hardly more
leisured writer:[19] and--as not a defect but a consequence of the
quality just attributed to them--they do not quite carry the reader
along with them in that singular fashion which distinguishes the others.
But no one save a dunce can find them dull: and their variety is
astonishing when one remembers that the writer was, for great part of
his life, a kind of recluse. He touches almost everything except love
(one wonders whether there were any unpublished, and feels pretty sure
that there must have been some unwritten, letters to Miss Speed which
would have filled the gap) and with a result of artistic success even
more decided than that assigned to Goldsmith's versatility by Gray's
enemy or at least "incompatible" Johnson.[20] His letters of travel are
admirable: his accounts of public affairs, though sometimes extremely
prejudiced, very clever; those of University society and squabbles among
the very best that we have in English; those touching "the picturesque"
extremely early and remarkably clear-sighted; those touching literature
among the least one-sided of their time. If there are, as observed or
hinted above, some unamiable touches, his persistent protection of the
poor creature Mason; his general attitude to his friends the Whartons;
and his communications with younger men like Norton Nicholls and
Bonstetten, go far to remove, or, at least, to counterbalance, the
impression.
This last division indeed, and the letters to Mason, emphasize what is
evident enough in almost all, a freedom on his part (which from some
things in his character and history we might not altogether have
expected) from a fault than which hardly any is more disagreeable in
letters. This is the manifestation of what is called, in various more or
less familiar terms, "giving oneself airs," "side," "patronising," etc.
He may sometimes come near this pitfall of "intellectuals," but he never
quite slips into it, being probably preserved by that sense of humour
which he certainly possessed, though he seldom gave vent to it in verse
and not very often in prose. Taking them altogether, Gray's letters may
be said to have few superiors in the combination of intellectual weight
and force with "pastime" interest. To some of course they may be chiefly
or additionally interesting because of such light as they throw or
withhold on a rather problematic character, but this, like the allegory
in Spenser according to Hazlitt, "won't bite" anyone who lets it alone.
They are extremely good letters to read: and the more points of interest
they provide for any reader the better for that reader himself. Once
more too, they illustrate the principle laid down at the beginning of
this paper. They are good letters because they are, with the usual
subtle difference necessary, like very good talk, recorded.[21]
[Sidenote: COWPER]
Nor is there any more doubt about the qualifications of the fifth of our
selected eighteenth-century letter-writers. Cowper's poetry has gone
through not very strongly marked but rather curious variations of
critical estimate. Like all transition writers he was a little too much
in front of the prevailing taste of his own time, and a little too much
behind that of the time immediately succeeding. There may have been a
very brief period, before the great romantic poets of the early
nineteenth century became known, when he "drove" young persons like
Marianne Dashwood "wild": but Marianne Dashwoods and their periods
succeed and do not resemble each other.[22] He had probably less hold on
this time--when he had the best chance of popularity--than Crabbe, one
of his own group, while he was destitute of the extraordinary
appeals--which might be altogether unrecognised for a time but when felt
are unmistakable--of the other two, Burns and Blake, of the poets of the
seventeen-eighties. His religiosity was a doubtful "asset" as people say
nowadays: and even his pathetic personal history had its awkward side.
But as to his letters there has hardly at any time, since they became
known, existed a difference of opinion among competent judges. There may
be some unfortunates for whom they are too "mild": but we hardly reckon
as arbiters of taste the people for whom even brandy is too mild unless
you empty the cayenne cruet into it. Moreover the "tea-pot pieties" (as
a poet-critic who ought to have known better once scornfully called
them) make no importunate appearance in the bulk of the correspondence:
while as regards the madness this supplies one of the most puzzling and
perhaps not the least disquieting of "human documents." A reader may
say--by no means in his haste, but after consideration--not merely
"Where is the slightest sign of insanity in these?" but "How on earth
did it happen that the writer of these _ever_ went mad?" even with the
assistance of Newton, and Teedon, and, one has to say, Mrs. Unwin.
For among the characteristics of Cowper's letters at their frequent and
pretty voluminous best, are some that seem not merely inconsistent with
insanity, but likely to be positive antidotes to and preservatives from
it. There is a quiet humour--not of the fantastic kind which, as in
Charles Lamb, forces us to admit the possibility of near alliance to
_over_-balance of mind--but _counter_-balancing, antiseptic, _salt_.
There is abundant if not exactly omnipresent common-sense; excellent
manners; an almost total absence in that part of the letters which we
are now considering of selfishness, and a total absence of
ill-nature.[23] It is no business of ours here to embark on the problem,
"What was the dram of eale" that ruined all this and more "noble
substance" in Cowper? though there is not much doubt about the agency
and little about the principal agents that effected the mischief. But it
is quite relevant to point out that all the good things noticed are
things distinctly and definitely good for letter-writing. And sometimes
one cannot help regretfully wondering whether, if he--who dealt so
admirably with such interests as were open to him--had had more and
wider ones to deal with, _we_ should not have had still more varied and
still more delightful letters, and _he_ would have escaped the terrible
fate that fell on him. For although Cowper was the reverse of selfish
in the ordinary sense, he was intensely self-centred, and his life gave
too much opportunity for that excessive self-concentration which is the
very hotbed of mental disease.
It is not a little surprising from this point of view, and it perhaps
shows how imperative the letter-writing faculty is when it is
possessed--that Cowper's letters are as good as they are: while that
point of view also helps us to understand why they are sometimes not so
good.
Of all the floating thoughts we find
Upon the surface of the mind,
as he himself very happily sums up the subjects of letter-writing, there
are few in his case which are of more unequal value than his criticisms.
Cowper had more than one of the makings of a critic, and a very
important critic. He was, or at any rate had been once, something of a
scholar; he helped to effect and (which is not always or perhaps even
often the case) helped _knowingly_ to effect, one of the most
epoch-making changes in English literature. But for the greater part of
his life he read very little; he had little chance of anything like
literary discussion with his peers; and accordingly his critical remarks
are random, uncoordinated, and mostly a record of what struck him at the
moment in the way of like and dislike, agreement or disagreement.
But then there is nothing that we go for to Cowper as a letter-writer so
little as for things of this kind: and even things of this kind take the
benefit of what Coleridge happily called--and what everybody has since
wisely followed Coleridge in calling--his "divine chit-chat." As with
Walpole--though with that difference of idiosyncrasy which all the best
things have from one another--it does not in the least matter what,
among mundane affairs at least, Cowper was talking about. If his
conversation--and some of the few _habitués_ of Olney say it was--was
anything like his letter-writing, it is no wonder that people sat over
even breakfast for an hour to "satisfy sentiment not appetite" as they
said with that slight touch of priggishness which has been visited upon
them heavily, but which perhaps had more to do with their merits than
more mannerless periods will allow.
And not even Walpole's show to quite the same degree, that extraordinary
power of making anything interesting--of entirely transcending the
subject--which belongs to the letter-writer in probably a greater
measure than to any man-of-letters in the other sense, except the poet.
The matter which these letters have to chronicle is often the very
smallest of small beer. The price, conveyance and condition of the fish
his correspondents buy for him or give him (Cowper was very fond of fish
and lived, before railways, in the heart of the Midlands); one of the
most uneventful of picnics; hares and hair (one of his most
characteristic pieces of quietly ironic humour is a brief descant on
wigs with a suggestion that fashion should decree the cutting off of
people's own legs and the substitution of artificial ones); the height
of chairs and candlesticks--anything will do. He remarks gravely
somewhere, "What nature expressly designed me for, I have never been
able to conjecture; I seem to myself so universally disqualified for the
common and customary occupations and amusements of mankind." Perhaps
poetry--at least poetry of the calibre of "Yardley Oak," and "The
Castaway," of "Boadicea" and the "Royal George" in one division; of
"John Gilpin" in the other, may not be quite properly classed among the
"common and customary occupations of mankind." But letter-writing might
without great impropriety be so classed: and there cannot be the
slightest doubt that Nature intended Cowper for a letter-writer. Whether
he writes "The passages and events of the day as well as of the night
are little better than dreams" or "An almost general cessation of
egg-laying among the hens has made it impossible for Mrs. Unwin to
enterprise a cake" one has (but perhaps a little more vividly) that
agreeable sensation which at one time visited Tennyson's Northern
Farmer. One "thinks he's said what he ought to 'a said" in the exact
manner in which he ought to have said it.
[Sidenote: MINORS]
It is however most important to remember that these Five are only, as it
were, commanding officers of the great Army, representative of the very
numerous constituents, who do the service and enjoy the franchise of
letter-writing in the eighteenth century. There is hardly a writer of
distinction in any other kind whose letters are not noteworthy; and
there are very numerous letter-writers of interest who are scarcely
distinguished in any other way. Perhaps Fielding disappoints us most in
this section by the absence of correspondence, all the more so that the
"Voyage to Lisbon" is practically letter-stuff of the best. From
Smollett also we might have more--especially more like his letter to
Wilkes on the subject of the supposed impressment of Johnson's negro
servant Frank, which we hope to give here. Sterne's character would
certainly be better if his astonishing daughter had suppressed some of
his epistles, but it would be much less distinct, and they are often, if
sometimes discreditably so, amusing if not edifying. The vast mass of
Richardson's correspondence would correspond in another sense to the
volume of his novels. We have letters from Berkeley at the beginning and
others from Gibbon at the end--these last peculiarly valuable, because,
as sometimes but not perhaps very often happens, they do not merely
illustrate but supplement and complete the published work. From ladies,
courtly, domestic, literary and others, we have shelves--and cases--and
almost libraries full; from the lively chat of the Lepels and Bellendens
and Howards of the early Georgian time to those copious and unstudied
but never dull, compositions which Fanny Burney poured forth to "Susan
and Fredy," to Maria Allen and to "Daddy Crisp" and a score of others;
those of the Montagu circle; the documents upon which some have based
aspersion and others defence of Mrs. Thrale; and the prose utterances of
the "Swan of Lichfield," otherwise Miss Seward.[24] There are
Shenstone's letters for samples of one kind and those of the Revd. Mr.
Warner (the supposed original of Thackeray's Parson Sampson) for another
and very different one. Even outside the proper and real "mail-bag"
letter all sorts of writings--travels, pamphlets, philosophical and
theological arguments, almost everything--throw themselves into the
letter form. To come back to that with which we began there is no doubt
that the eighteenth century is the century of the letter with us.
IV
NINETEENTH CENTURY LETTERS. EARLY
[Sidenote: EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY GROUPS]
There is, however, not the slightest intention of suggesting here that
the art of letter-writing died with the century in which it flourished
so greatly. In the first place, periods of literary art seldom or never
"die" in a moment like a tropical sunset; and, in the second, the notion
that centennial years necessarily divide such periods, as well as the
centuries in which they appear, is an unhistorical delusion. There have
been dates in our history--1400 was one of them--where something of the
kind seems to have happened: but they are very rare. Most ships of
literature at such times are fortunately what is called in actual ships
"clinker-built"--that is to say overlappingly--and except at 1600 this
has never been so much the case as two hundred years later and one
hundred ago. When the eighteenth century closed, Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Scott and Southey were men approaching more or less closely, thirty
years of age. Landor, Hazlitt, Lamb and Moore were at least, and some of
them well, past the conventional "coming of age"; De Quincey, Byron and
Shelley were boys and even Keats was more than an infant. In the first
mentioned of these groups there was still very marked eighteenth-century
idiosyncrasy; in the second some; and it was by no means absent from
Byron though hardly present at all in most respects as regards Shelley
and Keats. Certainly in none of the groups, and only in one or two
individuals, is there much if any shortcoming as concerns
letter-writing. Wordsworth indeed makes no figure as a letter-writer,
and nobody who has appreciated his other work would expect him to do so.
The first requisite of the letter-writer is "freedom"--in a rather
peculiar sense of that word, closest to the way in which it has been
employed by some religious sects. Wordsworth could _preach_--nearly
always in a manner deserving respect and sometimes in one commanding
almost infinite admiration; but when the letter-writer begins to preach
he is in danger of the waste-paper basket or the fire. Coleridge's
letters are fairly numerous and sometimes very good: but more than one
of his weaknesses appears in them.
The excellence of Scott's, though always discoverable in Lockhart, was
perhaps never easily appreciable till they were separately collected and
published not very many years ago. It may indeed be suggested that the
"Life and Letters" system, though very valuable as regards the "Life" is
apt a little to obscure the excellence of the "Letters" themselves. Of
this particular collection it is not too much to say that while it threw
not the least stain on the character of one of the most faultless (one
singular and heavily punished lapse excepted) of men of letters, it
positively enhanced our knowledge of the variety of his literary powers.
Perhaps however the best of letter-writers amongst these four
protagonists of the great Romantic Revival in England (the inevitable
attempt sometimes made now to quarrel with that term is as inevitably
silly) is the least good poet. Southey's letters, never yet fully but
very voluminously published, have not been altogether fortunate in
their fashion of publication. There have been questionings about the
propriety of "Selected" Works; but there surely can be little doubt that
in the case of Letters a certain amount of selection is not only
justifiable but almost imperative. Everyone at all addicted to
correspondence must know that in writing to different people on the same
or closely adjacent days, if "anything has" in the common phrase
"happened" he is bound to repeat himself. He may, if he has the sense of
art, take care to vary his phrase even though he knows that no two
letters will have the same reader; but he cannot vary his matter much.
Southey's letters, in the two collections by his son and his son-in-law,
were edited without due regard to this: and the third--those to Caroline
Bowles, his second wife--might have been "thinned" in a different way.
But the bulk of interesting matter is still very large and the quality
of the presentation is excellent. If anyone fears to plunge into some
dozen volumes let him look at the "Cats" and the "Statues" of Greta
Hall, printed at the end of the _Doctor_, but both in form and nature
letters. He will not hesitate much longer, if he knows good letter-stuff
when he sees it.[25]
[Sidenote: LANDOR]
Most of the second group wrote letters worth reading, but only one of
them reaches the first rank in the art; it is true that he is among the
first _of_ the first. The letters of Landor supply not the least part of
that curious problem which is presented by his whole work. They
naturally give less room than the _apices_ of his regular prose and of
his poetry for that marvellous perfection of style and phrase which is
allowed even by those who complain of a want of substance in him. And
another complaint of his "aloofness" affects them in two ways rather
damagingly. When it is present it cuts at the root of one of the chief
interests of letters, which is intimacy. When it is absent, and Landor
presents himself in his well-known character of an angry baby (as for
instance when he remarked of the Bishop who did not do something he
wanted, that "God alone is great enough for him [Walter Savage Landor]
to ask anything of _twice_") he becomes merely--or perhaps to very
amiable folk rather painfully--ridiculous. De Quincey and Hazlitt
diverted a good deal of what might have been utilised as mere
letter-writing faculty into their very miscellaneous work for
publication. Moore could write very good letters himself: but is perhaps
most noted and notable in connection with the subject as being one of
the earliest and best "Life-and-Letters" craftsmen in regard to Byron.
But none of these restrictions or provisos is requisite, or could for a
moment be thought of, in reference to Charles Lamb. Of him, as of hardly
any other writer of great excellence (perhaps Thackeray is most like him
in this way) it can be said that if we had nothing but his letters we
should almost be able to detect the qualities which he shows in his
regular works. Some of the _Essays of Elia_ and his other miscellanies
are or pretend to be actual letters. Certainly not a few of his letters
would seem not at all strange and by no means unable to hold up their
heads, if they had appeared as Essays of that singularly fortunate
Italian who had his name taken, _not_ in vain but in order to be titular
author of some of the choicest things in literature.
Indeed that unique combination of bookishness and native fancy which
makes the "Eliesque" quality is obviously as well suited to the letter
as to the essay, and would require but a stroke or two of the pen, in
addition or deletion, to produce examples of either. One often feels as
if it must have been, as the saying goes, a toss-up whether the _London
Magazine_ or some personal friend got a particular composition; whether
it was issued to the public direct or waited for Serjeant Talfourd to
collect and edit it. The two English writers whom, on very different
sides of course, Lamb most resembles, and whom he may be said to have
copied (of course as genius copies) most, are Sterne and Sir Thomas
Browne. But between the actual letters and the actual works of these
two, themselves, there is a great difference, while (as has just been
noted) in Lamb's case there is none. The reason of course is that though
Sir Thomas is one of our very greatest authors and the Reverend Yorick
not by any means unplaced in the running for greatness, both are in the
highest degree artificial: while Lamb's way of writing, complex as it
is, necessitating as it must have done not a little reading and (as
would seem almost necessary) not a little practice, seems to run as
naturally as a child's babble. The very tricks--mechanical dots, dashes,
aposiopeses--which offend us now and then in Sterne; the unfamiliar
Latinisms which frighten some and disgust others in Browne, drop from
Lamb's lips or pen like the pearls of the Fairy story. Unless you are
born out of sympathy with Elia, you never think about them as tricks at
all. Now this naturalness--it can hardly be said too often here--is the
one thing needful in letters. The different forms of it may be as
various and as far apart from each other as those of the other Nature
in flora or fauna, on mountain and sea, in field and town. But if it is
there, all is right.
[Sidenote: BYRON]
There are few more interesting groups in the population of our subject
than that formed by the three poets whom we mentioned last when
classifying the epistolers of the early nineteenth century. There is
hardly one of them who has not been ranked by some far from contemptible
judgments among our greatest as poets; and merely as letter-writers they
have been put correspondingly high by others or the same. It is rather
curious that the most contested as to his place as a poet has been, as a
rule, allowed it most easily as a letter-writer. The enormous vogue
which Byron's verse at once attained both at home and abroad--has at
home if not abroad (where reputations of poets often depend upon
extra-poetical causes) long ceased to be undisputed: indeed has chiefly
been sustained by spasmodic and not too successful exertions of
individuals. It was never, of course, paralleled in regard to his
letters. But these letters early obtained high repute and have never, in
the general estimate, lost it. Some good judges even among those who do
not care very much for the poems, have gone so far as to put him among
our very best epistolers; and few have put him very much lower.
Acceptance of the former estimate certainly--perhaps even of the
latter--depends however upon the extent to which people can also accept
recognition in Byron of the qualities of "Sincerity and Strength." That
he was always a great though often a careless craftsman, and sometimes a
great artist in literature, nobody possessed of the slightest critical
ability can deny or doubt. But there are some who shake their heads over
the attribution of anything like "sincerity" to him, except very
occasionally: and who if they had to translate his "strength" into Greek
would select the word _Bia_ ("violence") and not the word _Kratos_
(simple "strength") from the _dramatis personae_ of the _Prometheus
Vinctus_. Now "sincerity" of a kind--even of that kind which we found in
Walpole and did not find in Pope--has been contended for here as a
necessity in the best, if not in all good, letters; and "violence" is
almost fatal to them. Of a certain kind of letter Byron was no doubt a
skilful practitioner.[26] But to some it will or may always seem that
the vital principle of his correspondence is to that of the real "Best"
as stage life to life off the stage. These two can sometimes approach
each other marvellously: but they are never the same thing.
[Sidenote: SHELLEY]
When Mr. Matthew Arnold expressed the opinion that Shelley's letters
were more valuable than his poetry it was, of course, as Lamb said of
Coleridge "only his fun." In the words of another classic, he "did it to
annoy, because he knew it teased" some people. The absurdity is perhaps
best antagonised by the perfectly true remark that it only shows that
Mr. Arnold understood the letters and did not understand the poetry. But
it was a little unfortunate, not for the poetry but for the letters,
against which it might create a prejudice. They are so good that they
ought not to have been made victims of what in another person the same
judge would have called, and rightly, a _saugrenu_[27] judgment. Like
all good letters--perhaps all without exception according to Demetrius
and Newman--they carry with them much of their author's idiosyncrasy,
but in a fashion which should help to correct certain misjudgments of
that idiosyncrasy itself. Shelley _is_ "unearthly," but it is an entire
mistake to suppose that his unearthliness can never become earthly to
such an extent as is required. The beginning of _The Recollection_ ("We
wandered to the pine forest") is as vivid a picture of actual scenery as
ever appeared on the walls of any Academy: and _The Witch of Atlas_
itself, not to mention the portrait-frescoes in _Adonais_, is quite a
_waking_ dream. The quality of liveness is naturally still more
prominent in the letters, because poetical transcendence of fact is not
there required to accompany it. But it _does_ accompany now and then;
and the result is a blend or brand of letter-writing almost as unlike
anything else as the writer's poetry, and in its own (doubtless lower)
kind hardly less perfect. To prefer the letters to the poems is merely
foolish, and to say that they are as good as the poems is perhaps
excessive. But they comment and complete the Shelley of the Poems
themselves in a manner for which we cannot be too thankful.
[Sidenote: KEATS]
The letters of Keats did not attract much notice till long after those
of Byron, and no short time after those of Shelley, had secured it. This
was by no means wholly, though it may have been to some extent
indirectly, due to the partly stupid and partly malevolent attempts to
smother his poetical reputation in its cradle. The letters were
inaccessible till the late Lord Houghton practically resuscitated Keats;
and till other persons--rather in the "Codlin not Short" manner--rushed
in to correct and supplement Mr. Milnes as he then was. And it was even
much later still before two very different editors, Sir Sidney Colvin
and the late Mr. Buxton Forman, completed, or nearly so, the
publication. Something must be said and may be touched on later in
connection with a very important division of our subject in general, as
to the publication by the last-named, of the letters to Fanny Brawne:
but nothing in detail need be written, and it is almost needless to say
that none of these letters will appear here. No one but a brute who is
also something of a fool will think any the worse of Keats for writing
them. A thought of _sunt lacrimae rerum_ is all the price that need be
paid by any one who chooses to read them, nor is it our business to
characterise at length the taste and wits of the person who could
publish them.[28]
But putting this question aside, it is unquestionable that for some
years past there has been a tendency to value the Letters as a whole
very highly. Not only has unusual critical power been claimed for Keats
on the strength of them, but general epistolary merit; and though
nobody, so far as one knows, has yet paralleled the absurdity above
mentioned in the case of Shelley, Keats has been taken by some
credit-worthy judges as an unusually strong witness to the truth of the
proposition already adopted here, that poets are good letter-writers.
He certainly is no exception to the rule; but to what exact extent he
exemplifies it may not be a matter to be settled quite off hand. There
is no doubt that at his best Keats is excellent in this way, and that
best is perhaps to be found with greatest certainty, by anyone who
wants to dip before plunging, in the letters to his brother and
sister-in-law, George and Georgiana. Those to his little sister Fanny
are also charming in their way, though the peculiar and very happy
mixture of life and literature to be found in the others does not, of
course, occur in them. His letters of description, to whomsoever
written, are, as one might expect, first-rate; and the very late
specimen--one of his very last to anyone--to _Mrs._ not Miss Brawne is
as brave as it is touching. As for the criticism, there are undoubtedly
(as again we should expect from the author of the wonderful preface to
_Endymion_) invaluable remarks--the inspiration of poetical practice
turned into formulas of poetical theory. On the other hand, the famous
advice to Shelley to "be more of an artist and load every rift with
ore"--Shelley whose art transcends artistry and whose substance is as
the unbroken nugget gold, so that there are no rifts in it to load--is,
even when one remembers how often poets misunderstand each other,[29]
rather "cold water to the back" of admiration.
It may, however, not unfairly introduce a very few considerations on the
side of Keats's letters which is not so good. All but idolaters
acknowledge a certain boyishness in him--a boyishness which is in fact
no mean source contributary of his charm in verse. It is perhaps not
always quite so charming in prose, and especially in letters. You do not
want self-criticism of an obviously second-thought kind in them. But you
do want that less obtrusive variety which prevents them from appearing
unkempt, "down-at-heel" etc. Perhaps there is, at any rate in the
earlier letters, something of this unkemptness in Keats as an epistoler.
A hasty person may say "What! do you venture to quarrel with letters
where, side by side with agreeable miscellaneous details, you may
suddenly come upon the original and virgin text of 'La Belle Dame sans
Merci'?" Most certainly not. Such a find, or one ten times less
precious, would make one put up with accompaniments much more than ten
times worse than the worst of Keats's letters. But it may be observed
that the objection is only a fresh example of the unfortunate
tendency[30] of mankind to "ignore elenchs" as the logicians say, or, as
less pedantic phraseology has it, to talk beside the question. A man
might put a thousand pound note (and you might spend many thousand pound
notes without buying anything like the poem just mentioned) in a coarse,
vulgar, trivial or in other ways objectionable letter. The note would be
most welcome in itself, but it would not improve the quality of its
covering epistle. Not, of course, that Keats's letters are coarse or
vulgar, though they are sometimes rather trivial. But the point is that
their excellency, _as_ letters, does not depend on their enclosures (as
we may call them) or even directly on their importance as biography
which is certainly consummate. Are they good letters as such, and of how
much goodness? Have they been presented as letters should be presented
for reading? These are points on which, considering the title and range
of this Introduction, it may not be improper to offer a few
observations. We have already ventured to suggest that, if not the "be
all and end all," at any rate the quality to be first enquired into as
to its presence or its absence in letters, is "naturalness." And we have
said something as to the propriety or impropriety of different modes of
editing and publishing them. The present division of the subject seems
to afford a specially good text for adding something more on both these
matters.
As to the first point, the text is specially good because of the
position of Keats in the most remarkable group in which we have rather
found than placed him. To the present writer, as a reader, it seems, as
has been already said whether justly or unjustly, that the element of
"naturalness"--it is an ugly word, and French has no better, in fact
none at all: though German is a little luckier with _natürlichkeit_ and
Spanish much with _naturaleza_--is rather conspicuously deficient in
Byron. In Shelley it is pre-eminent, and can only be missed by those who
have no kindred touch of the nature which it reflects. Shelley could be
vague, unpractical, mystical; he could sometimes be just a little silly;
but it was no more possible for him to be affected, or to make those
slips of taste which are a sort of _minus_ corresponding to the _plus_
of affectation, than it was (after _Queen Mab_ at least) to write
anything that was not poetry. Thus in addition to the literary
perfection of his letters, they have the _sine qua non_ of naturalness
in perfection also.
But with Keats things are different. Opinions differ as to whether he
ever quite reached maturity even in poetry to the extent into which
Shelley struck straight with _Alastor_, never losing it afterwards, and
leaving us only to wonder what conceivable accomplishment might have
even transcended _Adonais_ and its successors. That with all his
marvellous promise and hardly less marvellous achievement, Keats was
only reaching maturity when he died has been generally allowed by the
saner judgments.[31] Now _im_maturity has perhaps its own naturalness
which is sometimes, and in a way, very charming, but is not the
naturalness pure and simple of maturity. Children are sometimes, nay
often, very pretty, agreeable and amusing things: but there comes a time
when we rather wish they would go to the nursery. Perhaps the
"sometimes" occurs with Keats's earlier letters if not with his later.
[Sidenote: EDITING OF LETTERS]
He is thus also a text for the second part of our sermon--the duty of
editors and publishers of correspondence. There is much to be said for
the view that publication, as it has been put, "is an unpardonable sin,"
that is to say, that no author (or rather no author's ghost) can justly
complain if what he once deliberately published is, when all but the
control of the dead hand is off, republished. _Il l'a voulu_, as the
famous tag from Molière has it. But letters in the stricter sense--that
is to say, pieces of private correspondence--are in very different case.
Not only were they, save in very few instances, never _meant_ for
publication: but, which is of even more importance, they were never
_prepared_ for publication.[32] Not only, again, did the writer never
see them in "proof," much less in "revise," as the technical terms go,
but he never, so far as we know, exercised on them even the revision
which all but the most careless authors give before sending their
manuscripts to the printer. Some people of course do read over their
letters before sending them: but it must be very rarely and in special,
not to say dubious, cases that they do this with a view to the thing
being seen by any other eyes than those of the intended recipient. It is
therefore to the last degree unfair to plump letters on the market
unselected and uncastigated. To what length the castigation should
proceed is of course matter for individual taste and judgment. Nothing
must be put in--that is clear; but as to what may or should be left out,
"there's the rub." Perhaps the best criterion, though it may be admitted
to be not very easy of application, is "Would the author, in publishing,
have left it out or not?" Sometimes this will pass very violent
expressions of opinion and even sentiments of doubtful morality and
wisdom. But that it should invariably exclude mere trivialities, faults
of taste, slovenlinesses of expression, etc., is at least the opinion of
the present writer. And a "safety razor" of such things might perhaps
with advantage have been used on Keats's, though he has written nothing
which is in the least discreditable to him.
V
NINETEENTH CENTURY LETTERS. LATER
[Sidenote: A NINETEENTH CENTURY GROUP]
Part at least of these general remarks has a very special relevance to
the rest of our story. There may be differences of respectable opinion
as to the system of editing just advocated; but they will hardly concern
one point--that the susceptibilities of living persons must be
considered. To some extent indeed this is a mere counsel of selfish
prudence: for an editor who neglects it may get himself into serious
difficulties. Even where such danger does not exist, or might perhaps be
disregarded, it is impossible for any decent person to run the risk of
needlessly offending others. It will be seen at once that this
introduces a new matter for consideration in regard to most--practically
all--of the correspondences which we have still to survey. Even those
just discussed have only recently passed from under its range. Shelley's
son died not so very long ago: grandchildren of Byron much more
recently; and if Keats had lived to the ordinary age of man and had, as
he very likely would have done, married not Fanny Brawne, but somebody
else later, a son or daughter of his (daughters are particularly and
sometimes inconveniently loyal to their deceased parents) might be alive
and flourishing now. As this constraint extends not merely to the
families of the writers but to those of persons mentioned by them (not
to speak of these persons themselves in the most recent cases), it
exercises, as will at once be seen, a most wide-ranging cramp and brake
upon publication. Blunders are occasionally made of course: the most
remarkable in recent times was probably an oversight of the editor of
Edward FitzGerald's letters, than which hardly any more interesting
exist among those yet to be noticed. FitzGerald, quite innocently and
without the slightest personal malevolence but thinking only of Mrs.
Browning's work, had expressed himself (as anybody might in a private
letter) to the effect that perhaps we need not be sorry for her death.
Unfortunately the letter was published while her husband was still
alive: and many people must remember the very natural and excusable, but
somewhat excessive and undignified, explosion which followed on his
part.
Such things must of course be avoided at all costs; and the consequence
is that nineteenth century letters must frequently--in fact with rare if
any exceptions--have appeared in a condition of expurgation which cannot
but have affected their spirit and savour to a very considerable extent.
It is for instance understood that Mr. Matthew Arnold's were very
severely censored; and, while readily believing this and acquiescing in
its probable propriety, the old Adam in some readers may be unable to
refrain from regret.
Again, there is something to be said about the less good effects of that
"Life-and-Letters" system which has been quite rightly welcomed and
praised for its better ones. Drawing on the Letters--with good material
to work on and good skill in the worker--improves the Life enormously;
but it is by no means certain--indeed it has been hinted already--that
the Letters themselves do not to a certain extent lose by it. Indeed
from one point of view, the word "loss" may be used in its most literal
meaning. The compiler of one very famous biography was said, for
instance, to have--with a disregard of the value of letters as
autographs which was magnificent perhaps in one way but far from "the
game" in others--cut up the actual sheets and pasted the pieces on his
manuscript, sending the whole to the printers and chancing the survival
even of what was sent, when it came back with the proofs.
But there is another sense of "loss" which has also to be reckoned. The
framework of biography is, or at least ought to be, something more than
a mere frame: and it distracts attention from the letters themselves,
breaks up their continuous effect, and in many cases necessitates at
least occasional omission of parts which an editor of them by themselves
would not think of excluding. Of course this is no argument against the
plan as such: but it has, together with what was said recently, to be
taken into account when we compare the epistolary position of the last
century with that of its immediate predecessor.[33]
These remarks are made not in the least by way of depreciating or even
making an apology for nineteenth century letters, but only in order to
put the reader in a proper state for critical estimation of them. Nor is
it necessary to repeat--still less to discuss--the more general
lamentations with some reference to which we started as to any decay of
letter-writing. Provisos and warnings may be taken as having been made
sufficiently: and we pass to the actual survey.
It may have been noticed in reference to the principal group of
letter-writers in the eighteenth that, with the exception of Cowper,
they were all acquainted with each other. Walpole knew Lady Mary,
Chesterfield and Gray; while Gray, if he did not know the other two,
knew Walpole very well indeed. Something of the same sort might be
contended for among those whom we have selected on the bridge of the
eighteenth and nineteenth. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and Lamb were
of course intimately connected: Southey knew Landor and Shelley, Keats
knew Shelley, Wordsworth and Lamb; while Byron and Shelley, however
unequally, were pretty closely yoked together. It is not meant that in
all these groups everybody wrote to each other; but that the writing
faculty was curiously prominent--diffused like a kind of atmosphere--in
all. Now if we look in the nineteenth for such a group it will be found
perhaps less readily. But one such at least certainly exists, to wit
that which includes Tennyson, Thackeray, Edward FitzGerald, Carlyle and
his wife, Fanny Kemble, Sterling and one or two more. There are of
course numerous others outside this group, and even in it Tennyson
himself is not a very remarkable letter-writer, any more than his great
rival, Browning, was. But there was the same diffusion of the
letter-writing spirit which has been noticed above, and Thackeray,
FitzGerald, the Carlyles, and perhaps Fanny Kemble are quite of the
greater clans among our peculiar people.
The most remarkable of all these--and as it seems to the present writer,
one of the most remarkable of all English letter-writers is one whose
letters have never been collected,[34] and from whom, until
comparatively lately, we had only few and as it were accidental
specimens. It is hoped that, notwithstanding the great changes of taste
recently as to reticence or indiscretion, there are still many people
who can not only understand but thoroughly sympathise with Thackeray's
disgust at the idea of having his "Life" written; and the even greater
reluctance which he would certainly have felt at that of having his
letters published. But, as has been suggested on a former occasion, when
things _are_ published there is nothing disgraceful in reading them: and
it may be frankly admitted that lovers of English literature would have
missed much pleasure and the opportunity of much admiration if the
"Brookfield" letters, those to the Baxter family and others in America,
those finally included in the "Biographical" edition, and yet others
which have turned up sporadically had remained unknown. It may be
doubted whether there is anything like them in our literature--if indeed
there is in any other--for the double, treble or even more complicated
gift of view into character, matter of interest, positive literary
satisfaction, and (perhaps most remarkable of all) resemblance to and
explanation of the author's "regular literature," as it has been called.
In some respects they resemble the letters of Keats; but there is absent
from them the immaturity which was noted in those, and which extended to
both matter and style. They are more various in subject and tone than
Shelley's. They are not deliberately quaint like Lamb's; and they
naturally lack (whether this is wholly an advantage or not, may admit,
though not here, of dispute) the restraint[35] which, in greater or less
degree and in varied kind, characterizes the great eighteenth century
epistolers.
[Sidenote: THACKERAY]
One additional charm which many of them possess may be regarded by
extreme precisians as of doubtful legitimacy as far as comment here is
concerned: but this may be ruled out as a superfluous scruple. It is the
illumination of the text "by the author's own candles" as he himself
says in a well-known Introduction: the actual "illustration" by
insertion in the script, of little pen-drawings. The shortcomings of
Thackeray's draughtsmanship have always been admitted: and by nobody
more frankly than by himself. But they hardly affect this sort of
"picturing" at all. The unfortunate inability to depict a pretty face
which he deplored need do no harm whatever: and his lack of
"composition" not much. A spice of caricature is almost invariably
admissible in such things: and the same tricksy spirit which prompted
the hundreds of initials, _culs-de-lampe_ etc. contributed by him to
_Punch_ and to be found collected in the "Oxford" edition of his works,
was most happily at hand for use in letters. Some years ago there
appeared, in a catalogue of autographs for sale, an extract of text and
cut which was irresistibly funny. The author and designer had had a
mishap by slipping on that peculiarly treacherous suddenly frozen rain
for which (though we are liable enough to it in England and though some
living have seen the entire Strand turned into one huge pantomime
scene, roars of laughter included, as people came out of theatres) we
have no special name. (The French, in whose capital it is said to be
even more frequent, call it _verglas_.) In telling it he had drawn
himself sitting (as involuntarily though one hopes not so eternally as
_infelix Theseus_) with arms, legs, hat, etcetera in disorder suitable
to the occasion and with a facial expression of the most ludicrous
dismay. It can hardly have taken a dozen strokes of the pen: but they
simply glorified the letter.
In no sense, however, can the value and delight of Thackeray's letters
be said to depend upon this _bonus_ of illustration. Without it they
would be among the most noteworthy and the most delectable of their
kind. One sees in them the "first state" of that extraordinary glancing
at all sorts of side-views, possible objections and comments on "what
the other fellow thinks," which is the main secret in his published
writings. If the view of him as a "sentimentalist" (which nobody, unless
it is taken offensively, need refuse to accept) is strengthened by them,
that absurd other view, which strangely prevailed so long, of his
"cynicism" is utterly destroyed. We see the variety of his interests;
the keenness of his sensations; the strange and kaleidoscopic rapidity
of the changes in his mood and thought. And through the whole there runs
the wonderful style which was so long unrecognised--nay, which those who
go by the trumpery machine-made rules of "composition books" used
gravely to stigmatise as "incorrect." Time lifts a great many (though
not perhaps all) the restraints upon publication which have been
discussed and advocated above: and it will probably be possible some day
for posterity to possess, not only a collected body of the now scattered
Thackeray letters, but a considerably larger one than has ever appeared
even in extracts and catalogues. It will be an addition to our
Epistolary Library which can bear comparison with any previous occupant
of those shelves: and one of the books which deserve, in a very peculiar
sense, the hackneyed praise of being "as good as a novel." For it will
be almost the equivalent of an additional novel of its author's own--a
_William Makepeace Thackeray_ in the familiar novel-form of title, and
in the old Richardsonian form of contents--but oh! how different from
anything of Richardson's save that it might possibly make you hang
yourself, not because you could not get to the story, but because you
had come to the end of it.
[Sidenote: FITZGERALD]
If, however, anyone insists on a formal and more or less complete
presentation, already existing, of nineteenth century "Letters" in a
body by a single writer, the palm must probably be given to those
(already referred to) of the translator or paraphrast of Omar Khayyàm.
Besides their great intrinsic interest and peculiar idiosyncrasy, they
have, for anyone studying the subject as we are endeavouring to do, a
curious attraction of comparison. Letter-writing, though by no means
exclusively, would appear to be specially and peculiarly the _forte_ of
men who live somewhat special and peculiar lives--men without the
ordinary family ties of wife and children--sometimes though by no means
always, recluses; possibly to some extent "originals," "humourists,"
"eccentrics," as they have been called at different times and from
different points of view. Even Walpole, fond as he was of society,
belongs to the class after a fashion, as do also Chesterfield[36] and
Lady Mary, while Gray, Cowper, and at a later period Lamb, are eminently
of it. But hardly anyone so unquestionably comes under the
classification as Edward FitzGerald. He certainly was for a time
married, but that marriage as certainly was not made in Heaven, if it
was not conspicuously of the other origin: and actual cohabitation
lasted but a short time. He had no children, and though he frequently
foregathered with the family from which he sprang, he was essentially a
"solitary." Such solitaries, even if they do not ticket and advertise
themselves as such after the fashion of Rousseau and Senancour and the
author of _Jacopo Ortis_, naturally enough find in letters the outlet
for communication with their fellows[37] which others find in
conversation, and the occupation which those others have ready-made, in
society, business of all kinds etc. That some copious and excellent
letter-writers, such as for instance Southey, have been extremely busy,
and "family men" of the most unblemished character, merely shows that
the rule is not universal. But it may be observed that their letters
usually have less intense idiosyncrasy than those of the others.
Of such idiosyncrasy, both in letters and in other work, few men have
had more than the author of _Euphranor_ and (as we have had to say
before) the "translator or paraphrast" not merely of Persian but of
Spanish and Greek masterpieces. It is indeed notorious that it was in
this latter capacity that he showed the individuality of his genius most
strongly. It is a frequently but perhaps idly[38] disputed question how
much is Omar and how much FitzGerald, while the problem might certainly
be extended by asking how much is Aeschylus and how much Calderon in his
versions of those masters: but it does not concern us here. What does
concern us is the fact that he has contrived to make his most famous
exercise in translation signally, and the others to some extent, not
dead "versions," but as it were reincarnations of the original, the
spirit or the flesh (whichever anyone pleases) being his own, or both
being blended of his and the author's. To do this requires a "strong
nativity" though not in the equivocal sense in which another great
translator of FitzGerald's own type[39] used that term. It shows in his
scanty "original" work: but it shows also and perhaps more strongly in
his letters. Everyone who has studied the history of the English
Universities in connection with that of English literature knows, even
if he has not been fortunate enough to experience it, the remarkable
fashion in which, at certain times, colleges and coteries at Oxford and
Cambridge have seemed to throw a strange and almost magical influence
over a generation (hardly more) of undergraduates. There was
unmistakably such an _aura_ or atmosphere about in Trinity College,
Cambridge, during the last of the twenties and the first of the thirties
of the nineteenth century--a spirit of literature and humour, of
seriousness and jest, of prose sense and half mystical poetry--which
produced things as diverse as _The Dying Swan_ and Clarke's _Library of
Useless Knowledge_, _Vanity Fair_ and the English _Rubaiyàt_.
Of this curiously blended mood-combination--of which in their different
ways Tennyson and Thackeray, as universally known, Brookfield, W. B.
Donne, G. S. Venables, as less known, but noteworthy instances suggest
themselves as examples--FitzGerald was certainly not the least
remarkable. He had, as eccentrics usually and almost necessarily have,
not a few limitations, some of which possibly were, though others
certainly were not, deliberately assumed or accepted. He would not allow
that Tennyson had ever in his later work (not latest by any means) done
anything so good as his earlier. In that unlucky though quite blameless
observation on Mrs. Browning which was referred to above, he ignored or
showed himself unable to appreciate the fact that the poetess had never
done anything better than, if anything so good as, some of her very
latest work.[40] It cannot be considered an entirely adequate cause for
ceasing to live with your wife,[41] that her dresses rustle; and many
other instances of what may be called practical and literary
_non-sequiturs_ might be alleged against him. But all these
"queernesses" are evidence of a temperament and a mode of thinking which
are likely to produce very satisfactory letters. They are sure not to be
dull: and when the queerness is accompanied by such literary power as
"Fitz" possessed they are not likely to be merely silly, as some things
are which attempt not to be dull. As a matter of fact they are
delightful: and their variety is astonishing. Odd stories and odd
experiences seem, despite his almost claustral life, to have had a habit
of flying to FitzGerald like filings to a magnet--as for instance the
irresistible anecdote of the parish clerk who insisted on giving out for
singing casual remarks of the parson above him as if they were verses of
a hymn, and who was duly echoed by the congregation. Even when he does
not make you laugh he satisfies you: even when you do not agree with him
you are obliged to him for having expressed his heresy.
[Sidenote: FANNY KEMBLE]
One of FitzGerald's special correspondents was, for reasons then
imperative, not a member of the Cambridge group itself, but as closely
connected with it as possible: being the sister of one of its actual
members. John M. Kemble, one of our earliest and best Anglo-Saxon
scholars in modern times, was, like others of his famous family (so far
as is generally known) a person of varied talents, though he showed
these neither in letter writing nor in the direction which Tennyson
incorrectly augured in the "Sonnet to J. M. K." His sister Frances
(invariably, like most though by no means all ladies of her name, called
"Fanny"[42]) was a very remarkable person indeed. After taking early and
with brilliant success to the stage which might almost be said to be
hers by inheritance,[43] she married an American planter with even worse
results (they were actually divorced) than her friend FitzGerald's
marriage brought about later: and for many years returned to public
life, not as an actress but as a reader. She wrote and published both
prose and verse of various kinds: but her best known work and that which
places her here, is a voluminous series of "Records," etc., much of
which is composed of actual letters, while practically the whole of it
is what we have called "letter-stuff." It has perhaps been published
_too_ voluminously: and it is certain that, as indeed one might expect,
its parts are not equal in interest. But experienced and balanced
judgment must always sum up in her favour as possessing, in letter- and
even other writing, more than ordinary talent, perhaps never quite
happily or fully developed. Merely as a person she seems to have
exercised an extraordinary attraction without being exactly amiable[44]:
and from the intellectual and artistic sides as a writer (we have
nothing here to do with her histrionic powers) to have been what has
sometimes in others been called "inorganic," "ill-regulated," "not
brought off," etc., but of extraordinary capacity.
This may have had something to do with her sudden and exceptional
success, when at barely twenty, and with no training except what
heredity might give her, she "took the town [and the country] by storm"
as Juliet, and very soon afterwards "carried" America likewise. But her
"records" of these and other things are of almost the first quality: and
this power of "recording" continued and was perhaps stimulated by the
less as well as the more fortunate events of her life. It may be said
indeed that in her time a young woman of full age (she was five and
twenty), unusual experience of the world, and still more unusual wits,
had no business to marry a planter in the Southern States, knowing that
she was to live there, unless she had reconciled herself to the
institution of slavery. Nor can anybody without prejudice deny this. But
the inconsistency and the troubles it developed gave occasion to some
very remarkable "recording," and the same had been the case earlier with
her life, whether at home, on the stage, or in society, and was the case
later whether she lived in England, in the Northern States, or on the
Continent of Europe. Perhaps you never exactly like her: an unusual
experience in the reading of letters, which for the most part are
singularly reconciling from the mere fact of their explanatory quality.
There is indeed no better confirmation of the well-known French saying
_tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner_. Here, however, there are, as
elsewhere, exceptions--Gray being perhaps one[45] as our present subject
is another. But there are few things more interesting, though their
interest may be somewhat tragic, than the spectacle of the way "things
go wrong" so easily, so finally, so fatally. Fanny Kemble had a sister
Adelaide, afterwards Mrs. Sartoris, with whom everything appears to have
gone right: but with herself it "seemed otherwise to the Gods." And her
letters or memoirs, or whatever they are to be called, are the record
thereof, as well as of other things.
[Sidenote: THE CARLYLES]
The letters and "letter-stuff" of the Carlyles, husband and wife,
according to the inevitable misfortune attending so much of our
subject--supplied the occasion of volumes of that disgusting and most
idle controversy which has made many people of taste pray that nothing
biographical may ever be published about them. Far be it from us to take
part in a game which if it does not always, like the unpleasant
personage in the old ballad,
Come for ill and never for good,
certainly comes for the former much oftener than for the latter purpose
and result. _Sunt lacrimae rerum_ is--once more and as so often--the
best and the sufficient observation. But there remains in the letters of
both, and especially in those of the lady, plenty of wholesome interest
and of justifiable--not spying or eavesdropping--information as to
character. Judged comparatively, they certainly do not contradict the
notion formerly referred to, that in some respects letter-writing is a
specially feminine gift. Carlyle's own letters[46] have plenty of merit
and attraction--some of the descriptive ones especially: and they
demonstrate, in the infallible way which letters and letters alone can
supply in the absence of long personal familiarity, that the general
tone and key of his writings was no falsetto but a perfectly genuine
thing--that the often urged contrast of the _Life of Schiller_, instead
of evidencing affectation in the later work, only proves constraint in
the earlier. At the same time, except for what may be called
side-illustration of the works, and completion of the biography for
those who want it, there is not very much in Carlyle's letters which
would be a serious loss.
With his wife the case is different. Without her "Letters and Memorials"
we might (it is rather improbable that we _should_, owing to the
misdemeanours of more persons than one and the blow-fly appetite of a
part of the public for sore places) have escaped a good deal of the
ignoble wrangling above referred to. But we should not only have failed
to appreciate a very remarkable character, but have missed some of the
very best of our now existing contributions to epistolary literature.
Personally Mrs. Carlyle was by no means a general favourite. She had a
fearfully sharp tongue, and a still sharper wit in directing it upon her
victims; her experiences were not very likely to edulcorate her acids
and mollify her asperities. The letters show that, as so often happens,
there was plenty of sweetness within the sharp exterior, and that her
strength was the strength of passion, not of obduracy. But this is not
all. There might have been biographical whitewashing of this kind
without much gain to pure literature. But the letters showed likewise a
power of expression, both lighter and more serious, which is hardly
inferior to that found in any correspondence of man or woman, genuine or
fictitious. Some people, not given to rash superlatives and pretty
extensively acquainted with literature, have held that the letter
describing her visit after many years to Haddington, and the
reminiscences it called forth, has no superior in the vast range of our
subject for pure pathos perfectly expressed, without constraint on
nature yet without loss of dignity.[47] On the other hand, the half
comic accounts of her domestic troubles etc. are worthy of Fielding or
Thackeray. The fact is that Mrs. Carlyle possessed what is rare in
women--humour. And she exemplified, as few other women and not so very
many men have done, Anne Evans's matchless definition of it as "thinking
in jest while feeling in earnest." Moreover while, as all true
humourists can, she could drop the jest altogether when necessary, she
could, as is the case with them likewise, never quite discard the
earnest.
[Sidenote: MACAULAY AND DICKENS]
Some of the most distinguished of Carlyle's contemporaries, the great
men of letters of the mid-nineteenth century, have left letters more or
less copious and more or less valuable from one or both of the two
sides, biographical and literary, but not eminently so. Macaulay's
letters and diaries suit biography excellently, and have been
excellently used in his. They lighten and sweeten the rather boisterous
"cocksureness" of the published writings: and help his few but very
remarkable poems other than the _Lays_ (which are excellent but in a
different kind) to show the soul and heart of the man as apart from his
mere intellect. But they are not perhaps intrinsically very capital. So
also in Dickens's case the "Life-and-Letters" system is excellently
justified, but one does not know that the letters in themselves would
always deserve a first class in this particular school of _Literae
Humaniores_. Letter-writing admits--if it may not even require--a
certain kind of egotism. But it must be what the French call an _Egoisme
à plusieurs_--a temper which takes, if only for the moment, other people
into itself and cares for them there. "The Inimitable" was perhaps too
generally thinking of that Inimitable himself or of the fictitious
creations of his marvellous genius. If, like his own Mr. Toots, he could
have written some letters to or from _them_ it would have been a very
different thing. In this respect he does not, as in others he does,
resemble Balzac, whose egotism was in a way as intense as his own and
like it extended to his creations, but could extend farther: while the
contrast with Thackeray is even more salient than in other cases from
this same point of view. At the same time it must not be supposed that
there is any intention here of belittling Dickens, either as a
letter-writer or in any other way. It is only suggested that he lacks
one of the things necessary to perfect letter-writing. Perhaps his most
noteworthy productions in the style are his editorial criticisms--rather
limited in taste and purview, but singularly shrewd within other limits.
And many of the others tell their substance with that faculty of
"telling" which he possessed as few have ever done, while the comedy of
those given here is "the true Dickens."
[Sidenote: SOME NOVELISTS]
Mention of the three greatest novelists (English and French) of the
mid-nineteenth century naturally suggests the rest of a class so
predominant in that century's literary production. Their record in the
matter is rather chequered, for reasons, in some respects and cases at
any rate, not difficult to discover. Reference is elsewhere made to the
disappointment experienced (perhaps not too reasonably) by some readers
of the letters of George Eliot. A not dissimilar feeling had been
expressed earlier in regard to those of Miss Austen: which, however,
were intrinsically far superior. Except to her sister, and it may be
even to her, Jane Austen was not at all likely to indulge in what is
called in French _épanchement_: it was not in the least her line,
whether in writing for publication or otherwise. Only one full year
passed between the death of Miss Austen and the birth of Miss Evans, and
the two illustrated very fairly the comfortable if not invariably
accurate idea that when one human being dies another is born to succeed
him or her in their special functions. But, as in other respects, they
differed here remarkably; and though in neither case was the nature of
the writer exactly expansive, this want of expansiveness was very
differently conditioned. Miss Austen no doubt could, if she had chosen,
(she has done something like it as it is) have written most delightful
letters. A hundred scenes in the novels from Catherine Morland's tremors
and trials, or John Dashwood's progressive limitations of generosity for
his sisters, to some of the best things in _Persuasion_, would take
letter form with the happiest results. But she did not choose that it
should be so. George Eliot, on the other hand, after her earlier days,
had ensconced herself in such a chrysalis of quasi-philosophical and
quasi-scientific thought and speech that she could hardly have recovered
the freedom of expression which is almost the soul of letter-writing.
Some of Bulwer's (the first Lord Lytton's) letters are remarkable in
ways, especially that of literary criticism, which might hardly be
expected by anyone who had insufficiently taken the measure of his
strangely unequal and imperfect, yet as strangely varied, talent. But as
the century went on a new prohibitory influence arose in the enormous
professional production which began to be customary with
novelists--principally tempted no doubt by the corresponding gain of
money, but perhaps also by the nobler desire of increasing, or at least
living up to, their reputations. Even short of the unbroken drudgery
which, it is said, compelled one lady novelist, of high rank for a time,
to scribble her novels as she was actually receiving and talking to
morning callers, the production of three or four novels a year--and
those not the cock-boats we often see now but attempts at least at "the
old three-decker" in its fullest dimensions--could leave little time or
inclination for extensive letter-writing. There were, however, some
exceptions. Charles Kingsley--who, though his novels were not very
numerous, supplemented them with all sorts of miscellaneous writing for
publication, was a diligent sportsman, an active cleric, and a busy man
in many kinds and ways--wrote certainly good and probably many letters.
The two brighter stars in the Brontë constellation, especially
Charlotte, were scarcely less remarkable with the pen in this way than
in others: and Mrs. Gaskell, Charlotte's biographer, has been put high
by some. The unconquerable personality of Charles Reade showed itself
here as elsewhere[48]: and others might be mentioned.[49] But perhaps
the most distinguished novelist next to Thackeray of the nineteenth
century, who was also a most distinguished letter-writer, was one who
died in middle age not long before its end--Robert Louis Stevenson.
[Sidenote: STEVENSON]
Stevenson had in fact practically all the qualifications necessary for a
good practitioner of our art. He had, eminently, that gift which the
Romans called _facundia_ and the French can translate, if with a slight
degradation of meaning, by _faconde_; but for which we, though the
adjective "facund" has, one believes, been tried, possess no noun,
"Eloquence" being too much specified to "fine" writing or speaking.
"Facility of expression" perhaps comes nearest. Whether he corrected or
corrupted this native gift by his famous "sedulous aping" of stylists
before him is a debated question: but one quite unnecessary to touch
here. It is sufficient to say that he never aped anyone in his letters,
unless playfully and in a sort of concert with his correspondent. Indeed
he possessed, quintessentially, that "naturalness" of matter and form on
which so much stress has been laid. He had a disposition equally
favourable to the business--if business we may call it. A person who is
habitually gloomy may write capital letters of an impressive character
now and then: but is likely to produce little but boredom if he extends
his practice. Louis Stevenson did not habitually "regard the world
through a horse collar" (as it was once put), but he certainly did not
pass through it gnashing his teeth or holding his handkerchief to his
eyes. Although he did a good deal of work, sometimes under no small
difficulties, he had very little if any of that _collar_-work--that
grinding "in Gaza at the mill with slaves" which takes the spring out of
all but the springsomest of men. He had widely varied experience of
scene, occupation, personal society. He knew plenty of books without
being in the least bookish; had, as the old saying goes, "wit at will,"
and, though he never made deliberate and affected efforts to _get_ out
of ruts, _kept_ out of them without the least trouble. He was as little
of a "poser" or of a "rotter" as he was of a prig, and there was not a
drop of bad blood in his veins. If these things could not make a good
letter-writer nothing could; and there is little doubt that he will hold
his place as such as long as English literature lasts. It is a great
pleasure to me to give, as I hope to do, one unpublished letter of his
to myself as a sort of _bonus_ to the reader of this little book--a
letter of rather unusual interest in literary as in other respects.
At this point, perhaps, actual survey may, and indeed had best, stop:
not merely because space is closing in. Lovers of letters will of course
detect what seem to them omissions in what has gone before and what
comes after. Some of these, no doubt, will have been real oversights.
Others, for this or that reason deliberate, such as Gibbon and
Newman--the latter not merely for his re-statement of the
character-value of correspondence, but for his exemplifications of
it--might certainly have been more fully noticed. But in regard to later
writers there are several obstacles in the path. Of some it would not be
easy to speak on account of their own lives being too recent: in regard
of nearly all the same fact must have occasioned exercise of
"censorship" to a degree which makes absolute judgment of their
competence as epistolers rash, and comparative judgment almost
impossible. To take up once more one example of men who were born a full
or almost a full century ago, Mr. Paul,[50] speaking apparently with
intimate knowledge of the originals, speaks also of the "severe process
of excision and retrenchment to which these [_the letters of Mr. Matthew
Arnold_] have been exposed." And he thinks that very few letters "could
have endured" it. Those who remember the appearance of these letters
will also remember that some critics doubted whether even "these" had
exactly "endured it"--that is to say, whether the expected salt of the
author of so much published _persiflage_ had not been left out or had
singularly lost its savour. To take another from the next generation, it
is pretty certain that Mr. Swinburne's letters, though we have judicious
selections from them, must have needed much more excision or
retrenchment than Mr. Arnold's, unless he wrote them in a manner
remarkably different both from his conversation and from his published
works. In such cases it is best, the evidence being not fully before us,
not to anticipate either the privileges or the decisions of posterity.
VI
SOME SPECIAL KINDS OF LETTER
A few more general remarks, however, on _kinds_ of letter-writing--as
distinguished from personality and accomplishment of letter-writers--may
not improperly be added.
[Sidenote: LETTERS AND THE NOVEL]
One extremely curious application of the Letter has not yet been
noticed, except by a glance or two: and that is the way in which--when
after birth-struggles for some two thousand years the novel at last got
itself born--letter-writing was pressed into its service. Historically,
as was briefly indicated near the beginning of this, one may connect
Greek Rhetoric and Greek Romance, and suggest the connection as the
origin of the "novel-in-letters." In the romance proper--that is to say
that of the Middle Ages--letters do not play any very important part,
just as they played none in life. But in the "Heroic" variety of the
late sixteenth and the whole of the seventeenth centuries they play a
much larger--partly no doubt because of the influence (here noted) of
the Greek Romance itself, but more because of the increased frequency
and importance of actual correspondence in life and society. We need
not, however, attribute too much to this influence of imitation in
seeking for the cause or causes which made Richardson adopt the form:
nor need we even put down to Richardson's own popularity, abroad as well
as at home, the very general further adoption and continuance of a form
which has perhaps more to be said against it than for it. Most serious
students of the history of prose fiction must have noticed, and some of
them have already pointed out, the curious, rather naïf, but quite
obvious feeling on the part of the earlier practitioners of such fiction
that somebody might ask them, in more polite language than that in which
Cardinal Ippolito d'Este asked Ariosto a similar question, "Where they
got their stories from?" The feeling seems sometimes to have affected
poets, but much more rarely: the Muse being allowed to possess and
confer a certain immunity from such cross-examination. Of the
unnecessary and sometimes unnatural devices invented to answer this
inconvenient question Scott in one well-known passage,[51] and others
elsewhere, have made ironic lists: and not the least characteristic of
Miss Austen's satiric touches is the passage where Catherine Morland
expects palpitating interest from a bundle of washing-bills in a
wardrobe-cupboard. But the anticipation of such a question, though
perhaps it became conventional before it disappeared altogether, was
certainly at one time real.
At any rate, helped by the example of Richardson--Father of English
novels as he is with whatever justice called--and by that overmastering
fancy for letter-writing itself, which, as should have been already made
clear, affected the century in which English novels were born--the
practice spread and held its ground. Fielding was too perfect an artist
in the higher and purer kind of fiction to favour it: and though Sterne
himself was a sufficiently characteristic letter-writer, the form would
not have suited the peculiar eccentricity of his two novels. But
Smollett's best, _Humphrey Clinker_, adopts the method, and is perhaps
one of its most successful examples. It suited the author's preference
for a succession of scenes rather than a connected plot; for the sharp
presentation of "humours" in character and incident. And it continued to
be practised both early in the nineteenth century--examples had swarmed
at the end of the eighteenth--and later. _Redgauntlet_ (which some have
thought one of the best of Scott's novels and which few good judges
would put much lower) is written in it to a great extent, but not
wholly. And it may be noticed that this combination of Letters and
narrative, which came in pretty early, is rather tell-tale. It is a sort
of confession of what certainly is the fact--that the novel entirely by
letters is a clumsy device, constantly getting in the way of the
"story." Indeed the method of _Redgauntlet_ is a kind of retreat to the
elder and more modern--one may say the more artistic and rational--plan
of _introducing_ letters, but only occasionally as auxiliaries to, and
as it were illustrations of, the actual narrative, not as substitutes
for, or at any rate main constituents of, it.[52] Indeed, in order to
make a novel wholly composed of letters thoroughly and absorbingly
attractive, either charm of style such as to make the kind of literature
in which it appears, more or less indifferent; or passion which is more
suitable to poetry or drama than to prose; or both, may seem
unnecessary.
[Sidenote: LETTERS AND BIOGRAPHY]
It was also in the eighteenth century--_the_ century once more of
letter-writing--that letters, this time genuine not fictitious, began
to play, to an important extent, a subsidiary part in yet another
department of literature--biography. They had always done so, of course,
to an extent less important in History, of which Biography is really a
subdivision. The truth expressed in that dictum of the pseudo-Demetrius
quoted above as to the illuminative power of letters on character could
be missed by no historian and by no biographer who had his wits about
him--even if he had less striking examples at hand than that letter of
the Emperor Tiberius to the Senate which is one of the Tacitean flashes
of lightning through the dark of history. But the credit of using
letters as a main constituent of biography--of originating the
"Life-and-Letters" class of books which fills so large a part of modern
library-shelves--has been given, as far as English is concerned, to
Mason in his dealings with Gray. There is so little to be said in favour
of Mason, that we need not enquire too narrowly into his right to this
commendation: though critical conscience must be appeased by adding that
he abused his privilege as an editor and "literary executor" by garbling
unblushingly. Boswell did Mason honour by acknowledging his example, and
much more also by following it; and this practically settled the matter.
Except in short pieces, which had need be of special excellence like
Carlyle's _Sterling_, the plan has always been followed since: and there
can here at least be no question that with a little favour of
circumstances, it is the best plan possible. You get, as has been said,
your character at first hand; if the letters include epistles to as well
as from him or her, you get invaluable side-lights; you get, except in
cases of wilful deception or great carelessness, the most trustworthy
accounts of fact; and you can, or ought to be able to, hear the man
talking.
At the same time it must be admitted that this "Life-and-Letters"
scheme, like every kind of art, requires care: and like most human
things, is exposed to dangers and difficulties in addition to some
previously noticed. To begin with, the _quality_ of the letters has to
be considered. It so happened that Mason, the originator by courtesy,
had unusually good material to work with. Gray, as is above pointed out
and as is also, with some provisos already made or very soon to be made,
universally admitted, is one of our best letter-writers. But not
everybody--not every considerable man or woman of letters even--can
write good letters.
And besides this--besides the temptation to rely on the letters and
merely to print them whether they deserve it or not--there is the
further difficulty--to judge by the scarcity of good biographies a very
great and insistent one--of composing the framework of the biography
itself so as to suit the letters--to give the apples of gold in a
picture not too obviously composed of some metal baser than silver.
Unless this is done it would be better simply to "calendar" the letters
themselves, with the barest schedule of dates and facts to assist the
comprehension of them. But to consider the different methods of doing
this--still more of presenting letters apart from deliberate
biographical intention--would lead us too far. Carlyle's _Cromwell_--the
presentation of an extraordinarily difficult set of documents not merely
with connecting narrative, but with a complete explanatory commentary
including paraphrase, is as remarkable an achievement as, and a far more
elaborate one than, his _Sterling_ in the way of biography pure and
simple. It is perhaps, though less delectable, not less admirable in its
style than the other in its own. But it has, of course, the drawback of
carrying with it a distinctly controversial character and, indeed,
intention. We have more recently had at least two examples of the
fullest possible comment with the least possible controversy in Mr.
Tovey's "Gray," and of less voluminous but excellently adequate editing
in Mrs. Toynbee's "Walpole."
[Sidenote: "LETTERS FROM UNKNOWNS"]
One not very large, but extremely curious division of letter-writing
closely connected with those most recently mentioned, invites if it does
not insist upon a word or two. Many people--almost all who have happened
to be at any time "in the lime-light" as a modern phrase goes--that is
to say in positions of publicity--must have had experience of the
strange appetite of their fellow-creatures for writing them letters
without previous acquaintance, without excuse of introduction, and on
the most flimsy pretexts of occasion. The present writer once received
from Australia a long list of queries on a book of his--most if not all
of which could have been answered from the ordinary reference-bookshelf
in the writing-room of such a club as that--never mind whether it was in
Sydney or Melbourne or Adelaide--from which the querist dated his
epistle. Indeed, on another occasion somebody demanded a catalogue of
"the important references to the medical profession in French
literature"! This tendency of humanity sometimes exercises and magnifies
itself into really remarkable correspondences. There is perhaps none
such in English quite to match those _Lettres à une Inconnue_ which
(after standing the brunt of not a little unfavourable criticism,
provoked not so much by their contents as by the personal, political,
and above all religious or anti-religious idiosyncrasy of their author,
Prosper Mérimée) have taken their place, for good and all, among the
classics of the art. Our most curious example perhaps is to be found in
the _Letters of the Duke of Wellington to Miss J._, the genuineness of
which has been a matter of some controversy, but which are rather more
inexplicable as forgeries than as authentic documents. Authors, from
Richardson onwards, have been the special targets of such
correspondents: and romance reports some, perhaps even history might
accept a few, instances of the closest relations resulting. On the other
hand, one of the very best of Miss Edgeworth's too much neglected
stories, "L'Amie Inconnue" not only may be useful as a warning to the
too open-hearted but has probably had not a few parallels in fact.
Generally, of course, the uninvited correspondent is merely a passing
phenomenon--rarely perhaps welcome except to persons of very much
self-centred temperament with a good deal of time on their hands;
tolerated and choked off placably by the good-natured and well-mannered;
answered snappishly or not answered at all by moroser victims.
[Sidenote: LOVE LETTERS]
There is yet a kind of letter, fictitious or real examples whereof are
not usually given in books which (as the Articles say of the Apocrypha)
are to be read "for example of life and instruction of manners," though
it is in a way the most interesting of all; and that is the love-letter.
It is, however, so varied in kind and not so very seldom so pre-eminent
as an illustration of the epistolary ideal--"writing as you would
talk"--that it would be absurd to say nothing about it in this
Introduction, and that it may even be possible to give some examples of
it--one such of Swift's must be given--in the text. Of those which, as
it was said of one famous group (those of Mlle. de Lespinasse) "burn the
paper," those of which the Abelard and Heloise collection, with those of
"The Portuguese Nun," Maria Alcoforado, and Julie de Lespinasse herself
are the most universally famous--we have two pretty recent collections
in English from two of the greatest poets and one of the greatest
poetesses in English of the nineteenth century. They are the letters,
referred to above, of Keats to Fanny Brawne, and those of the Brownings
to each other.
There are, it is to be hoped, few people who read such letters (unless
they are of such a date that Time has exercised his strange power of
resanctifying desecration and making private property public) without an
unpleasant consciousness of eavesdropping. But there is another class
which is not exposed to any such disagreeable liability: and that is the
very large proportion of love-letters where the amativeness is, so to
speak, more or less concealed, or where, though scarcely covered with
the thinnest veil, it is mixed with jest sometimes, jest rather on the
wrong side of the mouth, perhaps, but jest exercising its usual power of
embalming. (Salt and sugar both preserve: but in this particular
instance the danger is of oversweetness already.) There can--or perhaps
we should say there could, but for some differences of opinion worth
attending to--be no doubt that Swift owes much to this mixture: and if
anybody ever undertook a large collection of the best private
love-letters he would probably find the same seasoning in the best of
them. For examples in which the actual amatory element is present but as
it were under-current, like blood that flushes a cheek but does not
show outside it, some of the best examples are those of Scott to Lady
Abercorn. Those recently published, and already glanced at, of Disraeli
to various ladies would seem to be more demonstrative and more
histrionic. But the section as admitted lies, for us, on the extreme
border of our province. It is too important to be wholly omitted and
therefore these paragraphs have been given to it. And it may require
future touching in reference to some particular writers, especially that
greatest and most unhappy of all Deans of Saint Patrick, the greatest
perhaps of all Deans that ever were with the exception of John
Donne--himself no small epistoler, but greatest in those verse-letters
which are denied us.[53]
It is perhaps superfluous, but for completeness' sake may be
permissible, to say a very little about the use of letters for purposes
other than that of genuine personal communication. Indeed in doing so we
are only executing the time-honoured manoeuvre of returning to the point
whence we set out, and bringing the wheel full circle.[54] The strictly
"business" letter--which is, of course, a personal communication in a
way--and the "despatch" which is a form of it intended sooner or later
for more general information, require no notice or at best mere mention.
But in times past if not also in those present, "Letters" have been
used--specially perhaps in that century of letters, the eighteenth--for
purposes of definite instruction, argument, propaganda and so forth.
There are obvious advantages in the form for certain of the lighter of
these purposes as it is used in Montesquieu's _Lettres Persanes_ or
Goldsmith's _Citizen of the World_. But why Bishop Hurd's _Letters on
Chivalry and Romance_ (really valuable as they are) should have been
"Letters" at all, except for fashion's sake, it is difficult to say.
There is perhaps more excuse for the pamphlet, especially the political
pamphlet, assuming the title of letter as it has so often done in
instances from the great example of Bolingbroke and Burke downwards.[55]
You have, with less unreality, the advantage of the classical "speech"
addressed often to a single person, who is supposed to be specially
aware of the facts or specially to need instruction and encouragement,
or modified remonstrance, as to them. It was probably from these great
exemplars--perhaps also aided by the custom of eighteenth century
periodicals, that pamphlets of all kinds became titular epistles such as
"A Letter to the deputy-manager of a Theatre Royal, London, on his
lately acquired notoriety in contriving and arranging the 'Hair Powder
Act'" (but this was satire), or "A letter writ by a clergyman to his
neighbour concerning the kingdom and the allegiance due to the King and
Queen."[56]
[Sidenote: LETTERS TO THE PAPERS]
For a last class may be taken the ever increasing body of things
"written to the papers." It is unnecessary to consider the justice of a
sarcastic division of mankind into "those who write to the papers and
those who do not read the letters," or to discuss what men have been
heard to say--that the people who write _to_ papers are people who have
not written _in_ them. It is quite certain that, for many years past,
the less frivolous kind of newspaper-correspondence has been of admitted
interest and importance; indeed a paper might conceivably maintain its
position after its repute has sunk in other ways, simply because more
letters of importance appear in it than in others. As a source of
illustrations of how to write and how not to write letters this modern
development of the art could hardly be quite neglected; and it offers a
curious study of various kinds. Except with very guileless writers the
character-index quality is of course less certainly present than in
letters written _not_ for publication. A man must be, in the old Greek
phrase, "either a God or a beast," if he does not prepare for print--if
not exactly with a touch of "stage-fright," at any rate with the
premeditation with which even stage-fright-free actors go on the stage.
But it requires a great master or mistress of dissimulation to write
even these letters at all frequently without a certain amount of
self-revelation. And there is perhaps no more curious and interesting
part of that most curious and interesting business of editing than
(when it is not merely tedious), the reading of offered correspondence.
There is the pure lunatic, such as the man who for years sends
despatches in a sort of cuneiform cipher, probably quite meaningless and
certainly not likely to meet with a decipherer; there is the abusive
person who (less piquantly than Reade in the letter quoted above) gives
his opinion of your paper; the volunteer-corrector of obvious misprints;
the innocent who merely wants to see his own signature in print, and who
generally tries to bribe his way into it by references to "your powerful
journal," etc. They are all there--waiting for the waste-paper basket.
VII
CONCLUSION
A few more general remarks may close this Introduction. Something on the
Art of Letter-writing and also something on its history, especially in
English, was promised. It is hoped that the promise has not been too
much falsified, at least to the extent necessary for illustration and
understanding of the specimens which should follow, and which in their
turn should illustrate it and make it more intelligible. The History
part requires little or no postscript; whether ill or well done it
should pretty well speak for itself. What touches the Art may require
certain cautions and provisos.
This is especially the case with regard to the stress laid above on
"naturalness." It is (as the present writer at least believes) the very
passport of admission to the company of good letter-writers. But it must
not be misconstrued. It is quite possible that too little care may be
taken with the matter and style of letters. After all they
correspond--in a certain, if in the most limited degree--to appearance
"in company," and require as that does a certain etiquette of
observance. Complete deshabille[57] on paper is not attractive: and
there are letters (it is unnecessary to specify any particular
examples) which somewhat exaggerate "simplicity."
Cowper is perhaps the accepted classic in this style who has the least
of _apparatus_: but even Cowper bestows a certain amount of
care--indeed, a very considerable amount--on the dress of his letter's
body, on the cookery of its provender. If you have only small beer to
chronicle you can at the worst draw it and froth it and pour it out with
some gesture. In this respect as in others, while letter-writing has not
been inaccurately defined or described as the closest to conversation of
literary forms that do not actually reproduce conversation itself, it
remains apart from conversation and subject to an additional degree of
discipline.
[Sidenote: CONCLUSION]
Enough should have been said earlier of the opposite fault by excess of
dressing, which has, however, for a sort of solace the fact that it may
pass as literature though not exactly as letter-writing. Actually
beautiful style--not machine-made "fine writing," but that embodiment of
thought which is a special incarnation of it--is the one thing secure of
success and survival, whatever literary form it takes. And even short of
this supreme beauty accomplished literary manner can never be quite
unwelcome. The highest place in letter-writing has been refused here to
Pope: and unfortunately there is hardly a division of his work which,
when you know a little more about it and him, excites more disgust at
the man's nature. But, at the same time, hardly even his verse convinces
one more of that extraordinary power of expression as he wished to
express things which this Alexander, in some ways the infinitely
Little, possessed. Yet it gives in the first place a rather
sophisticated enjoyment, open only to those whom the gods have made, or
who have made themselves, critical. And in the second, whether
sophisticated or not, what it gives is the enjoyment of literature not
of life:[58] whereas the direct satisfaction which genuine letters
afford is almost identical with that given by actual intercourse with
other human beings. However, it is unnecessary to "go on refining."
Perhaps indeed, after all, the artificial letters may be permitted if
only in an "utmost, last, provincial band," to add to the muster of
pleasure-giving things which epistolary literature so amply provides.
Even fiction itself, which, as has been said often, draws on this
source, cannot supply anything more "pastimeous"; even drama anything
more arresting to the attention. Indeed good letters may be said to be
constantly presenting little stories, little dramas, little
pictures--all of them sometimes not so _very_ little--which are now
practically complete; now easily filled up by any reasonable
intelligence; now perhaps tantalizingly, but all the more interestingly
enigmatic. For those people (one may or may not sympathise with them,
but they are certainly pretty numerous) who cannot take interest or can
only take a reduced interest in things that "did not really happen";
letters may be even more interesting than novels. Only to very wayward
or very unimaginative ones can they be less so, if they are in any
respect good of their kind.
One of their main attractions is, with the same caution, their
remarkable _variety_. It has been complained with a certain amount of
truth that fiction, whether in prose or verse, is a little apt to fall
into grooves: that all the histories are told, all the plays acted. This
is undoubtedly the curse of Art, and every now and then we see it
acknowledged in the most convincing manner by the frantic efforts made
to be "different." But that real things and persons are never quite
identical is not merely a philosophical doctrine but a practical fact.
The "two peas" of one saying are never so much "alike" as the "two
blades of grass" of another are unlike.
Now as letters--that is to say letters that deserve to exist at all--are
bound to reproduce the personality of their writers, it will follow that
a refreshing diversity must also belong to them. And as a matter of fact
this will be found to be the case. Even the eighteenth century--the
century of rule and class, of objection to "the streaks of the tulip,"
of machine-made verse, etc.,--has, except in the case of letters
artificially made to pattern, shown this signally.
One last recommendation. A bad letter-writer is sure to betray himself
almost everywhere, and letters are as a rule short. Most people must
have attempted books of other classes, especially novels, and hoping
against hope turned them over, and dipped and peeped till repeated
disappointment compelled the traditional flinging to the other end of
the room, or simply dropping the thing in less explosive weariness. You
never need do that with letters. If a man's letters are not worth
reading you will "have a confessing criminal" at once; if they are he
will hardly be able to keep the quality latent whenever he goes beyond
the shortest business note. The man of one book, in the sense of having
read it, is proverbially formidable but in fact too frequently a bore.
The man of one letter, in the sense of having written a good one and no
more, probably never existed.[59]
APPENDIX TO INTRODUCTION
I
GREEK LETTERS.--SYNESIUS (_c._ 375-430)
English readers may know something, from Kingsley's
_Hypatia_, of the excellent bishop of Ptolemais who, at the
meeting of the fourth and fifth centuries, combined the
functions of neo-Platonist philosopher, Christian prelate,
country gentleman, and most efficient yeomanry officer
against the ancestors, or at least forerunners, of the
present Senussi, who were constantly raiding his diocese and
its neighbourhood. These two letters--to Hypatia herself and
to his brother--show him in different, but in each case
favourable lights.
LETTER CVIII. (TO HIS BROTHER)
I have already got 300 spears and as many cutlasses, though I had, even
before, only half a score two-edged swords: and these long flat blades
are not forged with us. But I think the cutlasses can be struck more
vigorously into the enemies' bodies, and so we shall use them. And at
need we shall have bludgeons--for the wild olive trees are good with
us.[60] Some of our men have single-bladed axes at their belts with
which those of us who have no defensive armour shall chop their[61]
shields and make them fight on equal terms. The fight will, at a guess,
come off to-morrow: for when some of the foe had fallen in with scouts
of ours and pursuing them at their best speed had found them too good to
catch, they bade them tell us what pleased us mightily--if indeed we may
no more have to wander in the footsteps of those fellows who made off
into the wastes of the interior. For they said they were going to stay
where they were and wanted to find out what sort of fellows _we_ were,
who dared to separate ourselves so many days' journey from our own place
that we might fight with men of war, nomads in way of life, and whose
civil polity was like our discipline in war-time. Therefore, as one who
by God's help shall to-morrow conquer--nay, conquer again if needful
(for I would say nothing of bad omen) I commit to thee the care of my
children: for it is fitting that thou, their uncle, shouldest carry over
thine affection to them.
LETTER CXXIV
"But if oblivion be the lot of the dead in Hades yet will _I_, even
there, remember" my dear Hypatia. Beset as I am by the sufferings of my
country, and sick, as I see daily weapons of war about me and men
slaughtered like altar-victims; drawing as I do breath infected by
rotting corpses; expecting myself a similar fate, (for who can be
hopeful when the very atmosphere is weighed down and dusky with the
shadow of carnivorous birds?) yet do I cling to my country. For what
else would my feeling be, born and bred as I am, and with the not
ignoble tombs of my fathers before my eyes? For thee alone does it seem
to me that I could neglect my country, and if I could get leisure, force
myself to run away.[62]
LATIN LETTERS.--PLINY (62-114)
The most famous letters of the younger Pliny are those which
describe his country houses, that which gives account of his
uncle's death in the great eruption of Vesuvius, and his
correspondence with Trajan. But the first mentioned are
rather long and require a good deal of technical
annotation;[63] the second is to be found in many books; and
the letters which make up the third (except those concerning
Christianity, which are again to be found in many places)
are mostly short and on points of business merely. The one I
have chosen is extremely characteristic, in two respects, of
the author and of Roman ways generally. It shows Pliny's
good-nature and right feeling, but it shows also a certain
"priggishness" with which he has been specially and
personally charged, but which, to speak frankly, he shared
with a great many of his famous countrymen. Priggishness was
almost unknown among the Greeks--though one may suspect its
presence among those Spartans who have told so few tales of
themselves. But it flourished at Rome, and was one of
Rome's many--and one of her worst--legacies to us moderns.
Secondly, the letter is amusing because one thinks what an
English judge would surely think and would probably say, if
counsel for a lady were to inform the court _uberius et
latius_ what an extremely good opinion that lady's father
had of him, the learned speaker. A minor but still
interesting difference is in Pliny's slight hesitation about
taking a brief against a consul-elect. The subtleties of
Roman etiquette are endless.
PLINIUS TO HIS ASINIUS GALLUS--HEALTH
You both advise[64] and ask me to take up the cause of Corellia in her
absence against C. Caecilius, Consul elect. I am obliged to you for
advising me but I complain of your _asking_. I ought to be advised that
I may know the fact, but not asked to do what it would be most
disgraceful for me _not_ to do. Could I doubt about protecting the
daughter of Corellius? True, there is between me and him against whom
you call on me, not exactly close friendship but still some friendship.
There is also to be taken into account the man's worth and the honour to
which he is destined, a thing which I ought to hold in the greater
respect that I have myself already enjoyed it. For it is natural that
things which one has oneself attained, one should wish to be regarded
with the greatest respect. But when I think that I am to help Corellius'
daughter, all this appears idle and empty. I seem to see the man than
whom our age had no one more dignified, more pious, of an acuter mind;
the man whom, when I had begun to like him out of admiration I admired
more, contrary to what usually happens, the more thoroughly I knew him.
For I did know him thoroughly; he kept nothing hid from me, neither
jocular nor serious, neither sad nor glad. I was quite a young man: but
already he held me in honour and I will dare to say respect--as if I
were his contemporary. He gave me his vote and interest in my standings
for honours; he, when I entered upon them, was my introducer and
companion; when I carried them out, my adviser and guide. In fact, in
every business of mine, though he was an old man and in weak health, he
was as forward as if he were young and strong. How much he furthered my
reputation, privately, publicly, and even with the Chief of the State!
For when by chance, in the presence of the Emperor Nerva, the
conversation had turned on young men of worth, and several persons spoke
in praise of me, he kept silence for a little, which gave him the more
authority. Then in the weighty manner you know, "I must needs," he said,
"say all the less about Secundus[65] because he never does anything but
by my advice." By saying this he gave me the credit (which it would have
been extravagant in me to hope for) of never doing anything in other
than the wisest way, seeing that I always acted on the advice of the
wisest man. Moreover, when dying, he said to his daughter, as she is
wont to declare, "I have provided you, as if I were myself to live
longer, many friends: but for the chief of them Secundus and Cornutus."
Now when I remember this, I see I must take care not in any way to
disappoint the trust in me of this most fore-thoughtful man. Therefore I
will come to Corellia's help without the least delay and will not refuse
to undergo inconveniences: though I think I shall secure not merely
pardon but even praise from the very person who as you say is bringing
a new action as against a woman, if it should happen to me to say these
same things in court more amply and fully than the narrow room of a
letter permits, either to excuse or indeed commend myself. Farewell.
LETTER OF THE "DARK" AGES
SIDONIUS APOLLINARIS (431?-482-4)
Caius Sollius Sidonius Apollinaris is one of the most
interesting figures of the troubled and obscure period
intervening between the fall of the Roman Empire _proper_
and the rise of mediaeval Europe. He was born at Lyons,
married Papianilla, daughter of Flavius Avitus, who was to
be one of the ephemeral "Emperors" of the West and the
Decadence, but was not injured by his father-in-law's
dethronement, and enjoyed various civil honours and posts.
In 471, though a married layman, he was peremptorily made a
bishop, and accordingly took orders, put away his wife, and
discharged his sacred duties as creditably as he had
discharged his profane ones. Sidonius was a not contemptible
poet, and an interesting letter-writer. Like most literary
men of his class he was given to what we call flattery; and
this Ecdicius, of whom he made a sort of Dark Age Admirable
Crichton, was his brother-in-law, an Emperor's son, and
Count or Duke (the titles were often interchangeable) of the
district. But it is fair to say that Gregory of Tours, the
accepted historian of the period, and living only in the
next century, makes the exploit over the Goths even more
signal--for he reduces the troopers to _ten_. The Arverni
(inhabitants of Auvergne and its neighbourhood) were the
strongest tribe in Southern Gaul when the Romans first came
into contact with them, retained much prominence in Caesar's
time, and had not lost individuality, if they had lost
independence, by this (5th) century. The mixture of "Arms"
and the "Gown" is noteworthy.
BOOK III. LETTER III
SIDONIUS TO HIS ECDICIUS--HEALTH
If ever, now you are longed for by my Arvernians, whose love for you
subdues them remarkably, and indeed for all sorts of reasons. First,
because a man's native land has the greatest part in creating affection
for him.[66] Then, because in your time you are about the only mortal
who was longed for before his birth as much as he was rejoiced in after
it.... I say nothing of such things--common to all, but no mean
incitement to affection--as that you crawled as a child on the same turf
with them. I pass over the grass which you first trod, the river you
first swam, the woods you broke through in hunting. I leave out the fact
that it was here you first played ball[67] and backgammon,[68] that you
hawked, coursed, rode, shot with the bow. I omit the fact that for the
sake of your boyish presence students of letters came hither from all
parts; and that it was due to you as an individual that our nobility,
anxious to shed the slough of Celtic speech, imbued itself now with the
style of oratory, now with the measures of the Muse. And this specially
kindled the love of the community[69] that you forbade those whom you
had already made Latins[70] to remain barbarians.[71] For it could never
slip the memory of our citizens what and how great you seemed, to every
age and rank and sex on the half-ruined mounds of our walls, when,
accompanied by scarcely eighteen horsemen, you cut your way through some
thousands of Goths in full daylight and (which posterity will hardly
believe) in the open field. A well trained army stood aghast at the
sound of your name and the sight of your person: so that the leaders of
the enemy, in their astonishment, hardly knew how many were their
followers, how few yours. Their line was then withdrawn to the brow of a
steep hill; it had before been gathered together to storm, but on your
appearance was not deployed for battle. Meanwhile you, having slain some
of their best men whom not sloth but courage had made the rearmost of
the troop, occupied the level ground alone, though such a fight gave you
not so many comrades as your table is wont to contain guests. And when
you returned to the town at your leisure what came to meet you in the
way of official compliments, applause, tears, rejoicings can be better
guessed than described. One might see in the crammed halls of the
spacious palace that happy ovation for your thronged return. Some caught
up the dust of your footsteps to kiss it: others took out the horses'
curbs stained with blood and foam; others prepared the stands for the
saddles drenched with the horses' sweat; others, when you were about to
put off your helmet, unbuckled the clasps of its plated chin-straps, or
busied themselves with unlacing your greaves. Yet others counted the
notches on the swords, blunted with slaughter, or measured with
livid[72] fingers the rings of the corslets, slashed or pierced by
weapons.[73]
EARLY MEDIAEVAL LETTER (TWELFTH CENTURY)
Of the other persons mentioned in this letter besides the
widowed Duchess and King Louis VII., the first is Ralph,
Count of (Peronne and) Vermandois, a leper. The lady's name
was Eleanor, and she also was probably a widow; the
Duchess's son Hugh was third of that name as Duke of
Burgundy. Ivo, Count of Soissons, was the guardian of the
Count of Vermandois, incapacitated legally by his plague.
The proposed marriage did not come off. The business-like
tone of the letter will only surprise those who do not
really know the "Ages of Romance." I owe the selection of it
to my friend the Rev. W. Hunt, D.Litt., who came to my aid
in the dearth of books of this period which circumstances
imposed on me.
To Louis[74] most excellent King of the Franks by the grace of God, and
her most beloved Lord, Mary, Duchess of Burgundy--health and due
respect. It is known to your Majesty that my son is your liegeman, and,
if it please you, your kinsman also. Whatsoever he can do is yours: and
if he could do more it were yours. And so I all the more confidently ask
your highest affection for my son. For it has been told me that Count
Ralph of Peronne has a certain marriageable sister who, as has been
reported to me and her own people, would be a suitable wife for my son.
For this reason, most beloved Lord, I and he ask that you would look to
this matter yourself and speak about it to the Count of Soissons, and
settle how this marriage may be contracted. You must know that though my
son might marry in another kingdom, I greatly prefer that he should
take a wife in yours, rather than in any other. The nearer he becomes
connected with you the more will he be yours and altogether a profit to
you.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] It may of course be "illustrated" in the other sense by a second use
of the pen; and we shall have instances of this kind to notice.
[2] As has often been pointed out Ben Jonson's exquisite "Drink to me
only with thine eyes" is a verse-paraphrase or mosaic from this writer's
prose.
[3] Pliny, if he did not always "write for publication," deliberately
"published," as we should say, his letters. Indeed, he is one of the
first to use the word in this sense, even if he uses it immediately of
an oration not a letter. Some think Cicero meant publication; and he was
very likely to do so.
[4] The Latin statesman, like the Greek bishop, condescends to write
about wine and even more fully. One of the most interesting and
informing things on the subject is his discourse on _vinum acinaticium_,
a sort of Roman Imperial Tokay made from grapes kept till the frost had
touched them.
[5] Genuine letters of Sappho would have been of the first interest to
compare with those of Heloise, and the "Portuguese Nun" and Mademoiselle
de Lespinasse. Diotima's might have been as disappointing as George
Eliot's: but by no means must necessarily have been so. Aspasia's,
sometimes counterfeited, ought to have been good.
[6] It is part of the plan to give, as a sort of Appendix to the
Introduction, and extension of it towards the main body of text, some
specimens of Greek, Roman (classical and post-classical) and Early
Mediaeval letter-writing, translated for the purpose by the present
writer. The _continuity_ of literary history is a thing which deserves
to be attended to, especially when there is an ever-growing tendency to
confine attention to things modern--albeit so soon to be antiquated! I
owe the last of these specimens, in the Latin from which I translate it,
to the kindness of my friend the Rev. W. Hunt, D.Litt., to whom I had
recourse as not myself having access to a large library at the moment,
and who has assisted me in other parts of this book.
[7] Yet others, as to authenticity, have, I believe, been rejected by
all competent scholarship.
[8] Benjamin Constant and Madame de Charrière.
[9] Some of us think Blake a great poet; but this is scarcely a general
opinion, and he does not appear till the century was three parts over.
Burns (whose own letters by the way do him little justice) hardly comes
in.
[10] Especially the most popular and voluminous if not the most
important of all--the periodical and the novel.
[11] The danger being of many sorts--usually in the direction of various
kinds of _excess_. A _quietly_ tragic letter may be a masterpiece:
perhaps there is no finer example than one to be again referred to, of
Mrs. Carlyle's.
[12] Mr. Paul thinks that "the baby language" is terribly out of
character, and that there is "too much of it"; that Swift "would try to
make love though he did not know what love meant"; and that the whole
rings hollow and insincere. Others, women as well as men, have held that
the "little language" is only less pathetic than it is charming; that
Swift was one of the greatest, if one of the unhappiest lovers of the
world; and that the thing is as sincere as if it had been written in the
Palace of Truth and only hollow as is the space between Heaven and Hell.
[13] It should never be, but perhaps sometimes is, forgotten that
"Stella" was a lady of unusual wits, and of what Swift's greatest
decrier called in his own protegée Mrs. Williams "universal curiosity,"
that is to say not "inquisitiveness" but "intelligent interest." The
politics etc. are not mere selfish attention to what interests the
writer only.
[14] It must not be forgotten that she was Fielding's cousin. And after
the remark above on Swift it is pleasant and may be fair to say that Mr.
Paul is a hearty "Marian."
[15] Johnson is again the chief and by no means trustworthy witness for
this "insolence." But in the same breath he admitted that Chesterfield
was "dignified." Now dignity is almost as doubtfully compatible with
insolence as with impudence.
[16] It is difficult to think of anyone who has combined statesmanship
(Chesterfield's accomplishments in which are constantly forgotten),
social gifts and literary skill in an equal degree.
[17] Excluding of course purely historical and public things like the
trials of the '45 and the riots of '80.
[18] They were travelling together (always rather a test of friendship)
in Italy, and Horace, as he confesses, no doubt gave himself airs. But
it is pretty certain that Gray had not at this time, if he ever had,
that fortunate combination of good (or at least well-commanded) temper
and good breeding which enables a gentleman to meet such conduct with
conduct on his own side as free from petulant "touchiness" as from
ignoble parasitism.
[19] Gray was not, like Walpole, a richly endowed sinecurist. But to use
a familiar "bull" he seems never to have had anything to do, and never
to have done it when he had. His poems are a mere handful; his excellent
_Metrum_ is a fragment; and as Professor of History at Cambridge he
never did anything at all.
[20] They do not seem to have known each other personally. But (for
reasons not difficult to assign but here irrelevant) Johnson was on the
whole, though not wholly, unjust to Gray, and Gray seems to have
disliked and spoken rudely of Johnson.
[21] The varieties of what may be called literary _exercise_ which have
been utilised for educational or recreative purposes, are almost
innumerable. Has anyone ever tried "breaking up" a letter (such as those
to be given hereafter) into a conversation by interlarded comment,
questions, etc.?
[22] As far as the accidents are concerned. The essentials vary not.
Marianne is eternal, whether she faints and blushes, or jazzes and--does
not blush.
[23] One unfortunate exception, the _ex-post facto_ references to the
split with Lady Austin, may be urged by a relentless prosecutor. But
when William has to choose between Mary and Anna it will go hard but he
will _have_ to be unfair to one of them.
[24] This "swan's" utterances in poetry were quite unlike those of
Tennyson's dying bird: and her taste in it was appalling. She tells
Scott that the Border Ballads were totally destitute of any right to the
name.
[25] For a singular misjudgment on this point see Prefatory Note
_infra_.
[26] Particularly when he is able to apply the _Don Juan_ mood of
sarcastic if rather superficial life-criticism in which he was a real
master.
[27] _I.e._ "violently and vulgarly absurd."
[28] It may, however, be suggested that the extraordinary _bluntness_
(to use no stronger word) of both is almost sufficiently evidenced in
the fact that in his last edition of Keats Mr. Forman committed the
additional outrage of distributing these letters according to their
dates among the rest. The isolation of the agony gives almost the only
possible excuse for revealing it.
[29] It is of course true that Shelley himself did not at first quite
appreciate Keats. But _Adonais_ cancels the deficit and leaves an almost
infinite balance in favour. One can only hope that, had the
circumstances been reversed, Keats would have set the account right as
triumphantly.
[30] This tendency makes it perhaps desirable to observe that in the
_particular_ context of the _Belle Dame_ there is nothing whatever to
cavil at.
[31] The recent centenary saw, as usual, with much welcome appreciation
some uncritical excesses.
[32] In not a few cases they may be said to have been deliberately
_un_prepared--intended though not labelled as "private and
confidential."
[33] In which, be it remembered, the "Life-and-Letters" system only came
in quite late.
[34] At the very moment when this is being written a considerable new
body of them is announced for sale.
[35] The word "restraint" may be misunderstood: but it is intended to
indicate something of the general difference between "classical" ages on
the one side and "romantic" or "realist" on the other.
[36] Chesterfield's deafness might, without frivolity, be brought in. It
is a hindrance to conversation, but none to letter-writing.
[37] Or at least expression of themselves.
[38] Idly: because he himself expressly and repeatedly disclaims _mere_
"translation."
[39] Dryden, in reference to Shadwell.
[40] "The Great God Pan" piece ("A Musical Instrument"), one of the
last, was perhaps her _very_ best. But he may have been thinking of
_Poems before Congress_, which are poor enough.
[41] Lucy, daughter of that curious Quaker banker's clerk Bernard
Barton, whose poetry is negligible, but who must have had some strong
personal attraction. For he was a favourite correspondent of two of the
greatest of contemporary letter-writers, Lamb and FitzGerald, though he
constantly misunderstood their letters; he received from Byron--on an
occasion likely to provoke one of the "noble poet's" outbursts of
pseudo-aristocratic insolence--a singularly wise and kindly answer; and
having as a perfect stranger lectured Sir Robert Peel he was--invited to
dinner!
[42] Some have attempted to make a distinction, alleging that there are
Franceses who can be called "Fanny" and others who can not. But it is
doubtful whether this holds. Of two great proficients of "letter-stuff"
in overlapping generations Fanny Burney was eminently a "Fanny." Fanny
Kemble, though always called so, was not.
[43] She was the niece of Mrs. Siddons and of John Kemble, generally
considered the greatest tragic actor and actress we have had; the
daughter of Charles Kemble, a player and manager of long practice and
great ability; while she had yet another uncle and any number of more
distant relations in the profession.
[44] See Prefatory Note on her letters _infra_, for an illustration of
what is said of her here and of Mrs. Carlyle a little further.
[45] Gray may not produce this effect of slight repulsion on everyone:
but on the other hand it is pretty generally admitted that the more you
read Walpole the more does the prejudice, which Macaulay and others have
helped to create against him, crumble and melt.
[46] They grow more and more numerous; a fresh batch having been
announced while this Introduction was being written.
[47] I see that Mr. Paul also has made special reference to this letter
and no wonder. From the time of its first publication I have regarded it
as matchless. But it seems to me that while it is lawful to mention it,
it should not have been published and that to republish it here would be
at least questionable.
[48] The present writer remembers as a boy reading (he supposes in the
newspaper to which it was addressed but is not sure) this very
remarkable epistle of Reade's to an editor: "Sir, you have brains of
your own and good ones. Do not echo the bray of such a very small ass as
the...." There was more, but this was the gist of it. Whether it has
ever reappeared he cannot say.
[49] Anthony Trollope did not choose to make his Autobiography a
"Life-and-Letters." But he has used the inserted letter very freely and
sometimes with great effect in his novels, for instance Mr. Slope's to
Eleanor Harding in _Barchester Towers_.
[50] In his Essay mentioned in Preface.
[51] The "Answer to the Introductory Epistle" of _The Monastery_.
[52] This plan was older than the "novel _by_ letters," and had, as
noticed above, been largely used in the sixteenth and seventeenth
century "heroic" romance.
[53] There is of course a class exactly opposite to the
love-letter--that of more or less modified hate or at least dislike.
Johnson's epistle to Chesterfield is an example of the dignified form of
this; Hazlitt's to Gifford of the undignified. But considering our
deserved reputation for humour we are less strong than might be expected
in letters which make the supposed writer make _himself_ ridiculous.
Sydney Smith's "Noodle's Oration" is the sort of thing in another kind:
and some of the letters in the _Spectator_ class of periodical are fun
in the kind itself. Defoe's _Shortest Way with the Dissenters_ comes
near. But we have nothing like the famous _Epistolae Obscurorum
Virorum_, which are the very triumph of the style.
[54] See the extensive classification of the Greeks, as noticed and
reproduced before.
[55] The "Letter to Sir W. Windham" of the one and the "Letter to a
noble Lord" of the other, have ample justification. _Letters on a
Regicide Peace_, great as they are in themselves, have less claim to
their title. But it was a favourite with both writers.
[56] The King was William and the Queen Mary, which limits considerably
the otherwise rather illimitable "concerning the kingdom."
[57] This word is of course a _vox nihili_, being neither French nor
English. But it has usage in its favour, and I do not see that it is
improved by writing it "_dis_habille." If anyone prefers the actual
French form he can add the accents.
[58] The account of the journey with Lintot the publisher is sometimes
quoted in disproof of this. It is amusing, but has still to some tastes
Pope's factitiousness without the technical charm of his verse to carry
it off.
[59] There is one small but rather famous class of letters which perhaps
should receive separate though brief notice. It is that of laconic and
either intentionally or unintentionally humorous utilisations of the
letter-form. Of one sort Captain Walton's "Spanish fleet taken and
destroyed as per margin" is probably the most noted type: of another the
equally famous rejoinder of the Highland magnate to his rival "Dear
Glengarry, When you have proved yourself to be my chief, I shall be
happy to admit your claim. Meanwhile I am Yours, Macdonald." In pure
farce of an irreverent kind, the possibly apocryphal interchange between
a Royal Duke and a Right Reverend Bishop, "Dear Cork, Please ordain
Stanhope, Yours, York," and "Dear York, Stanhope's ordained. Yours,
Cork," has the palm as a recognised "chestnut." But these things are
only the frills if not even the froth of the subject; and those who
imitate them should exercise caution in the imitation. The
police-courts, and even more exalted, but still more unwholesome abodes
of Justice, have sometimes been the consequences of misguided satire in
letters. Even in Captain Walton's case the Spaniards are said to have
endeavoured to show that his ironical laconism (which, moreover,
tradition has perhaps exaggerated in form) was not strictly in
accordance with fact.
[60] Wild olive, with more peaceful uses, was also the usual material
for the _un_peaceful club, or quarter-staff, often iron-shod, of the
ancients. It was probably like the _lathi_ which the mild Hindoo takes
with him to political meetings. The [Greek: pelekys] of the ancients was
generally double-bladed, hence the limitation here. This would be
lighter and more convenient to carry in the belt.
[61] Of course "the enemies'."
[62] Synesius addresses his letters to Hypatia [Greek: tê
phil
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