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 Sevigne, 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
glace_. 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 Sevigne'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 macedoine 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.