THIS lecture was founded by Mr. George F. Dominick, of the Class of
1894, in memory of Daniel S. Lamont, private secretary to President
Cleveland, and afterwards Secretary of War, during Mr. Cleveland’s
second term of office. Mr. Dominick had a high regard for Lamont’s skill
as a letter writer and in the composition of messages, despatches, and
reports. It was his wish, not only to perpetuate the memory of his
friend and to associate it with his own Alma Mater, but to give his
memorial a shape which should mark his sense of the importance of the
art of letter writing.
Mr. Dominick thought that Lamont was particularly happy in turning a
phrase and that many of the expressions which passed current in
Cleveland’s two presidencies were really of his secretary’s coinage. I
don’t suppose that we are to transfer such locutions as “innocuous
desuetude” and “pernicious activity” from the President to his
secretary. They bear the stamp of their authorship. I fancy that Mr.
Lamont’s good phrases took less room to turn in.
But however this may be, the founder of this lecture is certainly right
in his regard for the art of letter writing. It is an important asset in
any man’s equipment, and I have heard it said that the test of education
is the ability to write a good letter. Merchants, manufacturers, and
business men generally, in advertising for clerks or assistants, are apt
to judge of the fitness of applicants for positions by the kind of
letters that they write. If these are illegible, ill-spelled, badly
punctuated and paragraphed, ungrammatical, confused, repetitious,
ignorantly or illiterately expressed, they are usually fatal to their
writers’ hopes of a place. This is not quite fair, for there is many a
shrewd man of business who can’t write a good letter. But surely a
college graduate may be justly expected to write correct English; and he
is likely to be more often called on to use it in letters than in any
other form of written composition. “The writing of letters,” says John
Locke, “has so much to do in all the occurrences of human life, that no
gentleman can avoid showing himself in this kind of writing . . . which
always lays him open to a severer examination of his breeding, sense and
abilities than oral discourses whose transient faults . . . more easily
escape observation and censure.” _Litera scripta manet._ Who was the
prudent lady in one of Rhoda Broughton’s novels who cautioned her
friend: “My dear, never write a letter; there’s not a scrap of my
handwriting in Europe”? Rightly or wrongly, we are quick to draw
conclusions as to a person’s social antecedents from his pronunciation
and from his letters.
In the familiar epistle, as in other forms of social intercourse,
nothing can quite take the place of old use and wont. Still the proper
forms may be learned from the rhetoric books, just as the young man
whose education has been neglected may learn from the standard manuals
of politeness, such as “Etiquette and Eloquence or The Perfect
Gentleman,” what the right hour is for making an evening call, and on
what occasions the Tuxedo jacket is the correct thing. The rhetorics
give directions how to address a letter, to begin it, to close it, and
where to put the postage stamp; directions as to the date, the
salutation, the signature, and cautions not to write “yours
respectively” instead of “yours respectfully.” These are useful, but
beyond these the rhetoric books cannot go, save in the way of general
advice. The model letters in “The Complete Letter Writer” are dismal
things. “Ideas,” says one of these textbook authorities, “ideas should
be collected by the card system.” Now I rather think that ideas should
_not_ be collected by the card system, or by any other system. The charm
of a personal letter is its spontaneity. Any suspicion that the ideas in
it have been “collected” is deadly. To do the rhetoric books justice,
the best of them warn against formality in all except the necessarily
formal portions of the letter. A letter, like an epic poem, should begin
_in medias res_. Ancient targets for jest are the opening formulae in
servant girls’ correspondence. “I take my pen in hand to inform you that
I am well and hope you are enjoying the same great blessing;” or the
sentence with which our childish communications used to start out: “Dear
Champ,—As I have nothing else to do I thought I would write you a
letter”—matter of excusation and apology which Bacon instructs us to
avoid.
The little boy whom Dr. John Brown tells about was unconsciously obeying
Aristotle’s rule. Without permission he had taken his brother’s gun and
broken it; and after hiding himself all day, he opened written
communications with his stern elder; a blotted and tear-spotted scrawl
beginning: “O Jamie, your gun is broke and my heart is broke.”
But no general rules for letter writing give much help; nor for that
matter, do general rules for any kind of writing. A little practice in
the concrete, under intelligent guidance, is worth any number of
rhetorical platitudes. But such as it is, the rule for a business letter
is just the reverse of that for a friendly letter. It should be as brief
as is consistent with clearness, for your correspondent is a business
man, whose time is his money. It should above all things, however, be
explicit; and in striving to avoid surplusage should omit nothing that
is necessary. Ambiguity is here the unpardonable sin and has occasioned
thousands of law suits, involving millions of dollars. It should be
severely impersonal. Pleasantries, sentiments, digressions and the like
are impertinences in a business letter, like the familiarity of an
unintroduced stranger. I knew a lawyer—and a good lawyer—who suffered
professionally, because he would get himself into his business letters.
He made jokes; he made quotations; sometimes French quotations which his
correspondents could not translate; he expressed opinions and vented
emotions on subjects only incidentally connected with the matter in
hand, which he embroidered with wit and fancy; and he was a long time
coming to the point. Now men of business may trifle about all other
serious aspects of life or death, but when it concerns the making of
money, they are in deadly earnest; so that my friend’s frivolous
treatment of those interests seemed to them little less than sacrilege.
Viewed then as one of the commonest means of communication between man
and man, it is well to be able to write a good letter; just as it is
well to know how to tie a bowknot, cast an account, carve a joint, shave
oneself, or meet any other of the ordinary occasions of life. But tons
of letters are emptied from the mail bags every day, and burned, which
serve no other than a momentary end. The art of composing letters worth
keeping and printing is a part of the art literary. The word letters and
the word literature are indeed used interchangeably; we speak of a man
of letters, polite letters, the _belles lettres_, _literae humaniores_.
How far are such expressions justified? Manifestly a letter, or a
collection of letters, has not the structural unity and the deliberate
artistic appeal of the higher forms of literature. It is not like an
epic poem, a play, a novel or an ode. It has an art of its own, but an
art of a particular kind, the secret of which is artlessness. It is not
addressed to the public but to an individual and should betray no
consciousness of any third party. It belongs, therefore, in the class
with journals and table talk and, above all, autobiography, of which it
constitutes the very best material. A book is written for everybody, a
diary for oneself, a letter for one’s friend. While a letter, therefore,
cannot quite claim a standing among the works of the creative
imagination, yet it comes so freshly out of life and is so true in
self-expression that, in some moods, we prefer it to more artificial or
more objective kinds of literature; just as the advertisements in an old
newspaper or magazine often have a greater veracity and freshness as
dealing with the homely, actual needs and concerns of the time, than the
stories, poems, and editorials whose fashion has faded.
I am speaking now of a genuine letter, “a link between two
personalities,” as it has been defined. There are two varieties of
letters which are not genuine. The first of these is the open letter,
the letter to the editor, letter to a noble lord, etc. This is really
addressed to the public through the medium of a more or less imaginary
correspondent. The Englishman’s habit of writing to the _London Times_
on all occasions is proverbial. Professor Goldwin Smith is a living
example of the practice, transplanted to the field of the American
newspaper press. But _private_ letters written with an eye to
publication are spoiled in the act. To be natural they should not mean
to be overheard. If afterwards, by reason of the eminence of the writer,
or of some quality in the letters themselves, they get into print, let
it be by accident and not from forethought. Why is it, then, that the
best printed letters, such as Gray’s, Walpole’s, Cowper’s, Fitzgerald’s,
written with all the ease and intimacy of confidential
intercourse—“written _from_ one man and _to_ one man”—are found to be
composed in such perfect English, with such high finish, filled with
matter usually reserved by professional authors for their essays or
descriptive sketches; in fine, to be so literary? The reason I take to
be partly in the mutual intellectual sympathy between writer and
correspondent; and partly in the conscientious literary habit of the
letter writer. Hawthorne’s “Note Books,” intended only for his own eye,
are written with almost as much care as the romances and tales into
which many pages of them were decanted with little alteration.
Besides the open letter, there is another variety which is not a real
letter: I mean the letter of fiction. This has been a favorite method of
telling a story. You know that all the novels of our first novelist,
Richardson, are in this form: “Pamela,” “Clarissa Harlowe,” “Sir Charles
Grandison”; and some of the most successful American short stories of
recent years have been written in letters: Mr. James’s “A Bundle of
Letters,” Mr. Aldrich’s “Margery Daw,” Mr. Bishop’s “Writing to Rosina”
and many others. This is a subjective method of narration and requires a
delicate art in differentiating the epistolary style of a number of
correspondents; though not more, perhaps, than in the management of
dialogue in an ordinary novel or play. The plan has certain advantages
and in Richardson’s case was perhaps the most effective that he could
have hit upon, i.e., the best adapted to the turn of his genius and the
nature of his fiction. (Richardson began by writing letters for young
people.) Fitzgerald, the translator of Omar Khayyám, and himself one of
our best letter writers, preferred Richardson to Fielding, as did also
Dr. Johnson. For myself, I will acknowledge that, while I enjoy a
characteristic _introduced_ letter here and there in a novel, as
Thackeray, e.g., manages the thing; or even a short story in this form;
yet a long novel written throughout in letters I find tedious, and
Richardson’s interminable fictions, in particular, perfectly
unendurable.
The epistolary form is conveniently elastic and not only lends itself
easily to the purposes of fiction, but is a ready vehicle of reflection,
humor, sentiment, satire, and description. Such recent examples as “The
Upton Letters,” “The Love Letters of a Worldly Woman,” and Andrew Lang’s
“Letters to Dead Authors” are illustrations, holding in solution many of
the elements of the essay, the diary, the character sketch, and the
parody.
But from these fictitious uses of the form let us return to the
consideration of the real letter, the letter written by one man to
another for his private perusal, but which from some superiority to the
temporary occasion, has become literature. The theory of letter writing
has been well given by Mr. J. C. Bailey in his “Studies in Some Famous
Letters.” “What is a letter? It is written talk, with something, but not
all, of the easiness of talking; and something, but not all, of the
formality of writing. It is at once spontaneous and deliberate, a thing
of art and a thing of amusement, the idle occupation of an hour and the
sure index of a character.”
It is often said that letter writing is a lost art. It is an art of
leisure and these are proverbially the days of hurry. The modern spirit
is expressed by the telegraphic despatch, the telephone message, and the
picture postal card. It is much if we manage an answer to an R.S.V.P.
note of invitation. We have lost the habit of those old-fashioned
correspondents whose “friendship covered reams.” How wonderful now seem
the voluminous outpourings of Mme. de Sevigné to her daughter! How did
she get time to do it all? It has been shown by actual calculation that
the time occupied by Clarissa Harlowe in writing her letters would have
left no room for the happening of the events which her letters record.
She could not have been doing and suffering what she did and suffered
and yet have had the leisure to write it up. And not only want of time,
but an increasing reticence constrains our pens within narrower limits.
Members of families now exchange letters merely to give news, ask
questions, keep in touch with one another: not to confide feelings or
impart experiences. A man is ashamed to sit down and deliberately pour
out thoughts, sentiments, and descriptions, even to his intimates. “I
suppose,” wrote Fitzgerald, “that people who are engaged in serious ways
of life, and are of well filled minds, don’t think much about the
interchange of letters with any anxiety; but I am an idle fellow, of a
very ladylike turn of sentiment, and my friendships are more like loves,
I think.” It is from men of letters that the best letters are to be
expected, but they are busy magazining, overwork their pens for the
public, and are consequently impatient of the burden of private
correspondence. “Private letters,” wrote Willis to Poe, “are the last
ounce that breaks the camel’s back of a literary man.” To ask him to
write a letter after his day’s work, said Willis, was like asking a
penny postman to take a walk in the evening for the pleasure of it. And
in a letter to a friend he excused his brevity on the plea that he was
paid a guinea a page for everything he wrote, and could not afford to
waste manuscript. “I do not write letters to anybody,” wrote Lowell in
1842 to his friend Dr. G. B. Loring. “The longer I live the more irksome
does letter writing become to me. When we are young we need such a vent
for our feelings. . . . But as we grow older and find more ease of
expression, especially if it be in a way by which we can reach the
general ear and heart, these private utterances become less and less
needful to us.” In spite of this protest, when Mr. Charles Eliot Norton
came to print Lowell’s letters, he found enough of them to fill two
volumes of four hundred pages each. For after all, and with some
exceptions, it is among the class of professional writers that we find
the best letter writers: Gray, Cowper, Byron, Lamb, Fitzgerald, Lowell
himself. They do it out of hours, “on the side” and, as in Lowell’s
case, under protest; but the habit of literary expression is strong in
them; they like to practise their pens; they begin a note to a friend
and before they know it they have made a piece of literature, bound some
day to get into print with others of the same kind.
And here comes a curious speculation. Where do all the letters come from
that go into these collections? Do you keep the letters that you
receive? I confess that I burn most of mine as soon as I have read them.
Still more, do you keep copies of the letters that you send? I don’t
mean typewritten business letters which you put damp into the
patent-press-letter-copier to take off an impression to file away for
reference, but friendly letters? The typewriting machine, by the way, is
perhaps partly responsible for the decay of the letter writing art. It
is hard to imagine Charles Lamb, or any other master of this most
personal and intimate little art, who would not be disconcerted by this
mechanical interposition between his thought and his page. The last
generation must certainly have hoarded their letters more carefully than
ours. You come across trunks full of them, desks full of them in the
garrets of old houses: yellow bundles tied with tape, faded ink, stains
of pressed violets, dust and musty odors, old mirth, old sorrows, old
loves. Hackneyed themes of pathos, I mention them again, not to drop the
tear of sensibility on their already well-moistened paper, but to
enquire: Are these, and such as these, the sources of those many printed
volumes “Letters of Blank,” “Diary and Correspondence of So and So,”
ranging in date over periods of fifty or sixty years, and beginning
sometimes in the boyhood of the writer, when the correspondent who
preserved the letter could not possibly have foreseen Blank’s future
greatness and the value of his autograph?
Women are proverbially good letter writers. The letters of Mme. de
Sevigné to her daughter are masterpieces of their kind. Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu’s are among the best of English letters; and Fitzgerald
somewhat whimsically mentions the correspondence of a certain Mrs.
French as worthy to rank with Horace Walpole’s. “Would you desire at
this day,” says De Quincey, “to read our noble language in its native
beauty . . . steal the mail bags and break open all the letters in
female handwriting. Three out of four will have been written by that
class of women who have the most leisure and the most interest in a
correspondence by the post,” i.e., “unmarried women above twenty-five.”
De Quincey adds that “if required to come forward in some public
character” these same ladies “might write ill and affectedly. . . . But
in their letters they write under the benefit of their natural
advantages . . . sustained by some deep sympathy between themselves and
their correspondents.” “Authors can’t write letters,” says Lowell in a
letter to Miss Norton. “At best they squeeze out an essay now and then,
burying every natural sprout in a dry and dreary _sand flood_, as unlike
as possible to those delightful freshets with which your heart overflows
the paper. _They_ are thinking of their punctuation, of crossing their
t’s and dotting their i’s, and cannot forget themselves in their
correspondent, which I take to be the true recipe for a letter.” And
writing to another correspondent, C. E. Norton, he says: “The habits of
authorship are fatal to the careless unconsciousness that is the life of
a letter. . . . But worse than all is that lack of interest in one’s
self that comes of drudgery—for I hold that a letter which is not
mainly about the writer of it lacks the prime flavor.” This is slightly
paradoxical, for, I repeat, the best published letters are commonly the
work of professional _literati_. Byron’s letters have been preferred by
some readers to his poetry, such are their headlong vigor, dash,
_verve_, spontaneity, the completeness of their self-expression. Keats
was _par excellence_ the literary artist; yet nothing can exceed the
artlessness, simplicity, and sympathetic self-forgetfulness with which
he writes to his little sister. But it is easy to see what Lowell means.
Charles Lamb’s letters, e.g., though in many respects charming, are a
trifle too _composed_. They have that trick of quaintness which runs
through the “Essays of Elia,” but which gives an air of artificiality to
a private letter. He is practising a literary habit rather than thinking
of his correspondent. In this most intimate, personal, and mutual of
arts, the writer should write _to_ his friend what will interest him as
well as himself. He should not dwell on hobbies of his own; nor describe
his own experiences at too great length. It is all right to amuse his
friend, but not to air his own cleverness. Lowell’s letters are
delightful, and, by and large, I would place them second to none in the
language. But they are sometimes too literary and have the faults of his
prose writing in general. Wit was always his temptation, misleading him
now and then into a kind of Yankee smartness and a disposition to show
off. His temperament was buoyant, impulsive; there was to the last a
good deal of the boy about Lowell. Letter writing is a friendly art, and
Lowell’s warm expressions of love for his friends are most genuine. His
epistolary style, like his essay style, is lavish and seldom chastened
or toned down to the exquisite simplicity which distinguishes the best
letters of Gray and Cowper. And so Lowell is always getting in his own
way, tripping himself up over his superabundance of matter. Still, as a
whole, I know no collected letters richer in thought, humor, and
sentiment. And one may trace in them, read consecutively, the gradual
ripening and refining of a highly gifted mind and a nature which had at
once nobility and charm of thought.
Lowell speaks admiringly of Emerson’s “gracious impersonality.” Now
impersonality is the last thing we expect of a letter writer. Emerson
could write a good letter on occasion, as may be seen by a dip almost
anywhere into the Carlyle-Emerson correspondence. But when Mr. Cabot was
preparing his life of Emerson and applied to Henry James, Senior, for
permission to read his letters to Emerson, Mr. James replied, not
without a touch of petulance: “Emerson always kept one at such arm’s
length, tasting him and sipping him and trying him, to make sure that he
was worthy of his somewhat prim and bloodless friendship, that it was
fatiguing to write him letters. I can’t recall any serious letter I ever
sent him. I remember well what maidenly letters I used to receive from
him.” We know what doctrine Emerson held on the subject of “persons.”
But it is just this personality which makes Lowell the prince of letter
writers. He may attract, he may irritate, but he never fails to interest
us in himself. Even in his books it is the man in the book that
interests most.
Women write good letters because they are sympathetic; because they take
personal rather than abstract views; because they stay at home a great
deal and are interested in little things and fond of exchanging
confidences and news. They like to receive letters as well as to write
them. The fact that Richardson found his most admiring readers among the
ladies was due perhaps not only to the sentimentality of his novels, but
to their epistolary form. Hence there is apt to be a touch of the
feminine in the most accomplished letter writers. They are gossips, like
Horace Walpole, or dilettanti like Edward Fitzgerald, or shy, reserved,
sensitive persons like Gray and Cowper, who live apart, retired from the
world in a retirement either cloistral or domestic; who have a few
friends and a genius for friendship, enjoy the exercise of their pens,
feel the need of unbosoming themselves, but are not ready talkers. Above
all they are not above being interested in trifles and little things.
Cowper was absorbed in his hares, his cucumber frames and gardening,
country walks, tea-table chat, winding silk for Mrs. Unwin. Lamb was
unceasingly taken up with the oddities and antiquities of London
streets, the beggars, the chimney sweeps, the old benchers, the old
bookstalls, and the like. Gray fills his correspondence with his
solitary pursuits and recreations and tastes: Gothic curiosities,
engravings, music sheets, ballads, excursions here and there. The
familiar is of the essence of good letter writing: to unbend, to relax,
to _desipere in loco_, to occupy at least momentarily the playful and
humorous point of view. Solemn, prophetic souls devoted to sublimity are
not for this art. Dante and Milton and “old Daddy” Wordsworth, as
Fitzgerald calls him, could never have been good letter writers: they
were too great to care about little things, too high and rigid to stoop
to trifles.
Letter writing is sometimes described as a colloquial art.
Correspondence, it is said, is a conversation kept up between
interlocutors at a distance. But there is a difference: good talkers are
not necessarily good letter writers, and _vice versa_. Coleridge, e.g.,
was great in monologue, but his letters are in no way remarkable.
Cowper, on the other hand, did not sparkle in conversation, and Gray was
silent in company, “dull,” Dr. Johnson called him. Johnson himself,
notoriously a most accomplished talker, does not shine as a letter
writer. His letters, frequently excellent in substance, are ponderous in
style. They are of the kind best described as “epistolary
correspondence.” The Doctor needed the give and take of social
intercourse to allay the heaviness of his written discourse. His talk
was animated, pointed, idiomatic, but when he sat down and took pen in
hand, he began to translate, as Macaulay said, from English into
Johnsonese. His celebrated letter of rebuke to Lord Chesterfield labors
under the weight of its indignation, is not free from pomposity and
pedantry, and is written with an eye to posterity. One can imagine the
noble lord, himself an accomplished letter writer, smiling over this
oracular sentence: “The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with
Love, and found him a native of the rocks.” Heine’s irony, Voltaire’s
light touch would have stung more sharply, though somewhat of Johnson’s
dignified pathos would perhaps have been lost. Orators, in general, are
not good letter writers. They are accustomed to the _ore rotundo_
utterance, the “big bow-wow,” and they crave the large audience instead
of the audience of one.
The art of letter writing, then, is a relaxation, an art of leisure, of
the idle moment, the mind at ease, the bow unbent, the loin ungirt. But
there are times in every man’s life when he has to write letters of a
tenser mood, utterances of the passionate and agonized crises of the
soul, love letters, death messages, farewells, confessions, entreaties.
It seems profane to use the word _art_ in such connections. Yet even a
prayer, when it is articulate at all, follows the laws of human speech,
though directed to the ear that heareth in secret. The collects of the
church, being generalized prayer, employ a deliberate art.
Probably you have all been called upon to write letters of condolence
and have found it a very difficult thing to do. There is no harder test
of tact, delicacy, and good taste. The least appearance of insincerity,
the least intrusion of egotism, of an air of effort, an assumed
solemnity, a moralizing or edifying pose, makes the whole letter ring
false. Reserve is better here than the opposite extreme; better to say
less than you feel than even to _seem_ to say more.
There is a letter of Lincoln’s, written to a mother whose sons had been
killed in the Civil War, which is a brief model in this kind. I will not
cite it here, for it has become a classic and is almost universally
known. An engrossed copy of it hangs on the wall of Brasenose College,
Oxford, as a specimen of the purest English diction—the diction of the
Gettysburg address.