The preservation and posthumous publication of private correspondence
has supplied modern society with one of its daintiest literary
luxuries. The art of letter-writing is, of course, no recent
invention; it reached a high level of excellence, like almost every
other branch of refined expression in prose or verse, in the older
world of Rome. Nevertheless, the exceeding rarity of the specimens
that have come down to us from those times is an important element of
their value; while in our own day the letters of eminent persons fill
many book-shelves in every decent library, and their quantity
increases out of all proportion to their quality.
It may be said, generally, of fine letter-writing that it is a
distinctive product of a high civilisation, denoting the existence of
a cultured and leisurely class, implying the conditions of secure
intercourse, confidence, sociability, many common interests, and that
peculiar delight in the stimulating interchange of ideas and feelings
which is one characteristic of modern life. The language of a country
must have thrown off its archaic stiffness, must have acquired
suppleness and variety; the writer's instrument must be a style that
combines familiarity with distinction, correctness of thought with
easy diction. It is from the lack of these conditions that the Asiatic
world has given us no such letters; the material as well as the
intellectual environment has been wanting. For similar reasons the
middle ages of Europe produced us none of the kind with which we are
now dealing; the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries have left us
very few samples of them; and since in this article we propose to
treat only of English letter-writers, we may affirm that the art did
not flourish in England until the eighteenth century, when according
to certain authorities it rose to something like perfection. It is a
notable observation of Hume's that Swift is the first Englishman who
wrote polite prose; and Swift is one of the earliest, as he is still
one of the pleasantest, writers of private correspondence that has
taken a permanent place in our literature.
We can understand without difficulty why the eighteenth century was a
period favourable to the growth of excellent letter-writing. There
were very few newspapers, and those which appeared were low in tone
and ill-informed--political pamphleteers abounded and the essayists on
morals and manners were numerous--but it was chiefly by private hands
that accurate information and ideas were circulated in a small and
highly cultivated society with an exquisite taste in literature, with
a keen interest in public affairs, and a very strong appetite for
philosophic discussion. Side by side with the intellectual conditions
we may take into account the national circumstances of that age. The
post was expensive, with a slow and intermittent circulation, so that
letters, being infrequent, were worth writing carefully and at
length; while correspondents were nevertheless not separated by
distances of time and space sufficient to weaken or extinguish the
desire of interchanging thoughts and news. For it is within the
experience of most of us that the difficulty of keeping up regular
correspondence increases with distance; that friends who meet seldom
write to each other rarely; and that, although letters are most valued
by those who are far from home and long absent, yet it is precisely in
the case of prolonged separation that the chain of friendly
communication is apt gradually to slacken until it becomes entirely
disconnected. So long, indeed, as men depended for news on private
sources, there was always a kind of obligation to write; but the
telegraph and the newspaper have now monopolised the Intelligence
Department. On the whole, it may be concluded that the art of
letter-writing flourishes best within a limited radius of distance,
among persons living neither very near to each other nor yet far
apart, who meet occasionally yet not often, and who are within the
same range of social, political, and intellectual influences. Its best
period is probably before the advent of copious indefatigable
journalism, before men have taken to publishing letters in the morning
papers, and when they have not yet acquired the economical habit of
reserving all their valuable ideas and information for signed articles
in some monthly review.
It was under these conditions that the letters of eminent men in the
eighteenth century and the early part of the nineteenth century were
generally written. In the former century letter-writing was
undoubtedly a recognised form of high literary workmanship, with close
affinities on one side to the diary or private journal, and on another
to the essay. Long, continuous, and intimate correspondence, as in the
case of Swift and Walpole, gravitated toward the journal;
dissertations on literature, politics, and manners were more akin to
the essay; while in the hands of the novelist the journalistic series
of letters took artificial development into a method of story-telling.
On the other side, the tendency of epistles to become essays reached
its climax in the letters of Burke, some of which are only
distinguishable from brilliant pamphlets by the formal address and
subscription.
With the nineteenth century begins an era of amusing and animated
letter-writing. The classic and somewhat elaborate style of the
preceding age falls into disuse; the essayist draws gradually back
into a department of his own; the new school reflects, as is natural,
the general tendency of English literature toward a livelier and more
varied movement, with a wider range of subjects and sympathies. In his
letters, as in his poetry, the precursor of the Naturalistic school
was Cowper, who could be simple without being trivial, was never prosy
and often pathetic, and who possessed the rare art of stamping on his
reader's mind an enduring impression of quiet and somewhat commonplace
society in the English midlands. That poets should usually have been
good letter-writers is probably no more than might have been expected,
for imagination and word-power must tell everywhere; yet the list is
so long as to be worth noticing. Swift, Pope, Gray, and Cowper in the
last century, and in the present century Scott, Byron, Shelley,
Coleridge, and Southey, have all left us distinctive and copious
correspondence. Wordsworth may, perhaps, be classed as a notable
exception; for Wordsworth's letters are dull, being at their best more
like essays or literary dissertations than the free outpouring of
intimate thought. They have none of the charm which comes from the
revelation of private doubt or passionate affection that is
ordinarily stifled by convention; they are, on the contrary, eminently
respectable, deliberate, and carefully expressed. 'It has ever been
the habit of my mind,' he writes, 'to trust that expediency will come
out of fidelity to principles, rather than to seek my principles of
action in calculations of expediency.' This is what the Americans call
'high toned'; but the metal is too heavy for the light calibre of a
letter.
Whether Tennyson had the gift of letter-writing we shall be able to
judge when his biography appears; though we may anticipate that it
will contain some things worthy of a great master in the art of
language. The publication of letters deriving their sole or principal
interest from the general reputation of the writer is indeed quite
legitimate and intelligible. They are often biographical documents of
considerable value, apart from all questions of style and intellectual
quality; they can be handled and arranged to exhibit a man's
character; they may be used as negative proofs of reserve and
reticence, as showing his mental attitude toward various subjects, his
domestic habits and virtues, or merely as annals of where he went and
what he did. They may be carefully selected and revised for occasional
insertion at different stages of a long biography, where the editor
sees fit to let the dead man speak for himself; they may be employed
as an advocate chooses the papers in his brief, for attack or defence.
Or they may be produced without commentary, sifting, or omissions, as
the unvarnished presentation of a man's private life and particular
features which a candid friend commits to the judgment of posterity.
Or, lastly, they may be mere relics, not much more in some instances
than curiosities, valued for much the same reasons that would set a
high price on the autograph or the inkstand of a celebrated man, on
his furniture, his house, or anything that was his. In proportion as
little or nothing is known of such a man's private life, every scrap
of his writing increases in value; and so a letter of Shakespeare or
of Dante would be priceless. But of Shakespeare no letter has come
down to us; and of Dante not even, we believe, his signature; though
we do know something of what Dante did and thought, for his religion
and his politics are manifested in his poems; whereas Shakespeare's
works have the divine attribute of impersonality. Here is one supreme
poet of whom the world would gladly hear anything; but nothing remains
to feed the modern appetite, which is never so well gratified as when
a rare and sublime genius stands revealed as the writer of ordinary
letters upon petty domesticities.
It is evidently impossible to draw a line that shall accurately divide
the interest that men feel in a celebrated person from the interest
that they take in his posthumous correspondence; so as to determine
how far the letters are good in themselves. When the writer is well
known, he and his writings are inseparable. Yet some attempt must be
made, for the purposes of this article, to distinguish critically
between letters that are readable and will survive by their own
literary quality, as fine specimens of the art, and those which are
preserved and published on the score of the writer's name and fame,
with little aid from their merits. In which category are we to place
the letters of Keats, including those that have been very recently
unearthed by diligent literary excavation? His poetry is so exquisite,
so radiant with imaginative colour, that to see such a man in the
light of common day, among the ordinary cares and circumstances of the
lower world, is necessarily a descent and a disillusion. He was young,
he was poor, he had few acquaintances worthy of him; he roved about
England and Scotland without adventures; his letters were perfectly
familiar and unsophisticated. As Mr. Sidney Colvin has written, in an
excellent preface to an edition of 1891, 'he poured out to those he
loved his whole self indiscriminately, generosity and fretfulness,
ardour and despondency, boyish petulance side by side with manful good
sense, the tattle of suburban parlours with the speculations of a
spirit unsurpassed for native gift and insight.' Every now and then
the level of his easygoing discourse is lit up by a flash of wit, and
occasionally by a jet of brilliant fancies among which some of his
finest poetry may be traced in the process of incubation. His whole
mind is set upon his art; for that only, and for a few intimate
friends, does he care to live and work; his letters often tell us when
and where, under what influences, his best pieces were composed; one
likes to know, for example, that the _Ode to Autumn_ came to him on a
fine September day during a Sunday's walk over the stubbles near
Winchester. His criticisms are always good, and their form
picturesque. He compares human life to a chamber that becomes
gradually darkened, in which one door after another is set open,
showing only dim passages leading out into darkness. This, he says, is
the burden of the mystery which Wordsworth felt and endeavoured to
explore; and he thinks that Wordsworth is deeper than Milton, though
he attributes this, justly, more to 'the general and gregarious
advance of intellect, than individual greatness of mind.' So far as
spontaneity and the free unguarded play of sportive and serious ideas,
taken as they came uppermost, are tests and conditions of excellence
in this kind of writing, Keats's letters must rank high. Nevertheless
there is still room for doubt whether these juvenile productions would
have left any but a most ephemeral mark apart from their connection
with his poetry.
In the case of other poets, who were his contemporaries, the verdict
will be different. They are all to be classed, though not in the same
line, as writers of letters that have great original and intrinsic
value. Scott's letters exhibit his generous and masculine nature; the
buoyancy of his spirits in good or bad fortune; and that romantic
attachment to old things and ideas which hardened latterly into
inveterate Toryism. Southey's prose writings will probably survive his
metrical compositions, which indeed have already fallen into oblivion.
There is life in a poet so long as he is quoted; but no verses or even
lines of Southey have fixed themselves in the popular memory. And
whereas the letters of Keats disclose a mind filled with the sense of
beauty and rich with poetic seedlings that blossomed into beautiful
flowers, in Southey's correspondence we discern only an erudite man of
taste labouring diligently upon epics which he expected to be
immortal. The letters of Byron stand upon broader ground, because
Byron was so much more of a personage than either Keats, or Southey,
or Wordsworth. They supply, in the first place, an invaluable, and
indeed indispensable, interpretation of his poetry, which is to a
great extent the imaginative and romantic presentation of his own
feelings, fortunes, and peculiar experiences. Secondly, they are full
of good sayings and caustic criticism; they touch upon the domain of
politics and society as well as upon literature; they give the
opinions passed upon contemporary events and persons, during a
stirring period of European history, by a man of genius who was also a
man of the world; they float on the current of a strangely troubled
existence. In these letters we have an important contribution to our
acquaintance with literary circles and London society, and with
several notable figures on either stage, during the years immediately
before and after Waterloo. They were published in an introduction to
the works of a famous poet; yet, although they cannot be detached from
his poetry, they possess great independent merits of their own. They
echo the sounds of revelry by night; they strike a note of careless
vivacity, the tone of a man who is at home alike in good and bad
company, whose judgment on books and politics, on writers and
speakers, is always fresh, bold, and original. We may lament that the
spirit of reckless devilry and dissipation should have entered into
Byron; and the lessons to be drawn from the scenes and adventures in
Venice and elsewhere, described for the benefit of Tom Moore, are very
different from the moral examples furnished by the tranquil and
well-ordered correspondence of our own day. Yet the world would have
been poorer for the loss of this memorial of an Unquiet Life, and the
historical gallery of literature would have missed the full-length
portrait of an extraordinary man.
The letters of Coleridge, like their writer, belong to another class,
yet, like Byron's, they have the clear-cut stamp of individuality.
Here again we have the man himself, with his intensity of feeling, his
erratic moods and singular phraseology, the softness of his heart and
the weakness of his will. He belongs to the rapidly diminishing class
of notable men who have freely poured their real sentiments and
thoughts out of their brain into their letters, who have given their
best (without keeping their worst) to their correspondents, so that
the letters abound with pathetic and amusing confessions, and with
ideas that bear the stamp of the author's singular idiosyncrasy. The
_Memorials of Coleorton_ are a collection of letters written to the
Beaumont family by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, and Scott; the
reader may pass from one to another by taking them as they come; the
book is like the _menu_ of a dinner with varied courses. Wordsworth's
letters are the product of cultivated taste, a fine eye for rural
scenery, and lofty moral sentiment. Southey is the high-class
_litterateur_, with a strong dash of Toryism in Church and State; in
both there is a total absence of eccentricity, but in neither case is
the attention forcibly arrested or any striking passage retained. When
Coleridge is served up the flavour of unique expression and a sort of
divine simplicity is unmistakable; he is alternately indignant and
remorseful; he soars to themes transcendent, and sinks anon to the
humble details of his errors and embarrassments. Uncongenial society
plunged him into such dark depression that he is not ashamed to
confess that he found 'bodily relief in weeping.'
'On Tuesday evening Mr. R----, the author of ----, drank tea and
spent the evening with us at Grasmere; and this had produced a very
unpleasant effect upon my spirits.... If to be a poet or man of
genius entailed on us the necessity of housing such company in our
bosoms, I would pray the very flesh off my knees to have a head as
dark and unfurnished as Wordsworth's old Molly's.... If I believed
it possible that the man liked me, upon my soul I should feel
exactly as if I were tarred and feathered.'
And so on through the whole letter, with a comical energy of phrase
that scorns reserve or compass in giving vent to the misery caused by
uninteresting conversation. We may contrast this melancholy
tea-drinking with Byron's rollicking account of a dinner with some
friends 'of note and notoriety':
'Like other parties of the same kind, it was first silent, then
talking, then argumentative, then disputatious, then
unintelligible, then altogethery, then articulate, and then drunk.
When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder it was
difficult to get down again without stumbling; and, to crown all,
Kinnaird and I had to conduct Sheridan down a damned corkscrew
staircase, which had been certainly constructed before the
invention of fermented liquors, and to which no legs, however
crooked, could possibly accommodate themselves. Both he and Coleman
were, as usual, very good; but I carried away much wine, and the
wine carried away my memory, so that all was hiccup and happiness
for the last hour or so, and I am not impregnated with any of the
conversation.'
We are, of course, not reviewing Byron or Coleridge; we are only
giving samples by the way. Here are two great poets, remote from each
other as the two poles in social circumstances and habit of mind, but
at any rate alike in this one quality--that their life is in their
letters, and that in such passages as these the genuine undisguised
temperament of each writer stands forth in a relief that could only be
brought out by his own unintentional master-strokes. For neither of
them was aware that in these scenes he was describing his own
character--though Byron may have intended to display his wit, and
Coleridge may have been to some extent conscious of his own humour. In
the way of literary criticism, again, Coleridge throws out the quaint
and uncommon remark upon Addison's Essays, that they 'have produced a
passion for the unconnected in the minds of Englishmen.' And he
touches delicately upon the negative or barren side of the critical
mind in his observation that the critics are the eunuchs that guard
the temple of the Muses.
Of Shelley's letters, again, we may say that they are unconsciously
autobiographical; they are confessions of character, spontaneous,
unguarded, abounding with brilliancies and extravagances. They betray
his shortcomings, but they attest his generosity and courage; they are
the outpourings of a new spirit, who detests what would now be called
Philistinism in literature and society; who does not stop to pick his
words, or to mix water with the red wine of his enthusiasm. He
abandons himself in his letters to the feelings of the moment; he
ardently pursues his immediate object by sophistical arguments which
convict himself but could never convince a correspondent, and which
astonish and amuse the calm reader of after days. 'A kind of
ineffable, sickening disgust seizes my mind when I think of this most
despotic, most unrequired fetter which prejudice has forged to confine
its energies.... Anti-matrimonialism is as necessarily connected with
scepticism as if religion and marriage began their course together,'
for both are the fruit of odious superstition. He was endeavouring to
persuade Harriet Westbrook to join him in testifying by example
against the obsolete and ignoble ceremony of the marriage service,
which he held to be a degradation that no one could ask 'an amiable
and beloved female' to undergo. In Shelley's case, as in Byron's, the
letters are of inestimable biographical value as witnesses to
character, as reflecting the vicissitudes of a life which was to the
writer more like the 'fierce vexation of a dream' than a well-spent
leisurely existence, and as the sincere unstudied expression of his
emotions. For all these reasons they are essential to a right
appreciation of his magnificent poetry.
William Godwin, pedantic, self-conceited, and impecunious, has come
down to us as a kind of central figure in a literary group which
included such men as Coleridge, Shelley, and Lamb, of whom the
somewhat formal English world at the beginning of this century was not
worthy. By reason of this position, and because Shelley married his
daughter, he became the cause and subject of excellent letter-writing,
though his own correspondence is heavy with philosophic platitudes. It
is of the class which, as we have said, is akin to essays; he
discourses at large upon first principles in religion and politics;
and out of his frigid philosophy came some of Shelley's most ardent
paradoxes. But some of the most amusing letters in the English
language were addressed to him. It was after a supper at Godwin's that
Coleridge wrote remorsefully acknowledging 'a certain tipsiness'--not
that he felt any 'unpleasant titubancy'--whereby he had been seduced
into defending a momentary idea as if it had been an old and firmly
established principle; which (we may add) has been the way of other
talkers since Coleridge. No one, he goes on to say, could have a
greater horror than himself of the principles he thus accidentally
propounded, or a deeper conviction of their irrationality; 'but the
whole thinking of my life will not bear me up against the crowd and
press of my mind, when it is elevated beyond its natural pitch.' The
effect of punch, after wine, was to make a philosopher argue hotly
against his profoundest beliefs; yet it is to Godwin's supper that we
owe this diverting palinodia. And all Englishmen should be grateful to
Godwin for having written the tragedy of _Antonio_; for not only was
it most justly damned, but it also elicited some letters to the
unlucky author that are unmatched in the record of candid criticism.
Mrs. Inchbald writes, briefly:
'I thank you for the play of Antonio, and I most sincerely wish you
joy of having produced a work which will protect you from being
classed with the successful dramatists of the present time, but
which will hand you down to posterity among the honoured few who,
during the past century, have totally failed in writing for the
stage.'
Coleridge goes to work more elaborately:
'In the tragedy I have frequently used certain marks (which he
gives). Of these, the first calls your attention to my suspicions
that your language is false or intolerable English. The second
marks the passages that struck me as _flat_ or mean. The third is a
note of reprobation, levelled at those sentences in which you have
adopted that worst sort of vulgar language, commonplace book
language. The last mark implies bad metre.'
All this is free speaking beyond the compass of modern literary
consultations. It may be added that Lamb also discussed the play,
before it was performed, in his letters to Godwin; and that his
description of Godwin's deportment, of his own feelings, and of the
behaviour of the audience on the memorable night that witnessed its
utter failure, has bequeathed to us a comedy over which the tragic
Muse herself might well become hysterical.
There is, indeed, in the correspondence of this remarkable group a
tone of frankness and sincerity which, combined with the absence of
malice and a strong element of fun, distinguishes it from the
half-veiled disapproval and prudish reserve of later days. 'When you
next write so eloquently and well against law and lawyers,' says
Coleridge to Godwin, 'be so good as to leave a larger place for your
wafer, as by neglect of this a part of your last was obliterated.'
Again, in a more serious tone, 'Ere I had yet read or seen your works,
I, at Southey's recommendation, wrote a sonnet in praise of the
author. When I had read them, religious bigotry, the but half
understanding of your principles, and the _not_ half understanding of
my own, combined to render me a warm and boisterous anti-Godwinist.'
His moods and circumstances, his joys and pains, are reflected in his
language with remarkable fertility of metaphor; his feelings vary with
his society. Of Lamb he writes that 'his taste acts so as to appear
like the mechanic simplicity of an instinct--in brief, he is worth a
hundred men of more talents: conversation with the latter tribe is
like the use of leaden bells, one warms by exercise, Lamb every now
and then _irradiates_.' In the best letters of this remarkable group
we perceive the exquisite sensitiveness of open and eager minds,
giving free play to their ideas and feelings, their delight and
disgust, so that their life and thoughts are mirrored in their
correspondence as in their conversation. Such writing has become very
rare, if it is not entirely extinct, in these latter days of temperate
living and guarded writing. Lamb's own letters are all in a similar
key; and that which he wrote to Coleridge, who had a bad habit of
borrowing books, is a model of jocose expostulation: 'You never come
but you take away some folio that is part of my existence.... My third
shelf from the top has two devilish gaps, where you have knocked out
its two eye teeth.' And his lament over the desolation of London, as
it appears to a man who has lived there jovially, and revisits it as a
stranger in after years, may even now touch a chord in the hearts of
some of us.
'In London I passed houses and places, empty caskets now. The
streets, the shops are left, but all old friends are gone. The
bodies I cared for are in graves or dispersed. My old clubs that
lived so long and flourished so steadily are crumbled away. When I
took leave of our friend at Charing Cross, 'twas heavy unfeeling
rain, and I had nowhere to go ... not a sympathising house to turn
to in the great city. Never did the waters of heaven pour down on a
forlorner head. Yet I tried ten days at a sort of friend's house,
large and straggling; one of the individuals of my old long knot of
friends, card-players, and pleasant companions, that have tumbled
to pieces into dust and other things; and I got home convinced that
I was better to get to my hole in Enfield and hide like a sick cat
in my corner.'
We might, indeed, multiply indefinitely our quotations from the
correspondence of this literary period to show its sincerity, its
spontaneity, its uncommonness, the tone of intimate brotherhood and
natural unruly affection that pervades it everywhere. Nothing of the
kind has come down to us from the eighteenth century; and the last
fifty years of this century, so prolific in biographies and posthumous
publications of the papers of eminent men, go to prove that in the
general transformation of letter-writing these peculiar qualities have
almost, though not altogether, disappeared. Probably conversation has
suffered a like change; and we may ascribe it generally to a lowering
of the social temperature, to the habits of reserve, respectability,
and conventional self-restraint that in these days govern so largely
the intercourse of men. Something may be due to cautious expurgation
of passages which tell against the writer, or might offend modern
taste; yet in other respects contemporary editors have been
sufficiently indiscreet. And the growth of these habits, so
discouraging to free and fearless correspondence, may be partly
ascribed to the influence of journalism, which makes every subject
stale and sterile by incessantly threshing and tearing at it, and
which reviews biographies in a manner that acts as a solemn warning to
all men of mark that they take heed what they put into a private
letter. There are other causes, to which we may presently advert; but
it is quite clear that this fine art is undergoing certain
transmutations, and that on the whole it does not flourish quite so
vigorously as heretofore.
In a recent article upon Matthew Arnold's letters it is laid down by a
consummate critic[8] that the first canon of unsophisticated
letter-writing is that a letter is meant for the eye of a friend, and
not for the world. 'Even the lurking thought in anticipation of an
audience destroys the charm; the best letters are always
improvisations; the public breaks the spell.' In this, as we have
already suggested, there is much truth; yet the conditions seem to us
too straitly enjoined; for not every man of genius has the gift of
striking out his best thoughts, in their best form, clear and true
from the hot iron of his mind; and in some of our best writers the
improvising spirit is very faint. If a man writes with leisurely care,
selecting deliberately the word that exactly matches his thought,
aiming directly at the heart of his subject and avoiding prolixity, he
may, like Walpole, Gray, and others, produce a delightful letter,
provided only that he is sincere and open, has good stuff to give, and
does not condescend to varnish his pictures. We want his best
thoughts; we should like to have his best form; we do not always care
so much for negligent undress. And as for the copious outpouring of
his personal feelings, one says many things to a friend or kinsman
that are totally without interest to the public, unless they are
expressed in some distinctive manner or embody some originality of
handling an ordinary event. This a writer may have the knack of doing
artistically, even in a private and confidential letter, without
betraying the touch of art; nor, indeed, can we ever know how many of
the best modern letters are really improvised. Then, again, with
regard to the anticipation of an audience, it is a risk to which
every man of note must feel that he is exposed; the shadow of
eventual publicity is always in the background; his letters have
passed out of his control during his lifetime, and he can only trust
in the uncertain discretion of his literary executor. He does not care
to leave the record of his passing moods, his confessions of weakness,
his personal likings and antipathies, to be discussed by the general
reader; and it is probable that he only lets his pen run freely when
he feels assured that his confidential improvisations will be
judiciously omitted.
It is, we think, impossible to suppose that these considerations have
not weighed materially upon the minds of eminent men in our own day,
when biographies have become so much more numerous, and when they are
so much more closely criticised than formerly. And in comparing the
letters written in the early part of this century--such as those from
which we have given a few characteristic quotations--with those which
have been recently published, we have to take account of these things,
among other changes of the social and literary environment.
Undoubtedly the comparison is to the advantage of the earlier
writings; they seem infinitely more amusing, more genuine, more
biographical, more redolent of the manners and complexion of the time.
There is in them a flavour of heartiness and irresponsibility which
may partly be attributed to the fact that the best writers were poets,
whose genius flowered as early as their manhood, and most of whom died
young; so that their letters are fresh, audacious, and untempered by
the chilly caution of middle or declining age. Their spirits were
high, they were ardent in the pursuit of ideals; they were defying
society, they either had no family or were at feud with it, and they
gave not a thought to the solemn verdict of posterity. For
correspondents who were brimming over with humour, imagination, and
enthusiasm, no situation could be more thoroughly favourable to
sparkling improvisation; and accordingly they have left us letters
which will be a joy for ever.
The correspondence of our own generation has been written under a
different intellectual climate, and various circumstances have
combined to lower the temperature of its vivacity. Posthumous
publicity is now the manifest destiny that overhangs the private life
of all notable persons, especially of popular authors, who can observe
and inwardly digest continual warnings of the treatment which they are
likely to receive from an insatiable and inconsistent criticism. They
may have lived long and altered their opinions; they may have
quarrelled with friends or rivals, and may have become sworn allies
later; they may have publicly praised one whom in private they may
have laughed at; for when you have to think what you say, it does not
follow that you say what you think. All these considerations, enforced
by repeated examples, are apt to damp the natural ardour of
improvisation; the more so because the writer may be sure either that
his genuine utterances will be suppressed by the editor, or that, if
they are produced, the editor will be roundly abused for giving him
away. For in these matters the judgment of the general reader is
wayward, and his attitude undecided, with a leaning toward hypocrisy.
The story of the domestic tribulations and the conjugal bickerings of
a great writer, of the irritability that belongs to highly nervous
temperaments, and which has always made genius, like the finest
animals, hard to domesticate, has lost none of its savour with the
public. But if all letters that record such scenes and sayings are
faithfully reproduced in preparing the votive tablet upon which the
dead man's life is to be delineated, the ungrateful reader answers
with an accusation of imprudence, indiscretion, and betrayal of
confidence; and the surviving friends protest still more vehemently.
Within the last three months these consequences have been forcibly
illustrated by the reception of Cardinal Manning's Life, in which the
letters are of extraordinary value toward the formation of a right
understanding of that remarkable personage. Much of all this
sensitiveness is clearly due to the hasty fashion of publishing
private correspondence within a few years of the writer's decease, but
more to the fitful and somewhat feminine temper of an inquisitive yet
censorious society.
If, on the other hand, expurgation is freely employed, the result is a
kind of emasculation. Nothing is left that can offend or annoy living
people, or that might damage the writer's own reputation with an
audience that enjoys, yet condemns, unmeasured confidences. And so we
get clever, sensible letters of men who have travelled, worked, and
mixed much in society, who have already put into essays or reviews all
that they wanted the public to know, and whose private doubts, or
follies, or frolics, have been neatly removed from their
correspondence. Let us take, for example, two batches of letters very
lately published, and written by two men who have left their mark upon
their generation. Of Dean Stanley it may be affirmed that no
ecclesiastic of his time was better known, or had a higher reputation
for strength of character and undaunted Liberalism. His public life
and his place in the Anglican Church had been already described in a
meritorious biography; and it might have been expected that these
letters would bring the reader closer to the man himself, would
accentuate the points of a striking individuality. There are few of
these letters, we think, by which such expectations have been
fulfilled to any appreciable degree. In one or two of them Stanley
writes with his genuine sincerity and earnestness on the state of his
mind in regard to the new spirit of ecclesiasticism that had arisen in
Oxford nearly sixty years ago; we see that he saw and felt the
magnitude of a coming crisis, and we can observe the formation of the
opinions which he consistently and valiantly upheld throughout his
career. The whole instinct of his intellectual nature--and he never
lost his trust in reason--was against the high Roman or sacerdotal
absolutism in matters of dogma; he ranked Morals far above Faith; and
he had that dislike of authoritative uniformity in church government
which is in Englishmen a reflection of their political habits. Yet he
discerned plainly enough the spring of a movement that was bringing
about a Roman Catholic revival.
'Not that I am turned or turning Newmanist, but that I do feel that
the crisis in my opinions is coming on, and that the difficulties I
find in my present views are greater than I thought them to be, and
that here I am in the presence of a magnificent and consistent
system shooting up on every side, whilst all that I see against it
is weak and grovelling.' (Letter to C. J. Vaughan, 1838.)
'I expect,' he writes a year later, 'that the whole thing will have
the effect of making me either a great Newmanite or a great Radical';
and it did end in making him an advanced Liberal. His practical
genius, and his free converse with general society (from which Manning
deliberately turned away as fatal to ecclesiasticism), very soon
parted him from the theologians.
'I think it is true,' he writes to Jowett (1849), 'that we have not
the same mental interest in talking over subjects of theology that
we had formerly. They have lost their novelty, I suppose; we know
better where we are, having rolled to the bottom together, and
being now able only to make a few uphill steps. I acknowledge fully
my own want of freshness; my mind seems at times quite dried up....
And at times I have felt an unsatisfied desire after a better and
higher sort of life, which makes me impatient of the details of
theology.'
In these, and perhaps one or two other passages, we can trace the
development of character and convictions in the man to whom Jowett
wrote, thirty years afterwards, that he was 'the most distinguished
clergyman in the Church of England, who could do more than any one
towards the great work of placing religion on a rational basis.'[9]
But, on the whole, the quality of these letters is by no means equal
to their quantity; and too many of them belong to a class which,
though it may have some ephemeral interest among friends and kinsfolk,
can retain, we submit, no permanent value at all. It is best described
under a title common in French literature--_impressions de voyage_. A
very large part of the volume consists of letters written by Stanley,
an intelligent and indefatigable tourist, from the countries and
cities which he visited, from Petersburg and Palestine, from Paris and
Athens, from Spain and Scotland. The standpoint from which he surveys
the Holy Land is rather historical and archaeological than devotional;
but he had everywhere a clear eye for the picturesque in manners and
scenery. He had excellent opportunities of seeing the places and the
people; his descriptive powers are considerable; and there is a finely
drawn picture of All Souls' Day in the Sistine Chapel, written from
Rome to Hugh Pearson, although a ludicrous incident comes in at the
end like a false note. Such correspondence might be so arranged
separately as to make an interesting narrative of travel, but when
judged by a high literary or intellectual criterion of letter-writing
it is out of court. It is not too much to aver that most, if not all,
of these letters might have been written by any refined and cultivated
Englishman, whose education and social training had given him correct
tastes and a many-sided interest in the world. They belong to the type
of private diary or chronicle, and as such they inevitably include
trivialities, though not many. Some of Stanley's letters are from
Scotland, where he travels about admiring its wildness, and with a
cultured interest in its antiquities. But no country has been better
ransacked in search of the picturesque; it is the original
hunting-ground of the romantic tourist, and what Stanley said about it
to his family is pleasantly but not powerfully written. It is more
than doubtful whether excellence in letter-writing lies that way, or,
indeed, whether mediocrity is avoidable. Charles Lamb's letters are
none the worse because he stayed in London and had no time for the
beauties of Nature.
'For my part,' he wrote, 'with reference to my friends northwards,
I must confess that I am not romance-bit about Nature. The earth
and sea and sky (when all is said) is but a house to dwell in. If
the inmates be courteous, and good liquors flow like the conduits
at an old coronation, if they can talk sensibly and feel properly,
I have no need to stand staring at the gilded looking-glass, nor at
the five-shilling print over the mantelpiece. Just as important to
me (in a sense) is all the furniture of my world; eye pampering,
but satisfies no heart.'
This may be Cockney taste, yet it is better reading than Stanley's
account of Edinburgh or the valley of Glencoe.
The editor assures us, in his preface, that none of these letters
touch upon theological controversies, yet many readers might have been
very willing to part with some of the travelling journal for closer
knowledge of Stanley's inward feelings while he was bearing up the
fight of liberty and toleration against the gathering forces that have
since scattered and well-nigh overwhelmed the once flourishing Broad
Church party. Well might Jowett write to him in 1880, 'You and I, and
our dear friend Hugh Pearson, and William Rogers, and some others, are
rather isolated in the world, and we must hold together as long as we
can.' All those who are here named have passed away, leaving no party
leaders of equal rank and calibre, and if Stanley's letters survive at
all, they will live upon those passages which remind us how
strenuously he contended for the intellectual freedom that he believed
to be the true spiritual heritage of English churchmen.
The latest contribution to the department of national literature that
we have been surveying is the volume containing the letters of Matthew
Arnold (1848-88). 'Here and there,' writes their editor, 'I have been
constrained, by deference to living susceptibilities, to make some
slight excisions; but with regard to the bulk of the letters this
process had been performed before the manuscript came into my hands.'
No one has any business to question the exercise of a discretion which
must have been necessary in publishing private correspondence so
recently written, and only those who saw the originals can decide
whether they have been weakened or strengthened by the pruning. On the
other hand, the first canon of unsophistical letter-writing, as laid
down by the eminent critic already cited--that they should be written
for the eye of a friend, never for the public--is amply fulfilled. 'It
will be seen' (we quote again from the preface) 'that the letters are
essentially familiar and domestic, and were evidently written without
a thought that they would ever be read beyond the circle of his
family.' They are, in short, mostly family letters that have been
necessarily subjected to censorship, and it would be unreasonable to
measure a collection of this kind by the high standard that qualifies
for admission to the grade of permanent literature. As these letters
are to supply the lack of a biography (which was expressly prohibited
by his own wish), we are not to look for further glimpses of a
character which his editor rightly terms 'unique and fascinating.' The
general reader may therefore feel some disappointment at finding that
the correspondence takes no wider or more varied range; for Matthew
Arnold's circle of acquaintances must have been very large, and he
must have been in touch with the leading men in the political,
academical, and official society of his day.
The letters are as good as they could be expected to be under these
conditions, which are to our mind heavily disadvantageous. We must set
aside those which fall under the class of _impressions de voyage_, for
the reasons already stated in discussing Stanley's travelling
correspondence. One would not gather from this collection that Arnold
was a considerable poet. And the peculiar method of expression, the
vein of light irony, the flexibility of style, that distinguish his
prose works are here curiously absent; he does not write his letters,
as Carlyle did, in the same character as his books. Yet the turn of
thought, the prevailing note, can be often detected; as, for instance,
in a certain impatience with English defects, coupled with a strong
desire to take the conceit out of his fellow-countrymen:
'The want of independence of mind, the shutting their eyes and
professing to believe what they do not, the running blindly
together in herds for fear of some obscure danger and horror if
they go alone, is so eminently a vice of the English, I think, of
the last hundred years, has led them and is leading them into such
scrapes and bewilderment, that,' etc., etc.
It is certainly hard to recognise in this picture the features of the
rough roving Englishman who in the course of the last hundred years
has conquered India, founded great colonies, and fought the longest
and most obstinate war of modern times: who has been the type of
insularity and an incurable antinomian in religion and politics. Not
many pages afterwards, however, we find Arnold sharing with the herd
of his countrymen the shallow 'conviction as to the French always
beating any number of Germans who come into the field against them.'
He adds that 'they will never be beaten by any other nation but the
English, for to every other nation they are in efficiency and
intelligence decidedly superior'--an opinion which contradicts his
previous judgment of them, and replaces the national superiority on a
lofty though insecure basis; for if he was wrong about the French, he
may be wrong about us whom he puts above them. Arnold admired the
French as much as Carlyle liked the Germans, and both of them enjoyed
ridiculing or rating the English; but each was unconsciously swayed by
his own particular tastes and temperament, and neither of them had the
gift of political prophecy, which is, indeed, very seldom vouchsafed
to the highly imaginative mind. He had a strong belief, rare among
Englishmen, in administrative organisation. 'Depend upon it,' he
writes, 'that the great States of the Continent have two great
elements of cohesion, in their administrative system and in their
army, which we have not.' The general conclusion which Arnold seems to
have drawn from his travels in Europe and America is that England was
far behind France in lucidity of ideas, and inferior to the United
States in straightforward political energy and the faculties of
national success. 'Heaven forbid that the English nation should become
like this (the French) nation; but Heaven forbid that it should remain
as it is. If it does, it will be beaten by America on its own line,
and by the Continental nations on the European line. I see this as
plain as I see the paper before me.' Since this was written in 1865,
England has been perversely holding her own course, nor has she yet
fulfilled Arnold's melancholy foreboding, by which he was 'at times
overwhelmed with depression' that England was sinking into a sort of
greater Holland, 'for want of perceiving how the world is going and
must go, and preparing herself accordingly.'
On the other hand, his imaginative faculty comes out in his
speculation upon the probable changes in the development of the
American people that might follow their separation into different
groups, if the civil war between the Northern and Southern States
(which had just begun) should break up the Union.
'Climate and mixture of race will then be able fully to tell, and I
cannot help thinking that the more diversity of nation there is on
the American continent, the more chance there is of one nation
developing itself with grandeur and richness. It has been so in
Europe. What should we all be if we had not one another to check us
and to be learned from? Imagine an English Europe. How frightfully
_borne_ and dull! Or a French Europe either, for that matter.'
The suggestion is, perhaps, more fanciful than profound; for history
does not repeat itself; and, in fact, the result of breaking up South
America into a dozen political groups has not yet produced any very
satisfactory development of national character. Much more than
political subdivision goes to the creation of a new Europe;
nevertheless Arnold is probably right in supposing that uniformity of
institutions and a somewhat monotonous level of social conditions over
a vast area, may have depressed and stunted the free and diversified
growth of North American civilisation.
The literary criticism to be found in these letters shows a fastidious
and delicate taste that had been nurtured almost too exclusively upon
the masterpieces of classic antiquity. Homer he ranked far above
Shakespeare, though one might think them too different for comparison;
and he praises 'two articles in _Temple Bar_ (1869), one on Tennyson,
the other on Browning,' which were afterwards republished in a book
that made some stir in its day, and has brought down upon its author
the unquenchable resentment of his brother poets. He thought that both
Macaulay and Carlyle were encouraging the English nation in its
emphatic Philistinism, and thus counteracting his own exertions to
lighten the darkness of earnest but opaque intelligences. As his
interest in religious movements was acute, so his observations
occasionally throw some light upon the exceedingly complicated problem
of ascertaining the general drift of the English mind in regard to
things spiritual. The force which is shaping the future, is it with
the Ritualists or with the undogmatical disciples of a purely moral
creed? With neither, Arnold replies; not with any of the orthodox
religions, nor with the neo-religious developments which are
pretending to supersede them.
'Both the one and the other give to what they call religion, and to
religious ideas and discussions, too large and absorbing a place in
human life. Man feels himself to be a more various and richly
endowed animal than the old religious theory of human life
allowed, and he is endeavouring to give satisfaction to the long
suppressed and imperfectly understood instincts of their varied
nature.'
No man studied more closely than Arnold the intellectual tendencies of
his generation, so that on the most difficult of contemporary
questions this opinion is worth quoting, although the ritualistic
leanings of the present day hardly operate to support it. But here, as
in his published works, his religious utterances are somewhat
ambiguous and oracular; and one welcomes the marking of a definite
epoch in Church history when he writes emphatically that 'the Broad
Church _among the clergy_ may be said to have almost perished with
Stanley.'
But correspondence that was never meant for publication is hardly a
fair subject for literary criticism. Arnold seems to have written
hurriedly, in the intervals of hard work, of journeyings to and fro
upon his rounds of inspection, and of much social bustle; he had not
the natural gift of letter-writing, and he probably did it more as a
duty than a pleasure. He had none of the ever-smouldering irritability
which compelled Carlyle to slash right and left of him at the people
whom he met, at everything that he disliked, and every one whom he
despised. Nor was he born to chronicle the small beer of everyday life
in that spirit of contemplative quietism which is bred out of abundant
leisure and retirement. A few lines from one of Cowper's letters may
serve to indicate the circumstances in which 'our best letter-writer,'
as Southey calls him, lived and wrote a hundred years ago in a muddy
Buckinghamshire village:
'A long confinement in the winter, and indeed for the most part in
the autumn too, has hurt us both. A gravel walk, thirty yards
long, affords but indifferent scope to the locomotive faculty; yet
it is all that we have had to move in for eight months in the year,
during thirteen years that I have been a prisoner here.'
If we compare this manner of spending one's days with Arnold's hasty
and harassed existence among the busy haunts of men, we can understand
that in this century a hard-working literary man has neither the taste
nor the time for the graceful record of calm meditations, or for
throwing a charm over commonplace details. And, on the whole, Arnold's
correspondence, though it has some biographical value, must
undoubtedly be relegated to the class of letters that would never have
been published upon their own intrinsic merits.
Carlyle's letters, on the other hand, fall into the opposite category;
they stand on their own feet, they are as significant of style and
character as Arnold's, and even Stanley's, letters were comparatively
insignificant; they are the fearless outspoken expression of the
humours and feelings of the moment, and it is probable that the writer
did not trouble himself to consider whether they would or would not be
published. In these respects they as nearly fulfil the authorised
conditions of good letter-writing as any work of the sort that has
been produced in our own generation, though one may be permitted some
doubt in regard to improvisation; for the work is occasionally so
clean cut and pointed, his strokes are so keen and straight to the
mark, that it is difficult to believe the composition to be altogether
unstudied. Whether any writer ever excelled in this or, indeed, in any
other branch of the art literary without taking much trouble over it,
is, in our judgment, an open question; but surely Carlyle must have
selected and sharpened with some care the barbed epithets upon which
he suspends his grotesque and formidable caricatures.
For example, he writes, in 1831, of Godwin, who still figures, in
advanced age, as a martyr in the cause of good letter-writing--'A
bald, bushy browed, thick, hoary, hale little figure, with a very long
blunt characterless nose--the whole visit the most unutterable
stupidity.' Lord Althorp is 'a thick, large, broad-whiskered,
farmer-looking man.' O'Connell, 'a well-doing country shopkeeper with
a bottle-green frock and brown scratch wig.... I quitted them all (the
House of Commons) with the highest contempt.' Of Thomas Campbell, the
poet, it is written that 'his talk is small, contemptuous, and
shallow; his face has a smirk which would befit a shopman or an
auctioneer.' Wordsworth, 'an old, very loquacious, indeed, quite
prosing man.' Southey 'the shallowest chin, prominent snubbed Roman
nose, small carelined brow, the most vehement pair of faint hazel eyes
I have ever seen.' There is a savage caricature of Roebuck, and so
Carlyle goes on hanging up portraits of the notables whom he met and
conversed with, to the great edification of these latter days. No more
dangerous interviewer has ever practised professionally than this
artist in epithets, on whom the outward visible figure of a man
evidently made deep impressions; whereas the ordinary letter-writer is
usually content to record the small talk. As material for publication
his correspondence had three singular advantages. His earlier letters
were excellent, and we may hazard the generalisation that almost all
first-class letter-writing, like poetry, has been inspired by the
ardour and freshness and audacity of youth. He lived so long that
these letters could be published very soon after his death without
much damage to the susceptibilities of those whom his hard hitting
might concern; and, lastly, his biographer was a man of nerve, who
loved colour and strong lineaments, and would always sacrifice minor
considerations to the production of a striking historical portrait.
Undoubtedly, Carlyle's letters have this virtue--that they largely
contribute to the creation of a true likeness of the writer, for in
sketching other people he was also drawing himself. He could also
paint the interior of a country house, as at Fryston, and his
landscapes are vivid. He was, in short, an impressionist of the first
order, who grouped all his details in subordination to a general
effect, and never gave his correspondent a mere catalogue of trivial
particulars.
It was originally in a letter to his brother that Carlyle wrote his
celebrated description of an interview with Coleridge. No two men
could be more different in taste or temperament, and yet any one who
reads attentively Coleridge's letters may observe a certain similarity
to Carlyle's writing, not only in the figured style and prophetic
manner, but also in the tendency of their political ideas. In the
matter of linguistic eccentricities, it may be guessed that both of
them had been affected by the study of German literature; and in
politics they had both a horror of disorder, an aversion to the
ordinary Radicalism of their day, and a contempt for mechanic
philosophy and complacent irreligion. Each of them had a strong belief
in the power and duties of the State; but Coleridge held also that
salvation lay in a reconstitution of the Church on a sound
metaphysical basis, whereas for Carlyle all articles and liturgies
were dying or dead. A comparison of these two supreme intellectual
forces may help us to distinguish some of the most favourable
conditions of good letter-writing. They were men of highly nervous
mental constitution of mind, on whom the ideas and impressions that
had been secreted produced an excitability that was discharged upon
correspondents in a torrent of language, sweeping away considerations
of reserve or self-regard, and submerging the commonplace bits of news
and everyday observations which accumulate in the letters of
respectable notabilities. To whomsoever the letters may be addressed,
they are in consequence equally good and characteristic. Carlyle's
epistles to his wife and brother are among the best in the collection;
and Coleridge threw himself with the same ardour into letters to
Charles Lamb and to Lord Liverpool. It is this capacity for pouring
out the soul in correspondence, for draining the bottom of one's heart
to a friend, which, combined with exaltation under the stimulus of
spleen or keen sensibility, raises correspondence to the high-water
mark of English literature.
But in saying that these conditions are eminently favourable to the
production of fine letter-writing, we do not mean to affirm that they
are essential. Against such a theory it would be sufficient to quote
Cowper, though he had the poetic fire, and was subject to the
religious frenzy; and we know that repose and refinement have a
tendency to develop good correspondents. Among these we may number
Edward FitzGerald, whose letters are, perhaps, the most artistic of
any that have recently appeared, and may be placed without hesitation
in the class of letters that have a high intrinsic merit independently
of the writer's extraneous reputation; for FitzGerald was a recluse
with a tinge of misanthropy, nearly unknown to the outer world, except
by one exquisite paraphrase of a Persian poem, and his popularity
rests almost entirely upon his published correspondence. Of these
letters, so excellent of their kind, can it be said that they have the
note of improvisation, that they were written for a friend's eye,
without thought or care for that ordeal of posthumous publication
which has added, as we have been told, a fresh terror to death? The
composition is exactly suited to the tone of easy, pleasant
conversation; the writing has a serene flow, with ripples of wit and
humour; sometimes occupied with East Anglian rusticities and local
colouring, sometimes with pungent literary criticisms; it is never
exuberant, but nowhere dull or commonplace; the language is concise,
with a sedulous nicety of expression. A man of delicate irony, living
apart from the rough, tumbling struggle for existence, he was in most
things the very opposite to Carlyle, whose _French Revolution_ he
admired not much, and who, he thinks, 'ought to be laughed at a
little.' Such a man was not likely to write even the most ordinary
letter without a certain degree of mental preparation, without some
elaboration of thought, or solicitude as to form and finish, for all
which processes he had ample leisure. It may be noticed that he never
condescends to the travelling journal, and that his voyaging
impressions are given in a few fine strokes; but, although he was a
home-keeping Englishman, he was free from household cares, nor did he
keep up that obligatory family correspondence which, when it is
published to exhibit the domestic habits and affections of an eminent
person, becomes ever after a dead-weight upon his biography.
In endeavouring to analyse the charm of these delightful letters, we
may suggest that they gain their special flavour from his talent for
compounding them, like a skilful _chef de cuisine_, out of various
materials or intellectual condiments assorted and dexterously blended.
He is an able and accomplished egoist, one of the few modern
Englishmen who are able to plant themselves contentedly, like a tree,
in one spot, and who prefer books to company, the sedentary to the
stirring life. He was not cut off, like Cowper, a hundred years
earlier, from the outer world in winter and rough weather, yet he had
few visitors and went abroad little; so that he had ample leisure for
perusal and re-perusal of the classic masterpieces, ancient and
modern, and for surveying the field of contemporary literature. His
letters to Fanny Kemble have the advantage of unity in tone that
belongs to a series written to the same person, though the absence of
replies is apt to produce the effect of a monologue. How far good
letter-writing depends upon the course of exchange, upon the stimulus
of pleasant and prompt replies, is a question not easily answered,
since the correspondence on both sides of two good writers is very
rarely put together. Mrs. Kemble had certain fixed rules which must
have been fatal to the free epistolary spirit. 'I never write,' she
said, 'until I am written to; I always write when I am written to, and
I make a point of always returning the same amount of paper that I
receive;' but at any rate it is evident that FitzGerald's letters to
her were regularly answered. He had a light hand on descriptions of
season and scenery; he could give the autumnal atmosphere, the
awakening of leaf and flower in spring, the distant roar of the German
Ocean on the East Anglian coast. As he could record his daily life
without the minute prolixity of a diary, so he could throw off
criticisms on books without falling into the manner of an essayist. In
regard to the 'fuliginous and spasmodic Carlyle,' he asks doubtfully
whether he with all his genius will not subside into the Level that
covers, and consists of, decayed literary vegetation. 'And Dickens,
with all _his_ genius, but whose Men and Women act and talk already
after a more obsolete fashion than Shakespeare's?' None of the
contemporary poets--Tennyson, Browning, or Swinburne--seem to have
entirely satisfied him; he loved the quiet landscapes and rural tales
of Crabbe, who is now read by very few; and he quotes with manifest
enjoyment the lines:
'In a small cottage on the rising ground,
West of the waves, and just beyond the sound.'
'The sea,' he writes, 'somehow talks to one of old things,' probably
because it is changeless by comparison with the land; and a man whose
life is still and solitary is affected by the transitory aspect of
natural things, because he can watch them pass. As old friends drop
off he touches in his letters upon the memories of days that are gone,
and he consorts more and more with the personages of his favourite
poets and romancers, living thus, as he says, among shadows.
Here is a man to whom correspondence was a real solace and a vehicle
of thought and feeling, not a mere note-book of travel, nor a conduit
of confidential small talk. A faint odour of the seasons hangs round
some of these letters, of the sunshine and rain, of dark days and
roads blocked with snow, of the first spring crocus and the faded
autumnal garden plots. We can perceive that, as his retirement became
habitual with increasing age, the correspondence became his main
outlet of ideas and sensations, taking more and more the place of
friendly visits and personal discussion as a channel of intercourse
with the external world. The Hindu sages despised action as
destructive of thought; and undoubtedly the cool secluded vale of life
is good for the cultivation of letter-writing, in one who has the
artistic hand, and to whom this method of gathering up the fruits of
reading and meditation, the harvest of a quiet eye, comes easily. In
many respects the letters of FitzGerald, like his life, are in strong
contrast to Carlyle's; and FitzGerald was somewhat startled by the
publication of Carlyle's 'Reminiscences.' He thinks that, on the
whole, 'they had better have been kept unpublished;' though on reading
the 'Biography' he writes: 'I did not know that Carlyle was so good,
grand, and even lovable, till I read the letters which Froude now
edits.' He himself was not likely to give the general reader more than
he wished to be known about his private affairs; and if one or two
remarks with a sting in them appeared when these letters were first
published in a magazine, they have been carefully excerpted from the
book. The mellow music of his tones, the self-restraint and meditative
attitude, are pleasant to the reader after the turbid utterances and
twisted language of Carlyle; we may compare the stirring rebellious
spirit brooding over the folly of mankind with the man who takes
humanity as he finds it, and is content to make the best of a world in
which he sees not much, beyond art and nature and a few old friends,
to interest him. Upon the whole, we may place Carlyle and FitzGerald,
each in his very different manner, at the head of all the
letter-writers of the generation to which they belong, which is not
precisely our own. It is to be recollected that a man must be dead
before he can win reputation in this particular branch of literature,
and that he cannot be fairly judged until time has removed many
obstacles to unreserved publication. But both Carlyle and FitzGerald
had long lives.
Mr. Stevenson, whose letters are the latest important contribution to
this department of the national library, died early, in the full force
of his intellect, at the zenith of his fame as a writer of romance.
His letters have been edited by Mr. Sidney Colvin, with all the
sympathy and insight into character that are inspired by congenial
tastes and close friendship; and his preface gives an excellent
account of the conditions, physical and mental, under which they were
written, and of the limitations observed in the editing of them.
'Begun,' Mr. Colvin says, 'without a thought of publicity, and
simply to maintain an intimacy undiminished by separation, they
assumed in the course of two or three years a bulk so considerable,
and contained so much of the matter of his daily life and thoughts,
that it by-and-by occurred to him ... that "some kind of a book"
might be extracted out of them after his death.... In a
correspondence so unreserved, the duty of suppression and selection
must needs be delicate. Belonging to the race of Scott and Dumas,
of the romantic narrators and creators, Stevenson belonged no less
to that of Montaigne and the literary egotists.... He was a
watchful and ever interested observer of the motions of his own
mind.'
The whole passage, too long to be quoted, suggests an instructive
analysis of the mental qualities and disposition that go to make a
good letter-writer--a dash of egotism, sensitiveness to outward
impressions, literary charm, the habit of keeping a frank and familiar
record of every day's moods, thoughts, and doings, the picturesque
surroundings of a strange land. In these journal letters from Samoa
the canon of improvisation is to a certain extent infringed, for
Stevenson wrote with publicity in distant view; and the depressing
influence of remoteness is in his case overcome, for he lived in
tropical Polynesia, 'far off amid the melancholy main,' and had speech
with his correspondent only at long intervals. But it is the privilege
of genius to disconcert the rules of criticism; the letters have none
of the vices of the diary, the trivialities are never dull, the
incidents are uncommon or uncommonly well told, and the writer is
never caught looking over his shoulder at posterity.
For extracts there is now little space left in this article; but we
may quote, to show Stevenson's style of landscape-painting, a few
lines describing a morning in Samoa after a heavy gale:
'I woke this morning to find the blow quite ended. The heaven was
all a mottled grey; even the East quite colourless. The downward
slope of the island veiled in wafts of vapour, blue like smoke; not
a leaf stirred on the tallest tree. Only three miles below me on
the barrier reef I could see the individual breakers curl and fall,
and hear their conjunct roaring rise, like the roar of a
thoroughfare close by.'
It is good for the imaginative letter-writer to live within sight and
sound of the sea, to hear the long roll, and to see from his window 'a
nick of the blue Pacific.' It is also good for him to be within range
of savage warfare, and to take long rough rides in a disturbed
country. On one such occasion he writes:
'Conceive such an outing, remember the pallid brute that lived in
Skerryvore like a weevil in a biscuit, and receive the intelligence
that I was rather the better for my journey. Twenty miles ride,
sixteen fences taken, ten of the miles in a drenching rain, seven
of them fasting and in the morning chill, and six stricken hours'
political discussions with an interpreter; to say nothing of
sleeping in a native house, at which many of our excellent literati
would look askance of itself.'
The feat might not seem miraculous to a captain of frontier irregulars
in hard training; but for a delicate novelist in weak health it was
pluckily done. These letters would be readable if Stevenson had
written nothing else, though of course their worth is doubled by our
interest in a man of singular talent who died prematurely. They
illustrate the tale of his life and portray his character; and they
form an addition, valuable in itself, and unique as a variety, to the
series of memorable English letter-writers.
Mr. Colvin mentions, in his preface, that Stevenson's talk was
irresistibly sympathetic and inspiring, full of matter and mirth. It
cannot be denied that between correspondence and conversation,
regarded as fine arts, there is a close kinship; and very similar
reasons have been alleged for the common belief that both are on the
decline. Whether such a belief has any solid foundation in the case of
letter-writing, we may be warranted in doubting. Observations of this
sort, which have a false air of acuteness and profundity, are repeated
periodically. The remark so constantly made at this moment, that
nowadays people read nothing but magazines, was made by Coleridge
early in this century; and Southey prophesied the ruin of good letters
from the penny post. It is true that the number of letters written
must have increased enormously; it is also true that many more are
published than heretofore, and that as a great many of these are not
above mediocrity, are valueless as literature, and of little worth
biographically, they produce on the disappointed reader the effect of
a general depreciation of the standard. Nevertheless, this article
will have been written to little purpose, unless it has shown fair
cause for rejecting such a conclusion, and for maintaining that,
although fine letter-writers, like poets, are few and far between, yet
they have not been wanting in our own time, and are not likely to
disappear. There will always be men, like Coleridge or Carlyle, whose
impetuous thoughts and humoristic conceptions cannot perpetually
submit to the forms and limitations and delays of printing and
publishing, but must occasionally demand instant liberation and
prompt delivery by the natural process of private letters. And
although the stir and bustle of the world is increasing, so that quiet
corners in it are not easily kept, yet it is probable that the race of
literary recluses--of those who pass their days in reading books, in
watching the course of affairs, and in corresponding with a select
circle of friends--will also continue. Whether Englishwomen, who write
letters up to a certain point better than Englishmen, will now rise,
as Frenchwomen have done, to the highest line, and why they have not
done so heretofore, are points that we have no space here for taking
up.
But it is the exceptional peculiarity of letters, as a form of
literature, that the writer can never superintend their publication.
During his lifetime he has no control over them, they are not in his
hands; and they do not appear until after his death. He must rely
entirely, therefore, upon the discretion of his editor, who has to
balance the wishes of a family, or the susceptibilities of an
influential party in politics or religion, against his own notions of
duty toward a departed friend, or against his artistic inclination
toward presenting to the world a true and unvarnished picture of some
remarkable personage. He may resolve, as Froude did in the case of
Carlyle, that 'the sharpest scrutiny is the condition of enduring
fame,' and may determine not to conceal the frailties or the
underlying motives which explain conduct and character. He may refuse,
as in the case of Cardinal Manning, to set up a smooth and whitened
monumental effigy, plastered over with colourless panegyric, and may
insist on showing a man's true proportions in the alternate light and
shadow through which every life naturally and inevitably passes. But
such considerations would lead us beyond our special subject into the
larger field of Biography; and we must be content, on the present
occasion, with this endeavour to sketch in bare outline the history
and development of English letter-writing, and to examine very briefly
the elementary conditions that conduce to success in an art that is
universally practised, but in which high excellence is so very rarely
attained.