[Sidenote: A NINETEENTH CENTURY GROUP]
Part at least of these general remarks has a very special relevance to the rest of our story. There may be differences of respectable opinion as to the system of editing just advocated; but they will hardly concern one point--that the susceptibilities of living persons must be considered. To some extent indeed this is a mere counsel of selfish prudence: for an editor who neglects it may get himself into serious difficulties. Even where such danger does not exist, or might perhaps be disregarded, it is impossible for any decent person to run the risk of needlessly offending others. It will be seen at once that this introduces a new matter for consideration in regard to most--practically all--of the correspondences which we have still to survey. Even those just discussed have only recently pa.s.sed from under its range. Sh.e.l.ley"s son died not so very long ago: grandchildren of Byron much more recently; and if Keats had lived to the ordinary age of man and had, as he very likely would have done, married not f.a.n.n.y Brawne, but somebody else later, a son or daughter of his (daughters are particularly and sometimes inconveniently loyal to their deceased parents) might be alive and flourishing now. As this constraint extends not merely to the families of the writers but to those of persons mentioned by them (not to speak of these persons themselves in the most recent cases), it exercises, as will at once be seen, a most wide-ranging cramp and brake upon publication. Blunders are occasionally made of course: the most remarkable in recent times was probably an oversight of the editor of Edward FitzGerald"s letters, than which hardly any more interesting exist among those yet to be noticed. FitzGerald, quite innocently and without the slightest personal malevolence but thinking only of Mrs.
Browning"s work, had expressed himself (as anybody might in a private letter) to the effect that perhaps we need not be sorry for her death.
Unfortunately the letter was published while her husband was still alive: and many people must remember the very natural and excusable, but somewhat excessive and undignified, explosion which followed on his part.
Such things must of course be avoided at all costs; and the consequence is that nineteenth century letters must frequently--in fact with rare if any exceptions--have appeared in a condition of expurgation which cannot but have affected their spirit and savour to a very considerable extent.
It is for instance understood that Mr. Matthew Arnold"s were very severely censored; and, while readily believing this and acquiescing in its probable propriety, the old Adam in some readers may be unable to refrain from regret.
Again, there is something to be said about the less good effects of that "Life-and-Letters" system which has been quite rightly welcomed and praised for its better ones. Drawing on the Letters--with good material to work on and good skill in the worker--improves the Life enormously; but it is by no means certain--indeed it has been hinted already--that the Letters themselves do not to a certain extent lose by it. Indeed from one point of view, the word "loss" may be used in its most literal meaning. The compiler of one very famous biography was said, for instance, to have--with a disregard of the value of letters as autographs which was magnificent perhaps in one way but far from "the game" in others--cut up the actual sheets and pasted the pieces on his ma.n.u.script, sending the whole to the printers and chancing the survival even of what was sent, when it came back with the proofs.
But there is another sense of "loss" which has also to be reckoned. The framework of biography is, or at least ought to be, something more than a mere frame: and it distracts attention from the letters themselves, breaks up their continuous effect, and in many cases necessitates at least occasional omission of parts which an editor of them by themselves would not think of excluding. Of course this is no argument against the plan as such: but it has, together with what was said recently, to be taken into account when we compare the epistolary position of the last century with that of its immediate predecessor.[33]
These remarks are made not in the least by way of depreciating or even making an apology for nineteenth century letters, but only in order to put the reader in a proper state for critical estimation of them. Nor is it necessary to repeat--still less to discuss--the more general lamentations with some reference to which we started as to any decay of letter-writing. Provisos and warnings may be taken as having been made sufficiently: and we pa.s.s to the actual survey.
It may have been noticed in reference to the princ.i.p.al group of letter-writers in the eighteenth that, with the exception of Cowper, they were all acquainted with each other. Walpole knew Lady Mary, Chesterfield and Gray; while Gray, if he did not know the other two, knew Walpole very well indeed. Something of the same sort might be contended for among those whom we have selected on the bridge of the eighteenth and nineteenth. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and Lamb were of course intimately connected: Southey knew Landor and Sh.e.l.ley, Keats knew Sh.e.l.ley, Wordsworth and Lamb; while Byron and Sh.e.l.ley, however unequally, were pretty closely yoked together. It is not meant that in all these groups everybody wrote to each other; but that the writing faculty was curiously prominent--diffused like a kind of atmosphere--in all. Now if we look in the nineteenth for such a group it will be found perhaps less readily. But one such at least certainly exists, to wit that which includes Tennyson, Thackeray, Edward FitzGerald, Carlyle and his wife, f.a.n.n.y Kemble, Sterling and one or two more. There are of course numerous others outside this group, and even in it Tennyson himself is not a very remarkable letter-writer, any more than his great rival, Browning, was. But there was the same diffusion of the letter-writing spirit which has been noticed above, and Thackeray, FitzGerald, the Carlyles, and perhaps f.a.n.n.y Kemble are quite of the greater clans among our peculiar people.
The most remarkable of all these--and as it seems to the present writer, one of the most remarkable of all English letter-writers is one whose letters have never been collected,[34] and from whom, until comparatively lately, we had only few and as it were accidental specimens. It is hoped that, notwithstanding the great changes of taste recently as to reticence or indiscretion, there are still many people who can not only understand but thoroughly sympathise with Thackeray"s disgust at the idea of having his "Life" written; and the even greater reluctance which he would certainly have felt at that of having his letters published. But, as has been suggested on a former occasion, when things _are_ published there is nothing disgraceful in reading them: and it may be frankly admitted that lovers of English literature would have missed much pleasure and the opportunity of much admiration if the "Brookfield" letters, those to the Baxter family and others in America, those finally included in the "Biographical" edition, and yet others which have turned up sporadically had remained unknown. It may be doubted whether there is anything like them in our literature--if indeed there is in any other--for the double, treble or even more complicated gift of view into character, matter of interest, positive literary satisfaction, and (perhaps most remarkable of all) resemblance to and explanation of the author"s "regular literature," as it has been called.
In some respects they resemble the letters of Keats; but there is absent from them the immaturity which was noted in those, and which extended to both matter and style. They are more various in subject and tone than Sh.e.l.ley"s. They are not deliberately quaint like Lamb"s; and they naturally lack (whether this is wholly an advantage or not, may admit, though not here, of dispute) the restraint[35] which, in greater or less degree and in varied kind, characterizes the great eighteenth century epistolers.
[Sidenote: THACKERAY]
One additional charm which many of them possess may be regarded by extreme precisians as of doubtful legitimacy as far as comment here is concerned: but this may be ruled out as a superfluous scruple. It is the illumination of the text "by the author"s own candles" as he himself says in a well-known Introduction: the actual "ill.u.s.tration" by insertion in the script, of little pen-drawings. The shortcomings of Thackeray"s draughtsmanship have always been admitted: and by n.o.body more frankly than by himself. But they hardly affect this sort of "picturing" at all. The unfortunate inability to depict a pretty face which he deplored need do no harm whatever: and his lack of "composition" not much. A spice of caricature is almost invariably admissible in such things: and the same tricksy spirit which prompted the hundreds of initials, _culs-de-lampe_ etc. contributed by him to _Punch_ and to be found collected in the "Oxford" edition of his works, was most happily at hand for use in letters. Some years ago there appeared, in a catalogue of autographs for sale, an extract of text and cut which was irresistibly funny. The author and designer had had a mishap by slipping on that peculiarly treacherous suddenly frozen rain for which (though we are liable enough to it in England and though some living have seen the entire Strand turned into one huge pantomime scene, roars of laughter included, as people came out of theatres) we have no special name. (The French, in whose capital it is said to be even more frequent, call it _verglas_.) In telling it he had drawn himself sitting (as involuntarily though one hopes not so eternally as _infelix Theseus_) with arms, legs, hat, etcetera in disorder suitable to the occasion and with a facial expression of the most ludicrous dismay. It can hardly have taken a dozen strokes of the pen: but they simply glorified the letter.
In no sense, however, can the value and delight of Thackeray"s letters be said to depend upon this _bonus_ of ill.u.s.tration. Without it they would be among the most noteworthy and the most delectable of their kind. One sees in them the "first state" of that extraordinary glancing at all sorts of side-views, possible objections and comments on "what the other fellow thinks," which is the main secret in his published writings. If the view of him as a "sentimentalist" (which n.o.body, unless it is taken offensively, need refuse to accept) is strengthened by them, that absurd other view, which strangely prevailed so long, of his "cynicism" is utterly destroyed. We see the variety of his interests; the keenness of his sensations; the strange and kaleidoscopic rapidity of the changes in his mood and thought. And through the whole there runs the wonderful style which was so long unrecognised--nay, which those who go by the trumpery machine-made rules of "composition books" used gravely to stigmatise as "incorrect." Time lifts a great many (though not perhaps all) the restraints upon publication which have been discussed and advocated above: and it will probably be possible some day for posterity to possess, not only a collected body of the now scattered Thackeray letters, but a considerably larger one than has ever appeared even in extracts and catalogues. It will be an addition to our Epistolary Library which can bear comparison with any previous occupant of those shelves: and one of the books which deserve, in a very peculiar sense, the hackneyed praise of being "as good as a novel." For it will be almost the equivalent of an additional novel of its author"s own--a _William Makepeace Thackeray_ in the familiar novel-form of t.i.tle, and in the old Richardsonian form of contents--but oh! how different from anything of Richardson"s save that it might possibly make you hang yourself, not because you could not get to the story, but because you had come to the end of it.
[Sidenote: FITZGERALD]
If, however, anyone insists on a formal and more or less complete presentation, already existing, of nineteenth century "Letters" in a body by a single writer, the palm must probably be given to those (already referred to) of the translator or paraphrast of Omar Khayyam.
Besides their great intrinsic interest and peculiar idiosyncrasy, they have, for anyone studying the subject as we are endeavouring to do, a curious attraction of comparison. Letter-writing, though by no means exclusively, would appear to be specially and peculiarly the _forte_ of men who live somewhat special and peculiar lives--men without the ordinary family ties of wife and children--sometimes though by no means always, recluses; possibly to some extent "originals," "humourists,"
"eccentrics," as they have been called at different times and from different points of view. Even Walpole, fond as he was of society, belongs to the cla.s.s after a fashion, as do also Chesterfield[36] and Lady Mary, while Gray, Cowper, and at a later period Lamb, are eminently of it. But hardly anyone so unquestionably comes under the cla.s.sification as Edward FitzGerald. He certainly was for a time married, but that marriage as certainly was not made in Heaven, if it was not conspicuously of the other origin: and actual cohabitation lasted but a short time. He had no children, and though he frequently foregathered with the family from which he sprang, he was essentially a "solitary." Such solitaries, even if they do not ticket and advertise themselves as such after the fashion of Rousseau and Senancour and the author of _Jacopo Ortis_, naturally enough find in letters the outlet for communication with their fellows[37] which others find in conversation, and the occupation which those others have ready-made, in society, business of all kinds etc. That some copious and excellent letter-writers, such as for instance Southey, have been extremely busy, and "family men" of the most unblemished character, merely shows that the rule is not universal. But it may be observed that their letters usually have less intense idiosyncrasy than those of the others.
Of such idiosyncrasy, both in letters and in other work, few men have had more than the author of _Euphranor_ and (as we have had to say before) the "translator or paraphrast" not merely of Persian but of Spanish and Greek masterpieces. It is indeed notorious that it was in this latter capacity that he showed the individuality of his genius most strongly. It is a frequently but perhaps idly[38] disputed question how much is Omar and how much FitzGerald, while the problem might certainly be extended by asking how much is Aeschylus and how much Calderon in his versions of those masters: but it does not concern us here. What does concern us is the fact that he has contrived to make his most famous exercise in translation signally, and the others to some extent, not dead "versions," but as it were reincarnations of the original, the spirit or the flesh (whichever anyone pleases) being his own, or both being blended of his and the author"s. To do this requires a "strong nativity" though not in the equivocal sense in which another great translator of FitzGerald"s own type[39] used that term. It shows in his scanty "original" work: but it shows also and perhaps more strongly in his letters. Everyone who has studied the history of the English Universities in connection with that of English literature knows, even if he has not been fortunate enough to experience it, the remarkable fashion in which, at certain times, colleges and coteries at Oxford and Cambridge have seemed to throw a strange and almost magical influence over a generation (hardly more) of undergraduates. There was unmistakably such an _aura_ or atmosphere about in Trinity College, Cambridge, during the last of the twenties and the first of the thirties of the nineteenth century--a spirit of literature and humour, of seriousness and jest, of prose sense and half mystical poetry--which produced things as diverse as _The Dying Swan_ and Clarke"s _Library of Useless Knowledge_, _Vanity Fair_ and the English _Rubaiyat_.
Of this curiously blended mood-combination--of which in their different ways Tennyson and Thackeray, as universally known, Brookfield, W. B.
Donne, G. S. Venables, as less known, but noteworthy instances suggest themselves as examples--FitzGerald was certainly not the least remarkable. He had, as eccentrics usually and almost necessarily have, not a few limitations, some of which possibly were, though others certainly were not, deliberately a.s.sumed or accepted. He would not allow that Tennyson had ever in his later work (not latest by any means) done anything so good as his earlier. In that unlucky though quite blameless observation on Mrs. Browning which was referred to above, he ignored or showed himself unable to appreciate the fact that the poetess had never done anything better than, if anything so good as, some of her very latest work.[40] It cannot be considered an entirely adequate cause for ceasing to live with your wife,[41] that her dresses rustle; and many other instances of what may be called practical and literary _non-sequiturs_ might be alleged against him. But all these "queernesses" are evidence of a temperament and a mode of thinking which are likely to produce very satisfactory letters. They are sure not to be dull: and when the queerness is accompanied by such literary power as "Fitz" possessed they are not likely to be merely silly, as some things are which attempt not to be dull. As a matter of fact they are delightful: and their variety is astonishing. Odd stories and odd experiences seem, despite his almost claustral life, to have had a habit of flying to FitzGerald like filings to a magnet--as for instance the irresistible anecdote of the parish clerk who insisted on giving out for singing casual remarks of the parson above him as if they were verses of a hymn, and who was duly echoed by the congregation. Even when he does not make you laugh he satisfies you: even when you do not agree with him you are obliged to him for having expressed his heresy.
[Sidenote: f.a.n.n.y KEMBLE]
One of FitzGerald"s special correspondents was, for reasons then imperative, not a member of the Cambridge group itself, but as closely connected with it as possible: being the sister of one of its actual members. John M. Kemble, one of our earliest and best Anglo-Saxon scholars in modern times, was, like others of his famous family (so far as is generally known) a person of varied talents, though he showed these neither in letter writing nor in the direction which Tennyson incorrectly augured in the "Sonnet to J. M. K." His sister Frances (invariably, like most though by no means all ladies of her name, called "f.a.n.n.y"[42]) was a very remarkable person indeed. After taking early and with brilliant success to the stage which might almost be said to be hers by inheritance,[43] she married an American planter with even worse results (they were actually divorced) than her friend FitzGerald"s marriage brought about later: and for many years returned to public life, not as an actress but as a reader. She wrote and published both prose and verse of various kinds: but her best known work and that which places her here, is a voluminous series of "Records," etc., much of which is composed of actual letters, while practically the whole of it is what we have called "letter-stuff." It has perhaps been published _too_ voluminously: and it is certain that, as indeed one might expect, its parts are not equal in interest. But experienced and balanced judgment must always sum up in her favour as possessing, in letter- and even other writing, more than ordinary talent, perhaps never quite happily or fully developed. Merely as a person she seems to have exercised an extraordinary attraction without being exactly amiable[44]: and from the intellectual and artistic sides as a writer (we have nothing here to do with her histrionic powers) to have been what has sometimes in others been called "inorganic," "ill-regulated," "not brought off," etc., but of extraordinary capacity.
This may have had something to do with her sudden and exceptional success, when at barely twenty, and with no training except what heredity might give her, she "took the town [and the country] by storm"
as Juliet, and very soon afterwards "carried" America likewise. But her "records" of these and other things are of almost the first quality: and this power of "recording" continued and was perhaps stimulated by the less as well as the more fortunate events of her life. It may be said indeed that in her time a young woman of full age (she was five and twenty), unusual experience of the world, and still more unusual wits, had no business to marry a planter in the Southern States, knowing that she was to live there, unless she had reconciled herself to the inst.i.tution of slavery. Nor can anybody without prejudice deny this. But the inconsistency and the troubles it developed gave occasion to some very remarkable "recording," and the same had been the case earlier with her life, whether at home, on the stage, or in society, and was the case later whether she lived in England, in the Northern States, or on the Continent of Europe. Perhaps you never exactly like her: an unusual experience in the reading of letters, which for the most part are singularly reconciling from the mere fact of their explanatory quality.
There is indeed no better confirmation of the well-known French saying _tout comprendre c"est tout pardonner_. Here, however, there are, as elsewhere, exceptions--Gray being perhaps one[45] as our present subject is another. But there are few things more interesting, though their interest may be somewhat tragic, than the spectacle of the way "things go wrong" so easily, so finally, so fatally. f.a.n.n.y Kemble had a sister Adelaide, afterwards Mrs. Sartoris, with whom everything appears to have gone right: but with herself it "seemed otherwise to the G.o.ds." And her letters or memoirs, or whatever they are to be called, are the record thereof, as well as of other things.
[Sidenote: THE CARLYLES]
The letters and "letter-stuff" of the Carlyles, husband and wife, according to the inevitable misfortune attending so much of our subject--supplied the occasion of volumes of that disgusting and most idle controversy which has made many people of taste pray that nothing biographical may ever be published about them. Far be it from us to take part in a game which if it does not always, like the unpleasant personage in the old ballad,
Come for ill and never for good,
certainly comes for the former much oftener than for the latter purpose and result. _Sunt lacrimae rerum_ is--once more and as so often--the best and the sufficient observation. But there remains in the letters of both, and especially in those of the lady, plenty of wholesome interest and of justifiable--not spying or eavesdropping--information as to character. Judged comparatively, they certainly do not contradict the notion formerly referred to, that in some respects letter-writing is a specially feminine gift. Carlyle"s own letters[46] have plenty of merit and attraction--some of the descriptive ones especially: and they demonstrate, in the infallible way which letters and letters alone can supply in the absence of long personal familiarity, that the general tone and key of his writings was no falsetto but a perfectly genuine thing--that the often urged contrast of the _Life of Schiller_, instead of evidencing affectation in the later work, only proves constraint in the earlier. At the same time, except for what may be called side-ill.u.s.tration of the works, and completion of the biography for those who want it, there is not very much in Carlyle"s letters which would be a serious loss.
With his wife the case is different. Without her "Letters and Memorials"
we might (it is rather improbable that we _should_, owing to the misdemeanours of more persons than one and the blow-fly appet.i.te of a part of the public for sore places) have escaped a good deal of the ign.o.ble wrangling above referred to. But we should not only have failed to appreciate a very remarkable character, but have missed some of the very best of our now existing contributions to epistolary literature.
Personally Mrs. Carlyle was by no means a general favourite. She had a fearfully sharp tongue, and a still sharper wit in directing it upon her victims; her experiences were not very likely to edulcorate her acids and mollify her asperities. The letters show that, as so often happens, there was plenty of sweetness within the sharp exterior, and that her strength was the strength of pa.s.sion, not of obduracy. But this is not all. There might have been biographical whitewashing of this kind without much gain to pure literature. But the letters showed likewise a power of expression, both lighter and more serious, which is hardly inferior to that found in any correspondence of man or woman, genuine or fict.i.tious. Some people, not given to rash superlatives and pretty extensively acquainted with literature, have held that the letter describing her visit after many years to Haddington, and the reminiscences it called forth, has no superior in the vast range of our subject for pure pathos perfectly expressed, without constraint on nature yet without loss of dignity.[47] On the other hand, the half comic accounts of her domestic troubles etc. are worthy of Fielding or Thackeray. The fact is that Mrs. Carlyle possessed what is rare in women--humour. And she exemplified, as few other women and not so very many men have done, Anne Evans"s matchless definition of it as "thinking in jest while feeling in earnest." Moreover while, as all true humourists can, she could drop the jest altogether when necessary, she could, as is the case with them likewise, never quite discard the earnest.
[Sidenote: MACAULAY AND d.i.c.kENS]
Some of the most distinguished of Carlyle"s contemporaries, the great men of letters of the mid-nineteenth century, have left letters more or less copious and more or less valuable from one or both of the two sides, biographical and literary, but not eminently so. Macaulay"s letters and diaries suit biography excellently, and have been excellently used in his. They lighten and sweeten the rather boisterous "c.o.c.ksureness" of the published writings: and help his few but very remarkable poems other than the _Lays_ (which are excellent but in a different kind) to show the soul and heart of the man as apart from his mere intellect. But they are not perhaps intrinsically very capital. So also in d.i.c.kens"s case the "Life-and-Letters" system is excellently justified, but one does not know that the letters in themselves would always deserve a first cla.s.s in this particular school of _Literae Humaniores_. Letter-writing admits--if it may not even require--a certain kind of egotism. But it must be what the French call an _Egoisme a plusieurs_--a temper which takes, if only for the moment, other people into itself and cares for them there. "The Inimitable" was perhaps too generally thinking of that Inimitable himself or of the fict.i.tious creations of his marvellous genius. If, like his own Mr. Toots, he could have written some letters to or from _them_ it would have been a very different thing. In this respect he does not, as in others he does, resemble Balzac, whose egotism was in a way as intense as his own and like it extended to his creations, but could extend farther: while the contrast with Thackeray is even more salient than in other cases from this same point of view. At the same time it must not be supposed that there is any intention here of belittling d.i.c.kens, either as a letter-writer or in any other way. It is only suggested that he lacks one of the things necessary to perfect letter-writing. Perhaps his most noteworthy productions in the style are his editorial criticisms--rather limited in taste and purview, but singularly shrewd within other limits.
And many of the others tell their substance with that faculty of "telling" which he possessed as few have ever done, while the comedy of those given here is "the true d.i.c.kens."
[Sidenote: SOME NOVELISTS]
Mention of the three greatest novelists (English and French) of the mid-nineteenth century naturally suggests the rest of a cla.s.s so predominant in that century"s literary production. Their record in the matter is rather chequered, for reasons, in some respects and cases at any rate, not difficult to discover. Reference is elsewhere made to the disappointment experienced (perhaps not too reasonably) by some readers of the letters of George Eliot. A not dissimilar feeling had been expressed earlier in regard to those of Miss Austen: which, however, were intrinsically far superior. Except to her sister, and it may be even to her, Jane Austen was not at all likely to indulge in what is called in French _epanchement_: it was not in the least her line, whether in writing for publication or otherwise. Only one full year pa.s.sed between the death of Miss Austen and the birth of Miss Evans, and the two ill.u.s.trated very fairly the comfortable if not invariably accurate idea that when one human being dies another is born to succeed him or her in their special functions. But, as in other respects, they differed here remarkably; and though in neither case was the nature of the writer exactly expansive, this want of expansiveness was very differently conditioned. Miss Austen no doubt could, if she had chosen, (she has done something like it as it is) have written most delightful letters. A hundred scenes in the novels from Catherine Morland"s tremors and trials, or John Dashwood"s progressive limitations of generosity for his sisters, to some of the best things in _Persuasion_, would take letter form with the happiest results. But she did not choose that it should be so. George Eliot, on the other hand, after her earlier days, had ensconced herself in such a chrysalis of quasi-philosophical and quasi-scientific thought and speech that she could hardly have recovered the freedom of expression which is almost the soul of letter-writing.
Some of Bulwer"s (the first Lord Lytton"s) letters are remarkable in ways, especially that of literary criticism, which might hardly be expected by anyone who had insufficiently taken the measure of his strangely unequal and imperfect, yet as strangely varied, talent. But as the century went on a new prohibitory influence arose in the enormous professional production which began to be customary with novelists--princ.i.p.ally tempted no doubt by the corresponding gain of money, but perhaps also by the n.o.bler desire of increasing, or at least living up to, their reputations. Even short of the unbroken drudgery which, it is said, compelled one lady novelist, of high rank for a time, to scribble her novels as she was actually receiving and talking to morning callers, the production of three or four novels a year--and those not the c.o.c.k-boats we often see now but attempts at least at "the old three-decker" in its fullest dimensions--could leave little time or inclination for extensive letter-writing. There were, however, some exceptions. Charles Kingsley--who, though his novels were not very numerous, supplemented them with all sorts of miscellaneous writing for publication, was a diligent sportsman, an active cleric, and a busy man in many kinds and ways--wrote certainly good and probably many letters.
The two brighter stars in the Bronte constellation, especially Charlotte, were scarcely less remarkable with the pen in this way than in others: and Mrs. Gaskell, Charlotte"s biographer, has been put high by some. The unconquerable personality of Charles Reade showed itself here as elsewhere[48]: and others might be mentioned.[49] But perhaps the most distinguished novelist next to Thackeray of the nineteenth century, who was also a most distinguished letter-writer, was one who died in middle age not long before its end--Robert Louis Stevenson.
[Sidenote: STEVENSON]
Stevenson had in fact practically all the qualifications necessary for a good pract.i.tioner of our art. He had, eminently, that gift which the Romans called _facundia_ and the French can translate, if with a slight degradation of meaning, by _faconde_; but for which we, though the adjective "facund" has, one believes, been tried, possess no noun, "Eloquence" being too much specified to "fine" writing or speaking.
"Facility of expression" perhaps comes nearest. Whether he corrected or corrupted this native gift by his famous "sedulous aping" of stylists before him is a debated question: but one quite unnecessary to touch here. It is sufficient to say that he never aped anyone in his letters, unless playfully and in a sort of concert with his correspondent. Indeed he possessed, quintessentially, that "naturalness" of matter and form on which so much stress has been laid. He had a disposition equally favourable to the business--if business we may call it. A person who is habitually gloomy may write capital letters of an impressive character now and then: but is likely to produce little but boredom if he extends his practice. Louis Stevenson did not habitually "regard the world through a horse collar" (as it was once put), but he certainly did not pa.s.s through it gnashing his teeth or holding his handkerchief to his eyes. Although he did a good deal of work, sometimes under no small difficulties, he had very little if any of that _collar_-work--that grinding "in Gaza at the mill with slaves" which takes the spring out of all but the springsomest of men. He had widely varied experience of scene, occupation, personal society. He knew plenty of books without being in the least bookish; had, as the old saying goes, "wit at will,"
and, though he never made deliberate and affected efforts to _get_ out of ruts, _kept_ out of them without the least trouble. He was as little of a "poser" or of a "rotter" as he was of a prig, and there was not a drop of bad blood in his veins. If these things could not make a good letter-writer nothing could; and there is little doubt that he will hold his place as such as long as English literature lasts. It is a great pleasure to me to give, as I hope to do, one unpublished letter of his to myself as a sort of _bonus_ to the reader of this little book--a letter of rather unusual interest in literary as in other respects.
At this point, perhaps, actual survey may, and indeed had best, stop: not merely because s.p.a.ce is closing in. Lovers of letters will of course detect what seem to them omissions in what has gone before and what comes after. Some of these, no doubt, will have been real oversights.
Others, for this or that reason deliberate, such as Gibbon and Newman--the latter not merely for his re-statement of the character-value of correspondence, but for his exemplifications of it--might certainly have been more fully noticed. But in regard to later writers there are several obstacles in the path. Of some it would not be easy to speak on account of their own lives being too recent: in regard of nearly all the same fact must have occasioned exercise of "censorship" to a degree which makes absolute judgment of their competence as epistolers rash, and comparative judgment almost impossible. To take up once more one example of men who were born a full or almost a full century ago, Mr. Paul,[50] speaking apparently with intimate knowledge of the originals, speaks also of the "severe process of excision and retrenchment to which these [_the letters of Mr. Matthew Arnold_] have been exposed." And he thinks that very few letters "could have endured" it. Those who remember the appearance of these letters will also remember that some critics doubted whether even "these" had exactly "endured it"--that is to say, whether the expected salt of the author of so much published _persiflage_ had not been left out or had singularly lost its savour. To take another from the next generation, it is pretty certain that Mr. Swinburne"s letters, though we have judicious selections from them, must have needed much more excision or retrenchment than Mr. Arnold"s, unless he wrote them in a manner remarkably different both from his conversation and from his published works. In such cases it is best, the evidence being not fully before us, not to antic.i.p.ate either the privileges or the decisions of posterity.
VI
SOME SPECIAL KINDS OF LETTER
A few more general remarks, however, on _kinds_ of letter-writing--as distinguished from personality and accomplishment of letter-writers--may not improperly be added.
[Sidenote: LETTERS AND THE NOVEL]
One extremely curious application of the Letter has not yet been noticed, except by a glance or two: and that is the way in which--when after birth-struggles for some two thousand years the novel at last got itself born--letter-writing was pressed into its service. Historically, as was briefly indicated near the beginning of this, one may connect Greek Rhetoric and Greek Romance, and suggest the connection as the origin of the "novel-in-letters." In the romance proper--that is to say that of the Middle Ages--letters do not play any very important part, just as they played none in life. But in the "Heroic" variety of the late sixteenth and the whole of the seventeenth centuries they play a much larger--partly no doubt because of the influence (here noted) of the Greek Romance itself, but more because of the increased frequency and importance of actual correspondence in life and society. We need not, however, attribute too much to this influence of imitation in seeking for the cause or causes which made Richardson adopt the form: nor need we even put down to Richardson"s own popularity, abroad as well as at home, the very general further adoption and continuance of a form which has perhaps more to be said against it than for it. Most serious students of the history of prose fiction must have noticed, and some of them have already pointed out, the curious, rather naf, but quite obvious feeling on the part of the earlier pract.i.tioners of such fiction that somebody might ask them, in more polite language than that in which Cardinal Ippolito d"Este asked Ariosto a similar question, "Where they got their stories from?" The feeling seems sometimes to have affected poets, but much more rarely: the Muse being allowed to possess and confer a certain immunity from such cross-examination. Of the unnecessary and sometimes unnatural devices invented to answer this inconvenient question Scott in one well-known pa.s.sage,[51] and others elsewhere, have made ironic lists: and not the least characteristic of Miss Austen"s satiric touches is the pa.s.sage where Catherine Morland expects palpitating interest from a bundle of washing-bills in a wardrobe-cupboard. But the antic.i.p.ation of such a question, though perhaps it became conventional before it disappeared altogether, was certainly at one time real.
At any rate, helped by the example of Richardson--Father of English novels as he is with whatever justice called--and by that overmastering fancy for letter-writing itself, which, as should have been already made clear, affected the century in which English novels were born--the practice spread and held its ground. Fielding was too perfect an artist in the higher and purer kind of fiction to favour it: and though Sterne himself was a sufficiently characteristic letter-writer, the form would not have suited the peculiar eccentricity of his two novels. But Smollett"s best, _Humphrey Clinker_, adopts the method, and is perhaps one of its most successful examples. It suited the author"s preference for a succession of scenes rather than a connected plot; for the sharp presentation of "humours" in character and incident. And it continued to be practised both early in the nineteenth century--examples had swarmed at the end of the eighteenth--and later. _Redgauntlet_ (which some have thought one of the best of Scott"s novels and which few good judges would put much lower) is written in it to a great extent, but not wholly. And it may be noticed that this combination of Letters and narrative, which came in pretty early, is rather tell-tale. It is a sort of confession of what certainly is the fact--that the novel entirely by letters is a clumsy device, constantly getting in the way of the "story." Indeed the method of _Redgauntlet_ is a kind of retreat to the elder and more modern--one may say the more artistic and rational--plan of _introducing_ letters, but only occasionally as auxiliaries to, and as it were ill.u.s.trations of, the actual narrative, not as subst.i.tutes for, or at any rate main const.i.tuents of, it.[52] Indeed, in order to make a novel wholly composed of letters thoroughly and absorbingly attractive, either charm of style such as to make the kind of literature in which it appears, more or less indifferent; or pa.s.sion which is more suitable to poetry or drama than to prose; or both, may seem unnecessary.
[Sidenote: LETTERS AND BIOGRAPHY]
It was also in the eighteenth century--_the_ century once more of letter-writing--that letters, this time genuine not fict.i.tious, began to play, to an important extent, a subsidiary part in yet another department of literature--biography. They had always done so, of course, to an extent less important in History, of which Biography is really a subdivision. The truth expressed in that dictum of the pseudo-Demetrius quoted above as to the illuminative power of letters on character could be missed by no historian and by no biographer who had his wits about him--even if he had less striking examples at hand than that letter of the Emperor Tiberius to the Senate which is one of the Tacitean flashes of lightning through the dark of history. But the credit of using letters as a main const.i.tuent of biography--of originating the "Life-and-Letters" cla.s.s of books which fills so large a part of modern library-shelves--has been given, as far as English is concerned, to Mason in his dealings with Gray. There is so little to be said in favour of Mason, that we need not enquire too narrowly into his right to this commendation: though critical conscience must be appeased by adding that he abused his privilege as an editor and "literary executor" by garbling unblushingly. Boswell did Mason honour by acknowledging his example, and much more also by following it; and this practically settled the matter.
Except in short pieces, which had need be of special excellence like Carlyle"s _Sterling_, the plan has always been followed since: and there can here at least be no question that with a little favour of circ.u.mstances, it is the best plan possible. You get, as has been said, your character at first hand; if the letters include epistles to as well as from him or her, you get invaluable side-lights; you get, except in cases of wilful deception or great carelessness, the most trustworthy accounts of fact; and you can, or ought to be able to, hear the man talking.