A Letter Book

That this magical transforming element is wanting in a most remarkable pair of contemporaries, Chesterfield and "Lady Mary," has been generally allowed; though a strong fight has been made by some of her sisters for "my lady" and though the soundest criticism allows that "my lord" did not so much lack as dissemble heart and even sometimes showed the heart he had. It would be out of our proper line to discuss such questions here at any length. It may be enough to warn readers who have not yet had time to look into the matter for themselves that Pope's coarse attacks on Lady Mary and Johnson's fine rhetorical rebuff of Chesterfield were unquestionably outbursts of hurt personal pride. Horace Walpole made hits at both for reasons which we may call personal at second-hand, because the one was a friend of his sister-in-law and the other an enemy of his father. As for Dickens' caricature of "Sir John Chester" in Barnaby Rudge it is not so much a caricature as a sheer and inexcusable libel. Anyhow, the letters of the Earl and the Lady are exceedingly good reading. Persons of no advanced years who have been introduced to them in the twentieth century have been known to find them positively captivating: and their attractions are, not merely as between the two but even in each case by itself, singularly various. Lady Mary's forte – perhaps in direct following of her great forerunner and part namesake, Marie de Sévigné, though she spoke inadvisedly of her – lies in description of places and manners, and in literary criticism.14 Her accounts of her Turkish journey in earlier days, and of some scenes in Italy later, of her court and other experiences, etc., rank among the best things of the kind in English; and her critical acuteness, assisted as it was by no small possession of what might almost be called scholarship, was most remarkable for her time. Also, she does all these things naturally – with that naturalness at which – when they possess it at all – women are so much better than men. People say a lady can never pass a glass without looking at herself. (One thinks by the way one has seen men do that.) But after all what the glass gives is a reflection and record of nature: and women learn to see it in others as well as in themselves.

CHESTERFIELD

Few English writers have suffered more injustice in popular estimation than Chesterfield. Even putting aside the abuse by which, as above mentioned, Johnson showed (on Fluellen's principles convincingly) that he had more in common with the Goddess Juno than the J in both their names – that is to say an insanabile vulnus of vanity – there remain sources of mistakes and prejudice which have been all too freely tapped. The miscellaneous letters – which show sides of him quite different from those most in evidence throughout the "Letters to his Son" – are rarely read: these latter have been, at least once and probably oftener, made into a schoolbook for translation into other languages – an office by no means likely to conciliate affection. And even when they are not suspected of positive immorality there is a too general idea that they are frivolously and trivially didactic – the sort of thing that Mr. Turveydrop the elder might have written on Deportment – if he had had brains enough. Yet again, unbiassed appreciation of them has been hampered by all sorts of idle controversies as to the kind of man that young Stanhope actually turned out to be – a point of merely gossiping importance in any case, and, whatever be the facts of this one, having no more to do with the merit of the letters than the other fact that some people make mistakes in their accounts after having learnt the multiplication table has to do with the value of that composition. As a matter of relevant fact the letters – except (and even here the accusations against them are much exaggerated) from the point of view of very severe morality in regard to one or two points – perhaps no more than one – are full of sound advice, clear common-sense, and ripe experience of the world. The manners they recommend are not those of any but a very exceptional "dancing master," they are those of a gentleman. The temper that they inculcate and that they exhibit in the inculcator is positively kindly and relatively correct. Both these and the other batch of "Letters to his Godson" and successor in the Earldom (the Lord Chesterfield for forging whose name Dr. Dodd was hanged) show the most curious and unusual pains on the part of a man admitted to be in the highest degree a man of the world, and sometimes accused of being nothing else, to make himself intelligible and agreeable to young – at first very young – boys. In his letters to older folk, both men and women, qualities for which there was no room in the others arise – the thoughts of a statesman and a philosopher, the feelings of a being quite different from the callous, frivolous, sometimes "insolent"15 worldling who has been so often put in the place of the real Chesterfield. And independently of all this there is present in all these letters – though most attractively in those to his son – a power of literary expression which would have made the fortune of any professional writer of the time. If Chesterfield's literary taste was too often decided by the fashionable limitations of this time, it was, within those limitations, accomplished: and it was accompanied, as mere taste very often is not, by no small command of literary production. He could and did write admirable light verse; his wit in conversation is attested in the most final fashion by his enemy Horace Walpole, and some of the passages in the letters where he indulges in description or even dialogue are by no means unworthy of the best genteel comedy of the time. But he could also, as was said of someone else, be "nobly serious," as in his "character" writing and elsewhere. His few contributions to the half-developed periodical literature of his day show how valuable he would have been to the more advanced Review or Magazine of the nineteenth century: and if he had chosen to write Memoirs they would probably have been among the best in English.16 Now the Memoir and the Letter are perhaps the most straitly and intimately connected forms of literature.

HORACE WALPOLE

Horace Walpole – like his two contemporaries, fellow-members of English aristocratic society, acquaintances and objects of aversion just discussed – has been the subject of very various opinions. Johnson (of whom he himself spoke with ignorant contempt and who did not know his letters, but did know some of his now half-forgotten published works) dismissed him with good-natured belittlement. Macaulay made him the subject of some of the most unfortunately exaggerated of those antitheses of blame and praise which, in the long run, have done the writer more harm than his subjects. To take one example less likely to be known to English readers, the wayward and prejudiced, but often very acute French critic already mentioned, Barbey d'Aurevilly, though he admits Horace's esprit pronounces it un fruit brillant, amer, et glacé. There are undoubtedly many things to be said against him as a man – if you take the "Letters-a-telltale-of-character" view, especially so. He was certainly spiteful, and he had the particularly awkward – though from one point of view not wholly unamiable – peculiarity of being what may be called spiteful at second hand. To stand up for your friends at the proper time and in the proper place is the duty, and should be the pleasure, of every gentleman. But to bite and for the most part, if not almost always, to back-bite your friends' supposed enemies – often when they have done nothing adverse to those friends on the particular occasion – is the act at the best of an intempestively officious person, at the worst of a cur. And Horace was always doing this in regard to all sorts of people – his abuse of Johnson himself, of Chesterfield and Lady Mary, of Fielding and others, having no personal excuse or reason whatsoever.

His taste in collecting, building, etc., is not a matter in which men of other times should be too ready to throw stones, for taste in all such matters at almost all times, however sure a stronghold it may seem to those who occupy it, is the most brittle of glass-houses to others. He had also a considerable touch of almost original genius in important kinds of literature, as The Mysterious Mother and The Castle of Otranto showed – a touch which undoubtedly helped him in his letters. But of critical power he had nothing at all; and his knowledge (save, perhaps in Art) was anything but extensive and still less accurate. Politically he was a mere baby, all the eighty years of his life; though he passed many of them in the House of Commons and might have passed several in the House of Lords, had he chosen to attend it. When he was young he was a theoretical republican rejoicing in the execution of Charles I.: when he was old the French Revolution was to him anathema and he was horrified at the execution of Louis XVI. He was incapable of sustaining, perhaps of understanding, an argument: everything with him was a matter, as the defamers of women say it is with them, of personal and arbitrary fancy, prejudice, or whim.

But all this does not prevent him from being one of the best letter-writers in the English language: and if you take bulk of work along with variety of subject; maintenance of interest and craftsmanship as well as bulk, perhaps the very best of all. The latest standard edition of his letters, to which additions are still being made, is in sixteen well-filled volumes, and there are probably few readers of good taste and fair knowledge who would object if it could be extended to sixty. There is perhaps no body of epistles except Madame de Sévigné's own – which Horace fervently admired and, assisted perhaps by the feminine element in his own nature, copied assiduously – exhibiting the possible charm of letter-writing more distinctly or more copiously.

To examine the nature of this charm a little cannot be irrelevant in such an Introduction as this: and from what has just been said it would seem that these letters will form as good a specimen for examination as any. They are not very much "mannerised": indeed, nobody but Thackeray, in the wonderful chapter of The Virginians where Horace is made to describe his first interview with one of the heroes, has ever quite imitated them. Their style, though recognisable at once, is not a matter so much of phrase as of attitude. His revelations of character – his own that is to say, for Horace was no conjuror with any one else's – are constant but not deeply drawn. He cannot, or at least does not, give a plot of any kind: every letter is a sort of review of the subject – larger or smaller – from the really masterly accounts of the trial of the Jacobite Lords after the "Forty-five" to the most trivial notices of people going to see "Strawberry"; of remarkable hands at cards; of Patty Blount (Pope's Patty) in her autumn years passing his windows with her gown tucked up because of the rain. Art and letters appear; travelling and visiting; friendship and society; curious belated love-making with the Miss Berrys; scandal (a great deal of it); charity (a little, but more than the popular conception of Horace allows for); the court-calendar, club life, almost all manner of things except religion (though it is said Horace had an early touch of Methodism) and really serious thought of any kind, form the budget of his letter-bag. And it is all handled with the most unexpected equality of success. There is of course nothing very "arresting." Cooking chickens in a sort of picnic with madcap ladies, and expecting "the dish to fly about our ears" is perhaps the most exciting incident17 of the sixteen volumes and seven or eight thousand pages. But everywhere there is interest; and that of a kind that does not stale itself.

The fact would seem to be that the art of letter-writing is a sort of mosaic or macédoine of nearly all departments of the general Art of Literature. You want constant touches of the art narrative, and not very seldom some of the art dramatic. Always you want that of conversation – subtly differentiated. Occasionally, though in the ordinary letter not very often, you want argument: much oftener description. Pathos, tenderness, etc., are more exceptionally required: and it is, in modern times at least, generally accepted that in the letter consolatory, that almost greatest of Shakespearian magic phrases, "the rest is silence" should never be forgotten and very quickly applied. Wit is welcome, if it be well managed: but that is a pretty constant proviso in regard to the particular element. Perhaps the greatest negative caution of all is that the letter should not be obviously "written for publication."

Now the curious thing about Walpole is that his letters were, pretty certainly in some cases (those to Mann) and not improbably in nearly all, written with some view to publication if only of a limited sort, and yet that the intention is rarely prominent to an offensive degree. Even if we did not know the curious and disgusting tricks that Pope played with his, we should be certain that he was always thinking of the possibility of somebody else than the reader to whom they were addressed reading them. With nearly an equal presumption as to the fact in the case of Horace (though to do him justice he did not indulge in any ignoble tricks with them) this fact rarely occurs and never offends. An unkind critic with a turn for rather obvious epigram might say that the man's nature was so artificial that his artifice seems natural. If so, all the more credit to him as an artificer. And another feather in his cap is that, although you can hardly ever mistake the writer, his letters take a slight but sufficient colour of difference according to the personality of the recipient. He does not write to Montagu exactly as he writes to Mann; to Gray as to Mason; to Lady Upper-Ossory as to earlier she-correspondents. So once more, though there are large and important possible subjects for letters on which "Horry" does not write at all, it is questionable whether, everything being counted in that he has, and no unfair offsets allowed for what he does not attempt, we have in English any superior to him as a letter-writer.

GRAY

The case of another famous eighteenth-century epistoler – Walpole's schoolfellow and except for the time of a quarrel (the blame of which Horace rather generously took upon himself but in which there were doubtless faults on both sides)18 life-long friend – is curiously different. Gray was a poet, while Walpole, save for a touch of fantastic imagination, had nothing of poetry in him and could not, as some who are not poets can, even appreciate it. In more than one other intellectual gift he soared above Horace. He was essentially a scholar, while his friend was as essentially a sciolist. He even combined the scientific with the literary temperament to a considerable extent: and thus was enabled to display an orderliness of thought by no means universal in men of letters, and (at least according to common estimation) positively rare in poets. His tastes were as various as his friend's: but instead of being a mere bundle of casual likings and dislikings, they were aesthetically conceived and connected. He was not exactly an amiable person: indeed, though there was less spitefulness in him than in Horace there was, perhaps, more positive "bad blood." As for the feature in his character, or at least conduct, that impressed itself so much on Mr. Matthew Arnold – that he "never spoke out" – it might be thought, if it really existed, to have been rather fatal to letter-writing, in which a sense of constraint and "keeping back" is one of the very last things to be desired. And some of the positive characteristics and accomplishments above enumerated (not the poetry – poets have usually been good epistolers) might not seem much more suitable.

As a matter of fact, however, Gray is a good letter-writer – a very good letter-writer indeed. His letters, as might be expected from what has been said, carry much heavier metal than Horace's; but in another sense they are not in the least heavy. They are very much less in bulk than those of the longer lived and more "scriblative" though hardly more leisured writer:19 and – as not a defect but a consequence of the quality just attributed to them – they do not quite carry the reader along with them in that singular fashion which distinguishes the others. But no one save a dunce can find them dull: and their variety is astonishing when one remembers that the writer was, for great part of his life, a kind of recluse. He touches almost everything except love (one wonders whether there were any unpublished, and feels pretty sure that there must have been some unwritten, letters to Miss Speed which would have filled the gap) and with a result of artistic success even more decided than that assigned to Goldsmith's versatility by Gray's enemy or at least "incompatible" Johnson.20 His letters of travel are admirable: his accounts of public affairs, though sometimes extremely prejudiced, very clever; those of University society and squabbles among the very best that we have in English; those touching "the picturesque" extremely early and remarkably clear-sighted; those touching literature among the least one-sided of their time. If there are, as observed or hinted above, some unamiable touches, his persistent protection of the poor creature Mason; his general attitude to his friends the Whartons; and his communications with younger men like Norton Nicholls and Bonstetten, go far to remove, or, at least, to counterbalance, the impression.

This last division indeed, and the letters to Mason, emphasize what is evident enough in almost all, a freedom on his part (which from some things in his character and history we might not altogether have expected) from a fault than which hardly any is more disagreeable in letters. This is the manifestation of what is called, in various more or less familiar terms, "giving oneself airs," "side," "patronising," etc. He may sometimes come near this pitfall of "intellectuals," but he never quite slips into it, being probably preserved by that sense of humour which he certainly possessed, though he seldom gave vent to it in verse and not very often in prose. Taking them altogether, Gray's letters may be said to have few superiors in the combination of intellectual weight and force with "pastime" interest. To some of course they may be chiefly or additionally interesting because of such light as they throw or withhold on a rather problematic character, but this, like the allegory in Spenser according to Hazlitt, "won't bite" anyone who lets it alone. They are extremely good letters to read: and the more points of interest they provide for any reader the better for that reader himself. Once more too, they illustrate the principle laid down at the beginning of this paper. They are good letters because they are, with the usual subtle difference necessary, like very good talk, recorded.21

COWPER

Nor is there any more doubt about the qualifications of the fifth of our selected eighteenth-century letter-writers. Cowper's poetry has gone through not very strongly marked but rather curious variations of critical estimate. Like all transition writers he was a little too much in front of the prevailing taste of his own time, and a little too much behind that of the time immediately succeeding. There may have been a very brief period, before the great romantic poets of the early nineteenth century became known, when he "drove" young persons like Marianne Dashwood "wild": but Marianne Dashwoods and their periods succeed and do not resemble each other.22 He had probably less hold on this time – when he had the best chance of popularity – than Crabbe, one of his own group, while he was destitute of the extraordinary appeals – which might be altogether unrecognised for a time but when felt are unmistakable – of the other two, Burns and Blake, of the poets of the seventeen-eighties. His religiosity was a doubtful "asset" as people say nowadays: and even his pathetic personal history had its awkward side. But as to his letters there has hardly at any time, since they became known, existed a difference of opinion among competent judges. There may be some unfortunates for whom they are too "mild": but we hardly reckon as arbiters of taste the people for whom even brandy is too mild unless you empty the cayenne cruet into it. Moreover the "tea-pot pieties" (as a poet-critic who ought to have known better once scornfully called them) make no importunate appearance in the bulk of the correspondence: while as regards the madness this supplies one of the most puzzling and perhaps not the least disquieting of "human documents." A reader may say – by no means in his haste, but after consideration – not merely "Where is the slightest sign of insanity in these?" but "How on earth did it happen that the writer of these ever went mad?" even with the assistance of Newton, and Teedon, and, one has to say, Mrs. Unwin.

For among the characteristics of Cowper's letters at their frequent and pretty voluminous best, are some that seem not merely inconsistent with insanity, but likely to be positive antidotes to and preservatives from it. There is a quiet humour – not of the fantastic kind which, as in Charles Lamb, forces us to admit the possibility of near alliance to over-balance of mind – but counter-balancing, antiseptic, salt. There is abundant if not exactly omnipresent common-sense; excellent manners; an almost total absence in that part of the letters which we are now considering of selfishness, and a total absence of ill-nature.23 It is no business of ours here to embark on the problem, "What was the dram of eale" that ruined all this and more "noble substance" in Cowper? though there is not much doubt about the agency and little about the principal agents that effected the mischief. But it is quite relevant to point out that all the good things noticed are things distinctly and definitely good for letter-writing. And sometimes one cannot help regretfully wondering whether, if he – who dealt so admirably with such interests as were open to him – had had more and wider ones to deal with, we should not have had still more varied and still more delightful letters, and he would have escaped the terrible fate that fell on him. For although Cowper was the reverse of selfish in the ordinary sense, he was intensely self-centred, and his life gave too much opportunity for that excessive self-concentration which is the very hotbed of mental disease.

It is not a little surprising from this point of view, and it perhaps shows how imperative the letter-writing faculty is when it is possessed – that Cowper's letters are as good as they are: while that point of view also helps us to understand why they are sometimes not so good.

Of all the floating thoughts we findUpon the surface of the mind,

as he himself very happily sums up the subjects of letter-writing, there are few in his case which are of more unequal value than his criticisms. Cowper had more than one of the makings of a critic, and a very important critic. He was, or at any rate had been once, something of a scholar; he helped to effect and (which is not always or perhaps even often the case) helped knowingly to effect, one of the most epoch-making changes in English literature. But for the greater part of his life he read very little; he had little chance of anything like literary discussion with his peers; and accordingly his critical remarks are random, uncoordinated, and mostly a record of what struck him at the moment in the way of like and dislike, agreement or disagreement.

But then there is nothing that we go for to Cowper as a letter-writer so little as for things of this kind: and even things of this kind take the benefit of what Coleridge happily called – and what everybody has since wisely followed Coleridge in calling – his "divine chit-chat." As with Walpole – though with that difference of idiosyncrasy which all the best things have from one another – it does not in the least matter what, among mundane affairs at least, Cowper was talking about. If his conversation – and some of the few habitués of Olney say it was – was anything like his letter-writing, it is no wonder that people sat over even breakfast for an hour to "satisfy sentiment not appetite" as they said with that slight touch of priggishness which has been visited upon them heavily, but which perhaps had more to do with their merits than more mannerless periods will allow.