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Page 6
LETTER-WRITERS.
Since old Leisure died, we have come to think ourselves altogether too
fine and too busy to cultivate the delightful art of correspondence.
Dickens seems to have been almost the last man among us who gave his
mind to letter-writing; and his letters contain some of his very best
work, for he plunged into his subject with that high-spirited
abandonment which we see in "Pickwick," and the full geniality of his
mind came out delightfully. The letter in which he describes a certain
infant schoolboy who lost himself at the Great Exhibition is one of
the funniest things in literature, but it is equalled in positive
value by some of the more serious letters which the great man sent off
in the intervals of his heavy labour. Dickens could do nothing by
halves, and thus, at times when he could have earned forty pounds a
day by sheer literary work, he would spend hours in answering people
whom he had never seen, and, what is more remarkable, these
"task"-letters were marked by all the brilliant strength and
spontaneity of his finest chapters. He was the last of the true
correspondents, and we shall not soon look upon his like again. With
all the contrivances for increasing our speed of communication, and
for enabling us to cram more varied action into a single life, we have
less and less time to spare for salutary human intercourse. The
post-card symbolises the tendency of the modern mind. We have come to
find out so many things which ought to be done that we make up our
minds to do nothing whatever thoroughly; and the day may come when the
news of a tragedy ruining a life or a triumph crowning a career will
be conveyed by a sixpenny telegram. In the bad old days, when postage
was dear and the means of conveyance slow, people who could afford to
correspond at all sat down to begin a letter as though they were about
to engage in some solemn rite. Every patch of the paper was covered,
and every word was weighed, so that the writer screwed the utmost
possible value for his money out of the post-office. The letters
written in the last century resembled the deliberate and lengthy
communications of Roman gentlemen like Cicero: and there is little
wonder that the good folk made the most of their paper and their time.
We find Godwin casually mentioning the fact that he paid twenty-one
shillings and eightpence for the postage of a letter from Shelley;
readers of _The Antiquary_ will remember that Lovel paid twenty-five
shillings postage for one epistle, besides half a guinea for the
express rider. _Certes_ a man had good need to drive a hard bargain
with the Post Office in those pinching times! Of course the "lower
orders"--poor benighted souls--were not supposed to have any
correspondence at all, and the game was kept up by gentlemen of
fortune, by merchants, by eager and moneyed lovers, and by stray
persons of literary tastes, who could manage to beg franks from
members of Parliament and other dignitaries. One gentleman, not of
literary tastes, once franked a cow and sent her by post; but this
kind of postal communication was happily rare. The best of the
letter-writers felt themselves bound to give their friends good worth
for their money, and thus we find the long chatty letters of the
eighteenth century purely delightful. I do not care much for Lord
Chesterfield's correspondence; he was eternally posing with an eye on
the future--perhaps on the very immediate future. As Johnson sternly
said, "Lord Chesterfield wrote as a dancing-master might write," and
he spoke the truth. Fancy a man sending such stuff as this to a raw
boy--"You will observe the manners of the people of the best fashion
there; not that they are--it may be--the best manners in the world,
but because they are the best manners of the place where you are, to
which a man of sense always conforms. The nature of things is always
and everywhere the same; but the modes of them vary more or less in
every country, and an easy and genteel conformity to them, or rather
the assuming of them at proper times and proper places, is what
particularly constitutes a man of the world, and a well-bred man!" All
true enough, but how shallow, and how ineffably conceited! Here is
another absurd fragment--"My dear boy, let us resume our reflections
upon men, their character, their manners--in a word, our reflections
upon the World." It is quite like Mr. Pecksniff's finest vein. There
is not a touch of nature or vital truth in the Chesterfield letters,
and the most that can be said of them is that they are the work of a
fairly clever man who was flattered until he lost all sense of his
real size. If we take the whole bunch of finikin sermons and compare
them with the one tremendous knock-down letter which Johnson sent to
the dandy earl, we can easily see who was the Man of the pair. When we
return to Walpole, the case is different. Horace never posed at all;
he was a natural gentleman, and anything like want of simplicity was
odious to him. The age lives in his charming letters; after going
through them we feel as though we had been on familiar terms with that
wicked, corrupt, outwardly delightful society that gambled and drank,
and scandalised the grave spirits of the nation, in the days when
George III. was young. Horace Walpole was the letter-writer of
letter-writers; his gossip carries the impress of truth with it; and,
though he had no style, no brilliancy, no very superior ability, yet,
by using his faculties in a natural way, he was able to supply
material for two of the finest literary fragments of modern times. I
take it that the most stirring and profoundly wise piece of modern
history is Carlyle's brief account of William Pitt, given in the "Life
of Frederick the Great." Once we have read it we feel as though the
great commoner had stood before us for a while under a searching
light; his figure is imprinted on the very nerves, and no man who has
read carefully can ever shake off an impression that seems burnt into
the fibre of the mind. This superlatively fine historic portrait was
painted by Carlyle solely from Walpole's material--for we cannot
reckon chance newspaper scraps as counting for much--and thus the
gossip of Strawberry Hill conferred immortality on himself and on our
own Titanic statesman. But Walpole's influence did not end there.
Whoever wants to read a very good and charming work should not miss
seeing Sir George Trevelyan's "Life of Charles James Fox." To praise
this book is almost an impertinence. I content myself with saying that
those who once taste its fascination go back to it again and again,
and usually end by placing it with the books that are "the bosom
friends" of men. Now the grim Scotchman lit up Horace's letters with
the lurid furnace-glow of his genius; Sir George held the serene lamp
of the scholar above the same letters, and lo, we have two pieces that
can only die when the language dies! What a feat for a mere
letter-writer to achieve! Let ambitious correspondents take example by
Horace Walpole, and learn that simplicity is the first, best--nay, the
only--object to be aimed at by the letter-writer.
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