By the way, I thought you were honest and true; and yet you have deceived me wofully. You promised to come down to Blackheath and you have not appeared. I have been writing night and day or I should have presented myself to call you to account. Will you come down even yet, and take a family dinner with me? Any Sunday at five you will be sure to find me but if you come on another day, let me have a day’s notice by post, lest I be engaged, which would be a great disappointment to
Yours ever truly,
G. P. R. James
He always wrote frankly and freely to Cunningham. This letter deals with Attila.
The Cottage, Great Marlow, Bucks,
15th April 1837
My Dear Allan,
Many thanks for your letter and kind words upon Attila. I do believe that he is a good fellow, at all events he is very successful in society and though there are not as you well know twenty people in London who know who Attila was, he is as well received, I understand, as if he had the entrée. Conjectures as to who Attila was are various in the well informed circles of the Metropolis, and ever since the book was advertised two principal opinions have prevailed, some people maintaining that He, Attila, was Platoff; others asserting that he was a Lady, first cousin to Boru the Backswoodsman, and the heroine of a romance by Chateaubriand. This may look like a joke, but I can assure you, it is a fact and that out of one hundred people of the highest rank in Europe you will not find five who know who Attila was; setting aside the groveling animals who, as the Duke of Somerset says, addict themselves to Literature.
I am very sorry to hear you say that these well informed and enlightened times have not done justice to your romances. I’ll tell you one great fault they have, which is probably that which prevents the world from liking them as much as it should do: they have too much poetry in them, Allan, one and all from Michael Scott to Lord Roldan. But you must not expect to succeed in all walks of art. You are a lyric poet and a biographer; how can you expect that the critics would ever let you come near romances. No, no; they feel it their bounden duty to smother all such efforts of your genius and they fulfil that duty with laudable zeal. Did you see how the Athenæum attempted to dribble its small beer venom upon Attila. If you have not, read that sweet and gramatical (sic) article, when you will find that because a man has succeeded in one style of writing he cannot succeed in another, and apply the critics dictum to yourself. One half of this world is made up of idiocy, insanity, humbug, and peculation, and the other half (very nearly) of envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness.
Yours ever truly