This is a broad statement; yet to endure life smilingly is no ignoble task; and if the humors of mankind are inseparably blended with all their impulses and actions, it is worth while to consider bravely the value of qualities so subtle and far-reaching in their influences. Steele, as we know, dressed the invading bailiffs in liveries, and amazed his guests by the number and elegance of his retainers. Sydney Smith fastened antlers on his sheep, for the gratification of a lady who thought he ought to have deer in his park. Such elaborate jests, born of invincible gayety and high spirits, seem childish to our present adult seriousness; and we are too impatient to understand that they represent an attitude, and a very healthy attitude, towards life. The iniquity of Steele’s career lay in his repeatedly running into debt, not in the admirable temper with which he met the consequences of that debt when they were forced upon him; and if the censorious are disposed to believe that a less happy disposition would have avoided these consequences, let them consider the careers of poor Richard Savage and other misanthropic prodigals. As for Sydney Smith, he followed Burton’s excellent counsel, “Go on then merrily to heaven;” and his path was none the less straight because it was smoothed by laughter. That which must be borne had best be borne cheerfully, and sometimes a single telling stroke of wit, a single word rich in manly humor, reveals to us that true courage, that fine philosophy, which endures and even tolerates the vicissitudes of fortune, without for a moment relinquishing its honest hold upon the right. Mr. Lang has told us such a little story of the verger in a Saxon town who was wont to show visitors a silver mouse, which had been offered by the women to the Blessed Virgin that she might rid the town of mice. A Prussian officer, with that prompt brutality which loves to offend religious sentiment it does not share, asked jeeringly, “Are you such fools as to believe that the creatures went away because a silver mouse was dedicated?” “Ah, no,” replied the verger, “or long ago we should have offered a silver Prussian.”
It is the often-expressed opinion of Leigh Hunt that although wit and humor may be found in perfection apart from each other, yet their best work is shared in common. Wit separated from humor is but an element of sport; “a laughing jade,” with petulant whims and fancies, which runs away with our discretion, confuses our wisdom, and mocks at holy charity; yet adds greatly, withal, to the buoyancy and popularity of life. It makes gentlefolk laugh,—a difficult task, says Molière; it scatters our faculties, and “bears them off deridingly into pastime.” It is a fire-gleam in our dull world, a gift of the gods, who love to provide weapons for the amusement and discomfiture of mankind. But humor stands on common soil, and breathes our common air. The kindly contagion of its mirth lifts our hearts from their personal apprehension of life’s grievances, and links us together in a bond of mutual tears and laughter. If it be powerless to mould existence, or even explain it to our satisfaction, it can give us at least some basis for philosophy, some scope for sympathy, and sanity, and endurance. “The perceptions of the contrasts of human destiny,” says M. Scherer, “by a man who does not sever himself from humanity, but who takes his own shortcomings and those of his dear fellow-creatures cheerfully,—this is the essence of humor.”
LETTERS.
It is one of the current complaints of to-day that the art of letter-writing, as our great-grandfathers and our great-great-grandfathers knew it, has been utterly and irrevocably lost. Railways, which bring together easily and often people who used to spend the greater portion of their lives apart; cheap postage, which relieves a man from any serious responsibility for what he writes,—the most insignificant scrawl seems worth the stamp he puts on it; the hurried, restless pace at which we live, each day filled to the brim with things which are hardly so important as we think them, and which have cost us the old rich hours of leisurely thought and inaction,—these are the forces which have conspired to destroy the letter, and to crowd into its place that usurping and unprofitable little upstart called the note. “The art of note-writing,” says Mr. Bagehot, “may become classical; it is for the present age to provide models for that sort of composition; but letters have perished. In the last century, cultivated people who sat down to write took pains to have something to say, and took pains to say it. The correspondence of to-day is like a series of telegrams with amplified headings. There is not more than one idea, and that idea soon comes and is soon over. The best correspondence of the past is rather like a good light article, in which the points are studiously made; in which the effort to make them is studiously concealed; in which a series of selected circumstances is set forth; in which you feel, but are not told, that the principle of the writer’s selection was to make his composition pleasant.”
It is difficult not to agree with Mr. Bagehot and other critics who have uttered similar lamentations. The letter which resembled a good light article has indeed disappeared from our midst, and I am not sure that many dry eyes have not witnessed its departure. Light articles are now provided for us in such generous measure by our magazines that we have scant need to exact them from our friends. In fact, we should have no time to read them, if they were written. A more serious loss is the total absence of any minute information or gossip upon current topics in the mass of modern correspondence. The letter which is so useful to historians, which shows us, and shows us as nothing else can ever do, the ordinary, every-day life of prominent men and women, this letter has also disappeared, and there is nothing to take its place. We can reconstruct the England, or at least the London of George II. and George III. from the pages of Horace Walpole. Who is there likely to hand down in this fashion to a coming generation the England of Queen Victoria? Neither does the fact of Walpole’s being by no means a bigot in the matter of truth-telling interfere with his real value. He lies consciously and with a set purpose here and there; he is unconsciously and even inevitably veracious in the main. There are some points, observes Mr. Bagehot, on which almost everybody’s letters are true. “The delineation of a recurring and familiar life is beyond the reach of a fraudulent fancy. Horace Walpole was not a very scrupulous narrator, yet it was too much trouble, even for him, to tell lies on many things. His stories and conspicuous scandals are no doubt often unfounded; but there is a gentle undercurrent of daily unremarkable life and manners which he evidently assumed as a datum for his historical imagination.”
We may be quite sure, for example, on his testimony, that people of fashion went to Ranelagh two hours after the music was over, because it was thought vulgar to go earlier; that Lord Derby’s cook gave him warning, rather than dress suppers at three o’clock in the morning; that when a masked ball was given by eighteen young noblemen at Soho, the mob in the street stopped the fine coaches, held up torches to the windows, and demanded to have the masks pulled off and put on at their pleasure, “but all with extreme good humor and civility;” that he, Horace Walpole, one night at Vauxhall, helped Lady Caroline Petersham to mince seven chickens in a china dish, which chickens “Lady Caroline stewed over a lamp, with three pats of butter and a flagon of water, stirring and rattling and laughing, and we every minute expecting to have the dish fly about our ears;” that at the funeral of George II., the Duke of Newcastle—that curious burlesque of an English nobleman—stood on the train of the butcher Duke of Cumberland to avoid the chill of the marble. If we think these things are not worth knowing, we had better not read Walpole’s letters, for these are the things which he delights in telling us. Macaulay thought these things were not worth knowing, and he has accordingly branded Walpole as a superficial observer, a vain and shallow worldling. How, he wonders, can we listen seriously to a man who haunted auctions; who collected bricabrac; who sat up all night playing cards with fine, frivolous ladies; who liked being a fashionable gentleman, and had no proper pride in belonging to the august assemblage of authors; and who, most deadly crime of all, lived face to face with the great Whig leaders of the day, and was not in the least impressed by the magnitude of the distinction thus conferred on him. But, after all, we cannot, every one of us, be built upon the same solemn and righteous lines. It is not even granted to every one to be a fervent and consistent Whig. Horace Walpole, you see, was Horace Walpole, and not Thomas Babington Macaulay: therefore Macaulay despised him, and called on all his readers to despise him too. We can only have recourse to Mr. Lang’s philosophy: “’Tis a wide world, my masters; there is room for both.” Walpole is the prince of letter-writers, because writing letters was the inspiration, the ruling passion of his life, and he was preëminently qualified for the task. It has been well said that had some evil chance wrecked him, like Robinson Crusoe, upon a desert island, he would have gone on writing letters just the same, and waited for a ship to carry them away. This is a pleasant conceit, because the spectacle of Horace Walpole on a desert island is one which captivates the idle fancy. Think of his little airs and graces, his courtly affectations, his fine clothes and frippery, his dainty epicureanism, his sense of good comradeship, all thrown away upon a desert island, and upon the society of a parrot and a goat. What malicious tales he would have been forced to invent about the parrot! It is best not to believe evil of any one upon Walpole’s word, especially not of any one who had ever attacked Sir Robert’s ministry; for Horace’s filial piety took the very exclusive form of undying enmity to all his father’s political opponents. But when we have passed over and tried to forget all that is spiteful and caustic and coarse in these celebrated letters, there is a great deal left, a great deal that is not even the current gossip of the day. He goes to Paris in 1765, and finds that laughing is out of fashion in that once gay capital. “Good folks!” he cries, “they have no time to laugh. There are God and the king to be pulled down first, and men and women, one and all, are devoutly employed in the demolition. They think me quite profane for having my belief left.” A few years later, Walpole sees clearly that French politics must end in “despotism, a civil war, or assassination.” The age is not, he says, as he once thought, an age of abortion; but rather “an age of seeds which are to produce strange crops hereafter.” Surely, even Macaulay might allow that these are the words of a thinker, of a prophet, perhaps, standing unheeded in the market-place.
Granted, then, that the light-article letter, and the letter which gives us material with which to fill up the gaps and crannies of history, which holds the life of the past embalmed in its faded pages, have disappeared, perhaps forever. There is another letter which has not disappeared, which never can disappear as long as man stays man and woman, woman,—the letter which reveals to us the personality of the writer; which is dear and valuable to us because in it his hand stretches out frankly from the past, and draws us to his side. It may be long or short, carefully or carelessly written, full of useful information or full of idle nonsense, We do not stop to ask. It is enough for us to know from whom it came. And the finest type of such a letter may surely be found in the well-loved correspondence of Charles Lamb. If we eliminated from his pages all critical matter, all those shrewd and admirable verdicts upon prose and verse; if we cut out ruthlessly such scraps of news as they occasionally convey; if we banished all references to celebrated people, from the “obnoxious squeak” of Shelley’s voice to the generous sympathy expressed for Napoleon, we should still have left—the writer himself, which is all that we desire. We should still have the record of that harmless and patient, that brave and sorely tried life. We should still see infinite mirth and infinite pathos interwoven upon every page. We should catch the echo of that clear, kind laughter which never hardens into scorn. Lamb laughs at so many people, and never once wrongs any one. We should see the flashes of a wit which carries no venom in its sting. We should feel that atmosphere of wonderful, whimsical humor illuminating all the trivial details of existence. We should recognize in the turning of every sentence, the conscious choice of every word, the fine and distinctive qualities of a genius that has no parallel.
It matters little at what page we read. Here is the sad story of Henry Robinson’s waistcoat, which Mary Lamb tried to bring over from France, but which was seized at the Custom House, “for the use of the king,” says Charles dryly. “He will probably appear in it at the next levee.” Here is the never-to-be-forgotten tea-party at Miss Benjay’s, where that tenth-rate little upstart of a woman—type of a genus that survives to-day—alternately patronized and snubbed her guest; flinging at him her pitiful scraps of information, marveling that he did not understand French, insulting him when he ventured an opinion upon poetry,—“seeing that it was my own trade in a manner,”—imparting to him Hannah More’s valuable dogmas on education, feeding him scantily with macaroons, and sending him home,—not angry as he had a right to be, as any other man would have been in his place, only infinitely amused. And then some people say that a keen sense of the ridiculous is not a kindly sentiment! It is, we know it is, when we read the letter to Coleridge in which Lamb tells how he went to condole with poor Joseph Cottle on the death of his brother Amos, and how, as the readiest comfort he could offer, he swiftly introduced into his conversation Joseph’s epic poem, “Alfred,” luring the mourner gently from his grief by arousing his poetic vanity. The dear, good, stupid Cottle, brightening visibly under such soothing treatment, fixed upon his visitor a benevolent gaze, and prepared himself for melancholy enjoyment. After a while the name of Alswitha, Alfred’s queen, was slipped adroitly into the discourse. “At that moment,” says Lamb, “I could perceive that Cottle had forgot his brother was so lately become a blessed spirit. In the language of mathematicians, the author was as nine, the brother as one. I felt my cue, and strong pity stirring at the root, I went to work.” So the little comedy proceeds, until it reaches its climax when George Dyer, to whom all poems were good poems, remarks that the dead Amos was estimable both for his head and heart, and would have made a fine poet if he had lived. “To this,” says Lamb, “Joseph fully assented, but could not help adding that he always thought the qualities of his brother’s heart exceeded those of his head. I believe his brother, when living, had formed precisely the same idea of him; and I apprehend the world will assent to both judgments.” Now if we will but try to picture to ourselves how Carlyle would have behaved to poor Miss Benjay, how Walpole would have sneered at Joseph Cottle, we will understand better the harmless, the almost loving nature of Charles Lamb’s raillery, which we can enjoy so frankly because it gave no pain.
As for the well-known fact that Lamb’s letters reflect nothing of the political tumult, the stirring warfare, amid which he lived, it is interesting to place by their side the contemporary letters of Sir Gilbert Elliot, the first Earl of Minto, a correspondence the principal charm of which is the revelation it makes of a nature so fine and brave, so upright and honorable, so wise and strong and good, that we can best understand the secret of England’s greatness when we know she has given birth to such sons. To study the life of a man who played so prominent a part in home and foreign politics is to study the history of Europe during those troubled years. In Lord Minto’s letters we follow breathlessly the desperate struggle with Napoleon, the ceaseless wrangling of the Allies, the dangerous rebellions in Ireland, the grave perplexities of the Indian empire; and besides these all-important topics, we have side-lights thrown upon social life. We learn, for instance, that Mrs. Crewe, the celebrated beauty and toast of the Whigs, liked good conversation, and took an interest and even a part, writes Sir Gilbert naïvely to his wife, “in all subjects which men would naturally talk of when not in woman’s company, as politics and literature.” We learn also—what we half suspected before—that Madame de Stäel was so greedy of admiration that she was capable of purchasing “any quantity of anybody at any price, and among other prices by a traffic of mutual flattery;” and that she was never satisfied unless she could have the whole conversation to herself, and be the centre of every company.