The salon and English letters

by Chauncey Brewster Tinker

I am tempted to say that this self-consciousness of Walpole is an art in itself. He enjoys displaying various sides of himself, plays with his prejudices, exaggerates all his enthusiasms and all his dislikes, affects to be old and look back over a vista of years, jests about his gout and the infallible bootikins, pretends to believe that the country is going to the dogs, and takes refuge at Strawberry Hill among his cats and his cameos. There are moments when he is as full of humours as Charles Lamb. Throughout three thousand letters his sprightliness, that subtle union of wit and grace, is hardly once at fault; everything seems to contribute to it. Does he cross the Channel in rough weather? He is drowned without being shipwrecked. He has a ‘lap full of waves,’ is ‘washed from head to foot in the boat at ten o’clock at night,’ and plunged into the sea up to his knees. ‘Qu’avois-je à faire dans cette galère? In truth, it is a little late to be seeking adventures.’[418] Condemned to a state of eternal emaciation, none shall outdo him in the description of his leanness: he is ‘emaciated, wan, wrinkled,’ a ‘poor skeleton,’ a ‘thinner Don Quixote.’ Nor is he surpassed (even by Macaulay) in his account of the ‘tinsel glories’ of Strawberry Hill. He would certainly have been the first to call himself a snob, had he known the word, or had it occurred to him to invent it. Meanwhile he made no pretence of concealing his boredom with most things in heaven and earth: to three-quarters of the world he displayed only a polished indifference; most of the rest of it he openly despised, but it was that he might have the more attention for the few whom he found worth while. His career in the Parisian salons, which has been already described, his repudiation of the philosophes and the complete absorption of his interest in Madame du Deffand, are really typical of the man and of his entire career. If to be loyal through life to a few friends, to expend one’s genius in giving them delight—‘spreading one’s leaf gold over them and making them shine’—is to be a snob, then Walpole richly deserves the name.

There is no lack of naturalness in Walpole’s relations with his friends. He always ‘lets himself go,’ to a degree, indeed, that is surprising when one recalls that he knew all along that his letters would one day be printed. Like Johnson,[419] he feared the press, which, he says, ‘exceeds even the day of Judgement, for it brings to light everybody’s faults, and a good deal more.’[420] He was in nervous dread that his letters to Madame du Deffand would get into print, and made the poor lady wretched by harping upon his fear; on the other hand, he himself collected and prepared certain of his letters for print; and yet, in spite of all this, there is nothing of restraint in his style or of caution in his words. He never sues for the good opinion of posterity by adopting a judicial tone, but is always delightfully himself. He knew that his letters to Sir Horace Mann, which extend through forty-five years with hardly a break, would one day be an invaluable record of public events,[421] and was concerned that it should be kept intact; yet for all that he is never betrayed into the manner of the archivist. So strong, indeed, is Walpole’s individualism, so wayward his humour, that it is sometimes rash to use his letters as documentary evidence.

There is, perhaps, no species of literature more exposed to misinterpretation than the familiar letter. It may almost be stated as a general law of the species that in proportion as a letter is suited for print and for public reading, it is a poor thing. A letter is, by its very nature, not addressed to an audience, but to an individual; and as certainly as it becomes general in its appeal, it loses that intimacy of tone which is its peculiar charm. What is duller than an ‘open letter’? What is more chilling than a postscript which invites you, when you have read a letter, to pass it on to John and to Mary? Not there shall you find anything of that conversation apart which constitutes the joy of writing as of reading letters. The letter which is intelligible to everybody is already impersonal and almost professional in tone, and you may print it with impunity; but a letter which is addressed to a friend will, in proportion to its intimacy, teem with allusions, oddities of phrase, and obscure references which make full sense only to the recipient, and you will print it at your peril. Lockhart, who declined to ‘Boswellize’ Scott, has given full expression to this fact, contending that if conversation is not to be misunderstood, ‘it is a necessary pre-requisite that we should be completely familiar with all the interlocutors, and understand thoroughly all their minutest relations, and points of common knowledge.... In proportion as a man is witty and humorous, there will always be about him and his a widening maze and wilderness of cues and catchwords, which the uninitiated will, if they are bold enough to try interpretation, construe, ever and anon, egregiously amiss—not seldom into arrant falsity.’ Now all this is at least as true of letter-writing[422] as of conversation. It is, one might argue, never safe to attempt to understand a familiar letter until you know all about the author of it, and almost as much about the recipient; for the letter is but the resultant of the first force working upon the second.

It is obvious, therefore, that no good letter should ever be printed. A published letter courts all manner of misconstruction, and exacts premature payment for those idle words whereof we are one day to give account. Few men would willingly yield up the intimacies of their private correspondence to the cruelty of public scrutiny and criticism; it is disturbing to think how much of our published correspondence would perish if the wish of the writer could effect it.

And yet it is this very unsuitability for print, it is this baffling intimacy, the covert allusions, the obscure language of friendship, that attract us to published correspondence. The pleasure in reading it is the fun of seeing, once in your life, what was never intended for your eye. Every printed letter seems to reproach us in its revelation of a trust betrayed. There is thus something almost unholy in the joy of reading published letters. It is never quite a respectable thing to be doing. There is something of the eavesdropper in it; it savours of intrusion and at times even of listening at keyholes. One must be a kind of busybody to find out what it all means. Sprightly letters are often as obscure as an overheard conversation: witness the following extract from a letter of Walpole to Thomas Gray:

George Selwyn says I may, if I please, write Historic Doubts on the present Duke of G. too. Indeed they would be doubts, for I know nothing certainly.

There is wit here and more than one sly allusion; but it is only by prying rather deeply into old scandals that you discover the full meaning of the passage. Familiar correspondence soon comes to need a wealth of annotation. Walpole speaks of certain letters of Gray to him as not ‘printable yet,’ on the ground that they are ‘too obscure without many notes.’[423] But all the editorial art in the world will not restore the quondam lustre. ‘If one’s tongue,’ Walpole writes to George Montagu, ‘don’t move in the steps of the day, it is only an object of ridicule, like Mrs. Hobart in her cottillon.’ The brilliancy of this passage is bound up with the precarious fame of Mrs. Hobart, nay, with the yet more precarious fame of her dancing. Its elusiveness is an indication of the unfathomable quality in letters.

Walpole was himself an insatiable reader of letters, and understood and analyzed his ruling passion:

Fools! yes, I think all the world is turned fool, or was born so; cette tête à perruque, that wig-block the Chancellor, what do you think he has done? Burnt all his father’s correspondence with Pope, Swift, Arbuthnot &c.—why do you think? because several of the letters were indiscreet. To be sure he thought they would go and publish themselves, if not burnt, but indeed I suspect the indiscretion was that there were some truths which it was not proper to preserve, considering considerandis. That is just what I should like to have seen. There was otherwise so much discretion, and so little of anything else except hypocrisy in all the letters of those men that have appeared, that I should not so much regret what discreet folly has now burnt. Apropos, did I ever tell you a most admirable bon mot of Mr. Bentley? He was talking to me of an old devout Lady St. John, who burnt a whole trunk of letters of the famous Lord Rochester, ‘for which,’ said Mr. Bentley, ‘her soul is now burning in heaven.’ The oddness, confusion and wit of the idea struck me of all things.[424]