The salon and English letters

by Chauncey Brewster Tinker

‘That is just what I should like to have seen’—there is the passion of the letter-monger. It was all very indiscreet, no doubt, but ‘that is just what I should like to have seen.’ The indiscretion is the best proof that the correspondence was intimate, that it was not a mere series of messages nor a volume of essays. To burn it was an eminently safe thing to do with it—and eminently deplorable.

A good letter-writer, a Walpole, a Lamb, is hardly more concerned with the cause of edification than with the cause of discretion. His concern is with the news. He moves genially along the lower levels of life, content to ramble rather than to soar, and forgets high philosophies and abstract truths. What he offers his friend is companionship, not education. The news of yesterday is frequently a harder thing to get at than the learning of the ages, and all the wisdom of the east will not make a good letter.

This ideal of familiar correspondence was fully stated in the eighteenth century. It would be possible to construct a whole philosophy of the subject by marshalling a series of quotations from eighteenth century letters. Even the bluestockings appreciated the artlessness of letters. Hannah More never wrote wiser sentences than these:

If I want wisdom, sentiment or information, I can find them much better in books than in letters. What I want in a letter is a picture of my friend’s mind, and the common sense of his life. I want to know what he is saying and doing: I want him to turn out the inside of his heart to me, without disguise, without appearing better than he is, without writing for a character. I have the same feeling in writing to him. My letter is therefore worth nothing to an indifferent person, but it is of value to my friend who cares for me.[425]

Madame du Deffand, no unworthy successor of Madame de Sévigné, would have subscribed to all this. She, too, thought that physics and metaphysics had no place in correspondence, and detested the letters of Abelard and Héloïse because they lacked the note of intimacy and were filled with fustian, ‘faux, exagéré, dégoûtant.’ She begs Walpole to fill his letters with trifles, to send news of his dogs, Vachette and Rosette, to describe his curios, and to omit politics. ‘J’aime tous les détails domestiques.... Dans les lettres de Madame de Sévigné c’est un des articles qui me plaît le plus.’[426] Here was a correspondent worthy of Walpole’s quill.

It was long the custom to sneer at Walpole for his gossip. Lord Macaulay did not fail to ridicule him for it in language as unmeasured as that of scandal itself; but Macaulay’s manner is now giving way to apologies and vindications hardly less damaging. Walpole was indubitably and incorrigibly a gossip—why should we avoid the word? He did not avoid it. He was, on the contrary, the first to make the charge. As early as 1749 he calls his letters to Horace Mann ‘gossiping gazettes’; yet these are perhaps as little open to the charge as any letters that he wrote. The same charge was brought against Walpole’s idol, Madame de Sévigné. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu could find in her letters nothing but gossip—‘sometimes the tittle-tattle of a fine lady; sometimes that of an old nurse, always tittle-tattle.’[427] A similar charge may be brought against Cowper, Lamb, Jane Carlyle, and all favourite letter-writers. It is always ready to hand for those who prefer disquisitions to news. As for Walpole’s letters, they might almost be conceived as a delightful defence of the vice.

Now gossip is of course a very dreadful business; but its most hardened opponents can scarcely deny that it has at times been the staple of some very fine literature indeed. What is Pepys but gossip? What would Boswell be without his gossip? Even work that professes to attack gossip is often interesting chiefly for its illustration of what it denounces. Look at the career of Lady Teazle. As long as she retains her place in the Scandal School, she is human, almost lovable, and wholly delightful; but as soon as she is reformed, she becomes quite insignificant. Her entrance in the fifth act is the dullest moment in the play, and her demeanour is wholly unconvincing and perhaps untruthful. One cannot think of her apart from her glittering geysers of scandal; when she gives up gossip she is as dull as Maria, and we are glad that the play is over. If there is a more depressing spectacle than a bird that has lost its wings, it is a wit that has bridled the tongue.

Gossip, in its milder stages, may even denote a serene interest in the little affairs of life, which is truly admirable. Cowper’s letters, which Lady Mary would no doubt have found quite as filled with tittle-tattle as Madame de Sévigné’s, are in the truest sense of the term the treasure of the humble. The finest things in them are, like the finest things in The Task, the description of domestic trifles. The most delightful letter Cowper ever wrote describes a runaway rabbit. Cowper’s eminence as a letter-writer is an invaluable illustration of the fact that a man may be a master of this art though his life contains nothing of excitement or romance. The great explorers and adventurers have seldom been good letter-writers. Macaulay laughed at Walpole because he made a serious business of trifles; but it is in this very fact that half the delight of Walpole’s letters consists. Neither Walpole nor Cowper could have written the letters he did without that love; the one lends as much interest to crossing the Channel as to crossing the Alps, and the other amuses us as much with the loss of a rabbit as with the finding of a continent. Like Biron in conversation,