Women write good letters because they are sympathetic; because they take personal rather than abstract views; because they stay at home a great deal and are interested in little things and fond of exchanging confidences and news. They like to receive letters as well as to write them. The fact that Richardson found his most admiring readers among the ladies was due perhaps not only to the sentimentality of his novels, but to their epistolary form. Hence there is apt to be a touch of the feminine in the most accomplished letter writers. They are gossips, like Horace Walpole, or dilettanti like Edward Fitzgerald, or shy, reserved, sensitive persons like Gray and Cowper, who live apart, retired from the world in a retirement either cloistral or domestic; who have a few friends and a genius for friendship, enjoy the exercise of their pens, feel the need of unbosoming themselves, but are not ready talkers. Above all they are not above being interested in trifles and little things. Cowper was absorbed in his hares, his cucumber frames and gardening, country walks, tea-table chat, winding silk for Mrs. Unwin. Lamb was unceasingly taken up with the oddities and antiquities of London streets, the beggars, the chimney sweeps, the old benchers, the old bookstalls, and the like. Gray fills his correspondence with his solitary pursuits and recreations and tastes: Gothic curiosities, engravings, music sheets, ballads, excursions here and there. The familiar is of the essence of good letter writing: to unbend, to relax, to desipere in loco, to occupy at least momentarily the playful and humorous point of view. Solemn, prophetic souls devoted to sublimity are not for this art. Dante and Milton and “old Daddy” Wordsworth, as Fitzgerald calls him, could never have been good letter writers: they were too great to care about little things, too high and rigid to stoop to trifles.
Letter writing is sometimes described as a colloquial art. Correspondence, it is said, is a conversation kept up between interlocutors at a distance. But there is a difference: good talkers are not necessarily good letter writers, and vice versa. Coleridge, e.g., was great in monologue, but his letters are in no way remarkable. Cowper, on the other hand, did not sparkle in conversation, and Gray was silent in company, “dull,” Dr. Johnson called him. Johnson himself, notoriously a most accomplished talker, does not shine as a letter writer. His letters, frequently excellent in substance, are ponderous in style. They are of the kind best described as “epistolary correspondence.” The Doctor needed the give and take of social intercourse to allay the heaviness of his written discourse. His talk was animated, pointed, idiomatic, but when he sat down and took pen in hand, he began to translate, as Macaulay said, from English into Johnsonese. His celebrated letter of rebuke to Lord Chesterfield labors under the weight of its indignation, is not free from pomposity and pedantry, and is written with an eye to posterity. One can imagine the noble lord, himself an accomplished letter writer, smiling over this oracular sentence: “The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and found him a native of the rocks.” Heine’s irony, Voltaire’s light touch would have stung more sharply, though somewhat of Johnson’s dignified pathos would perhaps have been lost. Orators, in general, are not good letter writers. They are accustomed to the ore rotundo utterance, the “big bow-wow,” and they crave the large audience instead of the audience of one.
The art of letter writing, then, is a relaxation, an art of leisure, of the idle moment, the mind at ease, the bow unbent, the loin ungirt. But there are times in every man’s life when he has to write letters of a tenser mood, utterances of the passionate and agonized crises of the soul, love letters, death messages, farewells, confessions, entreaties. It seems profane to use the word art in such connections. Yet even a prayer, when it is articulate at all, follows the laws of human speech, though directed to the ear that heareth in secret. The collects of the church, being generalized prayer, employ a deliberate art.
Probably you have all been called upon to write letters of condolence and have found it a very difficult thing to do. There is no harder test of tact, delicacy, and good taste. The least appearance of insincerity, the least intrusion of egotism, of an air of effort, an assumed solemnity, a moralizing or edifying pose, makes the whole letter ring false. Reserve is better here than the opposite extreme; better to say less than you feel than even to seem to say more.
There is a letter of Lincoln’s, written to a mother whose sons had been killed in the Civil War, which is a brief model in this kind. I will not cite it here, for it has become a classic and is almost universally known. An engrossed copy of it hangs on the wall of Brasenose College, Oxford, as a specimen of the purest English diction—the diction of the Gettysburg address.
THACKERAY’S CENTENARY
AFTER all that has been written about Thackeray, it would be flat for me to present here another estimate of his work, or try to settle the relative value of his books. In this paper I shall endeavor only two things: first, to enquire what changes, in our way of looking at him, have come about in the half century since his death. Secondly, to give my own personal experience as a reader of Thackeray, in the hope that it may represent, in some degree, the experience of others.
What is left of Thackeray in this hundredth year since his birth? and how much of him has been eaten away by destructive criticism—or rather by time, that far more corrosive acid, whose silent operation criticism does but record? As the nineteenth century recedes, four names in the English fiction of that century stand out ever more clearly, as the great names: Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot. I know what may be said—what has been said—for others: Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, Charles Reade, Trollope, Meredith, Stevenson, Hardy. I believe that these will endure, but will endure as writers of a secondary importance. Others are already fading: Bulwer is all gone, and Kingsley is going fast.
The order in which I have named the four great novelists is usually, I think, the order in which the reader comes to them. It is also the order of their publication. For although Thackeray was a year older than Dickens, his first novels were later in date, and he was much later in securing his public. But the chronological reason is not the real reason why we read them in that order. It is because of their different appeal. Scott was a romancer, Dickens a humorist, Thackeray a satirist, and George Eliot a moralist. Each was much more than that; but that was what they were, reduced to the lowest term. Romance, humor, satire, and moral philosophy respectively were their starting point, their strongest impelling force, and their besetting sin. Whenever they fell below themselves, Walter Scott lapsed into sheer romantic unreality, Dickens into extravagant caricature, Thackeray into burlesque, George Eliot into psychology and ethical reflection.
I wonder whether your experience here is the same as mine. By the time that I was fourteen, as nearly as I can remember, I had read all the Waverley novels. Then I got hold of Dickens, and for two or three years I lived in Dickens’s world, though perhaps he and Scott somewhat overlapped at the edge—I cannot quite remember. I was sixteen when Thackeray died, and I heard my elders mourning over the loss. “Dear old Thackeray is gone,” they told each other, and proceeded to reread all his books, with infinite laughter. So I picked up “Vanity Fair” and tried to enjoy it. But fresh from Scott’s picturesque page and Dickens’s sympathetic extravagances, how dull, insipid, repellent, disgusting were George Osborne, and fat Joseph Sedley, and Amelia and Becky! What sillies they were and how trivial their doings! “It’s just about a lot of old girls,” I said to my uncle, who laughed in a provokingly superior manner and replied, “My boy, those old girls are life.” I will confess that even to this day, something of that shock of disillusion, that first cold plunge into “Vanity Fair,” hangs about the book. I understand what Mr. Howells means when he calls it “the poorest of Thackeray’s novels—crude, heavy-handed, caricatured.” I ought to have begun, as he did, with “Pendennis,” of which he writes, “I am still not sure but it is the author’s greatest book.” I don’t know about that, but I know that it is the novel of Thackeray’s that I have read most often and like the best, better than “Henry Esmond” or “Vanity Fair”: just as I prefer “The Mill on the Floss” to “Adam Bede,” and “The House of the Seven Gables” to “The Scarlet Letter” (as Hawthorne did himself, by the way); or as I agree with Dickens that “Bleak House” was his best novel, though the public never thought so. We may concede to the critics that, objectively considered, and by all the rules of judgment, this or that work is its author’s masterpiece and we ought to like it best—only we don’t. We have our private preferences which we cannot explain and do not seek to defend. As for “Esmond,” my comparative indifference to it is only, I suppose, a part of my dislike of the genre. I know the grounds on which the historical novel is recommended, and I know how intimately Thackeray’s imagination was at home in the eighteenth century. Historically that is what he stands for: he was a Queen Anne man—like Austin Dobson: he passed over the great romantic generation altogether and joined on to Fielding and Goldsmith and their predecessors. Still no man knows the past as he does the present. I will take Thackeray’s report of the London of his day; but I do not care very much about his reproduction of the London of 1745. Let me whisper to you that since early youth I have not been able to take much pleasure in the Waverley novels, except those parts of them in which the author presents Scotch life and character as he knew them.