Studies in Literature and History

by Sir Alfred C. Lyall

'A long confinement in the winter, and indeed for the most part in the autumn too, has hurt us both. A gravel walk, thirty yards long, affords but indifferent scope to the locomotive faculty; yet it is all that we have had to move in for eight months in the year, during thirteen years that I have been a prisoner here.'

If we compare this manner of spending one's days with Arnold's hasty and harassed existence among the busy haunts of men, we can understand that in this century a hard-working literary man has neither the taste nor the time for the graceful record of calm meditations, or for throwing a charm over commonplace details. And, on the whole, Arnold's correspondence, though it has some biographical value, must undoubtedly be relegated to the class of letters that would never have been published upon their own intrinsic merits.

Carlyle's letters, on the other hand, fall into the opposite category; they stand on their own feet, they are as significant of style and character as Arnold's, and even Stanley's, letters were comparatively insignificant; they are the fearless outspoken expression of the humours and feelings of the moment, and it is probable that the writer did not trouble himself to consider whether they would or would not be published. In these respects they as nearly fulfil the authorised conditions of good letter-writing as any work of the sort that has been produced in our own generation, though one may be permitted some doubt in regard to improvisation; for the work is occasionally so clean cut and pointed, his strokes are so keen and straight to the mark, that it is difficult to believe the composition to be altogether unstudied. Whether any writer ever excelled in this or, indeed, in any other branch of the art literary without taking much trouble over it, is, in our judgment, an open question; but surely Carlyle must have selected and sharpened with some care the barbed epithets upon which he suspends his grotesque and formidable caricatures.

For example, he writes, in 1831, of Godwin, who still figures, in advanced age, as a martyr in the cause of good letter-writing—'A bald, bushy browed, thick, hoary, hale little figure, with a very long blunt characterless nose—the whole visit the most unutterable stupidity.' Lord Althorp is 'a thick, large, broad-whiskered, farmer-looking man.' O'Connell, 'a well-doing country shopkeeper with a bottle-green frock and brown scratch wig.... I quitted them all (the House of Commons) with the highest contempt.' Of Thomas Campbell, the poet, it is written that 'his talk is small, contemptuous, and shallow; his face has a smirk which would befit a shopman or an auctioneer.' Wordsworth, 'an old, very loquacious, indeed, quite prosing man.' Southey 'the shallowest chin, prominent snubbed Roman nose, small carelined brow, the most vehement pair of faint hazel eyes I have ever seen.' There is a savage caricature of Roebuck, and so Carlyle goes on hanging up portraits of the notables whom he met and conversed with, to the great edification of these latter days. No more dangerous interviewer has ever practised professionally than this artist in epithets, on whom the outward visible figure of a man evidently made deep impressions; whereas the ordinary letter-writer is usually content to record the small talk. As material for publication his correspondence had three singular advantages. His earlier letters were excellent, and we may hazard the generalisation that almost all first-class letter-writing, like poetry, has been inspired by the ardour and freshness and audacity of youth. He lived so long that these letters could be published very soon after his death without much damage to the susceptibilities of those whom his hard hitting might concern; and, lastly, his biographer was a man of nerve, who loved colour and strong lineaments, and would always sacrifice minor considerations to the production of a striking historical portrait. Undoubtedly, Carlyle's letters have this virtue—that they largely contribute to the creation of a true likeness of the writer, for in sketching other people he was also drawing himself. He could also paint the interior of a country house, as at Fryston, and his landscapes are vivid. He was, in short, an impressionist of the first order, who grouped all his details in subordination to a general effect, and never gave his correspondent a mere catalogue of trivial particulars.

It was originally in a letter to his brother that Carlyle wrote his celebrated description of an interview with Coleridge. No two men could be more different in taste or temperament, and yet any one who reads attentively Coleridge's letters may observe a certain similarity to Carlyle's writing, not only in the figured style and prophetic manner, but also in the tendency of their political ideas. In the matter of linguistic eccentricities, it may be guessed that both of them had been affected by the study of German literature; and in politics they had both a horror of disorder, an aversion to the ordinary Radicalism of their day, and a contempt for mechanic philosophy and complacent irreligion. Each of them had a strong belief in the power and duties of the State; but Coleridge held also that salvation lay in a reconstitution of the Church on a sound metaphysical basis, whereas for Carlyle all articles and liturgies were dying or dead. A comparison of these two supreme intellectual forces may help us to distinguish some of the most favourable conditions of good letter-writing. They were men of highly nervous mental constitution of mind, on whom the ideas and impressions that had been secreted produced an excitability that was discharged upon correspondents in a torrent of language, sweeping away considerations of reserve or self-regard, and submerging the commonplace bits of news and everyday observations which accumulate in the letters of respectable notabilities. To whomsoever the letters may be addressed, they are in consequence equally good and characteristic. Carlyle's epistles to his wife and brother are among the best in the collection; and Coleridge threw himself with the same ardour into letters to Charles Lamb and to Lord Liverpool. It is this capacity for pouring out the soul in correspondence, for draining the bottom of one's heart to a friend, which, combined with exaltation under the stimulus of spleen or keen sensibility, raises correspondence to the high-water mark of English literature.

But in saying that these conditions are eminently favourable to the production of fine letter-writing, we do not mean to affirm that they are essential. Against such a theory it would be sufficient to quote Cowper, though he had the poetic fire, and was subject to the religious frenzy; and we know that repose and refinement have a tendency to develop good correspondents. Among these we may number Edward FitzGerald, whose letters are, perhaps, the most artistic of any that have recently appeared, and may be placed without hesitation in the class of letters that have a high intrinsic merit independently of the writer's extraneous reputation; for FitzGerald was a recluse with a tinge of misanthropy, nearly unknown to the outer world, except by one exquisite paraphrase of a Persian poem, and his popularity rests almost entirely upon his published correspondence. Of these letters, so excellent of their kind, can it be said that they have the note of improvisation, that they were written for a friend's eye, without thought or care for that ordeal of posthumous publication which has added, as we have been told, a fresh terror to death? The composition is exactly suited to the tone of easy, pleasant conversation; the writing has a serene flow, with ripples of wit and humour; sometimes occupied with East Anglian rusticities and local colouring, sometimes with pungent literary criticisms; it is never exuberant, but nowhere dull or commonplace; the language is concise, with a sedulous nicety of expression. A man of delicate irony, living apart from the rough, tumbling struggle for existence, he was in most things the very opposite to Carlyle, whose French Revolution he admired not much, and who, he thinks, 'ought to be laughed at a little.' Such a man was not likely to write even the most ordinary letter without a certain degree of mental preparation, without some elaboration of thought, or solicitude as to form and finish, for all which processes he had ample leisure. It may be noticed that he never condescends to the travelling journal, and that his voyaging impressions are given in a few fine strokes; but, although he was a home-keeping Englishman, he was free from household cares, nor did he keep up that obligatory family correspondence which, when it is published to exhibit the domestic habits and affections of an eminent person, becomes ever after a dead-weight upon his biography.

In endeavouring to analyse the charm of these delightful letters, we may suggest that they gain their special flavour from his talent for compounding them, like a skilful chef de cuisine, out of various materials or intellectual condiments assorted and dexterously blended. He is an able and accomplished egoist, one of the few modern Englishmen who are able to plant themselves contentedly, like a tree, in one spot, and who prefer books to company, the sedentary to the stirring life. He was not cut off, like Cowper, a hundred years earlier, from the outer world in winter and rough weather, yet he had few visitors and went abroad little; so that he had ample leisure for perusal and re-perusal of the classic masterpieces, ancient and modern, and for surveying the field of contemporary literature. His letters to Fanny Kemble have the advantage of unity in tone that belongs to a series written to the same person, though the absence of replies is apt to produce the effect of a monologue. How far good letter-writing depends upon the course of exchange, upon the stimulus of pleasant and prompt replies, is a question not easily answered, since the correspondence on both sides of two good writers is very rarely put together. Mrs. Kemble had certain fixed rules which must have been fatal to the free epistolary spirit. 'I never write,' she said, 'until I am written to; I always write when I am written to, and I make a point of always returning the same amount of paper that I receive;' but at any rate it is evident that FitzGerald's letters to her were regularly answered. He had a light hand on descriptions of season and scenery; he could give the autumnal atmosphere, the awakening of leaf and flower in spring, the distant roar of the German Ocean on the East Anglian coast. As he could record his daily life without the minute prolixity of a diary, so he could throw off criticisms on books without falling into the manner of an essayist. In regard to the 'fuliginous and spasmodic Carlyle,' he asks doubtfully whether he with all his genius will not subside into the Level that covers, and consists of, decayed literary vegetation. 'And Dickens, with all his genius, but whose Men and Women act and talk already after a more obsolete fashion than Shakespeare's?' None of the contemporary poets—Tennyson, Browning, or Swinburne—seem to have entirely satisfied him; he loved the quiet landscapes and rural tales of Crabbe, who is now read by very few; and he quotes with manifest enjoyment the lines:

'In a small cottage on the rising ground,
West of the waves, and just beyond the sound.'

'The sea,' he writes, 'somehow talks to one of old things,' probably because it is changeless by comparison with the land; and a man whose life is still and solitary is affected by the transitory aspect of natural things, because he can watch them pass. As old friends drop off he touches in his letters upon the memories of days that are gone, and he consorts more and more with the personages of his favourite poets and romancers, living thus, as he says, among shadows.

Here is a man to whom correspondence was a real solace and a vehicle of thought and feeling, not a mere note-book of travel, nor a conduit of confidential small talk. A faint odour of the seasons hangs round some of these letters, of the sunshine and rain, of dark days and roads blocked with snow, of the first spring crocus and the faded autumnal garden plots. We can perceive that, as his retirement became habitual with increasing age, the correspondence became his main outlet of ideas and sensations, taking more and more the place of friendly visits and personal discussion as a channel of intercourse with the external world. The Hindu sages despised action as destructive of thought; and undoubtedly the cool secluded vale of life is good for the cultivation of letter-writing, in one who has the artistic hand, and to whom this method of gathering up the fruits of reading and meditation, the harvest of a quiet eye, comes easily. In many respects the letters of FitzGerald, like his life, are in strong contrast to Carlyle's; and FitzGerald was somewhat startled by the publication of Carlyle's 'Reminiscences.' He thinks that, on the whole, 'they had better have been kept unpublished;' though on reading the 'Biography' he writes: 'I did not know that Carlyle was so good, grand, and even lovable, till I read the letters which Froude now edits.' He himself was not likely to give the general reader more than he wished to be known about his private affairs; and if one or two remarks with a sting in them appeared when these letters were first published in a magazine, they have been carefully excerpted from the book. The mellow music of his tones, the self-restraint and meditative attitude, are pleasant to the reader after the turbid utterances and twisted language of Carlyle; we may compare the stirring rebellious spirit brooding over the folly of mankind with the man who takes humanity as he finds it, and is content to make the best of a world in which he sees not much, beyond art and nature and a few old friends, to interest him. Upon the whole, we may place Carlyle and FitzGerald, each in his very different manner, at the head of all the letter-writers of the generation to which they belong, which is not precisely our own. It is to be recollected that a man must be dead before he can win reputation in this particular branch of literature, and that he cannot be fairly judged until time has removed many obstacles to unreserved publication. But both Carlyle and FitzGerald had long lives.