The letter has the advantage of not belonging at all to conscious or commercialized literature. It is not written to be seen of men, nor yet to be sold to them. It is literature intimate, unintentional, overheard. In so much as it is personal expression, plus detachment but minus self-importance, and also in so much as it endeavors to adapt itself sympathetically to another person’s interest and point of view, the letter strikes through the merely individual and touches deep and universal feeling, thus in all its humbleness fulfilling the ancient dictum for art. The letter-writer, scribbling himself forth merely to please himself and his friend, is not constrained by servility to the public taste; his medium allows him ease, fluidity, and a happy inconsequence, vital artistic qualities impossible to literature written to meet the market.
Its spontaneity gives the letter scope for its particular achievements. Being written by friend to friend, it is free from both shyness and stiffness: it may laugh or cry, be sagacious or absurd, in full confidence of being understood. It rings true in its directness and intimacy, and yet never descends to the morbidness that sometimes stains the revelations of the journal. The letter is intimate, but at bottom decorous. In a letter one wears one’s old clothes in comfort, but one does not undress as in a diary. The presence of a friend to whom one may open one’s heart is both invitation and wholesome restraint.
The letter as literature is particularly adapted to description made piquant by personal perception of lights and shades. The letter is especially fitted for quick portraiture, for flashing forth a face in an adjective, for touching off a character in the quirk of a phrase. Incidents also stand out by their very compression. Brevity is the soul of a letter, which is not saying that a letter may not be long. A letter can afford to be long, it can never afford to be diffuse. In the nature of things a good letter never flags because it is written by one possessing intensified vision and a vibrant pen. Such a person knows enough to stop before he is tired. The description, incident, comment of a letter are forced to a concentration that gives them an advantage over more formal and expansive writing. People who are interesting enough to wish to write letters, people who are interested enough to wish to read them, must by necessity of character have much else to occupy their time beside their correspondence. The value of epistolary writing lies in the fact that it is not a grave concern, but an inviting side issue. Letters, like friendship, lose their charm when one makes a business of them.
It is the greatest mistake to think that our hurried age is alien to the composition of letters. Haste is the best thing that can happen to a letter; it enforces compression. Actually our own time is peculiarly adapted to produce letters. Its very hurry is inimical to sustained writing. Thinking people may put themselves into letters when they have no time to put themselves into books. Not only the rapidity of the present but its intensity stimulates letter-writing. Even the most commonplace people are quickened to observation and to thought at a time when tragedies are being unrolled before the dullest of us, and when every day is fateful with pity and fear for even the most obscure. Personal reaction to the portents of the present is not to be escaped, for never in history was there so much to see and to feel.
As never before was there so much to see, so never before was there such an impulse to say something about it; but the immensity of our time prevents our speaking in any finished and final form. Our day is too vast for comment. All that we can record is our daily impressions; and how much more readily these fall into letter shape than into treatise or play or novel or poem! These four forms necessitate structure, analysis, synthesis; they presuppose penetration into the significance back of events. The letter is free from all these requirements, and therefore is better fitted to express our times than, for example, the poem, which to-day, false to its old high calling, deliberately avoids all divination, all guesses at the ultimate and the infinite.
The letter, always humble, informal, inconsequent, need not strain to recount any but an individual reaction and interpretation. It aspires to no universal wisdom, and by its very modesty and sincerity may perhaps for the future furnish the truest historical record obtainable of a period too terrible to understand itself.
One would naturally expect letters to be produced in an age which, bewildered as it is, is singularly articulate in regard to all its puzzles and its pain. Ease of expression was never so general as now. More people are able to say what they have to say than ever before, and more people are able to say it, too, with facility and with force. The newspapers are crowded by letters tingling with penetration, often memorable in phrasing, written by men and women in every class and place. The level of intelligence and of expression was never so high. People are writing not only to the press but to each other better letters than ever before. Impressions are so intense that they compel utterance. One proof of the prevalence and popularity of letter-writing to-day is in the many books and articles that are the chance discoveries of the mail box. For such revelations, such unintentional literature, every editor is on the alert. The history of our time is being everywhere written to-day in the best letters that were ever penned; but for one such collection discovered, how many are fated to be fugitive always and unpreserved?
XII
The Tyranny of Talent
WE come into life handicapped by many a tyranny, but by none heavier than the insolence of that particular ability packed into our still imperfect cranium. Although one may observe in rare individuals the exhibition of a fine independence that from infancy to age consistently refuses to develop the dominance of some obvious talent, for the most part we yield to the conventional views that defy such despotism, and to our own delight in that little toy, success, which the autocrat dangles before our eyes. The only people never disillusioned are the unsuccessful. Every time we succeed we take a tuck in a dream. Of all domains, the most desirable is the kingdom of dreams, and the only people who never lose it, who, rather, reinherit it from day to day, are the people who consistently and conscientiously fail.
There are, however, only an enviable few of us who are not able to do some one thing well. It does not need, of course, to be anything notable. We need not be the fools of fame, in order to taste all the depths of success. We may merely be able to tie up parcels with neatness and dispatch,—rest assured we shall be enforced to tie up everybody’s parcels until we totter into our graves. Most households can boast a member with an ability to find things; the demands upon the time and the resourcefulness of such a professional finder prevent her ever finding peace (a finder is, of course, always feminine). One could multiply indefinitely examples from immediate experience that prove the argument for inefficiency.