Studies in Literature and History
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.
Mr. Stevenson, whose letters are the latest important contribution to
this department of the national library, died early, in the full force
of his intellect, at the zenith of his fame as a writer of romance.
His letters have been edited by Mr. Sidney Colvin, with all the
sympathy and insight into character that are inspired by congenial
tastes and close friendship; and his preface gives an excellent
account of the conditions, physical and mental, under which they were
written, and of the limitations observed in the editing of them.
'Begun,' Mr. Colvin says, 'without a thought of publicity, and
simply to maintain an intimacy undiminished by separation, they
assumed in the course of two or three years a bulk so considerable,
and contained so much of the matter of his daily life and thoughts,
that it by-and-by occurred to him ... that "some kind of a book"
might be extracted out of them after his death.... In a
correspondence so unreserved, the duty of suppression and selection
must needs be delicate. Belonging to the race of Scott and Dumas,
of the romantic narrators and creators, Stevenson belonged no less
to that of Montaigne and the literary egotists.... He was a
watchful and ever interested observer of the motions of his own
mind.'
The whole passage, too long to be quoted, suggests an instructive
analysis of the mental qualities and disposition that go to make a
good letter-writer--a dash of egotism, sensitiveness to outward
impressions, literary charm, the habit of keeping a frank and familiar
record of every day's moods, thoughts, and doings, the picturesque
surroundings of a strange land. In these journal letters from Samoa
the canon of improvisation is to a certain extent infringed, for
Stevenson wrote with publicity in distant view; and the depressing
influence of remoteness is in his case overcome, for he lived in
tropical Polynesia, 'far off amid the melancholy main,' and had speech
with his correspondent only at long intervals. But it is the privilege
of genius to disconcert the rules of criticism; the letters have none
of the vices of the diary, the trivialities are never dull, the
incidents are uncommon or uncommonly well told, and the writer is
never caught looking over his shoulder at posterity.
For extracts there is now little space left in this article; but we
may quote, to show Stevenson's style of landscape-painting, a few
lines describing a morning in Samoa after a heavy gale:
'I woke this morning to find the blow quite ended. The heaven was
all a mottled grey; even the East quite colourless. The downward
slope of the island veiled in wafts of vapour, blue like smoke; not
a leaf stirred on the tallest tree. Only three miles below me on
the barrier reef I could see the individual breakers curl and fall,
and hear their conjunct roaring rise, like the roar of a
thoroughfare close by.'
It is good for the imaginative letter-writer to live within sight and
sound of the sea, to hear the long roll, and to see from his window 'a
nick of the blue Pacific.' It is also good for him to be within range
of savage warfare, and to take long rough rides in a disturbed
country. On one such occasion he writes:
'Conceive such an outing, remember the pallid brute that lived in
Skerryvore like a weevil in a biscuit, and receive the intelligence
that I was rather the better for my journey. Twenty miles ride,
sixteen fences taken, ten of the miles in a drenching rain, seven
of them fasting and in the morning chill, and six stricken hours'
political discussions with an interpreter; to say nothing of
sleeping in a native house, at which many of our excellent literati
would look askance of itself.'
The feat might not seem miraculous to a captain of frontier irregulars
in hard training; but for a delicate novelist in weak health it was
pluckily done. These letters would be readable if Stevenson had
written nothing else, though of course their worth is doubled by our
interest in a man of singular talent who died prematurely. They
illustrate the tale of his life and portray his character; and they
form an addition, valuable in itself, and unique as a variety, to the
series of memorable English letter-writers.
Mr. Colvin mentions, in his preface, that Stevenson's talk was
irresistibly sympathetic and inspiring, full of matter and mirth. It
cannot be denied that between correspondence and conversation,
regarded as fine arts, there is a close kinship; and very similar
reasons have been alleged for the common belief that both are on the
decline. Whether such a belief has any solid foundation in the case of
letter-writing, we may be warranted in doubting. Observations of this
sort, which have a false air of acuteness and profundity, are repeated
periodically. The remark so constantly made at this moment, that
nowadays people read nothing but magazines, was made by Coleridge
early in this century; and Southey prophesied the ruin of good letters
from the penny post. It is true that the number of letters written
must have increased enormously; it is also true that many more are
published than heretofore, and that as a great many of these are not
above mediocrity, are valueless as literature, and of little worth
biographically, they produce on the disappointed reader the effect of
a general depreciation of the standard. Nevertheless, this article
will have been written to little purpose, unless it has shown fair
cause for rejecting such a conclusion, and for maintaining that,
although fine letter-writers, like poets, are few and far between, yet
they have not been wanting in our own time, and are not likely to
disappear. There will always be men, like Coleridge or Carlyle, whose
impetuous thoughts and humoristic conceptions cannot perpetually
submit to the forms and limitations and delays of printing and
publishing, but must occasionally demand instant liberation and
prompt delivery by the natural process of private letters. And
although the stir and bustle of the world is increasing, so that quiet
corners in it are not easily kept, yet it is probable that the race of
literary recluses--of those who pass their days in reading books, in
watching the course of affairs, and in corresponding with a select