Studies in Literature and History
by those who are far from home and long absent, yet it is precisely in
the case of prolonged separation that the chain of friendly
communication is apt gradually to slacken until it becomes entirely
disconnected. So long, indeed, as men depended for news on private
sources, there was always a kind of obligation to write; but the
telegraph and the newspaper have now monopolised the Intelligence
Department. On the whole, it may be concluded that the art of
letter-writing flourishes best within a limited radius of distance,
among persons living neither very near to each other nor yet far
apart, who meet occasionally yet not often, and who are within the
same range of social, political, and intellectual influences. Its best
period is probably before the advent of copious indefatigable
journalism, before men have taken to publishing letters in the morning
papers, and when they have not yet acquired the economical habit of
reserving all their valuable ideas and information for signed articles
in some monthly review.
It was under these conditions that the letters of eminent men in the
eighteenth century and the early part of the nineteenth century were
generally written. In the former century letter-writing was
undoubtedly a recognised form of high literary workmanship, with close
affinities on one side to the diary or private journal, and on another
to the essay. Long, continuous, and intimate correspondence, as in the
case of Swift and Walpole, gravitated toward the journal;
dissertations on literature, politics, and manners were more akin to
the essay; while in the hands of the novelist the journalistic series
of letters took artificial development into a method of story-telling.
On the other side, the tendency of epistles to become essays reached
its climax in the letters of Burke, some of which are only
distinguishable from brilliant pamphlets by the formal address and
subscription.
With the nineteenth century begins an era of amusing and animated
letter-writing. The classic and somewhat elaborate style of the
preceding age falls into disuse; the essayist draws gradually back
into a department of his own; the new school reflects, as is natural,
the general tendency of English literature toward a livelier and more
varied movement, with a wider range of subjects and sympathies. In his
letters, as in his poetry, the precursor of the Naturalistic school
was Cowper, who could be simple without being trivial, was never prosy
and often pathetic, and who possessed the rare art of stamping on his
reader's mind an enduring impression of quiet and somewhat commonplace
society in the English midlands. That poets should usually have been
good letter-writers is probably no more than might have been expected,
for imagination and word-power must tell everywhere; yet the list is
so long as to be worth noticing. Swift, Pope, Gray, and Cowper in the
last century, and in the present century Scott, Byron, Shelley,
Coleridge, and Southey, have all left us distinctive and copious
correspondence. Wordsworth may, perhaps, be classed as a notable
exception; for Wordsworth's letters are dull, being at their best more
like essays or literary dissertations than the free outpouring of
intimate thought. They have none of the charm which comes from the
revelation of private doubt or passionate affection that is
ordinarily stifled by convention; they are, on the contrary, eminently
respectable, deliberate, and carefully expressed. 'It has ever been
the habit of my mind,' he writes, 'to trust that expediency will come
out of fidelity to principles, rather than to seek my principles of
action in calculations of expediency.' This is what the Americans call
'high toned'; but the metal is too heavy for the light calibre of a
letter.
Whether Tennyson had the gift of letter-writing we shall be able to
judge when his biography appears; though we may anticipate that it
will contain some things worthy of a great master in the art of
language. The publication of letters deriving their sole or principal
interest from the general reputation of the writer is indeed quite
legitimate and intelligible. They are often biographical documents of
considerable value, apart from all questions of style and intellectual
quality; they can be handled and arranged to exhibit a man's
character; they may be used as negative proofs of reserve and
reticence, as showing his mental attitude toward various subjects, his
domestic habits and virtues, or merely as annals of where he went and
what he did. They may be carefully selected and revised for occasional
insertion at different stages of a long biography, where the editor
sees fit to let the dead man speak for himself; they may be employed
as an advocate chooses the papers in his brief, for attack or defence.
Or they may be produced without commentary, sifting, or omissions, as
the unvarnished presentation of a man's private life and particular
features which a candid friend commits to the judgment of posterity.
Or, lastly, they may be mere relics, not much more in some instances
than curiosities, valued for much the same reasons that would set a
high price on the autograph or the inkstand of a celebrated man, on
his furniture, his house, or anything that was his. In proportion as
little or nothing is known of such a man's private life, every scrap
of his writing increases in value; and so a letter of Shakespeare or
of Dante would be priceless. But of Shakespeare no letter has come
down to us; and of Dante not even, we believe, his signature; though
we do know something of what Dante did and thought, for his religion
and his politics are manifested in his poems; whereas Shakespeare's
works have the divine attribute of impersonality. Here is one supreme
poet of whom the world would gladly hear anything; but nothing remains
to feed the modern appetite, which is never so well gratified as when
a rare and sublime genius stands revealed as the writer of ordinary
letters upon petty domesticities.
It is evidently impossible to draw a line that shall accurately divide
the interest that men feel in a celebrated person from the interest
that they take in his posthumous correspondence; so as to determine
how far the letters are good in themselves. When the writer is well
known, he and his writings are inseparable. Yet some attempt must be
made, for the purposes of this article, to distinguish critically
between letters that are readable and will survive by their own
literary quality, as fine specimens of the art, and those which are
preserved and published on the score of the writer's name and fame,
with little aid from their merits. In which category are we to place
the letters of Keats, including those that have been very recently
unearthed by diligent literary excavation? His poetry is so exquisite,
so radiant with imaginative colour, that to see such a man in the
light of common day, among the ordinary cares and circumstances of the
lower world, is necessarily a descent and a disillusion. He was young,
he was poor, he had few acquaintances worthy of him; he roved about
England and Scotland without adventures; his letters were perfectly
familiar and unsophisticated. As Mr. Sidney Colvin has written, in an
excellent preface to an edition of 1891, 'he poured out to those he
loved his whole self indiscriminately, generosity and fretfulness,
ardour and despondency, boyish petulance side by side with manful good
sense, the tattle of suburban parlours with the speculations of a
spirit unsurpassed for native gift and insight.' Every now and then
the level of his easygoing discourse is lit up by a flash of wit, and
occasionally by a jet of brilliant fancies among which some of his
finest poetry may be traced in the process of incubation. His whole
mind is set upon his art; for that only, and for a few intimate
friends, does he care to live and work; his letters often tell us when
and where, under what influences, his best pieces were composed; one
likes to know, for example, that the _Ode to Autumn_ came to him on a
fine September day during a Sunday's walk over the stubbles near
Winchester. His criticisms are always good, and their form
picturesque. He compares human life to a chamber that becomes
gradually darkened, in which one door after another is set open,
showing only dim passages leading out into darkness. This, he says, is
the burden of the mystery which Wordsworth felt and endeavoured to
explore; and he thinks that Wordsworth is deeper than Milton, though
he attributes this, justly, more to 'the general and gregarious
advance of intellect, than individual greatness of mind.' So far as
spontaneity and the free unguarded play of sportive and serious ideas,
taken as they came uppermost, are tests and conditions of excellence
in this kind of writing, Keats's letters must rank high. Nevertheless
there is still room for doubt whether these juvenile productions would
have left any but a most ephemeral mark apart from their connection
with his poetry.
In the case of other poets, who were his contemporaries, the verdict
will be different. They are all to be classed, though not in the same
line, as writers of letters that have great original and intrinsic
value. Scott's letters exhibit his generous and masculine nature; the
buoyancy of his spirits in good or bad fortune; and that romantic
attachment to old things and ideas which hardened latterly into
inveterate Toryism. Southey's prose writings will probably survive his
metrical compositions, which indeed have already fallen into oblivion.
There is life in a poet so long as he is quoted; but no verses or even
lines of Southey have fixed themselves in the popular memory. And
whereas the letters of Keats disclose a mind filled with the sense of
beauty and rich with poetic seedlings that blossomed into beautiful
flowers, in Southey's correspondence we discern only an erudite man of
taste labouring diligently upon epics which he expected to be
immortal. The letters of Byron stand upon broader ground, because
Byron was so much more of a personage than either Keats, or Southey,
or Wordsworth. They supply, in the first place, an invaluable, and
indeed indispensable, interpretation of his poetry, which is to a
great extent the imaginative and romantic presentation of his own
feelings, fortunes, and peculiar experiences. Secondly, they are full
of good sayings and caustic criticism; they touch upon the domain of
politics and society as well as upon literature; they give the
opinions passed upon contemporary events and persons, during a
stirring period of European history, by a man of genius who was also a
man of the world; they float on the current of a strangely troubled
existence. In these letters we have an important contribution to our
acquaintance with literary circles and London society, and with
several notable figures on either stage, during the years immediately
before and after Waterloo. They were published in an introduction to
the works of a famous poet; yet, although they cannot be detached from
his poetry, they possess great independent merits of their own. They
echo the sounds of revelry by night; they strike a note of careless
vivacity, the tone of a man who is at home alike in good and bad
company, whose judgment on books and politics, on writers and
speakers, is always fresh, bold, and original. We may lament that the
spirit of reckless devilry and dissipation should have entered into
Byron; and the lessons to be drawn from the scenes and adventures in
Venice and elsewhere, described for the benefit of Tom Moore, are very
different from the moral examples furnished by the tranquil and
well-ordered correspondence of our own day. Yet the world would have
been poorer for the loss of this memorial of an Unquiet Life, and the