Studies in Literature and History
bodies I cared for are in graves or dispersed. My old clubs that
lived so long and flourished so steadily are crumbled away. When I
took leave of our friend at Charing Cross, 'twas heavy unfeeling
rain, and I had nowhere to go ... not a sympathising house to turn
to in the great city. Never did the waters of heaven pour down on a
forlorner head. Yet I tried ten days at a sort of friend's house,
large and straggling; one of the individuals of my old long knot of
friends, card-players, and pleasant companions, that have tumbled
to pieces into dust and other things; and I got home convinced that
I was better to get to my hole in Enfield and hide like a sick cat
in my corner.'
We might, indeed, multiply indefinitely our quotations from the
correspondence of this literary period to show its sincerity, its
spontaneity, its uncommonness, the tone of intimate brotherhood and
natural unruly affection that pervades it everywhere. Nothing of the
kind has come down to us from the eighteenth century; and the last
fifty years of this century, so prolific in biographies and posthumous
publications of the papers of eminent men, go to prove that in the
general transformation of letter-writing these peculiar qualities have
almost, though not altogether, disappeared. Probably conversation has
suffered a like change; and we may ascribe it generally to a lowering
of the social temperature, to the habits of reserve, respectability,
and conventional self-restraint that in these days govern so largely
the intercourse of men. Something may be due to cautious expurgation
of passages which tell against the writer, or might offend modern
taste; yet in other respects contemporary editors have been
sufficiently indiscreet. And the growth of these habits, so
discouraging to free and fearless correspondence, may be partly
ascribed to the influence of journalism, which makes every subject
stale and sterile by incessantly threshing and tearing at it, and
which reviews biographies in a manner that acts as a solemn warning to
all men of mark that they take heed what they put into a private
letter. There are other causes, to which we may presently advert; but
it is quite clear that this fine art is undergoing certain
transmutations, and that on the whole it does not flourish quite so
vigorously as heretofore.
In a recent article upon Matthew Arnold's letters it is laid down by a
consummate critic[8] that the first canon of unsophisticated
letter-writing is that a letter is meant for the eye of a friend, and
not for the world. 'Even the lurking thought in anticipation of an
audience destroys the charm; the best letters are always
improvisations; the public breaks the spell.' In this, as we have
already suggested, there is much truth; yet the conditions seem to us
too straitly enjoined; for not every man of genius has the gift of
striking out his best thoughts, in their best form, clear and true
from the hot iron of his mind; and in some of our best writers the
improvising spirit is very faint. If a man writes with leisurely care,
selecting deliberately the word that exactly matches his thought,
aiming directly at the heart of his subject and avoiding prolixity, he
may, like Walpole, Gray, and others, produce a delightful letter,
provided only that he is sincere and open, has good stuff to give, and
does not condescend to varnish his pictures. We want his best
thoughts; we should like to have his best form; we do not always care
so much for negligent undress. And as for the copious outpouring of
his personal feelings, one says many things to a friend or kinsman
that are totally without interest to the public, unless they are
expressed in some distinctive manner or embody some originality of
handling an ordinary event. This a writer may have the knack of doing
artistically, even in a private and confidential letter, without
betraying the touch of art; nor, indeed, can we ever know how many of
the best modern letters are really improvised. Then, again, with
regard to the anticipation of an audience, it is a risk to which
every man of note must feel that he is exposed; the shadow of
eventual publicity is always in the background; his letters have
passed out of his control during his lifetime, and he can only trust
in the uncertain discretion of his literary executor. He does not care
to leave the record of his passing moods, his confessions of weakness,
his personal likings and antipathies, to be discussed by the general
reader; and it is probable that he only lets his pen run freely when
he feels assured that his confidential improvisations will be
judiciously omitted.
It is, we think, impossible to suppose that these considerations have
not weighed materially upon the minds of eminent men in our own day,
when biographies have become so much more numerous, and when they are
so much more closely criticised than formerly. And in comparing the
letters written in the early part of this century--such as those from
which we have given a few characteristic quotations--with those which
have been recently published, we have to take account of these things,
among other changes of the social and literary environment.
Undoubtedly the comparison is to the advantage of the earlier
writings; they seem infinitely more amusing, more genuine, more
biographical, more redolent of the manners and complexion of the time.
There is in them a flavour of heartiness and irresponsibility which
may partly be attributed to the fact that the best writers were poets,
whose genius flowered as early as their manhood, and most of whom died
young; so that their letters are fresh, audacious, and untempered by
the chilly caution of middle or declining age. Their spirits were
high, they were ardent in the pursuit of ideals; they were defying
society, they either had no family or were at feud with it, and they
gave not a thought to the solemn verdict of posterity. For
correspondents who were brimming over with humour, imagination, and
enthusiasm, no situation could be more thoroughly favourable to
sparkling improvisation; and accordingly they have left us letters
which will be a joy for ever.
The correspondence of our own generation has been written under a
different intellectual climate, and various circumstances have
combined to lower the temperature of its vivacity. Posthumous
publicity is now the manifest destiny that overhangs the private life
of all notable persons, especially of popular authors, who can observe
and inwardly digest continual warnings of the treatment which they are
likely to receive from an insatiable and inconsistent criticism. They
may have lived long and altered their opinions; they may have
quarrelled with friends or rivals, and may have become sworn allies
later; they may have publicly praised one whom in private they may
have laughed at; for when you have to think what you say, it does not
follow that you say what you think. All these considerations, enforced
by repeated examples, are apt to damp the natural ardour of
improvisation; the more so because the writer may be sure either that
his genuine utterances will be suppressed by the editor, or that, if
they are produced, the editor will be roundly abused for giving him
away. For in these matters the judgment of the general reader is
wayward, and his attitude undecided, with a leaning toward hypocrisy.
The story of the domestic tribulations and the conjugal bickerings of
a great writer, of the irritability that belongs to highly nervous
temperaments, and which has always made genius, like the finest
animals, hard to domesticate, has lost none of its savour with the
public. But if all letters that record such scenes and sayings are
faithfully reproduced in preparing the votive tablet upon which the
dead man's life is to be delineated, the ungrateful reader answers
with an accusation of imprudence, indiscretion, and betrayal of
confidence; and the surviving friends protest still more vehemently.
Within the last three months these consequences have been forcibly
illustrated by the reception of Cardinal Manning's Life, in which the
letters are of extraordinary value toward the formation of a right
understanding of that remarkable personage. Much of all this
sensitiveness is clearly due to the hasty fashion of publishing
private correspondence within a few years of the writer's decease, but
more to the fitful and somewhat feminine temper of an inquisitive yet
censorious society.
If, on the other hand, expurgation is freely employed, the result is a
kind of emasculation. Nothing is left that can offend or annoy living
people, or that might damage the writer's own reputation with an
audience that enjoys, yet condemns, unmeasured confidences. And so we
get clever, sensible letters of men who have travelled, worked, and
mixed much in society, who have already put into essays or reviews all
that they wanted the public to know, and whose private doubts, or
follies, or frolics, have been neatly removed from their
correspondence. Let us take, for example, two batches of letters very
lately published, and written by two men who have left their mark upon
their generation. Of Dean Stanley it may be affirmed that no
ecclesiastic of his time was better known, or had a higher reputation
for strength of character and undaunted Liberalism. His public life
and his place in the Anglican Church had been already described in a
meritorious biography; and it might have been expected that these
letters would bring the reader closer to the man himself, would
accentuate the points of a striking individuality. There are few of
these letters, we think, by which such expectations have been
fulfilled to any appreciable degree. In one or two of them Stanley
writes with his genuine sincerity and earnestness on the state of his
mind in regard to the new spirit of ecclesiasticism that had arisen in
Oxford nearly sixty years ago; we see that he saw and felt the
magnitude of a coming crisis, and we can observe the formation of the
opinions which he consistently and valiantly upheld throughout his
career. The whole instinct of his intellectual nature--and he never
lost his trust in reason--was against the high Roman or sacerdotal
absolutism in matters of dogma; he ranked Morals far above Faith; and
he had that dislike of authoritative uniformity in church government
which is in Englishmen a reflection of their political habits. Yet he
discerned plainly enough the spring of a movement that was bringing
about a Roman Catholic revival.
'Not that I am turned or turning Newmanist, but that I do feel that
the crisis in my opinions is coming on, and that the difficulties I
find in my present views are greater than I thought them to be, and
that here I am in the presence of a magnificent and consistent
system shooting up on every side, whilst all that I see against it
is weak and grovelling.' (Letter to C. J. Vaughan, 1838.)
'I expect,' he writes a year later, 'that the whole thing will have
the effect of making me either a great Newmanite or a great Radical';
and it did end in making him an advanced Liberal. His practical
genius, and his free converse with general society (from which Manning
deliberately turned away as fatal to ecclesiasticism), very soon
parted him from the theologians.
'I think it is true,' he writes to Jowett (1849), 'that we have not
the same mental interest in talking over subjects of theology that
we had formerly. They have lost their novelty, I suppose; we know
better where we are, having rolled to the bottom together, and
being now able only to make a few uphill steps. I acknowledge fully
my own want of freshness; my mind seems at times quite dried up....