Chapter 5

There is, indeed, in the correspondence of this remarkable group a tone of frankness and sincerity which, combined with the absence of malice and a strong element of fun, distinguishes it from the half-veiled disapproval and prudish reserve of later days. 'When you next write so eloquently and well against law and lawyers,' says Coleridge to Godwin, 'be so good as to leave a larger place for your wafer, as by neglect of this a part of your last was obliterated.' Again, in a more serious tone, 'Ere I had yet read or seen your works, I, at Southey's recommendation, wrote a sonnet in praise of the author. When I had read them, religious bigotry, the but half understanding of your principles, and the _not_ half understanding of my own, combined to render me a warm and boisterous anti-Godwinist.' His moods and circumstances, his joys and pains, are reflected in his language with remarkable fertility of metaphor; his feelings vary with his society. Of Lamb he writes that 'his taste acts so as to appear like the mechanic simplicity of an instinct--in brief, he is worth a hundred men of more talents: conversation with the latter tribe is like the use of leaden bells, one warms by exercise, Lamb every now and then _irradiates_.' In the best letters of this remarkable group we perceive the exquisite sensitiveness of open and eager minds, giving free play to their ideas and feelings, their delight and disgust, so that their life and thoughts are mirrored in their correspondence as in their conversation. Such writing has become very rare, if it is not entirely extinct, in these latter days of temperate living and guarded writing. Lamb's own letters are all in a similar key; and that which he wrote to Coleridge, who had a bad habit of borrowing books, is a model of jocose expostulation: 'You never come but you take away some folio that is part of my existence.... My third shelf from the top has two devilish gaps, where you have knocked out its two eye teeth.' And his lament over the desolation of London, as it appears to a man who has lived there jovially, and revisits it as a stranger in after years, may even now touch a chord in the hearts of some of us.

'In London I passed houses and places, empty caskets now. The streets, the shops are left, but all old friends are gone. The 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.... And at times I have felt an unsatisfied desire after a better and higher sort of life, which makes me impatient of the details of theology.'

In these, and perhaps one or two other passages, we can trace the development of character and convictions in the man to whom Jowett wrote, thirty years afterwards, that he was 'the most distinguished clergyman in the Church of England, who could do more than any one towards the great work of placing religion on a rational basis.'[9]

But, on the whole, the quality of these letters is by no means equal to their quantity; and too many of them belong to a class which, though it may have some ephemeral interest among friends and kinsfolk, can retain, we submit, no permanent value at all. It is best described under a title common in French literature--_impressions de voyage_. A very large part of the volume consists of letters written by Stanley, an intelligent and indefatigable tourist, from the countries and cities which he visited, from Petersburg and Palestine, from Paris and Athens, from Spain and Scotland. The standpoint from which he surveys the Holy Land is rather historical and archæological than devotional; but he had everywhere a clear eye for the picturesque in manners and scenery. He had excellent opportunities of seeing the places and the people; his descriptive powers are considerable; and there is a finely drawn picture of All Souls' Day in the Sistine Chapel, written from Rome to Hugh Pearson, although a ludicrous incident comes in at the end like a false note. Such correspondence might be so arranged separately as to make an interesting narrative of travel, but when judged by a high literary or intellectual criterion of letter-writing it is out of court. It is not too much to aver that most, if not all, of these letters might have been written by any refined and cultivated Englishman, whose education and social training had given him correct tastes and a many-sided interest in the world. They belong to the type of private diary or chronicle, and as such they inevitably include trivialities, though not many. Some of Stanley's letters are from Scotland, where he travels about admiring its wildness, and with a cultured interest in its antiquities. But no country has been better ransacked in search of the picturesque; it is the original hunting-ground of the romantic tourist, and what Stanley said about it to his family is pleasantly but not powerfully written. It is more than doubtful whether excellence in letter-writing lies that way, or, indeed, whether mediocrity is avoidable. Charles Lamb's letters are none the worse because he stayed in London and had no time for the beauties of Nature.

'For my part,' he wrote, 'with reference to my friends northwards, I must confess that I am not romance-bit about Nature. The earth and sea and sky (when all is said) is but a house to dwell in. If the inmates be courteous, and good liquors flow like the conduits at an old coronation, if they can talk sensibly and feel properly, I have no need to stand staring at the gilded looking-glass, nor at the five-shilling print over the mantelpiece. Just as important to me (in a sense) is all the furniture of my world; eye pampering, but satisfies no heart.'

This may be Cockney taste, yet it is better reading than Stanley's account of Edinburgh or the valley of Glencoe.

The editor assures us, in his preface, that none of these letters touch upon theological controversies, yet many readers might have been very willing to part with some of the travelling journal for closer knowledge of Stanley's inward feelings while he was bearing up the fight of liberty and toleration against the gathering forces that have since scattered and well-nigh overwhelmed the once flourishing Broad Church party. Well might Jowett write to him in 1880, 'You and I, and our dear friend Hugh Pearson, and William Rogers, and some others, are rather isolated in the world, and we must hold together as long as we can.' All those who are here named have passed away, leaving no party leaders of equal rank and calibre, and if Stanley's letters survive at all, they will live upon those passages which remind us how strenuously he contended for the intellectual freedom that he believed to be the true spiritual heritage of English churchmen.

The latest contribution to the department of national literature that we have been surveying is the volume containing the letters of Matthew Arnold (1848-88). 'Here and there,' writes their editor, 'I have been constrained, by deference to living susceptibilities, to make some slight excisions; but with regard to the bulk of the letters this process had been performed before the manuscript came into my hands.' No one has any business to question the exercise of a discretion which must have been necessary in publishing private correspondence so recently written, and only those who saw the originals can decide whether they have been weakened or strengthened by the pruning. On the other hand, the first canon of unsophistical letter-writing, as laid down by the eminent critic already cited--that they should be written for the eye of a friend, never for the public--is amply fulfilled. 'It will be seen' (we quote again from the preface) 'that the letters are essentially familiar and domestic, and were evidently written without a thought that they would ever be read beyond the circle of his family.' They are, in short, mostly family letters that have been necessarily subjected to censorship, and it would be unreasonable to measure a collection of this kind by the high standard that qualifies for admission to the grade of permanent literature. As these letters are to supply the lack of a biography (which was expressly prohibited by his own wish), we are not to look for further glimpses of a character which his editor rightly terms 'unique and fascinating.' The general reader may therefore feel some disappointment at finding that the correspondence takes no wider or more varied range; for Matthew Arnold's circle of acquaintances must have been very large, and he must have been in touch with the leading men in the political, academical, and official society of his day.

The letters are as good as they could be expected to be under these conditions, which are to our mind heavily disadvantageous. We must set aside those which fall under the class of _impressions de voyage_, for the reasons already stated in discussing Stanley's travelling correspondence. One would not gather from this collection that Arnold was a considerable poet. And the peculiar method of expression, the vein of light irony, the flexibility of style, that distinguish his prose works are here curiously absent; he does not write his letters, as Carlyle did, in the same character as his books. Yet the turn of thought, the prevailing note, can be often detected; as, for instance, in a certain impatience with English defects, coupled with a strong desire to take the conceit out of his fellow-countrymen:

'The want of independence of mind, the shutting their eyes and professing to believe what they do not, the running blindly together in herds for fear of some obscure danger and horror if they go alone, is so eminently a vice of the English, I think, of the last hundred years, has led them and is leading them into such scrapes and bewilderment, that,' etc., etc.

It is certainly hard to recognise in this picture the features of the rough roving Englishman who in the course of the last hundred years has conquered India, founded great colonies, and fought the longest and most obstinate war of modern times: who has been the type of insularity and an incurable antinomian in religion and politics. Not many pages afterwards, however, we find Arnold sharing with the herd of his countrymen the shallow 'conviction as to the French always beating any number of Germans who come into the field against them.' He adds that 'they will never be beaten by any other nation but the English, for to every other nation they are in efficiency and intelligence decidedly superior'--an opinion which contradicts his previous judgment of them, and replaces the national superiority on a lofty though insecure basis; for if he was wrong about the French, he may be wrong about us whom he puts above them. Arnold admired the French as much as Carlyle liked the Germans, and both of them enjoyed ridiculing or rating the English; but each was unconsciously swayed by his own particular tastes and temperament, and neither of them had the gift of political prophecy, which is, indeed, very seldom vouchsafed to the highly imaginative mind. He had a strong belief, rare among Englishmen, in administrative organisation. 'Depend upon it,' he writes, 'that the great States of the Continent have two great elements of cohesion, in their administrative system and in their army, which we have not.' The general conclusion which Arnold seems to have drawn from his travels in Europe and America is that England was far behind France in lucidity of ideas, and inferior to the United States in straightforward political energy and the faculties of national success. 'Heaven forbid that the English nation should become like this (the French) nation; but Heaven forbid that it should remain as it is. If it does, it will be beaten by America on its own line, and by the Continental nations on the European line. I see this as plain as I see the paper before me.' Since this was written in 1865, England has been perversely holding her own course, nor has she yet fulfilled Arnold's melancholy foreboding, by which he was 'at times overwhelmed with depression' that England was sinking into a sort of greater Holland, 'for want of perceiving how the world is going and must go, and preparing herself accordingly.'