Part 5

Women are proverbially good letter writers. The letters of Mme. de Sevigné to her daughter are masterpieces of their kind. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s are among the best of English letters; and Fitzgerald somewhat whimsically mentions the correspondence of a certain Mrs. French as worthy to rank with Horace Walpole’s. “Would you desire at this day,” says De Quincey, “to read our noble language in its native beauty . . . steal the mail bags and break open all the letters in female handwriting. Three out of four will have been written by that class of women who have the most leisure and the most interest in a correspondence by the post,” i.e., “unmarried women above twenty-five.” De Quincey adds that “if required to come forward in some public character” these same ladies “might write ill and affectedly. . . . But in their letters they write under the benefit of their natural advantages . . . sustained by some deep sympathy between themselves and their correspondents.” “Authors can’t write letters,” says Lowell in a letter to Miss Norton. “At best they squeeze out an essay now and then, burying every natural sprout in a dry and dreary _sand flood_, as unlike as possible to those delightful freshets with which your heart overflows the paper. _They_ are thinking of their punctuation, of crossing their t’s and dotting their i’s, and cannot forget themselves in their correspondent, which I take to be the true recipe for a letter.” And writing to another correspondent, C. E. Norton, he says: “The habits of authorship are fatal to the careless unconsciousness that is the life of a letter. . . . But worse than all is that lack of interest in one’s self that comes of drudgery—for I hold that a letter which is not mainly about the writer of it lacks the prime flavor.” This is slightly paradoxical, for, I repeat, the best published letters are commonly the work of professional _literati_. Byron’s letters have been preferred by some readers to his poetry, such are their headlong vigor, dash, _verve_, spontaneity, the completeness of their self-expression. Keats was _par excellence_ the literary artist; yet nothing can exceed the artlessness, simplicity, and sympathetic self-forgetfulness with which he writes to his little sister. But it is easy to see what Lowell means. Charles Lamb’s letters, e.g., though in many respects charming, are a trifle too _composed_. They have that trick of quaintness which runs through the “Essays of Elia,” but which gives an air of artificiality to a private letter. He is practising a literary habit rather than thinking of his correspondent. In this most intimate, personal, and mutual of arts, the writer should write _to_ his friend what will interest him as well as himself. He should not dwell on hobbies of his own; nor describe his own experiences at too great length. It is all right to amuse his friend, but not to air his own cleverness. Lowell’s letters are delightful, and, by and large, I would place them second to none in the language. But they are sometimes too literary and have the faults of his prose writing in general. Wit was always his temptation, misleading him now and then into a kind of Yankee smartness and a disposition to show off. His temperament was buoyant, impulsive; there was to the last a good deal of the boy about Lowell. Letter writing is a friendly art, and Lowell’s warm expressions of love for his friends are most genuine. His epistolary style, like his essay style, is lavish and seldom chastened or toned down to the exquisite simplicity which distinguishes the best letters of Gray and Cowper. And so Lowell is always getting in his own way, tripping himself up over his superabundance of matter. Still, as a whole, I know no collected letters richer in thought, humor, and sentiment. And one may trace in them, read consecutively, the gradual ripening and refining of a highly gifted mind and a nature which had at once nobility and charm of thought.

Lowell speaks admiringly of Emerson’s “gracious impersonality.” Now impersonality is the last thing we expect of a letter writer. Emerson could write a good letter on occasion, as may be seen by a dip almost anywhere into the Carlyle-Emerson correspondence. But when Mr. Cabot was preparing his life of Emerson and applied to Henry James, Senior, for permission to read his letters to Emerson, Mr. James replied, not without a touch of petulance: “Emerson always kept one at such arm’s length, tasting him and sipping him and trying him, to make sure that he was worthy of his somewhat prim and bloodless friendship, that it was fatiguing to write him letters. I can’t recall any serious letter I ever sent him. I remember well what maidenly letters I used to receive from him.” We know what doctrine Emerson held on the subject of “persons.” But it is just this personality which makes Lowell the prince of letter writers. He may attract, he may irritate, but he never fails to interest us in himself. Even in his books it is the man in the book that interests most.

Women write good letters because they are sympathetic; because they take personal rather than abstract views; because they stay at home a great deal and are interested in little things and fond of exchanging confidences and news. They like to receive letters as well as to write them. The fact that Richardson found his most admiring readers among the ladies was due perhaps not only to the sentimentality of his novels, but to their epistolary form. Hence there is apt to be a touch of the feminine in the most accomplished letter writers. They are gossips, like Horace Walpole, or dilettanti like Edward Fitzgerald, or shy, reserved, sensitive persons like Gray and Cowper, who live apart, retired from the world in a retirement either cloistral or domestic; who have a few friends and a genius for friendship, enjoy the exercise of their pens, feel the need of unbosoming themselves, but are not ready talkers. Above all they are not above being interested in trifles and little things. Cowper was absorbed in his hares, his cucumber frames and gardening, country walks, tea-table chat, winding silk for Mrs. Unwin. Lamb was unceasingly taken up with the oddities and antiquities of London streets, the beggars, the chimney sweeps, the old benchers, the old bookstalls, and the like. Gray fills his correspondence with his solitary pursuits and recreations and tastes: Gothic curiosities, engravings, music sheets, ballads, excursions here and there. The familiar is of the essence of good letter writing: to unbend, to relax, to _desipere in loco_, to occupy at least momentarily the playful and humorous point of view. Solemn, prophetic souls devoted to sublimity are not for this art. Dante and Milton and “old Daddy” Wordsworth, as Fitzgerald calls him, could never have been good letter writers: they were too great to care about little things, too high and rigid to stoop to trifles.

Letter writing is sometimes described as a colloquial art. Correspondence, it is said, is a conversation kept up between interlocutors at a distance. But there is a difference: good talkers are not necessarily good letter writers, and _vice versa_. Coleridge, e.g., was great in monologue, but his letters are in no way remarkable. Cowper, on the other hand, did not sparkle in conversation, and Gray was silent in company, “dull,” Dr. Johnson called him. Johnson himself, notoriously a most accomplished talker, does not shine as a letter writer. His letters, frequently excellent in substance, are ponderous in style. They are of the kind best described as “epistolary correspondence.” The Doctor needed the give and take of social intercourse to allay the heaviness of his written discourse. His talk was animated, pointed, idiomatic, but when he sat down and took pen in hand, he began to translate, as Macaulay said, from English into Johnsonese. His celebrated letter of rebuke to Lord Chesterfield labors under the weight of its indignation, is not free from pomposity and pedantry, and is written with an eye to posterity. One can imagine the noble lord, himself an accomplished letter writer, smiling over this oracular sentence: “The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and found him a native of the rocks.” Heine’s irony, Voltaire’s light touch would have stung more sharply, though somewhat of Johnson’s dignified pathos would perhaps have been lost. Orators, in general, are not good letter writers. They are accustomed to the _ore rotundo_ utterance, the “big bow-wow,” and they crave the large audience instead of the audience of one.

The art of letter writing, then, is a relaxation, an art of leisure, of the idle moment, the mind at ease, the bow unbent, the loin ungirt. But there are times in every man’s life when he has to write letters of a tenser mood, utterances of the passionate and agonized crises of the soul, love letters, death messages, farewells, confessions, entreaties. It seems profane to use the word _art_ in such connections. Yet even a prayer, when it is articulate at all, follows the laws of human speech, though directed to the ear that heareth in secret. The collects of the church, being generalized prayer, employ a deliberate art.

Probably you have all been called upon to write letters of condolence and have found it a very difficult thing to do. There is no harder test of tact, delicacy, and good taste. The least appearance of insincerity, the least intrusion of egotism, of an air of effort, an assumed solemnity, a moralizing or edifying pose, makes the whole letter ring false. Reserve is better here than the opposite extreme; better to say less than you feel than even to _seem_ to say more.

There is a letter of Lincoln’s, written to a mother whose sons had been killed in the Civil War, which is a brief model in this kind. I will not cite it here, for it has become a classic and is almost universally known. An engrossed copy of it hangs on the wall of Brasenose College, Oxford, as a specimen of the purest English diction—the diction of the Gettysburg address.

THACKERAY’S CENTENARY

AFTER all that has been written about Thackeray, it would be flat for me to present here another estimate of his work, or try to settle the relative value of his books. In this paper I shall endeavor only two things: first, to enquire what changes, in our way of looking at him, have come about in the half century since his death. Secondly, to give my own personal experience as a reader of Thackeray, in the hope that it may represent, in some degree, the experience of others.

What is left of Thackeray in this hundredth year since his birth? and how much of him has been eaten away by destructive criticism—or rather by time, that far more corrosive acid, whose silent operation criticism does but record? As the nineteenth century recedes, four names in the English fiction of that century stand out ever more clearly, as the great names: Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot. I know what may be said—what has been said—for others: Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, Charles Reade, Trollope, Meredith, Stevenson, Hardy. I believe that these will endure, but will endure as writers of a secondary importance. Others are already fading: Bulwer is all gone, and Kingsley is going fast.

The order in which I have named the four great novelists is usually, I think, the order in which the reader comes to them. It is also the order of their publication. For although Thackeray was a year older than Dickens, his first novels were later in date, and he was much later in securing his public. But the chronological reason is not the real reason why we read them in that order. It is because of their different appeal. Scott was a romancer, Dickens a humorist, Thackeray a satirist, and George Eliot a moralist. Each was much more than that; but that was what they were, reduced to the lowest term. Romance, humor, satire, and moral philosophy respectively were their starting point, their strongest impelling force, and their besetting sin. Whenever they fell below themselves, Walter Scott lapsed into sheer romantic unreality, Dickens into extravagant caricature, Thackeray into burlesque, George Eliot into psychology and ethical reflection.

I wonder whether your experience here is the same as mine. By the time that I was fourteen, as nearly as I can remember, I had read all the Waverley novels. Then I got hold of Dickens, and for two or three years I lived in Dickens’s world, though perhaps he and Scott somewhat overlapped at the edge—I cannot quite remember. I was sixteen when Thackeray died, and I heard my elders mourning over the loss. “Dear old Thackeray is gone,” they told each other, and proceeded to reread all his books, with infinite laughter. So I picked up “Vanity Fair” and tried to enjoy it. But fresh from Scott’s picturesque page and Dickens’s sympathetic extravagances, how dull, insipid, repellent, disgusting were George Osborne, and fat Joseph Sedley, and Amelia and Becky! What sillies they were and how trivial their doings! “It’s just about a lot of old girls,” I said to my uncle, who laughed in a provokingly superior manner and replied, “My boy, those old girls are life.” I will confess that even to this day, something of that shock of disillusion, that first cold plunge into “Vanity Fair,” hangs about the book. I understand what Mr. Howells means when he calls it “the poorest of Thackeray’s novels—crude, heavy-handed, caricatured.” I ought to have begun, as he did, with “Pendennis,” of which he writes, “I am still not sure but it is the author’s greatest book.” I don’t know about that, but I know that it is the novel of Thackeray’s that I have read most often and like the best, better than “Henry Esmond” or “Vanity Fair”: just as I prefer “The Mill on the Floss” to “Adam Bede,” and “The House of the Seven Gables” to “The Scarlet Letter” (as Hawthorne did himself, by the way); or as I agree with Dickens that “Bleak House” was his best novel, though the public never thought so. We may concede to the critics that, objectively considered, and by all the rules of judgment, this or that work is its author’s masterpiece and we _ought_ to like it best—only we don’t. We have our private preferences which we cannot explain and do not seek to defend. As for “Esmond,” my comparative indifference to it is only, I suppose, a part of my dislike of the _genre_. I know the grounds on which the historical novel is recommended, and I know how intimately Thackeray’s imagination was at home in the eighteenth century. Historically that is what he stands for: he was a Queen Anne man—like Austin Dobson: he passed over the great romantic generation altogether and joined on to Fielding and Goldsmith and their predecessors. Still no man knows the past as he does the present. I will take Thackeray’s report of the London of his day; but I do not care very much about his reproduction of the London of 1745. Let me whisper to you that since early youth I have not been able to take much pleasure in the Waverley novels, except those parts of them in which the author presents Scotch life and character as he knew them.

I think it was not till I was seventeen or eighteen, and a freshman in college, that I really got hold of Thackeray; but when once I had done so, the result was to drive Dickens out of my mind, as one nail drives out another. I never could go back to him after that. His sentiment seemed tawdry, his humor, buffoonery. Hung side by side, the one picture killed the other. “Dickens knows,” said Thackeray, “that my books are a protest against him: that, if the one set are true, the other must be false.” There is a species of ingratitude, of disloyalty, in thus turning one’s back upon an old favorite who has furnished one so intense a pleasure and has had so large a share in one’s education. But it is the cruel condition of all growth.

The heavens that now draw him with sweetness untold, Once found, for new heavens he spurneth the old.

But when I advanced to George Eliot, as I did a year or two later, I did not find that her fiction and Thackeray’s destroyed each other. I have continued to reread them both ever since and with undiminished satisfaction. And yet it was, in some sense, an advance. I would not say that George Eliot was a greater novelist than Thackeray, nor even so great. But her message is more gravely intellectual: the psychology of her characters more deeply studied: the problems of life and mind more thoughtfully confronted. Thought, indeed, thought in itself and apart from the story, which is only a chosen illustration of a thesis, seems her principal concern. Thackeray is always concrete, never speculative or abstract. The mimetic instinct was strong in him, but weak in his great contemporary, to the damage and the final ruin of her art. His method was observation, hers analysis. Mr. Brownell says that Thackeray’s characters are “delineated rather than dissected.” There is little analysis, indeed hardly any literary criticism in his “English Humorists”: only personal impressions. He deals with the men, not with the books. The same is true of his art criticisms. He is concerned with the sentiment of the picture, seldom with its technique, or even with its imaginative or expressional power.

In saying that Dickens was essentially a humorist and Thackeray a satirist, I do not mean, of course, that the terms are mutually exclusive. Thackeray was a great humorist as well as a satirist, but Dickens was hardly a satirist at all. I know that Mr. Chesterton says he was, but I cannot believe it. He cites “Martin Chuzzlewit.” Is “Martin Chuzzlewit” a satire on the Americans? It is a caricature—a very gross caricature—a piece of _bouffe_. But it lacks the true likeness which is the sting of satire. Dickens and Thackeray had, in common, a quick sense of the ridiculous, but they employed it differently. Dickens was a humorist almost in the Ben Jonsonian sense: his field was the odd, the eccentric, the grotesque—sometimes the monstrous; his books, and especially his later books, are full of queer people, frequently as incredible as Jonson’s _dramatis personae_. In other words, he was a caricaturist. Mr. Howells says that Thackeray was a caricaturist, but I do not think he was so except incidentally; while Dickens was constantly so. When satire identifies itself with its object, it takes the form of parody. Thackeray was a parodist, a travesty writer, an artist in burlesque. What is the difference between caricature and parody? I take it to be this, that caricature is the ludicrous _exaggeration_ of character for purely comic effect, while parody is its ludicrous _imitation_ for the purpose of mockery. Now there is plenty of invention in Dickens, but little imitation. He began with broad _facetiae_—“Sketches by Boz” and the “Pickwick Papers”; while Thackeray began with travesty and kept up the habit more or less all his life. At the Charterhouse he spent his time in drawing burlesque representations of Shakespeare, and composing parodies on L. E. L. and other lady poets. At Cambridge he wrote a mock-heroic “Timbuctoo,” the subject for the prize poem of the year—a prize which Tennyson captured. Later he wrote those capital travesties, “Rebecca and Rowena” and “Novels by Eminent Hands.” In “Fitzboodle’s Confessions” he wrote a sentimental ballad, “The Willow Tree,” and straightway a parody of the same. You remember Lady Jane Sheepshanks who composed those lines comparing her youth to

A violet shrinking meanly Where blow the March winds[3] keenly— A timid fawn on wildwood lawn Where oak-boughs rustle greenly.

I cannot describe the gleeful astonishment with which I discovered that Thackeray was even aware of our own excellent Mrs. Sigourney, whose house in Hartford I once inhabited (_et nos in Arcadia_). The passage is in “Blue-Beard’s Ghost.” “As Mrs. Sigourney sweetly sings:—

“‘O the heart is a soft and delicate thing, O the heart is a lute with a thrilling string, A spirit that floats on a gossamer’s wing.’

Such was Fatima’s heart.” Do not try to find these lines in Mrs. Sigourney’s complete poems: they are not there. Thackeray’s humor always had this satirical edge to it. Look at any engraving of the bust by Deville (the replica of which is in the National Portrait Gallery), which was taken when its subject was fourteen years old. There is a quizzical look about the mouth, prophetic and unmistakable. That boy is a tease: I would not like to be his little sister. And this boyish sense of fun never deserted the mature Thackeray. I like to turn sometimes from his big novels, to those delightful “Roundabout Papers” and the like where he gives a free rein to his frolic: “Memorials of Gormandizing,” the “Ballads of Policeman X,” “Mrs. Perkins’ Ball,” where the Mulligan of Ballymulligan, disdaining the waltz step of the Saxon, whoops around the room with his terrified partner in one of the dances of his own green land. Or that paper which describes how the author took the children to the zoölogical gardens, and how

First he saw the white bear, then he saw the black, Then he saw the camel with a hump upon his back. _Chorus of Children_: Then he saw the camel with the HUMP upon his back.