Part 2 (1/2)

But no one save a dunce can find them dull: and their variety is astonis.h.i.+ng when one remembers that the writer was, for great part of his life, a kind of recluse. He touches almost everything except love (one wonders whether there were any unpublished, and feels pretty sure that there must have been some unwritten, letters to Miss Speed which would have filled the gap) and with a result of artistic success even more decided than that a.s.signed to Goldsmith's versatility by Gray's enemy or at least ”incompatible” Johnson.[20] His letters of travel are admirable: his accounts of public affairs, though sometimes extremely prejudiced, very clever; those of University society and squabbles among the very best that we have in English; those touching ”the picturesque”

extremely early and remarkably clear-sighted; those touching literature among the least one-sided of their time. If there are, as observed or hinted above, some unamiable touches, his persistent protection of the poor creature Mason; his general att.i.tude to his friends the Whartons; and his communications with younger men like Norton Nicholls and Bonstetten, go far to remove, or, at least, to counterbalance, the impression.

This last division indeed, and the letters to Mason, emphasize what is evident enough in almost all, a freedom on his part (which from some things in his character and history we might not altogether have expected) from a fault than which hardly any is more disagreeable in letters. This is the manifestation of what is called, in various more or less familiar terms, ”giving oneself airs,” ”side,” ”patronising,” etc.

He may sometimes come near this pitfall of ”intellectuals,” but he never quite slips into it, being probably preserved by that sense of humour which he certainly possessed, though he seldom gave vent to it in verse and not very often in prose. Taking them altogether, Gray's letters may be said to have few superiors in the combination of intellectual weight and force with ”pastime” interest. To some of course they may be chiefly or additionally interesting because of such light as they throw or withhold on a rather problematic character, but this, like the allegory in Spenser according to Hazlitt, ”won't bite” anyone who lets it alone.

They are extremely good letters to read: and the more points of interest they provide for any reader the better for that reader himself. Once more too, they ill.u.s.trate the principle laid down at the beginning of this paper. They are good letters because they are, with the usual subtle difference necessary, like very good talk, recorded.[21]

[Sidenote: COWPER]

Nor is there any more doubt about the qualifications of the fifth of our selected eighteenth-century letter-writers. Cowper's poetry has gone through not very strongly marked but rather curious variations of critical estimate. Like all transition writers he was a little too much in front of the prevailing taste of his own time, and a little too much behind that of the time immediately succeeding. There may have been a very brief period, before the great romantic poets of the early nineteenth century became known, when he ”drove” young persons like Marianne Dashwood ”wild”: but Marianne Dashwoods and their periods succeed and do not resemble each other.[22] He had probably less hold on this time--when he had the best chance of popularity--than Crabbe, one of his own group, while he was dest.i.tute of the extraordinary appeals--which might be altogether unrecognised for a time but when felt are unmistakable--of the other two, Burns and Blake, of the poets of the seventeen-eighties. His religiosity was a doubtful ”a.s.set” as people say nowadays: and even his pathetic personal history had its awkward side.

But as to his letters there has hardly at any time, since they became known, existed a difference of opinion among competent judges. There may be some unfortunates for whom they are too ”mild”: but we hardly reckon as arbiters of taste the people for whom even brandy is too mild unless you empty the cayenne cruet into it. Moreover the ”tea-pot pieties” (as a poet-critic who ought to have known better once scornfully called them) make no importunate appearance in the bulk of the correspondence: while as regards the madness this supplies one of the most puzzling and perhaps not the least disquieting of ”human doc.u.ments.” A reader may say--by no means in his haste, but after consideration--not merely ”Where is the slightest sign of insanity in these?” but ”How on earth did it happen that the writer of these _ever_ went mad?” even with the a.s.sistance of Newton, and Teedon, and, one has to say, Mrs. Unwin.

For among the characteristics of Cowper's letters at their frequent and pretty voluminous best, are some that seem not merely inconsistent with insanity, but likely to be positive antidotes to and preservatives from it. There is a quiet humour--not of the fantastic kind which, as in Charles Lamb, forces us to admit the possibility of near alliance to _over_-balance of mind--but _counter_-balancing, antiseptic, _salt_.

There is abundant if not exactly omnipresent common-sense; excellent manners; an almost total absence in that part of the letters which we are now considering of selfishness, and a total absence of ill-nature.[23] It is no business of ours here to embark on the problem, ”What was the dram of eale” that ruined all this and more ”n.o.ble substance” in Cowper? though there is not much doubt about the agency and little about the princ.i.p.al agents that effected the mischief. But it is quite relevant to point out that all the good things noticed are things distinctly and definitely good for letter-writing. And sometimes one cannot help regretfully wondering whether, if he--who dealt so admirably with such interests as were open to him--had had more and wider ones to deal with, _we_ should not have had still more varied and still more delightful letters, and _he_ would have escaped the terrible fate that fell on him. For although Cowper was the reverse of selfish in the ordinary sense, he was intensely self-centred, and his life gave too much opportunity for that excessive self-concentration which is the very hotbed of mental disease.

It is not a little surprising from this point of view, and it perhaps shows how imperative the letter-writing faculty is when it is possessed--that Cowper's letters are as good as they are: while that point of view also helps us to understand why they are sometimes not so good.

Of all the floating thoughts we find Upon the surface of the mind,

as he himself very happily sums up the subjects of letter-writing, there are few in his case which are of more unequal value than his criticisms.

Cowper had more than one of the makings of a critic, and a very important critic. He was, or at any rate had been once, something of a scholar; he helped to effect and (which is not always or perhaps even often the case) helped _knowingly_ to effect, one of the most epoch-making changes in English literature. But for the greater part of his life he read very little; he had little chance of anything like literary discussion with his peers; and accordingly his critical remarks are random, uncoordinated, and mostly a record of what struck him at the moment in the way of like and dislike, agreement or disagreement.

But then there is nothing that we go for to Cowper as a letter-writer so little as for things of this kind: and even things of this kind take the benefit of what Coleridge happily called--and what everybody has since wisely followed Coleridge in calling--his ”divine chit-chat.” As with Walpole--though with that difference of idiosyncrasy which all the best things have from one another--it does not in the least matter what, among mundane affairs at least, Cowper was talking about. If his conversation--and some of the few _habitues_ of Olney say it was--was anything like his letter-writing, it is no wonder that people sat over even breakfast for an hour to ”satisfy sentiment not appet.i.te” as they said with that slight touch of priggishness which has been visited upon them heavily, but which perhaps had more to do with their merits than more mannerless periods will allow.

And not even Walpole's show to quite the same degree, that extraordinary power of making anything interesting--of entirely transcending the subject--which belongs to the letter-writer in probably a greater measure than to any man-of-letters in the other sense, except the poet.

The matter which these letters have to chronicle is often the very smallest of small beer. The price, conveyance and condition of the fish his correspondents buy for him or give him (Cowper was very fond of fish and lived, before railways, in the heart of the Midlands); one of the most uneventful of picnics; hares and hair (one of his most characteristic pieces of quietly ironic humour is a brief descant on wigs with a suggestion that fas.h.i.+on should decree the cutting off of people's own legs and the subst.i.tution of artificial ones); the height of chairs and candlesticks--anything will do. He remarks gravely somewhere, ”What nature expressly designed me for, I have never been able to conjecture; I seem to myself so universally disqualified for the common and customary occupations and amus.e.m.e.nts of mankind.” Perhaps poetry--at least poetry of the calibre of ”Yardley Oak,” and ”The Castaway,” of ”Boadicea” and the ”Royal George” in one division; of ”John Gilpin” in the other, may not be quite properly cla.s.sed among the ”common and customary occupations of mankind.” But letter-writing might without great impropriety be so cla.s.sed: and there cannot be the slightest doubt that Nature intended Cowper for a letter-writer. Whether he writes ”The pa.s.sages and events of the day as well as of the night are little better than dreams” or ”An almost general cessation of egg-laying among the hens has made it impossible for Mrs. Unwin to enterprise a cake” one has (but perhaps a little more vividly) that agreeable sensation which at one time visited Tennyson's Northern Farmer. One ”thinks he's said what he ought to 'a said” in the exact manner in which he ought to have said it.

[Sidenote: MINORS]

It is however most important to remember that these Five are only, as it were, commanding officers of the great Army, representative of the very numerous const.i.tuents, who do the service and enjoy the franchise of letter-writing in the eighteenth century. There is hardly a writer of distinction in any other kind whose letters are not noteworthy; and there are very numerous letter-writers of interest who are scarcely distinguished in any other way. Perhaps Fielding disappoints us most in this section by the absence of correspondence, all the more so that the ”Voyage to Lisbon” is practically letter-stuff of the best. From Smollett also we might have more--especially more like his letter to Wilkes on the subject of the supposed impressment of Johnson's negro servant Frank, which we hope to give here. Sterne's character would certainly be better if his astonis.h.i.+ng daughter had suppressed some of his epistles, but it would be much less distinct, and they are often, if sometimes discreditably so, amusing if not edifying. The vast ma.s.s of Richardson's correspondence would correspond in another sense to the volume of his novels. We have letters from Berkeley at the beginning and others from Gibbon at the end--these last peculiarly valuable, because, as sometimes but not perhaps very often happens, they do not merely ill.u.s.trate but supplement and complete the published work. From ladies, courtly, domestic, literary and others, we have shelves--and cases--and almost libraries full; from the lively chat of the Lepels and b.e.l.l.e.n.dens and Howards of the early Georgian time to those copious and unstudied but never dull, compositions which f.a.n.n.y Burney poured forth to ”Susan and Fredy,” to Maria Allen and to ”Daddy Crisp” and a score of others; those of the Montagu circle; the doc.u.ments upon which some have based aspersion and others defence of Mrs. Thrale; and the prose utterances of the ”Swan of Lichfield,” otherwise Miss Seward.[24] There are Shenstone's letters for samples of one kind and those of the Revd. Mr.

Warner (the supposed original of Thackeray's Parson Sampson) for another and very different one. Even outside the proper and real ”mail-bag”

letter all sorts of writings--travels, pamphlets, philosophical and theological arguments, almost everything--throw themselves into the letter form. To come back to that with which we began there is no doubt that the eighteenth century is the century of the letter with us.

IV

NINETEENTH CENTURY LETTERS. EARLY

[Sidenote: EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY GROUPS]

There is, however, not the slightest intention of suggesting here that the art of letter-writing died with the century in which it flourished so greatly. In the first place, periods of literary art seldom or never ”die” in a moment like a tropical sunset; and, in the second, the notion that centennial years necessarily divide such periods, as well as the centuries in which they appear, is an unhistorical delusion. There have been dates in our history--1400 was one of them--where something of the kind seems to have happened: but they are very rare. Most s.h.i.+ps of literature at such times are fortunately what is called in actual s.h.i.+ps ”clinker-built”--that is to say overlappingly--and except at 1600 this has never been so much the case as two hundred years later and one hundred ago. When the eighteenth century closed, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott and Southey were men approaching more or less closely, thirty years of age. Landor, Hazlitt, Lamb and Moore were at least, and some of them well, past the conventional ”coming of age”; De Quincey, Byron and Sh.e.l.ley were boys and even Keats was more than an infant. In the first mentioned of these groups there was still very marked eighteenth-century idiosyncrasy; in the second some; and it was by no means absent from Byron though hardly present at all in most respects as regards Sh.e.l.ley and Keats. Certainly in none of the groups, and only in one or two individuals, is there much if any shortcoming as concerns letter-writing. Wordsworth indeed makes no figure as a letter-writer, and n.o.body who has appreciated his other work would expect him to do so.

The first requisite of the letter-writer is ”freedom”--in a rather peculiar sense of that word, closest to the way in which it has been employed by some religious sects. Wordsworth could _preach_--nearly always in a manner deserving respect and sometimes in one commanding almost infinite admiration; but when the letter-writer begins to preach he is in danger of the waste-paper basket or the fire. Coleridge's letters are fairly numerous and sometimes very good: but more than one of his weaknesses appears in them.

The excellence of Scott's, though always discoverable in Lockhart, was perhaps never easily appreciable till they were separately collected and published not very many years ago. It may indeed be suggested that the ”Life and Letters” system, though very valuable as regards the ”Life” is apt a little to obscure the excellence of the ”Letters” themselves. Of this particular collection it is not too much to say that while it threw not the least stain on the character of one of the most faultless (one singular and heavily punished lapse excepted) of men of letters, it positively enhanced our knowledge of the variety of his literary powers.

Perhaps however the best of letter-writers amongst these four protagonists of the great Romantic Revival in England (the inevitable attempt sometimes made now to quarrel with that term is as inevitably silly) is the least good poet. Southey's letters, never yet fully but very voluminously published, have not been altogether fortunate in their fas.h.i.+on of publication. There have been questionings about the propriety of ”Selected” Works; but there surely can be little doubt that in the case of Letters a certain amount of selection is not only justifiable but almost imperative. Everyone at all addicted to correspondence must know that in writing to different people on the same or closely adjacent days, if ”anything has” in the common phrase ”happened” he is bound to repeat himself. He may, if he has the sense of art, take care to vary his phrase even though he knows that no two letters will have the same reader; but he cannot vary his matter much.

Southey's letters, in the two collections by his son and his son-in-law, were edited without due regard to this: and the third--those to Caroline Bowles, his second wife--might have been ”thinned” in a different way.