Chapter III: Part 3

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.'

On the other hand, his imaginative faculty comes out in his speculation upon the probable changes in the development of the American people that might follow their separation into different groups, if the civil war between the Northern and Southern States (which had just begun) should break up the Union.

'Climate and mixture of race will then be able fully to tell, and I
cannot help thinking that the more diversity of nation there is on
the American continent, the more chance there is of one nation
developing itself with grandeur and richness. It has been so in
Europe. What should we all be if we had not one another to check us
and to be learned from? Imagine an English Europe. How frightfully
_borne_ and dull! Or a French Europe either, for that matter.'

The suggestion is, perhaps, more fanciful than profound; for history does not repeat itself; and, in fact, the result of breaking up South America into a dozen political groups has not yet produced any very satisfactory development of national character. Much more than political subdivision goes to the creation of a new Europe; nevertheless Arnold is probably right in supposing that uniformity of institutions and a somewhat monotonous level of social conditions over a vast area, may have depressed and stunted the free and diversified growth of North American civilisation.

The literary criticism to be found in these letters shows a fastidious and delicate taste that had been nurtured almost too exclusively upon the masterpieces of classic antiquity. Homer he ranked far above Shakespeare, though one might think them too different for comparison; and he praises 'two articles in _Temple Bar_ (1869), one on Tennyson, the other on Browning,' which were afterwards republished in a book that made some stir in its day, and has brought down upon its author the unquenchable resentment of his brother poets. He thought that both Macaulay and Carlyle were encouraging the English nation in its emphatic Philistinism, and thus counteracting his own exertions to lighten the darkness of earnest but opaque intelligences. As his interest in religious movements was acute, so his observations occasionally throw some light upon the exceedingly complicated problem of ascertaining the general drift of the English mind in regard to things spiritual. The force which is shaping the future, is it with the Ritualists or with the undogmatical disciples of a purely moral creed? With neither, Arnold replies; not with any of the orthodox religions, nor with the neo-religious developments which are pretending to supersede them.

'Both the one and the other give to what they call religion, and to
religious ideas and discussions, too large and absorbing a place in
human life. Man feels himself to be a more various and richly
endowed animal than the old religious theory of human life
allowed, and he is endeavouring to give satisfaction to the long
suppressed and imperfectly understood instincts of their varied
nature.'

No man studied more closely than Arnold the intellectual tendencies of his generation, so that on the most difficult of contemporary questions this opinion is worth quoting, although the ritualistic leanings of the present day hardly operate to support it. But here, as in his published works, his religious utterances are somewhat ambiguous and oracular; and one welcomes the marking of a definite epoch in Church history when he writes emphatically that 'the Broad Church _among the clergy_ may be said to have almost perished with Stanley.'

But correspondence that was never meant for publication is hardly a fair subject for literary criticism. Arnold seems to have written hurriedly, in the intervals of hard work, of journeyings to and fro upon his rounds of inspection, and of much social bustle; he had not the natural gift of letter-writing, and he probably did it more as a duty than a pleasure. He had none of the ever-smouldering irritability which compelled Carlyle to slash right and left of him at the people whom he met, at everything that he disliked, and every one whom he despised. Nor was he born to chronicle the small beer of everyday life in that spirit of contemplative quietism which is bred out of abundant leisure and retirement. A few lines from one of Cowper's letters may serve to indicate the circumstances in which 'our best letter-writer,' as Southey calls him, lived and wrote a hundred years ago in a muddy Buckinghamshire village:

'A long confinement in the winter, and indeed for the most part in
the autumn too, has hurt us both. A gravel walk, thirty yards
long, affords but indifferent scope to the locomotive faculty; yet
it is all that we have had to move in for eight months in the year,
during thirteen years that I have been a prisoner here.'

If we compare this manner of spending one's days with Arnold's hasty and harassed existence among the busy haunts of men, we can understand that in this century a hard-working literary man has neither the taste nor the time for the graceful record of calm meditations, or for throwing a charm over commonplace details. And, on the whole, Arnold's correspondence, though it has some biographical value, must undoubtedly be relegated to the class of letters that would never have been published upon their own intrinsic merits.

Carlyle's letters, on the other hand, fall into the opposite category; they stand on their own feet, they are as significant of style and character as Arnold's, and even Stanley's, letters were comparatively insignificant; they are the fearless outspoken expression of the humours and feelings of the moment, and it is probable that the writer did not trouble himself to consider whether they would or would not be published. In these respects they as nearly fulfil the authorised conditions of good letter-writing as any work of the sort that has been produced in our own generation, though one may be permitted some doubt in regard to improvisation; for the work is occasionally so clean cut and pointed, his strokes are so keen and straight to the mark, that it is difficult to believe the composition to be altogether unstudied. Whether any writer ever excelled in this or, indeed, in any other branch of the art literary without taking much trouble over it, is, in our judgment, an open question; but surely Carlyle must have selected and sharpened with some care the barbed epithets upon which he suspends his grotesque and formidable caricatures.

For example, he writes, in 1831, of Godwin, who still figures, in advanced age, as a martyr in the cause of good letter-writing--'A bald, bushy browed, thick, hoary, hale little figure, with a very long blunt characterless nose--the whole visit the most unutterable stupidity.' Lord Althorp is 'a thick, large, broad-whiskered, farmer-looking man.' O'Connell, 'a well-doing country shopkeeper with a bottle-green frock and brown scratch wig.... I quitted them all (the House of Commons) with the highest contempt.' Of Thomas Campbell, the poet, it is written that 'his talk is small, contemptuous, and shallow; his face has a smirk which would befit a shopman or an auctioneer.' Wordsworth, 'an old, very loquacious, indeed, quite prosing man.' Southey 'the shallowest chin, prominent snubbed Roman nose, small carelined brow, the most vehement pair of faint hazel eyes I have ever seen.' There is a savage caricature of Roebuck, and so Carlyle goes on hanging up portraits of the notables whom he met and conversed with, to the great edification of these latter days. No more dangerous interviewer has ever practised professionally than this artist in epithets, on whom the outward visible figure of a man evidently made deep impressions; whereas the ordinary letter-writer is usually content to record the small talk. As material for publication his correspondence had three singular advantages. His earlier letters were excellent, and we may hazard the generalisation that almost all first-class letter-writing, like poetry, has been inspired by the ardour and freshness and audacity of youth. He lived so long that these letters could be published very soon after his death without much damage to the susceptibilities of those whom his hard hitting might concern; and, lastly, his biographer was a man of nerve, who loved colour and strong lineaments, and would always sacrifice minor considerations to the production of a striking historical portrait. Undoubtedly, Carlyle's letters have this virtue--that they largely contribute to the creation of a true likeness of the writer, for in sketching other people he was also drawing himself. He could also paint the interior of a country house, as at Fryston, and his landscapes are vivid. He was, in short, an impressionist of the first order, who grouped all his details in subordination to a general effect, and never gave his correspondent a mere catalogue of trivial particulars.

It was originally in a letter to his brother that Carlyle wrote his celebrated description of an interview with Coleridge. No two men could be more different in taste or temperament, and yet any one who reads attentively Coleridge's letters may observe a certain similarity to Carlyle's writing, not only in the figured style and prophetic manner, but also in the tendency of their political ideas. In the matter of linguistic eccentricities, it may be guessed that both of them had been affected by the study of German literature; and in politics they had both a horror of disorder, an aversion to the ordinary Radicalism of their day, and a contempt for mechanic philosophy and complacent irreligion. Each of them had a strong belief in the power and duties of the State; but Coleridge held also that salvation lay in a reconstitution of the Church on a sound metaphysical basis, whereas for Carlyle all articles and liturgies were dying or dead. A comparison of these two supreme intellectual forces may help us to distinguish some of the most favourable conditions of good letter-writing. They were men of highly nervous mental constitution of mind, on whom the ideas and impressions that had been secreted produced an excitability that was discharged upon correspondents in a torrent of language, sweeping away considerations of reserve or self-regard, and submerging the commonplace bits of news and everyday observations which accumulate in the letters of respectable notabilities. To whomsoever the letters may be addressed, they are in consequence equally good and characteristic. Carlyle's epistles to his wife and brother are among the best in the collection; and Coleridge threw himself with the same ardour into letters to Charles Lamb and to Lord Liverpool. It is this capacity for pouring out the soul in correspondence, for draining the bottom of one's heart to a friend, which, combined with exaltation under the stimulus of spleen or keen sensibility, raises correspondence to the high-water mark of English literature.

But in saying that these conditions are eminently favourable to the production of fine letter-writing, we do not mean to affirm that they are essential. Against such a theory it would be sufficient to quote Cowper, though he had the poetic fire, and was subject to the religious frenzy; and we know that repose and refinement have a tendency to develop good correspondents. Among these we may number Edward FitzGerald, whose letters are, perhaps, the most artistic of any that have recently appeared, and may be placed without hesitation in the class of letters that have a high intrinsic merit independently of the writer's extraneous reputation; for FitzGerald was a recluse with a tinge of misanthropy, nearly unknown to the outer world, except by one exquisite paraphrase of a Persian poem, and his popularity rests almost entirely upon his published correspondence. Of these letters, so excellent of their kind, can it be said that they have the note of improvisation, that they were written for a friend's eye, without thought or care for that ordeal of posthumous publication which has added, as we have been told, a fresh terror to death? The composition is exactly suited to the tone of easy, pleasant conversation; the writing has a serene flow, with ripples of wit and humour; sometimes occupied with East Anglian rusticities and local colouring, sometimes with pungent literary criticisms; it is never exuberant, but nowhere dull or commonplace; the language is concise, with a sedulous nicety of expression. A man of delicate irony, living apart from the rough, tumbling struggle for existence, he was in most things the very opposite to Carlyle, whose _French Revolution_ he admired not much, and who, he thinks, 'ought to be laughed at a little.' Such a man was not likely to write even the most ordinary letter without a certain degree of mental preparation, without some elaboration of thought, or solicitude as to form and finish, for all which processes he had ample leisure. It may be noticed that he never condescends to the travelling journal, and that his voyaging impressions are given in a few fine strokes; but, although he was a home-keeping Englishman, he was free from household cares, nor did he keep up that obligatory family correspondence which, when it is published to exhibit the domestic habits and affections of an eminent person, becomes ever after a dead-weight upon his biography.

In endeavouring to analyse the charm of these delightful letters, we may suggest that they gain their special flavour from his talent for compounding them, like a skilful _chef de cuisine_, out of various materials or intellectual condiments assorted and dexterously blended. He is an able and accomplished egoist, one of the few modern Englishmen who are able to plant themselves contentedly, like a tree, in one spot, and who prefer books to company, the sedentary to the stirring life. He was not cut off, like Cowper, a hundred years earlier, from the outer world in winter and rough weather, yet he had few visitors and went abroad little; so that he had ample leisure for perusal and re-perusal of the classic masterpieces, ancient and modern, and for surveying the field of contemporary literature. His letters to Fanny Kemble have the advantage of unity in tone that belongs to a series written to the same person, though the absence of replies is apt to produce the effect of a monologue. How far good letter-writing depends upon the course of exchange, upon the stimulus of pleasant and prompt replies, is a question not easily answered, since the correspondence on both sides of two good writers is very rarely put together. Mrs. Kemble had certain fixed rules which must have been fatal to the free epistolary spirit. 'I never write,' she said, 'until I am written to; I always write when I am written to, and I make a point of always returning the same amount of paper that I receive;' but at any rate it is evident that FitzGerald's letters to her were regularly answered. He had a light hand on descriptions of season and scenery; he could give the autumnal atmosphere, the awakening of leaf and flower in spring, the distant roar of the German Ocean on the East Anglian coast. As he could record his daily life without the minute prolixity of a diary, so he could throw off criticisms on books without falling into the manner of an essayist. In regard to the 'fuliginous and spasmodic Carlyle,' he asks doubtfully whether he with all his genius will not subside into the Level that covers, and consists of, decayed literary vegetation. 'And Dickens, with all _his_ genius, but whose Men and Women act and talk already after a more obsolete fashion than Shakespeare's?' None of the contemporary poets--Tennyson, Browning, or Swinburne--seem to have entirely satisfied him; he loved the quiet landscapes and rural tales of Crabbe, who is now read by very few; and he quotes with manifest enjoyment the lines:

'In a small cottage on the rising ground,
West of the waves, and just beyond the sound.'

'The sea,' he writes, 'somehow talks to one of old things,' probably because it is changeless by comparison with the land; and a man whose life is still and solitary is affected by the transitory aspect of natural things, because he can watch them pass. As old friends drop off he touches in his letters upon the memories of days that are gone, and he consorts more and more with the personages of his favourite poets and romancers, living thus, as he says, among shadows.

Here is a man to whom correspondence was a real solace and a vehicle of thought and feeling, not a mere note-book of travel, nor a conduit of confidential small talk. A faint odour of the seasons hangs round some of these letters, of the sunshine and rain, of dark days and roads blocked with snow, of the first spring crocus and the faded autumnal garden plots. We can perceive that, as his retirement became habitual with increasing age, the correspondence became his main outlet of ideas and sensations, taking more and more the place of friendly visits and personal discussion as a channel of intercourse with the external world. The Hindu sages despised action as destructive of thought; and undoubtedly the cool secluded vale of life is good for the cultivation of letter-writing, in one who has the artistic hand, and to whom this method of gathering up the fruits of reading and meditation, the harvest of a quiet eye, comes easily. In many respects the letters of FitzGerald, like his life, are in strong contrast to Carlyle's; and FitzGerald was somewhat startled by the publication of Carlyle's 'Reminiscences.' He thinks that, on the whole, 'they had better have been kept unpublished;' though on reading the 'Biography' he writes: 'I did not know that Carlyle was so good, grand, and even lovable, till I read the letters which Froude now edits.' He himself was not likely to give the general reader more than he wished to be known about his private affairs; and if one or two remarks with a sting in them appeared when these letters were first published in a magazine, they have been carefully excerpted from the book. The mellow music of his tones, the self-restraint and meditative attitude, are pleasant to the reader after the turbid utterances and twisted language of Carlyle; we may compare the stirring rebellious spirit brooding over the folly of mankind with the man who takes humanity as he finds it, and is content to make the best of a world in which he sees not much, beyond art and nature and a few old friends, to interest him. Upon the whole, we may place Carlyle and FitzGerald, each in his very different manner, at the head of all the letter-writers of the generation to which they belong, which is not precisely our own. It is to be recollected that a man must be dead before he can win reputation in this particular branch of literature, and that he cannot be fairly judged until time has removed many obstacles to unreserved publication. But both Carlyle and FitzGerald had long lives.

Mr. Stevenson, whose letters are the latest important contribution to this department of the national library, died early, in the full force of his intellect, at the zenith of his fame as a writer of romance. His letters have been edited by Mr. Sidney Colvin, with all the sympathy and insight into character that are inspired by congenial tastes and close friendship; and his preface gives an excellent account of the conditions, physical and mental, under which they were written, and of the limitations observed in the editing of them.

'Begun,' Mr. Colvin says, 'without a thought of publicity, and
simply to maintain an intimacy undiminished by separation, they
assumed in the course of two or three years a bulk so considerable,
and contained so much of the matter of his daily life and thoughts,
that it by-and-by occurred to him ... that "some kind of a book"
might be extracted out of them after his death.... In a
correspondence so unreserved, the duty of suppression and selection
must needs be delicate. Belonging to the race of Scott and Dumas,
of the romantic narrators and creators, Stevenson belonged no less
to that of Montaigne and the literary egotists.... He was a
watchful and ever interested observer of the motions of his own
mind.'

The whole passage, too long to be quoted, suggests an instructive analysis of the mental qualities and disposition that go to make a good letter-writer--a dash of egotism, sensitiveness to outward impressions, literary charm, the habit of keeping a frank and familiar record of every day's moods, thoughts, and doings, the picturesque surroundings of a strange land. In these journal letters from Samoa the canon of improvisation is to a certain extent infringed, for Stevenson wrote with publicity in distant view; and the depressing influence of remoteness is in his case overcome, for he lived in tropical Polynesia, 'far off amid the melancholy main,' and had speech with his correspondent only at long intervals. But it is the privilege of genius to disconcert the rules of criticism; the letters have none of the vices of the diary, the trivialities are never dull, the incidents are uncommon or uncommonly well told, and the writer is never caught looking over his shoulder at posterity.

For extracts there is now little space left in this article; but we may quote, to show Stevenson's style of landscape-painting, a few lines describing a morning in Samoa after a heavy gale:

'I woke this morning to find the blow quite ended. The heaven was
all a mottled grey; even the East quite colourless. The downward
slope of the island veiled in wafts of vapour, blue like smoke; not
a leaf stirred on the tallest tree. Only three miles below me on
the barrier reef I could see the individual breakers curl and fall,
and hear their conjunct roaring rise, like the roar of a
thoroughfare close by.'

It is good for the imaginative letter-writer to live within sight and sound of the sea, to hear the long roll, and to see from his window 'a nick of the blue Pacific.' It is also good for him to be within range of savage warfare, and to take long rough rides in a disturbed country. On one such occasion he writes:

'Conceive such an outing, remember the pallid brute that lived in
Skerryvore like a weevil in a biscuit, and receive the intelligence
that I was rather the better for my journey. Twenty miles ride,
sixteen fences taken, ten of the miles in a drenching rain, seven
of them fasting and in the morning chill, and six stricken hours'
political discussions with an interpreter; to say nothing of
sleeping in a native house, at which many of our excellent literati
would look askance of itself.'

The feat might not seem miraculous to a captain of frontier irregulars in hard training; but for a delicate novelist in weak health it was pluckily done. These letters would be readable if Stevenson had written nothing else, though of course their worth is doubled by our interest in a man of singular talent who died prematurely. They illustrate the tale of his life and portray his character; and they form an addition, valuable in itself, and unique as a variety, to the series of memorable English letter-writers.

Mr. Colvin mentions, in his preface, that Stevenson's talk was irresistibly sympathetic and inspiring, full of matter and mirth. It cannot be denied that between correspondence and conversation, regarded as fine arts, there is a close kinship; and very similar reasons have been alleged for the common belief that both are on the decline. Whether such a belief has any solid foundation in the case of letter-writing, we may be warranted in doubting. Observations of this sort, which have a false air of acuteness and profundity, are repeated periodically. The remark so constantly made at this moment, that nowadays people read nothing but magazines, was made by Coleridge early in this century; and Southey prophesied the ruin of good letters from the penny post. It is true that the number of letters written must have increased enormously; it is also true that many more are published than heretofore, and that as a great many of these are not above mediocrity, are valueless as literature, and of little worth biographically, they produce on the disappointed reader the effect of a general depreciation of the standard. Nevertheless, this article will have been written to little purpose, unless it has shown fair cause for rejecting such a conclusion, and for maintaining that, although fine letter-writers, like poets, are few and far between, yet they have not been wanting in our own time, and are not likely to disappear. There will always be men, like Coleridge or Carlyle, whose impetuous thoughts and humoristic conceptions cannot perpetually submit to the forms and limitations and delays of printing and publishing, but must occasionally demand instant liberation and prompt delivery by the natural process of private letters. And although the stir and bustle of the world is increasing, so that quiet corners in it are not easily kept, yet it is probable that the race of literary recluses--of those who pass their days in reading books, in watching the course of affairs, and in corresponding with a select circle of friends--will also continue. Whether Englishwomen, who write letters up to a certain point better than Englishmen, will now rise, as Frenchwomen have done, to the highest line, and why they have not done so heretofore, are points that we have no space here for taking up.

But it is the exceptional peculiarity of letters, as a form of literature, that the writer can never superintend their publication. During his lifetime he has no control over them, they are not in his hands; and they do not appear until after his death. He must rely entirely, therefore, upon the discretion of his editor, who has to balance the wishes of a family, or the susceptibilities of an influential party in politics or religion, against his own notions of duty toward a departed friend, or against his artistic inclination toward presenting to the world a true and unvarnished picture of some remarkable personage. He may resolve, as Froude did in the case of Carlyle, that 'the sharpest scrutiny is the condition of enduring fame,' and may determine not to conceal the frailties or the underlying motives which explain conduct and character. He may refuse, as in the case of Cardinal Manning, to set up a smooth and whitened monumental effigy, plastered over with colourless panegyric, and may insist on showing a man's true proportions in the alternate light and shadow through which every life naturally and inevitably passes. But such considerations would lead us beyond our special subject into the larger field of Biography; and we must be content, on the present occasion, with this endeavour to sketch in bare outline the history and development of English letter-writing, and to examine very briefly the elementary conditions that conduce to success in an art that is universally practised, but in which high excellence is so very rarely attained.

FOOTNOTES:

[7] (1) _The Letters of Charles Lamb._ Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by Alfred Ainger. London, 1888. (2) _Letters of John Keats to his Family and Friends._ Edited by Sidney Colvin. London, 1891. (3) _Letters and Verses of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley._ Edited by Rowland E. Prothero. London, 1895. (4) _Letters of Matthew Arnold_, 1848-88. Collected and arranged by George Russell. London and New York, 1895. (5) _Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble._ Edited by William Aldis Wright. London, 1895. (6) _Vailima Letters, from Robert Louis Stevenson to Sidney Colvin_, 1890-94. London, 1895.--_Edinburgh Review_, April 1896.

[8] Mr. John Morley, _Nineteenth Century_, December 1895.

[9] _Dean Stanley's Letters_, p. 440.

THACKERAY

It is remarkable that in a century which is far more profusely supplied with biographies than any preceding age, and at a time when chronicles of small beer no less than of fine vintages seem to gratify the rather indiscriminate taste of the British public, no formal life has ever been produced of Thackeray. That this omission has been due to his express wish is well understood, and at any rate it may be cited as a praiseworthy breach of the latter-day custom of publishing a man's private affairs and correspondence as soon as possible after his funeral. Nevertheless the generation of those who knew Thackeray, for whom and among whom he wrote, is now rapidly vanishing; so that it would have been a kind of national misfortune if posterity had been left without some authentic record of his personal history, his earlier experiences, his characteristic sayings and doings, and the general environment in which he worked.

For the biographical introductions, therefore, which are appended to each volume of this new edition,[10] we owe gratitude to his daughter, Mrs. Richmond Ritchie.[11] No more than seven volumes have been actually published up to this date, but since these include a large proportion of Thackeray's most important and characteristic work, we make no apology for anticipating the completion of the series by an attempt to make a critical examination of the salient points which distinguish his genius, and mark his place in general literature. Mrs. Ritchie tells us in a brief prefatory note that although her father's wishes have prevented her from writing his complete biography she has at last determined to publish memories which chiefly concern his books. Her desire has also been 'to mark down some of the truer chords to which his life was habitually set'; and accordingly we have in every volume an instalment, too brief and intermittent for such interesting matter, of the incidents and vicissitudes belonging to successive stages of his life and work, with glimpses of his mind and tastes, of the friendships that he made, and the society in which he moved. The form in which these reminiscences and _reliquiae_ appear has necessarily disconnected them, since they have been evidently chosen on the plan of connecting each novel with the circumstances or particular field of observation which may have suggested the plot, the scenery, or the characters. One can thus see that Thackeray's mind, like his sketch-book, was constantly taking down vivid impressions of people and places, and in some of his notes of travel can be easily traced the sources whence he took hints for elaborate studies. But under this arrangement the chronology becomes here and there somewhat entangled. _Pendennis_, for example, was finished in 1850, but as the hero's life at Oxbridge is described in the novel, its introduction takes us back to the period when the writer himself was at Cambridge in 1829. _Vanity Fair_, again, written in 1845, contains a well-known episode of Dobbin's school life, and the story carries us more than once to the Continent; so the introduction gives us recollections of Charterhouse, where Thackeray went in 1822, and of travels about Germany in the early thirties. The _Contributions to Punch_, which form the sixth volume of this series, began in 1842, and lasted ten years. They provide occasion for many diverting anecdotes, and for references to his colleagues who founded the fortunes of that most successful of comic papers; but as on this plan the biographical lines cross and recross each other it is not easy for the reader to obtain a connected or comprehensive view of Thackeray's career. Nevertheless as the system fortunately affords room and reason for giving many fresh details of his daily life, with some of his letters, or extracts from them, which are fresh and amusing, we may cheerfully pass over these petty drawbacks. We are heartily thankful for our admission to a closer acquaintance with an author who has drawn some immortal pictures of English society, its manners, prejudices, and characteristic types, in novels that will always hold the first rank in our lighter literature.

How his boyhood was passed is tolerably well known already. Returning home in childhood from India he was put first to a preparatory school, and afterwards, for nigh seven years, to Charterhouse. At eighteen he went up to Cambridge, where he spoke in the Union, wrote in university magazines, criticised Shelley's _Revolt of Islam_, 'a beautiful poem, though the story is absurd,' and composed a parody on Tennyson's prize poem, _Timbuctoo_. In 1830 he travelled in Germany, and had his interview at Weimar with Goethe; and from 1831 we find him settled in a London pleader's office, reading law with temporary assiduity, frequenting the theatres and Caves of Harmony, making many literary acquaintances, taking runs into the country to canvass for Charles Buller, and trying his 'prentice hand at journalism. His vocation for literature speedily damped his legal ardour, and drew him out of Mr. Tapsell's chambers, where he left a desk full of sketches and caricatures. In May 1832 he wrote: 'This lawyer's preparatory education is certainly one of the most cold-blooded, prejudicial pieces of invention that ever a man was slave to;' and he longs for fresh air and fresh butter. By August he had fled to Paris, where he read French, worked at a painter's _atelier_, and took seriously to the work of a newspaper correspondent. On the romantic school, which was just then at its height, he makes the following remark, which betrays the antipathy to artificial and theatrical tendencies in literature that always provoked his satire:

'In the time of Voltaire the heroes of poetry and drama were fine
gentlemen; in the days of Victor Hugo they bluster about in velvet
and mustachios and gold chains, but they seem in nowise more
poetical than their rigid predecessors.'

He had little taste, in fact, for mediaevalism in any shape, and 'old Montaigne' was more to his liking. We are told, also, that he became absorbed in Cousin's _Philosophy_, noting upon it that 'the excitement of metaphysics must equal almost that of gambling'; and finding, perhaps, no great attraction in either. After his marriage in 1836 he settled down in London, devoting himself thenceforward to literature as a profession; the _Yellowplush Papers_, published in 1837 by _Fraser's Magazine_, being his earliest contribution of any length or significance. In the introductory chapter Mrs. Ritchie says:

'I hardly know--nor, if I knew, should I care to give here--the
names and the details of the events which suggested some of the
_Yellowplush Papers_. The history of Mr. Deuceace was written from
life during a very early period of my father's career. Nor can one
wonder that his views were somewhat grim at that particular time,
and still bore the impress of an experience lately and very dearly
bought.... As a boy he had lost money at cards to some cardsharpers
who scraped acquaintance with him. He never blinked at the truth or
spared himself; but neither did he blind himself to the real
characters of the people in question, when once he had discovered
them. His villains became curious studies in human nature; he
turned them over in his mind, and he caused Deuceace, Barry Lyndon,
and Ikey Solomons, Esq., to pay back some of their ill-gotten
spoils, in an involuntary but very legitimate fashion, when he put
them into print and made them the heroes of those grim early
histories.'

We may infer from this passage that Thackeray's mind acted not only as a microscope but as a magnifying glass; he had an eye, as one knows, for characteristic details, and it appears that he could also enlarge the small fry of scoundrelism into magnificent rascals. There can be no doubt that he had the image-making faculty of sensitive genius, and that much of all he saw and felt went to fill up his canvas and fix his point of view. Writing to his mother, he once said, 'It is the fashion to say that people are unfortunate who have lost their money. Dearest mother, we know better than that;' though 'for years and years he had to face the great question of daily bread.' But while he could battle stoutly against losses of this kind, he had no mercy on the rogues who caused them; and his indignation, accentuated by the strain of married life on a very narrow income, may account in some degree for the cynical tone, now sombre, now mocking, which so perceptibly dominates his earlier writings, and pervades all his books, though in a lesser and more tolerant way, up to the end. Against this shaded background, however, we may set many kindly figures, and the contrast is heightened by the humorous joviality which finds vent in his talent for caricature. To this we owe the full-length portrait of Major Gahagan, and a whole gallery of other drawings, usually of Irishmen, which have been the delight of innumerable readers. The striking alternation between two extremes of character and conduct, between tragedy and farce, between ridiculous meanness and pathetic unselfishness, is to be found in all his novels, though in his later and finer work it is controlled and tempered to more artistic proportions. But in the productions of his youth the darker tints so predominate as to disconcert the judgment of a generation which has become habituated, at the present day, to a less energetic and uncompromising style of exposing fools and gibbeting knaves. And after making due allowance for those indescribable differences of taste which separate us from our fathers in every region of art--and even admitting, what is by no means sure, that sixty years ago rascality, snobbery, and humbug were more rampant in society than nowadays--we are still disposed to regret that a writer whose best work is superlatively good should have dwelt so persistently in his earlier stories upon the dreary and ignoble side of English life. From some passages in them it might be inferred by foreigners that the better born Englishmen habitually indulged in rudeness toward their social inferiors, and that English domestics in good houses broke out into vulgar insolence whenever they could do so with impunity.

Take, for an example, in the scene from _The Great Hoggarty Diamond_, the behaviour of Mr. Preston, 'one of her Majesty's Secretaries of State,' to an underbred but good-tempered little city clerk, whom Lady Drum takes in her carriage for a drive in Hyde Park, and whom she hints he might ask to dinner. Mr. Preston acts on the hint, but with savage sarcasm, and Titmarsh, the clerk, accepts in order to plague the minister for his astounding rudeness:

'"I did not," he says, "intend to dine with the man, but only to
give him a lesson in manners."'

And so, when the carriage drove up to Mr. Preston's door, he says to him:

'"When you came up and asked who the devil I was, I thought you
might have put the question in a more polite manner, but it wasn't
my business to speak. When, by way of a joke, you invited me to
dinner, I answered in a joke too, and here I am. But don't be
frightened, I'm not agoing to dine with you."...

'"Is that all, sir?" says Mr. Preston, still in a rage. "If you
have done, will you leave the house, or shall my servants turn you
out? Turn out this fellow; do you hear me?"'

Assuming that sixty years ago a Secretary of State was much the same sort of man that he is to-day, what are we to think of this spirited colloquy? and what kind of impression will it, and others no less forcible, produce upon the future student of manners who turns to light literature as the mirror of contemporary society?

With regard, again, to the _Yellowplush Papers_, is it from unpardonable fastidiousness, the affectation of an over-refined literary taste, that we are inclined to question whether they have been wisely preserved in standard editions of so great a novelist? The use of ludicrously distorted spelling intensifies the impression of ignorant vulgarity, and there is a moral lesson in the story of Mr. Deuceace that atones in some degree for the very low company whom we meet in it. But the labour of deciphering the ugly words, and the cheerless atmosphere of sordid vice and servility which they are most appropriately used to describe, are so unfamiliar to contemporary novel-readers that we think few will master two hundred pages of this dialect in the present edition. On the whole, after renewing our old acquaintance with Mr. Jeames, with Captain Rook and Mr. Pigeon, with Mr. Stubbs of the Fatal Boots, and others of the same kidney, we doubt whether these immature character sketches, which all belong to the author's first and most Hogarthian manner, do not range below the legitimate boundaries of literature as a fine art, and whether they do not much rather harm than heighten his permanent reputation when they are placed on a line with his masterpieces by formal reproduction. It is impossible to take much interest in personages with an unbroken record of profligacy and baseness; and we are reminded of the Aristotelian maxim that pure wickedness is no subject for dramatic treatment.

Yet we are aware that it may be practically impossible to publish incomplete editions of a very popular writer; and in the extravagances of his youth one may discern the promise of much higher things. Very rapidly, in fact, in the work which comes next, Thackeray rises at once to a far superior level of artistic performance. We are not indisposed to endorse the opinion, pronounced more than once by good judges, that the high-water mark of his peculiar genius was touched by _Barry Lyndon_, which first exhibits the rare and distinctive qualities that were completely developed in his later and larger novels. It may be affirmed, as a general rule, that most of our eminent writers of fiction have leapt, as Scott did, into the arena with some work of first-class merit, which has immediately caught public attention and established their position in literature. Their fugitive pieces, their crudities and imperfect essays, have been either judiciously suppressed or consigned to oblivion. They have followed, one may say, the goodly custom prescribed by the governor of the Cana marriage feast; they put forth in the beginning their good wine, and they fall back upon inferior brands only when the public, having well drunk of the potent vintage, will swallow anything from a favourite author. We may regret that Thackeray's start as a man of letters should have furnished an exception to this salutary rule; and in surveying, after the lapse of many years, his collected works, we are disposed to observe that no first-class writer has suffered more from the enduring popularity which has encouraged the republication of everything that is his, from the finished _chefs-d'oeuvres_ down to the ephemeral and unripe products of an exuberant youth. He would have given the world a notable confirmation of the rule that a great author usually leads off on a high note, if he had opened his munificent literary entertainment with _Barry Lyndon_. We quote here from Mrs. Ritchie's introduction:

'My father once said to me when I was a girl, "You needn't read
_Barry Lyndon_; you won't like it." Indeed it is scarcely a book to
_like_, but one to admire and to wonder at for its consummate power
and mastery.... Barry Lyndon tells his own story, so as to enlist
every sympathy against himself, and yet all flows so plausibly, so
glibly, that one can hardly explain how the effect was produced.
From the very first sentence, almost, one receives the impression
of a lawless adventurer, brutal, heartless, with low instincts and
rapid perceptions. Together with his own autobiography, he gives a
picture of the world in which he lives and brags, a picture so
vivid ... that as one reads one almost seems to hear the tread of
remorseless fate sounding through all the din and merriment. Take
those descriptions of the Prussian army during the Seven Years'
War, and of that hand of man which weighs so heavily upon man--what
a haunting page in history!'

These remarks are very justly appreciative, for the book stamps Thackeray as a fine impressionist, as an artist who skilfully mixes the colours of reality and imagination into a composition of striking scenes and the effective portrayal of character. With extraordinary ability and consistency to the type he works out the gradual evolution of a wild Irish boy, hot-headed in love and fighting, full of daring impetuosity and ignorant vanity, into the ruffianly soldier, the intrepid professional gambler, and finally into the selfish profligate, who marries a great heiress and sets up as a county magnate. Instead of the mere unadulterated villainy and meanness which were impersonated in his previous stories, we have here the complex strength and weakness of real human nature; we have the whole action lifted above the platform of city swindlers, insignificant scoundrels, and needy cardsharpers, up to a stage exhibiting historic personages and scenes, courts and battlefields; and we breathe freely in the wider air of immorality on a grand scale. As a sample of spirited freehand drawing, the sketches of Continental society, 'before that vulgar Corsican upset the gentry of the world,' are admirable for their force and originality; and what can be better as a touch of character than the following defence of his profession by a prince of gamblers?

'I speak of the good old days of Europe, before the cowardice of
the French aristocracy (in the shameful Revolution, which served
them right) brought ruin on our order.... You call a doctor an
honourable man--a swindling quack, who does not believe in the
nostrums which he prescribes, and takes your guinea for whispering
in your ear that it's a fine morning; and yet, forsooth, a gallant
man who sits him down before the baize and challenges all comers,
his money against theirs, his fortune against theirs, is proscribed
by your modern moral world. It is a conspiracy of the middle
classes against gentlemen; it is only the shopkeeper cant which is
to go down nowadays. I say that play was an institution of
chivalry; it has been wrecked along with other privileges of men of
birth.'

Here we have the romance of the gaming-table; and in the same chapter Barry Lyndon recounts the evil chance that befell him at cards with two young students, who had never played before:

'As ill luck would have it, they were tipsy, and against tipsiness
I have often found the best calculations of play fail entirely. A
few officers joined; they played in the most perfectly insane way,
and won always.... And in this ignoble way, in a tavern room thick
with tobacco smoke, across a deal table besmeared with beer and
liquor, and to a parcel of hungry subalterns and beardless
students, three of the most skilful and renowned players in Europe
lost seventeen hundred louis. It was like Charles xii. or Richard
Coeur de Lion falling before a petty fortress and an unknown
hand.'

The picture of gamblers in a grimy tavern, the unconscious humour of Lyndon's heroic lament, the comparison between the cardsharpers' discomfiture and the fall of mighty warriors, make up a fine example of Thackeray's eye for graphic detail, and prove the force and temper of his incisive irony.