OF LETTERS.

Press, Volume XLVI, Issue 7268, 26 March 1889, Page 2

OF LETTERS.

By Cara.

"At which account," says the Vicar ol Wakefield, " the ladies were greatly concerned; but being told that the family had received no hurt they were extremely glad; but being informed that we were almost killed by the fright they wer vastly sorry; but hearing that we had had a very good night they were extremely glad again." I have been sometimes a little bit reminded of these conversational amenities upon returning, not to a con versation, but to the perusal of an old letter of my own. Letters must reply to items of news as well as impart them, and when one has felt a friendly interest in the affairs discussed by a correspondent, what was more natural than to follow with assurances in all good faith, "I w_% glad " to hear this, " delighted " with that, "so sorry". for something else, and so forth ? As it was written perhaps one —j* too preoccupied to notice the whole effect probably one's correspondent, in considers' tion of the good feelings expressed, waj kind enough to overlook the faults oi style ; but it is rather tiresome when soma old letter in one's own hand, some Impertinent revenant from tbe past, takes ona back in cold blood to contemplate such a series of sudden transitions.

But in general I do not at all agree with the pessimistic view of modern letter writing I saw once taken by a biographer of Madame de S.vigne. "It is likely enough " he wrote, " that if some power allowed us to open one of the mail-bags carried in all directions by our railways now-a-days, we should find less entertainment in reading than we anticipated, and be struck by the monotonous basis of all we saw. Life In our society imposing the same burdens upon everyone and rolling round the same circle, It follows we have all the same things to say. Speaking or writing, ninety times out of a hundred, news is asked of the health, or business is discussed, these are the subjects for letters as of conversation." We shall see that Madame de S.vigne, despite her originality of mind, was no more exempt th %n the rest of us." With all deference to Mvlame de S_vigh. and her biographer, I refuse to admit that the example of modern letter-writer, must be adduced only as a convenient apology for her in her moments of dillness. Many delightful letters are writing now-a-days, and many more would be if people only cared to take a little trouble. The best book of letters I ever read, I think, was that collection of MrsCarlyle's. They are splendid. Terse, bright, and vigorous in thought and style, I think they must have been to many as they were to mc, a revelation of what the art of good letter-writing should be. For letter-writing is an art, and one very well worth cultivating. Jt is a fallacy to suppose that a little care in composition is foreign to the spirit of such things and must result in an artificiality of style* One needs some amount of practice and training in anything before even one's own individual style has ease enough to be natural. In book-making your most artificial writer is very often the one who knows least of art. And though we da not all write books, we have certainlj most of ns to write letters; and if we find that perfect freedom of expression la really the result of careful observation and self training, it must be worth while to look for a master or an example in every letter we read.

But the letter which comes in these mail-bags will still give a thousand times more pleasure than the best of all printed compositions, for "before art," as Barroughs would say, it has the great essential charm of subtle deference to the human weakness for monopoly. It is, one feels, a thing which, as it stands, could not have been written just so for anyone bat mc. Only the letter which contains no word of thoughts special to the writer and receiver, a mere impersonal performance which might be classed under a general heading, as " From Anyone to Anybody," though- it possess every merit to be discovered in the "Polite Letter-Writer" itsself, will be hopelessly a disappointment ai missing the very chief quality of delight. " A message, a thought, a sincerity," wa want, and without that individual touch, to my mind the cleverest sheet ever written is altogether deficient as a letter. Hall the charm of the pleasantest oo_re_pon< pondence lies not so much in the things said as in our mutual appreciation and reception of what is said. It is the loss of this absolutely untransferable element, I supposs, which so often makes a collection of letters disappointing. No more from a friend to a friend, they are left to us merely as literary performances. For cold readers of after aays, if the glory has been there, it has departed. Certainly, for some reason, upon the publication of their letters one S most frequent thought is that, except for the honour of it and the autograph, one would have cared very little for a great man as a correspondent. Thackeray's do not at all content mc. Bulwer Lytton's I entirely dislike. I must make the Philistine confession that I do not perceive what there is to be so greatly admired in any I have yet seen by Keats. Though there are certain letters, too, that one grudges to their first-hand receivers. I should like to have been Miss Mary Boyle, to have opened those charming letters £____ Walter Savage Landor: and I should like to have been Macaulajrs sister. He would have been a perfectly delightful correspond dent. I only wish that prince of good biographers, Trevelyan, had completed his excellence by giving just once or twice a specimen of Hannah's replies to the bright, brotherly, affectionately diffuse communications which came to her with such unfailing regularity from the tireless Macaulay pen. It Is generally agreed that women excel as letter-writers, so we may take it for granted that Hannah Macaulay's letters were all they ought to have been, and in fact a very fair exchange for Tom's. Though I am afraid myself that woman's superiority even in this direction is rather in average than anything else. I have no doubt that the generality of women write as a matter of course, far better letters than the generality of men; but then on tha other hand, if a man does write a good letter at all, how provokingly superior it is. Still it was a woman who found such fame among grave historians for the charm, and good sense, and historical value oi her love-letters, that Macaulay himsel. wrote "we would have gladly purchased equally interesting billets with ten times their weight la state, papers taken a. random." And now they are appearing in collected form, and furnish, so reviewers tell us (and from the extracts given readers are quite likely to agree,) one of the most delightful books of letters ever published. lam impatient for the day when the lcveletters Of Dorothy Osborne reach our shores and our libraries. The publication Of the ordinary loveletter, upon thestrength of its lo.e_n____st only, strikes one as a very unpleasing development of the great modern curiosity. Few of us, I think, take kindly to the idea of that recent collection," Love-letters of Famous Men and Women ;*' but there ara certain letters of the kind, purely artistic, visionary, and unattainable, about which 1 do confess an unsatisfied and hopeless curiosity. They are those waifs and strays of literary workmanship, dropped away now from all chance of recovery—the letters written by De Quincey during his wanderings in Wales. Some five months or so you remember in the year 1802, tha young De Quincey spent in North Wales, on a kind of solitary walking tour; living by day—so we are told —a most pleasant existence, "with perpetual delight from the mountain BCenery, the sylvan nooks, the rushing brooks, the picturesque evening groups of the villagers gathered round their harpers," and often entertained for the night by cottagers whose hospitality he repaid by giving his services as letterwriter. There is a pretty picture in his own account of these wanderings, how a charming family of young people having received him and made much of him he found his pen in request among the daughters for the serious business ol writing love-letters. De Quincey'a love letters! how the rustic receivers must have stared amazed at these artistically conceived productions, the senders hav_ wondered at the delicate interpretations of thought by which their messagebecame so exquisitely conveyed in words, letters of a type altogether too delightful and schohuly one feel, to have been wasted in those wilds, yet understood perhaps better that one might think, aa they appealed to feelings and translated thought, which though it could never have found such expression, did indeed exist, unspoken poetry, in the hearts of these untaught lovers.