The Art and Attainment of English F the many forms of literature, letter-writing is timate and sincere. This alone should ensure for it respect, yet upon the whole that respect has not been accorded, probably because some suspicion lingers in the minds even of acute critics that it is at best but an inferior and subsidiary form of literature. Very little consideration is needed, however, to dispel this suspicion. To write a really good letter requires a combination of qualities at once rare in themselves and rarer still in their conjunction. Thus the writer must himself be interesting, and have interesting matter to communicate; he must be something of an egoist, to whom his own sensations are noticeable, and worthy of notice; he must possess both daring and freedom, for the last place where caution and reticence are required is in the familiar epistle; he must be resolutely sincere, for the moment he begins to pose his magic wand is broken, and he becomes tedious and offensive; he must above all possess the intimate note, for without it he will produce an essay, but not a letter. Of all these qualities perhaps the last is the rarest, for a good letter is really a page from the secret memoirs of a man. It may be a memoir of ideas or of events; it does not greatly matter which, so long as it contributes to our knowledge of the man. For this is the first aim of a true letter, self-revelation. In many forms of lit erature self-revelation is the last thing that is to be expected; in most it would be a disturbing and offensive element. We do not need it in the historian; we need it only partially in the essayist; even in poetry, especially of the epic kind, it is not always wanted; but in a letter we want this, and nothing less than this. The man who is not prepared to unlock his heart to us can never write a great letter. It is recorded of various artists and writers that they imagined they worked better if they approached their task in the dignity of full dress; slovenly attire seemed incompatible with dignified expression. There are certain books which undoubtedly suggest the element of elaborate decorum, but letters suggest something of the very opposite. In them the author appears in undress. He may be pictured lounging at a tavern table, sitting in a green arbour, rounding off the day beside a study fire, his studious and public self forgotten, the pose demanded by his public laid aside, the natural man alone apparent, and speaking in the accent of fearless and unrestrained vivacity. He who writes for the public must needs keep the public in his eye; spectral reviewers throng around his table, critics watch for his misdemeanours, and he writes amid the rustle of a thousand journals and reviews. But the loud potentialities of publicity do not disturb the genuine letter-writer. He writes to gratify himself and please a friend; he has no more notorious object in view. Were he the most famous of authors, for the time he must become a mere private person; and unless he be capable of this spirit of detachment and divestiture, he will never write a genuine letter. This is why George Eliot's letters are dull and Matthew Arnold's letters stiff; they cannot forget that they are public personages. This is also why men so radically separate as Walpole and FitzGerald write with such an easy charm; they either despise or forget the existence of the public, and are intent upon nothing loftier than pleasant gossip about themselves, their opinions and their prejudices, their tastes and their employments. The world loves good gossip, which is after all the staple of all good conversation; and the letter-writer is a conversationalist who does not object to being overheard. If we bear these distinctions in mind, we shall be able to distinguish what really constitutes a good letter. In the preparation of this volume many hundreds of books have been sedulously winnowed for material, often with surprisingly poor results, even in the case of the greatest authors. Thus, for example, the biography of Charles Kingsley is a charming book, and since it consists in the main of extracts from his voluminous correspondence, one would have imagined that it was the easiest thing in the world to gather from it a large sheaf of interesting letters. Nothing of the kind has happened for the simple reason that in his most private hours Kingsley is never quite able to forget his relations with the public. He writes much, he writes well, and it argues an immense fund of good nature that he should have poured out his powers so fully in correspondence with his friends; but because he is always conscious of his mission he produces not letters so much as elaborate treatises and essays. Mrs. Carlyle, on the contrary, can make us more interested in her finger's ache than Kingsley in his most brilliant discussions of socialism and theology. It is the personal note we miss in Kingsley; it is nothing but the personal note that we have in Mrs. Carlyle. And as it was with Kingsley, so it has been with many greater men; they have had just enough egoism to make them conscious of the public, but not enough to make them forget it. Even Ruskin rarely attains this art. He, like Kingsley, was a correspondent of tireless industry, but more often than not his letters are moral or æsthetic dis The very sertations with a name and an adieu tacked on. first paragraph, with its exquisite balance and antithesis, undeceives us as to the true nature of all that follows. We know that the friend to whom these brilliant paragraphs are addressed is after all a wooden horse in whose belly a printing-press lies concealed. Among the earliest letter-writers of English literature the distinction between the essay and the letter was not very carefully preserved. Addison's essays, for example, are in reality extended letters; and it may be argued that the modern essay, which began with Addison, owes its origin to the epistolary art. The essay, nevertheless, soon took its own form, and became homiletic. It had a definite theme, and was a dissertation upon that theme. So popular was this form of literature that for a long time the value of the letter was overlooked, and its peculiar characteristics were forgotten. Alexander Pope did much to re-establish the letter in popular esteem by the publication of a series of epistles which at once took the taste of the town. Among his contemporaries was Lady Mary Montagu, who recognised in the letter a form of literary expression which precisely suited her rapid and wayward pen. No travel-letters have ever been more brilliant and vivacious than hers. To the same period belongs Horace Walpole. Walpole was a man curiously before his age in many things. He was the first exponent of the new romantic impulse which later on produced Scott and the Waverley Novels, the revival of Gothic architecture and Gilbert Scott, the Oxford Movement and Newman, the Esthetic movement and Ruskin. Horace Walpole despised literature as a profession, and being himself in receipt of a handsome income from the public treasury had no occasion to practise it. Yet he was conscious of the "irritation of the idea"-as Flaubert puts it, which is the source of all literary expression. To a man so constituted and circumstanced the familiar letter afforded just that mode of literary expression which was best suited to his genius. He was by temperament and habit a keen critic of life. He was indefatigably curious. He would rise at midnight to look upon a fire. He would hasten to Temple Bar and gaze through a telescope at the blood-stained heads of the rebel lords, as eager for a new sensation as the most vulgar of the crowd. He had the quickest and the keenest eye for foibles and defects in others. He was the master of a pen at once lucid and caustic. How could such a pen be better used than in the semi-confidential epistle? He was too indolent to write history and too indifferent to reward to attempt the serious essay. But in the letter he found the exact medium that suited him. Here he could say what he would, he could record his impressions with vividness, he could be as brilliantly malicious as he chose, without fear of contradiction. Things which no sober historian, conscious of the judgment of posterity, would have dared to write, he writes. He comments on the gaudy slovenliness of the Lady Mary Montagu, her eccentric dress, her pasty complexion, and her oily hair. He pictures Wesley as a lean-faced man, as palpably an actor as Garrick. He never mentions Lord North except to make him appear ridiculous. His one serious pursuit in life was to build, extend, alter, and adorn his mock-Gothic castle at Strawberry Hill; and yet is it so little serious that he often mocks his own endeavours with caustic raillery. Yet, with all these defects, and perhaps because of them, he made himself the most brilliant letter-writer of his time. He did more than this, for he vindicated the place of the letter in literature, by making it a mirror held up to his time, in which we see, as in a magic crystal, all the plots, intrigues, and follies of the great, with occasional prophetic glimpses of those un |