Human Intercourse

It may be worth while, for the sake of contrast, and that we may the better perceive the lost fragrance of the antique courtesy, to put the substance of this letter into the style of the present day. A modern young lady would probably write as follows:—

This, I think, is not an unfair specimen of a modern letter.[28] The expressions of worship, of humble respect, have disappeared, and so far it may be thought that there is improvement, yet that respect was not incompatible with tender feeling; on the contrary, it was closely associated with it, and expressions of sentiment have lost strength and vitality along with expressions of respect. Tenderness may be sometimes shown in modern letters, but it is rare; and when it occurs it is generally accompanied by a degree of familiarity which our ancestors would have considered in bad taste. Dorothy Plumpton’s own letter is far richer in the expression of tender feeling than any modern letter of the courteous and ceremonious kind, or than any of those pale and commonplace communications from which deep respect and strong affection are almost equally excluded. Please observe, moreover, that the young lady had reason to be dissatisfied with her father for his neglect, which does not in the least diminish the filial courtesy of her style, but she chides him in the sweetest fashion,—“Show now by your fatherly kindness that I am your child.” Could anything be prettier than that, though the reproach contained in it is really one of some severity?

Dorothy’s father, Sir Robert, puts the following superscription on a letter to his wife, “To my entyrely and right hartily beloved wife, Dame Agnes Plumpton, be this Letter delivered.” He begins his letter thus, “My deare hart, in my most hartily wyse, I recommend mee unto you;” and he ends tenderly, “By your owne lover, Robert Plumpton, Kt.” She, on the contrary, though a faithful and brave wife, doing her best for her husband in a time of great trial, and enjoying his full confidence, begins her letters, “Right worshipful Sir,” and ends simply, “By your wife, Dame Agnes Plumpton.” She is so much absorbed by business that her expressions of feeling are rare and brief. “Sir, I am in good health, and all your children prays for your daly blessing. And all your servants is in good health and prays diligently for your good speed in your matters.”

The generally courteous tone of the letters of those days may be judged of by the following example. The reader will observe how small a space is occupied with the substance of the letter in comparison with the expressions of pure courtesy, and how simply and handsomely regret for the trespass is expressed:—

The reader has no doubt by this time enough of these old letters, which are not likely to possess much charm for him unless, like the present writer, he is rather of an antiquarian turn.[29]

The quotations are enough to show some of the forms used in correspondence by our forefathers, forms that were right in their own day, when the state of society was more ceremonious and deferential, but no one would propose to revive them. We may, however, still value and cultivate the beautifully courteous spirit that our ancestors possessed and express it in our own modern ways.

I have already observed that the essentially modern form of courtesy is the rapidity of our replies. This, at least, is a virtue that we can resolutely cultivate and maintain. In some countries it is pushed so far that telegrams are very frequently sent when there is no need to employ the telegraph. The Arabs of Algeria are extremely fond of telegraphing for its own sake: the notion of its rapidity pleases and amuses them; they like to wield a power so wonderful. It is said that the Americans constantly employ the telegraph on very trivial occasions, and the habit is increasing in England and France. The secret desire of the present age is to find a plausible excuse for excessive brevity in correspondence, and this is supplied by the comparative costliness of telegraphing. It is a comfort that it allows you to send a single word. I have heard of a letter from a son to a father consisting of the Latin word Ibo, and of a still briefer one from the father to the son confined entirely to the imperative I. These miracles of brevity are only possible in letters between the most intimate friends or relations, but in telegraphy they are common.

It is very difficult for courtesy to survive this modern passion for brevity, and we see it more and more openly cast aside. All the long phrases of politeness have been abandoned in English correspondence for a generation, except in formal letters to official or very dignified personages; and the little that remains is reduced to a mere shred of courteous or affectionate expression. We have not, it is true, the detestable habit of abridging words, as our ancestors often did, but we cut our phrases short, and sometimes even words of courtesy are abridged in an unbecoming manner. Men will write D^r. Sir for Dear Sir. If I am dear enough to these correspondents for their sentiments of affection to be worth uttering at all, why should they be so chary of expressing them that they omit two letters from the very word which is intended to affect my feelings?

“If I be dear, if I be dear,”

as the poet says, why should my correspondent begrudge me the four letters of so brief an adjective?

The long French and Italian forms of ceremony at the close of letters are felt to be burdensome in the present day, and are gradually giving place to briefer ones; but it is the very length of them, and the time and trouble they cost to write, that make them so courteous, and no brief form can ever be an effective substitute in that respect.

I was once placed in the rather embarrassing position of having suddenly to send telegrams in my own name, containing a request, to two high foreign authorities in a corps where punctilious ceremony is very strictly observed. My solution of the difficulty was to write two full ceremonious letters, with all the formal expressions unabridged, and then have these letters telegraphed in extenso. This was the only possible solution, as an ordinary telegram would have been entirely out of the question. It being rather expensive to telegraph a very formal letter, the cost added to the appearance of deference, so I had the curious but very real advantage on my side that I made a telegram seem even more deferential than a letter.

The convenience of the letter-writer is consulted in inverse ratio to the appearances of courtesy. In the matter of sealing, for example, that seems so slight and indifferent a concern, a question of ceremony and courtesy is involved. The old-fashioned custom of a large seal with the sender’s arms or cipher added to the importance of the contents both by strictly guarding the privacy of the communication and by the dignified assertion of the writer’s rank. Besides this, the time that it costs to take a proper impression of a seal shows the absence of hurry and the disposition to sacrifice which are a part of all noble courtesy; whilst the act of rapidly licking the gum on the inside of an envelope and then giving it a thump with your fist to make it stick is neither dignified nor elegant. There were certain beautiful associations with the act of sealing. There was the taper that had to be lighted, and that had its own little candlestick of chased or gilded silver, or delicately painted porcelain; there was the polished and graven stone of the seal, itself more or less precious, and enhanced in value by an art of high antiquity and noble associations, and this graven signet-stone was set in massive gold. The act of sealing was deliberate, to secure a fair impression, and as the wax caught flame and melted it disengaged a delicate perfume. These little things may be laughed at by a generation of practical men of business who know the value of every second, but they had their importance, and have it still, amongst those who possess any delicacy of perception.[30] The reader will remember the sealing of Nelson’s letter to the Crown Prince of Denmark during the battle of Copenhagen. “A wafer was given him,” says Southey, “but he ordered a candle to be brought from the cockpit, and sealed the letter with wax, affixing a larger seal than he ordinarily used. ‘This,’ said he, ‘is no time to appear hurried and informal.’” The story is usually told as a striking example of Nelson’s coolness in a time of intense excitement, but it might be told with equal effect as a proof of his knowledge of mankind and of the trifles which have a powerful effect on human intercourse. The preference of wax to a wafer, and especially the deliberate choice of a larger seal as more ceremonious and important, are clear evidence of diplomatic skill. No doubt, too, the impression of Nelson’s arms was very careful and clear.

In writing to French Ministers of State it is a traditional custom to employ a certain paper called “papier ministre,” which is very much larger than that sent to ordinary mortals. Paper is by no means a matter of indifference. It is the material costume under which we present ourselves to persons removed from us by distance; and as a man pays a call in handsome clothes as a sign of respect to others, and also of self-respect, so he sends a piece of handsome paper to be the bearer of his salutation. Besides, a letter is in itself a gift, though a small one, and however trifling a gift may be it must never be shabby. The English understand this art of choosing good-looking letter-paper, and are remarkable for using it of a thickness rare in other nations. French love of elegance has led to charming inventions of tint and texture, particularly in delicate gray tints, and these papers are now often decorated with embossed initials of heraldic devices on a large scale, but that is carrying prettiness too far. The common American habit of writing letters on ruled paper is not to be recommended, as the ruling reminds us of copy-books and account-books, and has a mechanical appearance that greatly detracts from what ought to be the purely personal air of an autograph.

Modern love of despatch has led to the invention of the post-card, which, from our present point of view, that of courtesy, deserves unhesitating condemnation. To use a post-card is as much as to say to your correspondent, “In order to save for myself a very little money and a very little time, I will expose the subject of our correspondence to the eyes of any clerk, postman, or servant, who feels the slightest curiosity about it; and I take this small piece of card, of which I am allowed to use one side only, in order to relieve myself from the obligation, and spare myself the trouble, of writing a letter.” To make the convenience absolutely perfect, it is customary in England to omit the opening and concluding salutations on post-cards, so that they are the ne plus ultra, I will not say of positive rudeness, but of that negative rudeness which is not exactly the opposite of courtesy, but its absence. Here again, however, comes the modern principle; and promptitude and frequency of communication may be accepted as a compensation for the sacrifice of formality. It may be argued, and with reason, that when a man of our own day sends a post-card his ancestors would have been still more laconic, for they would have sent nothing at all, and that there are a thousand circumstances in which a post-card may be written when it is not possible to write a letter. A husband on his travels has a supply of such cards in a pocket-book. With these, and his pencil, he writes a line once or twice a day in train or steamboat, or at table between two dishes, or on the windy platform of a railway station, or in the street when he sees a letter-box. He sends fifty such communications where his father would have written three letters, and his grandfather one slowly composed and slowly travelling epistle.

Many modern correspondents appreciate the convenience of the post-card, but their conscience, as that of well-bred people, cannot get over the fault of its publicity. For these the stationers have devised several different substitutes. There is the French plan of what is called “Un Mot à la Poste,” a piece of paper with a single fold, gummed round the other three edges, and perforated like postage-stamps for the facility of the opener.[31] There is the miniature sheet of paper that you have not to fold, and there is the card that you enclose in an envelope, and that prepares the reader for a very brief communication. Here, again, is a very curious illustration of the sacrificial nature of courtesy. A card is sent; why a card? Why not a piece of paper of the same size which would hold as many words? The answer is that a card is handsomer and more costly, and from its stiffness a little easier to take out of the envelope, and pleasanter to hold whilst reading, so that a small sacrifice is made to the pleasure and convenience of the receiver, which is the essence of courtesy in letter-writing. All this brief correspondence is the offspring of the electric telegraph. Our forefathers were not used to it, and would have regarded it as an offence. Even at the present date (1884) it is not quite safe to write in our brief modern way to persons who came to maturity before the electric telegraph was in use.

There is a wide distinction between brevity and hurry; in fact, brevity, if of the intelligent kind, is the best preservative against hurry. Some men write short letters, but are very careful to observe all the forms; and they have the great advantage that the apparent importance of the formal expressions is enhanced by the shortness of the letter itself. This is the case in Robert Warcopp’s letter to Sir Robert Plumpton.

When hurry really exists, and it is impossible to avoid the appearance of it, as when a letter cannot be brief, yet must be written at utmost speed, the proper course is to apologize for hurry at the beginning and not at the end of the letter. The reader is then propitiated at once, and excuses the slovenly penmanship and style.

It is remarkable that legibility of handwriting should never have been considered as among the essentials of courtesy in correspondence. It is obviously for the convenience of the reader that a letter should be easily read; but here another consideration intervenes. To write very legibly is the accomplishment of clerks and writing-masters, who are usually poor men, and, as such, do not hold a high social position. Aristocratic pride has always had it for a principle to disdain, for itself, the accomplishments of professional men; and therefore a careless scrawl is more aristocratic than a clean handwriting, if the scrawl is of a fashionable kind. Perhaps the historic origin of this feeling may be the scorn of the ignorant mediæval baron for writing of all kinds as beneath the attention of a warrior. In a cultured age there may be a reason of a higher order. It may be supposed that attention to mechanical excellence is incompatible with the action of the intellect; and people are curiously ready to imagine incompatibilities where they do not really exist. As a matter of fact, some men of eminent intellectual gifts write with as exquisite a clearness in the formation of their letters as in the elucidation of their ideas. It is easily forgotten, too, that the same person may use different kinds of handwriting, according to circumstances, like the gentleman whose best hand some people could read, whose middling hand the writer himself could read, and whose worst neither he nor any other human being could decipher. Legouvé, in his exquisite way, tells a charming story of how he astonished a little girl by excelling her in calligraphy. His scribble is all but illegible, and she was laughing at it one day, when he boldly challenged her to a trial. Both sat down and formed their letters with great patience, as in a writing class, and it turned out, to the girl’s amazement, that the scribbling Academician had by far the more copperplate-like hand of the two. He then explained that his bad writing was simply the result of speed. Frenchmen provokingly reserve their very worst and most illegible writing for the signature. You are able to read the letter but not the signature, and if there is not some other means of ascertaining the writer’s name you are utterly at fault.

The old habit of crossing letters, now happily abandoned, was a direct breach of real, though not of what in former days were conventional, good manners. To cross a letter is as much as to say, “In order to spare myself the cost of another sheet of paper or an extra stamp, I am quite willing to inflict upon you, my reader, the trouble of disengaging one set of lines from another.” Very economical people in the past generation saved an occasional penny in another way at the cost of the reader’s eyes. They diluted their ink with water, till the recipient of the letter cried, “Prithee, why so pale?”

The modern type-writing machine has the advantage of making all words equally legible; but the receiver of the printed letter is likely to feel on opening it a slight yet perceptible shock of the kind always caused by a want of consideration. The letter so printed is undoubtedly easier to read than all but the very clearest manuscript, and so far it may be considered a politeness to use the instrument; but unluckily it is impersonal, so that the performer on the instrument seems far removed from the receiver of the letter and not in that direct communication with him which would be apparent in an autograph. The effect on the mind is almost like that of a printed circular, or at least of a letter which has been dictated to a short-hand writer.

The dictation of letters is allowable in business, because men of business have to use the utmost attainable despatch, and (like the use of the lead pencil) it is permitted to invalids, but with these exceptions it is sure to produce a feeling of distance almost resembling discourtesy. In the first place, a dictated letter is not strictly private, its contents being already known to the amanuensis; and besides this it is felt that the reason for dictating letters is the composer’s convenience, which he ought not to consult so obviously. If he dictates to a short-hand writer he is evidently chary of his valuable time, whereas courtesy always at least seems willing to sacrifice time to others. These remarks, I repeat, have no reference to business correspondence, which has its own code of good manners.

The most irritating letters to receive are those which, under a great show of courtesy, with many phrases and many kind inquiries about your health and that of your household, and even with some news adapted to your taste, contain some short sentence which betrays the fact that the whole letter was written with a manifestly selfish purpose. The proper answer to such letters is a brief business answer to the one essential sentence that revealed the writer’s object, not taking any notice whatever of the froth of courteous verbiage.

Is it a part of necessary good breeding to answer letters at all? Are we really, in the nature of things, under the obligation to take a piece of paper and write phrases and sentences thereupon because it has pleased somebody at a distance to spend his time in that manner?

This requires consideration; there can be no general rule. It seems to me that people commit the error of transferring the subject from the region of oral conversation to the region of written intercourse. If a man asked me the way in the street it would be rudeness on my part not to answer him, because the answer is easily given and costs no appreciable time, but in written correspondence the case is essentially different. I am burdened with work; every hour, every minute of my day is apportioned to some definite duty or necessary rest, and three strangers make use of the post to ask me questions. To answer them I must make references; however brief the letters may be they will take time,—altogether the three will consume an hour. Have these correspondents any right to expect me to work an hour for them? Would a cabman drive them about the streets of London during an hour for nothing? Would a waterman pull them an hour on the Thames for nothing? Would a shoe-black brush their boots and trousers an hour for nothing? And why am I to serve these men gratuitously and be called an ill-bred, discourteous person if I tacitly decline to be their servant? We owe sacrifices—occasional sacrifices—of this kind to friends and relations, and we can afford them to a few, but we are under no obligation to answer everybody. Those whom we do answer may be thankful for a word on a post-card in Gladstone’s brief but sufficient fashion. I am very much of the opinion of Rudolphe in Ponsard’s “L’Honneur et l’Argent.” A friend asks him what he does about letters:—

Rudolphe.Je les mets
Soigneusement en poche et ne réponds jamais.
Premier Ami.Oh! vous raillez.
Rudolphe. Non pas. Je ne puis pas admettre
Qu’un importun m’oblige à répondre à sa lettre,
Et, parcequ’il lui plaît de noircir du papier
Me condamne moi-même à ce fâcheux métier.

ESSAY XXIII.

As for the facilities afforded by steam communication with distant countries, they seem to be of little use to friendship, since a moderate distance soon puts a stop to friendly communication. Except in cases of strong affection the Straits of Dover are an effectual though imaginary bar to intercourse of this kind, not to speak of the great oceans.

The impediment created by a narrow sea is, as I have said, imaginary, but we may speculate on the reasons for it; and my own reflections have ended in the somewhat strange conclusion that it must have something to do with sea-sickness. It must be that people dislike the idea of writing a letter that will have to cross a narrow channel of salt-water, because they vaguely and dimly dread the motion of the vessel. Nobody would consciously avow to himself such a sympathy with a missive exempt from all human ills, but the feeling may be unconsciously present. How else are we to account for the remarkable fact that salt-water breaks friendly communication by letter? If you go to live anywhere out of your native island your most intimate friends cease to give any news of themselves. They do not even send printed announcements of the marriages and deaths in their families. This does not imply any cessation of friendly feeling on their part. If you appeared in England again they would welcome you with the utmost kindness and hospitality, but they do not like to post anything that will have to cross the sea. The news-vendors have not the same delicate imaginative sympathy with the possible sufferings of rag-pulp, so you get your English journals and find therein, by pure accident, the marriage of one intimate old friend and the death of another. You excuse the married man, because he is too much intoxicated with happiness to be responsible for any omission; and you excuse the dead man, because he cannot send letters from another world. Still you think that somebody not preoccupied by bridal joys or impeded by the last paralysis might have sent you a line directly, were it only a printed card.

Not only do the writers of letters feel a difficulty in sending their manuscript across the sea, but people appear to have a sense of difficulty in correspondence proportionate to the distance the letter will have to traverse. One would infer that they really experience, by the power of imagination, a feeling of fatigue in sending a letter on a long journey. If this is not so, how are we to account for the fact that the rarity of letters from friends increases in exact proportion to our remoteness from them? A simple person without correspondence would naturally imagine that it would be resorted to as a solace for separation, and that the greater the distance the more the separated friends would desire to be drawn together occasionally by its means, but in practice this rarely happens. People will communicate by letter across a space of a hundred miles when they will not across a thousand.

The very smallest impediments are of importance when the desire for intercourse is languid. The cost of postage to colonies and to countries within the postal union is trifling, but still it is heavier than the cost of internal postage, and it may be unconsciously felt as an impediment. Another slight impediment is that the answer to a letter sent to a great distance cannot arrive next day, so that he who writes in hope of an answer is like a trader who cannot expect an immediate return for an investment.

To prevent friendships from dying out entirely through distance, the French have a custom which seems, but is not, an empty form. On or about New Year’s Day they send cards to all friends and many acquaintances, however far away. The useful effects of this custom are the following:—

1. It acquaints you with the fact that your friend is still alive,—pleasing information if you care to see him again.

2. It shows you that he has not forgotten you.

3. It gives you his present address.

4. In case of marriage, you receive his wife’s card along with his own; and if he is dead you receive no card at all, which is at least a negative intimation.[32]

This custom has also an effect upon written correspondence, as the printed card affords the opportunity of writing a letter, when, without the address, the letter might not be written. When the address is well known the card often suggests the idea of writing.

When warm friends send visiting-cards they often add a few words of manuscript on the card itself, expressing friendly sentiments and giving a scrap of brief but welcome news.

Here is a suggestion to a generation that thinks friendly letter-writing irksome. With a view to the sparing of time and trouble, which is the great object of modern life (sparing, that is, in order to waste in other ways), cards might be printed as forms of invitation are, leaving only a few blanks to be filled up; or there might be a public signal-book in which the phrases most likely to be useful might be represented by numbers.

The abandonment of letter-writing between friends is the more to be regretted that, unless our friends are public persons, we receive no news of them indirectly; therefore, when we leave their neighborhood, the separation is of that complete kind which resembles temporary death. “No word comes from the dead,” and no word comes from those silent friends. It is a melancholy thought in leaving a friend of this kind, when you shake hands at the station and still hear the sound of his voice, that in a few minutes he will be dead to you for months or years. The separation from a corresponding friend is shorn of half its sorrows. You know that he will write, and when he writes it requires little imagination to hear his voice again.

To write, however, is not all. For correspondence to reach its highest value, both friends must have the natural gift of friendly letter-writing, which may be defined as the power of talking on paper in such a manner as to represent their own minds with perfect fidelity in their friendly aspect.

This power is not common. A man may be a charming companion, full of humor and gayety, a well of knowledge, an excellent talker, yet his correspondence may not reveal the possession of these gifts. Some men are so constituted that as soon as they take a pen their faculties freeze. I remember a case of the same congelation in another art. A certain painter had exuberant humor and mimicry, with a marked talent for strong effects in talk; in short, he had the gifts of an actor, and, as Pius VII. called Napoleon I., he was both commediante and tragediante. Any one who knew him, and did not know his paintings, would have supposed at once that a man so gifted must have painted the most animated works; but it so happened (from some cause in the deepest mysteries of his nature) that whenever he took up a brush or a pencil his humor, his tragic power, and his love of telling effects all suddenly left him, and he was as timid, slow, sober, and generally ineffectual in his painting as he was full of fire and energy in talk. So it is in writing. That which ought to be the pouring forth of a man’s nature often liberates only a part of his nature, and perhaps that part which has least to do with friendship. Your friend delights you by his ease and affectionate charm of manner, by the happiness of his expressions, by his wit, by the extent of his information, all these being qualities that social intercourse brings out in him as colors are revealed by light. The same man, in dull solitude at his desk, may write a letter from which every one of these qualities may be totally absent, and instead of them he may offer you a piece of perfunctory duty-writing which, as you see quite plainly, he only wanted to get done with, and in which you do not find a trace of your friend’s real character. Such correspondence as that is worth having only so far as it informs you of your friend’s existence and of his health.

Another and a very different way in which a man may represent himself unfairly in correspondence, so that his letters are not his real self, is when he finds that he has some particular talent as a writer, and unconsciously cultivates that talent when he holds a pen, whereas his real self has many other qualities that remain unrepresented. In this way humor may become the dominant quality in the letters of a correspondent whose conversation is not dominantly humorous.

Habits of business sometimes produce the effect that the confirmed business correspondent will write to his friend willingly and promptly on any matter of business, and will give him excellent advice, and be glad of the opportunity of rendering him a service, but he will shrink from the unaccustomed effort of writing any other kind of letter.

There is a strong temptation to blame silent friends and praise good correspondents; but we do not reflect that letter-writing is a task to some and a pleasure to others, and that if people may sometimes be justly blamed for shirking a corvée they can never deserve praise for indulging in an amusement. There is a particular reason why, when friendly letter-writing is a task, it is more willingly put off than many other tasks that appear far heavier and harder. It is either a real pleasure or a feigned pleasure, and feigned pleasures are the most wearisome things in life, far more wearisome than acknowledged work. For in work you have a plain thing to do and you see the end of it, and there is no need for ambages at the beginning or for a graceful retiring at the close; but a feigned pleasure has its own observances that must be gone through whether one has any heart for them or not. The groom who cleans a rich man’s stable, and whistles at his work, is happier than the guest at a state dinner who is trying to look other than what he is,—a wearied victim of feigned and formal pleasure with a set false smile upon his face. In writing a business letter you have nothing to affect; but a letter of friendship, unless you have the real inspiration for it, is a narrative of things you have no true impulse to narrate, and the expression of feelings which (even if they be in some degree existent) you do not earnestly desire to utter.

The sentiment of friendship is in general rather a quiet feeling of regard than any lively enthusiasm. It may be counted upon for what it is,—a disposition to receive the friend with a welcome or to render him an occasional service, but there is not, commonly, enough of it to be a perennial warm fountain of literary inspiration. Therefore the worst mistake in dealing with a friend is to reproach him for not having been cordial and communicative enough. Sometimes this reproach is made, especially by women, and the immediate effect of it is to close whatever communicativeness there may be. If the friend wrote little before being reproached he will write less after.

The true inspiration of the friendly letter is the perfect faith that all the concerns of the writer will interest his friend. If James, who is separated by distance from John, thinks that John will not care about what James has been doing, hoping, suffering, the fount of friendly correspondence is frozen at its source. James ought to believe that John loves him enough to care about every little thing that can affect his happiness, even to the sickness of his old horse or the accident that happened to his dog when the scullery-maid threw scalding water out of the kitchen window; then there will be no lack, and James will babble on innocently through many a page, and never have to think.

The believer in friendship, he who has the true undoubting faith, writes with perfect carelessness about great things and small, avoiding neither serious interests, as a wary man would, nor trivial ones that might be passed over by a writer avaricious of his time. William of Orange, in his letters to Bentinck, appears to have been the model of friendly correspondents; and he was so because his letters reflected not a part only of his thinking and living, but the whole of it, as if nothing that concerned him could possibly be without interest for the man he loved. Familiar as it must be to many readers, I cannot but quote a passage from Macaulay:

“The descendants of Bentinck still preserve many letters written by William to their master, and it is not too much to say that no person who has not studied those letters can form a correct notion of the Prince’s character. He whom even his admirers generally accounted the most frigid and distant of men here forgets all distinctions of rank, and pours out all his thoughts with the ingenuousness of a schoolboy. He imparts without reserve secrets of the highest moment. He explains with perfect simplicity vast designs affecting all the governments of Europe. Mingled with his communications on such subjects are other communications of a very different but perhaps not of a less interesting kind. All his adventures, all his personal feelings, his long runs after enormous stags, his carousals on St. Hubert’s Day, the growth of his plantations, the failure of his melons, the state of his stud, his wish to procure an easy pad-nag for his wife, his vexation at learning that one of his household, after ruining a girl of good family, refused to marry her, his fits of sea-sickness, his coughs, his headaches, his devotional moods, his gratitude for the Divine protection after a great escape, his struggles to submit himself to the Divine will after a disaster, are described with an amiable garrulity hardly to have been expected from the most discreetly sedate statesman of his age. Still more remarkable is the careless effusion of his tenderness, and the brotherly interest which he takes in his friend’s domestic felicity.”

Friendly letters easily run over from sheet to sheet till they become ample and voluminous. I received a welcome epistle of twenty pages recently, and have seen another from a young man to his comrade which exceeded fifty; but the grandest letter that I ever heard of was from Gustave Doré to a very old lady whom he liked. He was travelling in Switzerland, and sent her a letter eighty pages long, full of lively pen-sketches for her entertainment. Artists often insert sketches in their letters,—a graceful habit, as it adds to their interest and value.

The talent for scribbling friendly letters implies some rough literary power, but may coexist with other literary powers of a totally different kind, and, as it seems, in perfect independence of them. There is no apparent connection between the genius in “Childe Harold,” “Manfred,” “Cain,” and the talent of a lively letter-writer, yet Byron was the best careless letter-writer in English whose correspondence has been published and preserved. He said “dreadful is the exertion of letter-writing,” but by this he must have meant the first overcoming of indolence to begin the letter, for when once in motion his pen travelled with consummate naturalness and ease, and the exertion is not to be perceived. The length and subject of his communications were indeterminate. He scribbled on and on, every passing mood being reflected and fixed forever in his letters, which complete our knowledge of him by showing us the action of his mind in ordinal times as vividly as the poems display its power in moments of highest exaltation. We follow his mental phases from minute to minute. He is not really in one state and pretending to be in another for form’s sake, so you have all his moods, and the letters are alive. The transitions are quick as thought. He darts from one topic to another with the freedom and agility of a bird, dwelling on each just long enough to satisfy his present need, but not an instant longer, and this without any reference to the original subject or motive of the letter. He is one of those perfect correspondents qui causent avec la plume. Men, women, and things, comic and tragic adventures, magnificent scenery, historical cities, all that his mind spontaneously notices in the world, are touched upon briefly, yet with consummate power. Though the sentences were written in the most careless haste and often in the strangest situations, many a paragraph is so dense in its substance, so full of matter, that one could not abridge it without loss. But the supreme merit of Byron’s letters is that they record his own sensations with such fidelity. What do I, the receiver of a letter, care for second-hand opinions about anything? I can hear the fashionable opinions from echoes innumerable. What I do want is a bit of my friend himself, of his own peculiar idiosyncrasy, and if I get that it matters nothing that his feelings and opinions should be different from mine; nay, the more they differ from mine the more freshness and amusement they bring me. All Byron’s correspondents might be sure of getting a bit of the real Byron. He never describes anything without conveying the exact effect upon himself. Writing to his publisher from Rome in 1817, he gives in a single paragraph a powerful description of the execution of three robbers by the guillotine (rather too terrible to quote), and at the end of it comes the personal effect:—

“The pain seems little, and yet the effect to the spectator and the preparation to the criminal are very striking and chilling. The first turned me quite hot and thirsty, and made me shake so that I could hardly hold the opera-glass (I was close, but was determined to see as one should see everything once, with attention); the second and third (which shows how dreadfully soon things grow indifferent), I am ashamed to say, had no effect on me as a horror, though I would have saved them if I could.”

How accurately this experience is described with no affectation of impassible courage (he trembles at first like a woman) or of becoming emotion afterwards, the instant that the real emotion ceased! Only some pity remains,—“I would have saved them if I could.”

The bits of frank criticism thrown into his letters, often quite by chance, were not the least interesting elements in Byron’s correspondence. Here is an example, about a book that had been sent him:—

“Modern Greece—good for nothing; written by some one who has never been there, and, not being able to manage the Spenser stanza, has invented a thing of his own, consisting of two elegiac stanzas, an heroic line and an Alexandrine, twisted on a string. Besides, why modern? You may say modern Greeks, but surely Greece itself is rather more ancient than ever it was.”

The carelessness of Byron in letter-writing, his total indifference to proportion and form, his inattention to the beginning, middle, and end of a letter, considered as a literary composition, are not to be counted for faults, as they would be in writings of any pretension. A friendly letter is, by its nature, a thing without pretension. The one merit of it which compensates for every defect is to carry the living writer into the reader’s presence, such as he really is, not such as by study and art he might make himself out to be. Byron was energetic, impetuous, impulsive, quickly observant, disorderly, generous, open-hearted, vain. All these qualities and defects are as conspicuous in his correspondence as they were in his mode of life. There have been better letter-writers as to literary art,—to which he gave no thought,—and the literary merits that his letters possess (their clearness, their force of narrative and description, their conciseness) are not the results of study, but the characteristics of a vigorous mind.

The absolutely best friendly letter-writer known to me is Victor Jacquemont. He, too, wrote according to the inspiration of the moment, but it was so abundant that it carried him on like a steadily flowing tide. His letters are wonderfully sustained, yet they are not composed; they are as artless as Byron’s, but much more full and regular. Many scribblers have facility, a flux of words, but who has Jacquemont’s weight of matter along with it? The development of his extraordinary epistolary talent was due to another talent deprived of adequate exercise by circumstances. Jacquemont was by nature a brilliant, charming, amiable talker, and the circumstances were various situations in which this talker was deprived of an audience, being often, in long wanderings, surrounded by dull or ignorant people. Ideas accumulated in his mind till the accumulation became difficult to bear, and he relieved himself by talking on paper to friends at a distance, but intentionally only to one friend at a time. He tried to forget that his letters were passed round a circle of readers, and the idea that they would be printed never once occurred to him:—

“En écrivant aujourd’hui aux uns et aux autres, j’ai cherché à oublier ce que tu me dis de l’échange que chacun fait des lettres qu’il reçoit de moi. Cette pensée m’aurait retenu la plume, ou du moins, ne l’aurait pas laissée couler assez nonchalamment sur le papier pour en noircir, en un jour, cinquante-huit feuilles, comme je l’ai fait.... Je sais et j’aime beaucoup causer à deux; à trois, c’est autre chose; il en est de même pour écrire. Pour parler comme je pense et sans blague, il me faut la persuasion que je ne serai lu que de celui à qui j’écris.”

To read these letters, in the four volumes of them which have been happily preserved, is to live with the courageous observer from day to day, to share pleasures enjoyed with the freshness of sensation that belongs to youth and strength, and privations borne with the cheerfulness of a truly heroic spirit.

This Essay would run to an inordinate length if I even mentioned the best of the many letter-writers who are known to us; and it is generally by some adventitious circumstance that they have ever been known at all. A man wins fame in something quite outside of letter-writing, and then his letters are collected and given to the world, but perfectly obscure people may have been equal or superior to him as correspondents. Occasionally the letters of some obscure person are rescued from oblivion. Madame de Rémusat passed quietly through life, and is now in a blaze of posthumous fame. Her son decided upon the publication of her letters, and then it became at once apparent that this lady had extraordinary gifts of the observing and recording order, so that her testimony, as an eye-witness of rare intelligence, must affect all future estimates of the conqueror of Austerlitz. There may be at this moment, there probably are, persons to whom the world attributes no literary talent, yet who are cleverly preserving the very best materials of history in careless letters to their friends.

It seems an indiscretion to read private letters, even when they are in print, but it is an indiscretion we cannot help committing. What can be more private than a letter from a man to his wife on purely family matters? Surely it is wrong to read such letters; but who could repent having read that exquisite one from Tasso’s father, Bernardo Tasso, written to his wife about the education of their children during an involuntary separation? It shows to what a degree a sheet of paper may be made the vehicle of a tender affection. In the first page he tries, and, lover-like, tries again and again, to find words that will draw them together in spite of distance. “Not merely often,” he says, “but continually our thoughts must meet upon the road.” He expresses the fullest confidence that her feelings for him are as strong and true as his own for her, and that the weariness of separation is painful alike for both, only he fears that she will be less able to bear the pain, not because she is wanting in prudence but by reason of her abounding love. At length the tender kindness of his expressions culminates in one passionate outburst, “poi ch’ io amo voi in quello estremo grado che si possa amar cosa mortale.”

It would be difficult to find a stronger contrast than that between Bernardo Tasso’s warmth and the tranquil coolness of Montaigne, who just says enough to save appearances in that one conjugal epistle of his which has come down to us. He begins by quoting a sceptical modern view of marriage, and then briefly disclaims it for himself, but does not say exactly what his own sentiments may be, not having much ardor of affection to express, and honestly avoiding any feigned declarations:—

“Ma Femme vous entendez bien que ce n’est pas le tour d’vn galand homme, aux reigles de ce temps icy, de vous courtiser & caresser encore. Car ils disent qu’vn habil homme peut bien prendre femme: mais que de l’espouser c’est à faire à vn sot. Laissons les dire: ie me tiens de ma part à la simple façon du vieil aage, aussi en porte-ie tantost le poil. Et de vray la nouuelleté couste si cher iusqu’à ceste heure à ce pauure estat (& si ie ne sçay si nous en sommes à la dernière enchere) qu’en tout & par tout i’en quitte le party. Viuons ma femme, vous & moy, à la vieille Françoise.”

If friendship is maintained by correspondence, it is also liable to be imperilled by it. Not unfrequently have men parted on the most amiable terms, looking forward to a happy meeting, and not foreseeing the evil effects of letters. Something will be written by one of them, not quite acceptable to the other, who will either remonstrate and cause a rupture in that way, or take his trouble silently and allow friendship to die miserably of her wound. Much experience is needed before we entirely realize the danger of friendly intercourse on paper. It is ten times more difficult to maintain a friendship by letter than by personal intercourse, not for the obvious reason that letter-writing requires an effort, but because as soon as there is the slightest divergence of views or difference in conduct, the expression of it or the account of it in writing cannot be modified by kindness in the eye or gentleness in the tone of voice. My friend may say almost anything to me in his private room, because whatever passes his lips will come with tones that prove him to be still my friend; but if he wrote down exactly the same words, and a postman handed me the written paper, they might seem hard, unkind, and even hostile. It is strange how slow we are to discover this in practice. We are accustomed to speak with great freedom to intimate friends, and it is only after painful mishaps that we completely realize the truth that it is perilous to permit ourselves the same liberty with the pen. As soon as we do realize it we see the extreme folly of those who timidly avoid the oral expression of friendly censure, and afterwards write it all out in black ink and send it in a missive to the victim when he has gone away. He receives the letter, feels it to be a cold cruelty, and takes refuge from the vexations of friendship in the toils of business, thanking Heaven that in the region of plain facts there is small place for sentiment.

ESSAY XXIV.

It is presumed that there is nothing in correspondence to set against the advantages of pouring forth many words without effort, and of carrying on an argument rapidly; but the truth is, that correspondence has peculiar advantages of its own. A hearer seldom grasps another person’s argument until it has been repeated several times, and if the argument is of a very complex nature the chances are that he will not carry away all its points even then. A letter is a document which a person of slow abilities can study at his leisure, until he has mastered it; so that an elaborate piece of reasoning may be set forth in a letter with a fair chance that such a person will ultimately understand it. He will read the letter three or four times on the day of its arrival, then he will still feel that something may have escaped him, and he will read it again next day. He will keep it and refer to it afterwards to refresh his memory. He can do nothing of all this with what you say to him orally. His only resource in that case is to write down a memorandum of the conversation on your departure, in which he will probably make serious omissions or mistakes. Your letter is a memorandum of a far more direct and authentic kind.

Appointments are sometimes made in order to settle a matter of business by talking, and after the parties have met and talked for a long time one says to the other, “I will write to you in a day or two;” and the other instantly agrees with the proposal, from a feeling that the matter can be settled more clearly by letter than by oral communication.

In these cases it may happen that the talking has cleared the way for the letter,—that it has removed subjects of doubt, hesitation, or dispute, and left only a few points on which the parties are very nearly agreed.

There are, however, other cases, which have sometimes come under my own observation, in which men meet by appointment to settle a matter, and then seem afraid to cope with it, and talk about indifferent subjects with a half-conscious intention of postponing the difficult one till there is no longer time to deal with it on that day. They then say, when they separate, “We will settle that matter by correspondence,” as if they could not have done so just as easily without giving themselves the trouble of meeting. In such cases as these the reason for avoiding the difficult subject is either timidity or indolence. Either the parties do not like to face each other in an opposition that may become a verbal combat, or else they have not decision and industry enough to do a hard day’s work together; so they procrastinate, that they may spread the work over a larger space of time.

The timidity that shrinks from a personal encounter is sometimes the cause of hostile letter-writing about matters of business even when personal interviews are most easy. There are instances of disputes by letter between people who live in the same town, in the same street, and even in the same house, and who might quarrel with their tongues if they were not afraid, but fear drives them to fight from a certain distance, as it requires less personal courage to fire a cannon at an enemy a league away than to face his naked sword.

Timidity leads people to write letters and to avoid them. Some timorous people feel bolder with a pen; others, on the contrary, are extremely afraid of committing anything to paper, either because written words remain and may be referred to afterwards, or because they may be read by eyes they were never intended for, or else because the letter-writer feels doubtful about his own powers in composition, grammar, or spelling.

Of these reasons against doing business by letter the second is really serious. You write about your most strictly private affairs, and unless the receiver of the letter is a rigidly careful and orderly person, it may be read by his clerks or servants. You may afterwards visit the recipient and find the letter lying about on a disorderly desk, or stuck on a hook suspended from a wall, or thrust into a lockless drawer; and as the letter is no longer your property, and you have not the resource of destroying it, you will keenly appreciate the wisdom of those who avoid letter-writing when they can.

The other cause of timidity, the apprehension that some fault may be committed, some sin against literary taste or grammatical rule, has a powerful effect as a deterrent from even necessary business correspondence. The fear which a half-educated person feels that he will commit faults causes a degree of hesitation which is enough of itself to produce them; and besides this cause of error there is the want of practice, also caused by timidity, for persons who dread letter-writing practise it as little as possible.

The awkwardness of uneducated letter-writers is a most serious cause of anxiety to people who are compelled to intrust the care of things to uneducated dependants at a distance. Such care-takers, instead of keeping you regularly informed of the state of affairs as an intelligent correspondent would, write rarely, and they have such difficulty in imagining the necessary ignorance of one who is not on the spot, that the information they give you is provokingly incomplete on some most important points.

An uneducated agent will write to you and tell you, for example, that damage has occurred to something of yours, say a house, a carriage, or a yacht, but he will not tell you its exact nature or extent, and he will leave you in a state of anxious conjecture. If you question him by letter, he will probably miss what is most essential in your questions, so that you will have great difficulty in getting at the exact truth. After much trouble you will perhaps have to take the train and go to see the extent of damage for yourself, though it might have been described to you quite accurately in a short letter by an intelligent man of business.

Nothing is more wonderful than the mistakes in following written directions that can be committed by uneducated men. With clear directions in the most legible characters before their eyes they will quietly go and do something entirely different, and appear unfeignedly surprised when you show them the written directions afterwards. In these cases it is probable that they have unconsciously substituted a notion of their own for your idea, which is the common process of what the uneducated consider to be understanding things.

The extreme facility with which this is done may be illustrated by an example. The well-known French savant and inventor, Ruolz, whose name is famous in connection with electro-plating, turned his attention to paper for roofing and, as he perceived the defects of the common bituminous papers, invented another in which no bitumen was employed. This he advertised constantly and extensively as the “Carton non bitumé Ruolz,” consequently every one calls it the “Carton bitumé Ruolz.” The reason here is that the notion of papers for roofs was already so associated in the French mind with bitumen, that it was absolutely impossible to effect the disjunction of the two ideas.

Instances have occurred to everybody in which the consequence of warning a workman that he is not to do some particular thing, is that he goes and does it, when if nothing had been said on the subject he might, perchance, have avoided it. Here are two good instances of this, but I have met with many others. I remember ordering a binder to bind some volumes with red edges, specially stipulating that he was not to use aniline red. He therefore carefully stained the edges with aniline. I also remember writing to a painter that he was to stain some new fittings of a boat with a transparent glaze of raw sienna, and afterwards varnish them, and that he was to be careful not to use opaque paint anywhere. I was at a great distance from the boat and could not superintend the work. In due time I visited the boat and discovered that a foul tint of opaque paint had been employed everywhere on the new fittings, without any glaze or varnish whatever, in spite of the fact that old fittings, partially retained, were still there, with mellow transparent stain and varnish, in the closest juxtaposition with the hideous thick new daubing.

It is the evil of mediocrity in fortune to have frequently to trust to uneducated agents. Rich men can employ able representatives, and in this way they can inform themselves accurately of what occurs to their belongings at a distance. Without riches, however, we may sometimes have a friend on the spot who will see to things for us, which is one of the kindest offices of friendship. The most efficient friend is one who will not only look to matters of detail, but will take the trouble to inform you accurately about them, and for this he must be a man of leisure. Such a friend often spares one a railway journey by a few clear lines of report or explanation. Judging from personal experience, I should say that retired lawyers and retired military officers were admirably adapted to render this great service efficiently, and I should suppose that a man who had retired from busy commercial life would be scarcely less useful, but I should not hope for precision in one who had always been unoccupied, nor should I expect many details from one who was much occupied still. The first would lack training and experience; the second would lack leisure.

The talent for accuracy in affairs may be distinct from literary talent and education, and though we have been considering the difficulty of corresponding on matters of business with the uneducated, we must not too hastily infer that because a man is inaccurate in spelling, and inelegant in phraseology, he may not be an agreeable and efficient business correspondent. There was a time when all the greatest men of business in England were uncertain spellers. Clear expression and completeness of statement are more valuable than any other qualities in a business correspondent. I sometimes have to correspond with a tradesman in Paris who rose from an humble origin and scarcely produces what a schoolmaster would consider a passable letter; yet his letters are models in essential qualities, as he always removes by plain statements or questions every possibility of a mistake, and if there is any want of absolute precision in my orders he is sure to find out the deficiency, and to call my attention to it sharply.

The habit of not acknowledging orders is one of the worst negative vices in business correspondence. It is most inconveniently common in France, but happily much rarer in England. Where this vice prevails you cannot tell whether the person you wish to employ has read your order or not; and if you suppose him to have read it, you have no reason to feel sure that he has understood it, or will execute it in time.

It is a great gain to the writer of letters to be able to make them brief and clear at the same time, but as there is obscurity in a labyrinth of many words so there may be another kind of obscurity from their paucity,—that kind which Horace alluded to with reference to poetry,—

“Brevis esse laboro
Obscurus fio.”

Sometimes one additional word would spare the reader a doubt or a misunderstanding. This is likely to become more and more the dominant fault of correspondence as it imitates the brevity of the telegram.

Observe the interesting use of the word laboro by Horace. You may, in fact, labor to be brief, although the result is an appearance of less labor than if you had written at ease. It may take more time to write a very short letter than one of twice the length, the only gain in this case being to the receiver.

Letters of business often appear to be written in the most rapid and careless haste; the writing is almost illegible from its speed, the composition slovenly, the letter brief. And yet such a letter may have cost hours of deliberate reflection before one word of it was committed to paper. It is the rapid registering of a slowly matured decision.

It is a well-known principle of modern business correspondence that if a letter refers only to one subject it is more likely to receive attention than if it deals with several; therefore if you have several different orders or directions to give it is bad policy to write them all at once, unless you are absolutely compelled to do so because they are all equally pressing. Even if there is the same degree of urgency for all, yet a practical impossibility that all should be executed at the same time, it is still the best policy to give your orders successively and not more quickly than they can be executed. The only danger of this is that the receiver of the orders may think at first that they are small matters in which postponement signifies little, as they can be executed at any time. To prevent this he should be strongly warned at first that the order will be rapidly followed by several others. If there is not the same degree of urgency for all, the best way is to make a private register of the different matters in the order of their urgency, and then to write several short notes, at intervals, one about each thing.

People have such a marvellous power of misunderstanding even the very plainest directions that a business letter never can be made too clear. It will, indeed, frequently happen that language itself is not clear enough for the purposes of explanation without the help of drawing, and drawing may not be clear to one who has not been educated to understand it, which compels you to have recourse to modelling. In these cases the task of the letter-writer is greatly simplified, as he has nothing to do but foresee and prevent any misunderstanding of the drawing or model.

Every material thing constructed by mankind may be explained by the three kinds of mechanical drawing,—plan, section, and elevation,—but the difficulty, is that so many people are unable to understand plans and sections; they only understand elevations, and not always even these. The special incapacity to understand plans and sections is common in every rank of society, and it is not uncommon even in the practical trades. All letter-writing that refers to material construction would be immensely simplified if, by a general rule in popular and other education, every future man and woman in the country were taught enough about mechanical drawing to be able at least to read it.

It is delightful to correspond about construction with any trained architect or engineer, because to such a correspondent you can explain everything briefly, with the perfect certainty of being accurately understood. It is terrible toil to have to explain construction by letter to a man who does not understand mechanical drawing; and when you have given great labor to your explanation, it is the merest chance whether he will catch your meaning or not. The evil does not stop at mechanical drawing. Not only do uneducated people misunderstand a mechanical plan or section, but they are quite as liable to misunderstand a perspective drawing, as the great architect and draughtsman Viollet-le-Duc charmingly exemplified by the work of an intelligent child. A little boy had drawn a cat as he had seen it in front with its tail standing up, and this front view was stupidly misunderstood by a mature bourgeois, who thought the animal was a biped (as the hind-legs were hidden), and believed the erect tail to be some unknown object sticking out of the nondescript creature’s head. If you draw a board in perspective (other than isometrical) a workman is quite likely to think that one end of it is to be narrower than the other.

Business correspondence in foreign languages is a very simple matter when it deals only with plain facts, and it does not require any very extensive knowledge of the foreign tongue to write a common order; but if any delicate or complicated matter has to be explained, or if touchy sensitiveness in the foreigner has to be soothed by management and tact, then a thorough knowledge of the shades of expression is required, and this is extremely rare. The statement of bare facts, or the utterance of simple wants, is indeed only a part of business correspondence, for men of business, though they are not supposed to display sentiment in affairs, are in reality just as much human beings as other men, and consequently they have feelings which are to be considered. A correspondent who is able to write a foreign language with delicacy and tact will often attain his object when one with a ruder and more imperfect knowledge of the language would meet with certain failure, though he asked for exactly the same thing.