CHAPTER XIII
Walpole and the Art of Familiar Correspondence

The golden age of English letter-writing arrived without a period of long and painful preparation. With the more rudimentary correspondence of the seventeenth century, the new art had but the slightest relations, appearing in full bloom almost as soon as it appeared at all. There was of course much in England to encourage it. It is significant, for example, that the era of letter-writing was coincident with the production of large numbers of novels in letter-form, which made the art the vehicle of a new realism, and thus helped to spread the popularity of both types at once. Again, the era was also that of the development of the salons and of the art of conversation, a coincidence which is duplicated in the literary history of France.[409] Letter-writing, considered as a familiar art—and we have no concern with its other aspects—is but written conversation, a sort of tête-à-tête, with the talking, for the moment, all one side. It is dominated by a smiling intimacy, and it is this note which one feels to be a new thing in the correspondence of the eighteenth century, a note which is heard but seldom in the letters of an earlier period. The models of the new style were, in fact, not English. When Chesterfield was choosing exemplars for his son, he took no account of English letter-writers; he cites Cicero and Cardinal d’Ossat as models for serious correspondence, and then adds: ‘For gay and amusing letters, for enjouement and badinage, there are none that equal Comte Bussy’s and Madame Sévigné’s. They are so natural that they seem to be the extempore conversation of two people of wit rather than letters. I would advise you to let that book be one of your itinerant library.’[410] The regard for Madame de Sévigné was well-nigh universal. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who probably found her too womanly, is almost alone in her dislike. Thomas Gray has been said to imitate her.[411] Fanny Burney, who had read her from the days of her youth, considered her ‘almost all that can be wished to form female perfection,’ felt attached to her as though she were alive and in the same room, and longed to run into her arms.[412] Mrs. Boscawen created an almost national sensation by circulating a rumour of the discovery in France of five hundred new letters of Madame de Sévigné. All the blues were in a flutter over it. Mrs. Montagu wrote to Hannah More that the truth of the matter would be evident at once upon publication, since Madame de Sévigné’s style was ‘of all things the most inimitable.’[413] Miss More yielded to none in her admiration, and in one of her happiest phrases compares her to a ‘master sketching for his own amusement.’ But all this admiration is as nothing compared with the worship which Walpole gave the French writer. ‘My dear Madame de Sévigné,’ he calls her, ‘that divine woman,’ ‘my saint,’ and ‘Notre Dame de Livry.’ He collected relics of her with a fervour fairly religious, and enshrined them under her portrait. The cult became a jest among his friends. Madame du Deffand sent him a snuff-box, with the likeness of Madame de Sévigné painted upon it, and wrote a letter as from the lady herself to accompany the gift:

When people bored Walpole with talk of Shakespeare and Swift, he would set his thoughts upon Madame de Sévigné[415] as a monk takes refuge in holy meditation. ‘If she could have talked nonsense,’ he cries, ‘I should, like any other bigot, believe she was inspired.’[416]

Worshipping her thus, it is not surprising that he should have been, even in his own day, compared to her.[417] He affected to regard such praise as blasphemy; but, though he was in all probability secretly pleased, he was too great an artist in his own way not to realize that there was a difference between him and the goddess of his idolatry. It is typical of this difference that one thinks instinctively of Walpole as the ‘prince of letter-writers’ and of Madame de Sévigné as a friend. Walpole was too strongly individualist to be quite the ‘perfect medium’ that we find in the marquise. We are conscious of his cleverness, his prejudices, his distortions, his rank and snobbishness. We think of Walpole as often as we think of Walpole’s news. His art is not, however, the less perfect, but only different in method. He does not, like Madame de Sévigné, simply transmit the light, but stains and fractures it so that it glows with a confusion of colours and flashing rays. Walpole could never have attained to the pearl-like perfection of Madame de Sévigné. If we must needs deal in parallels, we shall find a much closer one between Madame de Sévigné and William Cowper. The recluse of Olney, like the Lady of Livry, had caught the secret of the unpremeditated art. Walpole—like the prince that he is—is almost never free from a sense of his rank.

I am tempted to say that this self-consciousness of Walpole is an art in itself. He enjoys displaying various sides of himself, plays with his prejudices, exaggerates all his enthusiasms and all his dislikes, affects to be old and look back over a vista of years, jests about his gout and the infallible bootikins, pretends to believe that the country is going to the dogs, and takes refuge at Strawberry Hill among his cats and his cameos. There are moments when he is as full of humours as Charles Lamb. Throughout three thousand letters his sprightliness, that subtle union of wit and grace, is hardly once at fault; everything seems to contribute to it. Does he cross the Channel in rough weather? He is drowned without being shipwrecked. He has a ‘lap full of waves,’ is ‘washed from head to foot in the boat at ten o’clock at night,’ and plunged into the sea up to his knees. ‘Qu’avois-je à faire dans cette galère? In truth, it is a little late to be seeking adventures.’[418] Condemned to a state of eternal emaciation, none shall outdo him in the description of his leanness: he is ‘emaciated, wan, wrinkled,’ a ‘poor skeleton,’ a ‘thinner Don Quixote.’ Nor is he surpassed (even by Macaulay) in his account of the ‘tinsel glories’ of Strawberry Hill. He would certainly have been the first to call himself a snob, had he known the word, or had it occurred to him to invent it. Meanwhile he made no pretence of concealing his boredom with most things in heaven and earth: to three-quarters of the world he displayed only a polished indifference; most of the rest of it he openly despised, but it was that he might have the more attention for the few whom he found worth while. His career in the Parisian salons, which has been already described, his repudiation of the philosophes and the complete absorption of his interest in Madame du Deffand, are really typical of the man and of his entire career. If to be loyal through life to a few friends, to expend one’s genius in giving them delight—‘spreading one’s leaf gold over them and making them shine’—is to be a snob, then Walpole richly deserves the name.

There is no lack of naturalness in Walpole’s relations with his friends. He always ‘lets himself go,’ to a degree, indeed, that is surprising when one recalls that he knew all along that his letters would one day be printed. Like Johnson,[419] he feared the press, which, he says, ‘exceeds even the day of Judgement, for it brings to light everybody’s faults, and a good deal more.’[420] He was in nervous dread that his letters to Madame du Deffand would get into print, and made the poor lady wretched by harping upon his fear; on the other hand, he himself collected and prepared certain of his letters for print; and yet, in spite of all this, there is nothing of restraint in his style or of caution in his words. He never sues for the good opinion of posterity by adopting a judicial tone, but is always delightfully himself. He knew that his letters to Sir Horace Mann, which extend through forty-five years with hardly a break, would one day be an invaluable record of public events,[421] and was concerned that it should be kept intact; yet for all that he is never betrayed into the manner of the archivist. So strong, indeed, is Walpole’s individualism, so wayward his humour, that it is sometimes rash to use his letters as documentary evidence.

There is, perhaps, no species of literature more exposed to misinterpretation than the familiar letter. It may almost be stated as a general law of the species that in proportion as a letter is suited for print and for public reading, it is a poor thing. A letter is, by its very nature, not addressed to an audience, but to an individual; and as certainly as it becomes general in its appeal, it loses that intimacy of tone which is its peculiar charm. What is duller than an ‘open letter’? What is more chilling than a postscript which invites you, when you have read a letter, to pass it on to John and to Mary? Not there shall you find anything of that conversation apart which constitutes the joy of writing as of reading letters. The letter which is intelligible to everybody is already impersonal and almost professional in tone, and you may print it with impunity; but a letter which is addressed to a friend will, in proportion to its intimacy, teem with allusions, oddities of phrase, and obscure references which make full sense only to the recipient, and you will print it at your peril. Lockhart, who declined to ‘Boswellize’ Scott, has given full expression to this fact, contending that if conversation is not to be misunderstood, ‘it is a necessary pre-requisite that we should be completely familiar with all the interlocutors, and understand thoroughly all their minutest relations, and points of common knowledge.... In proportion as a man is witty and humorous, there will always be about him and his a widening maze and wilderness of cues and catchwords, which the uninitiated will, if they are bold enough to try interpretation, construe, ever and anon, egregiously amiss—not seldom into arrant falsity.’ Now all this is at least as true of letter-writing[422] as of conversation. It is, one might argue, never safe to attempt to understand a familiar letter until you know all about the author of it, and almost as much about the recipient; for the letter is but the resultant of the first force working upon the second.

It is obvious, therefore, that no good letter should ever be printed. A published letter courts all manner of misconstruction, and exacts premature payment for those idle words whereof we are one day to give account. Few men would willingly yield up the intimacies of their private correspondence to the cruelty of public scrutiny and criticism; it is disturbing to think how much of our published correspondence would perish if the wish of the writer could effect it.

And yet it is this very unsuitability for print, it is this baffling intimacy, the covert allusions, the obscure language of friendship, that attract us to published correspondence. The pleasure in reading it is the fun of seeing, once in your life, what was never intended for your eye. Every printed letter seems to reproach us in its revelation of a trust betrayed. There is thus something almost unholy in the joy of reading published letters. It is never quite a respectable thing to be doing. There is something of the eavesdropper in it; it savours of intrusion and at times even of listening at keyholes. One must be a kind of busybody to find out what it all means. Sprightly letters are often as obscure as an overheard conversation: witness the following extract from a letter of Walpole to Thomas Gray:

There is wit here and more than one sly allusion; but it is only by prying rather deeply into old scandals that you discover the full meaning of the passage. Familiar correspondence soon comes to need a wealth of annotation. Walpole speaks of certain letters of Gray to him as not ‘printable yet,’ on the ground that they are ‘too obscure without many notes.’[423] But all the editorial art in the world will not restore the quondam lustre. ‘If one’s tongue,’ Walpole writes to George Montagu, ‘don’t move in the steps of the day, it is only an object of ridicule, like Mrs. Hobart in her cottillon.’ The brilliancy of this passage is bound up with the precarious fame of Mrs. Hobart, nay, with the yet more precarious fame of her dancing. Its elusiveness is an indication of the unfathomable quality in letters.

Walpole was himself an insatiable reader of letters, and understood and analyzed his ruling passion:

‘That is just what I should like to have seen’—there is the passion of the letter-monger. It was all very indiscreet, no doubt, but ‘that is just what I should like to have seen.’ The indiscretion is the best proof that the correspondence was intimate, that it was not a mere series of messages nor a volume of essays. To burn it was an eminently safe thing to do with it—and eminently deplorable.

A good letter-writer, a Walpole, a Lamb, is hardly more concerned with the cause of edification than with the cause of discretion. His concern is with the news. He moves genially along the lower levels of life, content to ramble rather than to soar, and forgets high philosophies and abstract truths. What he offers his friend is companionship, not education. The news of yesterday is frequently a harder thing to get at than the learning of the ages, and all the wisdom of the east will not make a good letter.

This ideal of familiar correspondence was fully stated in the eighteenth century. It would be possible to construct a whole philosophy of the subject by marshalling a series of quotations from eighteenth century letters. Even the bluestockings appreciated the artlessness of letters. Hannah More never wrote wiser sentences than these:

Madame du Deffand, no unworthy successor of Madame de Sévigné, would have subscribed to all this. She, too, thought that physics and metaphysics had no place in correspondence, and detested the letters of Abelard and Héloïse because they lacked the note of intimacy and were filled with fustian, ‘faux, exagéré, dégoûtant.’ She begs Walpole to fill his letters with trifles, to send news of his dogs, Vachette and Rosette, to describe his curios, and to omit politics. ‘J’aime tous les détails domestiques.... Dans les lettres de Madame de Sévigné c’est un des articles qui me plaît le plus.’[426] Here was a correspondent worthy of Walpole’s quill.

It was long the custom to sneer at Walpole for his gossip. Lord Macaulay did not fail to ridicule him for it in language as unmeasured as that of scandal itself; but Macaulay’s manner is now giving way to apologies and vindications hardly less damaging. Walpole was indubitably and incorrigibly a gossip—why should we avoid the word? He did not avoid it. He was, on the contrary, the first to make the charge. As early as 1749 he calls his letters to Horace Mann ‘gossiping gazettes’; yet these are perhaps as little open to the charge as any letters that he wrote. The same charge was brought against Walpole’s idol, Madame de Sévigné. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu could find in her letters nothing but gossip—‘sometimes the tittle-tattle of a fine lady; sometimes that of an old nurse, always tittle-tattle.’[427] A similar charge may be brought against Cowper, Lamb, Jane Carlyle, and all favourite letter-writers. It is always ready to hand for those who prefer disquisitions to news. As for Walpole’s letters, they might almost be conceived as a delightful defence of the vice.

Now gossip is of course a very dreadful business; but its most hardened opponents can scarcely deny that it has at times been the staple of some very fine literature indeed. What is Pepys but gossip? What would Boswell be without his gossip? Even work that professes to attack gossip is often interesting chiefly for its illustration of what it denounces. Look at the career of Lady Teazle. As long as she retains her place in the Scandal School, she is human, almost lovable, and wholly delightful; but as soon as she is reformed, she becomes quite insignificant. Her entrance in the fifth act is the dullest moment in the play, and her demeanour is wholly unconvincing and perhaps untruthful. One cannot think of her apart from her glittering geysers of scandal; when she gives up gossip she is as dull as Maria, and we are glad that the play is over. If there is a more depressing spectacle than a bird that has lost its wings, it is a wit that has bridled the tongue.

Gossip, in its milder stages, may even denote a serene interest in the little affairs of life, which is truly admirable. Cowper’s letters, which Lady Mary would no doubt have found quite as filled with tittle-tattle as Madame de Sévigné’s, are in the truest sense of the term the treasure of the humble. The finest things in them are, like the finest things in The Task, the description of domestic trifles. The most delightful letter Cowper ever wrote describes a runaway rabbit. Cowper’s eminence as a letter-writer is an invaluable illustration of the fact that a man may be a master of this art though his life contains nothing of excitement or romance. The great explorers and adventurers have seldom been good letter-writers. Macaulay laughed at Walpole because he made a serious business of trifles; but it is in this very fact that half the delight of Walpole’s letters consists. Neither Walpole nor Cowper could have written the letters he did without that love; the one lends as much interest to crossing the Channel as to crossing the Alps, and the other amuses us as much with the loss of a rabbit as with the finding of a continent. Like Biron in conversation,

The display of such a wit as this is all the more delightful in a letter because of the very intimacy of the thing. It is not done to amuse a company, but to delight a friend. Every true letter is a gift. If it rises to the plane of literature, it is literature created in honour of an individual, and is his to cherish or destroy. It is thus the most personal and private of all literary types, since it is the only one that can be held to be the peculiar and exclusive property of an individual. A lover of letters is as jealous as he is insatiable. Like Madame du Deffand with the letters of Walpole, he is always looking about for somebody with whom to share his pleasures, and is for ever discovering that no one is worthy of the honour;[428] and, like her, his passion is such that he would give the two letters that he has for the one which he is awaiting. The secret of such a jealous sense of ownership as this lies in the fact that every intimate letter is really suffused with two personalities, one of which is that of the recipient.

Such intimate correspondence as this was not without an effect upon English literature. The idealization of intimacy which made it possible spread the love of simplicity and of a more familiar tone. The type was, oddly enough, at one with the new romanticism in this demand for the natural. The style in which it was expressed is fifty years ahead of its time, and already prophesies the more familiar tone of such men as Lamb and Hazlitt. The following passage from Walpole is typical:

If the style of nineteenth century prose marks an improvement over that of the eighteenth century in respect of sprightliness, then surely such a passage as this must be held to indicate the progress towards it.

It is amazing how wide-spread was the knowledge of this craft. There are scores of letter-writers at the end of the century who may be read with pleasure. Even Mrs. Montagu could descend from the heights long enough to write in this pleasant tone to Mrs. Garrick and Miss More:

With the presence of such letter-writers as Cowper, Johnson, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Horace Walpole, not to mention countless minor names, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the familiar letter was the chosen medium of the age, as the periodic essay was of the earlier period and as the drama was of the Elizabethan age. It will always remain the best general record of the social life of the century; but its value is more particular than this. You may read the boisterous life of the age in its novels, you may find its solidity in Johnson and its superficiality in Chesterfield; you may see its rags in Hogarth or its grace in Reynolds; but for its simplicity, its affectionate intimacies, and its smiling ease, you must turn to its letters.