The Connecticut Wits and Other Essays

In the familiar epistle, as in other forms of social intercourse, nothing can quite take the place of old use and wont. Still the proper forms may be learned from the rhetoric books, just as the young man whose education has been neglected may learn from the standard manuals of politeness, such as “Etiquette and Eloquence or The Perfect Gentleman,” what the right hour is for making an evening call, and on what occasions the Tuxedo jacket is the correct thing. The rhetorics give directions how to address a letter, to begin it, to close it, and where to put the postage stamp; directions as to the date, the salutation, the signature, and cautions not to write “yours respectively” instead of “yours respectfully.” These are useful, but beyond these the rhetoric books cannot go, save in the way of general advice. The model letters in “The Complete Letter Writer” are dismal things. “Ideas,” says one of these textbook authorities, “ideas should be collected by the card system.” Now I rather think that ideas should not be collected by the card system, or by any other system. The charm of a personal letter is its spontaneity. Any suspicion that the ideas in it have been “collected” is deadly. To do the rhetoric books justice, the best of them warn against formality in all except the necessarily formal portions of the letter. A letter, like an epic poem, should begin in medias res. Ancient targets for jest are the opening formulae in servant girls’ correspondence. “I take my pen in hand to inform you that I am well and hope you are enjoying the same great blessing;” or the sentence with which our childish communications used to start out: “Dear Champ, – As I have nothing else to do I thought I would write you a letter” – matter of excusation and apology which Bacon instructs us to avoid.

The little boy whom Dr. John Brown tells about was unconsciously obeying Aristotle’s rule. Without permission he had taken his brother’s gun and broken it; and after hiding himself all day, he opened written communications with his stern elder; a blotted and tear-spotted scrawl beginning: “O Jamie, your gun is broke and my heart is broke.”

But no general rules for letter writing give much help; nor for that matter, do general rules for any kind of writing. A little practice in the concrete, under intelligent guidance, is worth any number of rhetorical platitudes. But such as it is, the rule for a business letter is just the reverse of that for a friendly letter. It should be as brief as is consistent with clearness, for your correspondent is a business man, whose time is his money. It should above all things, however, be explicit; and in striving to avoid surplusage should omit nothing that is necessary. Ambiguity is here the unpardonable sin and has occasioned thousands of law suits, involving millions of dollars. It should be severely impersonal. Pleasantries, sentiments, digressions and the like are impertinences in a business letter, like the familiarity of an unintroduced stranger. I knew a lawyer – and a good lawyer – who suffered professionally, because he would get himself into his business letters. He made jokes; he made quotations; sometimes French quotations which his correspondents could not translate; he expressed opinions and vented emotions on subjects only incidentally connected with the matter in hand, which he embroidered with wit and fancy; and he was a long time coming to the point. Now men of business may trifle about all other serious aspects of life or death, but when it concerns the making of money, they are in deadly earnest; so that my friend’s frivolous treatment of those interests seemed to them little less than sacrilege.

Viewed then as one of the commonest means of communication between man and man, it is well to be able to write a good letter; just as it is well to know how to tie a bowknot, cast an account, carve a joint, shave oneself, or meet any other of the ordinary occasions of life. But tons of letters are emptied from the mail bags every day, and burned, which serve no other than a momentary end. The art of composing letters worth keeping and printing is a part of the art literary. The word letters and the word literature are indeed used interchangeably; we speak of a man of letters, polite letters, the belles lettres, literae humaniores. How far are such expressions justified? Manifestly a letter, or a collection of letters, has not the structural unity and the deliberate artistic appeal of the higher forms of literature. It is not like an epic poem, a play, a novel or an ode. It has an art of its own, but an art of a particular kind, the secret of which is artlessness. It is not addressed to the public but to an individual and should betray no consciousness of any third party. It belongs, therefore, in the class with journals and table talk and, above all, autobiography, of which it constitutes the very best material. A book is written for everybody, a diary for oneself, a letter for one’s friend. While a letter, therefore, cannot quite claim a standing among the works of the creative imagination, yet it comes so freshly out of life and is so true in self-expression that, in some moods, we prefer it to more artificial or more objective kinds of literature; just as the advertisements in an old newspaper or magazine often have a greater veracity and freshness as dealing with the homely, actual needs and concerns of the time, than the stories, poems, and editorials whose fashion has faded.

I am speaking now of a genuine letter, “a link between two personalities,” as it has been defined. There are two varieties of letters which are not genuine. The first of these is the open letter, the letter to the editor, letter to a noble lord, etc. This is really addressed to the public through the medium of a more or less imaginary correspondent. The Englishman’s habit of writing to the London Times on all occasions is proverbial. Professor Goldwin Smith is a living example of the practice, transplanted to the field of the American newspaper press. But private letters written with an eye to publication are spoiled in the act. To be natural they should not mean to be overheard. If afterwards, by reason of the eminence of the writer, or of some quality in the letters themselves, they get into print, let it be by accident and not from forethought. Why is it, then, that the best printed letters, such as Gray’s, Walpole’s, Cowper’s, Fitzgerald’s, written with all the ease and intimacy of confidential intercourse – “written from one man and to one man” – are found to be composed in such perfect English, with such high finish, filled with matter usually reserved by professional authors for their essays or descriptive sketches; in fine, to be so literary? The reason I take to be partly in the mutual intellectual sympathy between writer and correspondent; and partly in the conscientious literary habit of the letter writer. Hawthorne’s “Note Books,” intended only for his own eye, are written with almost as much care as the romances and tales into which many pages of them were decanted with little alteration.

Besides the open letter, there is another variety which is not a real letter: I mean the letter of fiction. This has been a favorite method of telling a story. You know that all the novels of our first novelist, Richardson, are in this form: “Pamela,” “Clarissa Harlowe,” “Sir Charles Grandison”; and some of the most successful American short stories of recent years have been written in letters: Mr. James’s “A Bundle of Letters,” Mr. Aldrich’s “Margery Daw,” Mr. Bishop’s “Writing to Rosina” and many others. This is a subjective method of narration and requires a delicate art in differentiating the epistolary style of a number of correspondents; though not more, perhaps, than in the management of dialogue in an ordinary novel or play. The plan has certain advantages and in Richardson’s case was perhaps the most effective that he could have hit upon, i.e., the best adapted to the turn of his genius and the nature of his fiction. (Richardson began by writing letters for young people.) Fitzgerald, the translator of Omar Khayyám, and himself one of our best letter writers, preferred Richardson to Fielding, as did also Dr. Johnson. For myself, I will acknowledge that, while I enjoy a characteristic introduced letter here and there in a novel, as Thackeray, e.g., manages the thing; or even a short story in this form; yet a long novel written throughout in letters I find tedious, and Richardson’s interminable fictions, in particular, perfectly unendurable.

The epistolary form is conveniently elastic and not only lends itself easily to the purposes of fiction, but is a ready vehicle of reflection, humor, sentiment, satire, and description. Such recent examples as “The Upton Letters,” “The Love Letters of a Worldly Woman,” and Andrew Lang’s “Letters to Dead Authors” are illustrations, holding in solution many of the elements of the essay, the diary, the character sketch, and the parody.

But from these fictitious uses of the form let us return to the consideration of the real letter, the letter written by one man to another for his private perusal, but which from some superiority to the temporary occasion, has become literature. The theory of letter writing has been well given by Mr. J. C. Bailey in his “Studies in Some Famous Letters.” “What is a letter? It is written talk, with something, but not all, of the easiness of talking; and something, but not all, of the formality of writing. It is at once spontaneous and deliberate, a thing of art and a thing of amusement, the idle occupation of an hour and the sure index of a character.”

It is often said that letter writing is a lost art. It is an art of leisure and these are proverbially the days of hurry. The modern spirit is expressed by the telegraphic despatch, the telephone message, and the picture postal card. It is much if we manage an answer to an R.S.V.P. note of invitation. We have lost the habit of those old-fashioned correspondents whose “friendship covered reams.” How wonderful now seem the voluminous outpourings of Mme. de Sevigné to her daughter! How did she get time to do it all? It has been shown by actual calculation that the time occupied by Clarissa Harlowe in writing her letters would have left no room for the happening of the events which her letters record. She could not have been doing and suffering what she did and suffered and yet have had the leisure to write it up. And not only want of time, but an increasing reticence constrains our pens within narrower limits. Members of families now exchange letters merely to give news, ask questions, keep in touch with one another: not to confide feelings or impart experiences. A man is ashamed to sit down and deliberately pour out thoughts, sentiments, and descriptions, even to his intimates. “I suppose,” wrote Fitzgerald, “that people who are engaged in serious ways of life, and are of well filled minds, don’t think much about the interchange of letters with any anxiety; but I am an idle fellow, of a very ladylike turn of sentiment, and my friendships are more like loves, I think.” It is from men of letters that the best letters are to be expected, but they are busy magazining, overwork their pens for the public, and are consequently impatient of the burden of private correspondence. “Private letters,” wrote Willis to Poe, “are the last ounce that breaks the camel’s back of a literary man.” To ask him to write a letter after his day’s work, said Willis, was like asking a penny postman to take a walk in the evening for the pleasure of it. And in a letter to a friend he excused his brevity on the plea that he was paid a guinea a page for everything he wrote, and could not afford to waste manuscript. “I do not write letters to anybody,” wrote Lowell in 1842 to his friend Dr. G. B. Loring. “The longer I live the more irksome does letter writing become to me. When we are young we need such a vent for our feelings… But as we grow older and find more ease of expression, especially if it be in a way by which we can reach the general ear and heart, these private utterances become less and less needful to us.” In spite of this protest, when Mr. Charles Eliot Norton came to print Lowell’s letters, he found enough of them to fill two volumes of four hundred pages each. For after all, and with some exceptions, it is among the class of professional writers that we find the best letter writers: Gray, Cowper, Byron, Lamb, Fitzgerald, Lowell himself. They do it out of hours, “on the side” and, as in Lowell’s case, under protest; but the habit of literary expression is strong in them; they like to practise their pens; they begin a note to a friend and before they know it they have made a piece of literature, bound some day to get into print with others of the same kind.

And here comes a curious speculation. Where do all the letters come from that go into these collections? Do you keep the letters that you receive? I confess that I burn most of mine as soon as I have read them. Still more, do you keep copies of the letters that you send? I don’t mean typewritten business letters which you put damp into the patent-press-letter-copier to take off an impression to file away for reference, but friendly letters? The typewriting machine, by the way, is perhaps partly responsible for the decay of the letter writing art. It is hard to imagine Charles Lamb, or any other master of this most personal and intimate little art, who would not be disconcerted by this mechanical interposition between his thought and his page. The last generation must certainly have hoarded their letters more carefully than ours. You come across trunks full of them, desks full of them in the garrets of old houses: yellow bundles tied with tape, faded ink, stains of pressed violets, dust and musty odors, old mirth, old sorrows, old loves. Hackneyed themes of pathos, I mention them again, not to drop the tear of sensibility on their already well-moistened paper, but to enquire: Are these, and such as these, the sources of those many printed volumes “Letters of Blank,” “Diary and Correspondence of So and So,” ranging in date over periods of fifty or sixty years, and beginning sometimes in the boyhood of the writer, when the correspondent who preserved the letter could not possibly have foreseen Blank’s future greatness and the value of his autograph?

Women are proverbially good letter writers. The letters of Mme. de Sevigné to her daughter are masterpieces of their kind. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s are among the best of English letters; and Fitzgerald somewhat whimsically mentions the correspondence of a certain Mrs. French as worthy to rank with Horace Walpole’s. “Would you desire at this day,” says De Quincey, “to read our noble language in its native beauty.. steal the mail bags and break open all the letters in female handwriting. Three out of four will have been written by that class of women who have the most leisure and the most interest in a correspondence by the post,” i.e., “unmarried women above twenty-five.” De Quincey adds that “if required to come forward in some public character” these same ladies “might write ill and affectedly… But in their letters they write under the benefit of their natural advantages.. sustained by some deep sympathy between themselves and their correspondents.” “Authors can’t write letters,” says Lowell in a letter to Miss Norton. “At best they squeeze out an essay now and then, burying every natural sprout in a dry and dreary sand flood, as unlike as possible to those delightful freshets with which your heart overflows the paper. They are thinking of their punctuation, of crossing their t’s and dotting their i’s, and cannot forget themselves in their correspondent, which I take to be the true recipe for a letter.” And writing to another correspondent, C. E. Norton, he says: “The habits of authorship are fatal to the careless unconsciousness that is the life of a letter… But worse than all is that lack of interest in one’s self that comes of drudgery – for I hold that a letter which is not mainly about the writer of it lacks the prime flavor.” This is slightly paradoxical, for, I repeat, the best published letters are commonly the work of professional literati. Byron’s letters have been preferred by some readers to his poetry, such are their headlong vigor, dash, verve, spontaneity, the completeness of their self-expression. Keats was par excellence the literary artist; yet nothing can exceed the artlessness, simplicity, and sympathetic self-forgetfulness with which he writes to his little sister. But it is easy to see what Lowell means. Charles Lamb’s letters, e.g., though in many respects charming, are a trifle too composed. They have that trick of quaintness which runs through the “Essays of Elia,” but which gives an air of artificiality to a private letter. He is practising a literary habit rather than thinking of his correspondent. In this most intimate, personal, and mutual of arts, the writer should write to his friend what will interest him as well as himself. He should not dwell on hobbies of his own; nor describe his own experiences at too great length. It is all right to amuse his friend, but not to air his own cleverness. Lowell’s letters are delightful, and, by and large, I would place them second to none in the language. But they are sometimes too literary and have the faults of his prose writing in general. Wit was always his temptation, misleading him now and then into a kind of Yankee smartness and a disposition to show off. His temperament was buoyant, impulsive; there was to the last a good deal of the boy about Lowell. Letter writing is a friendly art, and Lowell’s warm expressions of love for his friends are most genuine. His epistolary style, like his essay style, is lavish and seldom chastened or toned down to the exquisite simplicity which distinguishes the best letters of Gray and Cowper. And so Lowell is always getting in his own way, tripping himself up over his superabundance of matter. Still, as a whole, I know no collected letters richer in thought, humor, and sentiment. And one may trace in them, read consecutively, the gradual ripening and refining of a highly gifted mind and a nature which had at once nobility and charm of thought.

Lowell speaks admiringly of Emerson’s “gracious impersonality.” Now impersonality is the last thing we expect of a letter writer. Emerson could write a good letter on occasion, as may be seen by a dip almost anywhere into the Carlyle-Emerson correspondence. But when Mr. Cabot was preparing his life of Emerson and applied to Henry James, Senior, for permission to read his letters to Emerson, Mr. James replied, not without a touch of petulance: “Emerson always kept one at such arm’s length, tasting him and sipping him and trying him, to make sure that he was worthy of his somewhat prim and bloodless friendship, that it was fatiguing to write him letters. I can’t recall any serious letter I ever sent him. I remember well what maidenly letters I used to receive from him.” We know what doctrine Emerson held on the subject of “persons.” But it is just this personality which makes Lowell the prince of letter writers. He may attract, he may irritate, but he never fails to interest us in himself. Even in his books it is the man in the book that interests most.

Women write good letters because they are sympathetic; because they take personal rather than abstract views; because they stay at home a great deal and are interested in little things and fond of exchanging confidences and news. They like to receive letters as well as to write them. The fact that Richardson found his most admiring readers among the ladies was due perhaps not only to the sentimentality of his novels, but to their epistolary form. Hence there is apt to be a touch of the feminine in the most accomplished letter writers. They are gossips, like Horace Walpole, or dilettanti like Edward Fitzgerald, or shy, reserved, sensitive persons like Gray and Cowper, who live apart, retired from the world in a retirement either cloistral or domestic; who have a few friends and a genius for friendship, enjoy the exercise of their pens, feel the need of unbosoming themselves, but are not ready talkers. Above all they are not above being interested in trifles and little things. Cowper was absorbed in his hares, his cucumber frames and gardening, country walks, tea-table chat, winding silk for Mrs. Unwin. Lamb was unceasingly taken up with the oddities and antiquities of London streets, the beggars, the chimney sweeps, the old benchers, the old bookstalls, and the like. Gray fills his correspondence with his solitary pursuits and recreations and tastes: Gothic curiosities, engravings, music sheets, ballads, excursions here and there. The familiar is of the essence of good letter writing: to unbend, to relax, to desipere in loco, to occupy at least momentarily the playful and humorous point of view. Solemn, prophetic souls devoted to sublimity are not for this art. Dante and Milton and “old Daddy” Wordsworth, as Fitzgerald calls him, could never have been good letter writers: they were too great to care about little things, too high and rigid to stoop to trifles.

Letter writing is sometimes described as a colloquial art. Correspondence, it is said, is a conversation kept up between interlocutors at a distance. But there is a difference: good talkers are not necessarily good letter writers, and vice versa. Coleridge, e.g., was great in monologue, but his letters are in no way remarkable. Cowper, on the other hand, did not sparkle in conversation, and Gray was silent in company, “dull,” Dr. Johnson called him. Johnson himself, notoriously a most accomplished talker, does not shine as a letter writer. His letters, frequently excellent in substance, are ponderous in style. They are of the kind best described as “epistolary correspondence.” The Doctor needed the give and take of social intercourse to allay the heaviness of his written discourse. His talk was animated, pointed, idiomatic, but when he sat down and took pen in hand, he began to translate, as Macaulay said, from English into Johnsonese. His celebrated letter of rebuke to Lord Chesterfield labors under the weight of its indignation, is not free from pomposity and pedantry, and is written with an eye to posterity. One can imagine the noble lord, himself an accomplished letter writer, smiling over this oracular sentence: “The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and found him a native of the rocks.” Heine’s irony, Voltaire’s light touch would have stung more sharply, though somewhat of Johnson’s dignified pathos would perhaps have been lost. Orators, in general, are not good letter writers. They are accustomed to the ore rotundo utterance, the “big bow-wow,” and they crave the large audience instead of the audience of one.

The art of letter writing, then, is a relaxation, an art of leisure, of the idle moment, the mind at ease, the bow unbent, the loin ungirt. But there are times in every man’s life when he has to write letters of a tenser mood, utterances of the passionate and agonized crises of the soul, love letters, death messages, farewells, confessions, entreaties. It seems profane to use the word art in such connections. Yet even a prayer, when it is articulate at all, follows the laws of human speech, though directed to the ear that heareth in secret. The collects of the church, being generalized prayer, employ a deliberate art.

Probably you have all been called upon to write letters of condolence and have found it a very difficult thing to do. There is no harder test of tact, delicacy, and good taste. The least appearance of insincerity, the least intrusion of egotism, of an air of effort, an assumed solemnity, a moralizing or edifying pose, makes the whole letter ring false. Reserve is better here than the opposite extreme; better to say less than you feel than even to seem to say more.

There is a letter of Lincoln’s, written to a mother whose sons had been killed in the Civil War, which is a brief model in this kind. I will not cite it here, for it has become a classic and is almost universally known. An engrossed copy of it hangs on the wall of Brasenose College, Oxford, as a specimen of the purest English diction – the diction of the Gettysburg address.