BOOKS AND WRITERS
SOME time ago I found a collection of letters written' between 1838 and 1843 from my grandmother in London (the wife of Lewis Vulliamy, the architect) to her mother in Wales. My grandmother was a well-read though not a literary woman, and there are many things in these letters which are vivid and interesting: the Coronation in 1838, a view of the Queen riding in the Park, a meeting with Faraday, a voyage by steamship in 1838 from Southampton to Havre, many reflections upon the desperate state of public affairs in 1839 (" they are past mending "), accounts of life in an architect's household, the " machinations " of clerks and of servants, the appalling price of asparagus, a choice of pictures- " there is one of a wizard and a fiend at the Royal Academy that 1 think I could have "—some astonishing facts about the rearing of children, and all the cares, joys, hopes. fears and embarrassments of a young wife and a young mother. Very naturally the question of publishing these letters, or parts of them, came into my mind. But I decided, perhaps wrongly, that such letters were not sufficiently well written to have a literary interest, and were not sufficiently old to possess in their own right a definite social or historical value as "documents."
I mention this because it seems to indicate the principles upon which the value of letters, whether "great " or otherwise, must eventually be judged. The letters of a good writer are generally worth printing because they are the productions of a literary mind. Extraordinary people can only rarely be dull or commonplace. When he wrote the shorteit of notes, Byron could Lash or sting in lines that were never forgotten ; and even on a passing social occasion Meredith could write a letter that was luminous with irony, sentiment and whimsical images. Thus letters written by great writers—though not necessarily by men otherwise great—are usually perusable, and are very frequently composed with an eye to the printed page and the edification or entertainment of posterity. What one should never look for in the letters of a writer, except when he is incautiously Fincere, are the unsophisticated effusions of the heart or the natural accents of benignity and affection. There ire no impostors in the world, even when the imposture is innocent, like fine speakers and fine writers. It is rhetoric, style and eloquence Ihat play such dismal havoc among the simple-minded, whether in public or in private.
The best-letters are clearly those of the best writers ; they are, in comparison with books, what sketches are in comparison with pictures, revealing even in a few strokes the unmistakable presence of mastery. But it seems proper to make a distinction between letters vihich are good or great as literature and letters which are interest- ing by virtue of their contents. To the second of these categories belong the letters of men of action, such as fought in ancient wars or made their way to the uttermost parts of the earth or sought the hazards of adventure in foreign lands ; and letters which admit us to the private lives of people who lived long ago ; and those which reveal with alarming clarity the true characters of statesmen, lawyers, generals and other persons of eminence.
To make a selection of published letters may seem an easy matter, hut, in fact, few literary tasks are more difficult. Perhaps the difficulties are the same with all anthologies. The anxious compiler has to think of the people who like their literary provender cut up into easily digested fragments. There seem to be plenty of such people, but you have to avoid the dishing-up of things which have become too familiar. Knowing these difficulties, I have perused kith pleasure and interest, and only a few growls,- a new anthology of letters.* lt is, to be exact, a companion or supplementary volume h one already published, for the first volume of The World's Great 1 fliers appeared in 1941. .
The book is handsomely produced in the American style, with Lnneeessary expanses of blank paper and a journalistic flamboyance
A Second Treasury of the World's Great Letters. Edited by Wallace Brockway and Bart Keith Winer. (Heinemann. 2Is.) in some of the headlines ; for example, "Erasmus refuses to writt against Luther and counsels the Pope to clean house," or "Dorothy Osborne envisions a contented marriage," or " Herman Melville . spills out his artist's soul." This kind of thing makes it suffi- ciently obvious that the book is intended to be a popular work. a book for parlour-reading, and not a book of reference for the student ; but this does not detract fioni the general excellence of the selection and the adequacy of the notes, apart from an occasional maladroit flippancy, undue length, a lumpy style and a slightly jarring colloquialism. It is, however, entirely wrong to say that the "furious bombing of London" began in August, 1940; ii began on September 7th, as many millions of us remember well. Nor can one be much impressed by such an observation as " The beautiful have a way with history " ; and as for the misuse ol " protagonist," that is now so common that it seems futile, even when we have a "motley collection" of them in a single drama, to oppose the prevailing ignorance.
This collection begins with Cicero and ends with a very siIl letter from Stanley Lupin° to his wife. It will be seen that the editors have aimed at comprehensiveness and variety. But the number of letters by any one writer is never more than two, and the principles of choice arc sometimes obscure. None the less, the book provides a fine groundwork for the study of letter-writing.
Great men do not always write great letters. Few posthumous demolitions, in fact. are so complete as the printing of every scrap which a man has been so foolish as to leave behind him—a process lamentably displayed in the case of James Boswell, who is now becoming known as a solemn fool, a sot, a braggart and a lecher. even more contemptible than the wretch depicted by Macaulay. To a lesser extent, and in a very different way, I think the fame of D. H. Lawrence has very perceptibly suffered through the publica- tion of too many of his letters ; and among earlier men who have suffered the same fate one of the most obvious examples is Thackeray. Minoi damage of reputation may be caused, inversely, by the publication of a few ill-chosen letters. For instance, in this volume Johnson is represented by a single letter, and it happens to be the stupid and rude letter which he wrote to Macpherson. By no reckoning can such a spurt of irritability be regarded as "great." Similarly the two Byron letters which are here presented are among the least entertaining that he wrote, and it is curious to find him absent from the little group which is headed "Satire and Irony."
What is tragically observable in following the course and evolution of letter-writing from happier times to the present day is the shift of emphasis from the generally unmomentous affairs of a contented private life to the horrors and alarms of the world at large, and a sense, not always very al ticulate, of the unsteadiness of civilisation and the loss of spiritual hope. This tendency reached a climax in D. H. Lawrence and the letter-writers of his time ; they felt, with Katherine Mansfield, " the ugliness of life "—an ugliness that, in 1941, was to overwhelm the gentle and exquisitely sensitive mind of Virginia Woolf. Compare, by way of illustration, the leisured complacency and the competent ease of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century letter-writers with all the hurry and uneasiness the strained excitement, the jangle and agony of so many of the letters written since 1914. Who, living in the English world of today, could write with such comfortable and undistracted wit and with such a considered fluency of style as you will find in the letters of Edward FitzGerald in the nineteenth century and of Horace Walpole and a dozen others in the eighteenth ? Our characters today are shown by a method of selected repression, the choice of what we conceal and avoid. Only thus, by the sacrifice of candour, may we prevent others from sharing our despondency.
Finally, in running once again through the series, I cannot but regret the omission of letters belonging to part of my second cate- gory—letters which, though hardly " great," would have illustrated the daily rounds and the private lives of those who are now so remote from us in time and circumstance. But the book, within its limitations, is highly commendable. C. E. VULLIAMY.
Previous page
