THE TYRANNY OF CORRESPONDENCE.
THE classic age of letter-writing, like that of chivalry, is gone, although no Burke has been found yet to utter its splendid funeral oration. It is of course true that more letters are written every day in England now than were written every year a century ago, even taking into consideration the difference in population. But there are letters and letters. Correspondence on business, hurried notes containing invita- tions to dinner or acceptances thereof,—these are the missives which fill the bag of the letter-carrier. No, there is one kind of correspondence that, even in our days of telephones and phonographs, is immortal The love-letter, we presume, still holds its sway ; and if we are to judge from the revela- tions of breach of promise cases, is as full of sugary senti- mentalism as in the days of Lydia Languish. But the letter as it has passed into literature, the letter whose highest claim to be treated as art is that it conceals art, the letter as written by William Cowper, or Oliver Goldsmith, or Horace Walpole, or Miss Burney----that charming epistle intended only for the affectionate perusal of friends, and yet of such value to the historian of life and manners—shall we say that it has disappeared from the busy modern world, killed by the " railway and the steamship and the thoughts that shake mankind " ? At least it is now but a rare product, a fragile flower scarcely able to maintain itself in our altered social soil.
Correspondence from being a cherished art and solace has in our day tended to become what is called in slang a " grind." It is " snippety," like the cheap newspapers, a sort of " bits " or " cuts," giving hints which require to be filled out, only that the receiver has hardly time for that mental process. Doubt- less there are here and there quiet persons who still cherish the implied conviction of White of Selborne, that the budding of a-new flower, or the spring arrival of another bird from the south, is as important an event as the Anglo-German agreement or the Presidential Election, but the recent books on these themes, interesting as some of them are, will all be forgotten while our still distant ancestors are reading the correspondence of the Selborne parson. Truth to tell, a great deal of our letter-writing is boredom, the source of irrita- tion and weariness to those who are called on to undertake it. We are reminded of this by the somewhat pathetic letter from Mr. Herbert Spencer, printed in the New York Journal, in which the philosopher begs to be excused from replying to correspondents on the ground that in his declining years he has no time or energy for writing on all manner of difficult subjects to all the persons who either genuinely desire en- lightenment or who (as is more probable) wish to " draw " an eminent thinker and perhaps preserve his autograph in their collection.
It is one of the misfortunes of the modern rapid trans- mission of news and thought that, while destroying the old
leisure which made the artistic letter possible, it has made thousands of people acquainted with the great writers of our time in a hurried, superficial kind of way, creating a morbid
desire for controverting what are supposed to be their views, or for suggesting to them points which they may not have considered, and which are probably utterly irrelevant. Not a Living writer but has had experience of this " crank." Even to reply to him in the celebrated words of Dr. Johnson, " Sir, I have given you arguments, I cannot provide you with an understanding," costs pen, ink, and paper, and usually a postage stamp, which the correspondent rarely furnishes. But to enter on a serious campaign of letter-writing with all and sundry costs a loss of time, an expenditure of energy, and, in some cases, a friction of the nervous system which no statistics can adequately express. This tyranny of corre- spondence is, it may be urged, a condition of intellectual great- ness ; it is one of the penalties a great writer has to pay. But it might surely be assumed that the writer has said what he has to say in his book ; that is what he wrote it for, and if he never thought of some hint or argument which his correspondent is good enough to suggest to him, he is not quite the great writer he is taken for. In any case, his shortcomings are sure to be pointed out by a critic of his own calibre in a work which he can quietly study in his library free from the intrusion of bores and spies. A still worse form of this tyranny which the cheap postal system: lias made possible is the letter which demands one's views of par- ticular subjects with which he does not profess, and never has professed, to deal. A man of letters uses tobacco, or drinks old port, or walks ten miles a day, or reads sensational novels, and instantly hundreds of persons who have heard of the fact bombard him with letters asking the reason why. One imagines that there are some writers who do not venerate the memory of Rowland Rill. But there is, let it be frankly admitted, another side to this question of correspondence, as there is to nearly every fact in this imperfect world. You are rendered almost insane by the click, click of the telephone, and are willing to curse its inven- tor, and to subscribe to a fund for its destruction. But next door some father may be blessing this very instrument for instantaneous news of his dying child. The same postbag which contains the deadly missive of the bore may also hold the well-considered and intelligent thanks of the serious student; and what more grateful message for the writer than that ? The literary review can never be quite so delightful as the personal communication from a student who takes the trouble to tell you how much he owes to you. Think what Goethe's letter to Carlyle must have meant amid all the dull, unenlightened chatter of the English reviews. Even the " trivial fond records " of the average domestic letter consti- tute an important part of one's life. The tendency in our time is to scattering. Families do not live in the old-fashioned solidarity, but go to the ends of the earth, break up, separate far and wide. Science, which has produced this new exodus, has also in part provided that, if bodily separation there must be, there shall at least be no separation of mind. The ship which bears the emigrant from his old home also bears the letters from the father and mother, the old friends, and so the continuity of life is maintained, the threads of human association are kept together. Not a few of these letters, rough and broken, as they are, are veritable human documents; if we could collect them, we might find that their contemplation was by no means beneath the "dignity of history." If the letter as a leisured artistic product is largely a thing of the past, the letter as a distinct, spontaneous expression of individual thought and feeling, the outcome of widespread ability to read and write, and of the inventions of modern science, is a great fact which has added permanently to the happiness of the many. To the thinker, whose daily work lies in writing, correspondence must be in the main a tyranny ; to those who labour in the office or the shop it is a kind of liberation from the drudgery of the daily round.
Previous page
