OARDIN.A fs NEWMAN'S VIEW OF LETTER. WRITING.
31 ISS MOZLEY heads her interesting and frequently fascinating volumes containing the letters written by Cardinal Newman while still an Anglican to his family and friends, with a passage in one of his letters to his sister, written on May 18th, 1863 :—" It has ever been a hobby of mine," he writes, "though perhaps it is a truism, not a hobby, that the true life of a man is in his
letters Not only for the interest of a biography, but for arriving at the inside of things, the publication of letters is the true method. Biographers varnish, they assign motives, they conjecture feelings, they interpret Lord Burleigh's nods ; but contemporary letters are facts." No doubt they are ; but what can be more misleading than some facts P Footprints found on the scene of a burglary are fdets ; yet if the boots or shoes of which the print is left on the soft soil were stolen from some innocent person, and used expressly in order to mislead, the facts will give the wrong clue rather than the right. So, too, Byron's letters are facts, and very important facts, concerning Byron ; but they are facts which require a good deal of very cautious and yet necessarily very speculative handling, if they are not to furnish a most misleading clue to Byron's nature and character. Nor is it only in the case of persons whose letters are more or less intentionally artificial, that it is far from a truism, a serious mistake, to treat the letters of a man as necessarily revealing the true character. There are plenty of people who are constitutionally unable to express their real nature in their letters, whether from want of general ease and pliancy of mind, or want of familiarity with the particular art of letter-writing. Burns, for instance, hardly ever wrote letters which would represent his true nature at all ; nor, in- deed, did Dr. Johnson. You see the true Johnson, as you see the true Luther, in his table.talk ; but you would hardly ever discover either the true Johnson or the true Luther in their letters, a kind of medium in Which neither of them moved easily. And so, too, it was with Coleridge, whose table-talk is as much superior to his long-drawn and diffuse letters as a mode of expressing his real character, as a surprise is better than a cross-examination for letting the light into a half-realised motive. One man will be best seen in his actions, a second in his letters, a third in his conversa- tion, and a fourth in his efforts to enter into and appraise the life of others. There is no fixed rule in the matter. There have been men and women, and not a few of them, whose letters have revealed their inner nature as nothing else could have done. Cicero was such a man, so was Cowper, so was Charles Lamb, so was, in the higlsest sense, Newman him- self, especially, perhaps, in his later years. But it is by no means true that letters always give a good measure of a man. They are often an opaque screen between the writer and the reader, instead of a glass which reflects the writer so that the reader can study him. Goethe's letters, for instance, seem Co us very seldom of the essence of him. His conversa- tions with Eekermann are ten times as characteristic as his rather unreal letters in which he seldom seems to have been at his ease, but to have expatiated with a good deal of almost artificial mannerism. So, too, Emerson's letters are better than Carlyle's, and Mrs. Carlyle's than either. It is curious, but true, that very few men, very few even of men of genius, express themselves happily in their letters. Coleridge overflowed, became long-winded, and wandering; Wordsworth prosed didactically ; even Carlyle lost a good deal of the vividness of his literary style, without gaining anything by way of ease to compensate for the loss. We do not think it would be difficult to lay down the principal qualities without possessing which a man's letters will hardly be a good mirror of his real mind. And though undoubtedly they will be qualities which Cardinal Newman himself possessed in the very highest degree, especially after the impetuousness of youth had subsided, they will be qualities in which very many eminent men of whom, nevertheless, we want to have a true picture, were deficient.
In the first place, in order to write expressive letters, a man. must have a certain amount of real pleasure in thinking of himself. Of Course we do not mean that he must be self- occupied or selfish, which would at once destrey the charm of his letters, but that he must more or less Iesa subject of real interest to himself, as Cardinal Newman, and Cowper, and Charles Lamb, and Mrs. Carlyle, and the poet Gray, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Cicero, and, in short, all the most charming and lively letter-writers in the world, always have been. Any one might have observed in the whole history of the "Apologia pro Vita sua," how keen the legitimate interest of Newman in himself always was. We had occasion to observe it again when Lord Malmesbury, in his Reminiscences, gave an account of the want of discipline in Newman's classes which Newman knew to be unjust, and was most eager to correct. So, too, it appears vividly in Miss Moaley's volumes just published, where the Cardinal tells us frankly how he made up his mind that the letters he had written before he became a Catholic must be edited by one of his Anglican friends or relations, and only those written since, by a Catholic. The subject of the de- velopment of his own life and thoughts always interested him deeply. He felt none of the impatience and disgust in thinking about himself which very much more selfish men often do feel in considering their own careers. On the contrary, it was a pleasant subject to him, which awakened his imagination and his higher interests. Mins, he writes to his mother, knowing that it would please her fa hear that he had been well-satisfied with himself : have been humming, whistling, and laughing loud to myself all day." And again, some years later, writing about his college duties and the difficulties with his pupils which they involved, he tells his mother and sisters, with genuine gaiety of heart,—" We are having rows as thick as blackberries. What a thing it is to be vigorous J. [Jemima], and to be dignified H. [Harriett]. I am so dignified, it is quite overpowering." You may see precisely the same innocent sort of pleasure in his own doings in Cowper's letters, and the same vivid pleasure in her own doings, if not one quite so thildlike, in Mrs. Carlyle's. It is greatly because you don't see it in Carlyle's own letters, nor in Schiller's, nor in Goethe's, nor in Wordsworth's, nor generally in Coleridge's, that their letters are by no means the same SI:MCC of interest to the reader that is to be found in many of their other works.
But egotistic letters are never really good. It is not egotism to have a real interest in yourself; it is egotism only when you show that your interest in yourself predominates over your interest in any one else. Good letters suggest just the opposite idea. All Cardinal Nesvman's letters show him to be interested in himself, but to be all the time .much more interested in the 'person to whom he is writing. His interest in himself is quite subordinate to that deeper interest, and is only manifested because it gives pleasure to his correspondent. Thus, when he has his sister Harriett with him away from home, he writes a playful complaint to his sister Jemima "Harriett is very stingy, and dribbles out her morsels of information from letters occasionally and graciously, and I have told her 1 mean to complain to you of it. I, on the contrary, am most liberal to her of my letters. And in her acts of grace she quietly tells me what you and Mary, &c., say in her words. Now, it is not so much for the mailer of letters that I like to read them, as for their being written by those I love. It is nothing, then, to tell me that so-and-so tells no news,' 'says nothing,' &a. ; for if he or she says nothing, yet he or she says, and the saying is the thing. Am I not very sensible ?" What could be better put, and how vividly it suggests the deep personal interest which Newman felt in the attitude of mind of his correspondents. Now, letter-writers who do not feel this keen interest in the very manner and mode of speech of those to whom they write, never acquire the art of letter-writing, and their letters often rather hide them from view instead of presenting them vividly to those who read their letters.
And again, it is essential for the success of letters in giving us an image of the writer, that he or she shall have a lively and natural way of saying the thing that is the subject of the letter. A letter should not be a disquisition or an essay. It should be a more vivid kind of talk. We say more vivid, because talk alWays has the advantage of voice and expression to help the meaning, while in a letter the writer sometimes forgets that it will not be read in the playful, or mock-serious, or careless, cheery sense in which it is written. There are many good letter-writers whose letters give no pleasure, and are, indeed, misunderstood, because, though they say precisely the things which they would say by word of mouth, they do not seem to say them in the same way, but appear to be contemptuous when the writer was only a little impatient, or angry when he was only whimsical, or bored when he was only out of spirits. The best letter-writers have the happy art of making the reader see by some turn in the expression which probably would not be needed, and therefore would not be used, in conversa- tion, in what key of feeling the writer really is ; in a word, of giving him some hint of the true drift, such as his voice and smile would give if he were talking and not writing. And this art Cardinal Newman, at all events in his later days, possessed in perhaps a higher degree of perfection than any other letter-writer of this century.
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