There is perhaps still something to be said as to the apparently almost pre-established harmony between the eighteenth century and letter-writing. It concerns what has been called the "Peace of the Augustans"; the at least comparative freedom alike from the turmoil of passion and the most riotous kinds of fun. Tragedy may be very fine in letters, as it may be anywhere: but it is in them the most dangerous,[11] most rarely successful and most frequently failed-in of all motives—again as it is everywhere. Comedy in letters is good: but it should be fairly "genteel" comedy, such as this age excelled in—not roaring Farce. An "excruciatingly funny" letter runs the risk of being excruciating in a sadly literal sense. Now the men of good Queen Anne and the first three Georges were not given to excess, in these ways at any rate; and there are few better examples of the happy mean than the best of their letters. The person who is bored by any one of those sets which have been mentioned must bring the boredom with him—as, by the way, complainers of that state of suffering do much oftener than they wot of. Nor is much less to be said of scores of less famous epistolers of the time, from the generation of Berkeley and Byrom to that of Scott and Southey.
swift
To begin with Swift, it is a scarcely disputable fact that opinions about this giant of English literature—not merely as to his personal character, though perhaps this has had more to do with the matter than appears on the surface, but as to his exact literary value—have differed almost incomprehensibly. Johnson thought, or at least affected to think, that A Tale of a Tub could not be Swift's, because it was too good for him, and that "Tom Davies might have written The Conduct of the Allies": while on the other hand Thackeray, indulging in the most extravagant denunciation of Swift as a man, did the very fullest, though not in the least too full, homage to his genius. But one does not know many things more surprising in the long list of contradictory criticisms of man and genius alike, than Mr. Herbert Paul's disapproval of the Journal to Stella as letters while admitting its excellence as "narrative."[12] To other judges these are some of the most perfect letters in existence, some of the most absolutely genuine and free from the slightest taint of writing for publication; some of the most extraordinarily blended of intense intimacy which is neither ridiculous nor productive of the shame-faced feeling that you ought not to have heard it; and full of that dealing with matters less intimate but still interesting to both correspondents which displays the "narrative" excellence conceded by this acute critic. It must of course be remembered that these "Journal-letters" are by no means Swift's only proofs of his epistolary expertness. The Vanessa ones perhaps display a little of the hopelessly enigmatic character which spreads like a mist over the whole of that ill-starred relationship: but they make all the more useful contrast to the "wholeheartedness"—one may even use that word in reference to the little bit of what we may call constructive deception as to "the other person"—of those to her rival.[13] Those to Pope (of which so shabby a use was made by their strangely constituted recipient), to Bolingbroke and others are among the best of friendly letters: and the curious batch to the Duchess of Queensberry might be classed with those "court-paying" letters of man to woman which are elsewhere more particularly noted. But the "Stella" or "Stella-cum-Dingley" division (if that most singular of value-completing zeros is to be brought in) is a thing by itself. Perhaps appreciating or not appreciating the "little language" is a matter very largely of personal constitution, and the failure to appreciate is (like colour-blindness or other physical deficiencies) a thing to be sorry for, not to condemn. But one might have thought that even if what we may call "feeling" of this were absent there would be an intellectual understanding of the way in which it completes the whole-heartedness just mentioned—the manner in which the writer deals with politics, society, letters, the common ways of life, and his own passion—this last sometimes in the fore-sometimes in the background, but never far off. Other letters, from Horace Walpole's downwards, may contain a panorama of life as brilliant as these give, or more brilliant. Yet it is too frequently a panorama or a puppet show, or at the best a marvellously acted but somewhat bloodless drama. On the other hand, the pure passion-letters lack as a rule this many-sidedness. With Swift we get both. Seldom has any collection shown us more varied interests. But through it all there is an anticipation of the knell of this commerce of his—"Only a woman's hair"—and that hair threads, in subtle fashion, the whole of the Journal, turning the panorama to something felt as well as seen, and the puppet-show to realities of flesh and blood.
That this magical transforming element is wanting in a most remarkable pair of contemporaries, Chesterfield and "Lady Mary," has been generally allowed; though a strong fight has been made by some of her sisters for "my lady" and though the soundest criticism allows that "my lord" did not so much lack as dissemble heart and even sometimes showed the heart he had. It would be out of our proper line to discuss such questions here at any length. It may be enough to warn readers who have not yet had time to look into the matter for themselves that Pope's coarse attacks on Lady Mary and Johnson's fine rhetorical rebuff of Chesterfield were unquestionably outbursts of hurt personal pride. Horace Walpole made hits at both for reasons which we may call personal at second-hand, because the one was a friend of his sister-in-law and the other an enemy of his father. As for Dickens' caricature of "Sir John Chester" in Barnaby Rudge it is not so much a caricature as a sheer and inexcusable libel. Anyhow, the letters of the Earl and the Lady are exceedingly good reading. Persons of no advanced years who have been introduced to them in the twentieth century have been known to find them positively captivating: and their attractions are, not merely as between the two but even in each case by itself, singularly various. Lady Mary's forte—perhaps in direct following of her great forerunner and part namesake, Marie de Sévigné, though she spoke inadvisedly of her—lies in description of places and manners, and in literary criticism.[14] Her accounts of her Turkish journey in earlier days, and of some scenes in Italy later, of her court and other experiences, etc., rank among the best things of the kind in English; and her critical acuteness, assisted as it was by no small possession of what might almost be called scholarship, was most remarkable for her time. Also, she does all these things naturally—with that naturalness at which—when they possess it at all—women are so much better than men. People say a lady can never pass a glass without looking at herself. (One thinks by the way one has seen men do that.) But after all what the glass gives is a reflection and record of nature: and women learn to see it in others as well as in themselves.
chesterfield
Few English writers have suffered more injustice in popular estimation than Chesterfield.