A Letter Book. Saintsbury George

showed (on Fluellen's principles convincingly) that he had more in common with the Goddess Juno than the J in both their names—that is to say an insanabile vulnus of vanity—there remain sources of mistakes and prejudice which have been all too freely tapped. The miscellaneous letters—which show sides of him quite different from those most in evidence throughout the "Letters to his Son"—are rarely read: these latter have been, at least once and probably oftener, made into a schoolbook for translation into other languages—an office by no means likely to conciliate affection. And even when they are not suspected of positive immorality there is a too general idea that they are frivolously and trivially didactic—the sort of thing that Mr. Turveydrop the elder might have written on Deportment—if he had had brains enough. Yet again, unbiassed appreciation of them has been hampered by all sorts of idle controversies as to the kind of man that young Stanhope actually turned out to be—a point of merely gossiping importance in any case, and, whatever be the facts of this one, having no more to do with the merit of the letters than the other fact that some people make mistakes in their accounts after having learnt the multiplication table has to do with the value of that composition. As a matter of relevant fact the letters—except (and even here the accusations against them are much exaggerated) from the point of view of very severe morality in regard to one or two points—perhaps no more than one—are full of sound advice, clear common-sense, and ripe experience of the world. The manners they recommend are not those of any but a very exceptional "dancing master," they are those of a gentleman. The temper that they inculcate and that they exhibit in the inculcator is positively kindly and relatively correct. Both these and the other batch of "Letters to his Godson" and successor in the Earldom (the Lord Chesterfield for forging whose name Dr. Dodd was hanged) show the most curious and unusual pains on the part of a man admitted to be in the highest degree a man of the world, and sometimes accused of being nothing else, to make himself intelligible and agreeable to young—at first very young—boys. In his letters to older folk, both men and women, qualities for which there was no room in the others arise—the thoughts of a statesman and a philosopher, the feelings of a being quite different from the callous, frivolous, sometimes "insolent"[15] worldling who has been so often put in the place of the real Chesterfield. And independently of all this there is present in all these letters—though most attractively in those to his son—a power of literary expression which would have made the fortune of any professional writer of the time. If Chesterfield's literary taste was too often decided by the fashionable limitations of this time, it was, within those limitations, accomplished: and it was accompanied, as mere taste very often is not, by no small command of literary production. He could and did write admirable light verse; his wit in conversation is attested in the most final fashion by his enemy Horace Walpole, and some of the passages in the letters where he indulges in description or even dialogue are by no means unworthy of the best genteel comedy of the time. But he could also, as was said of someone else, be "nobly serious," as in his "character" writing and elsewhere. His few contributions to the half-developed periodical literature of his day show how valuable he would have been to the more advanced Review or Magazine of the nineteenth century: and if he had chosen to write Memoirs they would probably have been among the best in English.[16] Now the Memoir and the Letter are perhaps the most straitly and intimately connected forms of literature.

      horace walpole

      Horace Walpole—like his two contemporaries, fellow-members of English aristocratic society, acquaintances and objects of aversion just discussed—has been the subject of very various opinions. Johnson (of whom he himself spoke with ignorant contempt and who did not know his letters, but did know some of his now half-forgotten published works) dismissed him with good-natured belittlement. Macaulay made him the subject of some of the most unfortunately exaggerated of those antitheses of blame and praise which, in the long run, have done the writer more harm than his subjects. To take one example less likely to be known to English readers, the wayward and prejudiced, but often very acute French critic already mentioned, Barbey d'Aurevilly, though he admits Horace's esprit pronounces it un fruit brillant, amer, et glacé. There are undoubtedly many things to be said against him as a man—if you take the "Letters-a-telltale-of-character" view, especially so. He was certainly spiteful, and he had the particularly awkward—though from one point of view not wholly unamiable—peculiarity of being what may be called spiteful at second hand. To stand up for your friends at the proper time and in the proper place is the duty, and should be the pleasure, of every gentleman. But to bite and for the most part, if not almost always, to back-bite your friends' supposed enemies—often when they have done nothing adverse to those friends on the particular occasion—is the act at the best of an intempestively officious person, at the worst of a cur. And Horace was always doing this in regard to all sorts of people—his abuse of Johnson himself, of Chesterfield and Lady Mary, of Fielding and others, having no personal excuse or reason whatsoever.

      His taste in collecting, building, etc., is not a matter in which men of other times should be too ready to throw stones, for taste in all such matters at almost all times, however sure a stronghold it may seem to those who occupy it, is the most brittle of glass-houses to others. He had also a considerable touch of almost original genius in important kinds of literature, as The Mysterious Mother and The Castle of Otranto showed—a touch which undoubtedly helped him in his letters. But of critical power he had nothing at all; and his knowledge (save, perhaps in Art) was anything but extensive and still less accurate. Politically he was a mere baby, all the eighty years of his life; though he passed many of them in the House of Commons and might have passed several in the House of Lords, had he chosen to attend it. When he was young he was a theoretical republican rejoicing in the execution of Charles I.: when he was old the French Revolution was to him anathema and he was horrified at the execution of Louis XVI. He was incapable of sustaining, perhaps of understanding, an argument: everything with him was a matter, as the defamers of women say it is with them, of personal and arbitrary fancy, prejudice, or whim.

      But all this does not prevent him from being one of the best letter-writers in the English language: and if you take bulk of work along with variety of subject; maintenance of interest and craftsmanship as well as bulk, perhaps the very best of all. The latest standard edition of his letters, to which additions are still being made, is in sixteen well-filled volumes, and there are probably few readers of good taste and fair knowledge who would object if it could be extended to sixty. There is perhaps no body of epistles except Madame de Sévigné's own—which Horace fervently admired and, assisted perhaps by the feminine element in his own nature, copied assiduously—exhibiting the possible charm of letter-writing more distinctly or more copiously.

      To examine the nature of this charm a little cannot be irrelevant in such an Introduction as this: and from what has just been said it would seem that these letters will form as good a specimen for examination as any. They are not very much "mannerised": indeed, nobody but Thackeray, in the wonderful chapter of The Virginians where Horace is made to describe his first interview with one of the heroes, has ever quite imitated them. Their style, though recognisable at once, is not a matter so much of phrase as of attitude. His revelations of character—his own that is to say, for Horace was no conjuror with any one else's—are constant but not deeply drawn. He cannot, or at least does not, give a plot of any kind: every letter is a sort of review of the subject—larger or smaller—from the really masterly accounts of the trial of the Jacobite Lords after the "Forty-five" to the most trivial notices of people going to see "Strawberry"; of remarkable hands at cards; of Patty Blount (Pope's Patty) in her autumn years passing his windows with her gown tucked up because of the rain. Art and letters appear; travelling and visiting; friendship and society; curious belated love-making with the Miss Berrys; scandal (a great deal of it); charity (a little, but more than the popular conception of Horace allows for); the court-calendar, club life, almost all manner of things except religion (though it is said Horace had an early touch of Methodism) and really serious thought of any kind, form the budget of his letter-bag. And it is all handled with the most unexpected equality of success. There is of course nothing very "arresting." Cooking chickens in a sort of picnic with madcap ladies, and expecting "the dish to fly about our ears" is perhaps the most exciting incident[17] of the sixteen volumes and seven or eight thousand pages. But everywhere there is interest; and that of a kind that does not stale itself.

      The fact would seem to be that the