Modern Letters
AMONG the commonplaces, this one takes a prominent place — that the art of letter writing is dead; that it flourished in the days of the frank, dwindled under the penny post, and was dealt its death blow by the telephone — now it lies feebly expiring. Once in a way it might be well to look into this truism, to examine the day’s post, to compare the flimsy sheets of to-day, rapidly written over in such various hands with those statelier compositions that were a week, or perhaps a month, on the road, and were, therefore, written in much better hands upon paper that still lies crisp between thumb and finger.
There, of course, lie some of the chief distinctions between the old letters and the new, more care, more time went to their composition. But need we take it for granted that care and time are wholly to the good? A letter then was written to be read and not by one person only. It was a composition that did its best to deserve the expense it cost. The arrival of the post was an occasion. The sheets were not for the waste-paper basket in five minutes, but for handing round, and reading aloud and then for deposit in some family casket as a record. These undoubtedly were inducements to careful composition, to the finishing of sentences, the artful disposition of trifles, the polish of phrases, the elaboration of arguments and the arts of the writing master. But whether Sir William Temple, who wished to know if Dorothy was well and happy and to be assured that she loved him, enjoyed her letters as much as we enjoy them is perhaps doubtful. Sir Horace Mann or West or Gray did not, one guesses, break the seals of Walpole’s thick packets in a hurry. One can imagine that they waited for a good fire, and a bottle of wine, and a group of friends and then read the witty and delightful pages aloud, in perfect confidence that nothing was going to be said that was too private for another ear — indeed, the very opposite was the case — such wit, such polish, such a budget of news was too good for a single person and demanded to be shared with others. Often, more often than not, the great letter writers were suppressed novelists, frustrated essayists born before their time. In our day, Dorothy Osborne would have been an admirable biographer, and Walpole one of our most distinguished and prolific journalists — whether to the profit or loss of the world it is impossible to say. Indisputably they practised to perfection a peculiar art, born of special circumstances, but to go on, as we in our rash condemnatory mood so often do, to say that their art was the art of letter writing and that we have lost it, and that our art, because it differs from theirs, is no art at all, seems an unnecessary act of pessimism and self-depreciation.
Here, of course, there should be laid down once and for all the principles of letter writing. But since Aristotle never got so far and since the art has always been an anonymous and hand-to-mouth practice, whose chief adepts would have been scandalized had they been convicted of design or intention, it will be more convenient to leave those principles obscure. Let us turn, therefore, without a yard measure to examine the morning’s post, and those posts of other mornings that have been thrust pell-mell into old drawers more from laziness than from any desire to preserve a record for posterity. These pages came by post, were addressed by one person to one person, fell into the letterbox, and were laid on the breakfast table — that is all. In the first place, they are very badly written. Whether the invention of the fountain pen is to blame, certainly a well-formed handwriting is now the rarest of happy discoveries. Moreover, no common style of writing prevails. Here it slants, here it bends back; it is rapid, and running in almost every case. The paper too is of all sizes and coloured blue, green, yellow; much of it is shoddy enough, and coated with some smooth glaze which will no doubt turn traitor before fifty years are passed. This haphazard harum scarum individuality is reflected in the style. There is none at first showing — each writer makes his own. Urgent need is the begetter of most of these pages. The writers have forgotten, or want to know, or wish to be sure, or must remind one. A sentence about the weather may be thrown in as make weight; an initial is scrawled, the stamp stuck on upside down, and so off it goes. The whole affair is purely utilitarian.
Besides these, however, though not so common, are letters written mostly from abroad with the old wish to get into touch with a friend, to give news, to communicate in short what would be said in a private conversation. A friend marooned in a Spanish inn, one travelling in Italy, one who has taken up his residence in India, these are now the nearest representatives of Cowper at Olney writing to Lady Hesketh at Bath. But with what a difference! In the first place nobody would be so rash as to read a modern letter, even from Rangoon, in mixed company. One does not know what is coming next. Modern letter writers are highly indiscreet. Almost certainly there is some phrase that will cause pain. Very careful editing is needed before a letter can be read aloud to friends. And then our conventions allow of so much freedom of speech — language is so colloquial, slap dash, and unpruned that the presence of someone of another generation would be a grave deterrent. What is sincerity might be mistaken for coarseness. Further, the modern letter writer is so casual, and so careless of the forms and ceremonies of literature, that the pages do not stand the ordeal of reading aloud well. But then, on the other hand, the privacy, the intimacy of these letters make them far more immediately interesting and exciting than the old letters. There is no news for the whole world in them, because newspapers have made that unneeded. Only one person is written to, and the writer had some reason for wishing to write to him or her in particular. Its meaning is private, its news intimate. For these reasons it is a rash incriminating document and the proper place for it is not between the pages of the family Bible but in a drawer with a key.
There then, pell-mell, with all their imperfections thick upon them, they are stuffed — to-day’s post on top of yesterday’s post and so on, undocketed, unsorted, as they came. And as the years pass so they accumulate. The drawers are almost bursting with letters; some of the writers are dead, others have vanished; others write no more. What is to be done with them? Let us look quickly through them and see whether the time has not come to burn them. But once begin dipping and diving, reading this and reading that, and what to do with them is completely forgotten. Page after page is turned. Here are invitations to parties ten years old. Here are postcards demanding the return of lost umbrellas. Here are childish sheets thanking for boxes of water-colour paints. Here are calculations about the cost of building a house. Here are long, wild, profuse letters, all about somebody who did not want, it seems, to marry somebody else. The effect is indescribable. One could swear one heard certain voices, smelt certain flowers, was in Italy, was in Spain, was horribly bored, terribly unhappy, tremendously excited all over again. If the art of letter writing consists in exciting the emotions, in bringing back the past, in reviving a day, a moment, nay a very second, of past time, then these obscure correspondents, with their hasty haphazard ways, their gibes and flings, their irreverence and mockery, their careful totting up of days and dates, their general absorption in the moment and entire carelessness what posterity will think of them, beat Cowper, Walpole, and Edward Fitzgerald hollow. Yes, but what to do with them? The question remains, for as one reads it becomes perfectly plain that the art of letter writing has now reached a stage, thanks to the penny post and telephone, where it is not dead — that is the last word to apply to it — but so much alive as to be quite unprintable. The best letters of our time are precisely those that can never be published.
Reading
WHY did they choose this particular spot to build the house on? For the sake of the view perhaps. Not, I suppose, that they looked at views as we look at them, but rather as an incentive to ambition, as a proof of power. For in time they were lords of that valley, green with trees, and owned at least all that part of the moor that lies on the right-hand side of the road. At any rate the house was built here, here a stop was put to trees and ferns; here one room was laid upon another, and down some feet into the earth foundations were thrust and deep cool cellars hollowed out.
The house had
its library; a long low room, lined with little burnished books, folios, and stout blocks of divinity. The cases were carved with birds pecking at clusters of wooden fruit. A sallow priest tended them, dusting the books and the carved birds at the same time. Here they all are; Homer and Euripides; Chaucer; then Shakespeare; and the Elizabethans, and following come the plays of the Restoration, more handled these, and greased as if from midnight reading, and so down to our time or very near it, Cowper, Burns, Scott, Wordsworth and the rest. I liked that room. I liked the view across country that one had from the window, and the blue line between the gap of the trees on the moor was the North Sea. I liked to read there. One drew the pale armchair to the window, and so the light fell over the shoulder upon the page. The shadow of the gardener mowing the lawn sometimes crossed it, as he led his pony in rubber shoes up and down, the machine giving a little creak, which seemed the very voice of summer, as it turned and drew another broad belt of green by the side of the one just cut. Like the wake of ships I used to think them, especially when they curved round the flower beds for islands, and the fuchsias might be lighthouses, and the geraniums, by some freak of fancy, were Gibraltar; there were the red coats of the invincible British soldiers upon the rock.
Then tall ladies used to come out of the house and go down the grass drives to be met by the gentlemen of those days, carrying racquets and white balls which I could just see, through the bushes that hid the tennis lawn, bounding over the net, and the figures of the players passed to and fro. But they did not distract me from my book; any more than the butterflies visiting the flowers, or the bees doing their more serious business on the same blossoms, or the thrushes hopping lightly from the low branches of the sycamore to the turf, taking two steps in the direction of some slug or fly, and then hopping, with light decision, back to the low branch again. None of these things distracted me in those days; and somehow or another, the windows being open, and the book held so that it rested upon a background of escalonia hedges and distant blue, instead of being a book it seemed as if what I read was laid upon the landscape not printed, bound, or sewn up, but somehow the product of trees and fields and the hot summer sky, like the air which swam, on fine mornings, round the outlines of things.
These were circumstances, perhaps, to turn one’s mind to the past. Always behind the voice, the figure, the fountain there seemed to stretch an immeasurable avenue, that ran to a point of other voices, figures, fountains which tapered out indistinguishably upon the furthest horizon. If I looked down at my book I could see Keats and Pope behind him, and then Dryden and Sir Thomas Browne — hosts of them merging in the mass of Shakespeare, behind whom, if one peered long enough, some shapes of men in pilgrims’ dress emerged, Chaucer perhaps, and again — who was it? some uncouth poet scarcely able to syllable his words; and so they died away.
But, as I say, even the gardener leading his pony was part of the book, and, straying from the actual page, the eye rested upon his face, as if one reached it through a great depth of time. That accounted for the soft swarthy tint of the cheeks, and the lines of his body, scarcely disguised by the coarse brown stuff of his coat, might have belonged to any labouring man in any age, for the clothing of the field labourer has changed little since Saxon days, and a half-shut eye can people a field much as it was before the Norman conquest. This man took his place naturally by the side of those dead poets. He ploughed; he sowed; he drank; he marched in battle sometimes; he sang his song; he came courting and went underground raising only a green wave in the turf of the churchyard, but leaving boys and girls behind him to continue his name and lead the pony across the lawn, these hot summer mornings.
Through that same layer of time one could see, with equal clearness, the more splendid figures of knights and ladies. One could see them; that is true. The ripe apricot of the ladies’ dress, the gilt crimson of the knights set floating coloured images in the dark ripples of the lake water. In the church too you see them laid out as if in triumphant repose, their hands folded, their eyes shut, their favourite hounds at their feet, and all the shields of their ancestors, faintly touched still with blue and red, supporting them. Thus garnished and made ready they seem to await, to expect, in confidence. The day of judgment dawns. His eyes open, his hand seeks hers, he leads her forth through the opened doors and the lines of angels with their trumpets, to some smoother lawn, more regal residence and mansions of whiter masonry. Meanwhile, the silence is scarcely broken by a word. It is, after all, a question of seeing them.
For the art of speech came late to England. These Fanshawes and Leghs, Verneys, Pastons, and Hutchinsons, all well endowed by birth and nature and leaving behind them such a treasure of inlaid wood and old furniture, things curiously made and delicately figured, left with it only a very broken message or one so stiff that the ink seems to have dried as it traced the words. Did they, then, enjoy these possessions in silence, or was the business of life transacted in a stately way to match these stiff polysyllables and branching periods? Or, like children on a Sunday, did they compose themselves and cease their chatter when they sat down to write what would pass from hand to hand, serve for winter gossip round a dozen firesides, and be laid up at length with other documents of importance in the dry room above the kitchen fireplace?
“In October, as I told you,” wrote Lady Fanshawe some time about the year 1601, “my husband and I went into France by way of Portsmouth where, walking by the seaside... two ships of the Dutch shot bullets at us, so near that we heard them whiz by us: at which I called my husband to make haste back, and began to run. But he altered not his pace, saying, if we must be killed, it were as good to be killed walking as running.” There, surely, it is the spirit of dignity that controls her. The bullets whiz across the sand, but Sir Richard walks no faster, and summons up his idea of death — death visible, tangible, an enemy, but an enemy of flesh and blood to be met courageously with drawn sword like a gentleman — which temper she poor woman admires, though she cannot, on the beach at Portsmouth, altogether imitate. Dignity, loyalty, magnanimity — such are the virtues she would commend, and frame her speech to, checking it from its natural slips and trifles, and making believe that life for people of gentle birth and high morality was thus decorous and sublime. The pen, too, when the small shot of daily life came whizzing about her — eighteen children in twenty-one years she bore and buried the greater part — must curb itself to walk slowly, not to run. Writing is with them, as it can no longer be with us, making; making something that will endure and wear a brave face in the eyes of posterity. For posterity is the judge of these ideals, and it is for that distant and impartial public that Lady Fanshawe writes and Lucy Hutchinson, and not for John in London or Elizabeth married and gone to live in Sussex; there is no daily post for children and friends bringing to the breakfast table not only news of crops and servants, visitors and bad weather, but the subtler narrative of love and coldness, affection waning or carried on secure; there is no language it seems for that frail burden. Horace Walpole, Jane Carlyle, Edward Fitzgerald are ghosts on the very outskirts of time. Thus these ancestors of ours, though stately and fair to look upon, are silent; they move through galleries and parks in the midst of a little oasis of silence which holds the intruding modern spirit at bay. Here, again, are the Leghs; generations upon generations of them, all red haired, all living at Lyme, which has been building these three centuries and more, all men of education, character, and opportunity, and all, by modern standards, dumb. They will write of a fox hunt and how afterward “a Bowie of Hott Punch with ye Fox’s foot stew’d in it” was drunk, and how “Sir Willm drunk pretty plentifully, and just at last perceive’d he should be fuddled, ‘but,’ quoth he, ‘I care not if I am, I have kill’d a fox to-day’.” But having killed their fox, drunk their punch, raced their horses, fought their cocks, and toasted, discreetly, the King over the water, or, more openly, “A Fresh Earth and High Metaled Terrier,” their lips shut, their eyes close; they have nothing more to say to us. Taciturn or crass
as we may think them, dull men inheriting their red hair and very little brain beneath it, nevertheless more business was discharged by them, more of life took its mould from them than we can measure, or, indeed, dispense with. If Lyme had been blotted out and the thousand other houses of equal importance which lay about England like little fortresses of civilization, where you could read books, act plays, make laws, meet your neighbours, and talk with strangers from abroad, if these spaces won from the encroaching barbarity had not persisted till the foothold was firm and the swamp withheld, how would our more delicate spirits have fared — our writers, thinkers, musicians, artists — without a wall to shelter under, or flowers upon which to sun their wings? Waging war year after year upon winter and rough weather, needing all their faculties to keep the roof sound, the larder full, the children taught and clothed, dependents cared for, naturally our ancestors appear in their spare time rather surly and silent — as ploughboys after a long day’s work scrape the mud from their boots, stretch the cramped muscles of their backs, and stumble off to bed without thought of book or pen or evening paper. The little language of affection and intimacy which we seek in vain necessitates soft pillows, easy chairs, silver forks, private rooms; it must have at its command a store of little words, nimble and domesticated, coming at the call of the lightest occasion, refining themselves to the faintest shadow. Above all perhaps, good roads and carriages, frequent meetings, partings, festivities, alliances, and ruptures are needed to break up the splendid sentences; easy chairs it may be were the death of English prose. The annals of an old and obscure family like the Leghs show clearly enough how the slow process of furnishing the bare rooms and taking coach for London, as a matter of course, abolish its isolation, merge the dialect of the district into the common speech of the land, and teach, by degrees, a uniform method of spelling. One can see in fancy the face itself changing, and the manner of father to son, mother to daughter, losing what must have been their tremendous formality, their unquestioned authority. But what dignity, what beauty broods over it all!
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 463
