George Saintsbury

“ Of course people who must have noise, and bustle, and "importance" of matter, and so forth, may be dissatisfied. But their dissatisfaction convicts not Cowper but themselves: and the conviction is not for want of Art, but for want of appreciation of Art. Now this last is one of the most terrible faults to be found in any human creature. Not everybody can be an artist: but everybody who is not deficient to this or that extent in sense—to use that word in its widest and best interpretation, for understanding and feeling both—can enjoy an artist's work. ”

“ The very tricks—mechanical dots, dashes, aposiopeses—which offend us now and then in Sterne; the unfamiliar Latinisms which frighten some and disgust others in Browne, drop from Lamb's lips or pen like the pearls of the Fairy story. Unless you are born out of sympathy with Elia, you never think about them as tricks at all. Now this naturalness—it can hardly be said too often here—is the one thing needful in letters. ”

“ Everybody wrote letters: and a surprising number of people wrote letters well. Our own three most famous epistolers of the male sex, Horace Walpole, Gray and Cowper—belong wholly to it; and "Lady Mary"—our most famous she-ditto—belongs to it by all but her childhood; as does Chesterfield, whom some not bad judges would put not far if at all below the three men just mentioned. The rise of the novel in this century is hardly more remarkable than the way in which that novel almost wedded itself—certainly joined itself in the most frequent friendship—to the letter-form. ”

“ I have not, however, been quite idle, and as an old seaman have tried to go by a side wind when I had not the means of going before it, and this will be so far plain to you when I say that I have every reason to believe the good intelligence is true that a separation is signed between Lord and Lady Byron. If I am not as angry as you have good reason to expect every thinking and feeling man to be, it is from deep sorrow and regret that a man possessed of such noble talents should so utterly and irretrievably lose himself. ”

“ To-morrow Sara and I dine at Mister Gobwin's, as Hartley calls him, who gave the philosopher such a rap on the shins with a ninepin that Gobwin in huge pain lectured Sara on his boisterousness. I was not at home. Est modus in rebus. Moshes is somewhat too rough and noisy, but the cadaverous silence of Gobwin's children is to me quite catacombish, and, thinking of Mary Wollstonecraft, I was oppressed by it the day Davy and I dined there.
God love you and
S. T. Coleridge. ”

“ By my troth, as desperate and perplexed men, grow from thence bold; so must I take the boldness of accusing you, who would draw so dark a Curtain betwixt me and your purposes, as that I had no glimmering, neither of your goings, nor the way which my Letters might haunt. ”

“ But whatever may be the position of the seventeenth in respect of letter-writing it is impossible for anything but sheer ignorance, hopeless want of critical discernment, or idle paradox to mistake, in the direction of belittlement, that of the eighteenth. By common consent of all opinion worth attention that century was, in the two European literatures which were equally free from crudity and decadence—French and English—the very palmiest day of the art. ”

“ This will be universally the case, in common life, of every inattentive awkward man, let his real merit and knowledge be ever so great.
When I was of your age, I desired to shine, as far as I was able, in every part of life; and was as attentive, to my manners, my dress, and my air, in company on evenings, as to my books, and my tutor in the mornings. A young fellow should be ambitious to shine in everything ”

“ His colouring is less warm than that of Guido, but nothing can be more clear and delicate; it is as if he could have dipped his pencil in the hues of some serenest and star-shining twilight. His forms have the same delicacy and aërial loveliness; their eyes are all bright with innocence and love; their lips scarce divided by some gentle and sweet emotion. His winged children are the loveliest ideal beings ever created by the human mind. These are generally, whether in the capacity of Cherubim or Cupid, accessories to the rest of the picture ”

“ The letters and "letter-stuff" of the Carlyles, husband and wife, according to the inevitable misfortune attending so much of our subject—supplied the occasion of volumes of that disgusting and most idle controversy which has made many people of taste pray that nothing biographical may ever be published about them. Far be it from us to take part in a game which if it does not always, like the unpleasant personage in the old ballad,
Come for ill and never for good,
certainly comes for the former much oftener than for the latter purpose and result. ”

“ The quality of liveness is naturally still more prominent in the letters, because poetical transcendence of fact is not there required to accompany it. But it does accompany now and then; and the result is a blend or brand of letter-writing almost as unlike anything else as the writer's poetry, and in its own (doubtless lower) kind hardly less perfect. To prefer the letters to the poems is merely foolish, and to say that they are as good as the poems is perhaps excessive. But they comment and complete the Shelley of the Poems themselves in a manner for which we cannot be too thankful. ”

“ I hardly know a more painful object of consideration than a man of genius in such a situation; those of lower minds do not feel the degradation, and become like pigs, familiarised with the filthy elements in which they grovel; but it is impossible that a man of Lord Byron's genius should not often feel the want of that which he has forfeited—the fair esteem of those by whom genius most naturally desires to be admired and cherished. ”

“ But no one save a dunce can find them dull: and their variety is astonishing when one remembers that the writer was, for great part of his life, a kind of recluse. He touches almost everything except love (one wonders whether there were any unpublished, and feels pretty sure that there must have been some unwritten, letters to Miss Speed which would have filled the gap) and with a result of artistic success even more decided than that assigned to Goldsmith's versatility by Gray's enemy or at least "incompatible" Johnson. ”

“ All the sounds that nature utters are delightful,—at least in this country. I should not perhaps find the roaring of lions in Africa, or of bears in Russia, very pleasing; but I know no beast in England whose voice I do not account musical, save and except always the braying of an ass. The notes of all our birds and fowls please me, without one exception. I should not indeed think of keeping a goose in a cage, that I might hang him up in the parlour for the sake of his melody, but a goose upon a common, or in a farmyard, is no bad performer ”

“ There is a quiet humour—not of the fantastic kind which, as in Charles Lamb, forces us to admit the possibility of near alliance to over-balance of mind—but counter-balancing, antiseptic, salt. There is abundant if not exactly omnipresent common-sense; excellent manners; an almost total absence in that part of the letters which we are now considering of selfishness, and a total absence of ill-nature. ”

“ Only one full year passed between the death of Miss Austen and the birth of Miss Evans, and the two illustrated very fairly the comfortable if not invariably accurate idea that when one human being dies another is born to succeed him or her in their special functions. But, as in other respects, they differed here remarkably; and though in neither case was the nature of the writer exactly expansive, this want of expansiveness was very differently conditioned. Miss Austen no doubt could, if she had chosen, (she has done something like it as it is) have written most delightful letters. ”

“ Besides, for practical purposes, all our literature begins with Greek: so to Greek let us turn. We have a fair bulk of letters in that language. Hercher's Epistolographi Graeci is a big volume, and would not be a small one, if you cut out the Latin translations. But it is unfortunate that nearly the whole, like the majority of later Greek literature, is the work of that special class called rhetoricians—a class for which, though our term "book-makers" may be a little too derogatory, "men of letters" is rarely (it is sometimes) applicable, as we use it when we mean to be complimentary. ”

“ I never will converse with an absent man; one may as well talk with a deaf one. It is, in truth, a practical blunder, to address ourselves to a man, who we see plainly neither hears, minds, nor understands us. Moreover, I aver that no man is, in any degree, fit for either business or conversation, who cannot, and does not, direct and command his attention to the present object, be that what it will.
You know, by experience, that I grudge no expense in your education, but I will positively not keep you a flapper. ”

“ It is therefore rather a Pinnace to discover; and the entire Colony of Letters, of Hundreds and Fifties, must follow; whose employment is more honourable, than that which our State meditates to Virginia because you are worthier than all that Country, of which that is a wretched inch; for you have better treasure and a harmlessness. If this sound like a flattery, tear it out. I am to my Letters as rigid a Puritan as Caesar was to his Wife. I can as ill endure a suspicious and misinterpretable word as a fault ”

“ It cannot be too often or too solemnly laid down that an adoration of Madame de Sévigné as a letter-writer is not crotchet or fashion or affectation—is no result of merely taking authority on trust. The more one reads her, and the more one reads others, the more convinced should one be of her absolute non-pareility in almost every kind of genuine letter (as apart from letters that are really pamphlets or speeches or sermons) except pure love-letters, of [vii] which we have none from her. ”

“ Not a few men otherwise distinguished in literature wrote letters—sometimes in curious contrast with other productions of theirs. The most remarkable instance of this, but an instance easily comprehensible, is that of Samuel Pepys. Only a part of Pepys' immense correspondence has ever been printed, but there is no reason to expect from the remainder—whether actually extant, mislaid or lost—anything better than the examples which are now accessible, and which are for the most part the very opposite in every respect of the famous and delectable Diary. ”

“ There has also to be taken into account in Thackeray's case domestic sorrow—coming quickly and life-long after it began; means long restricted (partly by his own folly but not so more tolerable) ; recognition of genius almost as long deferred; and yet other "maladies of the soul." The result was a constant ferment, of which the letters are in a way the relieving valve or tap. That they are often apparently light-hearted has nothing surprising in it: for when a man habitually "eats his heart" it naturally becomes lighter—till there is nothing of it left. ”

“ Now as letters—that is to say letters that deserve to exist at all—are bound to reproduce the personality of their writers, it will follow that a refreshing diversity must also belong to them. And as a matter of fact this will be found to be the case. Even the eighteenth century—the century of rule and class, of objection to "the streaks of the tulip," of machine-made verse, etc.,—has, except in the case of letters artificially made to pattern, shown this signally.
One last recommendation. A bad letter-writer is sure to betray himself almost everywhere, and letters are as a rule short. ”

“ If from the Dark Ages themselves we have not very many, it must be remembered [14] that from them we have little literature at all: while from the close of that period and the beginning of the next we have one of the most famous of all correspondences, the Letters of Abelard and Heloise. Of the intrinsic merit of these long-and far-famed compositions, as displaying character, there have been different opinions—one of the most damaging attacks on them may be found in Barbey d'Aurevilly's already mentioned book. ”

“ But it is unfortunately undeniable that the bulk of this department of Greek literature is spurious to begin with, and uninteresting, even if spuriousness be permitted to pass. The Letters of Phalaris—once famous in themselves, again so as furnishing one of the chief battle-grounds in the "Ancient and Modern" quarrel, and never to be forgotten because of their connection with Swift's Battle of the Books—are as dull as ditchwater in matter, and utterly destitute of literary distinction in style. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Some of Bulwer's (the first Lord Lytton's) letters are remarkable in ways, especially that of literary criticism, which might hardly be expected by anyone who had [79] insufficiently taken the measure of his strangely unequal and imperfect, yet as strangely varied, talent. But as the century went on a new prohibitory influence arose in the enormous professional production which began to be customary with novelists—principally tempted no doubt by the corresponding gain of money, but perhaps also by the nobler desire of increasing, or at least living up to, their reputations. ”

“ No one but a brute who is also something of a fool will think any the worse of Keats for writing them. A thought of sunt lacrimae rerum is all the price that need be paid by any one who chooses to read them, nor is it our business to characterise at length the taste and wits of the person who could publish them. [28]
But putting this question aside, it is unquestionable that for some years past there has been a tendency to value the Letters as a whole very highly. Not only has unusual critical power been claimed for Keats on the strength of them, but general epistolary merit ”

“ It is true that even here Moore, his biographer and letter-giver, at first included, though he afterwards cut out, some attacks on Sir Samuel Romilly, whom Byron thought guilty of causing or abetting dissension between Lady Byron and himself. But the letter loses nothing by the omission and does not even gain unfairly by it. There is nothing false in the contrast of comedy and sentiment concerning the cemetery. His impression by the epitaphs Byron gave in more letters than one. Nor is there any affectation in his remarks about his own burial, about his children, or any other subject. ”

“ Others, written in various moods from the time when Sir William Temple "spoiled a fine gentleman," and Esther Johnson set running a life-long course of un-smooth love, would be more welcome still. They would no doubt be stumbling-blocks to those apt to stumble, just as the existing epistles are: but they would be stepping-stones for the wise. As it is, we have to do without them and perhaps, like most things that are, it is better. For the stumblers are saved the sin of stumbling, and the wise men the nuisance of seeing them do it, and trying to set them right. ”

“ And after all, I dare challenge any man, whether Protestant, Papist, or Dissenter, Whig or Tory, (and I have drawn up and published memoirs of women who professed all those principles) to prove me guilty of partiality, or to shew that I have made any uncharitable reflections on any person, and whenever that is done, I will faithfully promise to make a public recantation. I wish, Sir, you would point out to me any one unbecoming word or expression which has fell from me on Bishop Burnet. ”

“ They had always done so, of course, to an extent less important in History, of which Biography is really a subdivision. The truth expressed in that dictum of the pseudo-Demetrius quoted above as to the illuminative power of letters on character could be missed by no historian and by no biographer who had his wits about him—even if he had less striking examples at hand than that letter of the Emperor Tiberius to the Senate which is one of the Tacitean flashes of lightning through the dark of history. ”

“ We have in Greek absolutely no such letters from the flourishing time of the literature as those of Cicero, of Pliny [3] and even of Seneca—while as we approach the "Dark" Ages Julian and Synesius in the older language cannot touch Sidonius Apollinaris or perhaps Cassiodorus [4] in the younger. Of course all these are beyond reasonable doubt genuine, while the Greek letters attributed to Plato, Socrates and other great men are almost without doubt and without exception spurious. But there is very little likelihood that the Greeks of the great times wrote many "matter-ful" letters at all. ”

“ It has been complained with a certain amount of truth that fiction, whether in prose or verse, is a little apt to fall into grooves: that all the histories are told, all the plays acted. This is undoubtedly the curse of Art, and every now and then we see it acknowledged in the most convincing manner by the frantic efforts made to be "different." But that real things and persons are never quite identical is not merely a philosophical doctrine but a practical fact. ”

“ I cannot for my life perceive that I have said any thing of that excellent woman, which she does not merit; and I must beg leave to say that I think her letter to F. Turbeville deserves to be wrote in letters of gold, and ought to be carefully read and preserved by all Protestants. Mary Queen of Scots fell under my notice, no otherwise than as a learned woman. ”

“ He travelled a great deal; edited periodicals for many years, taking that duty by no means in the spirit of Olympian aloofness which some popular opinion connects with editorship; only sometimes shirked society; and had all sorts of miscellaneous occupations and avocations. His very fancy for long walks might seem one of the least compatible with letter-writing; yet a very large bulk of his letters (by no means mainly composed of editorial ones) has been published, and there are no doubt many unpublished. ”

“ Most of the writers of the Paston Letters were, though in some cases of good rank and fairly educated, persons entirely unacademic in character, and their society was that of the last trouble and convulsion through which the Early Middle Ages struggled into the Renaissance, so long delayed with us. Ascham was one of our chief representatives of the Renaissance itself—that is to say, of a type at once scholarly and man-of-the-worldly, a courtier and a diplomatist as well as a "don" and a man of letters; a sportsman as well as a schoolmaster. ”