University of Virginia Library

XI
Letters and Letter-Writers

It is a popular fallacy that letter-writing is a bygone art. Arguments for this opinion point to the array of picture-cards expressing every sentiment known to experience, and saving, by the neatness and dispatch of their machine-made couplets, all the fumbling effort we used to expend in saying thank you to a hostess, bon voyage to a friend, or even in offering sympathy to one bereaved. The night-message also seems to indicate a sorry substitution for the formality of the post. The truth is that the picture-card, by doing the work of the duty letter, clears the way for the real letter, so spontaneous that it can't help being written; while the night-message contributes to epistolary art a terseness and vigor that should not be undervalued. While we continue to look back at the voluminous eighteenth century and to regret the decay of letter-writing, we are every one of us every week receiving from a dozen different correspondents letters vibrant with personality, vivid, readable, inviting preservation. Far

from not writing letters, people never wrote more letters than they do to-day, nor better ones; if ours are not so long as the letters of the past, they are far livelier. Both in theory and in fact the present time is peculiarly fitted to be epistolary.

If each one of us will examine that packet of letters we are loath to destroy because they have made us see pictures or think thoughts or chuckle with appreciation, we shall pause to ponder how diverse in character are the authors. One missive, guiltless of grammar, is racy with backwoods wisdom; another shows the rapier wit and apt allusiveness of the Hellenist; another is as crisp and keen as the typewriter that clicked it forth; still another peals with freshman skylarking. It is not at first easy to perceive underlying all the variety the essential characteristics which belong alike to all these correspondents and which differentiate that happily constituted being, the born letter-writer; man or woman, young or old, educated or illiterate, certain qualities he must inalienably possess.

The letter-writer is always an observant person. He has the pictorial eye and the pictorial pen. The view framed by his window sash must never grow stale for him, across it the clouds must always roll as if across a

painter's canvas, and its commonplace roof-line must keep always its quaintness and its quirks. Of the groups of people that crowd his day, he must see each as if staged for a play, he must perceive the color of hair and the cut of clothes and the connotation of attitudes as vividly as if he were always seated before a rising curtain. This freshness of vision varies in different people. It is always found in every good letter, but of the writers, some require the stimulus of an unusual scene; while they have not the power to see or to paint the pictures of Dulltown Center, they can portray Tokio or Archangel till it glows on the wall before the reader's eye; others, more really gifted, see drama everywhere, even if they have never been twenty miles from their own farm and forest. Whether our correspondent is stay-at-home or traveler, he must so combine his gift of observation with his gift of representation that his angle of vision is unique. We have all of us received narratives of travel that were colorless as guide-books and narratives of a village sewing society that were palpitant with portraiture. The true letter-writer makes us feel not only that we have been present at a scene but that we have been present with him.

The genuine epistolary endowment shows

qualities in pleasant poise. A letter should be personal, but not over-personal. A self-analyst may cover many pages of notepaper, but we read him only under protest, and drop him promptly into the waste-basket. We enjoy the record of personal observation just so long as it is balanced by detachment. We like to see our friend moving across the scene he describes, but we don't want to see him bulking large in his own landscape. In a well-penned letter the people written about stand forth as vividly as does the author. It is this power of amused detachment that makes all true letter-writers true humorists as well.

To write letters it is not enough to be observant, objective, humorous: one must have the impulse to express the observation and the fun. This impulse is, of course, the literary will to write, but there is a sharp distinction between the litterateur and the letter-writer. The latter does not merely wish to write, he wishes to write to somebody. He is not lyric, for it is not enough for him to burst into song unheard; he is not a diarist, for it is not enough for him to talk to himself; he is not a genius, for it is not enough for him to talk to a vast, formless creature called the Public. A letter-writer is one who finds life so entertaining that he must talk about it to a friend. Never

a self-sufficient person, he is as genial as he is shy; it would therefore no more occur to him to pour himself out upon paper that nobody was to read than to pour himself into print that everybody was to read. He has the literary impulse without the literary ambition. He must be sure of his auditor before his pen will move, and yet when it once begins to gambol, it carries him off and away, after the manner of all pens, until the friendly listener becomes idealized from homely reality into very quintessence of sympathy.

The individual auditor is not only the first requisite for the letter-writer, but the determining influence that gives to letters themselves the qualities which distinguish them from other forms of literature. Letters stand halfway between the formlessness of conversation and the formality of essay or fiction. A letter to a friend has this advantage over a chat with him, that you can choose the impression you wish to make and make it without interference from the interlocutor's telepathy, or interruption through his rejoinders. Conversation gives and takes, but a letter only gives, and gives exactly what it wishes, no more. In a letter one employs words, weaving them happily to one's will, but it is a mistake to suppose that conversation is much con

cerned with words. It is a far more shifting and subtle thing than that, for mere speech is constantly supplemented or corrected or contradicted by the twinkle in our eyes, the tautness or tremor in our voice, the twisting of our lips. The attention of the listener is diverted by watching all these manifestations. While it has all the camaraderie of chat, the letter, in the clarity and singleness of its impression, is distinctly different from talk.

The epistolary form differs as much from the memoir as it does from conversation. The diarist is a self-important person, talking to himself and to the future, and conscious of his effect upon both. If he is great enough, that effect is worth making, and we read his account of himself and his times with the reverence we accord to history. We do not read, however, with the pleasant personal warmth with which we peruse a letter, for we know the diarist is not speaking as comrade to comrade. We know and he knows that he is speaking to posterity.

The letter has the advantage of not belonging at all to conscious or commercialized literature. It is not written to be seen of men, nor yet to be sold to them. It is literature intimate, unintentional, overheard. In so much as it is personal expression, plus detachment

but minus self-importance, and also in so much as it endeavors to adapt itself sympathetically to another person's interest and point of view, the letter strikes through the merely individual and touches deep and universal feeling, thus in all its humbleness fulfilling the ancient dictum for art. The letter-writer, scribbling himself forth merely to please himself and his friend, is not constrained by servility to the public taste; his medium allows him ease, fluidity, and a happy inconsequence, vital artistic qualities impossible to literature written to meet the market.

Its spontaneity gives the letter scope for its particular achievements. Being written by friend to friend, it is free from both shyness and stiffness: it may laugh or cry, be sagacious or absurd, in full confidence of being understood. It rings true in its directness and intimacy, and yet never descends to the morbidness that sometimes stains the revelations of the journal. The letter is intimate, but at bottom decorous. In a letter one wears one's old clothes in comfort, but one does not undress as in a diary. The presence of a friend to whom one may open one's heart is both invitation and wholesome restraint.

The letter as literature is particularly

adapted to description made piquant by personal perception of lights and shades. The letter is especially fitted for quick portraiture, for flashing forth a face in an adjective, for touching off a character in the quirk of a phrase. Incidents also stand out by their very compression. Brevity is the soul of a letter, which is not saying that a letter may not be long. A letter can afford to be long, it can never afford to be diffuse. In the nature of things a good letter never flags because it is written by one possessing intensified vision and a vibrant pen. Such a person knows enough to stop before he is tired. The description, incident, comment of a letter are forced to a concentration that gives them an advantage over more formal and expansive writing. People who are interesting enough to wish to write letters, people who are interested enough to wish to read them, must by necessity of character have much else to occupy their time beside their correspondence. The value of epistolary writing lies in the fact that it is not a grave concern, but an inviting side issue. Letters, like friendship, lose their charm when one makes a business of them.

It is the greatest mistake to think that our hurried age is alien to the composition of letters. Haste is the best thing that can

happen to a letter; it enforces compression. Actually our own time is peculiarly adapted to produce letters. Its very hurry is inimical to sustained writing. Thinking people may put themselves into letters when they have no time to put themselves into books. Not only the rapidity of the present but its intensity stimulates letter-writing. Even the most commonplace people are quickened to observation and to thought at a time when tragedies are being unrolled before the dullest of us, and when every day is fateful with pity and fear for even the most obscure. Personal reaction to the portents of the present is not to be escaped, for never in history was there so much to see and to feel.

As never before was there so much to see, so never before was there such an impulse to say something about it; but the immensity of our time prevents our speaking in any finished and final form. Our day is too vast for comment. All that we can record is our daily impressions; and how much more readily these fall into letter shape than into treatise or play or novel or poem! These four forms necessitate structure, analysis, synthesis; they presuppose penetration into the significance back of events. The letter is free from all these requirements, and therefore is better fitted to

express our times than, for example, the poem, which to-day, false to its old high calling, deliberately avoids all divination, all guesses at the ultimate and the infinite.

The letter, always humble, informal, inconsequent, need not strain to recount any but an individual reaction and interpretation. It aspires to no universal wisdom, and by its very modesty and sincerity may perhaps for the future furnish the truest historical record obtainable of a period too terrible to understand itself.

One would naturally expect letters to be produced in an age which, bewildered as it is, is singularly articulate in regard to all its puzzles and its pain. Ease of expression was never so general as now. More people are able to say what they have to say than ever before, and more people are able to say it, too, with facility and with force. The newspapers are crowded by letters tingling with penetration, often memorable in phrasing, written by men and women in every class and place. The level of intelligence and of expression was never so high. People are writing not only to the press but to each other better letters than ever before. Impressions are so intense that they compel utterance. One proof of the prevalence and popularity of letter-writing

to-day is in the many books and articles that are the chance discoveries of the mail box. For such revelations, such unintentional literature, every editor is on the alert. The history of our time is being everywhere written to-day in the best letters that were ever penned; but for one such collection discovered, how many are fated to be fugitive always and unpreserved?