LETTERS OF FRIENDSHIP.

If the art of writing had been unknown till now, and if the invention of it were suddenly to burst upon the world as did that of the telephone, one of the things most generally said in praise of it would be this. It would be said, “What a gain to friendship, now that friends can communicate in spite of separation by the very widest distances!”

Yet we have possessed this means of communication, the fullest and best of all, from remote antiquity, and we scarcely make any use of it—certainly not any use at all responding to its capabilities, and as time goes on, instead of developing those capabilities by practice in the art of friendly correspondence, we allow them to diminish by disuse.

The lowering of cost for the transport of letters, instead of making friendly correspondents numerous, has made them few. The cheap postage-stamp has increased business correspondence prodigiously, but it has had a very different effect on that of friendship. Great numbers of men whose business correspondence is heavy scarcely write letters of friendship at all. Their minds produce the business letter as by a second nature, and are otherwise sterile.

As for the facilities afforded by steam communication with distant countries, they seem to be of little use to friendship, since a moderate distance soon puts a stop to friendly communication. Except in cases of strong affection the Straits of Dover are an effectual though imaginary bar to intercourse of this kind, not to speak of the great oceans.

The impediment created by a narrow sea is, as I have said, imaginary, but we may speculate on the reasons for it; and my own reflections have ended in the somewhat strange conclusion that it must have something to do with sea-sickness. It must be that people dislike the idea of writing a letter that will have to cross a narrow channel of salt-water, because they vaguely and dimly dread the motion of the vessel. Nobody would consciously avow to himself such a sympathy with a missive exempt from all human ills, but the feeling may be unconsciously present. How else are we to account for the remarkable fact that salt-water breaks friendly communication by letter? If you go to live anywhere out of your native island your most intimate friends cease to give any news of themselves. They do not even send printed announcements of the marriages and deaths in their families. This does not imply any cessation of friendly feeling on their part. If you appeared in England again they would welcome you with the utmost kindness and hospitality, but they do not like to post anything that will have to cross the sea. The news-vendors have not the same delicate imaginative sympathy with the possible sufferings of rag-pulp, so you get your English journals and find therein, by pure accident, the marriage of one intimate old friend and the death of another. You excuse the married man, because he is too much intoxicated with happiness to be responsible for any omission; and you excuse the dead man, because he cannot send letters from another world. Still you think that somebody not preoccupied by bridal joys or impeded by the last paralysis might have sent you a line directly, were it only a printed card.

Not only do the writers of letters feel a difficulty in sending their manuscript across the sea, but people appear to have a sense of difficulty in correspondence proportionate to the distance the letter will have to traverse. One would infer that they really experience, by the power of imagination, a feeling of fatigue in sending a letter on a long journey. If this is not so, how are we to account for the fact that the rarity of letters from friends increases in exact proportion to our remoteness from them? A simple person without correspondence would naturally imagine that it would be resorted to as a solace for separation, and that the greater the distance the more the separated friends would desire to be drawn together occasionally by its means, but in practice this rarely happens. People will communicate by letter across a space of a hundred miles when they will not across a thousand.

The very smallest impediments are of importance when the desire for intercourse is languid. The cost of postage to colonies and to countries within the postal union is trifling, but still it is heavier than the cost of internal postage, and it may be unconsciously felt as an impediment. Another slight impediment is that the answer to a letter sent to a great distance cannot arrive next day, so that he who writes in hope of an answer is like a trader who cannot expect an immediate return for an investment.

To prevent friendships from dying out entirely through distance, the French have a custom which seems, but is not, an empty form. On or about New Year’s Day they send cards to all friends and many acquaintances, however far away. The useful effects of this custom are the following:—

1. It acquaints you with the fact that your friend is still alive,—pleasing information if you care to see him again.

2. It shows you that he has not forgotten you.

3. It gives you his present address.

4. In case of marriage, you receive his wife’s card along with his own; and if he is dead you receive no card at all, which is at least a negative intimation.[32]

This custom has also an effect upon written correspondence, as the printed card affords the opportunity of writing a letter, when, without the address, the letter might not be written. When the address is well known the card often suggests the idea of writing.

When warm friends send visiting-cards they often add a few words of manuscript on the card itself, expressing friendly sentiments and giving a scrap of brief but welcome news.

Here is a suggestion to a generation that thinks friendly letter-writing irksome. With a view to the sparing of time and trouble, which is the great object of modern life (sparing, that is, in order to waste in other ways), cards might be printed as forms of invitation are, leaving only a few blanks to be filled up; or there might be a public signal-book in which the phrases most likely to be useful might be represented by numbers.

The abandonment of letter-writing between friends is the more to be regretted that, unless our friends are public persons, we receive no news of them indirectly; therefore, when we leave their neighborhood, the separation is of that complete kind which resembles temporary death. “No word comes from the dead,” and no word comes from those silent friends. It is a melancholy thought in leaving a friend of this kind, when you shake hands at the station and still hear the sound of his voice, that in a few minutes he will be dead to you for months or years. The separation from a corresponding friend is shorn of half its sorrows. You know that he will write, and when he writes it requires little imagination to hear his voice again.

To write, however, is not all. For correspondence to reach its highest value, both friends must have the natural gift of friendly letter-writing, which may be defined as the power of talking on paper in such a manner as to represent their own minds with perfect fidelity in their friendly aspect.

This power is not common. A man may be a charming companion, full of humor and gayety, a well of knowledge, an excellent talker, yet his correspondence may not reveal the possession of these gifts. Some men are so constituted that as soon as they take a pen their faculties freeze. I remember a case of the same congelation in another art. A certain painter had exuberant humor and mimicry, with a marked talent for strong effects in talk; in short, he had the gifts of an actor, and, as Pius VII. called Napoleon I., he was both commediante and tragediante. Any one who knew him, and did not know his paintings, would have supposed at once that a man so gifted must have painted the most animated works; but it so happened (from some cause in the deepest mysteries of his nature) that whenever he took up a brush or a pencil his humor, his tragic power, and his love of telling effects all suddenly left him, and he was as timid, slow, sober, and generally ineffectual in his painting as he was full of fire and energy in talk. So it is in writing. That which ought to be the pouring forth of a man’s nature often liberates only a part of his nature, and perhaps that part which has least to do with friendship. Your friend delights you by his ease and affectionate charm of manner, by the happiness of his expressions, by his wit, by the extent of his information, all these being qualities that social intercourse brings out in him as colors are revealed by light. The same man, in dull solitude at his desk, may write a letter from which every one of these qualities may be totally absent, and instead of them he may offer you a piece of perfunctory duty-writing which, as you see quite plainly, he only wanted to get done with, and in which you do not find a trace of your friend’s real character. Such correspondence as that is worth having only so far as it informs you of your friend’s existence and of his health.

Another and a very different way in which a man may represent himself unfairly in correspondence, so that his letters are not his real self, is when he finds that he has some particular talent as a writer, and unconsciously cultivates that talent when he holds a pen, whereas his real self has many other qualities that remain unrepresented. In this way humor may become the dominant quality in the letters of a correspondent whose conversation is not dominantly humorous.

Habits of business sometimes produce the effect that the confirmed business correspondent will write to his friend willingly and promptly on any matter of business, and will give him excellent advice, and be glad of the opportunity of rendering him a service, but he will shrink from the unaccustomed effort of writing any other kind of letter.

There is a strong temptation to blame silent friends and praise good correspondents; but we do not reflect that letter-writing is a task to some and a pleasure to others, and that if people may sometimes be justly blamed for shirking a corvÉe they can never deserve praise for indulging in an amusement. There is a particular reason why, when friendly letter-writing is a task, it is more willingly put off than many other tasks that appear far heavier and harder. It is either a real pleasure or a feigned pleasure, and feigned pleasures are the most wearisome things in life, far more wearisome than acknowledged work. For in work you have a plain thing to do and you see the end of it, and there is no need for ambages at the beginning or for a graceful retiring at the close; but a feigned pleasure has its own observances that must be gone through whether one has any heart for them or not. The groom who cleans a rich man’s stable, and whistles at his work, is happier than the guest at a state dinner who is trying to look other than what he is,—a wearied victim of feigned and formal pleasure with a set false smile upon his face. In writing a business letter you have nothing to affect; but a letter of friendship, unless you have the real inspiration for it, is a narrative of things you have no true impulse to narrate, and the expression of feelings which (even if they be in some degree existent) you do not earnestly desire to utter.

The sentiment of friendship is in general rather a quiet feeling of regard than any lively enthusiasm. It may be counted upon for what it is,—a disposition to receive the friend with a welcome or to render him an occasional service, but there is not, commonly, enough of it to be a perennial warm fountain of literary inspiration. Therefore the worst mistake in dealing with a friend is to reproach him for not having been cordial and communicative enough. Sometimes this reproach is made, especially by women, and the immediate effect of it is to close whatever communicativeness there may be. If the friend wrote little before being reproached he will write less after.

The true inspiration of the friendly letter is the perfect faith that all the concerns of the writer will interest his friend. If James, who is separated by distance from John, thinks that John will not care about what James has been doing, hoping, suffering, the fount of friendly correspondence is frozen at its source. James ought to believe that John loves him enough to care about every little thing that can affect his happiness, even to the sickness of his old horse or the accident that happened to his dog when the scullery-maid threw scalding water out of the kitchen window; then there will be no lack, and James will babble on innocently through many a page, and never have to think.

The believer in friendship, he who has the true undoubting faith, writes with perfect carelessness about great things and small, avoiding neither serious interests, as a wary man would, nor trivial ones that might be passed over by a writer avaricious of his time. William of Orange, in his letters to Bentinck, appears to have been the model of friendly correspondents; and he was so because his letters reflected not a part only of his thinking and living, but the whole of it, as if nothing that concerned him could possibly be without interest for the man he loved. Familiar as it must be to many readers, I cannot but quote a passage from Macaulay:

“The descendants of Bentinck still preserve many letters written by William to their master, and it is not too much to say that no person who has not studied those letters can form a correct notion of the Prince’s character. He whom even his admirers generally accounted the most frigid and distant of men here forgets all distinctions of rank, and pours out all his thoughts with the ingenuousness of a schoolboy. He imparts without reserve secrets of the highest moment. He explains with perfect simplicity vast designs affecting all the governments of Europe. Mingled with his communications on such subjects are other communications of a very different but perhaps not of a less interesting kind. All his adventures, all his personal feelings, his long runs after enormous stags, his carousals on St. Hubert’s Day, the growth of his plantations, the failure of his melons, the state of his stud, his wish to procure an easy pad-nag for his wife, his vexation at learning that one of his household, after ruining a girl of good family, refused to marry her, his fits of sea-sickness, his coughs, his headaches, his devotional moods, his gratitude for the Divine protection after a great escape, his struggles to submit himself to the Divine will after a disaster, are described with an amiable garrulity hardly to have been expected from the most discreetly sedate statesman of his age. Still more remarkable is the careless effusion of his tenderness, and the brotherly interest which he takes in his friend’s domestic felicity.”

Friendly letters easily run over from sheet to sheet till they become ample and voluminous. I received a welcome epistle of twenty pages recently, and have seen another from a young man to his comrade which exceeded fifty; but the grandest letter that I ever heard of was from Gustave DorÉ to a very old lady whom he liked. He was travelling in Switzerland, and sent her a letter eighty pages long, full of lively pen-sketches for her entertainment. Artists often insert sketches in their letters,—a graceful habit, as it adds to their interest and value.

The talent for scribbling friendly letters implies some rough literary power, but may coexist with other literary powers of a totally different kind, and, as it seems, in perfect independence of them. There is no apparent connection between the genius in “Childe Harold,” “Manfred,” “Cain,” and the talent of a lively letter-writer, yet Byron was the best careless letter-writer in English whose correspondence has been published and preserved. He said “dreadful is the exertion of letter-writing,” but by this he must have meant the first overcoming of indolence to begin the letter, for when once in motion his pen travelled with consummate naturalness and ease, and the exertion is not to be perceived. The length and subject of his communications were indeterminate. He scribbled on and on, every passing mood being reflected and fixed forever in his letters, which complete our knowledge of him by showing us the action of his mind in ordinal times as vividly as the poems display its power in moments of highest exaltation. We follow his mental phases from minute to minute. He is not really in one state and pretending to be in another for form’s sake, so you have all his moods, and the letters are alive. The transitions are quick as thought. He darts from one topic to another with the freedom and agility of a bird, dwelling on each just long enough to satisfy his present need, but not an instant longer, and this without any reference to the original subject or motive of the letter. He is one of those perfect correspondents qui causent avec la plume. Men, women, and things, comic and tragic adventures, magnificent scenery, historical cities, all that his mind spontaneously notices in the world, are touched upon briefly, yet with consummate power. Though the sentences were written in the most careless haste and often in the strangest situations, many a paragraph is so dense in its substance, so full of matter, that one could not abridge it without loss. But the supreme merit of Byron’s letters is that they record his own sensations with such fidelity. What do I, the receiver of a letter, care for second-hand opinions about anything? I can hear the fashionable opinions from echoes innumerable. What I do want is a bit of my friend himself, of his own peculiar idiosyncrasy, and if I get that it matters nothing that his feelings and opinions should be different from mine; nay, the more they differ from mine the more freshness and amusement they bring me. All Byron’s correspondents might be sure of getting a bit of the real Byron. He never describes anything without conveying the exact effect upon himself. Writing to his publisher from Rome in 1817, he gives in a single paragraph a powerful description of the execution of three robbers by the guillotine (rather too terrible to quote), and at the end of it comes the personal effect:—

“The pain seems little, and yet the effect to the spectator and the preparation to the criminal are very striking and chilling. The first turned me quite hot and thirsty, and made me shake so that I could hardly hold the opera-glass (I was close, but was determined to see as one should see everything once, with attention); the second and third (which shows how dreadfully soon things grow indifferent), I am ashamed to say, had no effect on me as a horror, though I would have saved them if I could.”

How accurately this experience is described with no affectation of impassible courage (he trembles at first like a woman) or of becoming emotion afterwards, the instant that the real emotion ceased! Only some pity remains,—“I would have saved them if I could.”

The bits of frank criticism thrown into his letters, often quite by chance, were not the least interesting elements in Byron’s correspondence. Here is an example, about a book that had been sent him:—

“Modern Greece—good for nothing; written by some one who has never been there, and, not being able to manage the Spenser stanza, has invented a thing of his own, consisting of two elegiac stanzas, an heroic line and an Alexandrine, twisted on a string. Besides, why modern? You may say modern Greeks, but surely Greece itself is rather more ancient than ever it was.”

The carelessness of Byron in letter-writing, his total indifference to proportion and form, his inattention to the beginning, middle, and end of a letter, considered as a literary composition, are not to be counted for faults, as they would be in writings of any pretension. A friendly letter is, by its nature, a thing without pretension. The one merit of it which compensates for every defect is to carry the living writer into the reader’s presence, such as he really is, not such as by study and art he might make himself out to be. Byron was energetic, impetuous, impulsive, quickly observant, disorderly, generous, open-hearted, vain. All these qualities and defects are as conspicuous in his correspondence as they were in his mode of life. There have been better letter-writers as to literary art,—to which he gave no thought,—and the literary merits that his letters possess (their clearness, their force of narrative and description, their conciseness) are not the results of study, but the characteristics of a vigorous mind.

The absolutely best friendly letter-writer known to me is Victor Jacquemont. He, too, wrote according to the inspiration of the moment, but it was so abundant that it carried him on like a steadily flowing tide. His letters are wonderfully sustained, yet they are not composed; they are as artless as Byron’s, but much more full and regular. Many scribblers have facility, a flux of words, but who has Jacquemont’s weight of matter along with it? The development of his extraordinary epistolary talent was due to another talent deprived of adequate exercise by circumstances. Jacquemont was by nature a brilliant, charming, amiable talker, and the circumstances were various situations in which this talker was deprived of an audience, being often, in long wanderings, surrounded by dull or ignorant people. Ideas accumulated in his mind till the accumulation became difficult to bear, and he relieved himself by talking on paper to friends at a distance, but intentionally only to one friend at a time. He tried to forget that his letters were passed round a circle of readers, and the idea that they would be printed never once occurred to him:—

“En Écrivant aujourd’hui aux uns et aux autres, j’ai cherchÉ À oublier ce que tu me dis de l’Échange que chacun fait des lettres qu’il reÇoit de moi. Cette pensÉe m’aurait retenu la plume, ou du moins, ne l’aurait pas laissÉe couler assez nonchalamment sur le papier pour en noircir, en un jour, cinquante-huit feuilles, comme je l’ai fait.... Je sais et j’aime beaucoup causer À deux; À trois, c’est autre chose; il en est de mÊme pour Écrire. Pour parler comme je pense et sans blague, il me faut la persuasion que je ne serai lu que de celui À qui j’Écris.”

To read these letters, in the four volumes of them which have been happily preserved, is to live with the courageous observer from day to day, to share pleasures enjoyed with the freshness of sensation that belongs to youth and strength, and privations borne with the cheerfulness of a truly heroic spirit.

This Essay would run to an inordinate length if I even mentioned the best of the many letter-writers who are known to us; and it is generally by some adventitious circumstance that they have ever been known at all. A man wins fame in something quite outside of letter-writing, and then his letters are collected and given to the world, but perfectly obscure people may have been equal or superior to him as correspondents. Occasionally the letters of some obscure person are rescued from oblivion. Madame de RÉmusat passed quietly through life, and is now in a blaze of posthumous fame. Her son decided upon the publication of her letters, and then it became at once apparent that this lady had extraordinary gifts of the observing and recording order, so that her testimony, as an eye-witness of rare intelligence, must affect all future estimates of the conqueror of Austerlitz. There may be at this moment, there probably are, persons to whom the world attributes no literary talent, yet who are cleverly preserving the very best materials of history in careless letters to their friends.

It seems an indiscretion to read private letters, even when they are in print, but it is an indiscretion we cannot help committing. What can be more private than a letter from a man to his wife on purely family matters? Surely it is wrong to read such letters; but who could repent having read that exquisite one from Tasso’s father, Bernardo Tasso, written to his wife about the education of their children during an involuntary separation? It shows to what a degree a sheet of paper may be made the vehicle of a tender affection. In the first page he tries, and, lover-like, tries again and again, to find words that will draw them together in spite of distance. “Not merely often,” he says, “but continually our thoughts must meet upon the road.” He expresses the fullest confidence that her feelings for him are as strong and true as his own for her, and that the weariness of separation is painful alike for both, only he fears that she will be less able to bear the pain, not because she is wanting in prudence but by reason of her abounding love. At length the tender kindness of his expressions culminates in one passionate outburst, “poi ch’ io amo voi in quello estremo grado che si possa amar cosa mortale.”

It would be difficult to find a stronger contrast than that between Bernardo Tasso’s warmth and the tranquil coolness of Montaigne, who just says enough to save appearances in that one conjugal epistle of his which has come down to us. He begins by quoting a sceptical modern view of marriage, and then briefly disclaims it for himself, but does not say exactly what his own sentiments may be, not having much ardor of affection to express, and honestly avoiding any feigned declarations:—

“Ma Femme vous entendez bien que ce n’est pas le tour d’vn galand homme, aux reigles de ce temps icy, de vous courtiser & caresser encore. Car ils disent qu’vn habil homme peut bien prendre femme: mais que de l’espouser c’est À faire À vn sot. Laissons les dire: ie me tiens de ma part À la simple faÇon du vieil aage, aussi en porte-ie tantost le poil. Et de vray la nouuelletÉ couste si cher iusqu’À ceste heure À ce pauure estat (& si ie ne sÇay si nous en sommes À la derniÈre enchere) qu’en tout & par tout i’en quitte le party. Viuons ma femme, vous & moy, À la vieille FranÇoise.”

If friendship is maintained by correspondence, it is also liable to be imperilled by it. Not unfrequently have men parted on the most amiable terms, looking forward to a happy meeting, and not foreseeing the evil effects of letters. Something will be written by one of them, not quite acceptable to the other, who will either remonstrate and cause a rupture in that way, or take his trouble silently and allow friendship to die miserably of her wound. Much experience is needed before we entirely realize the danger of friendly intercourse on paper. It is ten times more difficult to maintain a friendship by letter than by personal intercourse, not for the obvious reason that letter-writing requires an effort, but because as soon as there is the slightest divergence of views or difference in conduct, the expression of it or the account of it in writing cannot be modified by kindness in the eye or gentleness in the tone of voice. My friend may say almost anything to me in his private room, because whatever passes his lips will come with tones that prove him to be still my friend; but if he wrote down exactly the same words, and a postman handed me the written paper, they might seem hard, unkind, and even hostile. It is strange how slow we are to discover this in practice. We are accustomed to speak with great freedom to intimate friends, and it is only after painful mishaps that we completely realize the truth that it is perilous to permit ourselves the same liberty with the pen. As soon as we do realize it we see the extreme folly of those who timidly avoid the oral expression of friendly censure, and afterwards write it all out in black ink and send it in a missive to the victim when he has gone away. He receives the letter, feels it to be a cold cruelty, and takes refuge from the vexations of friendship in the toils of business, thanking Heaven that in the region of plain facts there is small place for sentiment.