LETTERS OF BUSINESS.

The possibilities of intercourse by correspondence are usually underestimated.

That there are great natural differences of talent for letter-writing is certainly true; but it is equally true that there are great natural differences of talent for oral explanation, yet, although we constantly hear people say that this or that matter of business cannot be treated by correspondence, we never hear them say that it cannot be treated by personal interviews. The value of the personal interview is often as much over-estimated as that of letters is depreciated; for if some men do best with the tongue, others are more effective with the pen.

It is presumed that there is nothing in correspondence to set against the advantages of pouring forth many words without effort, and of carrying on an argument rapidly; but the truth is, that correspondence has peculiar advantages of its own. A hearer seldom grasps another person’s argument until it has been repeated several times, and if the argument is of a very complex nature the chances are that he will not carry away all its points even then. A letter is a document which a person of slow abilities can study at his leisure, until he has mastered it; so that an elaborate piece of reasoning may be set forth in a letter with a fair chance that such a person will ultimately understand it. He will read the letter three or four times on the day of its arrival, then he will still feel that something may have escaped him, and he will read it again next day. He will keep it and refer to it afterwards to refresh his memory. He can do nothing of all this with what you say to him orally. His only resource in that case is to write down a memorandum of the conversation on your departure, in which he will probably make serious omissions or mistakes. Your letter is a memorandum of a far more direct and authentic kind.

Appointments are sometimes made in order to settle a matter of business by talking, and after the parties have met and talked for a long time one says to the other, “I will write to you in a day or two;” and the other instantly agrees with the proposal, from a feeling that the matter can be settled more clearly by letter than by oral communication.

In these cases it may happen that the talking has cleared the way for the letter,—that it has removed subjects of doubt, hesitation, or dispute, and left only a few points on which the parties are very nearly agreed.

There are, however, other cases, which have sometimes come under my own observation, in which men meet by appointment to settle a matter, and then seem afraid to cope with it, and talk about indifferent subjects with a half-conscious intention of postponing the difficult one till there is no longer time to deal with it on that day. They then say, when they separate, “We will settle that matter by correspondence,” as if they could not have done so just as easily without giving themselves the trouble of meeting. In such cases as these the reason for avoiding the difficult subject is either timidity or indolence. Either the parties do not like to face each other in an opposition that may become a verbal combat, or else they have not decision and industry enough to do a hard day’s work together; so they procrastinate, that they may spread the work over a larger space of time.

The timidity that shrinks from a personal encounter is sometimes the cause of hostile letter-writing about matters of business even when personal interviews are most easy. There are instances of disputes by letter between people who live in the same town, in the same street, and even in the same house, and who might quarrel with their tongues if they were not afraid, but fear drives them to fight from a certain distance, as it requires less personal courage to fire a cannon at an enemy a league away than to face his naked sword.

Timidity leads people to write letters and to avoid them. Some timorous people feel bolder with a pen; others, on the contrary, are extremely afraid of committing anything to paper, either because written words remain and may be referred to afterwards, or because they may be read by eyes they were never intended for, or else because the letter-writer feels doubtful about his own powers in composition, grammar, or spelling.

Of these reasons against doing business by letter the second is really serious. You write about your most strictly private affairs, and unless the receiver of the letter is a rigidly careful and orderly person, it may be read by his clerks or servants. You may afterwards visit the recipient and find the letter lying about on a disorderly desk, or stuck on a hook suspended from a wall, or thrust into a lockless drawer; and as the letter is no longer your property, and you have not the resource of destroying it, you will keenly appreciate the wisdom of those who avoid letter-writing when they can.

The other cause of timidity, the apprehension that some fault may be committed, some sin against literary taste or grammatical rule, has a powerful effect as a deterrent from even necessary business correspondence. The fear which a half-educated person feels that he will commit faults causes a degree of hesitation which is enough of itself to produce them; and besides this cause of error there is the want of practice, also caused by timidity, for persons who dread letter-writing practise it as little as possible.

The awkwardness of uneducated letter-writers is a most serious cause of anxiety to people who are compelled to intrust the care of things to uneducated dependants at a distance. Such care-takers, instead of keeping you regularly informed of the state of affairs as an intelligent correspondent would, write rarely, and they have such difficulty in imagining the necessary ignorance of one who is not on the spot, that the information they give you is provokingly incomplete on some most important points.An uneducated agent will write to you and tell you, for example, that damage has occurred to something of yours, say a house, a carriage, or a yacht, but he will not tell you its exact nature or extent, and he will leave you in a state of anxious conjecture. If you question him by letter, he will probably miss what is most essential in your questions, so that you will have great difficulty in getting at the exact truth. After much trouble you will perhaps have to take the train and go to see the extent of damage for yourself, though it might have been described to you quite accurately in a short letter by an intelligent man of business.

Nothing is more wonderful than the mistakes in following written directions that can be committed by uneducated men. With clear directions in the most legible characters before their eyes they will quietly go and do something entirely different, and appear unfeignedly surprised when you show them the written directions afterwards. In these cases it is probable that they have unconsciously substituted a notion of their own for your idea, which is the common process of what the uneducated consider to be understanding things.

The extreme facility with which this is done may be illustrated by an example. The well-known French savant and inventor, Ruolz, whose name is famous in connection with electro-plating, turned his attention to paper for roofing and, as he perceived the defects of the common bituminous papers, invented another in which no bitumen was employed. This he advertised constantly and extensively as the “Carton non bitumÉ Ruolz,” consequently every one calls it the “Carton bitumÉ Ruolz.” The reason here is that the notion of papers for roofs was already so associated in the French mind with bitumen, that it was absolutely impossible to effect the disjunction of the two ideas.

Instances have occurred to everybody in which the consequence of warning a workman that he is not to do some particular thing, is that he goes and does it, when if nothing had been said on the subject he might, perchance, have avoided it. Here are two good instances of this, but I have met with many others. I remember ordering a binder to bind some volumes with red edges, specially stipulating that he was not to use aniline red. He therefore carefully stained the edges with aniline. I also remember writing to a painter that he was to stain some new fittings of a boat with a transparent glaze of raw sienna, and afterwards varnish them, and that he was to be careful not to use opaque paint anywhere. I was at a great distance from the boat and could not superintend the work. In due time I visited the boat and discovered that a foul tint of opaque paint had been employed everywhere on the new fittings, without any glaze or varnish whatever, in spite of the fact that old fittings, partially retained, were still there, with mellow transparent stain and varnish, in the closest juxtaposition with the hideous thick new daubing.

It is the evil of mediocrity in fortune to have frequently to trust to uneducated agents. Rich men can employ able representatives, and in this way they can inform themselves accurately of what occurs to their belongings at a distance. Without riches, however, we may sometimes have a friend on the spot who will see to things for us, which is one of the kindest offices of friendship. The most efficient friend is one who will not only look to matters of detail, but will take the trouble to inform you accurately about them, and for this he must be a man of leisure. Such a friend often spares one a railway journey by a few clear lines of report or explanation. Judging from personal experience, I should say that retired lawyers and retired military officers were admirably adapted to render this great service efficiently, and I should suppose that a man who had retired from busy commercial life would be scarcely less useful, but I should not hope for precision in one who had always been unoccupied, nor should I expect many details from one who was much occupied still. The first would lack training and experience; the second would lack leisure.

The talent for accuracy in affairs may be distinct from literary talent and education, and though we have been considering the difficulty of corresponding on matters of business with the uneducated, we must not too hastily infer that because a man is inaccurate in spelling, and inelegant in phraseology, he may not be an agreeable and efficient business correspondent. There was a time when all the greatest men of business in England were uncertain spellers. Clear expression and completeness of statement are more valuable than any other qualities in a business correspondent. I sometimes have to correspond with a tradesman in Paris who rose from an humble origin and scarcely produces what a schoolmaster would consider a passable letter; yet his letters are models in essential qualities, as he always removes by plain statements or questions every possibility of a mistake, and if there is any want of absolute precision in my orders he is sure to find out the deficiency, and to call my attention to it sharply.

The habit of not acknowledging orders is one of the worst negative vices in business correspondence. It is most inconveniently common in France, but happily much rarer in England. Where this vice prevails you cannot tell whether the person you wish to employ has read your order or not; and if you suppose him to have read it, you have no reason to feel sure that he has understood it, or will execute it in time.

It is a great gain to the writer of letters to be able to make them brief and clear at the same time, but as there is obscurity in a labyrinth of many words so there may be another kind of obscurity from their paucity,—that kind which Horace alluded to with reference to poetry,—

“Brevis esse laboro
Obscurus fio.”

Sometimes one additional word would spare the reader a doubt or a misunderstanding. This is likely to become more and more the dominant fault of correspondence as it imitates the brevity of the telegram.

Observe the interesting use of the word laboro by Horace. You may, in fact, labor to be brief, although the result is an appearance of less labor than if you had written at ease. It may take more time to write a very short letter than one of twice the length, the only gain in this case being to the receiver.

Letters of business often appear to be written in the most rapid and careless haste; the writing is almost illegible from its speed, the composition slovenly, the letter brief. And yet such a letter may have cost hours of deliberate reflection before one word of it was committed to paper. It is the rapid registering of a slowly matured decision.

It is a well-known principle of modern business correspondence that if a letter refers only to one subject it is more likely to receive attention than if it deals with several; therefore if you have several different orders or directions to give it is bad policy to write them all at once, unless you are absolutely compelled to do so because they are all equally pressing. Even if there is the same degree of urgency for all, yet a practical impossibility that all should be executed at the same time, it is still the best policy to give your orders successively and not more quickly than they can be executed. The only danger of this is that the receiver of the orders may think at first that they are small matters in which postponement signifies little, as they can be executed at any time. To prevent this he should be strongly warned at first that the order will be rapidly followed by several others. If there is not the same degree of urgency for all, the best way is to make a private register of the different matters in the order of their urgency, and then to write several short notes, at intervals, one about each thing.

People have such a marvellous power of misunderstanding even the very plainest directions that a business letter never can be made too clear. It will, indeed, frequently happen that language itself is not clear enough for the purposes of explanation without the help of drawing, and drawing may not be clear to one who has not been educated to understand it, which compels you to have recourse to modelling. In these cases the task of the letter-writer is greatly simplified, as he has nothing to do but foresee and prevent any misunderstanding of the drawing or model.

Every material thing constructed by mankind may be explained by the three kinds of mechanical drawing,—plan, section, and elevation,—but the difficulty, is that so many people are unable to understand plans and sections; they only understand elevations, and not always even these. The special incapacity to understand plans and sections is common in every rank of society, and it is not uncommon even in the practical trades. All letter-writing that refers to material construction would be immensely simplified if, by a general rule in popular and other education, every future man and woman in the country were taught enough about mechanical drawing to be able at least to read it.

It is delightful to correspond about construction with any trained architect or engineer, because to such a correspondent you can explain everything briefly, with the perfect certainty of being accurately understood. It is terrible toil to have to explain construction by letter to a man who does not understand mechanical drawing; and when you have given great labor to your explanation, it is the merest chance whether he will catch your meaning or not. The evil does not stop at mechanical drawing. Not only do uneducated people misunderstand a mechanical plan or section, but they are quite as liable to misunderstand a perspective drawing, as the great architect and draughtsman Viollet-le-Duc charmingly exemplified by the work of an intelligent child. A little boy had drawn a cat as he had seen it in front with its tail standing up, and this front view was stupidly misunderstood by a mature bourgeois, who thought the animal was a biped (as the hind-legs were hidden), and believed the erect tail to be some unknown object sticking out of the nondescript creature’s head. If you draw a board in perspective (other than isometrical) a workman is quite likely to think that one end of it is to be narrower than the other.

Business correspondence in foreign languages is a very simple matter when it deals only with plain facts, and it does not require any very extensive knowledge of the foreign tongue to write a common order; but if any delicate or complicated matter has to be explained, or if touchy sensitiveness in the foreigner has to be soothed by management and tact, then a thorough knowledge of the shades of expression is required, and this is extremely rare. The statement of bare facts, or the utterance of simple wants, is indeed only a part of business correspondence, for men of business, though they are not supposed to display sentiment in affairs, are in reality just as much human beings as other men, and consequently they have feelings which are to be considered. A correspondent who is able to write a foreign language with delicacy and tact will often attain his object when one with a ruder and more imperfect knowledge of the language would meet with certain failure, though he asked for exactly the same thing.

It is surety possible to be civil and even polite in business correspondence without using the deplorable commercial slang which exists, I believe, in every modern language. The proof that such abstinence is possible is that some of the most efficient and most active men of business never have recourse to it at all. This commercial slang consists in the substitution of conventional terms originally intended to be more courteous than plain English, French, etc., but which, in fact, from their mechanical use, become wholly destitute of that best politeness which is personal, and does not depend upon set phrases that can be copied out of a tradesman’s model letter-writer. Anybody but a tradesman calls your letter a letter; why should an English tradesman call it “your favor,” and a French one “votre honorÉe”? A gentleman writing in the month of May speaks of April, May, and June, when a tradesman carefully avoids the names of the months, and calls them ultimo, courant, and proximo; whilst instead of saying “by” or “according to,” like other Englishmen, he says per. This style was touched upon by Scott in Provost Crosbie’s letter to Alexander Fairford: “Dear Sir—Your respected favor of 25th ultimo, per favor of Mr. Darsie Latimer, reached me in safety.” This is thought to be a finished commercial style. One sometimes meets with the most astonishing and complicated specimens of it, which the authors are evidently proud of as proofs of their high commercial training. I regret not to have kept some fine examples of these, as their perfections are far beyond all imitation. This is not surprising when we reflect that the very worst commercial style is the result of a striving by many minds, during several generations, after a preposterous ideal.

Tradesmen deserve credit for understanding the one element of courtesy in letter-writing which has been neglected by gentlemen. They value legible handwriting, and they print clear names and addresses on their letter-paper, by which they spare much trouble.

Before closing this chapter let me say something about the reading of business letters as well as the writing of them. It is, perhaps, a harder duty to read such letters with the necessary degree of attention than to compose them, for the author has his head charged with the subject, and writing the letter is a relief to him; but to the receiver the matter is new, and however lucid may be the exposition it always requires some degree of real attention on his part. How are you, being at a distance, to get an indolent man to bestow that necessary attention? He feels secure from a personal visit, and indulges his indolence by neglecting your concerns, even when they are also his own. Long ago I heard an English Archdeacon tell the following story about his Bishop. The prelate was one of that numerous class of men who loathe the sight of a business letter; and he had indulged his indolence in that respect to such a degree that, little by little, he had arrived at the fatal stage where one leaves letters unopened for days or weeks. At one particular time the Archdeacon was aware of a great arrear of unopened letters, and impressed his lordship with the necessity for taking some note of their contents. Yielding to a stronger will, the Bishop began to read; and one of the first communications was from a wealthy man who offered a large sum for church purposes (I think for building), but if the offer was not accepted within a certain lapse of time he declared his intention of making it to that which a Bishop loveth not—a dissenting community. The prelate had opened the letter too late, and he lost the money. I believe that the Archdeacon’s vexation at the loss was more than counterbalanced by gratification that his hierarchical superior had received such a lesson for his neglect. Yet he did but imitate Napoleon, of whom Emerson says, “He directed Bourrienne to leave all letters unopened for three weeks, and then observed with satisfaction how large a part of the correspondence had disposed of itself and no longer required an answer.” This is a very unsafe system to adopt, as the case of the Bishop proves. Things may “dispose of themselves” in the wrong way, like wine in a leaky cask, which, instead of putting itself carefully into a sound cask, goes trickling into the earth.

The indolence of some men in reading and answering letters of business would be incredible if they did not give clear evidence of it. The most remarkable example that ever came under my notice is the following. A French artist, not by any means in a condition of superfluous prosperity, exhibited a picture at the Salon. He waited in Paris till after the opening of the exhibition and then went down into the country. On the day of his departure he received letters from two different collectors expressing a desire to purchase his work, and asking its price. Any real man of business would have seized upon such an opportunity at once. He would have answered both letters, stayed in town, and contrived to set the two amateurs bidding against each other. The artist in question was one of those unaccountable mortals who would rather sacrifice all their chances of life than indite a letter of business, so he left both inquiries unanswered, saying that if the men had really wanted the picture they would have called to see him. He never sold it, and some time afterwards was obliged to give up his profession, quite as much from the lack of promptitude in affairs as from any artistic deficiency.

Sometimes letters of business are read, but read so carelessly that it would be better if they were thrown unopened into the fire. I have seen some astounding instances of this, and, what is most remarkable, of repeated and incorrigible carelessness in the same person or firm, compelling one to the conclusion that in corresponding with that person or that firm the clearest language, the plainest writing, and the most legible numerals, are all equally without effect. I am thinking particularly of one case, intimately known to me in all its details, in which a business correspondence of some duration was finally abandoned, after infinite annoyance, for the simple reason that it was impossible to get the members of the firm, or their representatives, to attend to written orders with any degree of accuracy. Even whilst writing this very Essay I have given an order with regard to which I foresaw a probable error. Knowing by experience that a probable error is almost certain if steps are not taken energetically to prevent it, I requested that this error might not be committed, and to attract more attention to my request I wrote the paragraph containing it in red ink,—a very unusual precaution. The foreseen error was accurately committed.