"Now for enditing of Letters: alas, what need wee much adoe about a little matter?"

In a letter to Miss Sara Hennel, George Eliot writes that "there are but two kinds of regular correspondence possible—one of simple affection, which gives a picture of all the details, painful and pleasurable, that a loving heart pines after …, and one purely moral and intellectual, carried on for the sake of ghostly edification in which each party has to put salt on the tails of all sorts of ideas on all sorts of subjects." These two classes embrace, perhaps, the great bulk of letters, but George Eliot says there is a third class to which her correspondence with Miss Hennel belongs—one of impulse. Strictly speaking, all of the letters which really belong as such to literature come under this last head. The result of a perfect fusion of the two other styles, they exhibit a sparkle, a pungency, and lightness of touch, which take the curse from mere gossip, supple the joints of intellectual disquisition, and mark unmistakably the epistolary artist. The letter-writer, no less than the poet, is born, not made, and his art, though for the most part unconscious, is no less an art. The expression of every sentiment, the choice of every word, however random it may seem, is determined for the born enditer of epistles by a sense of fitness so exquisite that its niceties of distinction escape analysis and only its more general principles can be enunciated.

The most vital of these principles is pretty generally observed. Thackeray perceives it when at the close of a delightful letter to Mrs. Brookfield he exclaims, "Why, this is almost as good as talk!" He was right: it was written talk. If read aloud with pauses for the correspondent's reply, the perfect letter would make perfect conversation. It should call up the voice, gesture, and bearing of the writer. Though it may be more studied than oral speech, it must appear no less impromptu. This, indeed, is its essential charm, that it contains the mind's first fruits with the bloom on, that it exhale carelessly the mixed fragrance of the spirit like a handful of wild flowers not sorted for the parlor table but, as gathered among the fields, haphazard, with here a violet, there a spice of mint, a strawberry blossom from the hillside, and a sprig of bittersweet. This is the opportunity for the clergyman to show that he is not all theologian, but part naturalist; the farmer that he is not all ploughman, but part philosopher. This is the place for little buds of sentiment, short flights of poetry, wise sermons all in three lines, odd conceits, small jests rubbing noses with deacon-browed moralities; in short, for every fine extravagance in which the mind at play delights. Sickness and sorrow, too, and death, if spoken of reverently and bravely, must not be denied a place. So we shall have a letter now all grave, now all gay, but generally, if it be a good letter, part grave, part gay, just as the mingled threads are clipped from the webs of life.

That such a letter cannot be written with white gloves goes without saying. The first requisite is freedom from stiffness. The realm of good letters is a republic in which no man need lift his hat to another. It is hail-fellow well met, or not met at all. So when the humble address their superiors, or when children write to austere grandfathers, they suffer from an awkwardness of mental attitude which is the paralysis of all spontaneity. Before the indispensable ease can exist, certain relations of equality must be established. But there are some whose fountains of speech, in letters as in conversation, lie forever above the line of perpetual snow. They never thaw out. Bound by a sort of viscosity of spirits, that peculiar stamp of the Anglo-Saxon temperament, they are incapable of getting their thoughts and emotions under way; with the best will in the world, genuine warmth of feeling, minds stocked with information on all subjects, they are never fluent. The man with no ear must not hope to be a musician, nor the man with no fluency a letter-writer. Yet this is not all. You will find some at perfect ease in conversation who, touching pen to paper, exhibit the affected primness commonly ascribed to the maiden aunt. They have not learned that this is a place where words must speak for themselves without comment of inflection, gesture of the hand, or interpreting smile. Here to be unaffected one must take thought. As on the stage a natural hue must be obtained by unnatural means, so in the writing of letters one must a trifle overdo in order to do but ordinarily. A word which rings on the lips with frank cordiality will stare coldly from the written page and must be heightened to avoid offense. This is a license requiring the exercise of moderation and the utmost tact. Not all expressions suitable for conversation need reinforcement in black and white. In speaking one frequently raps out a phrase whose literalness one's eyes warn the listener to question. These must be toned down or glossed. An example of the toned down variety, which illustrates as well men's fondness for assailing their friends with opprobrious epithet, is offered by Darwin when he writes, "I cannot conclude without telling you that of all blackguards you are the greatest and best." If Darwin had been talking face to face with Fox, he would doubtless have called him a blooming blackguard outright.

A writer in a journal of psychology points out the strong psychic link existing between a certain short expletive of condemnation and a refractory collar-button. These words seem to come at times charged with the very marrow of the mind, and, if the letters of a man who occasionally indulges in them be wholly purged of them, the letters lose one of their most distinctive characteristics. The point to be made is, that the personal word is all-important, that till the fact is related to the writer, it is dead. If we want news, we can consult the dailies; but in letters facts are little, ideas about facts everything. That is to say, all events, especially the more trifling, should be shown through the colored glass of the writer's personality. What concerns you is not what happened, but what relations the happening bears to you and your correspondent.

When once the personal vein is struck, nothing is so easy as to find a theme for a letter. The materials are only too plentiful if the eyes and heart are open to receive them. Stevenson wrote that he scarcely pulled a weed in his garden without pondering some fit phrase to report the fact to his friend Colvin, and we may be sure that the weed was not allowed to wither, but when it was transplanted, flourished again and reached its destination in a veritable Pot of Basil. No great events are necessary; the plainest incident, the morning's shopping, is as good as a Pan-American exposition for ideas to crystallize about, since exactly in proportion as an event is embedded in opinion, comment, and feeling, must its value as an epistolary item be rated. While the born letter-writer is driving a nail or polishing a shoe, a thought apropos of his occupation or of stars, perhaps, drops complete and perfect like ripe fruit in an orchard. It matters little; seen through the eyes of a friend, all homely things are invested with an extrinsic interest and a new glory not their own.

… By the very nature of the composition a mean man cannot possibly write a good letter. When we cast about for a perfect exemplar of the epistolary style, we must of necessity look among the high-souled men—Cowper, Lamb, FitzGerald, Hearn—for where else shall we find one to stand the test of self-revelation? Happily, one of the blithest, manliest, completest spirits of our times was a matchless writer of letters—Stevenson. Aching for absolute honesty of style and making clearness almost synonomous with good morals, he has given us in the Vailima collection and in the two larger volumes of his correspondence an almost unexampled self-revelation. The man Stevenson is in them, "his essence and his sting." The grip of his hand and the look of his eye lose none of their force in the transparent medium through which they are constrained to pass. Knowing that a man who constantly gives his best finds his best constantly growing better, he never hoarded his ideas for publication, but poured his intellectual riches into a note to a friend as freely as if each line were coining him gold. It results that the lover of Stevenson would almost prefer to give up all the romances rather than the letters. For they feel that in this correspondence, besides finding the qualities which distinguish the other works, they have met face to face and known personally the romancer, the essayist, the poet, and above all the man who, ridden by an incubus of disease, spoke always of the joy of living, the man who knew hours of bitterness but none of flinching, the man who grappled with his destiny undaunted, and, when death hunted him down in a South Sea island, fell gallantly and gazing unabashed into "the bright eyes of danger."

Stevenson approached close to the beau ideal of epistolary art. When we and our friends have achieved it, distance will be annihilated and there will be no such thing as separation. We shall draw from our little box a small white packet, and, though Nostradamus may offer us every secret of magician or alchemist in exchange for it, we shall refuse offhand. How shall he lure us with a shadow, a ghostly visitant, savoring of the pit and summoned only by the most marrow-freezing incantations? Here in our hand is a mysterious, more potent charm, bringing us the warm, human personality of the man. We are not spiritualists, yet here sealed in the white packet is an incorporal presence. Given but a mastery of the twenty-six signs and their combinations, and lo, the heart of our friend served up in Boston bond! Then, as for enditing of letters, we shall rise up and call them blessed who have made "much ado about a little matter."

Literary Monthly, 1901.