A Letter Book Part 21

[127] One of the pleasantest, _to me_, of d.i.c.kens's letters is that in which, extravagant anti-Tory as he was, he refuses to let a contributor echo the too common grudges at Lockhart (see _inf._ under Stevenson).

But it is very short, and perhaps of no general interest.

[128] Referring, I suppose, to the well-known and "inimitable" (but by no means indispensable) flourish of his signature.

[129] "The comedy" is Bulwer-Lytton's _Not so Bad as we Seem_, acted by d.i.c.kens and other amateurs for charity at Devons.h.i.+re House seventy years ago, and about to be reproduced _in loco_ as these proofs are being revised.

CHARLES KINGSLEY (1819-1875)

There are some people who, while thinking that the author of _Westward Ho!_ has not, at least recently, been given his due rank in critical estimation, admit certain explanations of this. As a historian and in almost all his writings Kingsley was inaccurate,--almost (as his friend and brother-in-law Froude was once said to be) "congenitally inaccurate"; in his novels and elsewhere he went out of his way to tread on the corns of all sorts of people; he constantly ventured out of his depth in such subjects as philosophy and theology; and he suffered a terrible defeat by rashly engaging, and by tactical inept.i.tude, in his contest with Newman. His politics, in which matter at one time he engaged hotly, were those of a busier and more educated Colonel Newcome. His poems, which were his least unequal work, seem never to have attracted due notice.

But none of his foibles--not even corn-treading--is a fatal defect in familiar letter-writing: consequently he has good chance here, and his _Letters and Memoirs_ have been deservedly often reprinted. It is true that letters cannot show in full the really exceptional versatility which enabled the same man to write _Yeast_ and _Westward Ho!_, _Andromeda_ and _The Water Babies_, the best of the Essays and the best of the Sermons, _Alton Locke_ and _At Last_.

But they can and they do show it in part: and it gives them the interest which has been noticed in other cases. Indeed in one respect--as a writer--Kingsley is perhaps better in his letters than in his _Essays_, where he too often affects a Macaulayesque positiveness on rather inadequate grounds.

The following specimen should show him in pleasantly varied character--as a thoroughly human person, a good sportsman, and what Matthew Arnold (by no means himself very liberal of praise to his literary contemporaries) thought him--"the most generous man [he had] ever known; the most forward to praise, the most willing to admire, the most free from all thought of himself in praising and admiring and the most incapable of being made ill-natured by having to support ill-natured attacks upon himself." It is to be feared that Mr. Arnold did not go far wrong when he declared, "Among men of letters I know nothing so rare as this."

It is true that the author of _Tom Brown's Schooldays_ was an intimate personal friend, and in politics and other things a close comrade of Kingsley's; but he was as generous to others, and while the scars of the battle with Newman were almost fresh, he writes that he has read _The Dream of Gerontius_ "with admiration and awe." [Greek: thymos], in this sense = "spirit." "Jaques" = "Jack" = "Pike," while on the other side we get, through him of _As You Like It_, an explanation of "melancholies." And in fact the pike is not a cheerful-looking fish. Even two whom the present writer once saw tugging at the two ends of one dead trout in a shallow, did it sulkily.

52. TO TOM HUGHES, ESQ.

Jan. 12. 1857.

I have often been minded to write to you about 'Tom Brown.' I have puffed it everywhere I went, but I soon found how true the adage is that good wine needs no bush, for every one had read it already, and from every one, from the fine lady on her throne to the red-coat on his c.o.c.k-horse and the school-boy on his forrum (as our Irish brethren call it), I have heard but one word, and that is, that it is the jolliest book they ever read. Among a knot of red-coats at the cover-side, some very fast fellow said, 'If I had had such a book in my boyhood, I should have been a better man now!' and more than one capped his sentiment frankly. Now isn't it a comfort to your old bones to have written such a book, and a comfort to see that fellows are in a humour to take it in?

So far from finding men of our rank in a bad vein, or sighing over the times and prospects of the rising generation, I can't help thinking they are very teachable, humble, honest fellows, who want to know what's right, and if they don't go and do it, still think the worst of themselves therefor. I remark now, that with hounds and in fast company, I never hear an oath, and that, too, is a sign of self-restraint.

Moreover, drinking is gone out, and, good G.o.d, what a blessing! I have good hopes, of our cla.s.s, and better than of the cla.s.s below. They are effeminate, and that makes them sensual. Pietists of all ages (George Fox, my dear friend, among the worst) never made a greater mistake than in fancying that by keeping down manly [Greek: thymos], which Plato saith is the root of all virtue, they could keep down sensuality. They were dear good old fools. However, the day of 'Pietism' is gone, and 'Tom Brown' is a heavy stone on its grave. 'Him no get up again after that,' as the n.i.g.g.e.rs say of a buried obi-man. I am trying to polish the poems: but Maurice's holidays make me idle; he has come home healthier and jollier than ever he was in all his life, and is truly a n.o.ble boy.

Sell your last coat and buy a spoon. I have a spoon of huge size (Farlow his make). I killed forty pounds weight of pike, &c., on it the other day, at Strathfieldsaye, to the astonishment and delight of ----, who cut small jokes on 'a spoon at each end,' &c., but altered his tone when he saw the melancholies coming ash.o.r.e, one every ten minutes, and would try his own hand. I have killed heaps of big pike round with it. I tried it in Lord Eversley's lakes on Monday, when the fish wouldn't have even his fly. Capricious party is Jaques. Next day killed a seven pounder at Hurst.... We had a pretty thing on Friday with Garth's, the first run I've seen this year. Out of the Clay Vale below Tilney Hall, pace as good as could be, fields three acres each, fences awful, then over Hazeley Heath to Brams.h.i.+ll, shoved him through a false cast, and a streamer over Hartford Bridge flat, into an unlucky earth. Time fifty-five minutes, falls plentiful, started thirty, and came in eight, and didn't the old mare go? Oh, Tom, she is a comfort; even when a bank broke into a lane, and we tumbled down, she hops up again before I'd time to fall off, and away like a four-year old. And if you can get a horse through that clay vale, why then you can get him 'mostwards'; leastwise so I find, for a black region it is, and if you ain't in the same field with the hounds, you don't know whether you are in the same parish, what with hedges, and trees, and woods, and all supernumerary vegetations. Actually I was pounded in a 'taty-garden,' so awful is the amount of green stuff in these parts. Come and see me, and take the old mare out, and if you don't break her neck, she won't break yours.

JOHN RUSKIN (1819-1900)

The peculiar wilfulness--the unkind called it wrong-headedness--which flecked and veined Mr. Ruskin's genius, had, owing to his wealth and to his entire indifference to any but his own opinion, opportunities of displaying itself in all his work, public as well as private, which are not common. Naturally, it showed itself nowhere more than in letters, and perhaps not unnaturally he often adopted the epistolary form in books which, had he chosen, might as well have taken another--while he might have chosen this in some which do not actually _call_ themselves "letters." There is, however, little difference, except "fuller dress" of expression, between any of the cla.s.ses of his work, whether it range from the first volume of _Modern Painters_ to _Verona_ in time, or from _The Seven Lamps of Architecture_ to _Unto This Last_ in subject. If anybody ever could "write beautifully about a broomstick" he could: though perhaps it is a pity that he so often did. But this faculty, and the entire absence of bashfulness which accompanied it, are no doubt grand accommodations for letter-writing; and the reader of Mr. Ruskin's letters gets the benefit of both very often--of a curious study of high character and great powers uncontrolled by logical self-criticism almost always. The following--part of a still longer letter which he addressed to the _Daily Telegraph_, Sep. 11, 1865, on the eternal Servant Question--was of course written for publication, but so, practically, was everything that ever came from its author. It so happens too that, putting aside his usual King Charles's Head of Demand and Supply, there is little in it of his more mischievous crotchets, nothing of the petulance (amounting occasionally to rudeness) of language in which he sometimes indulged, but much of his n.o.bler idealism, while it is a capital example of his less florid style. "Launce," "Grumio" and "Old Adam"

are of course Shakespeare's: "Fairservice" (of whom, tormenting and selfish as he was, Mr. Ruskin perhaps thought a little too harshly) and "Mattie," Scott's. "Latinity enough"--the unfortunate man had written, and the newspaper had printed, _hoc_ instead of _hac_. "A book of Scripture,"

Colenso's work had just been finished. "Charlotte Winsor" a baby-farmer of the day.

53. From "THE DAILY TELEGRAPH"

September 18, 1865.

DOMESTIC SERVANTS: SONs.h.i.+P AND SLAVERY.

To the Editor of "The Daily Telegraph."

Sir,

I have been watching the domestic correspondence in your columns with much interest, and thought of offering you a short a.n.a.lysis of it when you saw good to bring it to a close, and perhaps a note or two of my own experience, being somewhat conceited on the subject just now, because I have a gardener who lets me keep old-fas.h.i.+oned plants in the greenhouse, understands that my cherries are grown for the blackbirds, and sees me gather a bunch of my own grapes without making a wry face. But your admirable article of yesterday causes me to abandon my purpose; the more willingly, because among all the letters you have hitherto published there is not one from any head of a household which contains a complaint worth notice. All the masters or mistresses whose letters are thoughtful or well written say they get on well enough with their servants; no part has yet been taken in the discussion by the heads of old families.

The servants' letters, hitherto, furnish the best data; but the better cla.s.s of servants are also silent, and must remain so. Launce, Grumio, or Fairservice may have something to say for themselves; but you will hear nothing from Old Adam nor from Carefu' Mattie. One proverb from Sancho, if we could get it, would settle the whole business for us; but his master and he are indeed "no more." I would have walked down to Dulwich to hear what Sam Weller had to say; but the high-level railway went through Mr. Pickwick's parlour two months ago, and it is of no use writing to Sam, for, as you are well aware, he is no penman. And, indeed, Sir, little good will come of any writing on the matter. "The cat will mew, the dog will have its day." You yourself, excellent as is the greater part of what you have said, and to the point, speak but vainly when you talk of "probing the evil to the bottom." This is no sore that can be probed, no sword nor bullet wound. This is a plague spot. Small or great, it is in the significance of it, not in the depth, that you have to measure it. It is essentially bottomless, cancerous; a putrescence through the const.i.tution of the people is indicated by this galled place. Because I know this thoroughly, I say so little, and that little, as your correspondents think, who know nothing of me, and as you say, who might have known more of me, unpractically. Pardon me, I am no seller of plasters, nor of ounces of civet. The patient's sickness is his own fault, and only years of discipline will work it out of him.

That is the only really "practical" saying that can be uttered to him.

The relation of master and servant involves every other--touches every condition of moral health through the State. Put that right, and you put all right; but you will find that it can only come ultimately, not primarily, right; you cannot begin with it. Some of the evidence you have got together is valuable, many pieces of partial advice very good.

You need hardly, I think, unless you wanted a type of British logic, have printed a letter in which the writer accused (or would have accused, if he had possessed Latinity enough) all London servants of being thieves because he had known one robbery to have been committed by a nice-looking girl. But on the whole there is much common sense in the letters; the singular point in them all, to my mind, being the inapprehension of the breadth and connection of the question, and the general resistance to, and stubborn rejection of, the abstract ideas of sons.h.i.+p and slavery, which include whatever is possible in wise treatment of servants. It is very strange to see that, while everybody shrinks at abstract suggestions of there being possible error in a book of Scripture, your sensible English housewife fearlessly rejects Solomon's opinion when it runs slightly counter to her own, and that not one of your many correspondents seems ever to have read the Epistle to Philemon. It is no less strange that while most English boys of ordinary position hammer through their Horace at one time or other time of their school life, no word of his wit or his teaching seems to remain by them: for all the good they get out of them, the Satires need never have been written. The Roman gentleman's account of his childhood and of his domestic life possesses no charm for them; and even men of education would sometimes start to be reminded that his "_noctes coenaeque Deum!_"

meant supping with his merry slaves on beans and bacon. Will you allow me, on this general question of liberty and slavery, to refer your correspondents to a paper of mine touching closely upon it, the leader in the _Art-Journal_ for July last? and to ask them also to meditate a little over the two beautiful epitaphs on Epictetus and Zosima, quoted in the last paper of the _Idler_?

"I, Epictetus, was a slave; and sick in body, and wretched in poverty; and beloved by the G.o.ds."

"Zosima, who while she lived was a slave only in her body, has now found deliverance for that also."

How might we, over many an "independent" Englishman, reverse this last legend, and write--

"This man, who while he lived was free only in his body, has now found captivity for that also."

I will not pa.s.s without notice--for it bears also on wide interests--your correspondent's question, how my principles differ from the ordinary economist's view of supply and demand. Simply in that the economy I have taught, in opposition to the popular view, is the science which not merely ascertains the relations of existing demand and supply, but determines what _ought_ to be demanded and what _can_ be supplied. A child demands the moon, and, the supply not being in this case equal to the demand, is wisely accommodated with a rattle; a footpad demands your purse, and is supplied according to the less or more rational economy of the State, with that or a halter; a foolish nation, not able to get into its head that free trade does indeed mean the removal of taxation from its imports, but not of supervision from them, demands unlimited foreign beef, and is supplied with the cattle murrain and the like. There may be all manner of demands, all manner of supplies. The true political economist regulates these; the false political economist leaves them to be regulated by (not Divine) Providence. For, indeed, the largest final demand anywhere reported of, is that of h.e.l.l; and the supply of it (by the broad gauge line) would be very nearly equal to the demand at this day, unless there were here and there a swineherd or two who could keep his pigs out of sight of the lake.

Thus in this business of servants everything depends on what sort of servant you at heart wish for or "demand." If for nurses you want Charlotte Winsors, they are to be had for money; but by no means for money, such as that German girl who, the other day, on her own scarce-floating fragment of wreck, saved the abandoned child of another woman, keeping it alive by the moisture from her lips. What kind of servant do you want? It is a momentous question for you yourself--for the nation itself. Are we to be a nation of shopkeepers, wanting only shop-boys: or of manufacturers, wanting only hands: or are there to be knights among us, who will need squires--captains among us, needing crews? Will you have clansmen for your candlesticks, or silver plate?

Myrmidons at your tents, ant-born, or only a mob on the Gillies' Hill?

Are you resolved that you will never have any but your inferiors to serve you, or shall Enid ever lay your trencher with tender little thumb, and Cinderella sweep your hearth, and be cherished there? It _might_ come to that in time, and plate and hearth be the brighter; but if your servants are to be held your inferiors, at least be sure they _are_ so, and that you are indeed wiser, and better-tempered, and more useful than they. Determine what their education ought to be, and organize proper servants' schools, and there give it them. So they will be fit for their position, and will do honour to it, and stay in it: let the masters be as sure they do honour to theirs, and are as willing to stay in that. Remember that every people which gives itself to the pursuit of riches, invariably, and of necessity, gets the sc.u.m uppermost in time, and is set by the genii, like the ugly bridegroom in the Arabian Nights, at its own door with its heels in the air, showing its shoe-soles instead of a Face. And the reversal is a serious matter, if reversal be even possible, and it comes right end uppermost again, instead of to conclusive Wrong-end.

ROBERT LOUIS BALFOUR STEVENSON (1850-1894)

The author of _Treasure Island_ (invariably known to his friends simply as "Louis," the "Robert" being reserved in the form of "Bob" for his less famous but very admirable cousin the art-critic) will perhaps offer to some Matthew Arnold of posterity the opportunity of a paradox like that of our Matthew on Sh.e.l.ley. For a short time some of these friends--not perhaps the wisest of them--were inclined to regard him as, and to urge him to continue to be, a writer of criticisms and miscellaneous articles--a sort of new Hazlitt. Others no sooner saw the _New Arabian Nights_ than they recognised a tale-teller such as had not been seen for a long time--such as, in respect of anything imitable, had never been seen before. And he fortunately fell in with these views and hopes. But all his tales are pure Romance, and Romance has her eclipses with the vulgar. On the other hand his letters are almost as good as his fiction, and not in the least open to the charges of a certain non-naturalness of style--even of thought--which could, justly or not, be brought against his other writings. And it is perhaps worth noting here that letters have held their popularity with all fit judges almost better than any other division of literature. Whether this is the effect of their "touches of nature" (using the famous phrase without the blunder so common in regard to it but not without reference to its context) need not be discussed.

As, by the kindness of Mr. Lloyd Osbourne, I am enabled to give here an unpublished letter of Stevenson's to myself, it may require some explanation, not only of the commentatory and commendatory kind but of fact. Stevenson, coming to dine with me, had brought with him, and showed with much pride, a new umbrella (a seven-and-sixpenny one) which, to my surprise, he had bought. But when he went away that night he forgot it; and when I met him next day at the Savile and suggested that I should send it to him, there or somewhere, he said he was going abroad almost immediately and begged me to keep it for him. By this or that accident, but chiefly owing to his constant expatriations, no opportunity of rest.i.tution ever occurred: though I used to remind him of it as a standing joke, and treasured it religiously, stored and unused. This letter is partly in answer to a last reminder in which I said that I was going to present it to the nation, that it might be kept with King Koffee Kalcalli's, but as a memory of a "victor in romance" not of a vanquished enemy.

I of course told Mr. Kipling of the contents which concerned him: and he, equally of course, demanded delivery of the goods at once. But, half in joke, I demurred, saying that I was a bailee, and the gift was not formal enough, being undated and only a "suggestion"; he should have it without fail at my death, or Stevenson's.[130]

When alas! this latter came, I prepared to act up to my promise; but, alas! again, the umbrella had vanished! Some prated of mislaying in house-removal, of illicit use by servants, etc.; but for my part I had and have no doubt that the thing had been enskyed and constellated--like Ariadne's Crown, Berenice's Locks, Ca.s.siopeia's Chair, and a whole galaxy of other now celestial objects--to afford a special place to my dead friend then, and to my live one when (may the time still be far distant) he is ready for it.

As for the more serious subject of the letter, I must refer curious readers to an essay of mine on Lockhart, originally published in 1884 and reprinted in _Essays in English Literature_ some years later. To this reprint I subjoined, _before_ I got this letter from R. L. S., a reasoned defence of Lockhart from the charge of cowardice and "caddishness": but it is evident that Stevenson had not yet seen it. When he did see it, he wrote me another letter chiefly about my book itself, and so of no interest to the public, but touching again on this Lockhart question. He avowed himself still dissatisfied: but said he was sorry for his original remark which was "ungracious and unhandsome" if not untrue, adding, "for to whom do I owe more pleasure than to Lockhart?"

54.

My dear Saintsbury,

Thanks for yours. Why did I call Lockhart a cad? That calls for an answer, and I give it. "Scorpion"[131] literature seems at the best no very fit employment for a man of genius, which Lockhart was--and none at all for a gentleman. But if a man goes in for such a trade, he must be ready for the consequences; and I do not conceive a gentleman as a coward; the white feather is not his crest, it _almost_ excludes--and I put the "almost" with reluctance. Well, now about the duel? Even Bel-Ami[132] turned up on the _terrain_. But Lockhart? _Et responsum est ab omnibus, Non est inventus._[133] I have often wondered how Scott took that episode.[134] I do not know how this view will strike you;[135] it seems to me the "good old honest" fas.h.i.+on of our fathers, though I own it does not agree with the New Morality. "Cad" may be perhaps an expression too vivacious and not well chosen; it is, at least upon my view, substantially just.

Now if you mean to comb my wig, comb it from the right parting--I know you will comb it well.