How to Write Letters (Formerly The Book of Letters) | Page 2

over with.
And perhaps this attitude of getting the thing over with at all costs is
not so bad after all. There are those who lament the passing of the
ceremonious letter and others who regret that the "literary" letter--the
kind of letter that can be published--is no longer with us. But the old
letter of ceremony was not really more useful than a powdered wig, and
as for the sort of letter that delights the heart and lightens the labor of
the biographer--well, that is still being written by the kind of person
who can write it. It is better that a letter should be written because the
writer has something to say than as a token of culture. Some of the
letters of our dead great do too often remind us that they were not
forgetful of posterity.
The average writer of a letter might well forget culture and posterity

and address himself to the task in hand, which, in other than the most
exceptional sort of letter, is to say what he has to say in the shortest
possible compass that will serve to convey the thought or the
information that he wants to hand on. For a letter is a conveyance of
thought; if it becomes a medium of expression it is less a letter than a
diary fragment.
Most of our letters in these days relate to business affairs or to social
affairs that, as far as personality is concerned, might as well be business.
Our average letter has a rather narrow objective and is not designed to
be literature. We may, it is true, write to cheer up a sick friend, we may
write to tell about what we are doing, we may write that sort of missive
which can be classified only as a love letter--but unless such letters
come naturally it is better that they be not written. They are the
exceptional letters. It is absurd to write them according to rule. In fact,
it is absurd to write any letter according to rule. But one can learn the
best usage in correspondence, and that is all that this book attempts to
present.
The heyday of letter writing was in the eighteenth century in England.
George Saintsbury, in his interesting "A Letter Book," says:
"By common consent of all opinion worth attention that century was, in
the two European literatures which were equally free from crudity and
decadence--French and English--the very palmiest day of the art.
Everybody wrote letters, and a surprising number of people wrote
letters well. Our own three most famous epistolers of the male sex,
Horace Walpole, Gray, and Cowper--belong wholly to it; and 'Lady
Mary'--our most famous she-ditto--belongs to it by all but her
childhood; as does Chesterfield, whom some not bad judges would put
not far if at all below the three men just mentioned. The rise of the
novel in this century is hardly more remarkable than the way in which
that novel almost wedded itself--certainly joined itself in the most
frequent friendship--to the letter-form. But perhaps the excellence of
the choicer examples in this time is not really more important than the
abundance, variety, and popularity of its letters, whether good,
indifferent, or bad. To use one of the informal superlatives sanctioned

by familiar custom it was the 'letter-writingest' of ages from almost
every point of view. In its least as in its most dignified moods it even
overflowed into verse if not into poetry as a medium. Serious epistles
had--of course on classical models--been written in verse for a long
time. But now in England more modern patterns, and especially
Anstey's New Bath Guide, started the fashion of actual correspondence
in doggerel verse with no thought of print--a practice in which persons
as different as Madame d'Arblay's good-natured but rather foolish
father, and a poet and historian like Southey indulged; and which did
not become obsolete till Victorian times, if then."
There is a wide distinction between a letter and an epistle. The letter is
a substitute for a spoken conversation. It is spontaneous, private, and
personal. It is non-literary and is not written for the eyes of the general
public. The epistle is in the way of being a public speech--an audience
is in mind. It is written with a view to permanence. The relation
between an epistle and a letter has been compared to that between a
Platonic dialogue and a talk between two friends. A great man's letters,
on account of their value in setting forth the views of a school or a
person, may, if produced after his death, become epistles. Some of
these, genuine or forgeries, under some eminent name, have come
down to us from the days of the early Roman Empire. Cicero, Plato,
Aristotle, Demosthenes, are the principal names