them.' Lady Mary felt this, as we believe. She had seen all the world of England, and it did not satisfy. She turned abroad, not in pursuit of definite good, nor from fear of particular evil, but from a vague wish for some great change-from a wish to escape from a life which harassed the soul, but did not calm it; which awakened the intellect without answering its questions. She lived abroad for more than twenty years, at Avignon and Venice and elsewhere; and, during that absence, she wrote the letters which compose the greater part of her works. And there is no denying that they are good letters. The art of note-writing may become classical-it is for the present age to provide models of that sort of composition-but letters have perished. Nobody but a bore now takes pains enough to make them pleasant ; and the only result of a bore's pains is to make them unpleasant. The correspondence of the present day is a continual labour without any visible achievement. The dying penny-a-liner said with emphasis : 'That which I have written has perished. We might all say so of the mass of petty letters we write. They are a heap of small atoms, each with some interest individually, but with no interest as a whole; all the items concern us, but they all add up to nothing. In the last century, cultivated people who sat down to write a letter took pains to have something to say, and took pains to say it. The postage was perhaps ninepence; and it would be impudent to make a correspondent pay ninepence for nothing. Still more impudent was it, after having made him pay ninepence, to give him the additional pain of making out what was half expressed. People, too, wrote to one another then, not unfrequently, who had long been separated, and who required much explanation and many details to make the life of each intelligible to the other. The correspondence of the nineteenth century is like a series of telegrams with amplified headings. There is not more than one idea; and that idea comes soon, and is soon over. The best correspondence of the last age is rather like a good light article,-in which the points are studiously made, in which the effort to make them is studiously concealed,-in which a series of selected circumstances is set forth,-in which you feel, but are not told, that the principle of the writer's selection was to make his composition pleasant. In letter-writing of this kind Lady Mary was very skilful. She has the highest merit of letterwriting she is concise without being affected. Fluency, which a great orator pronounced to be the curse of orators, is at least equally the curse of writers. There are many people, many ladies especially, who can write letters at any length, in any number, and at any time. We may be quite sure that the letters so written are not good letters. Composition of any sort implies consideration; you must see where you are going before you can go straight, or can pick your steps as you go. On the other hand, too much consideration is unfavourable to the ease of letter-writing, and perhaps of all writing. A letter too much studied wants flow; it is a museum of hoarded sentences. Each sentence sounds effective; but the whole composition wants vitality. It was written with the memory instead of the mind; and every reader feels the effect, though only the critical reader can detect the cause. Lady Mary understood all this. She said what she had to say in words that were always graphic and always sufficiently good, but she avoided curious felicity. Her expressions seem choice, but not chosen. At the end of her life, Lady Mary pointed a subordinate but not a useless moral. The masters of mundane ethics observe that you should stay in the world, or stay out of the world. Lady Mary did neither. She went out and tried to return. Horace Walpole thus describes the result: 'Lady Mary Wortley is arrived; I have seen her; I think her avarice, her art, and her vivacity are all increased. Her dress, like her language, is a galimatias of several countries; the groundwork rags, and the embroidery nastiness. She needs no cap, no handkerchief, no gown, no petticoat, and no shoes. An old black laced hood represents the first; the fur of a horseman's coat, which replaces the third, serves for the second; a dimity petticoat is deputy and officiates for the fourth; and slippers act the part of the last. When I was at Florence, and she was expected there, we were drawing sortes Virgilianas for her; we literally drew "Insanam vatem aspicies." 1 It would have been a stranger prophecy now even than it was then.' There is a description of what the favourite of society becomes after leaving it for years, and after indulging eccentricities for years! There is a commentary on the blunder of exposing yourself in your old age to young people, to whom you have always been a tradition and a name! Horace Walpole doubtless painted up a few trivialities a little. And one of the traits is true. Lady Mary lived before the age in which people waste half their lives in washing the whole of their persons. Lady Mary did not live long after her return to 1 'Thou shalt behold the frenzied prophetess :' Æneid, iii. 443. England. Horace Walpole's letter is written on the 2nd February [1762], and she died on the 21st August in the same year. Her husband had died just before her return, and perhaps, after so many years, she would not have returned unless he had done so. Requiescat in pace; for she quarrelled all her life. VOL. II.-16 STERNE AND THACKERAY.1 MR. PERCY FITZGERALD has expressed his surprise that no one before him has narrated the life of Sterne in two volumes. We are much more surprised that he has done so. The life of Sterne was of the very simplest sort. He was a Yorkshire clergyman, and lived for the most part a sentimental, questionable, jovial life in the country. He was a queer parson, according to our notions; but in those days there were many queer parsons. Late in life he wrote a book or two, which gave him access to London society; and then he led a still more questionable and unclerical life at the edge of the great world. After that he died in something like distress, and leaving his family in something like misery. A simpler life, as far as facts go, never was known; and simple as it is, the story has been well told by Sir Walter Scott, and has been well commented on by Mr. Thackeray. It should have occurred to Mr. Fitzgerald that a subject may only have been briefly treated because it is a limited and simple subject, which suggests but few remarks, and does not require an elaborate and copious description. There are but few materials, too, for a long life of Sterne. Mr. Fitzgerald has stuffed his volumes 1 [NATIONAL REVIEW, April 1864.] The Life of Laurence Sterne. By Percy Fitzgerald, M.A., M.R.I.A. In two volumes. Chapman & Hall. Thackeray the Humourist and the Man of Letters. By Theodore Taylor, Esq. London: John Camden Hotten. |