The Peripatetic Reviewer

E. V. LUCAS called letter writing “the gentlest art” and he used that phrase as a title for one of the most delightful of anthologies, The Gentlest Art: A Choice of Letters hy Entertaining Hands. This anthology was three times reprinted, a success which led to a second volume called The Second Post.Both were published before the First World War, both reflect the serenily of Viotoria’s and Edward’s England, both reflect the affectionate, high-spirited, often passionate individualism of men and women reaching across the silence of space for the sympathy of that other heart.

These were the letter writers who most appealed to Mr. Lucas: he liked the smiling friendliness of Edward FitzGerald and the keen-edged monologues of Mrs. Carlyle: he liked the self-contemplation of Robert Louis Stevenson (to me Stevenson’s letters sound as if they were written before a mirror); he liked the warm geniality of Charles Lamb, the cooleyed observation of Shelley (who was more impassioned in his poetry than in his prose); he liked the tart, confiding revelations of Lord Byron and the eager devotion of John Keats as he writes down his love of the two women who matter most, Fanny Keats, his younger sister, and Fanny Brnwne.

You feel these letters had to be written. They are the instant expression of a mood that could not wait: “Pray do write to me,” says Edward FitzGerald; “a few lines soon are better than a threedecker a month hence.” Some of these letters run long; some are only two lines; some are working on the surface; some, like Dean Swift’s to Stella, are so charged with intimacy and association that one must be a detective to find their full message.

Here, for instance, is Shelley’s account of his visit to Lord Byron in Ravenna in 1821: —

Lord Byron is in excellent cue both of health and spirits. He has got rid of all those melancholy and degrading habits which he indulged at Venice. He lives with one woman, a lady of rank here [Countess Gniccioli], to whom he is attached, and who is attached to him, and is in every respect an altered man. He has written three more cantos of “Don Juan.”I have yet only heard the fifth, and I think that every word of it is pregnant with immortality. . . . Lord Byron gets up at two[P.M.]. I get up, quite contrary to my usual custom, but one must sleep or die, like Southey’s sea-snake in “Kehama,”at 12. After breakfast we sit talking till six. From six till eight we gallop through the pine forests which divide Ravenna from the sea; we then come home and dine, and sit up gossiping till six in the morning. I don’t suppose this will kill me in a week or fortnight, but I shall not try it longer. Lord B.’s establishment consists, besides servants, of ten horses, eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow, and a falcon; and all these, except the horses, walk about the house, which every now and then resounds with their unarbitrated quarrels, as if they were the masters of it.

Now set beside that description Byron’s letters of the very same period to Murray and Hobhouse, sardonic, sulphuric, completely candid in his sudden impatience with the Countess whom he cannot leave, premonitory as when he declares how old he feels, and pathetic in his unphrased desire to regain England’s respect. If Byron is rated the greatest letter writer in English literature — and there are many who so consider him — it is because he wrote himself down so naturally, so unsparingly, and with that extraordinary mixture of feelings which was his character. He never wrote self-consciously, as if posterity were looking over his shoulder.

This incidentally cannot be said of one of the remarkable letter writers of our time, T. E. Lawrence. Lawrence maintained a wide-ranging correspondence, and his letters — particularly those dealing with the revolt in the desert — were probably the most brilliant to emerge from the First World War. But it is a curious thing that Lawrence had no compunction about writing the identical episode almost word for word to six or seven friends. And the repetition, as if one could not make too much of a good thing, became something of a public literary exercise.

Personally I should place Keats’s letters on the same shelf with Byron’s. They each brought to their correspondence the openness, the intimacy, and the essence of the individual, which show the man plain. There is a wide range in Keats’s writing: the refreshing gaiety as he tells of his walking trip in Scotland with Brown; the sorrow as when he writes of Tom’s death; the teasing, half-serious manner as he writes to George and Georgian a Keats in America describing his first meetings with Miss Brawne; his dignity, as when he tells the reproachful artist Ilaydon, to whom he has loaned £30, that he is penniless and can lend him no more: the letters which look ahead to the writing which he hoped to complete, and the last letters to Fanny Brawne, which even at this distance go through the reader “like a spear.”

In The Keats Circle (Harvard University Press, 2 vols., $12.50) Hyder Edward Rollins has linked together the letters and papers ol those young men and women who, beginning in 1810, gathered around the magnetic young poet. They were drawn to him by friendship and the unmistakable signs of his genius. Their loyalty rallied him when his work was lumped into that of the Cockney School; they were united — the men at least —in mistrusting the influence of Fanny Brawne; they were the loyalists who financed Keats’s hopeless trip to Italy and to whom Severn wrote the despairing letters from Rome; after his death, they constituted themselves the arbiters of Keats’s biography, and he lived on in their letters and reminiscences as the brightest, most lovable being they had ever known.

Time did not treat them kindly. We See Leigh Hunt and Moncklon Milnes in their literary success but we also see, in Mr. Rollins’s phrase, “Reynolds and his drunkenness, Rice and his incurable disease, Ilaydon and his suicide, Brown and his thwarted hopes in New Zealand, Caroline Mathew and her religious mania. . . . George Keats and his fortune’s vanishing just as he died — a melancholy illustration of what added years all too often do bring.”

The value of those letters to one who, like myself, was deeply stirred in the first reading of Sir Sidney Colvin’s Keats and rather less so by the overblown volumes of Miss Amy Lowell’s, is that they throw new light on people and on points which had evaded the earlier biographers. Certainly Fannv Brawne comes into the clear here with a charm I had not earlier felt. The brief fragments of her thirty-one letters to Fanny Keats make one wonder whether in spite of her marriage she ever did get over Keats’s death.

Now the financial entanglement begins to unravel. We see how short Keats honestly was when he most needed funds. We see the friends denouncing George for having taken more than his share of the inheritance and George, curiously enough, making no contribution for the invalids care though he was afterwards to pay the debts of his dead brother. Brown, Keats s landlord and walking companion, becomes less the man than we thought he was, and Joseph Severn, the artist and last resort, rather the more. We are drawn to the gaiety of Reynolds and the wit and affection of Rice, and we have reason to be thankful that, of all the possible biographers, it was Moncklon Milnes whom the inner circle entrusted with their attempted biographies and their reminiscences.

These two volumes are an admirable example of understanding scholarship. The biographical portraits at the beginning are discriminating and welllit; the arrangement and the footnotes place the letters and papers in a fair, understandable context; the typography and architecture of the books maintain the quality of Gordon Ray’s Thackeray.

In The God-Seeker (Random House, $3.50) Sinclair Lewis is proving his ability as an historical novelist, and the question each reader must determine for himself is whether this is the old Red in fancy dress or whether he has disciplined himself in a different medium. The jacket of the book gives us a glamorous portrait of the hero, the frontier missionary, looking like Gary Cooper in black tie, high collar, fringed buckskin coat, and completely equipped with Bible, long rifle, and powder horn. As we turn the book over, the snatch of dialogue reprinted on the hack cover shows that the “Godseeker" has been sorely tempted, if not seduced, be a girl called Selene. Here then is the romance or as much as you need to know for the teasing outset. Now what has Mr. Lewis honestly made of it?

The story begins in Clunford in the Berkshires in 1830, and a not very good beginning it is. Aaron Gadd, the missionary-to-be, son of the flint-hearted Uriel, who runs slaves, grows up to be a strapping, amorous, discontented young carpenter. Aaron’s girl friend and his drinking companions are never plausible, and our initial distrust of the hero derives from them. But Aaron has a conscience — which they do not: it is flicked and finally whipped into action by a revival meeting at which we hear the extended oratory of Charles Grandison Finney, a real spellbinder, and others. Aaron is persuaded. He finds himself “kneeling at the mourners’ bench, with the solid hand of Missionary Harge on his shoulder holding him safe"; he accepts the call as a fledgling missionary to the Sioux in Minnesota, and, despite his misgivings in the cooling-off, what holds him to his dedication is the thought of Selene Lanark, a flirtatious half-breed “finishing" her education in the East preparatory to a trip to Europe.

She of course comes from Minnesota, where her father is a wealthy fur trader. Aaron meets her shortly after his conversion and falls in love with her for life. All this occupies 82 pages, and I find it pretly crude whether taken as history or fiction.

But when Aaron Gadd at last sets out for the Mission at Bois des Morts, the writing quickens, I he descriptions become more rugged (“The Mississippi was a prairie in passionate motion; . . . The steamer’s bow butted snags and sawyers, and they scraped over shoals with the chandeliers in the salon rocking and the chairs leaping and gamblers not even looking up”), and the people, Aaron included, become more colloquial and more alive.

Among these frontier folk walks a scrappy twentieth-century novelist in no disguise. Mr. Lewis could no more keep himself out of these scenes than he could fly. His native-son, almost innocent love of Minnesota combines with his distrust ol what was happening elsewhere, and the result is satire, not I think in keeping with the Forty-niners, but very entertaining as a backward glance. In two short chapters Aaron is transformed from a nincompoop into a highly intelligent young traveler. “Never since the Puritans came to boston . . . , thought Aaron, had there been such a chance in history as this opening of the North Middlewest. Bring in the Greek books and the Lord’s Prayer and the habit of bathing, but leave behind the horsehair sofas, social dinners, slavery, stock companies, genealogies, and all titles, such as Colonel. Honorable, perhaps even Reverend. All this he would do!”

I am not going to try to meddle with the romance. It blows hot and cold by turns and is once almost frozen to death in a rather incredible blizzard. Aaron wants Selene and Selene, who can play any number of parts, finally wants him. I am mildly put off, as tlie lovers are too, by the sanctimoniousness of Sister Huldah, a daughter of God who comes bet ween them al every opportunity. But I think whal troubles me most about this historical novel is Mr. Lewis’s undisguised effort to translate his convictions and prejudices of 1949 back into a setting of one hundred years ago. When toward the end Harry Oldham, the Negro bricklayer, is discriminated against and Aaron and Selene (escaped from the missionary fold) are voted into the union as honorary members, I feel as if someone had run out of costumes and make-up.

Mr. Lewis is at his best when he is writing of that Territory which was growing to be the stale of Minnesota. He knows the local lore, he has assimilated the state history, and he draws what I believe are verifiable portraits of the earliest St. Paul settlers, the missionaries, the soldiers and the doctors whose leadership is si ill remembered. He wants us to feel the forces which were contending for the control of the young state, and in such a scene as that in which Caesar Lanark offers Aaron a joint partnership in his building empire (“In St. Paul, which is certain to grow vastly, I shall venture on banking, shipping, lumber. My future is big with the future of the slate that is to be”) you recognize the motives and the idealism, if not the hard-grained reality, of the men involved.