Yourselves in Your Letters.
I have been reading Ticknor's life of Prescott, the historian. It is a remarkable biography of a remarkable man—remarkable in what he accomplished under great difficulties, the almost total loss of sight. The book has been an inspiration to me in many ways. One of these, and not the most important, but a very delightful gain, has been a new sense of the possibilities of letter-writing.
You would have thought that Prescott, heavily handicapped as he was in the matter of writing, would have used the scanty fragments of his sight for his great histories, and would have dictated his letters, or, at any rate, have made them very brief. But he did neither. Usually with his own hand, and always at full length, he wrote lavishly, or, at least, what seems lavishly to our curt and telegraphic age.
What charming letters they are! Every sentence is turned as carefully as if it were to form part of some immortal page. All the graces of his fascinating style are here. Wit and wisdom are here, and eloquence as well. To be sure, much of his correspondence was with famous men and women, whose letters also are models of finish and thought; but when he wrote to the members of his own family and to lifelong intimates it was with precisely the same elegance and painstaking.
This is very fine. It makes me long for leisure to imitate the author of "The Conquest of Mexico."
Leisure? How do I know that it is leisure that is lacking? If I had all my time at my disposal, and forty-four hours in the day to boot, what reason have I to believe that my letters would be any better than the crabbed affairs they are now?
For letter-writing, like conversation, is a matter of the heart quite as much as of the head. It is a matter of unselfishness when it is at its best-of unselfishness and sympathy and good will. That is why women are so much better letter-writers than men, because they are so much more unselfish.
On the whole, I shall not charge the decadence of fine letter-writing to the hurry of the age, but to the self-absorption of the age. If there were money in it, we should all proceed to imitate Prescott.