Pebbles on the shore [by] Alpha of the plough eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 223 pages of information about Pebbles on the shore [by] Alpha of the plough.

Pebbles on the shore [by] Alpha of the plough eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 223 pages of information about Pebbles on the shore [by] Alpha of the plough.

In the great sense letter-writing is no doubt a lost art.  It was killed by the penny post and modern hurry.  When Madame de Sevigny, Cowper, Horace Walpole, Byron, Lamb, and the Carlyles wrote their immortal letters the world was a leisurely place where there was time to indulge in the luxury of writing to your friends.  And the cost of franking a letter made that letter a serious affair.  If you could only send a letter once in a month or six months, and then at heavy expense, it became a matter of first-rate consequence.  The poor, of course, couldn’t enjoy the luxury of letter-writing at all.  De Quincey tells us how the dalesmen of Lakeland a century ago used to dodge the postal charges.  The letter that came by stage coach was received at the door by the poor mother, who glanced at the superscription, saw from a certain agreed sign on it that Tom or Jim was well, and handed it back to the carrier unopened.  In those days a letter was an event.

Now when you can send a letter half round the globe for a penny, and when the postman calls half a dozen times a day, few of us take letter-writing seriously.  Carlyle saw that the advent of the penny post would kill the letter by making it cheap.  “I shall send a penny letter next time,” he wrote to his mother when the cheap postage was about to come in, and he foretold that people would not bother to write good letters when they could send them for next to nothing.  He was right, and the telegraph, the telephone, and the postcard have completed the destruction of the art of letter-writing.  It is the difficulty or the scarcity of a thing that makes it treasured.  If diamonds were as plentiful as pebbles we shouldn’t stoop to pick them up.

But the case of Bill and Sam and thousands of their comrades to-day is different.  They don’t want to write literary letters, but they do want to tell the folks at home something about their life and the great things of which they are a part.  But the great things are too great for them.  They cannot put them into words.  And they ought not to try, for the secret of letter-writing is intimate triviality.  Bill could not have described the retreat from Mons; but he could have told, as he told me, about the blister he got on his heel, how he hungered for a smoke, how he marched and marched until he fell asleep marching, how he lost his pal at Le Cateau, and how his boot sole dropped off at Meaux.  And through such trivialities he would have given a living picture of the great retreat.

In short, to write a good letter you must approach the job in the lightest and most casual way.  You must be personal, not abstract.  You must not say, “This is too small a thing to put down.”  You must say, “This is just the sort of small thing we talk about at home.  If I tell them this they will see me, as it were, they’ll hear my voice, they’ll know what I’m about.”  That is the purpose of a letter.  Keats expresses the idea very well in one of those voluminous letters

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Pebbles on the shore [by] Alpha of the plough from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.