The morning news., 1899-12-31
WOMAN'S
WORLD.

The true love letter the man or woman
as he or she really is. Discussing this sub
ject the New York Commercial Advertiser
says: Every one remembers how in
"Cyrano de- Bergerac," after Roxane has
been drawn into love for Christian be-
cause of the impression made upon her by
the impassioned love letters written to her
in Christians name by Cyrano himself,
she meets Christian and is terribly disap-
pointed and almost wholly disallusioned
because his wooing by word of mouth is
so much less impressive than what she
had expected from her reading of the let
ters. The scene of this first actual love-
making is one of the most amusing of the
play. The man whom Roxane believes to
have been pouring out to her a torrent of
amatory eloquence inspired by the intens-
est love and ardor can find nothing to say
except to reiterate again and again, like
a parrot, the words, Il love you"
1t is a pity that NJ Rostand had not al
lowed us to read a number of these letters
of Cyrano which produced such a tre-
mendous effect upon the mind of the wo-
letters preserved in literature, or even
seen by those for whose eyes they were
not originally intended, which come up to
ones notion of what true love letter
ought to be. Those of Abelard and Hello
Use, while at times they are touching and
tender, fall short of being ideal, because
they lack simplicity. Much the same
thing can be said of the much discussed
letters that passed between Robert Brown
fy,., ND Ifva hail De- tT4s
persons were very exceptional natures.
and 1t may be assumed that the letters
which they wrote each other were just
the sort of letters adapted to their indi-
vidual temperaments; but to the reader it
will always seem that lovers who min
gled their intimacies with Greek quota
tons and philosophical illusions were
not safe guides for other lovers to follow
I'm this particular direction.
OF course in certain way, poor Chris
tian's mumbled iteration of 81 love you"
contains everything and means every
thing that the most magnificent erotic
eloquence can utter or imply; for every
thing else can only be an elaboration and
an ornamentation of this one central
thought and fact. But, none the less,
both men and women are never fully sat
isfied with the mere declaration of their
love.
They want to dwell upon it and to pet
IL ana TO extract from IL all lne exquisite
little fancies and sensations that are pos
sible; to caress it, so to speak, and to
make much of it and to glorify it. be-
cause for the time there is absolutely
nothing else for them in the whole world.
And this they try to do when they are
separated and when they try in words to
set down something that will convey to
one another the yearning, the thrill and
the intensity of emotion by which each is
mastered and shaken
/ am inclined to think that nothing in
the world would afford so searching a
test of ones mind and taste and feeling
and fineness as the love letters which he
should write. There is no other form of
composition in which ell that is beau
tiful and touching comes so perilously
near to what is ludicrous and mawkish.
The man or woman who can pour out un-
reservedly all the utterances of a great
passion in such way as to make it seem
exquisite 10 an uuinterested person must
have qualities that are very rare. The
true love letter is in the first place written
without the slightest consciousness of self,
without a thought to form and without
the smallest touch of self restraint, and
with frankness that cannot possibly feel
any sense of shame. Hence, it is an un-
erring index of the writer's heart and
bare of all the conventional dsguises
which he puts on in the company even of
his most intimate and trusted friends.
IL is unlikely that the finest and most
moving letters of this sort are ever seen
except by those who write them and re-
ceive them. Could true love letters be
collected and printed they would form a
mass of reading that could moi fail to ex-
cite in every mind a most intense and al
most painful interest for in them there
would be found the vivisection of human
souls. Rousseau's confessions are usually
self-analysis; yet even if Rousseau had
been sincere, as undoubtedly he was not
and had he been honest and not following
Out his natural propensity to pose. what
ne set down would still be far inferior
TO the self-revelati ations which lovers make
for, whatever one may say, Rousseau was
consciously endeavoring to be frank, while
lovers are entirely unconscious of a mo-
tive such as his. They are simply striv-
ing with each other, both in thought and
word, to reach the most perfect under
standing of each other, and to attain al
last to an absolute oneness of ympathy
and knowledge and feeling. This is why
the love letter, which is written out of a
fun heart and with no thought that the
third person will ever see it, displays the
man or the woman as he or she actually
and really is common man and a COM
anon woman will express their stunted
and vulgar little personalities in the sort
of promise trials amid the outlaws of the
hanger-on of the court room. Cold ma
lures and minds that are eternally self
conscious will be accurately mirrored in
letters that are stilted and pedantic. Low
ers who are moved by intense devotion
will express all that emotion with Sin
cerity and ardor, but unless their minds
are of the very finest and most sensitive
type, they will always introduce into their
letters something incongruous something
that falls below the dignity of true pas
sion; something that will jar and make
the reader have little shiver of distaste
When one reads letters such as these he
feels that he is intruding upon what is
wholly personal and private, and il
makes him quite uncomfortable. This, GU
riously enough, is not the case when one
chances on the love letter that is truly
wonderful and perfect, because then
while il in reality is intimate beyond any
other intimacy, il is so fine, so elemental
so marvellous and so beautiful that one
forgets 'all about the personality of the
writer and looks al what is written in its
pages rs ne would look upon a perfect ere.