LOVE-LETTERS

The great trouble with compliments is that they have an annoying habit

of occurring to the mind about ten or twenty minutes after the natural

opportunity for getting them off has passed away. It is here that

Love-letters come to the rescue. They enable a man to excogitate the

most excruciatingly subtle and hyperbolic compliments, and then “lead up

to them” most naturally.

There is an old superstition that Love-letters _must_ be incoherent

trash to be genuine evidences of passion. When Keats’s Love-letters to

Fanny Brawne were sold at auction, a spicy journalist commented as

follows on the occasion:—

“It is open to question whether, like so many of the letter-writers of

the age of which Keats inherited the traditions, the singer of

_Endymion_ had not a shrewd eye to posterity when he wrote the laboured

compositions which the world regards as the record of his wooing. The

manuscript is painfully correct, the punctuation worthy of a printer’s

reader, the capitals much nicer than fiery lovers usually form, and the

periods rounded with painful care. Like so many cultivators of the art

of letter-writing, the sensitive poet, ‘who was snuffed out by a

review,’ seems to have copied the gush, which last week sold for ten

times more than _Endymion_ fetched, before he committed it to the

fourpenny post. Hence the veriest scrawl, the most illegible postcard of

these times is, as an index to the writer’s character, infinitely more

valuable than the ponderous pieces of rhetoric which last century passed

for love-making between Strephon, who quotes the elegant Tully, and

Chloe, who makes free use of the ‘Elegant Extracts.’ Duller fustian than

such priggish love-letters it is hard to conceive. They remind one of

nothing so much as the epistles copied out of _The Complete

Letter-Writer_, and must recall to some middle-aged men certain painful

experiences of those salad days when their young affections suffered a

sudden blight by missives of so severely correct an order that they

suggest the idea of having undergone maternal supervision.”

Yet why, pray, should Keats _not_ have written his Love-letters so

carefully and copied them so neatly? Is it not a fact that when a man is

in love he cares more to make a pleasing impression on one particular

person than on all the rest of the world combined? and that even his

ambition and fame, for which he labours so hard, seem valuable in his

eyes solely as a means of winning Her Love? And if Love is a deeper

passion, even in a poet, than ambition, why should he not go to the

extent even of _taking notes_ and utilising his very best conceits in

his Love-letters? The truth is, in the writing of Love-letters

everything depends on the man’s habits. If he is accustomed to writing

carelessly, his Love-letters will probably be hasty and slovenly enough

to suit orthodox notions on this subject. But if he is a literary

artist, he will probably polish his _billets-doux_ more than anything

else _con amore_, considering the probable effect on her mind of every

sentence. And although the thought of future publication may enter his

mind, it will appear as the veriest trifle compared with the more

important object of winning a woman’s Love by a display of complimentary

wit and passionate protestations of undying affection.

Sir Richard Steele evidently did not believe that Love-letters, to be

genuine, must be slovenly. In one of his letters to Miss Scurlock he

apologises for not having time to revise what he had written. In another

letter he exclaims: “How art thou, oh my soul, stolen from thyself! how

is all my attention broken! my books are blank paper, and my friends

intruders.” Again: “It is the hardest thing in the world to be in love,

and yet attend business. As for me, all that speak to find me out, and I

must lock myself up, or other people will do it for me. A gentleman

asked me this morning, ‘What news from Holland?’ and I answered, ‘She is

exquisitely handsome.’ Another desired to know when I had been last at

Windsor; I replied, ‘She designs to go with me.’” And once more: “It is

to my lovely charmer I owe that many noble ideas are continually affixed

to my words and actions: it is the natural effect of that generous

passion to create in the admirers some similitude of the object admired;

thus, my dear, am I every day to improve from so sweet a companion.”

The first score or so of Keats’s Love-letters have the ring of true

gold. Here are a few specimens in which the thermometer of endearments

rises steadily from My Dearest Lady, through My Sweet Girl, My Dear

Girl, My Dearest Girl, My Sweet Fanny, to My Sweet Love, Dearest Love

and Sweetest Fanny. In the very first letter he writes:—

“Ask yourself, my love, whether you are not very cruel to have so

entrammelled me, so destroyed my freedom. Will you confess this in the

letter you must write immediately? and do all you can to console me in

it—make it rich as a draught of poppies to intoxicate me—write the

softest words and kiss them, that I may at least touch my lips where

yours have been. For myself, if I do not know how to express my devotion

to so fair a form, I want a brighter word than bright, a fairer word

than fair. I almost wish we were butterflies, and lived but three summer

days—three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty

common years could ever contain.”

“All I can bring you is a swooning admiration of your beauty.”

“I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks—your loveliness and the

hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the

same minute.”

“I hate the world: it batters too much the wings of my self-will, and

would I could take a sweet poison from your lips to send me out of it.

From no others would I take it.”

“At Winchester I shall get your letters more readily; and it being a

cathedral city, I shall have a pleasure, always a great one to me when

near a cathedral, of reading them during the service up and down the

aisle.”

All this is in the true Shaksperian key of Romantic Love, as are the

Love-letters of Burns, Byron, Moore, Heine, Bürger, Lenau, and most

other poets. Room must be made here for a few extracts from Lenau’s

letters to his love, which, in some respects, resemble those of

Keats—equally polished, poetic, deep, and sincere:—

“It makes me melancholy to see how incapable I am of sympathizing with

the pleasures of my friends. My Love goes out afar towards you; it

hearkens and listens and stares in the distance for you, and takes no

note of all the love by which it is surrounded here. I am truly ill. I

constantly think of you alone and death. It often seems to me as if my

time had expired. I cannot write poetry, I cannot rejoice in anything,

cannot hope, can only think of you and death. The other day I wrote to

you to take good care of your health—though I myself feel so little

desire to live.”

“The whole evening I was unable to think of anything but of you and the

possibility of losing you. The large crowd of people seemed to have

assembled on purpose to show me most painfully what a mere nothing the

world would be to me if I had to part from you. I constantly saw but

your face, your lovely, divine eye.”

“Alexander wishes me to go to the baths at Leuk with him. He is quite

ill. But I cannot go. If I have to see Switzerland without you, I prefer

not to see it at all.”

“My poetic composition is in a bad way. Though a thought sprouts in me

here and there, it withers before it has reached maturity. When I go to

see you I shall bring along a dry wreath of prematurely-faded poetic

blossoms, and make them revive in your presence, as there are warm

fountains dipped into which faded flowers blossom again.”

“I have lost all pleasure in other people when you are absent. If you

had only been at Weinsberg! Even the Æolian harps did not produce the

usual impression on me.” It is noticeable how the overtone of Monopoly

is accented in all these plaints.

“I have found in your companionship more evidence of an eternal life

than in all my investigations and studies of nature. Whenever, in a

happy hour, I believed I had reached the climax of Love and the proper

moment for death, since a more delicious moment could never follow: it

was on each occasion an illusion, for another hour followed in which I

loved you still more deeply. These ever new, ever deeper abysses of life

convince me of its immortality. To-day I saw in your eyes the full

measure of the divine. Most distinctly did I perceive to-day that the

swelling and sinking of the eye is the breathing of the soul. In an eye

of such beauty as yours we can see, as in a prophetic hieroglyphic, the

essence of which some day our immortal body will consist. If I die, I

shall depart rich, for I have seen what is most beautiful in the world.”

“The rose you gave me at parting has a most delicious fragrance, as if

it were a Good-Night from you! Sleep well, dearest heart! Preserve the

second rose as a memento. I love you immeasurably.”

No doubt the average Love-letters read in courts of justice in breach of

promise cases, to the intense amusement of the audience, are very

different in character from these poetic effusions. But to say that,

because the average Love-letters are ludicrous, therefore all

Love-letters, to be genuine, must be ludicrous and incoherent, is the

very Bedlam of absurdity. What makes common Love-letters so laughable is

the fact that the writer, previously a paragon of prosiness, suddenly

gets some poetic fancies and tries to put them into language. But as the

writing of poetry—in verse or prose—is a more difficult art than

piano-playing, first attempts cannot be otherwise than harrowing or

amusing. On the other hand, just as a pianist can never improvise so

soulfully as when he is in love, so a poet will write his best prose in

the letters addressed to his love; the only ludicrous feature being that

extravagant and exclusive admiration of one person which is the very

essence of Love.

Surely Hawthorne was neither “insincere” nor “thinking of posterity”

when he finished one of his Love-letters with this poetic conceit,

expressed in his best prose style:—

“When we shall be endowed with spiritual bodies I think they will be so

constituted that we may send thoughts and feelings any distance, in no

time at all, and transfuse them warm and fresh into the consciousness of

those we love. Oh, what happiness it would be, at this moment, if I

could be conscious of some purer feeling, some more delicate sentiment,

some lovelier fantasy than could possibly have had its birth in my own

nature, and therefore be aware that you were thinking through my mind

and feeling through my heart! Perhaps you possess this power already.”

This is true epistolary Love-making—the sublimated essence of

complimentary Gallantry.