ODD PAPERS

Southland Times, Issue 20979, 11 January 1930, Page 11

ODD PAPERS

LOVE LETTERS

By

“Q.R.S.”

It is not to be regretted that, nowadays, love letters seem out of date? Neither the men nor women of to-day write those sentimental epistles that were once part of everybody’s experience. Our grandparents always possessed their packets of old loveletters, neatly tied up with faded ribbons, but the care with which they were written and the tenderness of the expressions used were, indeed, worthy of admiration. Is it possible that such love is out of date, or is it that our ancestors, having far fewer interests and distractions, had more time to concentrate on the etiquette of the gentle passion ?

Love in 1829 was romantic. In 1929 it appears to be realistic. To every age, apparently, must go its particular technique and the love-letter seems to belong to the days of leisure and quiet. Often, husbands were absent from their wives or lovers from their sweethearts for

many years in those good old days, but their devotion was kept alight by genuine love letters—not the hastily-dictated word that so often substitutes to-day—letters without sentiment, as cold and trite as business communications, as casual as information about stock-exchange shares, the state of the weather or enquiries about health; nor long-distance telephone-calls or laconic telegrams and night letters. In those days, there were engagements often of four and five years, during which wooing was carried on through love-letters! To-day, however, many girls feel neglected unless they have successive admirers, and boast of their superficial affairs and many offers of marriage. The often patient waiting of the years gone by stand out in significant contrast to the promiscuous mingling of the sexes and the too trifling regard for the obligations of marriage on the part of so many young people now. While the younger generation has advanced in many ways over the preceding, while there is much in the new freedom which is for their own development and happiness, yet in the romances of the last century was there much that was idealistic, spiritual and beautiful which many of our modern young people have lost. If we have thrown off many evils and inhibitions of a time when women were repressed and when many men regarded their wives as chattels, there is yet much that was fine and exalted in the older conceptions of love and marriage which, if we are to find our balance and work out of the present chaos to some constructive basis, must be regained. Yes! the writing of love-letters has to-day become almost a lost art with the young, as it has with married people as well, most of whom employ the modern method, which is most significant of the spirit,, of hast.e and ' materialism of our age, so different from what it was thirty years ago •whenthe average young lover in his own: crude way would often imitate the passionate examples of Abelard or Keats in pouring forth his heart on paper; when a young girl, her imagination fired by the poems of Tennyson or Ella Wheeler Wilcox, would write 'to her fiance in the ardent language of poetry; and when husbands and wives, separated by distance,: confided to each other intimate, details of every day. and so kept ; close, to* gethtjr no matter what distance;. separated! them. Those were the days when the young lover approached a girl in something of the spirit with which Charmides addressed his goddess in more ancient times, when the young maiden, withheld from crude familiarities by reticence and charming modesty, possessed something of the mystery and allure of the immortal Juliet. Then the lustre of poetic imagery, idealization and romance often transmuted a. physical traction into something exalted and spiritualized.

Of course, there may have been considerable false sentimentality, but there was also much that was real and ennobling, and the passing of which one cannot but regret now, when our ultra mature-minded moderns consider it smart to discuss erudite psychologists and pathologists and to psy-cho-analyse their feelings and attractions until there is no romance left. Far be it that the olden love letters were all gems of literary or of passionate art. The important thing was what they signified—the engrossment of one human being in another to the exclusion of pleasures or business, a seriousness of thought and regard, a giving of time to the welding of ties of sentiment which could bring and hold people together over a lapse of many years—or a distance of thousands of miles.

To-day what have we in many cases? The average girl, if left by a fiance for a period of any length, would console herself with a procession of transient companions at dances, etc.

Yes! Letters can be very potent; and in this age of freedom for women, youth in revolt, of jazz, the automobile and radio, we have lost much in seriousness and tenderness of sentiment. There must be thoughtful regard, and those things of the spirit, if the first attraction of youthful passion is to develop into a lasting love, and if marriage is to remain happy.Successful and highly romantic rapidfire courtships in the past were the exception. But there were elements' to them—depths of passion, sincerity of regard and common interests—that you do not generally find in current marriages to-day. After marriage there was no continual chasing around; houses were not turned into amateur cabarets with the constant giving of parties. Rapid as had been their wooing, their love was real, and with mutual interests they grew’ closer together as the years passed. Only after the children had grown up and settled down themselves did the parents set forth together into the world in their quest of the “isles of Hesperides” and to renew their youthful romance in strange lands and strange adventure. Of course, of the couples who wooed and w'ere won to each other through the more tangible and beautiful courtship of letters, comparatively few achieved real heights of literary expression. But the motive and feeling were there; and if few were capable of putting into words the poetry and passion of the letters of, say, Keats to Fanny Brawne, the lovers of that time accomplished their ends. They took the time and pains at least for telling what- each other felt for the other; they came intimately to know one another and developed together; and they could, as many did when their own vocabulary failed, quote Tennyson, or Shakespeare’s impassioned passages between Juliet and Romeo, and between people who thus corresponded there was musjh of the glamour and allure of those immortal lovers).

Our shoddy materialism has .well-nigh achieved a destruction- of the old-time glamour. Idealization is necessary if what is basically a physical attraction is to be sublimated into something more lasting and finer. Sex attraction, exalted into romantic love, has been the motif and inspiration of the world’s supreme art of music, painting and literature. Nothing has even so deeply stirred the heart of man from Sappho to Shakespeare and Shelley. But to-day, few think of love as a thing to last until death do them part. , i.

If we could but combine something of the idealism and decorousness of the oldtime romance with the present ■■ freedom, conditions would be pretty nearly “perfect.