The variety of "admirers" that are the lot of a person on the stage is extraordinary. It is very difficult for the stage persons themselves to understand it. It has never seemed to me that actors as a class are particularly interesting. Personally I have always been too cognisant of the personalities behind the scenes to ever have any theatrical idols; but to a great many there is something absolutely fascinating about the stage and stage folk. The actor appears to the audience in a perpetual, hazy, calcium glory. We are, one and all, children with an inherent love for fairy tales and it is probably this love which is in a great measure accountable for the blind adoration received by most stage people.
I have received, I imagine, the usual number of letters from "your sincere admirer," some of them funny and some of them rather pathetic. Very few of them were really impertinent or offensive. In nearly all was to be found the same touching devotion to an abstract ideal for which, for the moment, I chanced to be cast. Once in a while there was some one who, like a person who signed himself "Faust," insisted that I had "met his eyes" and "encouraged him from afar." Needless to say I had never in my life seen him; but he worked himself into quite a fever of resentment on the subject and wrote me several letters. There was also a man who wrote me several perfectly respectful, but ardent, love letters to which, naturally, I did not respond. Then, finally, he bombarded me with another type of screed of which the following is a specimen:
"Oh, for Heaven's sake, say something,—if it is only to rate me for my importunities or to tell me to go about my business! Anything but this contemptuous silence!"
But these were exceptions. Most of my "admirers'" letters are gems of either humour or of sentiment. Among my treasures is an epistle that begins:
"Miss Clara Louise Kellogg
Miss:
Before to expand my feelings, before to make you known the real intent of this note, in fine before to disclose the secrets of my heart, I will pray you to pardon my indiscretion (if indiscretion that can be called) to address you unacquainted," etc.
Isn't this a masterpiece?
There was also an absurdly conceited man who wrote me one letter a year for several years, always in the same vein. He was evidently a very pious youth and had "gotten religion" rather badly, for in every epistle he broke into exhortation and urged me fervently to become a "real Christian," painting for me the joys of true religion if I once could manage to "find it." In one of his later letters—after assuring me that he had prayed for me night and morning for three years and would continue to do so—he ended in this impressive manner:
"...And if, in God's mercy, we are both permitted to walk 'the Golden Streets,' I shall there seek you out and give you more fully my reasons for writing you."