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Title: Letters to a daughter
Author: Bland, Hubert
Language: English
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LETTERS TO A DAUGHTER
THIRD AND POPULAR EDITION
LETTERS
TO A DAUGHTER
BY
HUBERT BLAND
(“HUBERT” OF THE “SUNDAY CHRONICLE”)
Author of “With the Eyes of a Man”
[Illustration]
T. WERNER LAURIE
CLIFFORD’S INN
LONDON
TO
ROSAMUND
“More dear to me than are the ruddy drops
That visit my sad heart.”
CONTENTS
PAGE
ON LIFE AT LARGE 1
ON GOING TO CHURCH 15
ON BEING DELIGHTFUL 27
THE GLAMOUR OF THE FOOTLIGHTS 39
THE RUDENESS OF WOMEN 51
DRESS AND FASHION 65
A MORAL QUESTION 79
THE LIMITS OF FLIRTATION 91
MEN’S LOVE 107
THE MAN’S POINT OF VIEW 121
THE DOMESTIC HEARTH 135
THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE 149
THE RIGHT SORT OF MAN 163
MODERN MARRIAGE 179
THE SUBTLE SOMETHING 195
LETTERS TO A DAUGHTER
ON LIFE AT LARGE
_Oct. 17, 19—._
MY DEAR ALEXA,—
You asked me to write to you while you were away—“long letters,” you
said; and the request set me wondering a little. I think I understand
now. Comprehension came to me in a flash as I was stropping my razor this
morning: the sharpening of one thing helped to sharpen another—my wits.
You felt, didn’t you, that as I am a writing sort of man, I might, in
long letters, find it possible to say things that an impalpable something
had hitherto made it difficult for me to say when you and I were face to
face? I think, perhaps, you were right; these long letters will show. All
the same, we have been as intimate as most fathers and daughters; more
intimate, I fondly think.
I should like to write at length to-day; about 2000 words—forgive the
jargon of the trade—on the relations of father and grown-up daughter, but
you asked for letters, not essays. Still, I might point out this, in case
it has not occurred to you before:—Those relations are peculiar, more
than that, unique. His daughter is the only woman in all the world for
whom a man five-and-twenty years her senior can feel no stir of passion,
no trace of that complex emotion that modern novelists and people of that
sort are so pleased to call sex-love; the only woman from whom he cannot
possibly evoke passion in return. That fact of itself gives his daughter
a chamber all to herself in the man’s heart, a chamber guarded by an
angel with a flaming sword.
To talk of love is the next thing to making love, they say, or something
like that. It is probably not quite true; but now that I come to think of
it, when I have talked of love to women whom I knew well, after a quarter
of an hour or so a certain tartness, a certain uncomfortableness has come
into the talk, also one felt oneself becoming just a trifle artificial,
less entirely frank, less spontaneous, than one likes to be. Such talks
have ended not infrequently in tears and temper. I need not assure you,
Alexa, that the tears were not mine: as for the temper! And when I have
talked of love to women whom I have not known well I have sensed a sort
of agitation on both sides which seemed to portend danger in the not dim
distance. One never felt quite sure as to what might happen in the next
five minutes. Of course, all this refers to a long time ago. You will
understand that. There is some truth in the old saying evidently. You
might remember it. But the point of these remarks, as Mr. Bunsby says (it
is one of your merits that you are not ashamed to love Dickens), lies in
the application of them. His daughter is the one young woman to whom a
man can talk of love quit of the faintest fear of being led into making
it. I probably shall talk of love in these long letters you asked me to
write. I am not sure but what, in any other mood and on any other day
but this, I should have said that between men and women there is nothing
else worth talking about. But if I said that now, I should be insincere,
for I don’t feel it. This autumn weather, this dismal lingering death
of summer, oppress my soul, and one should be in high fettle to talk
intelligently of love. Now I am not that to-day as I look out of the
library window and see those big funereal cedars lords of all, the whole
garden subdued to their sombre humour. Day and night the piteous leaves
of all the other trees are falling, falling like slow rain-drops; and
at twilight they sound upon the garden paths as the footsteps of ghosts
might sound—creepy, creepy. This morning I picked a rose for sheer
pity of it, and in half an hour its charm was gone; its very colour
had changed, its pink shell-like petals (it was the last of the Maman
Cochets) had turned livid as the lips of a corpse; it exhaled, not
perfume, but an odour of death. The birds flutter about aimlessly, they
seem to feel there is nothing left for them to do in a world so full of
sadness, no nests to be builded, no broods to be reared; and they haven’t
the heart to sing. To add the last touch of sable to the whole mumpish
outlook, you are away. Don’t think that insincere: it is not a bit. I
wandered moodily, and with no definite object, into your room to-day. It
was in shocking disorder, untidiness appalling, of course, or it had not
been yours; but somehow the chaos did not irritate me as it usually does.
Somehow I was glad of it. Had it been otherwise—as neat as my own study,
for instance—I had been plunged into still deeper gloom. It was like an
empty nursery in which the toys were still lying scattered all about. Oh,
the deathly chill of an empty and tidy nursery!
Let me see, you are nineteen or a trifle more, aren’t you? And Love must
be lying in wait for you somewhere very near by. I wonder whether you
will know him when you see him. If you do, then will you be the cleverest
of your sex, and much cleverer than any one of mine. If he is anything
at all like the Love of the Christmas cards and the funny little poets
who like to display a smattering of classic knowledge—have no fear of him
whatever. He won’t hurt, that chubby child with the toy bow and arrows.
Of what drivelling folly, what stupendous ignorance were they guilty who
personified Love as a pink and pulpy baby nourished on Pott’s Emulsion!
Don’t believe them, dear. When Love’s self comes he comes always a
strong man armed—a warrior with old scars upon his forehead and dints
upon his shield. And there is another mailed adventurer, too, who may
likely spring upon you unawares. He is so like Love in his equipment and
in the manner of his attack, this one, that it is not until forty years
have passed that one can see through his disguise. He is, by the most,
held to be unmentionable between men of my age and women of yours, but
the name of him is Passion. If I were an ideal instead of a practicable,
work-a-day parent, I should warn you against him in the solemnest way,
or I should pretend that there was no such a person. But I don’t do
either; first because I know the warning and the conventional lie would
be futile, and next, because I don’t think either would be quite fair to
you. This world is an interesting place; it would be considerably less
interesting but for Passion’s vagaries, his adroit ambushes, his sudden
swift assaults, his slow retirements, and, sometimes, his unexpected
defeats. And I want you to find life interesting—you are sure not to find
it happy, folk of our temperament never do. Here I should like to drop
metaphor and dissertate for a while in the plain language of what some
modern writers call “psycho-physiology,” but I don’t want to startle
you, much less to shock, so I will reserve psycho-physiology for another
time. This, however, I may say: you will know Love from Passion just by
this—that Love wants ever to give; Passion, to take. When the two appear
as close allies—well, then you will be upon the eve of certainly the most
momentous and, perhaps, the most catastrophic event of all your life.
There is really no saying what may happen then, and you had better come
and talk it over quietly with me. Don’t be afraid of Passion because you
have heard him called by uglier names, and remember always this—that
come he by tempestuous assault or by patient siege he never wins of his
own strength alone. It is always a traitor within the gates that gives
the citadel away. That’s the one you have to keep an eye on—the traitor
inside.
I have often heard you say (you are the only woman I have heard say it)
that you would not, if you could, be a man. I like you the better for
saying it, but you are wrong all the same; at least I think so. Whether
men or women have the better time I don’t know, but I do know that men
have the safer. They get more out of life, and they risk infinitely less
in the getting thereof. In this matter of Passion, for instance (the
metaphor’s changed now), the handicap is quite infernally unfair. It
almost makes a just man blaspheme the handicapper. It is as though the
two sexes were skating. Each equally enjoys the exhilarating exercise.
To mine a slip means, at the worst, a ridiculous posture for a moment
or two and a few bruises; to yours, the almost certainty of a compound
fracture, possibly of a broken back. But perhaps in a sporting spirit you
will reply, the deadlier peril carries with it the keener thrill; and
really there may be something in that. My observation of life, however,
convinces me to the contrary. For me the chances of the undignified
tumble and the bruises are enough. Some of your advanced sisters (you’ll
meet them presently, if not in the flesh, then in books) will tell you
that the tendencies of the times are all in favour of equalising the
chances. Maybe; but put not your trust in tendencies, Alexa. Think
what you like, but act as though the world were going to be always
just what it is now. Pioneers are always uncomfortable, and for that
reason, mostly unpleasant. Your business is to make life interesting,
and in so far as you do that you yourself will be an interesting woman.
At the same time, an you love me, don’t imagine that I am counselling
cowardice or even prudence. If cowardice be a positive vice, prudence
is but a negative virtue, and the line that divides the two is so thin
as to be often imperceptible. As you travel through life you will find
the negative virtues, the cloistered virtues, as Milton, I think it is,
calls them, about the least amiable and the most irritating things you
will encounter. No, don’t be a coward. No woman with a chin like yours,
and the brain I feel sure you have inherited, need be that. No end of
obstacles and hindrances will go down before that chin of yours if only
you thrust it forward at the exactly right moment; realities as well as
unrealities, your living fellow creatures and the ghosts of dead ideas.
Before such a chin many a seeming lion in the path will turn into naught
more fearsome than a spitting kitten after all; still kittens, it is
worth remembering, can scratch. And scratches disfigure.
Try to avoid scratches: they smart, and there is no honour in the scars
thereof. Make the world interesting to yourself, as I charged you before,
and make it comfortable. To do that is about the most one can hope to do
’twixt swaddling clothes and shroud. I don’t ask you to venerate other
people’s prejudices—scorn them as much as you like; but I do advise you
to respect their power. Bow reverentially in the House of Rimmon. Try
to imagine yourself (the effort will not be very great after you have
looked around you for a while) a civilised being cast among savages. The
savages have, of course, some rigid rules of conduct, of the origin of
which they know nothing and which, for that very reason, they hold in the
deeper awe. The breaking of a rule involves a slow scraping to death with
oyster shells, and yet such breaking gives a good deal of comfort and
satisfaction to you; there is a thrill about it somewhere. “_Que faire_”
then? Stick to the rules like the most besotted savage of them all? Not a
bit of it; break them just when and how it suits you and then use your
superior intelligence. You will get a poignant and penetrating pleasure
from the mere exercise of your higher faculty. I am not sure but that
that alone will not be reward sufficient. All this sounds like a lengthy
way of restating the old eleventh commandment, I know; but, indeed, it is
something more than that, it is rather an intelligent criticism of some
of the ten and a reasonable justification of that odd one.
My advice assumes, of course, that you are a Superior Person. I think
I have noted certain traits in you which convince me that that is
rather your view of yourself. Well, even so, you probably know little
of yourself, but yet more than any one else knows of you. You see you
are the one most nearly interested in the diagnosis. Time will test the
correctness of your judgment; but when he has had long enough to form an
opinion it will not matter much to you what his opinion is. But of Time’s
dealings with your sex I shall have something to say anon. Some one has
said that the bitterest of all regrets is that for the sins we have not
committed. That is mere cynical ineptitude.
It is not the memory of omitted sins, but the recollection of lost
chances that writhes and rankles.
Always, my dear Alexa,
Your didactic but most affectionate friend and
FATHER.
ON GOING TO CHURCH
ON GOING TO CHURCH
_Oct. 28, 19—_
MY DEAR ALEXA,—
Some commonplace person has said that the really important part of a
woman’s letter is always in the postscript. It pains me to recognise how
often the commonplace is also the true. It is the postscript of your
pleasant letter that I must answer to-day. “Ought I to go to church?” you
ask, and I can’t think why you say “ought.” “Ought” is a word which you
know irritates me. It suggests Ethical Societies and their preposterous
hymns. It raises questions of “right and wrong,” and I feel that at my
age one should be done with questions of that disturbing kind. And the
worst of it is I don’t quite know what you mean, for you may mean one
of two things. It may be a very little question or a very big one you
are putting. Well, I will try to deal with both. If you mean ought you
to go to church on Sunday just now, when you are staying with correct
people who go themselves, then I answer most emphatically “Yes.” To begin
with it is a mere act of politeness. You might as well ask “Ought I to
dress for dinner?” But it is something more than that. To stay away from
church when your host and his friends go is to challenge after-luncheon
controversy, to invite a religious polemic. It is to advertise in the
most vulgar and objectionable way possible your irreligion, or, if not
that exactly, at least your religious doubts. It is to make yourself
prominent and prickly.
But I can’t believe you mean that. A child of mine may have prickles,
but I am happily confident that she would carefully conceal them. What I
think you do mean is, “Is it wise, in order to make the best of life, to
cultivate the religious emotions?” That was it, wasn’t it? “Ought I to go
to church?” was only your succinct and symbolical way of putting it. It
was neatly put, and I congratulate you, Alexa.
Well, it is a big question, as I said, but one that is comparatively
easy to answer, for the answer is obvious. It may take a long time
answering but that is the worst of the obvious: it always does take such
a long time stating, whereas the non-obvious may generally be put into an
epigram. Who are the nicest people you know, Alexa; the people you like
best to talk to; the people whose judgment you most rely on; the gayest
people; the people who have the art of treating serious things lightly
and light things with a becoming seriousness; the _all round_ people; the
people whose opinion you would most value of a poem, a novel, a symphony,
a landscape; the people whose taste you trust? Think now, are they not
in almost every case people with some sort of religious belief? Or, to
put it otherwise, have you ever met a really delightful Atheist, man or
woman? You have met many worthy Atheists, I know, persons whose moral
code was as conspicuous as a red nose, whose admirable qualities stuck
out of them like hat-pins, persons you are almost bound in common decency
to respect; but have they been delightful? Were you not always conscious
of a _want_ in them somewhere, just as you are conscious of something
lacking in a person who has no ear for music, or who does not like olives?
The religious instinct, the craving to get into touch with something
outside the material world, beyond _the things we see_ or apprehend
with any of our five senses is born in us just like any other instinct.
The history of mankind is proof positive of the fact. We have never
yet caught a primitive man—most savages are degenerates they say; but,
depend upon it, if ever we do we shall find him going “to church,” as you
would put it. Even if we didn’t, even if it could be demonstrated beyond
possibility of doubt that our arboreal ancestor knew naught of religious
emotion, but was contented with his wives and his cocoanuts, it would be
no disproof of my assertion that _we_, the people of 19—, are born with
the religious instinct. There are exceptions of course, freaks, just
as there are unfortunates born without drums to their ears and without
a liking for the scent of tonkin beans; but we need not bother about
them. You, my child, have drums to your ears, you keep a tonkin bean in
your glove-box, and you have the religious instinct. The question I am
answering, remember, is: ought _you_, Alexa, to go to church? In other
words, then, it amounts to this: ought you to suppress an instinct? It
is a question surely which answers itself. The pleasures of life consist
in the gratification of instincts, either inherited or cultivated. To
suppress an instinct, then, or to allow it to atrophy by disuse, is to
shut oneself off from an opportunity of pleasure, to narrow the range
of one’s emotions and one’s intellect, to diminish the number of one’s
sensations; it is to be incomplete, and if you are incomplete, you cannot
be delightful, Alexa. Your favourite Heine says somewhere that a charming
woman without religion is like a beautiful flower without perfume. He was
always right when he wrote of women. So am I.
But I think I hear you asking, is it true that the religious emotions are
necessarily always pleasurable? Was it pleasure that St Simeon Stylites
felt upon his pillar? Does the missionary experience a delightful thrill
while the savage is skinning him alive? Well, I am not sure. I am
inclined to think that St Simeon did enjoy that cold eminence of his,
at any rate more than he was capable of enjoying anything else. As for
the missionary, I did meet one once who had been partially skinned, and
strangely enough, he was just on the eve of starting to pay another visit
to the interesting island folk who had flayed him; so we must presume
it was not so bad after all. But even were it otherwise, my reply would
be that persons like St Simeon have cultivated their religious emotions
overmuch, and have paid insufficient attention to the other sides of
their nature. They are like gluttons, or drunkards, or profligates, or
the musically mad. They are religious debauchees. To spend all one’s
time in religious exercises is as bad, and as foolish in its way, as to
be perpetually playing the piano: it is wasting your own life and making
yourself a nuisance to your neighbours. Prayer is good, my child, but
really I think I would as soon see you always on your head as always on
your knees. There is a line of a hymn which speaks of Heaven as a place
“Where congregations ne’er break up
And Sabbaths have no end.”
but that was written, we may be sure, by a religious debauchee. He was
a glutton, that fellow. Now, in this, as in all other things, I would
have my daughter be an epicure—not a greedy pig. Talking of Epicurus,
by the way, I feel sure that if Epicurus were alive in London to-day
he would attend the services in the Chapter House of the New Cathedral
almost daily. Yes, and not as a mere listener to music: he would absorb
the atmosphere of the place; he would be of the most devout. After all,
the proof of the pudding is in the eating, isn’t it?—and in the eupeptic
tranquillity that follows. You can put the thing to a practical and a
personal test if you will. Go, sit as much by yourself as you can in
some great church—a cathedral for choice, of course; choose some corner
where the light is broken by a stained-glass window—the glass must not
be of date later than the end of the sixteenth century—and stay there
quietly until after the service ends. Let the music of the organ, the
clear voices of the choir boys, the penetrating odour of the incense,
work their will upon you. Surrender yourself wholly, uncritically, to
the influence of the place, and then, when it is all over, and you are
the last to leave, or the last but one, say—for it were well, it were
perfect if, as you cross the chancel, you should see one wimpled nun
“breathless in adoration” before the altar—write and ask me again, if you
can, ought you to go to church!
Ah, but you, or some other girl who, unlike you, is a little agnostic
Philistine, might say, those emotional experiences are æsthetic, not
religious. It is the music itself that thrills, not the devotion that
the music seeks to express; it is the particles of the incense that
titillate the nostrils, not the odour of prayer that penetrates to the
soul. Not a bit of it, Alexa, that is a callow observation worthy only
a Hall of Science lecturer. Listen to exactly the same music played
by the same hands, sung by the same voices, in the Queen’s Hall, and
see if the emotional effect upon yourself is in any sense the same. It
will charm you, of course, but there will be something missing—and that
something is the satisfaction of the religious instinct, the response
of the Unseen to our craving for relations with it. Yes, but the church
itself, the building, the pointed arches, the clustered columns, the
groined roof—have not all these much to do with the psychological
effect? Of course they have. But then the church was builded of men who
had cultivated their religious instincts: men who believed, who felt: the
building fits the religious idea as perfectly as I hope your latest frock
fits your frame, my kiddie. What is a great cathedral but the religious
emotion expressed in stone?
“And yet—it mayn’t be true,” I hear you mutter, with a little sceptical
tremor of the lips. I don’t quite know what you mean by “it,” and I don’t
greatly care. To define “it,” would require a big book, wouldn’t it?
It has already required big libraries full of big books—and still the
foolish squabble. There It is all the time. So we will let that question
pass. What is true, what is a fact as palpable as, more palpable than,
the improvement in the Strand, is the existence in us, in you, of the
religious instinct—of a craving for personal relations with the Unseen,
as I said. Not to seek to gratify that were as foolish as to refuse to
listen to a Beethoven sonata because you feel doubtful whether Beethoven
ever lived—whether all his music were not written by another gentleman of
the same name.
Your mother asks me to tell you that she thinks you ought sometimes to
write to her. “Ought,” and again “ought” and always “ought” in this beast
of a world!
Your devoted and truly religious
FATHER.
ON BEING DELIGHTFUL
ON BEING DELIGHTFUL
_Nov. 8, 19—._
MY DEAR ALEXA,—
You accuse me of perpetually charging you to be delightful, and of never
giving you any detailed and specific instructions as to how to be it.
I can’t help feeling that the accusation is more than a little unjust,
that is to say, I did suffer under a sense of injustice for a quarter
of an hour or so. It seemed to me that although I had never taught you
by way of precept, by way of example I had not failed, for I have been
extremely charming to you, Alexa. But reflection has caused me to realise
that, perhaps, nay certainly, you are right. Many of the qualities that
make a man charming are the antipodes of those which render a woman
delightful. There are a few, of course, that should be common to both,
but they are few. I will not trifle with the subject and do outrage to
your common sense by telling you that Nature herself will teach you
to be delightful, because I remember that you and I long ago, when
you were little more than a kiddie, agreed that delightfulness is the
one attribute which Nature never possesses, and, therefore, can never
transmit to her children. Nature is all sorts of pleasant things. She
is wholesome, for instance, impressive, restorative, not infrequently
magnificent—just here and now she is damp and abominably depressing—but
she is never delightful. Delightfulness is an achievement of art. One may
speak, accurately, of a delightful garden; none but an indiscriminating
idiot would talk of a delightful wilderness. An alcove decorated with
tact and lighted, or half-lighted—better—with Chinese lanterns, might
be delightful: a sunset never could be. Therefore, my daughter, if you
follow the promptings of Nature you may be, let us say, astonishing, but
you will never be delightful or anything like it.
Personally, I think you are delightful already; but then, I am quite
conscious that that view of mine may be a paternal _parti pris_ which
other people with blunter perceptions than mine may possibly not share.
If you wish to be universally delightful then, you must be prepared to
make of yourself a work of Art. Nature, happily for you—I may say this
without flattery—has given you the materials; it is for you to work
them up, remembering that a naturally-gifted young woman is no more a
delightful young woman than a box of colours is a picture.
In the eighties, when the Æsthetic Movement, as it was absurdly called,
was on the town, we used to talk a good deal, of “Art for Art’s sake.”
It was a phrase that gave grave offence to the Philistine, (that was
why we used it so constantly), the Philistine who nosed in it a danger
to his own peculiar variety of morals. You don’t often hear it now, for
the Philistine was too strong for us, and he has conquered. And yet it
was a phrase as innocent as it was apt. It summed up in four words—nay,
in three, for one is repeated—a true and imperishable principle. All
it meant was that Art should seek no end outside itself: that if you
set about painting a picture, say, your aim should be just to paint a
beautiful picture, not to inculcate moral habits in a Sunday school,
or to boil your own pot by achieving the line in Burlington House, or
even the gold medal of the Salon. You see the implication, Alexa? You
see how “Art for Art’s sake” applies to you just now? If you are going
to practise the art of being delightful you must do it for the sake of
being delightful, not with any _arrière pensée_, not with an eye to the
best partners at dances or invitations to the mansions of the affluent.
To die with the consciousness of all your life long having been a
delightful person! Can anything be better than that, save living with the
same consciousness? Moreover, I can’t help thinking that the best of all
preparations for the next world is to be as nice as one possibly can in
this.
You know a good deal; a good deal of many things, I have seen to that.
But it would be well rather to conceal than to display your knowledge.
There is nothing people in general like so little in woman as knowledge,
and when I say people in general I mean people of both sexes. So you
must never put all the goods in the shop window, or, at any rate, not
all at once. Show just as many as, and those of the sort that, will
attract the particular gazer in the window at the time. Therefore,
affect an ignorance if you have it not, remembering that the more you
really do know the easier is it to appear not to know it. This seems an
unreasonable injunction, and therefore I will give you my reason for
proffering it. Broadly speaking, human nature suffers from a passion to
be instructive. We all love to teach, to tell things. Particularly do
men love to tell things to young women. I have often had a man come up
to me and say “Miss So-and-So is a charming girl,” just after I have
been noticing that the charm for him consisted wholly in the interested
and receptive manner with which she had been listening, or affecting
to listen, to such information as he had delighted to impart. Whenever
a man talks to a young woman he tries his best to appear a little
_bigger_ all round than he knows himself to be. Unexpectedly to check
his enterprise by showing that you know as much as he does has pretty
much the same effect upon his mind as though you were suddenly to add
twenty years to your age, to discover wrinkles, or to develop a squint.
Of course, I do not mean that when a man is “telling you things” you
should sit mumchance and, as it were, dumfounded at his erudition. A
few well-directed and intelligent questions will help you vastly. But
take care that the questions are such as you feel pretty confident he
will be able to answer. Here I can speak to you from the depths of my
own experience. When a pretty young woman asks me something that I don’t
know, I feel more inclined to box her ears than to kiss her.
Learn early, dear student of life, to suffer bores gladly. Remember that
in so doing you are making yourself delightful, not only to the poor
bore, but also doubly delightful to the other persons present from whom
you have drawn him off.
Get as quickly as possible out of the way of speaking of yourself,
even of regarding yourself as “a girl.” You are, I know, only nineteen
now, or is it twenty?—and there is not much harm in it so far—but one
day you will be five-and-twenty, and then it will sound, and will be,
ridiculous. Girlishness of speech, of thought and of manner is a habit
easily acquired and with difficulty dropped. Let others think of you and
speak of you as a girl if they will, but don’t do it yourself as you
hope for delightfulness. There are few things in a small way that give
the wise and fastidious man a nastier jar than to hear a woman well away
towards the end of her third decade refer to herself as a “girl.” It is
the fashion of folks nowadays to try to defer their children’s womanhood
as long as possible—one constantly hears it remarked, “how much younger
women are than they used to be!” Don’t believe it, Alexa, they are just
the same age as ever they were. We cannot, do what we will, keep our
daughters young. We can keep them silly, but we can’t keep them young.
Great is Art, but Nature beats her there. Besides, this in your ear! Just
as it is hateful to hear a mature young woman call herself a girl, so
it is delightful to hear one who really is a girl speak of herself as a
woman. I cannot tell you why—I think I know, but it would take too long
just now, and the psychology of it is subtle extremely—but trust me in
this, it is so.
Never if you can help it let a man do for you anything you have reason to
believe he will not like doing—anything which you think you would not
like to do were you he and were he you. As a practical instance: If you
happen to be bicycle-riding with a man, don’t let him drag you up the
hills, or against the wind. Even at some inconvenience to yourself refuse
the proffered aid of his shoulder, of a bit of rope, or the waistband of
his Norfolk jacket. The aid will be proffered as a matter of conventional
courtesy, but the fellow’s heart will not be in it. He will like you ever
so much the better if you assert your independence; unless, of course, he
be intensely young, and then he doesn’t count. When I was a young man I
once went skating with a very charming young woman who told me she could
skate, and that she enjoyed the fun of it. I found she couldn’t skate—she
could only sprawl about and tumble down when unsupported. I had to spend
the whole of that glorious afternoon—I can smell the perfume of the pines
which stood around the lake even now across nearly half a century of
time—in upholding her until my arms and ankles ached. It was the only day
of hard ice that winter. That girl was not your mother, my child. After
that day she never could by any possibility have become your mother.
When I set out on that skating expedition I was half in love with her;
when I came home I wasn’t! Selfish? Yes—well!
Now for a really unworldly piece of counsel. Don’t be at too much trouble
to acquire or to cultivate the acquaintance or the friendship of the
rich. In the mix-up that goes on to-day you will meet them, of course—but
they are seldom worth the bother. There is little or nothing worth having
to be got from them. And the fact that you have made yourself even a
trifle more agreeable to a rich man or woman than you would have done to
a poor person, is sure, sooner or later, to inflict upon you a feeling
of self-despite, of self-humiliation. It is as well to have as few of
those sorts of feelings as possible. A visit to a house much bigger than
one’s own, overflowing with butlers, so to speak, is but poor recompense
for the very smallest scratch to one’s self-respect. A woman with scars
on her self-respect is never quite delightful. You will find it easier
to be delightful to men than to women. With men, over and above the
cultivated charm of your art, you have always your sex—that potent
mystery—to trust to. With women it tells rather against than for you.
Therefore double your efforts to be delightful to women. In this matter I
can give you none of the specific details you ask for. To them apply the
golden rule—do unto women as you would have women do unto you. You will
meet many fool-women—whom in your heart and brain you will contemn—but
remember that the veriest fool-woman of them all will probably be clever
enough to know exactly when and where to stick her claws into the other
woman. Avoid those claws, my child.
Your devoted
FATHER.
THE GLAMOUR OF THE FOOTLIGHTS
THE GLAMOUR OF THE FOOTLIGHTS
_Dec. 5, 19—._
MY DEAR ALEXA,—
I was delighted to get your long letter on Monday. It was just the sort
of letter I like to have, from a woman especially: a letter with naught
impersonal in it, full of the familiar and intimate turns of phrase. I
fancied I could hear the very inflection of your voice here and there.
That is the way to write; to write to a friend, I mean. Try hard to
remember all the time that you are not writing to a newspaper, or
labouring to produce what, at school, used to be called “a meritorious
composition.” Avoid the _cliché_ as you would the devil; nay, even more;
for he, in some of his moods, might be interesting; the _cliché_ is
always tiresome. Your letter caught me in a moment of depression, one
of those mopish moments which come upon me oftener than they should of
late, and lie like shadows upon the spirit’s surface, turning to monotone
what should be all iridescence. I went down into the breakfast-room and
fired off an epigram. It is true I had already perfected and polished
that epigram while I lay wakeful in the dead waste and middle of the
night, but I should never have summoned energy enough to part with it
so soon had it not been for your letter. It was not appreciated. The
bacon had been served on a coldish dish. So you see you are responsible
for that wilful waste of a good thing, Alexa; a thing that would have
(and mayhap will yet) set the club smoking-room in a titter. At the
breakfast-table it raised only an acidulous smile, the merest flicker.
The family looked reprovingly at me for beginning the day so frivolously.
Had you been there, now! That is one of your chiefest charms, my
daughter, that is why I love you so; you always appreciate your father’s
efforts to pervert the truth.
There was one thing in your letter that troubled me a little though,
because I fancied I saw in it a symptom, a foreshadowing, so to speak,
like the sore throat and little dry cough that herald an attack of
scarlet fever. Do you remember when you had scarlet fever and what a
pale ghost your father was for seven dreadful days until the danger was
over and gone? Ah me! But as to this symptom. It was only two lines in
which you said something—I don’t remember exactly what, and I have not
your letter by me at the moment—about your “favourite actor.” You did
not mention the fellow’s name, and I thank you for that. It has probably
saved me from the crime of assassination. Think how disgusting it would
have been! I don’t mean the assassination itself, that would have been
jolly, but the newspaper boys bawling up and down the Strand, “Horrible
murder of Cyril, or Claude, or Basil Somebody-or-other!” And your poor
mother in tears at home; and then the squalid Old Bailey, and the glib
counsel, and the solemn ass on the Bench, and the unsympathetic stodgers
in the jury box. I feel I could never survive a criminal trial. My spirit
would break through its fleshly casings, and flee away from the deadly
commonplaceness of the thing before it was half over. Therefore in the
days of your youth look not upon the mimes to admire them, Alexa, and
bring not your father’s gray hairs in sorrow to the dock.
But to return to seriousness and that symptom I spoke of. I have noticed
lately in several young women of your age, though I am glad to say
not in you, an unsalutary tendency to exalt the mummer. I have heard
them chatter to each other about him in the drawing-room, here; I am
told (Jane tells me in fact, she tells me unblushingly) that they buy
his photographs, sometimes as many as three or four of one of him in
different costumes; that they stick these photographs up on their bedroom
mantelpieces, and that in some desperate cases, they write him letters
asking for his autograph, and even go the length of sending him flowers.
Flowers! They had far better send onions.
I will not let myself think hardly of these maidens of our day. I feel
I must recognise that after all they are but doing what the young males
of their species always have done and still do. The glamour of the
footlights has always tempted youth to make a donkey of itself. Young
men of a like age talk actress over their cheap cigars, spend their
sparse shillings on photographs of legs, and go the full length of their
limited credit in flower shops. But, then, they _are_ young men, you see,
and that makes all the difference. It does, I assure you, and my fondest
hope is that the discovery that it does may not come upon you as a shock.
There may be no reason, “in justice,” why there should be one law for
women and another for men, but just now there is, and if ever there
isn’t what a deuce of a world it will be! Let me imagine an instance
of what I mean. If a few years hence I were to come upon your brother
John with his arm round a dairymaid (I shall not, for dairymaids are
buried in the picturesque past) I should give him a talking to, but the
amorous incident would not break my night’s rest. But if, oh my child—if
I caught you kissing the postman! There, you see. I know quite well you
are ill-treating that pretty mobile under-lip of yours at the indelicate
suggestion. “Indelicate,” I feel sure that is the word you will use.
And it is, that is just what I mean it to be. Well, there is something
indelicate in this fuss about the actor fellow.
I don’t like doing it, but for once let me pose before you as _laudator
temporis acti_. You were pretty good at Latin a year ago, and you
still keep enough of it to translate that. I can’t conceal from myself
that there has been a change, and a change not for the better, in the
emotional atmosphere of the young woman; it has become soppy, stuffy;
if I were to say sniffy I should not say too much, but I won’t say
quite that. Young women have always fallen in love—I use the phrase in
its widest, vaguest sense—with Man, with just the male creature. Had
they not we should none of us be here, I suppose. When that nebulous
emotion becomes more definite, concentrates itself and gets directed at
a particular member of the species, it becomes Love, the real thing,
the motive power of life, the subject matter of poetry, of drama, of
legend, of art generally. But in its vague state it hovers over Man,
just Man. Obviously it must be over Man in some more or less definite
form. Well, now, what I wanted to say was this. Once upon a time, not so
long ago either, young women “fell in love” with, made a fuss over, Man
in his more heroic, more intensely masculine and vigorous aspects. It
was the soldier, the sailor, the adventurer of all sorts, that appealed
to their tenderest susceptibilities. Even the highwayman was held a
romantic figure. Many a nice girl has tossed a bouquet or waved a damp
pocket-handkerchief at a highwayman on his last drive to Tyburn Tree.
Women upon whom one must not be too hard have before now eloped with
their grooms. I say “upon whom one must not be too hard,” because after
all grooming is a _man’s_ trade. Personable prize-fighters, too, have
had their share of delicate feminine attentions. Now all these types
of manhood,—and, remember, it is the type more than the individual who
first appeals to those vague unsettled amatory emotions we are talking
about,—were male things who _did something_, something mostly that had
danger in it, that called for a spice of hardihood, of courage, of some
honest, manly, simple quality in the doing. Venus, you know, ’tis said,
gave herself to Mars, and tried it on—the hussy—with a robust young
hunter; but scandal does not connect even her name with a mummer’s!
Now, this change in the young woman’s emotional outlook from the hero,
of sorts, to the actor, is a change I can’t help feeling to be for the
worse. For, you see, the object of the emotional outpouring is no longer
a man who does something, but only a man who pretends to do something,
who postures and poses and plays at doing something! “The Captain with
his whiskers” of whom our grandmothers sang, and at whom our mothers
were not allowed to peep through the slats of their Venetian blinds, may
have been a bit of a dog, not “a marrying man,” mayhap, as another old
song had it; but at least his scarlet jacket and his gold lace stood for
something, for something worth having. That scarlet was smoke-blackened
at Waterloo, that gold lace lost its lustre on the slopes at Inkerman.
Girls don’t sing “The Captain with his whiskers” now, and, to tell you
the truth, I’m rather glad of that. May I not live to see the day, though
I am afraid I shall, when they will hymn the seductions of “The actor
with his grease pot.”
Please understand—but I need not ask that, you always do understand
me, you are the only woman who ever has, and consequently made the
right allowances—that I do not say one word in contempt of the actor’s
profession as such. It is an arduous trade, and as honest as any other
whose object is to amuse the public. They call it an “art” now, I notice,
and, perhaps it is, a kind of a sort of an art; but my point is that
it is not a business that calls out the best, the virile, from a man.
On the other hand, it does evoke, by the confession of lots of actors
and actresses themselves, the malign qualities of personal vanity,
petty jealousy, and peacockiness. The constant assumption of other
personalities does and must wipe out such personality as the man may have
to begin with. If you are always pretending to be somebody else you must
inevitably lose your own self at last. And then, it is so quite awfully
an affair of clothes; of clothes and of powdered wigs, and of shaven
faces and smirks. Now, I put it to you, Alexa, do you think a delightful
woman ought to fall in love with a suit of clothes bought in Covent
Garden? Further, do you think she can be really delightful if she does?
After all, perhaps, the change is not so great, or the thing so serious
as it seems. Perhaps, when all’s said and done, it is only the actor
in his character of hero with whom the young woman “falls in love.”
There would be a sharp reaction, I make no doubt, did she see the fellow
himself in tweeds guzzling brandy and soda in a Strand bar, or even in
evening dress sipping champagne at the Savoy. And, to do him justice,
sometimes, on the stage, in the glare of the footlights, an actor does
look uncommonly like a gentleman. You might almost fancy he was the Sir
Rupert Glenalmond or the Lord Archibald Heavyswell he pretends to be.
But still it is, while you are about it, better to “fall in love” with
the reality than with the sham, isn’t it? You must fall in love with
something, I know; but let it be with the Man, not with the Mimic.
Therefore, Alexa dear, next time you go to the theatre spend the dressing
hour in the cultivation of the critical spirit. That shall save you. Be a
modern girl by all means; be as modern as ever you can, and count on my
support to the utmost extreme of your modernity, but don’t, don’t be a
little duffer.
Always your affectionate, if, this time, also
Your admonitory
FATHER.
THE RUDENESS OF WOMEN
THE RUDENESS OF WOMEN
_Dec. 17, 19—._
MY DEAR ALEXA,—
As in your last letter you pose me with no puzzling questions on the
subject of conduct, I may take it, I suppose, that for the moment, at
least, life has become less problematical to you. That is well. Even the
youngest and most intelligent of us should cease from bothering now and
then, and be content just to be onlookers, to banish that fearsome word
“ought” from our vocabularies and from our minds. Conduct, as Matthew
Arnold pointed out a long time ago, is three-fourths of life, a biggish
fraction, but, after all, a fraction only; and there come periods when
we thank our stars for the comparative restfulness of that odd quarter.
I often think that Matthew might, with advantage, slightly have expanded
his formula. Had he said that conduct is three-fourths of life _for_
three-fourths of life he had been nearer the mark. Men and women, but
more often men than women, I fancy, who have passed the third quarter
rarely worry themselves as to what they ought, or ought not, to do. They
just go ahead and do it, confident that whether the action turn out for
weal or for woe it has been decided for them in that other three-quarters
left behind and beyond recall or undoing. We spend the greater part of
our life in acquiring habits, and the lesser in acquiescent obedience
to them. Therefore, if you are to be a delightful middle-aged lady you
must practise sedulously to be a delightful young one. It is worth a bit
of hard work to begin with, for middle-age lasts longer than youth, and
middle-aged ladies who are not delightful are not anything; they simply
don’t count.
One little habit I advise you to cultivate, to cultivate until it becomes
as natural and as spontaneous as eating peas with a fork; it is the
habit of saying “Thank you” for minor services rendered. We are all of
us taught that in the nursery, I know, but an uncountable number of us,
or rather of you, seem to forget it when you lengthen your skirts. Let
me tell you something that happened only yesterday. I went up to Charing
Cross by a mid-day train from here. The only other person in the carriage
was a woman. She was a lady—you know what I mean—the sort of woman who
lives in a hundred-a-year house, who keeps three maidservants and a
boot boy, possibly a carriage, and who goes for a month or six weeks to
the Continent or elsewhere every autumn with her husband. The sort of
person who when she gives a small dinner party has little pink shades
over the candles and at least two sorts of wine. I think, by the way,
she was the sort who would call a table napkin a serviette, but perhaps
I’m prejudiced by what happened. Well, when she reached Blackheath she
rose to leave the carriage. I was sitting in the corner by the door
through which she had to get out, and, of course, I opened it for her.
If you sit by the door you have to open it for all the outgoers. It is
a nuisance, but it has its compensation in the extra comfort of the
corner seat. This woman did not say “Thank you”; she passed me without
even an inclination of her sulky head. Presently two other women got
in, two women of the same social standing as the one who had left. At
Lewisham one of these got out. I opened the door for her. She didn’t say
“Thank you.” At London Bridge precisely the same thing happened with the
remaining third. All the way thence I meditated on writing a stinging
letter to the _Times_ on “The Decadence of Manners in the Upper Middle
Class,” but you who know me know that the letter is still to write. What
happened psychologically to me was this: that I felt just a trifle less
regard and respect for your sex, Alexa, than I was conscious of when I
left home. I daresay it was unreasonable of me, but there it was. Women
of our class are not really nice, I found myself saying to myself, not
really and truly nice in the innermost soul of them. No wonder they
don’t get on with their servants, I thought to myself, for if they are
rude to their social equals, what must they be to those whom they think
their inferiors? I rather hated your sex for about twenty-five minutes.
And please don’t tell me that these impolite hussies were exceptions,
because on the balance of probabilities it is most unlikely that I should
have struck three exceptions in the course of one short train journey.
No, Alexa, you are very rude. You are attractive sometimes, I admit; you
are even, in passing moments of folly and madness, bewitching, but you
are very rude. I don’t mean you personally, of course, but you regarded
collectively—you women, you!
I find myself getting cross even now as I write when I recall that
incident, getting cross and asking myself all sorts of questions which
it were well for women that men should not ask. As, for instance: Why do
we put up so tamely with so much of your cheek? Cheek is a slang word,
but made venerable by long use, and I can think of no other so exactly
adequate, so comprehensively expressive. Why do we not give you more
severe talkings to than we do? They would do you no end of good, and we
know it, and yet refrain. You scarcely ever get a severe talking to,
any of you. Yesterday, after leaving Charing Cross Station, I walked up
Bond Street. I was really going somewhere, oh sceptical child; you must
not think your father was merely loafing. I was not in a hurry, and I
looked at the shops. There were lots of pretty women driving up and down
in their carriages, but I did not look at them; I was at odds with the
whole sex. Well, those shops! With the exception of a fishmonger’s, a
few most attractive tobacconists, in which you cannot get a briar root
pipe under 25s., and a stray tailor or two, all those shops were women’s
shops; full of hats for women to wear, each hat to be worn about twice,
or at the most half-a-dozen times; shops full of frocks, each frock
costing more than a week’s earnings of a man who works hard to make, say,
£2000 a year; shops creaming over with fluffy, frilly under-things, the
fluffiest and the frilliest of which disappear for ever when once they
leave the shop, or, let us say, almost disappear. And then the jewellers!
Rubies, emeralds, sapphires, opals in little heaps on velvet-lined trays.
Diamonds and diamonds, and yet more diamonds flashing in the sunlight,
flashing scorn and contempt upon all such as are too poor to purchase
them; and gold, gold enough to have paved the street! Oh, and the pearls,
the ropes, nay, rather the cables of pearls. Pearl fishing, they used to
tell me in my _Child’s Guide to Knowledge_, is a perilous profession,
and a profession followed wholly by men. And all the things that these
shops displayed—of course, there was more than as much again in drawers
and cupboards and stout iron safes within the shops—were to be bought by
men and given to women. For what? For what, in the name of reason? Men,
merely as men, give to women as much as women, just as women, give to
men; and so that part of the account is squared by nature’s self, as it
were. But all this balance, this ransack of Bond Street, of South African
and Eastern and Australasian mines, of ocean depths, of forest solitudes,
all this is collared by women, and they won’t even say “Thank you.” It is
true I did not give those three women yesterday any jewels to speak of;
but still I did save them the soiling of their light-coloured gloves, and
you know by experience, Alexa, that carriage door handles on our railway
are always filthy.
Forgive this outburst, which, after all, so far as you are concerned,
is quite impersonal, but out of the bitterness of the heart the pen
writeth. You want to be, and I want you to be, an exceptional woman, and
the easiest way in which to be an exceptional woman is to be a polite
one. I don’t think there is any radical difference between the sexes in
the way of politeness. We are all born impolite—there is nothing much
more impolite than a young baby—but one sex acquires politeness and the
other doesn’t—that’s where it is. I wonder if you have ever noticed that.
If not, just use your eyes for the next four-and-twenty hours, and once
more you will be compelled to admit and to admire the accuracy of your
father’s criticisms of life. Watch, watch closely, next time you see two
or three young men talking to two or three women in a drawing-room or at
a garden party. Notice the difference (it is not a subtle, it is a quite
blatant difference) between the attitude and tone of the men to the women
and those of the women to the men. Unless the men be rank outsiders, and
that sort is not likely to come your way, you will find in the men’s
attitude and tone a deference, a respectful diffidence—how shall I put
it?—quite lacking in the women. However foolish, jejune, inconsequential
be the remarks of any one of the women the man immediately talking to
her will put on an air of interest; he will treat her as though anything
she said had some real importance; he will receive her feeblest joke as
though it were wit of the most polished. But she, well, if he doesn’t
amuse her she won’t even try to look amused, and if he bores her she
will most unmistakably look bored. It is horribly impolite to look bored,
you know. To bore is beastly, but to look bored is damnable. Most women
behave as though their mere existence were a blessing to men, as though
all that men could possibly ask of them was just to be there! It is not
enough, you know, Alexa; it really isn’t, and in our saner moods we men
feel that. We don’t say unpleasant things of you, but we feel them.
The worst of it is that social custom accepts the woman’s point of
view and enforces it. Think what happened to me last week. It was on
Wednesday—on Wednesday your mother and I dined with the Devrients.
Your mother was all right from start to finish. She was taken down by
Forsyth—I know you rather admire him, and you are right, for he is about
as clever as they make them, and talks even better than he writes. But,
then, your mother is a woman, and these sort of things are arranged for
the likes of her and you. But I! In obedience to that monstrous social
convention which pairs off married men with married women—I never felt it
so bitterly before, for your friend, the beautiful Janet, was there and
sat opposite me, hidden behind a tall epergne of tall flowers, and I’m
fond of Janet, and you say she likes me—I was sent down with Mrs ⸺ (never
mind, I won’t mention names), a middle-aged woman, who has no beauty nor
traces of beauty, who is neither clever nor interesting, who is nothing,
so far as I could make out, but stupid and rather greedy. For the whole
of that awful dinner—it lasted from eight until a quarter to ten—I had to
make myself agreeable to that preposterous person. And I did it. I was
as nice and kind as anything. I plied her with banalities, such as her
soul (what there was of it) loved. I wouldn’t have minded her not being
intelligent had she been pretty. I wouldn’t have minded her not being
pretty had she been intelligent; but she was neither, and at the end of
it I felt as though my brain had been wiped out with a sponge. Now, there
was a man there with whom I particularly wanted to talk, he is one of
the few men out of whom one always sets an idea or two, but devil a word
could I get with him, and all because it is taken for granted that I, a
man, must needs want to sit next to a woman. On the way home your mother
remarked what a delightful evening it had been, and how quickly it had
passed! I said—but you who know me, Alexa, know quite well that I said
nothing.
The Registrar-General’s returns inform me that men are marrying less
freely than they used, and that each year they marry less freely than in
the year before. It is almost the one piece of evidence I can discover
of the growth and development of intelligence among my sex. It means,
say the commentators in the newspapers and the magazines, that men are
getting more selfish, more exacting. It does. As we get more and more
civilised so shall we demand more and more from life. My savage ancestor
asked but little here below. I ask quite a lot, and get some. My remote
descendant will ask more, and get all of it. Of course, men who fall in
love will continue to marry; the Registrar-General will always have them
to go on with. For a man in love the _mere girl_ suffices. But hitherto
the marriage returns have been made up by the marriages of a certain
number, and a pretty large number, of men who have not been in love and
who consequently can see things, I mean women, more or less as they
really are. For them the mere girl does not suffice. She has got to be
a nice girl as well, a girl who takes as much trouble to be nice as she
does, say, to be clean. These are the fellows, I feel certain, whose
defection has caused, and will further cause, the fall in the marriage
rate. Your sex is being found out, my child, found out at long last by
mine. When the discovery is quite complete Lord only knows what sort of a
world we shall have!
I don’t suppose it has ever struck you before how nice we are to
you—now has it?—how patient we are with your caprices, how tolerant of
your tempers, how semi-blind to your deficiencies, how little and how
rarely we use against you the strength, moral, mental, and physical,
that is ours. An excellent French priest once advised me, as a cure for
discontent, to spend half an hour three times a week in meditating upon
my blessings. You do that, Alexa, and don’t forget that perhaps, on the
whole, the chiefest of yours is the possession of a most wise and always
a most loving
FATHER.
DRESS AND FASHION
DRESS AND FASHION
_Jan. 2, 19—._
MY DEAR ALEXA,—
Don’t be alarmed at getting a letter from me not in reply to one of
yours. Nothing has happened. “All is silver grey,” as Andrea del Sarto
says. I won’t add “placid and perfect with my art” as he does, because it
is cheek to call one’s work perfect even when it is, but, at any rate,
both I and my art are placid enough.
No, nothing has happened. That is the worst of it. When one reaches my
age nothing ever does happen unless one makes it happen. When one is
young adventures, excitements, thrills, come suddenly out of the void,
thus adding to the ordinary joy of them the throb of the unexpected.
But when one is older one has to fare forth out into the void and seek
diligently adventures, excitements, thrills; and if one has one’s living
to earn, and a whole lot of little things to see after, why then one
hasn’t much time for excursions into the void.
This is a purely selfish letter. It is written to relieve my mind; by way
of getting down in black and white some thoughts that have been twisting
and twirling about like maggots in my brain all the afternoon. In that
respect, at least, I am an artist, Alexa, and, forgive me, my daughter,
in that same respect, you are not.
The artistic temperament is not, as fools of novelists appear to think,
an itching to be singular or noticeable in any way, an inclination to
wear ridiculous neck-ties, to omit to wash behind the ears, or to live
with people to whom one is not married; and to quarrel with them. It is
the desire, the invincible desire, to externalise and express in paint or
pencil, in clay or marble, in musical sounds or in written words, one’s
emotions, one’s thoughts, one’s aspirations, one’s dreams.
You, for instance, draw. For a girl of your years and training you draw
rather well. But when you see a thing that appeals to you—a face, a
landscape, a little bit of an interior, you do not ache and ache until
you have got it down in pencil upon paper. You are quite content to
keep it within you. I, when I get ever such a stupid idea in my head,
am miserable until I see it before me in words, in words arranged as
well as I know how to arrange them. I would rather, far rather, keep an
aching tooth in my jaw than an aching idea in my head. And so, though my
neck-ties are ever the correctest of their kind that Bond Street knows,
and though I never do any of those other things peculiar to the artistic
temperament of rubbishy fiction, I do claim to belong to the great
company of artists.
By the way, I have often wondered what the author of the _Te Deum_ was
about not to have added another line to it:—
“The great Brotherhood of Artists, throughout all the world: Praise
Thee.”
Every artist, in every bit of honest work he does, though he may not
mean it or know it, praises God. How supremely well Kipling expressed
the gist of our creed when he wrote in that exquisite _Envoi_ to “Life’s
Handicap”; you remember it:—
“One instant’s toil to Thee denied
Stands all Eternity’s offence.”
And now to come down from the heights to the valley—I never could
breathe freely on mountain tops, Alexa; that’s why I hate Switzerland so
cordially. It is not the touring Anglican clergy and their impossible
wives I object to so much; it is those appalling Alps. But, as I was
going to say, I write this letter because I spent a whole half-hour this
morning reading a woman’s paper. At least, I’m not sure it called itself
a woman’s paper, it might have been a woman’s page in an ordinary paper.
I don’t know where the thing has got to now, so I can’t refer to it. I
found it on the hall table when I came down to breakfast.
Doesn’t it make you feel a good deal ashamed of your sex and of yourself,
as one of it, when you come across a woman’s page in a newspaper? Doesn’t
it make you feel pretty much as you would feel if you saw someone of your
own standing behaving rudely at dinner? or being impolite to a child?
Don’t you ask yourself, with something as near to a swear word as you
can get, “Whom on earth is all the rest of the paper for then? Are women
so small, so narrow, such children, such idiots as to have no interest
in politics, in art, in science, in literature; in all the extraordinary
doings of human beings all over the world, such as the rest of the paper
discusses and records?”
“The Women’s Corner!” Think of it, Alexa, child of my heart! The corner
into which the poor stunted, shrivelled, petty-minded creature must
betake herself to read about dress. Pah!
Here your feminine intuition will tell you that I am in rather a bad
temper. There, there, I don’t mean to sneer at feminine intuition. Heaven
knows I have both profited and suffered from it enough, and more than
enough in my time, and when the sum comes to be cast up it will be found,
I daresay, that I have profited as much as I have suffered.
But I am in rather a bad temper with that woman’s paper, not because it
was all about dress, but because it was all wrong about dress. I don’t
mean wrong in the absurd details—I know nothing of them—but wrong in the
essence, wrong in the soul of it.
Here anyone but you would say “What in the world does the man mean by
talking about soul in an article on dress?” You won’t say it because you
know—we have agreed about it often—that an article on anything whatever
that has no soul in it, is not an article at all; it is just a bladder of
rattling peas.
It is not because I despise or even think lightly of dress, that I am
so unwontedly annoyed with the person who wrote all this slops. On the
contrary, it is because I am fulfilled with the idea of the importance
of dress and of the part it plays in the amenities and pleasures of
life. You have often told me after we have been out together, or people
have been here, and I have been admiring this lady or that, that I
did not even know what she had on. Precisely. That was because she
was well-dressed. Had she been badly dressed I should have known fast
enough. The woman is well-dressed of whose costume you remember only the
_ensemble_, what we artists call the total impression—an impression of
colour and contour. Or sometimes of nothing even so definite as that, of
fluffiness merely.
Now the writer of all this abominable fustian knew nothing of that, that
elementary philosophy of dress. He, she, it—I don’t know what the sex of
the creature was—thought all of the costume and nothing of the woman.
With him, her, it, the woman was a thing to be worn with a costume,
not the costume a thing for a woman to wear. You do see the tremendous
difference, don’t you? But, of course, you do.
Really—but there, one must be tolerant. These people are flatly ignorant,
and, moreover, they are the hirelings of others whose business it is
to make money out of dress. That, nowadays, at anyrate, is the meaning
of fashion in the restricted sense of the word. Fashion is not a mode
of being beautiful or even of changing from one variety of beauty to
another, or of changing to meet changing circumstances. It is a means of
putting money into the pockets of dressmakers and manufacturers. These
people are getting stronger and stronger, more and more arrogant.
Take a case in point. Once upon a time, not so long ago, every woman in
our class had what was called “a set” of furs. It was horribly expensive
to begin with, but it was taken care of and it lasted, oh, I don’t know
how long. Of course, that didn’t suit the furriers and fur sellers—the
fierce competition of commerce and all the silly rest of it—and so,
though the wearing of furs is still the comfortable fashion, each season
sees a change in the smaller fashion of the furs, the cut of them, the
kind, and so on, and the women even in our class, who don’t adopt the
latest thing, feel hopelessly uncomfortable and out of it. They either
go cold, or wear cat-skin or rabbit-skin faked to look like something
expensive, or spend money that they haven’t got.
With that rabbit-skin and cat-skin I have struck the note of fashion as
it is in the suburbs, the provinces, and everywhere else except among the
rich and idle people to whom money does not matter, the people who do
nothing to make money, and so have most of it to spend. The designers for
the big dressmakers design something that is perhaps, though by no means
certainly, beautiful enough. If perchance it be beautiful, its beauty
lives in the artistry and science of its fashioning, and the material of
which it is made. Now the people at the top can purchase, without feeling
it, the artistry, the science, the rare and costly material. But the
others, you see, can’t.
Nevertheless, pricked and spurred by the low-down fashion journalists,
they feel that life is a desert without the new thing in some shape or
another. So they get it inartistically designed, unscientifically cut,
and of some cheaper, commoner stuff. Result, they don’t look a bit like
Duchesses after all, but only like what they are, silly and snobby women.
These are hard words, Alexa, but I am cross to-day.
Fashion in its smaller sense, “the fashion” as it is forced upon women
by the dressmakers and designers, as a card is forced by a sharper on
a flat, is for nine people out of ten an accursed thing, a monstrous
thing. It assumes that all women will look well dressed in the same way.
Now, if anything is certain, it is that of any hundred women selected
haphazard, not more than ten can dress in the same way and look anything
but ridiculous. The human body is, as you learnt when you used to draw it
at the Slade and at Colorossi’s, a subtle thing, and demands the subtlest
treatment. There are idiosyncrasies of body as there are of mind. I don’t
mean merely that some women are tall, some short, some thick, and others
thin, some curvy and others angular. That has to be remembered, too, but
I mean something more elusive than that.
Let us take a concrete case. You are not very different in height or
form from your friend, Berta Roselli. You are not a bit prettier. A
person just looking casually at you two—a second-rate milliner sort
of person—would say that the same sort of costume would suit you both
equally well. Yet how delightful you used to look in those frocks which
you call, I think, “Princess” frocks, and how completely they took away
the delightfulness from Berta. I told her so once in so many words when
we were walking round the garden together, and she had the good sense
never to wear them again. If you ask me why they enhanced your charm, and
destroyed Berta’s, I can’t tell you. Perhaps there is no “why.”
Then again, colour. It drives the artistic soul furious to be told that
“heliotrope is to be fashionable in the approaching season,” because one
knows at once what one is in for. Think of heliotrope or of any other
colour or tint in the universe worn beside every sort of complexion,
with every sort of shade of hair! It makes one’s nerves stand on end
like quills. There again, the rich women score because they can, and do,
change their complexions and their hair to “match,” as this putrid paper
calls it, the fashionable colour. The poorer women try to do the same
thing, and look—well. Or don’t even try, and then!—
This is merely a grumbling letter, not a didactic essay, and so I will
offer no advice in it. To offer advice one should be in a judicial mood,
serene, detached! but I may just say this. The one fatal thing in dress
is to wear anything because you happened to have admired it on someone
else, and for that reason only. The one triumphant thing in the matter of
dress is to remember that you are yourself and not that other person. In
all other matters women seem to remember it easily enough. In the matter
of dress only do they lose their sense of identity.
Now, Alexa, turn on me, do, and _riposte_ by telling me that men are
every bit as bad; that they too are the slaves of fashion. Say things
about my waistcoats if you like; I don’t care, for I have a crushing
retort up my sleeve. Think of the things that tailor people have tried to
force upon us and how miserably they have failed; how they have tried to
make us go back to peg-tops, to wear coloured coats and knee-breeches, as
evening dress. Think of these things and withhold the gibe. Or, don’t. I
do not mind. Sedate in my sense of my sex’s immeasurable superiority,
I remain,
Your angry and æsthetic
FATHER.
A MORAL QUESTION
A MORAL QUESTION
_Jan. 15, 19—._
MY DEAR ALEXA,—
Your last letter interested and amused me vastly, as I know you intended
it should. It is much the best thing in the way of writing you have ever
done. I read and re-read and read it yet again after breakfast, and then
I carefully, though regretfully, burnt it. One can spare oneself and
others a lot of unhappiness by the simple process of burning letters,
especially women’s letters, more especially still charming women’s
charming letters. Indeed, the more charming the woman and the more
charming the letter the more urgently do the flames clamour for their
rights of destruction. Had anyone else read this last letter of yours,
say, ten years hence, they would have formed an entirely false impression
of you, and had even you read it yourself after that lapse of time you
would have formed almost as false an impression of yourself. Almost, I
say, not quite, for you, I fain hope, would remember the sort of man to
whom it was written. And it is the character of the recipient even more
than that of the writer which gives the keynote of every letter worth the
reading. An intimate letter is the achievement of _two_ personalities—it
is a kind of dialogue in which one of the interlocutors is silent, or
rather, is heard only by the other. That is why published letters nearly
always lack interest; we do not hear that other.
Now, if anyone but your understanding father had read that last letter
of yours, they would have thought you “not quite a nice girl” to have
repeated little bits of scandal which you have picked up in a house in
which you are a welcome guest, and to have criticised so freely your
hosts and their friends. They would have liked the letter, mind you—they
would have chortled over it in pharisaical glee—I chortle, too, but I
chortle not as the Pharisees chortle—but they would not have liked you,
for they would have feared and distrusted you, as critics are always
distrusted and feared by the stodgy, especially critics of life. They,
you see, these hypothetical but now impossible readers of your letter,
would not have known me—would not have known, as you do, that I enjoy
scandal and appreciate criticism; and would therefore have failed to
realise how dutiful a daughter you were in giving me the things I like.
Need I, to a girl of your perceptiveness, attempt to justify the
enjoyment of scandal? Surely it is the exceptional, not the ordinary,
which should and does interest us. If, for instance, one were to discover
a pork butcher, who spent all the daylight hours in butchering pork,
witching the midnight with an exquisite performance of Bach’s Chaconne
on a Strad, one would be interested in the man, not because he was a
pork butcher, but because he was a virtuoso who loved Bach and possessed
a Strad. If Dr. Clifford were caught with a guitar serenading a lady’s
maid in Gower Street, how one’s interest in the man would spring to
life—how much of his windy rhetoric would instantly be forgotten? One
side of our heads would condemn him, no doubt, but how the whole of our
hearts would warm to the man? Ah, that one touch of nature! Forgive the
banal quotation, but I don’t often quote from other people’s works, do
I? Well, then, scandal is interesting because it is exceptional. And
conduct that is not exceptional is not scandal. No one would call the
improprieties of Messalina scandals; they were just the commonplace
occurrences of her daily life. Now, these four persons of whose doings
you tell me are made interesting to me now by the very fact that I have
always held them to be of the properest sect of the proper. Next time
I meet Mrs ⸺ (I had better omit the name) I shall look at her from an
entirely different point of view. I shall make an effort to talk to
the woman, whereas, as you know, last time I took her down to dinner I
devoted myself in esurient silence to the entrées. See now, my daughter,
what a kindly act you have done her in repeating that little morsel
of scandal. For, as you know, when I do try to talk—really to talk—I
generally succeed rather well. You have assured the dear and erring lady
at least one pleasant dinner party.
But you ask me—or seem to ask me, though you do not put your query
in so many words, what ought to be your own attitude to the lady in
question—should you continue “to know” her, as the phrase goes, in the
future. Of course, you can’t help knowing her just now, for a guest
must needs be courteous to fellow guests, or leave the host’s house as
quickly as is compatible with politeness. Very well, Alexa, let us go
into this matter for a moment. What do we, you and I, know of this lady,
“know for certain,” as the phrase goes? We know her to be a kindly if
not an obtrusively intelligent person. We know, if you come to think
of it, quite a lot of nice, kind things she has done for other people,
things she might have left undone and caused no remark, superfluously
kind things, that is. We know her to be—for we have seen her in her own
home—a devoted and efficient mother—alas that the two terms should not
be synonymous—to her little children. Judging by her husband’s conduct
to her, he finds her an eminently satisfactory wife. Personally, though
I have never heard her say a brilliant or even a clever thing, I have
never heard her say an unkind one. As to this other matter of which
you tell me, we are not quite sure that it is true, are we? A thing
that is neither confessed nor proved is doubtful, and according to the
wholesome custom of English law—and English law, broadly speaking, is
English common sense—the accused has always the benefit of the doubt.
But, you seem to hint, you yourself are “morally certain” that it is
true. Moral certainties lead often to immoral judgments, Alexa, and,
like moral victories, are always eminently unsatisfying. But let us take
it for granted that it is true. What then? It is assuredly nothing that
immediately concerns you or your relations with the woman, is it? You do
not catch yourself desiring to follow her example in any way, do you? You
find no trace of her backslidings in her conversations with you? So far
as you can perceive, and you have pretty sharp eyes, my daughter, it does
not affect her life or manners in any way whatever. You told me you know,
that it came upon you as an overwhelming surprise. You may reply that
such a thing “_must_” in some way affect a woman’s life. I reply that it
is not with what _must_, but with what _does_ perceptibly happen that
we in this practical work-a-day world only are concerned. We do well to
leave _musts_ to the hereafter.
In asking yourself whether you shall or shall not continue “to know”
this lady, you are really and essentially asking yourself whether you
shall act as judge, jury and executioner to a person accused of an
offence against current convention, or, yes, if you like, against current
morality. But I would point out to you that even in Law, which is at best
but a rough and ready attempt to secure justice, the peculiar facts of
the offence, the temptations that led up to it, are taken into some sort
of account. The plea of extenuating circumstances has weight. Moreover,
the accused is allowed to speak in his defence either by his own lips or
those of skilled counsel. Now your court, the court which you in secret
hold, and where you alone are judge, jury, prosecutor, and witnesses—your
court knows nothing, and can know nothing, of peculiar facts, and of
special temptations—it can mitigate nothing on account of extenuating
circumstances, because it is wholly ignorant of their existence or
non-existence. The accused’s lips are sealed, and there is no counsel to
plead for her. Do you think, then, that a court so constituted is at all
likely to get anywhere near to justice in its decisions? How would you
like to be tried, and executed, by such a court, if you were charged with
stealing a yard of ribbon?
You may reply, and I think you will, for you are a persistent little
dialectician when you like, that an analogy is not an argument. And,
besides, that in talking of “execution” I exaggerate: that anything so
unimportant a person as yourself may do can matter but little to the
lady. No, perhaps not, but it matters a good deal to you, child, and it
is you with whom I am concerned. An unjust act hurts the doer, hurts
especially if it be a stupidly unjust act. After it he will be a trifle
stupider, blunter, more prejudiced than he was before. There is nothing
roots itself—no, not even the horse-radish in our garden—so easily, and
is so hard to eradicate, as prejudice. Now prejudiced and strong you may
be, my child, but you can’t be prejudiced and delightful, and, as I have
so often told you, above all things I want you to be delightful.
So far you are delightful, and you are strong, too, and it is because
you are strong that I am going to say one thing more on this matter.
The moral code of society is not equally valid in all its clauses. Some
are of more importance and significance than others. Those which say we
must not murder and we must not steal are of immeasurable importance,
because they apply not to this time or that, or to that place or this,
but to _all_ times and to every place. A society which permitted or
winked to any extent at murder or theft would cease, almost at once, to
be a society. We are here now living in comparative comfort and security
because societies in the past forbade murder and theft; therefore the
commands which treat of these offences are of what we philosophical old
buffers call universal validity. But there are other commandments in
the moral code of the day which are only “of the day,” as it were. Time
was when they were not—places are where they are not, and possibly time
will come again when they will not be. The morality which they seek to
maintain is never more than the morality of a phase in human evolution.
It may be valid _for that phase_, but it has not universal validity. Now,
judgments and actions based on universal validity must needs be ever so
much more assured than judgments and actions based on phasal validity, if
you will allow the phrase to pass. Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t want
to minimise the importance of the rules and regulations which are “only
of the day,” for, after all, that day is the day in which we live. Still,
you see there is a difference, isn’t there? Yes, and it is just one of
those differences of which a wise and delightful young woman should take
count.
Of course, I have not nearly exhausted my subject, but I have very nearly
exhausted myself, and
I am your tired
FATHER.
THE LIMITS OF FLIRTATION
THE LIMITS OF FLIRTATION
_Feb. 20, 19—._
MY DEAR ALEXA,—
What a very short note! Its brevity and its interrogativeness give it
almost the urgency of a telegram. And yet how am I to answer it, how am I
even to begin to answer it in less than half a dozen pages of quarto?
I will not remind you of the old saying that a certain sort of person
can ask more questions in five minutes than a wise man can answer in a
lifetime. I will not remind you, I say, because you are not the sort of
person the old saying means, and I feel sure that when you asked your
question you did not do it just to annoy, but because for some reason or
another you really wanted to know. Was it personal, that reason? Because,
if so, I think, perhaps, on the whole you had better come home.
What, you ask me, are the limits of flirtation? Where does it begin;
where end?
I wish you hadn’t used the word: it is a word I happen intensely to
dislike, to dislike with one of those prejudices of which we can never
give a satisfactory account. I think, perhaps, I dislike it because it
always brings before me a mental image of one of my own sex making a fool
or a rogue of himself. And yet I cannot blame you, for I myself have been
quite unable to find a synonym for it.
“Coquetry” is a pretty word, but coquetry, I quite recognise, is a
different thing. Coquetry is exclusively feminine. Now it takes two to
make a flirtation, and one of them must not be a woman. And then, after
all, the word has a worthy ancestry.
Do you know who invented it? A dozen pairs of gloves to one you don’t?
It was that greatest of all gentlemen that ever were, Lord Chesterfield,
and he, like the gallant fellow he was, modestly attributed it to some
unnamed lady of his acquaintance.
I came across it quite a little while ago in Volume XVI. of my _British
Essayists_. You know them, those little books bound in expensive calf
with red labels, which nearly fill a whole bookshelf in the library, and
which you always refuse to open because you say they look so dull. Well,
in No. 101 of _The World_, dated December 5, 1754, Lord Chesterfield is
praising your sex for the good service it has done to the English tongue;
and I can’t think how he could! “I never see a pretty mouth opening to
speak,” he says, “but I expect, and am seldom disappointed, some new
improvement of our language.”
Happy times! Happy man! If only he could have been here the other day
when the Darkleigh girls called. Their entire vocabulary consisted of one
word, “ripping.” No, I do them wrong. There was another, “rag.” And yet
what an extremely charming girl Muriel is, isn’t she? And, after all, why
should a woman be a dictionary?
But to return to Lord Chesterfield. He goes on to say:—
“I assisted at the birth of that most significant word
‘flirtation,’ which dropped from the most beautiful mouth in
the world, and which has since received the sanction of our
most accurate Laureate in one of his comedies. Some inattentive
and undiscerning people have, I know, taken it to be a term
synonymous with coquetry; but I lay hold of this opportunity
to undeceive them, and eventually to inform Mr Johnson that
flirtation is short of coquetry and intimates only the first
hints of approximation, which subsequent coquetry may reduce to
those preliminary articles that commonly end in a definitive
treaty.”
I have quoted Chesterfield merely for the sake of historic interest, not
because his definition is much to the point just now. Since his time the
word flirtation has changed its meaning, just as the thing has changed
its character. It means a good deal more to-day than those “first hints
of approximation.” Flirtation with us does not end (except by some
calamitous accident) in the “definitive treaty” of marriage. The proof of
which is that when it does we usually say, or think, “Oh, then it wasn’t
a flirtation after all, it was serious;” implying, of course, that that
which is serious is not flirtation.
Not but what stupid people among us misuse the word abominably. You will
sometimes hear a woman accused of flirting with a man when she has been
merely making herself as delightful as she knows how to him; doing her
simple duty to herself and to him, that is.
But we need not trouble ourselves, you and I, as to what stupid people
say or think. We agreed that we wouldn’t, a long time ago, you remember.
I have noticed, too, that people who say things about us always are
stupid—which is one to us, isn’t it?
No, no, flirtation to-day may go a long way beyond those first hints of
approximation and still remain flirtation, without reaching those limits
you talk of. It may ... but perhaps only concrete instances have value in
a discussion of this sort, so let me give you one. A day or two ago, I
went, rather late in the afternoon, to the Exhibition of Old Masters now
on in Burlington House. I wish you had been there too; there is gorgeous
Sir Joshua, which you would have knelt down and worshipped. I should
have done it myself but for a sense of humour and a touch of rheumatism
in the knee. Well, in the water-colour gallery I came upon a man I know
and you know, with a woman I know and so do you. They were not looking at
the drawings, they were sitting on a seat between two screens. My almost
feminine intuition (don’t jeer) told me that they had not looked at a
picture since they had passed the turnstile. However, please understand,
Alexa, that there was not the slightest harm in those two people being
where they were on that afternoon.
At our time of day and amongst our set, I should hope, any man might go
to any picture gallery with any woman and escape censure. But the point
about these two people was this. When they saw me, and saw that I saw
them, they seemed embarrassed. And then the man gave me a look which
meant, if ever a look meant anything, “I know you’re a decent chap, and
I am confident you will hold your tongue,” and the lady did not look at
me at all, she fidgeted with the edge of her veil. The veil, by the way,
of course, gave the whole thing away. It was thickish. People who want to
see pictures don’t wear thick veils. Now, that embarrassment, that look
of the man’s at me, that little nervous gesture of the lady’s, told me
that here was a flirtation. Nothing more than a flirtation so far. I am
confident of that. But a flirtation, mind you, that had almost reached
the limits.
An understanding, a secret understanding, an understanding from which
the rest of the world is excluded, is of the very essence of flirtation.
The _entente_, the agreement, may never have been made by words spoken
in corners, or written in notes, but it must at least have been made
in looks or, no, perhaps not by anything so definite as they, by the
creation of that most impalpable but most real thing, an atmosphere, an
emotional atmosphere.
When does a flirtation begin, then? It begins directly she has succeeded
in convincing him (of course you may reverse the sexes) that he is
more attractive to her than any of the other men about. Mind, I say in
convincing him. Until he is convinced the thing has not begun; it is
only an attempt at a flirtation—and to fail in such an attempt is, with
one exception, the most disastrous defeat a woman can sustain. No woman
can encounter two beatings of that sort and retain her self-esteem. Her
_amour propre_ is irreparably ruined. A man, on the other hand, can
survive any number of rebuffs and come up smiling to face the next; for
he can always comfort himself with the thought that it was the lady’s
prudence and not his own unattractiveness that was responsible for the
licking.
A flirtation must be without serious intent. If one of the parties to it
have anything more definite in view, consciously in view, then he or she
is not flirting; it is a one-sided affair. It is in no way destructive of
the accuracy of my definition that most affairs are one-sided affairs.
There may be in a flirtation, there nearly always is, a sort of subtle
subconsciousness of delightful possibilities, of dangerously delightful
possibilities, but that is all there may be; and it is just these vague
possibilities that give the salt to the dish.
Flirtation then you see, Alexa, is, like virtue, its own reward. That, I
think, is the only respect in which it does resemble virtue. Like art, it
must exist only for its own sake; and it is remarkably like art. Indeed,
it is no inconsiderable part of the art of life. The object of art, as
Pater says somewhere, is to render radiant, to intensify, our moments.
That and nothing else is the object, so far as it has an object, of
flirtation.
Of course it gratifies our vanity, and of all gratifications, or nearly
all, the gratification of vanity is the sweetest, the one with least
alloy or unpleasant after-taste. Vanity suffers from hunger, but never
from indigestion, no, nor from satiety. There are few things in this
world which give a man, who is a man and not a pudding, such a tingling
thrill of pleasure as the consciousness that a woman, an ordinarily
discreet woman, has run the ever-so-slightest risk of compromising
herself for his sake.
A woman once told me—quite a nice woman, Alexa, not a cat, nothing like
a cat—that life’s height was the knowledge that she could raise a man
to the summits or cast him down to the depths, by giving or withholding
a glance as she left the dinner-table for the drawing-room. So you see
flirtation has its points as a form of sport.
Obviously then, as I said, there must be an understanding, a tacit, if
temporary, alliance between the pair. They must have made a little circle
for themselves, a little circle in which they two move alone, from which
the rest of the world is excluded, as it were, by a burning bush. There
may be a _ménage à trois_, indeed, I am told that the _ménage à trois_
is one of the commonest of social phenomena, but a flirtation _à trois_
there can never be. A woman may flirt with two men, or a man with two
women, but neither of the two must know of the other’s existence or the
thing falls to pieces.
It is in truth a sort of exercise preliminary to the duel of sex. The
combatants are combatants only by courtesy; they fence with the buttons
on the foils. So long as the game is played according to the rules, there
is likely to be naught more seriously discommoding than a scratch or a
tiny little blue bruise which in a day or two will disappear. But, and
here is the spice of it, at any moment one of the buttons may come off
by accident, or be taken off by fraud, and then—well, then certainly a
garment may be torn to rags, possibly a heart may be pierced.
Where does flirtation end? you ask. Well, I can tell you where it never
ends. It never ends in a row. Never, at any rate, when he or she has more
brains than a guinea-pig. Of course, with downright fools there is no
telling. If there be ever so slight a row, ever so faint a scandal, then
there has been something more than a flirtation. The limits have been
passed; a button, somehow or other, has come off a foil. When somebody is
trying to get back somebody’s letters somebody has leaped the limits: be
sure of that.
Miss Rhoda Broughton, an author whom young women of to-day are a little
apt to slight, makes Sarah in _Belinda_ say:—“I may be a flirt, but thank
heaven in the whole length and breadth of Europe there exists not a scrap
of my handwriting.” Or words to this effect. May be a flirt forsooth! Of
course she was a flirt, and a flirt of accomplishment, or she could never
truthfully have made the boast.
But the limits? Well, they are like most other limits that determine the
conduct of men and women. They are shifting limits, they change from age
to age, and from climate to climate; nay, more than that, from social set
to social set. Judging from what I hear on the top and bottom levels
of our present society there is no fault to find with their narrowness;
and even with us though they may be not so wide as a church door (horrid
simile that; a church should never even be thought of in connection with
a flirtation) they will do, they will serve.
Perhaps you want me to be practical though. Well, here goes then. Secret
assignations should be avoided as beyond the limits, so should the
underground post. You know what I mean by the underground post; letters
sent to clubs or to post-offices.
Dark corners at dances? Well—yes. A dark corner may just be inside the
boundary, but a clasped hand in that dark corner is well over it. But by
the way, Alexa, on the whole it seems not wise in me to set out these
limits for you, because the limits of flirtation are also the perilous
edges of—find the word for me in the _Thesaurus_. There is plenty of
room well within those limits for you to entertain yourself, and others,
in security. Keep away from the limits, for, as I said, they are vague,
apt sometimes, in emotional moments, to become blurred, invisible even
perhaps. When a girl of your tender years gets near to the limits she is
likely to call for the prompt and most disagreeable intervention of a,
and particularly of
Your, stern and relentless,
Though never heavy,
FATHER.
MEN’S LOVE
MEN’S LOVE
_Jan. 20, 19—._
MY DEAR ALEXA,—
Your appetite for knowledge does you credit. It is inherited, doubtless.
And how comprehensive it is! You wish you knew all about men, do you?
A moderate wish; a wish that if realised would make you empress of the
world. Yes, that and nothing less than that is the destiny of the woman,
when she arrives, who knows all about men. We shall not see her just yet
though, and when, if ever we do, then, as Swinburne’s distressful lover
says:
“Content you, I shall not be there.”
So as things are I sleep peacefully o’ nights. That masterful lady does
not even trouble my dreams.
Don’t you know, child, that men are now, and always have been, combined
in a conspiracy not to let women know all about them; nay, more than
that, to permit women to know as little as possible? Men are not very
clever in other ways, but they are, I fancy, clever enough to make that
particular conspiracy a success. They have done very well so far, anyhow.
Women know curiously little about men; curiously little considering the
long time they have had to study the subject, and how greatly it has
always been to their interest to know as much as possible. Take women
novelists, for instance—not the silly sort, but the very best of them,
the giantesses of fiction—Georges Sand, George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë—to
say nothing of the second string, the women writers of our day, the Mrs
Craigies, the Ouidas, the Mrs Humphrey Wardses. Why is it, by the way,
that when there was no “Woman Movement” there were great women artists,
and that now when woman is clamorous and obtrusive there are none?
But take, as I said, the big women. Scarce one of them has presented
us with a real live man. Think of Charlotte Brontë’s Rochester! George
Eliot did better. Just now and then some of her men do really think and
feel as men feel and think. But that, I suggest, was because George
Eliot was herself something more or less than a woman. The men in women’s
novels, it is true, act as men act, but they rarely or never think as men
think. Women are keenly observant; they see what men do; they don’t know,
because men never tell them, what men think.
Now please don’t make, even in your own mind, the obvious and inept
reply, “Neither do men know women,” because by the universal consent of
women themselves the great men novelists, and some of the small ones,
have portrayed veritable women; Balzac, for example, and George Meredith,
and Thomas Hardy and Flaubert! Was there ever a realer woman than Madame
Bovary?—I am not sure, though, that you have made her acquaintance.
The concealment, conscious and unconscious, begins almost at the
beginning. The smallest schoolboy never lets his sisters see him as he
sees himself and as he is seen of his fellows. To his sisters he talks a
different language even, a different language from the language of the
playground, I mean. And it is well for him that he does. If he didn’t,
and his father caught him at it, there would be sorrow and soreness for
that boy. No novelist, man or woman, has so much as begun to depict the
schoolboy as he is. Kipling is nowhere near it, nor Eden Phillpotts, nor
the rest. And as for Tom Brown...!
No, not only do women not know men, but they don’t even know boys, and
that really is queer, because women themselves are curiously like boys
in many ways, and, after all, they do have a good deal to do with the
bringing up of boys. But it is wonderful how much a boy manages to
hide even from his mother. I don’t think he does it consciously; it
is the inherited instinct of his sex—the result of natural selection,
probably—explainable on Darwinian principles, like most else in this
world.
You see, for you know your Darwin, if a man were to let women know all
about him no decently civilised woman would ever be found so fond or so
foolish as to mate with him. Consequently he would never reproduce his
kind—he would not be the fittest and would not survive.
Rum, isn’t it? I have only just thought of it, but I am quite sure it is
a discovery of vast importance—that the continuance of the race depends
upon women’s ignorance of men.
Let me give you an example of their colossal ignorance of boys. Mrs Bates
was here the other day. You know she is an exceptionally intelligent
woman, and really learned also. She had been reading some Italian
psychologist’s book on Love; and, judging from what she told me, that
foreigner really appears to have known something about it. It seems he
gave a case of a lad of fourteen who had a passion for a lady of thirty
or thereabouts. And Mrs Bates asked me if such a thing were possible! I
enlightened her with frankness and great wealth of detail. But I could
see she didn’t believe me; she thought I was talking through my hat all
the time; inventing as I went on.
I don’t ask you, Alexa, whence comes this new-born desire of yours to
know all about men; but I warn you that I am pretty good at guessing.
However, let that pass. Not only will you never know all about men, but
at present, my kiddie, you don’t know anything at all. Knowledge of live
things is not to be got from books or plays. All you can get from books
or plays is—what shall I call it? there is no one word that will do—a
sort of vague and deceptive hint of the reality. That is not very well
put, but it is the best I can do for the moment. Knowledge of life means
knowledge of men and women, just that and naught but that, and knowledge
of life can only be got by living. You can learn no more of it from books
than you could learn of a country by merely studying a map. You would,
of course, learn more of it in five minutes from some intelligent and
talkative traveller who had been there, and who chatted freely.
Well, your father is such a traveller, and he has made a longish journey
through the territory of life, a territory in which he has looked about
him with the eyes of a man. Even so, he can’t do much for his daughter,
but he can do something, he has done something, and he will do more if
time be granted him.
Bear in mind, then, when you read of love, the love of the sexes, when
you hear it talked about, when you see it, apparently going on under
your eyes, that this traveller towards the end of his journeyings often
catches himself doubting whether there is such a thing as _love_ of the
sexes at all, whether, in short, to call the thing “love” is not to do an
outrage to language and to common sense.
Of course, you can call any thing by any name you like, but you have no
sort of right to call two widely and fundamentally different things by
the same name. And to call the emotion I have for you, for instance, by
the same name as you call the emotion a man experiences for a woman when
he is “in love” with her is monstrous. The two things are dissimilar in
almost every respect.
When a man and woman are infected by what some scientific French
gentleman seriously declares to be the love-microbe they are, it seems
to me, the victims of all sorts of curious delusions and illusions,
and they are unable to analyse their own states of mind. The man feels
capable of all sorts of heroism and nobility, and the woman of any amount
of self-sacrifice. That feeling of theirs is sheer delusion. In point
of fact they are both in a state of highly inflamed egoism. Introduce
the slightest whiff of jealousy and the heroism and the self-sacrifice
are converted into the lowest-down sort of meanness. At once you get
base and baseless suspicions, spying, of the opening-letters and
listening-outside-doors order, and often, to wind up with, cruelty and
savagery more frightful than the beast’s.
Well now, is the thing, this in-loveness which can be so easily
transformed into devilry, worthy of the name we give to the feeling of
parents for children, or friends towards one another? Yet that first
thing is what is meant when one talks of the love of the sexes!
Mind you, there is no avoiding that microbe, the anti-toxin has not yet
been found, and I don’t mind predicting that if ever it be found the
demand for it will be of the slackest. I don’t mind confessing that
if that microbe were swept out of the world, as we hope some day to
sweep out the tubercle bacillus, the little chap would leave the world
considerably duller than he found it, so dull as to be no place for the
likes of me. But still we may as well see the thing for what it is.
Because we are all mad sometimes, and enjoy our brief deliriums, there is
no reason why in the sane intervals we should not frankly recognise what
we were the last time we went mad and what we are likely to be the next.
Please don’t imagine that I have written the above passage by way of a
warning to you. The philosopher neither warns against the inevitable nor
regrets it. He likes just to look it straight in the face sometimes,
that’s all. It amuses him.
But now, apart from this in-loveness—which I will not call love, hang
me if I will—do men, men as a whole, men as a sex, love women, women
in the lump, women as a sex? As I live, I don’t believe they do! It
would be interesting if some leisured and industrious person—you might
take on the job, Alexa, when you return—would compile a volume of
proverbs, aphorisms, epigrams, from all languages, which have women as
their subject. There is scarcely one of them—I don’t remember one—that
has a word to say in her praise. As Dick Phenyl used to say in _Sweet
Lavender_, ... ah heaven! a senile shudder runs through me when I think
what a long time ago that was—“it’s all blame, blame, nothing but blame,”
and a good deal more than blame, heavy vituperation, acrid snarling, and,
I freely admit it, often disgusting and mendacious slander. But still,
there we are; men made these proverbs and aphorisms, men cut and polished
these epigrams, and men have kept them as current coin in the world.
Now I put it to you, does one satirise, ironise, slate, bully-rag, and
squirt verbal vitriol at the thing one loves?
Then, watch men. You have the opportunity, since I understand you have
a full house just now. Watch them, then. Do they, for instance, hurry
up to the drawing-room after dinner, or do they linger down there over
their wine and their talk till the hostess loses her patience and every
feminine eye keeps turning to the door? No doubt if there’s any man there
hopelessly “in love” he would sneak up if he dared. But the others? And
oh! if you were to see us the moment after the dining-room door has
closed behind you, you dears! If you were to see how we draw our chairs
up, to note the change in our voices, the air of comfort with which we
finger our glasses, the heavy reluctance with which we rise when the host
gives the word! Oh!
I suppose there’s a little shooting still going on, isn’t there, or is
it all over? But if there is, I dare say some of the women go out with
the guns, or at any rate meet the men for luncheon. Well, watch the men’s
faces, watch closely (don’t listen to their voices, we know how to school
our voices) when the women volunteer. You will see how men pant for
“women’s society!”
They won’t have you in their clubs, Alexa; think of that. Some years ago
I, greatly daring, did propose at the annual general meeting of my club
that women should be admitted—to tea. I could not find a seconder. One
old gentleman who, to my great surprise, did rise to second me turned out
to be deaf, and thought I was proposing something quite different. That
luckless attempt of mine almost ruined my reputation; the memory of it
still clings to me like the traces of some fell disease. They thought I
was, well—pretty much everything but what I am.
And yet how polite and altogether nice men are to you, aren’t they? How
promptly they spring forward to take the lightest parcel from your hand,
with what lackey-like deference do they hold open the door that you may
pass out! Yes, but then you are a woman, a pretty and attractive woman
of their own social standing. Again I say, watch. Do they show quite the
same alacrity in the case of a less delightful or of a much older woman
than you? Still further, do they show any disposition at all to carry the
coal-box upstairs for the housemaid—and the housemaid, after all, is a
woman, you know.
No; men do not love women. Or, if they love them they love them as the
hawk loves the pigeon, or as you love chocolate almonds. Men, as men, do
not, I repeat, love women as women; but I love you, and I am always
Your devoted
FATHER.
THE MAN’S POINT OF VIEW
THE MAN’S POINT OF VIEW
_Feb. 9, 19—._
MY DEAR ALEXA,—
No—that formal greeting inadequately expresses my emotion at the moment—I
will say then, Alexa dearest—
I am really sorry that my last letter should have put you into such a
flutter; should have ruffled your mind’s plumage so quite unduly. I find
I nearly always do come to grief in this way when I neglect the advice
given me years and years ago by a wise and wicked old man, when I was a
foolish and a passably good young one.
“My boy,” that old rapscallion said—he was holding up a glass of his own
port to the candle when he said it, and enjoying the delight of the eye
previous to the pleasure of the palate. “My boy, never tell the truth
to women. You’ll find it infernally difficult to do any way, and it
always turns out badly.” He gave me much other counsel of a similar sort.
Sometimes I have acted upon it and sometimes I have not. When I have
I have always scored handsomely; when I haven’t I have invariably been
sorry for myself.
He was a remarkable old gentleman, old Gillion. He enjoyed the worst
reputation of any man of his set. When I say enjoyed I mean enjoyed. He
loved it; he cherished it as a collector of books cherishes his rare old
editions. He died at the age of eighty-seven in an odour of diabolism,
tenderly served and waited upon by a troop of affectionate and expectant
grandchildren, to whom he left not a penny. Years before he had invested
all his money in an annuity. But they didn’t know that. They say he died
with a smile on his lips. I can quite believe it. He always loved irony.
It is, as that sage reprobate said, infernally difficult to tell the
truth to women, and that, I make no doubt, is why it so seldom gets told.
For one thing the truth, the bare truth, is nearly always unpleasant,
and so you see, the temptation to lie attacks us on our softer, our more
kindly, side. I am quite sure that nine times out of ten when men deceive
women they do it much less for their own sakes than for the sakes of the
women. Now, don’t raise your eyebrows and draw down your lip-corners,
because that really is so. Moreover, they often feel (if they be of a
philosophic cast they know) that the deception comes nearer to the truth
than the actual bald fact would be. Bald facts are seldom or never true
facts. Truth is ever a thing of atmosphere, of light and shade, of fine
gradations. Truth is a point of view, sometimes a very temporary and
transient point of view.
A point of view. Yes, that’s it. And that is why it is not only difficult
but, I incline to think, impossible for men to tell the truth to women.
Suppose you have two persons whose eyes are so constructed that they can
only see the world through glasses, and suppose one of these persons
is doomed always to wear green glasses and the other pink glasses. How
on earth can any object ever look the same to both? A can tell B that
a sheet of paper is green, but he may say so for ever, and yet B will
always see it pink. And the fun of the thing is that it is really white
all the time! And what do I mean by “really”? I don’t know.
But are men and women so different as all that, you will be asking
yourself. Yes, they are. Quite as different as all that, and more so.
They are wonderfully different. The longer I live and the more I look
about me the greater and more distinct do the differences seem to become.
I know it’s the fashion just now, especially among strong women and weak
men, to deny this, and to declare that as we evolve we grow nearer to,
more like, each other. Sheer nonsense, my dear, sheer nonsense!
One of the most notable marks of civilisation is the way in which it
differentiates the sexes. A savage father is much nearer to his daughter
than I am to you. I am rather sorry for it, but it can’t be helped, and
this letter of yours goes some way towards proving it. And yet I don’t
know that I am quite honest in saying that I am sorry for it—another
instance of how difficult it is to tell the truth, you see—for it seems
to me that a good deal of the joy, or at any rate of the excitement, of
life is brought about by just that difference. Life has little that is
exciting to your civilised man, and if you deprive him of that...!
But to come to your letter. You say that I picture the world to you, the
world of men and women, as a place full of ravening beasts of prey, and
you add that now whenever two or three men are fluffing round you, you
will feel like a defenceless pigeon surrounded by hungry hawks. Well, if
my letter has done that for you it must have wrought a transformation
indeed. I have seen you more than once with two or three young men
fluffing (I like that word fluffing, it is apt; keep it for future use)
round you and somehow it never struck me that they in the faintest degree
resembled hawks or that there was anything of the silly pigeon about my
daughter. They generally, I seem to remember, looked nervous and rather
scared, though genuinely anxious to please, very unhawk like; but then
they were young, and I dare say a callow hawk is pretty well as timid as
a newly hatched chick. Courage comes with age, with the hardening of the
beak and the sharpening of the talons.
Yet I am not altogether sorry if my last letter brought to you some
realisation of some part of the truth; one aspect of it, let us say.
Looked at from one point of view, the world of men and women is full of
ravening beasts of prey. But take up another standpoint and you will see
that the powers and opportunities of the beasts are often pretty narrowly
limited. Limited sometimes by their own ignorance of their own powers,
limited always by the social institutions which they themselves have
established. It seems rum, but the wolf has filed his own fangs, the hawk
has clipped his own claws.
You may be a pigeon, Alexa, but, thanks to many things, you are not a
defenceless pigeon. You are defended, for instance, by your own brains,
by the knowledge which I have taken good care should be yours, by the
customs of the social circle in which you were born, by the institution
of marriage, and most of all by the jealousy and suspicion the wolves
and hawks have of one another. So on the whole you are tolerably safe,
my birdie; you need not flutter a feather. Remember what I once told
you in another letter when I was employing a slightly different set of
metaphors—it is always the traitor in the citadel who gives the fortress
away.
“If men don’t really love women, women as a sex, as distinguished from
their own particular women,” you ask, “why is it that they protect
them to such an extent, to such a so often unnecessary and troublesome
extent? Why do they always rescue them first in shipwrecks and fires,
and so on?”
Curiously enough, that was almost exactly the question your friend Stella
put to me only yesterday when she called here at tea time and everybody
but I was out.
By the way, what a ferociously advanced young woman Stella is becoming!
She quite scared me now and then. I never felt at all sure what she was
going to say next. She was in a great rage with one of her young men
cousins who had taken her to the theatre the night before, or the night
before that. I forget for the moment what the play was, but it doesn’t
matter. She liked it and was intensely interested in it, but the young
man violently disapproved of it—disapproved of it for her, that is. Half
way through the second act he insisted on her leaving the theatre there
and then. Stella made a fight of it, but she couldn’t make a scene, and
so she caved in, and now she swears she will never speak to him again.
The reason he gave her was that he could not bear the idea of his cousin
(“_his_ cousin,” you should have heard Stella emphasise the possessive)
listening to such a grossly improper thing as that. Stella’s very pretty
face wrinkled with wrath when she told me. “_His_ cousin,” she repeated.
“As though I were his property. But that’s always the way with men. The
man’s point of view! How I hate it! They can’t bear that anything of
which they disapprove should come near any woman connected with them.
They don’t mind about the others.”
And so, quite against my own will, I was compelled—the while I soothed
her with chocolates—to defend, or rather to explain (it comes to the
same thing) the Man’s Point of View. My explanation will go some way to
answering you.
Stella was right in one thing. She put her finger—what beautiful hands
the girl has, by the way, did you ever notice them?—directly on the spot.
It is the sense of proprietorship that does it. Men do not love women as
women, but they do love, or at any rate have some sort of feeling which
serves the purpose of love, their own women kind, the women “connected
with them.” There is nothing a bit noble in it to begin with, it is
just sheer egoism; the same sort of feeling that makes a child before
it can talk hold on tight to a toy that you try to take away from it.
I remember you, when you were in your cradle, punched me with one fist
while you clung on with the other to a woolly red ball that you would
cram into your mouth. Well, just so, but more effectively would I punch
a man who tried to take you away from me. And at the root the motive for
the punching would be the same. So, Alexa, unless the man be quite of the
right sort let him look to himself, for I still keep my punching muscles
in trim.
No, in this sense of ownership there is nothing noble, nothing
magnificent, nothing to swagger about. But just as a very lovely and
exquisite flower may have a very dirty and ugly root, so from this sense
of ownership has grown the fine flower of chivalry and the less fine and
flowerlike but, for work-a-day purposes, the much more useful plant of
men’s protective attitude to all women, or, not to exaggerate, to a good
many women.
It is sometimes inconvenient to the women concerned, no doubt, as it
was the other night to Stella; but it is thanks to it that they have
any sort of a time in the world. That feeling of proprietorship which
a man concentrates on his own women folk he extends in a diluted and
attenuated form to the women of his own class, and in a form still more
attenuated (sometimes very thin indeed) to all women. Roughly put it
amounts to this, that each man is ready to protect any woman against any
other man. There are occasions, spite of the proverb to the contrary,
when hawks do peck out other hawks’ eyes.
So you see on the whole it is a little ungrateful to grumble at the Man’s
Point of View, isn’t it?
I think I said a page or two back that one of your defences was the
institution of marriage. Perhaps, lest you should think I was talking
mere conventional rubbish, I had better explain what I meant.
Men are not cowards; lots of them love and choose danger for its own
sake. Bernard Shaw is quite wrong when he says in one of his plays that
fear is the greatest of all human forces. That remark is only a little
feat of intellectual gymnastics, designed to startle. But, valiant and
daring blades though men are, there is one thing that they fear with a
craven, shrinking, shivering terror. That thing is marriage.
“They marry!” you reply. Why, yes, and so also do they die, though often
with somewhat less reluctance; and they marry just as they die, because
they can’t help themselves. The impulse to marriage (as things are) is
as irresistible as the spear-thrust of Death. It would be interesting if
in the vestry after the ceremony one could apply some species of Chinese
torture to every bridegroom and extort from him the truth as to whether
he did indeed want to marry this woman. He wanted this woman, of course,
but did he want, actually want, to take upon himself the life-long
responsibilities, the life-long expenses, the life-long risks, the
life-long limitation of liberty?
Why the fact, this deep aversion of the man from marriage, this recoil
from the altar, is marked in common speech, and anything that is marked
in common speech “is so,” as the Americans say. Don’t you often hear
it said that Miss So-and-So has “caught,” “hooked,” “captured,” young
Thingamy? When do you ever hear that a man has caught, hooked, or
captured (in a matrimonial sense) a woman?
The institution of marriage is the highest and the stoutest barrier
between the sexes that society has ever set up. That is not a paradox.
It is a plain, almost an obvious truth. Thus the pigeon (poor little
pigeon!) escapes many attacks from the hawks without the trouble of
moving a wing. In other words, a woman meets with far fewer advances,
much less pursuit, and consequently much less temptation, from men than
she would were it not for this institution of marriage. The boldest and
most hungry hawk thinks twice before swooping on the pigeon if he knows
that the pigeon, harmless as she looks, may turn and manacle him to her
for the rest of his natural life, before he knows where he is.
And so, Alexa, if you sometimes feel that fewer young men fluff around
you than your many attractions might warrant, don’t be depressed or
self-distrustful. It is not because you are not pretty or fascinating
enough; it is because they are afraid you might marry them. Their
self-restraint is really the highest compliment they can pay you.
Good-bye, and don’t be offended with your truth-loving
FATHER.
THE DOMESTIC HEARTH
THE DOMESTIC HEARTH
_March 1, 19—._
MY DEAR ALEXA,—
If you have a fault—and far be it from your adoring father to suggest
that you have—but if you have a fault, it shows itself in your trick of
asking questions beginning with an “ought.” I think my recollection is
right when it tells me that your last three letters have, together with a
good deal that was both interesting and diverting, contained a query as
to whether you or somebody else “ought” or “ought” not to do something
or other. When it is a case of You, I feel myself more or less competent
to answer; for about You I do know a little, you see; but when you ask
me what somebody else ought to do or to leave undone, somebody else of
whom I know nothing, why, then I am stricken with a feeling of hopeless
futility. I sit here and dither, and cover sheets of letter paper with my
illegible handwriting only to tear them up after a miserable half-hour’s
boggling. For to know what a person “ought” to do, one must know the
person, you see, and the circumstances in which that person is posed.
There are no “oughts” unrelated to particular persons and particular
circumstances. If there were, what plain sailing life’s perilous voyage
would be, wouldn’t it? In point of dismal fact that voyage is made upon
an uncharted sea. A few plain general instructions in the principles of
navigation are all we get; we have to look out for the rocks and shoals
and whirlpools and adverse currents for ourselves.
There are not nearly so many “oughts” in life as you in the solemn
ingenuousness of your youth doubtless imagine. As you grow older you will
find the “oughts” diminish and the “musts” increase. That is to say what
looks like moral freedom gradually, and not so very gradually either,
gives way to what in stern fact is practical necessity. But I suppose I
must come to the point.
“Ought girls to earn their own livings?” you ask in a postscript, which
I can’t help wishing you had forgotten to add. There is no dodging
a postscript, there is no pretending one hasn’t noticed it. That is
perhaps why women are so fond of it. But—no longer to dodge yours—see
how the facts of life limit the scope of your question. See how your
“ought” is, for the vast majority of young women, at once converted into
a “must.” For the vast majority of young women the question does not so
much as arise. They do earn their own livings as it is, and they do it
not because they ought or because they choose, but just because they
must. The housemaid, for instance, who made your bed this morning, and
who, I hope, dusted and put straight your room—a lengthy business, Alexa,
for I know your ways—do you suppose that her action was the outcome of
any moral questionings or of personal predilection? Do you suppose she
did it from a high sense of duty, because she felt that something would
go askew with the universe or with her own soul if she left it undone?
Of course she didn’t. She did it because she had to do it, to do either
that or something just a trifle more objectionable, on the whole. She is
probably one of a large and poor family, and as soon as she had passed
the Sixth Standard, or whatever it is which the law of her country
demands that she should pass, she had to go out to service. There was no
“ought” about it. And those young women whom you saw in Fleet Street, at
mid-day, when you were there with me, you remember, a day or two before
you left home, and whose behaviour struck you as being so vulgar and
objectionable! They were binders’ girls; they had already been working
several hours in a stuffy atmosphere, and after a quarter-of-an-hour’s
rollicking up and down Fleet Street, they were about to return and work
several more hours. And do you think that they had decided to do all that
work after mature deliberation as to the rights and wrongs of it? Of
course they hadn’t. It was for them that, or something infinitely worse
than that, and so they chose, if they can be said to choose, that. It was
a case of “must,” not of “ought.” And when a thing must be, there is no
more reckless waste of honest time possible than that spent in discussing
whether it ought to be.
Your question applies then, you see, only to a very limited number of
young women. It was not a thoughtfully-framed question, Alexa. It was,
if you will forgive me, a middle-class sort of question. When you wrote
“girls,” you were thinking of yourself and of young women in a social
position similar to yours, and they are rather a small minority of the
earth’s inhabitants; delightful, but few, comparatively. So let me frame
the question for you as you would have framed it if you had thought a
little more about it, and then let’s get to work upon it.
What you meant to ask was, I think, this: Ought a young woman of good
education, ordinary health, stature, and capacity (whose parents can
afford to keep her in idleness) to live upon their income until such time
as she is asked by a nice young gentleman to come and live upon his? That
is about as near as we can get to it, isn’t it?
Well, even that very limited interrogative proposition is not altogether
easy to tackle. One question leads always directly or indirectly to
another, and so we go on asking “Why?” until we come flat up against a
dead wall before which we can do nothing but gibber. In the affairs of
practical life it is necessary to treat some matters as settled, and one
of such matters is this:—If you receive from a person services for which
you make no return, you are under an obligation to that person; and to
sit quiescent under an obligation, to make no effort to get out of it, is
to suffer humiliation and indignity. That, reasonably or unreasonably,
is the view of every decently honest man and woman, of every man and
woman whose hand you would care to take in friendship. That is your own
view, Alexa, when you come to think of it, isn’t it? I have noticed that
whenever a friend makes you a present you begin to cast about for some
way in which you can make some return without doing it too obviously.
Moreover, you would not accept a present at all from one who was not a
friend. If one of your fellow-guests now, for instance, were to offer you
a diamond bracelet, you would be in no end of a rage, and would probably
write to me.
Now then, everybody of full age and capacity who is eating, drinking,
dwelling in a house and wearing clothes, and yet doing nothing whatever
to provide that food, drink, house and apparel, is suffering that
humiliation and indignity of which we have just spoken. He may not be
conscious of it. Obviously he is not (for there are many millions of
him) conscious of it, but the fact remains. There is just one reply he
can make to the charge. He can say, if he likes, “Oh, it is true I do
nothing practical, material, in return for the many services which are
done for me; but I consent to live. I exist beautifully. I look nice, I
talk, when I take the trouble to talk, quite prettily. I wear my clothes
with an air. I am an example of what a human being should be. Thus, by
merely being, do I recompense the world for all the trouble it takes for
me.” If he does say that, then I for my part can think of no adequate
rejoinder. If it be a man who talks like that, one kicks him and takes
the consequences; if a woman, one (perhaps) kisses her and drops the
controversy.
But that tiresome “ought” of yours which I feel buzzing round my head
as I write, like a bee, and a bee with a sting, too! To deal with it
properly I must assume something to start with, and so here goes. I
assume this: One OUGHT to do that which will enable one to live the
happiest life attainable in one’s circumstances and to develop one’s
capabilities to their fullest. I assume that, and if you query it,
Alexa, I will wait until you return home and have a couple of hours’
_tête-à-tête_ with you in my study.
Now then, does a grown-up young woman live the happiest life attainable
or develop her natural capacities to their fullest while she lives in her
parents’ house, dependent for every penny she spends upon her parents’
bounty or caprice, acting under her parents’ orders in all the great
and in the most of the smaller doings of her life, and subject to her
parents’ rules, regulations, and discipline?
Judging from my own observation and knowledge of the way in which human
nature is composed I haven’t the smallest hesitation in answering
“No.” My observation tells me that there may be outward acquiescence,
my penetration tells me no less surely that there is always hidden
resentment. A thwarted desire for freedom works like poison in the blood;
in the long run it sours the finest temper. It gives birth to a fire
which, though it may never flame, continually smoulders; and, remember,
this desire for freedom, for the power to do what we will, to go where we
wish, to say what we like, subject always to the limitations of external
circumstances, is inherent in every human breast. The restrictions of
external circumstances we most of us accept without over much of rancour.
What we do not accept, that against which we are in eternal revolt, is
the restriction imposed upon us by other wills than ours. That impulsive
desire to break away from pupillage, to strike out “on our own,” is
perhaps of all motives the most legitimate that can stir the human soul.
The Home as we so often know it, the Home which consists of father,
mother, and grown-up dependent sons or daughters, or both, is not a place
wherein such impulses and motives can rightly develop or have anything
like free play. Such a Home is necessarily and inevitably a tyranny; at
best a benevolent tyranny, at worst a tyranny in which benevolence is far
to seek. Don’t imagine that I have joined the cult of Mr Bernard Shaw and
am about to say anything so ridiculously untrue as that the Home is the
very worst institution in which to bring up a child, except the school.
That is a mere paradox of Nihilism distraught. The Home, so far, is the
best of all institutions in which to bring up a child—to _bring up a
child_, mark, not to support a grown man or woman. It has its analogy
in the nests of birds and the lairs of beasts; but Nature, for once in
a way, is wiser than modern man. The young bird leaves the nest as soon
as it is strong enough on the wing; the young tiger says good-bye to the
lair on the day on which he can kill his own prey. The Home of grown-up
sons and daughters who are not earning their own livings—even the
happiest of such Homes—is a place of continual and constant compromise
and surrender, of suppression, of restraint, of concealed (and not always
concealed) resentments and silent rebellions. Just now and then maybe
(for I want to avoid extremes) it may draw forth the best that is in us;
but much more often it evokes the worst. It narrows even when it does not
actually distort; it cripples even when it does not actually slay. And
there is no help for it, Alexa. The profoundest wisdom, the sincerest
love, can do little more than slightly ameliorate the essential, the
immutable wrongness of the Thing, the subjection of adult will to adult
will. Children of no matter what age who are dependent upon their parents
economically, must needs be dependent in all else. The world is so
constructed that he who pays the piper calls the tune. And it is well;
for even worse than an ordered tyranny is an anarchic republic.
There is just another point. Marriages, Alexa, are not made in Heaven as
some are still found to say, nor in Hell, as too many just now are apt
to declare. They are made for the most part in the Home. The strongest
condemnation of the grown-up Home is the enormous number of young women
who marry to get away from it. In the name of my own sex I do resent
and protest against that. It is hard upon us that we should be so often
regarded by the Beloved as a sort of melancholy alternative to the Home.
Girls, in our class at any rate, marry much more often with a view to
being their own mistresses, as we say, than to being men’s wives or
children’s mothers. And I sometimes fancy they are under no very serious
illusions as to the radiant possibilities of the married state, these
marrying maidens of ours. There was once a man, you know, who after
several days’ suffering from acute earache went out and had a tooth
drawn. When he was asked why he supposed that the extraction of a sound
tooth would remedy the agony of an unsound ear, he replied that he had
never supposed anything of the kind. All he wanted was to change the
pain, and that the dentist had done for him! A similar desire, I am sure,
will alone account for some recent marriages of your young friends which
have caused you so much puzzlement. “I cannot make out what she saw in
him,” you have more than once remarked to me. Well, she saw just that—a
change in the pain. Not nice for him, is it? Nor so very nice for her.
And now I wonder whether you consider that I have answered your question
at all satisfactorily. I daresay not, for this world is a welter, and the
wisest of us is bemazed with doubts. It is possible to have doubts about
everything—at least I should say about everything but one, and that is
that I am always, my own kiddie,
Your loving
FATHER.
THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE
THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE
_April 2, 19—._
MY DEAR ALEXA,—
The question put in the last paragraph of your last letter, to which I
have perhaps been a little overlong in replying, is one which I should
have thought I had already answered, answered, too, in the only way in
which such questions can be answered satisfactorily—by actual practice.
You know me well enough, I take it, to know that, like every other
decently-honest man, when I have a conviction I act upon it. Mind, I say
a conviction, not a mere opinion. Mere opinions, when they differ widely
from the opinions held by those around us, we often do wisely to keep to
ourselves. But convictions are of another stuff. When we have them (and
we don’t have very many of them as a rule) we must out with them, both in
word and deed, or we perish. Concealed convictions set up in the soul a
moral and intellectual rot.
Well, now, you ask me, or seem to ask me, what are my views as to the
amount of censorship that should be exercised over the reading of young
women. That, I gather, was your particular point. More generally you seem
to inquire what fruit of the tree of knowledge should still be forbidden
to those of your sex after that cardinal day when they have put their
hair up and let their skirts down.
Now, for once in a way, I yield to the temptation to reply by the
stale rhetorical device of asking another question. What has been my
practice with you, child—a practice deliberately adopted and resolutely
persevered in, spite of the remonstrances of some who had every right to
remonstrate, and of others who had none? Ever since you were sixteen or
thereabouts—I don’t remember at what age exactly it was that you began
to show unmistakable proofs of marked and hereditary (don’t smile!)
intelligence—have you not had a free run of my library? A library, by
the way, in which there is only one locked book-case, and that case kept
locked, not because of the dangerous character of the contents, but on
account of the expensive nature of the bindings. What happened when—but
I won’t go on with these tiresome interrogatives. I will just recall
to your memory what happened now and then when I saw in your hands a
book about which, to express indefinitely my indefinite state of mind,
I had my doubts. I just looked up from my table and said, “If I were
you, I wouldn’t read that: it is rather dull and rather nasty”; or, “The
only points about that book that have any merit are points you wouldn’t
understand,” and, like the sensible girl you always were, you invariably
put the books back in their shelves again. But I was not always in the
library when you came there in search of literary refreshment, and once,
only once, I remember I came upon you deep in a book about which I had
no doubts at all. I noticed that you were rather more than half-way
through it, and that you looked interested, though a little puzzled
too. “Do you like that book?” I asked. “No—yes—perhaps—I don’t know—a
little,” you stammered, and you blushed. Now, a blush does not in the
least imply consciousness of guilt, or even of offence, as is commonly
supposed. People blush not when they find themselves in the prisoner’s
dock, but, rather, when they are in a tight corner; more often still when
they believe themselves to be suspected of something of which they are
entirely innocent. When you have to deal with a child, Alexa, and you
accuse it of, or question it concerning, some little delinquency, don’t,
should it stammer and blush, leap to the conclusion that it is guilty.
But this is by the way. “Don’t you wish me to read this book; shall I put
it back?” you asked. “Oh, you had better finish it,” I said, and turned
away to my work. I did not explain to you then, but I tell you now,
because it has a definite bearing on the subject in hand, that I knew
that, having already got half-way through it, your interest was awakened
and your curiosity excited, and I knew that in a young woman or in a
young man either, for the matter of that, excited or only half-gratified
curiosity is—well, I can’t use too strong a term, so I will say, the very
devil—the most devilish of all the legion of devils that beset the path
of youth. I felt sure, too, that if I forbade you the reading of the
second half of that book you would attach undue importance to what you
had learned from the first half. You would see the thing—the evil thing,
let us frankly call it—exaggerated out of all true proportion. You would
conceive it to be worse than it really was, you would believe that it
played a greater part in life than as a fact it does. Moreover, I did not
feel sure—for you were, thank God, a very human girl, that you would not
come back to that book when I was not there, and finish it in private,
and thus do your own soul a thousand times more harm by the deception
than any undesirable knowledge you might acquire could possibly do you.
You tell me that your question to me arose out of a discussion which
took place a few nights ago between your host, your fellow-guests, and
yourself: that it began an hour after dinner and lasted well away beyond
the usual bed-time. Let me congratulate you, Alexa, on staying with such
sensible people as the Mauleverers, and on being one of several guests as
intelligent as yourself. By “sensible people” I mean people who are able,
and who like, to talk after dinner for more than five consecutive minutes
on any subject under the sun. Such people in our, or in any other class,
are rare, and are, I fancy, growing rarer. It can’t have escaped your
intelligent observation, that ninety-nine-hundredths of the talk of
to-day is about persons, and, as a rule, about uninteresting persons.
The very fact that a subject is important, that it concerns us, that it
has some bearing on our lives and thoughts, is sufficient to bar it out
of what we ridiculously call “conversation.” Is anybody interested in
anything? I often ask myself on my way home from a dinner or an evening
out somewhere.
But to return to this matter of the parental or guardianly censorship of
books. I am convinced that if the censor could be all-wise, and managed
to use his restrictive powers effectively, his censorship would work for
good. But in point of practical fact, not a parent or a guardian of us
all is all-wise, or is able to make use of even such wisdom as he has. An
“effective blockade,” as they call it in war time, over a young girl’s
mind is almost impossible to establish. All sorts of contraband craft
will manage to escape the vigilance of the blockading squadron, do we
what we may. Still, on the whole, the thing is pretty thoroughly done in
France. There the novel, the novel of ordinary life, the novel written by
the best and most popular writers of the day, or of past days, is never
suffered to fall into a young woman’s hands at all. Books for girls are
things apart. They are written by inferior authors, and as a rule are
dull and insipid beyond words. The French ideal of a young woman is that
until she is married her mind, so far as a certain sort of knowledge is
concerned, should be a sheet of white paper. And in most French families,
outside Paris at any rate, the ideal is fairly well realised. Now then,
if there be any value in that ideal—if it be an ideal worth maintaining
or worth following, the outcome of it ought to be that the average French
married woman should have a higher standard and habit of chastity and
virtue than her sister in England, where no such rigorous supervision
prevails. Well, she has not, Alexa, I can confidently assure you of that.
Heaven forfend that I should say a word to her discredit. She is often
delightful, though not quite so often as she herself imagines. But in the
matter of conduct—woman-conduct let us call it, for want of a better
term—she is not a bit better than our women over here. Observe I do not
say that she is worse: to say that would be to be guilty of vulgar and
insular British Philistinism; but to be quite safe I content myself by
saying that she is not a bit better, and consequently, is not worth all
the blockading trouble that is taken with her. I have met young French
ladies who have been married less than a year, and, well—I need not
amplify, but my intimacy with them has left me with the conviction that
it was sheer waste of time and energy to be at such pains to preserve
for twenty years an innocence that four or five months were enough so
completely to dissipate and to destroy.
The question, it seems to me, leads directly to the larger issue: Is
knowledge often hurtful? I say “often,” not “ever,” for in this life
there are always exceptions. For the exceptions we cannot, try we never
so carefully, provide. We must, willy-nilly, be guided by general rules.
In what other department of life, then, is it even pretended that
knowledge, the fullest knowledge, works for ill? Can you think of one?
If a traveller were about to set out on a journey through some country
where grew in rich luxuriance any number of tempting fruits, beautiful to
look upon, delectable to the palate, but charged with deadly poison, and
certain seriously to injure or to slay outright whosoever should pluck
and eat, would it, or would it not, be desirable that that traveller
should be furnished with all the knowledge available as to the number
and the nature of these fruits, their habits of growth, the particular
places where they were most likely to be found, the antidotes to their
several poisons? Would you, if you could, prevent his reading printed
treatises descriptive of them, or even poems and dramas that told of them
in a poetic or a dramatic way? Who would be most likely to come through
the journey unscathed—the traveller who was ignorant, or the traveller
who was knowledgable? Surely the questions answer themselves. It is true,
of course, that even the best-instructed voyager, hard put to it by
hunger or thirst, and face to face with the temptation of some specially
seductive fruit, might even so pluck, eat, and perish. The clamour of his
senses might prove too urgent for the resistance of his intelligence.
But even so, by telling him all there was to tell, you would have
done your best for him, wouldn’t you? And what poor chance would the
similarly-tempted ignoramus have? Well, now, every young woman is just
such a traveller, and life is for her just such a journey.
On my honour, I think I have put the case as fairly and as squarely as
I know how. If knowledge be our safeguard, our only safeguard, in every
other of life’s journeys, why in the name of all that is rational should
ignorance be our best protection in this? Why should there be one little
corner in the house of life in which the light shall not be suffered to
shine?
You know Mr Findlater. He was here a night or two ago, and was very angry
because one of his junior clerks, lately a Board School boy, had been
detected in a small forgery. It was a very trifling affair, and did no
harm to anyone but the poor silly lad who had been guilty of it. But Mr
Findlater was full to the brim of indignation. Not with the lad—I’ll do
him justice in that; he didn’t even intend to prosecute, he told me—but
with the whole system of national education. “This is what comes of Board
Schools,” he declared. “You rate us for teaching these gutter brats to
write, and the first use they make of their knowledge is to forge our
names to cheques!” He did really, he said just that, and he is a man
of not much less than ordinary intelligence! And, of course, if you
come to think of it, if no one were taught to write no one could commit
forgery, could they? And Mr Findlater’s argument was quite as good as
the arguments of those who contend that a young woman’s virtue is best
established on a foundation of ignorance.
And now it occurs to me that I have been wasting all the time taken in
writing this letter. I feel sure that you put all this yourself, and put
it quite as well, to your friends the other night. But then, you see, you
have the inestimable advantage of a wise as well as a loving
FATHER.
THE RIGHT SORT OF MAN
THE RIGHT SORT OF MAN
_April 28, 19—._
My surprise is not nearly so great, my dear girlie, as you seemed to
anticipate. I told you, you remember, that I was good at guessing, and I
had already guessed this, or something very like this. All the same it is
a blow, for a blow is none the less a blow because one sees it coming.
Indeed, recollections of my sparring days seem to tell me that the blow
you see coming, and from which you can escape neither by guard nor duck,
is just about the nastiest of all.
Fate is a desperately skilled antagonist. It hammers us and hammers us,
and knocks us out at last; but we do manage to get a punch or two back
at someone or something now and then ... and that is good to remember.
It is curious, isn’t it, that this letter of yours, the subject of which
I suppose is Love, should have set me to write about fighting? And yet
... I don’t know ... they are never very far apart, Love and Strife,
are they? Love is the great disintegrator, the breaker-up. See how he is
coming between you and me now!
You are “not exactly engaged, but ...” I will not quote the end of your
sentence, for I know how irritating it is to have one’s words given back
to one. Well, it is good of you to refer the final word on the matter
to me. Even the most unconventional woman does wisely at great crises
to respect the established conventions. Her life is made easier, less
stormy so. But there! It was unjust of me to say that. I will—no, will
has nothing to do with it—I do believe that in leaving this, to you so
intensely personal, matter still open, so that I may have my say on it,
you have not been motived by a desire to do the right, the correct thing
in such cases, but by a real belief and trust in me. You have done it not
because it is always done, but because you are you, and I am I, and we
are to each other what we are.
But because you and I and this Third, this Third to me so shadowy, yet so
portentous, to you, so substantial, are going to do all the usual things,
there is no reason why I should write them to you, is there? So I will
not express my gratification and my hopes, and end with a stuffy little
lecture inculcating a prudential course of conduct. I will practise up
the heavy-father style so as to have it all perfect by the time he (no, I
will not give him a capital “h,” though I note that you do) comes to see
me. How I hope that at the first glimpse of him I shall feel that I may
drop it. Does he expect a heavy father, I wonder. Well, if he does, he
shall have one; be sure of that.
The first glimpse of him! And I haven’t had it yet! It is that which
has given me this queer indescribable sensation of unreality from which
I have been suffering ever since I opened your letter this morning. By
the way I posted your other letter to your mother on to her at once; she
is staying at Richmond until Friday. One always has that curious, empty
feeling when one part of one’s mind fails to realise what another part
of one’s mind tells one is a fact. It is thus we feel for the first few
moments in the presence of death. We know that it has happened, but we
can’t adjust our minds to the knowledge. So to-day with me. I know, or
almost know, that your life, the life of all others ... but there, I will
not be sentimental, so you fill in the rest ... but your life is to be
dominated—well, if not dominated exactly, at anyrate directed for good
or ill or half of each, by a man of whom I have never so much as caught
sight, of whose very name I am ignorant.
Do you know that you forgot to mention his name? Not that it matters so
long as it isn’t anything very distressing. I am not afraid of that,
for you know the names to which I object, and which I would rather die
than have my name connected with, and I remember that you share my
prejudices. We both agreed, didn’t we, that Walter Pater was justified
when he refused to vote a Fellowship at Oxford to a man named Juggins or
something. So I take it for granted that your future name will be beyond
the reach of æsthetic criticism. It ought to be a single syllable name,
of course, so as to go rightly with Alexa. Christian names of two or
three syllables should always be followed by a surname of one.
But I take it you have seen to that. You could not, I am sure,
contemplate a life in which you would suffer from a spasm of artistic
horror every time you signed your name.
Whatever he is you know well enough that I shall not be glad of him,
don’t you? You know that I shall wish every time I see or think about
him that he had never been born. You won’t mind that, because if it were
not so you would feel that your father was not one of the right sort of
men. Truly, I don’t believe that the right sort of men ever look forward
to their daughter’s marriages with anything but fierce distaste. When it
comes to the point, I mean. They wouldn’t like them not to be married,
and they hate it when they are. From which you will gather what a mistake
it is to be the right sort of man, and what supreme folly it is to beget
daughters, anyway.
It is rum though, rum and inexplicable, that feeling of savage resentment
one has against every other man who aspires to any sort of intimacy
with any woman for whom one cares even a little. Of course, one says
to oneself that it is because one feels that no other man is half good
enough for her. It is quite astonishing how one can lie to oneself. I
know, for instance, when I can get myself for a second or two into a
reasonable mood, that there must be at least a hundred thousand or so
of men in England, not to mention the rest of the world, who are quite
half good enough for you, and yet I hate with an incandescent hatred the
mere idea, the tenuous probability that you will some day be married. If
he, the unnamed and unnamable, were to come into this room now I should,
or at least should try to, break him up with my bare hands and send the
fragments of him home in a cab.
It was Nero or Caligula, wasn’t it, who expressed the genial wish that
humanity had only one head that he might cut it off? Well, I believe
that at the bottom of every right-minded man’s heart there is a lurking
wish that all femininity were compact and personified in one woman and
that she might belong to him. “Turkish?” you smile. Oh, much more than
Turkish; primitive rather.
I shall not kill him, Alexa. I shall probably be tremendously nice to him
if he wears the right necktie. You might give him a hint about that. One
never does do the things one most passionately desires to do—they are
always so outrageous those passionately desired things.
Haven’t you often, when sitting at dinner, say, with a lot of
depressingly correct people, ached and ached to rip out some hideous,
impossible, unspeakable expression, just to watch their shocked,
flabbergasted faces; and then to disappear for ever from the cognisance
of man? I am sure you have; we all have. But you have never done it,
thank heaven, and you know you never will. It is almost irresistible that
impulse, isn’t it?
And yet we resist it every time. That is because we are sane. If we
yielded we should be mad; that’s all. That is what sanity means, the
power to resist the almost irresistible impulse. Well, I am sane, so far.
I shall offer him my hand and a chair. Perhaps a cigar. I hope he smokes.
Oh yes, that reminds me. I must say just this. If he does not smoke and
if he refuse wine at dinner in favour of water, or even of whisky and
soda—a hateful decadent modern habit—then I will have none of him,
Alexa, nor shall you. If the worst come to the worst, I will convince him
by ocular and tactile demonstration that there is lunacy in our family,
and I am quite certain that a fellow who neither smokes nor drinks wine
will never have the hardihood or enterprise to face that. It is not that
smoking or wine drinking (at dinner) are in themselves virtues, but they
are indications of the only temperament and attitude towards life which
are compatible with true virtue.
Mind, I will say nothing so widely embracing as that a non-smoker and
non-wine drinker is not good for anybody—never mind what I think, but
I will not say it. What I will say is that he would not be good enough
for you; for one of us. His very presence at dinner and after would be a
perpetual reproach, a constant criticism. And you would not like to be
faced every evening by a criticism and a reproach.
A man who, in a world of good things, tobacco and wine and other things,
abstains, is a man who makes exacting demands upon himself, and a man
who makes exacting demands upon himself will inevitably make exacting
demands upon his womankind.
And now, while I am about it, I may as well mention one or two other
things, one or two other essentials which any man must possess before he
can even begin to think of connecting his name with ours. By the way, it
is you who will change your name, isn’t it? What an intolerable thought
that is. He must be what the Scots call “gleg in the uptak’;” he must
divine what you mean almost before you have said it, certainly before
you have said it all. He must not, when you happen to speak a trifle
elusively, stare at you blankly for half a minute or so, and then say,
“I am afraid I don’t quite follow you,” or look it without saying it,
perhaps the worst outrage of all, for the remark does at least imply a
consciousness of inferiority and a sort of commendable humility.
A truly civilised woman, one of us, would rather live with a Zulu
(assegais and all) who understood what she was after, than with a thing
in up-and-down collars (and golf sticks) who was for ever asking her to
explain herself. Heavens, how I know the look on the face of a woman
after she has been married a year or two to that. No, the man who
marries you must talk our language, think our thought, or there will be
rocks ahead on which you and I and he will get ourselves badly grazed,
not to say broken.
Then he must read and admire Henry James. I say must read, not must have
read, for if he have not it may be only his misfortune and the fault not
of him, but of his upbringing. The novels of Henry James (we have agreed,
you remember) are the touchstone of the modern spirit. If a man can’t
understand them, or gets bored by them, or wishes they were shorter or
less involved, then that man, whatever else he may be, is not of us or
even of our time. I would rather see my daughter mated to a megatherium
than to a man who could not “make out,” as they put it, the novels of
Henry James.
While I was on the subject of tobacco and wine I ought to have added that
he must not be “anti” anything to any extent. Not anti-vaccination or
anti-vivisection, or anti-clerical, or any of those things about which
the faddist rages. I don’t mean that he may not have strong opinions, but
he must not carry them to the point of being “anti.” When a man reaches
that point it always seems to me he ceases to be human. A husband should
be human.
And then—I had nearly forgotten this, that accursed feeling of unreality
is so strong upon me to-day—he must be a man whom other women like and
who likes all other women, or nearly all, all that count. I know, of
course, that his voice changes and takes on another tone when he speaks
to you. That is all right. But does it change and take on another tone
when he speaks to the other girl? That’s the thing that matters. When
he hands a—oh, well, a cup, let us say, to a woman, does he do it in an
altogether different way to that in which he would hand a cigar-case to
a man? If he doesn’t his wife will soon find herself wishing that he had
never handed anything at all to her. A man’s love for “the one woman,” is
after all only in a quintessential, concentrated form the emotion he has
for all other women, the generalised thing particularised.
I don’t agree with the incorrect saying that reformed rakes make the
best of husbands, but I do say that the man who has not in him the
potentiality of rakehood should never be trusted with a wife.
But there! What does it all amount to? I write, but all the time I am
writing I am conscious that for all practical purposes I might as well
go and shoot peas at the sun as direct these wise observations at a girl
in the first bloom of what they call love. Of course, I know well enough
that just now you see in this intrusive Third all these qualities and
attributes upon which I have been insisting. Or if you don’t you think
they don’t matter; and that I don’t matter; and that even you don’t
matter; that nothing matters but this new magic that bandages your eyes
and carries honey to your lips. Could I have chosen for you I would have
scaled the heights of heaven if haply I might bring down to you a god,
and ... you would not have liked him dear. You would have asked for a man
instead. And you would have been right, for you are not a goddess, but a
girl and the heart of my heart:—
“And you must twine of common flowers
The wreath that happy women wear,
And bear in desolate darkened hours
The common griefs that all men bear.”
Write to me again soon. Come home soon, very soon. It is a long time that
you have been away; twice as long since yesterday.
Your
FATHER.
MODERN MARRIAGE
MODERN MARRIAGE
_May 3, 19—._
MY DEAR ALEXA,—
I resist gallantly the temptation to begin much less formally, much more
sentimentally than that; but I feel that marriage is the one subject on
which a man may not be sentimental. In matters of marriage it is always
sentiment that undoes us.
He called here yesterday afternoon, as by this time you are no doubt
aware, for I feel pretty sure that as soon as he left he scribbled a note
to you from the nearest post-office. If I know anything about men I know
that. I should not be at all surprised if he telegraphed; but I hope not,
for it is bad to begin matrimonial enterprises by a present to the Post
Office.
So you see I have had a whole evening in which to think him over; a
night to sleep upon my thoughts and a morning in which to recast them,
as it were. When I tell you that I really did sleep and that I found my
breakfast this morning not more hateful than usual, you will realise that
all is pretty much as you would wish.
Yes, the man will do. Except that he is a man, and that he wants to marry
my daughter, my critical eye can find no serious fault in him. Of course
I wish he were dead or in some distant colony—but no, no, I don’t dislike
him quite so much as that last would imply—but that wish of mine means
little or nothing that need worry you. One so often does wish dead people
in whom one can find no fault—indeed, they are more often than not the
very people one can do so well without.
I tried him by all the tests. I offered him one of my very best cigars,
the sort I never have enough of in the house, and he smoked it like
a fellow of taste. Even when we were talking seriously about serious
matters—you are a serious matter to him and to me—he held it now and then
so that the perfumed smoke could titillate his nostrils. Had it been a
bad cigar and he had done that, I should have known him for a charlatan
and sent him about his business.
He came in a frock coat too, a frock coat fullish in the skirts—I hope
you didn’t put him up to that. Had he worn one of those cut-away things
that fasten with one button in the middle of the waistcoat! Words fail me
as to what would have happened had he worn one of those.
He knows how to sit in an arm chair without getting into trouble with his
elbows or showing too much sock. Has it ever occurred to you, Alexa, that
in the matter of the disclosure of ankles a man should be as discreet as
a woman?
We did not talk of you all the time. I should have learnt little by
permitting that, for the veriest oaf can say the right things about a
girl with whom he is in love; but we talked of books, of pictures, of
music, of cathedrals, of the things that really matter, and he was all
right there.
He has a good deal to learn, but then he has some time in which to learn
it; and if you do justice to your upbringing he will not lack a competent
tutor. There—that’s the prettiest compliment I have paid you for many a
long day.
Your mother was charmed with him. I rather think she is writing to
you at this moment to tell you so. I confess that fact does not vastly
impress me, because mothers look always with a friendly eye upon their
daughters’ suitors, supposing, of course, that they are anywhere near the
mark.
Has it ever struck you as queer and rather significant that while women
are always anxious for their daughters to marry, men, for the most part,
boggle at the thought of it? It looks almost as though your sex got more
out of the arrangement than ours, doesn’t it? That if they stand to lose
more, as they indubitably do, they stand to win more too?
The inveterate belief of women in the glory and beauty of marriage always
stupefies me. I suppose there is not one married woman alive who does
not know at least half a dozen others who have come hopelessly to grief
in their marriages, and yet they go on believing! Such robust faith is
touching and a tremendous compliment to us.
Indeed, it is a wonderful institution this marriage—marriage as it exists
among civilised people, I mean: civilised Western people, I should add.
I suppose if a committee of ingenious men and women of the world had met
together to devise the scheme of sex relationship best calculated to
ensure unhappiness to the two parties concerned, they could not have hit
upon anything more likely to secure this object ... well, perhaps not
unhappiness exactly, but uncomfortableness, let us say ... than modern
marriage, monogamic marriage.
From that point of view it is almost perfection. The object of it would
seem to be to destroy as quickly as possible all the feelings with which
people start off on it. The end, it would seem, is the negation of the
beginning. Rum!
Think, now. What is it that gives the quintessential charm to that state
of mind we call being in love? What is the magic of it? You can’t be
expected to know just now, because you are not in an analytical mood;
emotion of any kind is fatal to accurate analysis.
Well then, I’ll tell you. It is romance—a sense of strangeness, of
something to be discovered, of infinite, thrilling, and perilous
possibilities.
Why do sisters and brothers not fall in love with each other? Not because
to do so would be “unnatural,” not a bit of it, never believe that.
Nature has nothing whatever to do with it. It is because they have been
brought up together in close and daily intimacy; because there is no
romance, no glamour of the undiscovered, no possibilities just beyond the
horizon line.
Now marriage, as we know it, is the inevitable slayer of romance. Before
the intimacy of marriage romance disappears like a mist wreath in the
blazing sun.
Mind, I do not say that in losing romance you lose everything; there are
many other things that are worth having, perhaps even more worth having,
but you lose romance, and lose it in something less than six weeks.
And when you have lost romance you are no longer “in love.” You may still
love and be loved. You do and are, if all things go well with you, both;
but you are no longer “in love.” The very feelings which attracted you to
start with, which brought you together, are gone, and gone for ever.
That is the stupendous fact of marriage; it kills the thing that made it.
It is the outcome of illusion. People in love imagine that marriage is a
continuance of the feelings, intensified, which they have for each other
before they enter upon it. That, Alexa, is exactly what it is not. It is
the very opposite of that.
Most people will tell you—one hears it said all about, especially just
now—that the reason why marriage is not the success it might be is that
married people “see too much of each other.” There is something in that,
no doubt, but there is more not in it, so to speak. It is not, I am
convinced, so much because married folk see each other every day that
romance takes wings; it is rather because _they can make sure_ of seeing
each other every day. It is the sense of security that kills.
I verily believe that an odalisque in an Oriental harem, for whom a visit
from her lord is some sort of an event, a thing which may or may not
happen on any particular day, has a better emotional time of it than the
wife in a suburban villa who knows that her husband will appear at the
front door, little black bag and all, ten minutes after she has heard his
train puff into the station, or the still more unfortunate lady who can
always get speech of him by just calling up the stairs.
Your poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti once told a friend of his, and of mine,
that all those exquisite sonnets of his, dedicated to his wife and to
wedded love, were written when Mrs Rossetti was away on long visits. That
I can well believe, and I believe moreover that they were written not
only when she was away, but when he was not at all sure when she would
come back.
Once in a little walled town in the South of France I saw a play in
which the husband and wife used to make assignations to meet and dine in
a private room at a restaurant, although they had an excellent cook at
home. It was a silly little play, but the dramatist knew something of
human nature and of marriage, all the same. Poor dears, they were trying
after something which they could not get, of course, but still, the very
fact that they did try proves something, doesn’t it?
Intimacy, security—these are the fatal diseases of marriage. I think
I see you gibe a little at the word “security,” and murmur something
cynical about divorce. You are right in a way and wrong in another way.
One has only to look around one to learn that marriage is by no means
synonymous with security; but all of us, when we marry, believe it is,
and so the result is the same.
Mention of divorce suggests to me to say this. I don’t believe that
the sort of thing which leads to the divorce court, and, where quite
uncivilised people are concerned, to the Old Bailey, is half so often, as
most suppose, the outcome of wilful incontinence or of sheer naughtiness,
no, nor even of the waning of love. It is the passion for something that
marriage does not satisfy—the passion for Romance. The unfortunates
yearn, yearn with an irresistible yearning, for something to happen,
something unusual, something with a spice of danger in it, something
which pulls at the heart’s strings, something to make one wake up in the
morning with a feeling that the eggs and bacon for breakfast are not the
most exciting prospect of the day. Ah, heaven! Don’t we all know it—the
coldest, the oldest, the most austere of us!
I formed this opinion entirely out of my own head years ago, and it
was curiously confirmed by an experience of three days I once spent in
the divorce court. It was when I had that tiresome Chancery suit—you
remember, about Ida’s marriage settlement—and I had to waste a lot of
time in the law courts.
I could not sit and listen to the Chancery counsel prosing over
technicalities, and so I passed the days in a court which touches human
nature a trifle more shrewdly and less expensively.
In those three days I saw about a dozen cases tried and disposed of.
And what sort of people do you think they were who came there with and
against their wills? The gay, the frivolous, the debonnair? Oh, dear me,
no; not in the least. I saw not one gallant gentleman, not one lovely
lady. On the contrary, they were the dusty, the dowdy, the humdrum, and,
this is the odd thing, the middle-aged! They were the kind of women who
make their own hats, make them very badly, and talk about their servants
at afternoon tea; and of men who go up to town at 8-45 of a morning, and
come home by the 6-15. Some of them, of course, had occasionally lost
the 6-15, and that was where the trouble began.
It is grossly unfair to the aristocracy to say that it is they who keep
the divorce court going. “Aristocratic divorce cases,” as the Radical
papers absurdly call them, make not one per cent. of the whole. It is the
dull, stodgy middle-class among whom immorality is rampant! And it is
just because they are dull, stodgy, and middle-class.
The pleasures, the emotional outlets of art, the distractions which
intelligence can always find in the world, are closed against them.
Meanwhile, beneath their commonplace domesticity the passion for Romance,
though smothered, smoulders on. One fine day, on the most ridiculously
inadequate provocation, it bursts into a flame and then—“decree _nisi_
with costs.”
Poor devils, poor, poor devils, they haven’t brains enough to outwit a
Slaters’ detective or even a prying housemaid.
Brains, ah! yes. Brains are your stand-by in marriage as in most other
of life’s perplexities, Alexa. It is brains that keep you out of
matrimonial troubles, and even, when in a slack moment, you do get into
difficulties, it is brains that will pull you out of them.
Looking at those of my personal acquaintances who have come bad croppers
over their marriages, I find that in every case there has been want of
wit on one side or the other, often on both. Brains! That is why I have
considerable confidence in your future, my daughter.
One word more. Romance, in-loveness, cannot survive six weeks of the
appalling intimacy of marriage. That is past praying for. What shall
follow its departure then? Mere emptiness, a tramp across a sandy desert
or a treacherous bog? That depends. The thing that should follow is
friendship, friendship of a peculiar, a unique, sort; friendship touched
by tenderness, mixed with memories, coloured by emotion.
But again remember this—it takes as much brains to build up and to
maintain a friendship of that kind as it does to ... well ... more than
it does to do anything else in the world so well worth doing. Fools may
make satisfactory lovers, only the wise can be lasting friends.
You return on Friday, isn’t it? I shall be at Paddington to meet you. See
to it that He is not there—just for this once!
Your
FATHER.
THE SUBTLE SOMETHING
THE SUBTLE SOMETHING
_June 5, 19—._
It is all right, child. I have not a word of blame, not a word of
criticism even. You are valiant and original. I am sorry, of course,
sorry for you, sorry for him, for myself, for everyone remotely
concerned. But I am congratulatory too. I congratulate you, him, and
myself. You are prepared for blame of course, for blame from everybody
but your own consciousness and your own father. A young woman who
engages herself to a man, remains engaged for nearly a month and then
“breaks it off” when there is no conventionally agreed-upon cause for
the rupture is, in the eyes of the world, a jilt. It can’t be helped.
It’s no use grumbling. The world will have its labels—and small blame to
it, they spare it the trouble of thinking, of exercising the faculty of
discrimination. And we upon whom its labels are stuck, must just grin and
wear them. Let us see to it that we do grin and wear them—with a grace.
That “subtle something” of which you can’t say more even to me—there
is no need of greater definiteness, I, as always, understand—is the
true, almost the only, irremovable hindrance to happiness in marriage,
the marriage of sensible people. Anything does to make fools unhappy.
It is unpardonable and unforgettable. Unpardonable, because it is not
a deed or even a thought or a look; unforgettable because it is always
there. And the worst of it is, it can by its very nature discover itself
only in intimacy. One has to jump into the water before one finds out
with certainty that one can’t swim. That subtle something, so colossal,
so inexpugnable yet so elusive! What is it? Where is it? Is it in the
blood, or in the brain, or is it some attribute of that unthinkable
but must-be-thought-of entity, the Transcendental Ego? I hate to seem
so grossly materialist, but I think it is in the blood, and will be
discovered some day by chemical analysis, or by an improved microscopy;
caught and put into a little bottle.
At present only something finer than chemical analysis, personal
perceptiveness to wit, can discern it, and it must be the personal
perceptiveness of the one most interested. All the others must needs be
the veriest bunglers. That is why I am not kicking myself to any extent
for having thought, in my blindness, my inevitable blindness, that he was
all right, that he would do. He would have done for me, but how could I
know that he would not have done for you? And yet I did just once have
the vaguest, dimmest, shadowiest ghost of a suspicion that all was not
quite well. It scurried past me that thought, that thought that was not
quite a thought, across the darkness of my mind as a small mouse scurries
across a dark room. It was one night when you had been seeing him off
downstairs and we were all in the drawing-room. When you came back I
caught a look upon your face ... no, something less than that ... just a
flicker across your lips ... and it made me uneasy, gave me a tiny twinge
in that rickety old heart of mine, it kept me awake for an hour or two,
as a mouse, fidgeting, has often done.
I am glad of one thing though; that except in the matter of which I
could not judge, I did not judge him wrongly. He _is_ made of the right
stuff. I had a letter from him last night—a letter from a man to a man.
He doesn’t whine, he doesn’t rage, he doesn’t wrangle. He doesn’t even
complain. He accepts the inevitable. I think the final test of a man
is his attitude in face of the inevitable. I will never show you that
letter—of course you would not wish it. I feel in a curious way as though
it were I and not you who had hurt him.
Once more then, my daughter, you are right. You have done well. Let no
misgivings on that point ever gnaw or even nibble. There are not many
things that can justify the breach of a betrothal deliberately entered
upon. That subtle something is one of them. Had the case been reversed,
had it been he instead of you who had made the discovery, I should have
said the same.
Now let the subject be dropped for ever. We will not even refer to it,
no, not by a look, when you come home next week.
Your approving
FATHER.
THE END
* * * * *
Camp Fires in the Canadian Rockies.
BY WILLIAM T. HORNADAY.
_With 70 illustrations, from photographs taken by JOHN M. PHILLIPS, and
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_T. Werner Laurie, Clifford’s Inn, London._
* * * * *
Literary London.
BY ELSIE M. LANG.
With Introduction by G. K. CHESTERTON.
_42 Illustrations by W. J. Roberts._
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_T. Werner Laurie, Clifford’s Inn, London._
* * * * *
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BY ROBERT MACHRAY.
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PICCADILLY CIRCUS (11 P.M. TO 1 A.M.).
IN THE STREETS.
IN THE STREETS—_continued_ (RATCLIFF HIGHWAY).
“IN SOCIETY.”
STILL “IN SOCIETY.”
NOT “IN SOCIETY.”
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THE MASKED BALL.
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* * * * *
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_SCOTSMAN_:
“Studies in the passions of love and jealousy admirably arranged.”
_MADAME_:
“‘Six Women’ is written with the artistic touch which is associated
with the best French fiction, and which is too often lacking in English
novels. It is only the prudish and the prurient who will object to ‘Six
Women.’”
_T. Werner Laurie, Clifford’s Inn, London._
* * * * *
T. WERNER LAURIE’S
Cathedral Series.
This Series is probably the most artistic, scholarly, complete, and cheap
set of books yet published. Infinite pains have been expended on every
branch of reproduction employed.
“The Daily News” said of the “Cathedrals of Northern France”:—“In paper,
print, binding, and reproduction, this record is a joy to the reader.”
SOME OPINIONS OF THE PRESS ON “THE CATHEDRALS OF ENGLAND AND WALES.”
“Of each Cathedral an admirable historical sketch is given, detailing its
architectural growth, and the volumes make admirable handbooks for those
who wish to study our English Cathedrals intelligently.”—_Literary World._
“Mr. Bumpus’ book is a valuable guide in the case of these buildings, not
only describing them very fully, but also pointing out what parts of them
are original and what new. Mr. Laurie is to be heartily congratulated
on this series, which is illustrated by numerous plates from good
photographs.”—_Athenæum._
“Mr. Bumpus’ style has a refreshing air of the enthusiastic
ecclesiologist, and of that ‘Domine, dilexi decorum domus Tuæ,’ which is
ill replaced by the cold professionalism of the mere expert.”—_Saturday
Review._
“The description of St. Paul’s, surrounded by the City church steeples,
is a magnificent tribute to Wren.”—_Yorkshire Post._
LIST OF SERIES.
1. The Cathedrals of Northern France. By FRANCIS MILTOUN. With 80
illustrations from original drawings, and many minor decorations, by
BLANCHE MCMANUS. 1 vol., decorative cover, 7¾ × 5¼ × 1⅜. Cloth gilt,
6_s._ net.
2. The Cathedrals of Southern France. By FRANCIS MILTOUN. Cloth gilt,
6_s._ net.
*3, 4, 5. The Cathedrals of England and Wales. By T. FRANCIS BUMPUS,
Author of “Summer Holidays Among the Glories of France.” With many plates
and minor decorations, and specially designed heads and tailpieces to
each chapter. 3 vols., 8vo, decorative cover, cloth gilt, 6_s._ net each;
in leather, 10_s._ 6_d._ net per vol.
*6. The Cathedrals of Northern Germany and the Rhine. By T. FRANCIS
BUMPUS. With many plates and minor decorations. 8vo, cloth gilt, 6_s._
net; leather, 10_s._ 6_d._ net.
7. The Cathedrals of Northern Spain. By CHARLES RUDY. Many illustrations.
6_s._ net.
8. The Cathedrals of Northern Italy. By T. F. BUMPUS. 6_s._ net. 40
plates. [_In preparation_
* _These volumes are issued also in leather binding (bound by the Oxford
Press) at 10s. 6d. each net._
_T. Werner Laurie, Clifford’s Inn, London._
* * * * *
_RECENT NOVELS. 6s. each._
The Cubs.
By SHAN F. BULLOCK. 6_s._
Six Women.
By VICTORIA CROSS. 6_s._
The Poison Dealer.
By GEORGES OHNET. 6_s._
Thurtell’s Crime.
By DICK DONOVAN. 6_s._
Rowena.
By AGNES GIBERNE. 6_s._
The Mummy and Miss Nitocris.
By GEORGE GRIFFITH. 6_s._
_Three Books by James Huneker._
Melomaniacs. 6_s._
Visionaries. 6_s._
Iconoclasts: A Book of Dramatists. 6_s._ _net._
Illuminating critical studies of modern revolutionary playwrights.
_T. Werner Laurie, Clifford’s Inn, London._
* * * * *
_The Novel Of The Season._
The Sinews of War.
BY EDEN PHILLPOTTS AND ARNOLD BENNETT.
_With cover design by Charles E. Dawson. 6s._
A thrilling story of mystery and imagination. It is an attempt to show
how, given immense histrionic genius, a man without principle might
use it to the confusion of Society and be responsible for seemingly
inexplicable mysteries. The romance deals with modern days in London, and
a phase of life hidden largely from Londoners themselves. An astonishing
murder opens the way to the story, and the coroner’s inquest introduces
to the reader one of the most original characters in modern sensational
fiction. From the lodging-houses, clubs, and theatres of the metropolis,
the scene changes to London Docks, thence to mid-ocean, and finally to
the West Indies. There the mystery of “The Sinews of War,” becomes at
last unravelled and a title that will puzzle the reader until the end, is
explained.
_T. Werner Laurie, Clifford’s Inn, London._
* * * * *
_TWO BOOKS BY LOUIS BECKE._
Sketches in Normandy.
BY LOUIS BECKE,
Author of “By Reef and Palm.”
_Illustrated, Cloth gilt, 6s._
It is quite a new departure for Mr. Louis Becke to take as his theme
stories of Normandy life, but his three years’ wanderings along the
coasts of Normandy and Brittany, and among the fisher-folk, has resulted
in his giving us some charming and amusing pictures.
Notes from my South Sea Log.
BY LOUIS BECKE.
_Crown 8vo, cloth gilt, 6s. net._
An account of Mr. Becke’s sporting and fishing adventures whilst
supercargo in the South Seas, together with many notes on the habits and
superstitions of the Islanders.
_T. Werner Laurie, Clifford’s Inn, London._
* * * * *
“_The Up To Date Doctor._”
Modern Medicine for the Home.
BY ERNEST WALKER, M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P. (Lond.)
_Crown 8vo, Paper 1/- net. Cloth 1/6 net._
This work is scientific and up to date; all technical and misleading
terms are omitted, and the diseases are classified alphabetically and
under their popular names.
The treatment is scientific and simple and nothing is advised that cannot
be carried out at home.
The description of complicated symptoms and treatment is avoided.
The signs of severe illnesses are given, so that the disease may be
recognised and the patient comforted by simple home remedies till skilled
help is obtained.
The want of a little medical or surgical knowledge has led to the loss
of many lives which might have been saved, and this book conveys to the
unskilled reader in a few trenchant and simple sentences the best way to
act in all emergencies.
An invaluable volume and one which ought to be in every home library.
_T. Werner Laurie, Clifford’s Inn, London._
* * * * *
_THE MUSIC LOVER’S LIBRARY._
VOL. I.
Chats on Violins.
BY OLGA RACSTER.
_Fully Illustrated. Crown 8vo, cloth gilt, 3s. 6d. net._
Under this title are grouped a series of pleasant chats telling the early
history of the violin, and also dealing with all the better known forms
of the violin. All the great makers, from Gaspar di Salo, Maggini, Amati,
to Stradivarius are described, the whole being interspersed with many
anecdotes about makers and players, and useful chapters on violin music
and playing.
The pictures are delightfully uncommon, comprising as they do the
representations of all the ancient members of the violin family from the
ninth century. The whole work is full of interesting information and is
written in a bright and unconventional manner.
Stories from the Operas.
BY GLADYS DAVIDSON.
_Illustrated. Crown 8vo, cloth gilt, 3s. 6d._
_First Review._
“Each Opera is adequately and interestingly dealt with. It
is the best book of its kind we have seen.”—_Sheffield Daily
Independent._
A charming series of tales arranged from the Grand Operas. Few people
seem to know the actual stories contained in the great music dramas of
Wagner and others.
Most of them are very beautiful and interesting, and this volume contains
twenty of the more popular tales simply written and in accordance with
the libretto.
_IN PREPARATION_:
Vol. III. “Chats on the Violoncello.” OLGA RACSTER.
Vol. IV. “Chats with Music Lovers.” DR. PATTERSON.
Vol. V. “Stories from the Operas.” Second Series.
_T. Werner Laurie, Clifford’s Inn, London._
* * * * *
_NEW NOVELS. 6s. each._
The Last Miracle.
By M. P. SHIEL.
This long-since-promised novel of Mr. M. P. Shiel is the third of the
trilogy of novels which commenced with the “Lords of the Sea,” and was
continued by the much-translated “Purple Cloud,” all the three purporting
to be the words dropped from the lips of a clairvoyant in her swoons, as
memorandumed in the note-books of her doctor.
A Russian Coward.
By FRED WHISHAW.
The story gives a vivid picture of the corruption of the Grand Dukes
and Army Contractors, and is altogether a thrilling, sensational, and
unhackneyed story.
The Financier’s Wife.
By FLORENCE WARDEN.
Miss Warden takes the City for her theme, and her story is reminiscent of
a recent financial crash which paralysed Lombard Street for some time.
The character of the great financial magnate is wonderfully drawn, and
the description of his downfall is most graphically told.
A Widow by Choice.
By CORALIE STANTON and HEATH HOSKEN.
The principal action of this story takes place in Italy—in Florence
and near Perugia; and the book is a human document peopled with living
characters. Readers who want a glowing and absorbing story of Italy
should get this book.
A King’s Wife.
By HÉLÈNE VACARESCO.
_Crown 8vo. Cloth. Decorated Cover. 6s._
This is a novel which will assuredly create a great sensation. The
brilliant authoress was barely 18 when the Academy crowned her first
volume of poems, “Chants d’Aurore.”
The close friendship between the Queen of Roumania, Carmen Sylva, and
Hélène Vacaresco is well known, and also the romance of the projected
marriage between the young poet and the royal prince of Roumania; this
project was abandoned for State reasons, but it created an idyllic and
legendary atmosphere round the authoress.
Her book, while pure fiction, may be said to mirror the mode of living
and sentiments of certain royal personages, and probably no more intimate
picture of Court Life from the inside has ever been published. It is a
story full of passion and interest.
The Salving of a Derelict.
By MAURICE DRAKE.
The _Daily Mail_ offered a prize of £100 for the best novel, and over 600
competitors sent in manuscripts. The prize was awarded to this thrilling
and romantic adventure story.
Lucy of the Stars.
By FREDERICK PALMER.
With Four Illustrations.
FIRST REVIEWS.
“Delightful reading—the study of the central figure is work of
which the author may well be proud.”—_Country Life._
“This is a remarkably clever novel, and Lucy is as delightful a
personage as any of recent fiction.”—_Dundee Advertiser._
“We have not recently read anything which left upon us so
profound an impression of the writer’s ability.”—_Glasgow
Herald._
“Far above the average.”—_Birmingham Post._
“Good, sincere, and readable.”—_Belfast N. Whig._
The Arncliffe Puzzle.
By GORDON HOLMES.
A Thrilling Detective Romance of Love, Mystery, and Murder.
FIRST REVIEWS.
“An exceptionally ingenious murder mystery.”—_Literary World._
“The book must be read at a sitting; it is impossible to lay it
down until it is finished.”—_Madame._
“The characters are well contrasted—the solution emotionally
effective.”—_Athenæum._
“This vivacious and attractive record.”—_Glasgow Herald._
“Stirring and well contrived.”—_Morning Leader._
“Spirited and well written—a thoroughly readable
book.”—_Speaker._
“What one looks for are a strong plot, sustained interest, and
good situations, and Mr. Holmes gives these to his readers in
full measure.”—_Manchester Guardian._
_T. Werner Laurie, Clifford’s Inn, London._
* * * * *
_5th Thousand now ready, with additional Chapters on MISERY BRIDGE AND
SPECIMEN HANDS._
THE NEW LAWS OF BRIDGE AND COMMENTS THEREON.
The Complete Bridge Player
BY EDWYN ANTHONY (“CUT CAVENDISH”).
_Crown 8vo, 244 pages, 2s. 6d. net._
A bright and cheery guide, carrying the reader through Bridge in all its
varying stages, and finally landing him on the high road to success.
Although the treatise will be readily understood by beginners, the more
advanced player will derive considerable pleasure and profit from a study
of its contents.
The arrangement of the book is excellent, its advice sound and
practicable, and attention to its precepts should qualify the reader as
an expert in the game.
The chapters on Dummy, Cut Throat, Auction, Duplicate, Progressive,
and Misery Bridge will also no doubt be widely appreciated, whilst the
revised laws of the game are included in the volume.
INTRODUCTION. A VOCABULARY OF BRIDGE. HOW TO PLAY THE GAME. A FIRST
LESSON IN BRIDGE. THE DECLARATION IN NO TRUMPS. THE PLAY IN NO TRUMPS.
A RED SUIT DECLARATION. A BLACK SUIT DECLARATION. THE PLAY TO A SUIT
DECLARATION. THE DOUBLE AND REDOUBLE. THE ORIGINAL LEAD. THE FINESSE AND
THE DISCARD. THE PLAY OF THE HAND. SOME BRIDGE MAXIMS. PENALTIES, AND
WHEN TO ENFORCE THEM. ETIQUETTE OF THE GAME. ENGLISH AND AMERICAN CODES.
THE NEW LAWS OF BRIDGE. DUMMY BRIDGE. CUT THROAT BRIDGE. AUCTION BRIDGE.
PROGRESSIVE BRIDGE. DUPLICATE BRIDGE. SPECIMEN HANDS. MISERY BRIDGE.
_T. Werner Laurie, Clifford’s Inn, London._
* * * * *
LADY JIM OF CURZON STREET. By FERGUS HUME, author of “The Mystery of a
Hansom Cab.” Cover design by Charles E. Dawson. Crown 8vo, cloth gilt, 6s.
While this is a smart Society novel in place of his more
familiar detective work, Mr. Hume gives his readers plenty of
mystery and excitement from his first page to his last, and
they will find in the book just those qualities which have made
his work so popular.
PLAYING THE KNAVE. By FLORENCE WARDEN, author of “The House on the
Marsh.” Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s.
A LINDSAY’S LOVE. A Tale of the Tuileries and the Siege of Paris. By
CHARLES LOWE, author of “A Fallen Star,” etc. Crown 8vo, cloth gilt, 6s.
“I can recommend this book to all readers who appreciate a
fresh and vigorous story of romance and war, told with a
freshness of touch which is becoming more and more rare in
modern fiction.”—_T. P.’s Weekly._
THE BELL AND THE ARROW. An English Love Story, By NORA HOPPER (Mrs. Hugh
Chesson). Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s.
“Mrs. Chesson is to be congratulated on her first novel.
This is a book of great promise and of a considerable
performance.”—_Athenæum._
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. By GEORGE MOORE, author of “Esther Waters,”
“The Mummer’s Wife,” “Evelyn Innes,” etc. A new edition, revised, and
with a new foreword. Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s.
“It is difficult to convey a sense of the book’s brilliance in
a brief review. His style has the delicious freshness of youth.
His paragraphs reveal blossom after blossom, with a promise
of a rarer beauty yet to come at each full stop.”—_Manchester
Guardian._
_SECOND PRINTING._
THE WILD IRISHMAN. By T. W. H. CROSLAND, author of “The Unspeakable
Scot,” “Lovely Woman,” etc. Crown 8vo, cloth gilt, 5s.
CONTENTS: Disthressful—The Shillelagh—Blarney—Whiskey—The
Patriot—Orangemen—The Low Scotch—Priestcraft—Morals—Pretty
Women—The London Irish—Tom Moore—Mr. W. B.
Yeats—Wit and Humour—More Wit and Humour—Dirt—The
Tourist—Potatoes—Pigs—Emigration.
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Letters to a daughter" ***
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