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.