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.