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.