I can’t help wishing you had forgotten to add. There is no dodging
a postscript, there is no pretending one hasn’t noticed it. That is
perhaps why women are so fond of it. But—no longer to dodge yours—see
how the facts of life limit the scope of your question. See how your
“ought” is, for the vast majority of young women, at once converted into
a “must.” For the vast majority of young women the question does not so
much as arise. They do earn their own livings as it is, and they do it
not because they ought or because they choose, but just because they
must. The housemaid, for instance, who made your bed this morning, and
who, I hope, dusted and put straight your room—a lengthy business, Alexa,
for I know your ways—do you suppose that her action was the outcome of
any moral questionings or of personal predilection? Do you suppose she
did it from a high sense of duty, because she felt that something would
go askew with the universe or with her own soul if she left it undone?
Of course she didn’t. She did it because she had to do it, to do either
that or something just a trifle more objectionable, on the whole. She is
probably one of a large and poor family, and as soon as she had passed
the Sixth Standard, or whatever it is which the law of her country
demands that she should pass, she had to go out to service. There was no
“ought” about it. And those young women whom you saw in Fleet Street, at
mid-day, when you were there with me, you remember, a day or two before
you left home, and whose behaviour struck you as being so vulgar and
objectionable! They were binders’ girls; they had already been working
several hours in a stuffy atmosphere, and after a quarter-of-an-hour’s
rollicking up and down Fleet Street, they were about to return and work
several more hours. And do you think that they had decided to do all that
work after mature deliberation as to the rights and wrongs of it? Of
course they hadn’t. It was for them that, or something infinitely worse
than that, and so they chose, if they can be said to choose, that. It was
a case of “must,” not of “ought.” And when a thing must be, there is no
more reckless waste of honest time possible than that spent in discussing
whether it ought to be.
Your question applies then, you see, only to a very limited number of
young women. It was not a thoughtfully-framed question, Alexa. It was,
if you will forgive me, a middle-class sort of question. When you wrote
“girls,” you were thinking of yourself and of young women in a social
position similar to yours, and they are rather a small minority of the
earth’s inhabitants; delightful, but few, comparatively. So let me frame
the question for you as you would have framed it if you had thought a
little more about it, and then let’s get to work upon it.
What you meant to ask was, I think, this: Ought a young woman of good
education, ordinary health, stature, and capacity (whose parents can
afford to keep her in idleness) to live upon their income until such time
as she is asked by a nice young gentleman to come and live upon his? That
is about as near as we can get to it, isn’t it?
Well, even that very limited interrogative proposition is not altogether
easy to tackle. One question leads always directly or indirectly to
another, and so we go on asking “Why?” until we come flat up against a
dead wall before which we can do nothing but gibber. In the affairs of
practical life it is necessary to treat some matters as settled, and one
of such matters is this:—If you receive from a person services for which
you make no return, you are under an obligation to that person; and to
sit quiescent under an obligation, to make no effort to get out of it, is
to suffer humiliation and indignity. That, reasonably or unreasonably,
is the view of every decently honest man and woman, of every man and
woman whose hand you would care to take in friendship. That is your own
view, Alexa, when you come to think of it, isn’t it? I have noticed that
whenever a friend makes you a present you begin to cast about for some
way in which you can make some return without doing it too obviously.
Moreover, you would not accept a present at all from one who was not a
friend. If one of your fellow-guests now, for instance, were to offer you
a diamond bracelet, you would be in no end of a rage, and would probably
write to me.
Now then, everybody of full age and capacity who is eating, drinking,
dwelling in a house and wearing clothes, and yet doing nothing whatever
to provide that food, drink, house and apparel, is suffering that
humiliation and indignity of which we have just spoken. He may not be
conscious of it. Obviously he is not (for there are many millions of
him) conscious of it, but the fact remains. There is just one reply he
can make to the charge. He can say, if he likes, “Oh, it is true I do
nothing practical, material, in return for the many services which are
done for me; but I consent to live. I exist beautifully. I look nice, I
talk, when I take the trouble to talk, quite prettily. I wear my clothes
with an air. I am an example of what a human being should be. Thus, by
merely being, do I recompense the world for all the trouble it takes for
me.” If he does say that, then I for my part can think of no adequate
rejoinder. If it be a man who talks like that, one kicks him and takes
the consequences; if a woman, one (perhaps) kisses her and drops the
controversy.
But that tiresome “ought” of yours which I feel buzzing round my head
as I write, like a bee, and a bee with a sting, too! To deal with it
properly I must assume something to start with, and so here goes. I
assume this: One OUGHT to do that which will enable one to live the
happiest life attainable in one’s circumstances and to develop one’s
capabilities to their fullest. I assume that, and if you query it,
Alexa, I will wait until you return home and have a couple of hours’
_tête-à-tête_ with you in my study.
Now then, does a grown-up young woman live the happiest life attainable
or develop her natural capacities to their fullest while she lives in her
parents’ house, dependent for every penny she spends upon her parents’
bounty or caprice, acting under her parents’ orders in all the great
and in the most of the smaller doings of her life, and subject to her
parents’ rules, regulations, and discipline?
Judging from my own observation and knowledge of the way in which human
nature is composed I haven’t the smallest hesitation in answering
“No.” My observation tells me that there may be outward acquiescence,
my penetration tells me no less surely that there is always hidden
resentment. A thwarted desire for freedom works like poison in the blood;
in the long run it sours the finest temper. It gives birth to a fire
which, though it may never flame, continually smoulders; and, remember,
this desire for freedom, for the power to do what we will, to go where we
wish, to say what we like, subject always to the limitations of external
circumstances, is inherent in every human breast. The restrictions of
external circumstances we most of us accept without over much of rancour.
What we do not accept, that against which we are in eternal revolt, is
the restriction imposed upon us by other wills than ours. That impulsive
desire to break away from pupillage, to strike out “on our own,” is
perhaps of all motives the most legitimate that can stir the human soul.
The Home as we so often know it, the Home which consists of father,
mother, and grown-up dependent sons or daughters, or both, is not a place
wherein such impulses and motives can rightly develop or have anything
like free play. Such a Home is necessarily and inevitably a tyranny; at
best a benevolent tyranny, at worst a tyranny in which benevolence is far
to seek. Don’t imagine that I have joined the cult of Mr Bernard Shaw and
am about to say anything so ridiculously untrue as that the Home is the
very worst institution in which to bring up a child, except the school.
That is a mere paradox of Nihilism distraught. The Home, so far, is the
best of all institutions in which to bring up a child—to _bring up a
child_, mark, not to support a grown man or woman. It has its analogy
in the nests of birds and the lairs of beasts; but Nature, for once in
a way, is wiser than modern man. The young bird leaves the nest as soon
as it is strong enough on the wing; the young tiger says good-bye to the
lair on the day on which he can kill his own prey. The Home of grown-up
sons and daughters who are not earning their own livings—even the
happiest of such Homes—is a place of continual and constant compromise
and surrender, of suppression, of restraint, of concealed (and not always
concealed) resentments and silent rebellions. Just now and then maybe
(for I want to avoid extremes) it may draw forth the best that is in us;
but much more often it evokes the worst. It narrows even when it does not
actually distort; it cripples even when it does not actually slay. And
there is no help for it, Alexa. The profoundest wisdom, the sincerest
love, can do little more than slightly ameliorate the essential, the
immutable wrongness of the Thing, the subjection of adult will to adult
will. Children of no matter what age who are dependent upon their parents
economically, must needs be dependent in all else. The world is so
constructed that he who pays the piper calls the tune. And it is well;
for even worse than an ordered tyranny is an anarchic republic.
There is just another point. Marriages, Alexa, are not made in Heaven as
some are still found to say, nor in Hell, as too many just now are apt
to declare. They are made for the most part in the Home. The strongest
condemnation of the grown-up Home is the enormous number of young women
who marry to get away from it. In the name of my own sex I do resent
and protest against that. It is hard upon us that we should be so often
regarded by the Beloved as a sort of melancholy alternative to the Home.
Girls, in our class at any rate, marry much more often with a view to
being their own mistresses, as we say, than to being men’s wives or
children’s mothers. And I sometimes fancy they are under no very serious
illusions as to the radiant possibilities of the married state, these
marrying maidens of ours. There was once a man, you know, who after
several days’ suffering from acute earache went out and had a tooth
drawn. When he was asked why he supposed that the extraction of a sound
tooth would remedy the agony of an unsound ear, he replied that he had
never supposed anything of the kind. All he wanted was to change the
pain, and that the dentist had done for him! A similar desire, I am sure,
will alone account for some recent marriages of your young friends which
have caused you so much puzzlement. “I cannot make out what she saw in
him,” you have more than once remarked to me. Well, she saw just that—a
change in the pain. Not nice for him, is it? Nor so very nice for her.
And now I wonder whether you consider that I have answered your question
at all satisfactorily. I daresay not, for this world is a welter, and the
wisest of us is bemazed with doubts. It is possible to have doubts about
everything—at least I should say about everything but one, and that is
that I am always, my own kiddie,
Your loving
FATHER.
THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE
THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE
_April 2, 19—._
MY DEAR ALEXA,—
The question put in the last paragraph of your last letter, to which I
have perhaps been a little overlong in replying, is one which I should
have thought I had already answered, answered, too, in the only way in
which such questions can be answered satisfactorily—by actual practice.
You know me well enough, I take it, to know that, like every other
decently-honest man, when I have a conviction I act upon it. Mind, I say
a conviction, not a mere opinion. Mere opinions, when they differ widely
from the opinions held by those around us, we often do wisely to keep to
ourselves. But convictions are of another stuff. When we have them (and
we don’t have very many of them as a rule) we must out with them, both in
word and deed, or we perish. Concealed convictions set up in the soul a
moral and intellectual rot.
Well, now, you ask me, or seem to ask me, what are my views as to the
amount of censorship that should be exercised over the reading of young
women. That, I gather, was your particular point. More generally you seem
to inquire what fruit of the tree of knowledge should still be forbidden
to those of your sex after that cardinal day when they have put their
hair up and let their skirts down.
Now, for once in a way, I yield to the temptation to reply by the
stale rhetorical device of asking another question. What has been my
practice with you, child—a practice deliberately adopted and resolutely
persevered in, spite of the remonstrances of some who had every right to
remonstrate, and of others who had none? Ever since you were sixteen or
thereabouts—I don’t remember at what age exactly it was that you began
to show unmistakable proofs of marked and hereditary (don’t smile!)
intelligence—have you not had a free run of my library? A library, by
the way, in which there is only one locked book-case, and that case kept
locked, not because of the dangerous character of the contents, but on
account of the expensive nature of the bindings. What happened when—but
I won’t go on with these tiresome interrogatives. I will just recall
to your memory what happened now and then when I saw in your hands a
book about which, to express indefinitely my indefinite state of mind,
I had my doubts. I just looked up from my table and said, “If I were
you, I wouldn’t read that: it is rather dull and rather nasty”; or, “The
only points about that book that have any merit are points you wouldn’t
understand,” and, like the sensible girl you always were, you invariably
put the books back in their shelves again. But I was not always in the
library when you came there in search of literary refreshment, and once,
only once, I remember I came upon you deep in a book about which I had
no doubts at all. I noticed that you were rather more than half-way
through it, and that you looked interested, though a little puzzled
too. “Do you like that book?” I asked. “No—yes—perhaps—I don’t know—a
little,” you stammered, and you blushed. Now, a blush does not in the
least imply consciousness of guilt, or even of offence, as is commonly
supposed. People blush not when they find themselves in the prisoner’s
dock, but, rather, when they are in a tight corner; more often still when
they believe themselves to be suspected of something of which they are
entirely innocent. When you have to deal with a child, Alexa, and you
accuse it of, or question it concerning, some little delinquency, don’t,
should it stammer and blush, leap to the conclusion that it is guilty.
But this is by the way. “Don’t you wish me to read this book; shall I put
it back?” you asked. “Oh, you had better finish it,” I said, and turned
away to my work. I did not explain to you then, but I tell you now,
because it has a definite bearing on the subject in hand, that I knew
that, having already got half-way through it, your interest was awakened
and your curiosity excited, and I knew that in a young woman or in a
young man either, for the matter of that, excited or only half-gratified
curiosity is—well, I can’t use too strong a term, so I will say, the very
devil—the most devilish of all the legion of devils that beset the path
of youth. I felt sure, too, that if I forbade you the reading of the
second half of that book you would attach undue importance to what you
had learned from the first half. You would see the thing—the evil thing,
let us frankly call it—exaggerated out of all true proportion. You would
conceive it to be worse than it really was, you would believe that it
played a greater part in life than as a fact it does. Moreover, I did not
feel sure—for you were, thank God, a very human girl, that you would not
come back to that book when I was not there, and finish it in private,
and thus do your own soul a thousand times more harm by the deception
than any undesirable knowledge you might acquire could possibly do you.
You tell me that your question to me arose out of a discussion which
took place a few nights ago between your host, your fellow-guests, and
yourself: that it began an hour after dinner and lasted well away beyond
the usual bed-time. Let me congratulate you, Alexa, on staying with such
sensible people as the Mauleverers, and on being one of several guests as
intelligent as yourself. By “sensible people” I mean people who are able,
and who like, to talk after dinner for more than five consecutive minutes
on any subject under the sun. Such people in our, or in any other class,
are rare, and are, I fancy, growing rarer. It can’t have escaped your
intelligent observation, that ninety-nine-hundredths of the talk of
to-day is about persons, and, as a rule, about uninteresting persons.
The very fact that a subject is important, that it concerns us, that it
has some bearing on our lives and thoughts, is sufficient to bar it out
of what we ridiculously call “conversation.” Is anybody interested in
anything? I often ask myself on my way home from a dinner or an evening
out somewhere.
But to return to this matter of the parental or guardianly censorship of
books. I am convinced that if the censor could be all-wise, and managed
to use his restrictive powers effectively, his censorship would work for
good. But in point of practical fact, not a parent or a guardian of us
all is all-wise, or is able to make use of even such wisdom as he has. An
“effective blockade,” as they call it in war time, over a young girl’s
mind is almost impossible to establish. All sorts of contraband craft
will manage to escape the vigilance of the blockading squadron, do we
what we may. Still, on the whole, the thing is pretty thoroughly done in
France. There the novel, the novel of ordinary life, the novel written by
the best and most popular writers of the day, or of past days, is never
suffered to fall into a young woman’s hands at all. Books for girls are
things apart. They are written by inferior authors, and as a rule are
dull and insipid beyond words. The French ideal of a young woman is that
until she is married her mind, so far as a certain sort of knowledge is
concerned, should be a sheet of white paper. And in most French families,
outside Paris at any rate, the ideal is fairly well realised. Now then,
if there be any value in that ideal—if it be an ideal worth maintaining
or worth following, the outcome of it ought to be that the average French
married woman should have a higher standard and habit of chastity and
virtue than her sister in England, where no such rigorous supervision
prevails. Well, she has not, Alexa, I can confidently assure you of that.
Heaven forfend that I should say a word to her discredit. She is often
delightful, though not quite so often as she herself imagines. But in the
matter of conduct—woman-conduct let us call it, for want of a better
term—she is not a bit better than our women over here. Observe I do not
say that she is worse: to say that would be to be guilty of vulgar and
insular British Philistinism; but to be quite safe I content myself by
saying that she is not a bit better, and consequently, is not worth all
the blockading trouble that is taken with her. I have met young French
ladies who have been married less than a year, and, well—I need not
amplify, but my intimacy with them has left me with the conviction that
it was sheer waste of time and energy to be at such pains to preserve
for twenty years an innocence that four or five months were enough so
completely to dissipate and to destroy.
The question, it seems to me, leads directly to the larger issue: Is
knowledge often hurtful? I say “often,” not “ever,” for in this life
there are always exceptions. For the exceptions we cannot, try we never
so carefully, provide. We must, willy-nilly, be guided by general rules.
In what other department of life, then, is it even pretended that
knowledge, the fullest knowledge, works for ill? Can you think of one?
If a traveller were about to set out on a journey through some country
where grew in rich luxuriance any number of tempting fruits, beautiful to
look upon, delectable to the palate, but charged with deadly poison, and
certain seriously to injure or to slay outright whosoever should pluck
and eat, would it, or would it not, be desirable that that traveller
should be furnished with all the knowledge available as to the number
and the nature of these fruits, their habits of growth, the particular
places where they were most likely to be found, the antidotes to their
several poisons? Would you, if you could, prevent his reading printed
treatises descriptive of them, or even poems and dramas that told of them
in a poetic or a dramatic way? Who would be most likely to come through
the journey unscathed—the traveller who was ignorant, or the traveller
who was knowledgable? Surely the questions answer themselves. It is true,
of course, that even the best-instructed voyager, hard put to it by
hunger or thirst, and face to face with the temptation of some specially
seductive fruit, might even so pluck, eat, and perish. The clamour of his
senses might prove too urgent for the resistance of his intelligence.
But even so, by telling him all there was to tell, you would have
done your best for him, wouldn’t you? And what poor chance would the
similarly-tempted ignoramus have? Well, now, every young woman is just
such a traveller, and life is for her just such a journey.
On my honour, I think I have put the case as fairly and as squarely as
I know how. If knowledge be our safeguard, our only safeguard, in every
other of life’s journeys, why in the name of all that is rational should
ignorance be our best protection in this? Why should there be one little
corner in the house of life in which the light shall not be suffered to
shine?
You know Mr Findlater. He was here a night or two ago, and was very angry
because one of his junior clerks, lately a Board School boy, had been
detected in a small forgery. It was a very trifling affair, and did no
harm to anyone but the poor silly lad who had been guilty of it. But Mr
Findlater was full to the brim of indignation. Not with the lad—I’ll do
him justice in that; he didn’t even intend to prosecute, he told me—but
with the whole system of national education. “This is what comes of Board
Schools,” he declared. “You rate us for teaching these gutter brats to
write, and the first use they make of their knowledge is to forge our
names to cheques!” He did really, he said just that, and he is a man
of not much less than ordinary intelligence! And, of course, if you
come to think of it, if no one were taught to write no one could commit
forgery, could they? And Mr Findlater’s argument was quite as good as
the arguments of those who contend that a young woman’s virtue is best
established on a foundation of ignorance.
And now it occurs to me that I have been wasting all the time taken in
writing this letter. I feel sure that you put all this yourself, and put
it quite as well, to your friends the other night. But then, you see, you
have the inestimable advantage of a wise as well as a loving
FATHER.
THE RIGHT SORT OF MAN
THE RIGHT SORT OF MAN
_April 28, 19—._
My surprise is not nearly so great, my dear girlie, as you seemed to
anticipate. I told you, you remember, that I was good at guessing, and I
had already guessed this, or something very like this. All the same it is
a blow, for a blow is none the less a blow because one sees it coming.
Indeed, recollections of my sparring days seem to tell me that the blow
you see coming, and from which you can escape neither by guard nor duck,
is just about the nastiest of all.
Fate is a desperately skilled antagonist. It hammers us and hammers us,
and knocks us out at last; but we do manage to get a punch or two back
at someone or something now and then ... and that is good to remember.
It is curious, isn’t it, that this letter of yours, the subject of which
I suppose is Love, should have set me to write about fighting? And yet
... I don’t know ... they are never very far apart, Love and Strife,
are they? Love is the great disintegrator, the breaker-up. See how he is
coming between you and me now!
You are “not exactly engaged, but ...” I will not quote the end of your
sentence, for I know how irritating it is to have one’s words given back
to one. Well, it is good of you to refer the final word on the matter
to me. Even the most unconventional woman does wisely at great crises
to respect the established conventions. Her life is made easier, less
stormy so. But there! It was unjust of me to say that. I will—no, will
has nothing to do with it—I do believe that in leaving this, to you so
intensely personal, matter still open, so that I may have my say on it,
you have not been motived by a desire to do the right, the correct thing
in such cases, but by a real belief and trust in me. You have done it not
because it is always done, but because you are you, and I am I, and we
are to each other what we are.