portentous, to you, so substantial, are going to do all the usual things,
there is no reason why I should write them to you, is there? So I will
not express my gratification and my hopes, and end with a stuffy little
lecture inculcating a prudential course of conduct. I will practise up
the heavy-father style so as to have it all perfect by the time he (no, I
will not give him a capital “h,” though I note that you do) comes to see
me. How I hope that at the first glimpse of him I shall feel that I may
drop it. Does he expect a heavy father, I wonder. Well, if he does, he
shall have one; be sure of that.
The first glimpse of him! And I haven’t had it yet! It is that which
has given me this queer indescribable sensation of unreality from which
I have been suffering ever since I opened your letter this morning. By
the way I posted your other letter to your mother on to her at once; she
is staying at Richmond until Friday. One always has that curious, empty
feeling when one part of one’s mind fails to realise what another part
of one’s mind tells one is a fact. It is thus we feel for the first few
moments in the presence of death. We know that it has happened, but we
can’t adjust our minds to the knowledge. So to-day with me. I know, or
almost know, that your life, the life of all others ... but there, I will
not be sentimental, so you fill in the rest ... but your life is to be
dominated—well, if not dominated exactly, at anyrate directed for good
or ill or half of each, by a man of whom I have never so much as caught
sight, of whose very name I am ignorant.
Do you know that you forgot to mention his name? Not that it matters so
long as it isn’t anything very distressing. I am not afraid of that,
for you know the names to which I object, and which I would rather die
than have my name connected with, and I remember that you share my
prejudices. We both agreed, didn’t we, that Walter Pater was justified
when he refused to vote a Fellowship at Oxford to a man named Juggins or
something. So I take it for granted that your future name will be beyond
the reach of æsthetic criticism. It ought to be a single syllable name,
of course, so as to go rightly with Alexa. Christian names of two or
three syllables should always be followed by a surname of one.
But I take it you have seen to that. You could not, I am sure,
contemplate a life in which you would suffer from a spasm of artistic
horror every time you signed your name.
Whatever he is you know well enough that I shall not be glad of him,
don’t you? You know that I shall wish every time I see or think about
him that he had never been born. You won’t mind that, because if it were
not so you would feel that your father was not one of the right sort of
men. Truly, I don’t believe that the right sort of men ever look forward
to their daughter’s marriages with anything but fierce distaste. When it
comes to the point, I mean. They wouldn’t like them not to be married,
and they hate it when they are. From which you will gather what a mistake
it is to be the right sort of man, and what supreme folly it is to beget
daughters, anyway.
It is rum though, rum and inexplicable, that feeling of savage resentment
one has against every other man who aspires to any sort of intimacy
with any woman for whom one cares even a little. Of course, one says
to oneself that it is because one feels that no other man is half good
enough for her. It is quite astonishing how one can lie to oneself. I
know, for instance, when I can get myself for a second or two into a
reasonable mood, that there must be at least a hundred thousand or so
of men in England, not to mention the rest of the world, who are quite
half good enough for you, and yet I hate with an incandescent hatred the
mere idea, the tenuous probability that you will some day be married. If
he, the unnamed and unnamable, were to come into this room now I should,
or at least should try to, break him up with my bare hands and send the
fragments of him home in a cab.
It was Nero or Caligula, wasn’t it, who expressed the genial wish that
humanity had only one head that he might cut it off? Well, I believe
that at the bottom of every right-minded man’s heart there is a lurking
wish that all femininity were compact and personified in one woman and
that she might belong to him. “Turkish?” you smile. Oh, much more than
Turkish; primitive rather.
I shall not kill him, Alexa. I shall probably be tremendously nice to him
if he wears the right necktie. You might give him a hint about that. One
never does do the things one most passionately desires to do—they are
always so outrageous those passionately desired things.
Haven’t you often, when sitting at dinner, say, with a lot of
depressingly correct people, ached and ached to rip out some hideous,
impossible, unspeakable expression, just to watch their shocked,
flabbergasted faces; and then to disappear for ever from the cognisance
of man? I am sure you have; we all have. But you have never done it,
thank heaven, and you know you never will. It is almost irresistible that
impulse, isn’t it?
And yet we resist it every time. That is because we are sane. If we
yielded we should be mad; that’s all. That is what sanity means, the
power to resist the almost irresistible impulse. Well, I am sane, so far.
I shall offer him my hand and a chair. Perhaps a cigar. I hope he smokes.
Oh yes, that reminds me. I must say just this. If he does not smoke and
if he refuse wine at dinner in favour of water, or even of whisky and
soda—a hateful decadent modern habit—then I will have none of him,
Alexa, nor shall you. If the worst come to the worst, I will convince him
by ocular and tactile demonstration that there is lunacy in our family,
and I am quite certain that a fellow who neither smokes nor drinks wine
will never have the hardihood or enterprise to face that. It is not that
smoking or wine drinking (at dinner) are in themselves virtues, but they
are indications of the only temperament and attitude towards life which
are compatible with true virtue.
Mind, I will say nothing so widely embracing as that a non-smoker and
non-wine drinker is not good for anybody—never mind what I think, but
I will not say it. What I will say is that he would not be good enough
for you; for one of us. His very presence at dinner and after would be a
perpetual reproach, a constant criticism. And you would not like to be
faced every evening by a criticism and a reproach.
A man who, in a world of good things, tobacco and wine and other things,
abstains, is a man who makes exacting demands upon himself, and a man
who makes exacting demands upon himself will inevitably make exacting
demands upon his womankind.
And now, while I am about it, I may as well mention one or two other
things, one or two other essentials which any man must possess before he
can even begin to think of connecting his name with ours. By the way, it
is you who will change your name, isn’t it? What an intolerable thought
that is. He must be what the Scots call “gleg in the uptak’;” he must
divine what you mean almost before you have said it, certainly before
you have said it all. He must not, when you happen to speak a trifle
elusively, stare at you blankly for half a minute or so, and then say,
“I am afraid I don’t quite follow you,” or look it without saying it,
perhaps the worst outrage of all, for the remark does at least imply a
consciousness of inferiority and a sort of commendable humility.
A truly civilised woman, one of us, would rather live with a Zulu
(assegais and all) who understood what she was after, than with a thing
in up-and-down collars (and golf sticks) who was for ever asking her to
explain herself. Heavens, how I know the look on the face of a woman
after she has been married a year or two to that. No, the man who
marries you must talk our language, think our thought, or there will be
rocks ahead on which you and I and he will get ourselves badly grazed,
not to say broken.
Then he must read and admire Henry James. I say must read, not must have
read, for if he have not it may be only his misfortune and the fault not
of him, but of his upbringing. The novels of Henry James (we have agreed,
you remember) are the touchstone of the modern spirit. If a man can’t
understand them, or gets bored by them, or wishes they were shorter or
less involved, then that man, whatever else he may be, is not of us or
even of our time. I would rather see my daughter mated to a megatherium
than to a man who could not “make out,” as they put it, the novels of
Henry James.
While I was on the subject of tobacco and wine I ought to have added that
he must not be “anti” anything to any extent. Not anti-vaccination or
anti-vivisection, or anti-clerical, or any of those things about which
the faddist rages. I don’t mean that he may not have strong opinions, but
he must not carry them to the point of being “anti.” When a man reaches
that point it always seems to me he ceases to be human. A husband should
be human.
And then—I had nearly forgotten this, that accursed feeling of unreality
is so strong upon me to-day—he must be a man whom other women like and
who likes all other women, or nearly all, all that count. I know, of
course, that his voice changes and takes on another tone when he speaks
to you. That is all right. But does it change and take on another tone
when he speaks to the other girl? That’s the thing that matters. When
he hands a—oh, well, a cup, let us say, to a woman, does he do it in an
altogether different way to that in which he would hand a cigar-case to
a man? If he doesn’t his wife will soon find herself wishing that he had
never handed anything at all to her. A man’s love for “the one woman,” is
after all only in a quintessential, concentrated form the emotion he has
for all other women, the generalised thing particularised.
I don’t agree with the incorrect saying that reformed rakes make the
best of husbands, but I do say that the man who has not in him the
potentiality of rakehood should never be trusted with a wife.
But there! What does it all amount to? I write, but all the time I am
writing I am conscious that for all practical purposes I might as well
go and shoot peas at the sun as direct these wise observations at a girl
in the first bloom of what they call love. Of course, I know well enough
that just now you see in this intrusive Third all these qualities and
attributes upon which I have been insisting. Or if you don’t you think
they don’t matter; and that I don’t matter; and that even you don’t
matter; that nothing matters but this new magic that bandages your eyes
and carries honey to your lips. Could I have chosen for you I would have
scaled the heights of heaven if haply I might bring down to you a god,
and ... you would not have liked him dear. You would have asked for a man
instead. And you would have been right, for you are not a goddess, but a
girl and the heart of my heart:—
“And you must twine of common flowers
The wreath that happy women wear,
And bear in desolate darkened hours
The common griefs that all men bear.”
Write to me again soon. Come home soon, very soon. It is a long time that
you have been away; twice as long since yesterday.
Your
FATHER.
MODERN MARRIAGE
MODERN MARRIAGE
_May 3, 19—._
MY DEAR ALEXA,—
I resist gallantly the temptation to begin much less formally, much more
sentimentally than that; but I feel that marriage is the one subject on
which a man may not be sentimental. In matters of marriage it is always
sentiment that undoes us.
He called here yesterday afternoon, as by this time you are no doubt
aware, for I feel pretty sure that as soon as he left he scribbled a note
to you from the nearest post-office. If I know anything about men I know
that. I should not be at all surprised if he telegraphed; but I hope not,
for it is bad to begin matrimonial enterprises by a present to the Post
Office.
So you see I have had a whole evening in which to think him over; a
night to sleep upon my thoughts and a morning in which to recast them,
as it were. When I tell you that I really did sleep and that I found my
breakfast this morning not more hateful than usual, you will realise that
all is pretty much as you would wish.
Yes, the man will do. Except that he is a man, and that he wants to marry
my daughter, my critical eye can find no serious fault in him. Of course
I wish he were dead or in some distant colony—but no, no, I don’t dislike
him quite so much as that last would imply—but that wish of mine means
little or nothing that need worry you. One so often does wish dead people
in whom one can find no fault—indeed, they are more often than not the
very people one can do so well without.
I tried him by all the tests. I offered him one of my very best cigars,
the sort I never have enough of in the house, and he smoked it like
a fellow of taste. Even when we were talking seriously about serious
matters—you are a serious matter to him and to me—he held it now and then
so that the perfumed smoke could titillate his nostrils. Had it been a
bad cigar and he had done that, I should have known him for a charlatan
and sent him about his business.
He came in a frock coat too, a frock coat fullish in the skirts—I hope
you didn’t put him up to that. Had he worn one of those cut-away things
that fasten with one button in the middle of the waistcoat! Words fail me
as to what would have happened had he worn one of those.
He knows how to sit in an arm chair without getting into trouble with his
elbows or showing too much sock. Has it ever occurred to you, Alexa, that
in the matter of the disclosure of ankles a man should be as discreet as
a woman?
We did not talk of you all the time. I should have learnt little by
permitting that, for the veriest oaf can say the right things about a
girl with whom he is in love; but we talked of books, of pictures, of
music, of cathedrals, of the things that really matter, and he was all
right there.
He has a good deal to learn, but then he has some time in which to learn
it; and if you do justice to your upbringing he will not lack a competent
tutor. There—that’s the prettiest compliment I have paid you for many a
long day.
Your mother was charmed with him. I rather think she is writing to
you at this moment to tell you so. I confess that fact does not vastly
impress me, because mothers look always with a friendly eye upon their
daughters’ suitors, supposing, of course, that they are anywhere near the
mark.
Has it ever struck you as queer and rather significant that while women
are always anxious for their daughters to marry, men, for the most part,
boggle at the thought of it? It looks almost as though your sex got more
out of the arrangement than ours, doesn’t it? That if they stand to lose
more, as they indubitably do, they stand to win more too?
The inveterate belief of women in the glory and beauty of marriage always
stupefies me. I suppose there is not one married woman alive who does
not know at least half a dozen others who have come hopelessly to grief
in their marriages, and yet they go on believing! Such robust faith is
touching and a tremendous compliment to us.
Indeed, it is a wonderful institution this marriage—marriage as it exists
among civilised people, I mean: civilised Western people, I should add.
I suppose if a committee of ingenious men and women of the world had met
together to devise the scheme of sex relationship best calculated to
ensure unhappiness to the two parties concerned, they could not have hit
upon anything more likely to secure this object ... well, perhaps not
unhappiness exactly, but uncomfortableness, let us say ... than modern
marriage, monogamic marriage.
From that point of view it is almost perfection. The object of it would
seem to be to destroy as quickly as possible all the feelings with which
people start off on it. The end, it would seem, is the negation of the
beginning. Rum!
Think, now. What is it that gives the quintessential charm to that state
of mind we call being in love? What is the magic of it? You can’t be
expected to know just now, because you are not in an analytical mood;
emotion of any kind is fatal to accurate analysis.
Well then, I’ll tell you. It is romance—a sense of strangeness, of
something to be discovered, of infinite, thrilling, and perilous
possibilities.
Why do sisters and brothers not fall in love with each other? Not because
to do so would be “unnatural,” not a bit of it, never believe that.
Nature has nothing whatever to do with it. It is because they have been
brought up together in close and daily intimacy; because there is no
romance, no glamour of the undiscovered, no possibilities just beyond the
horizon line.
Now marriage, as we know it, is the inevitable slayer of romance. Before
the intimacy of marriage romance disappears like a mist wreath in the
blazing sun.
Mind, I do not say that in losing romance you lose everything; there are
many other things that are worth having, perhaps even more worth having,
but you lose romance, and lose it in something less than six weeks.
And when you have lost romance you are no longer “in love.” You may still
love and be loved. You do and are, if all things go well with you, both;
but you are no longer “in love.” The very feelings which attracted you to
start with, which brought you together, are gone, and gone for ever.
That is the stupendous fact of marriage; it kills the thing that made it.
It is the outcome of illusion. People in love imagine that marriage is a
continuance of the feelings, intensified, which they have for each other
before they enter upon it. That, Alexa, is exactly what it is not. It is
the very opposite of that.
Most people will tell you—one hears it said all about, especially just
now—that the reason why marriage is not the success it might be is that
married people “see too much of each other.” There is something in that,
no doubt, but there is more not in it, so to speak. It is not, I am
convinced, so much because married folk see each other every day that
romance takes wings; it is rather because _they can make sure_ of seeing
each other every day. It is the sense of security that kills.
I verily believe that an odalisque in an Oriental harem, for whom a visit
from her lord is some sort of an event, a thing which may or may not
happen on any particular day, has a better emotional time of it than the
wife in a suburban villa who knows that her husband will appear at the
front door, little black bag and all, ten minutes after she has heard his
train puff into the station, or the still more unfortunate lady who can
always get speech of him by just calling up the stairs.
Your poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti once told a friend of his, and of mine,
that all those exquisite sonnets of his, dedicated to his wife and to
wedded love, were written when Mrs Rossetti was away on long visits. That
I can well believe, and I believe moreover that they were written not
only when she was away, but when he was not at all sure when she would
come back.
Once in a little walled town in the South of France I saw a play in
which the husband and wife used to make assignations to meet and dine in
a private room at a restaurant, although they had an excellent cook at
home. It was a silly little play, but the dramatist knew something of
human nature and of marriage, all the same. Poor dears, they were trying
after something which they could not get, of course, but still, the very
fact that they did try proves something, doesn’t it?
Intimacy, security—these are the fatal diseases of marriage. I think
I see you gibe a little at the word “security,” and murmur something
cynical about divorce. You are right in a way and wrong in another way.
One has only to look around one to learn that marriage is by no means
synonymous with security; but all of us, when we marry, believe it is,
and so the result is the same.
Mention of divorce suggests to me to say this. I don’t believe that
the sort of thing which leads to the divorce court, and, where quite
uncivilised people are concerned, to the Old Bailey, is half so often, as
most suppose, the outcome of wilful incontinence or of sheer naughtiness,
no, nor even of the waning of love. It is the passion for something that
marriage does not satisfy—the passion for Romance. The unfortunates
yearn, yearn with an irresistible yearning, for something to happen,
something unusual, something with a spice of danger in it, something
which pulls at the heart’s strings, something to make one wake up in the
morning with a feeling that the eggs and bacon for breakfast are not the
most exciting prospect of the day. Ah, heaven! Don’t we all know it—the
coldest, the oldest, the most austere of us!
I formed this opinion entirely out of my own head years ago, and it
was curiously confirmed by an experience of three days I once spent in
the divorce court. It was when I had that tiresome Chancery suit—you
remember, about Ida’s marriage settlement—and I had to waste a lot of
time in the law courts.
I could not sit and listen to the Chancery counsel prosing over
technicalities, and so I passed the days in a court which touches human
nature a trifle more shrewdly and less expensively.
In those three days I saw about a dozen cases tried and disposed of.
And what sort of people do you think they were who came there with and
against their wills? The gay, the frivolous, the debonnair? Oh, dear me,
no; not in the least. I saw not one gallant gentleman, not one lovely
lady. On the contrary, they were the dusty, the dowdy, the humdrum, and,
this is the odd thing, the middle-aged! They were the kind of women who
make their own hats, make them very badly, and talk about their servants
at afternoon tea; and of men who go up to town at 8-45 of a morning, and
come home by the 6-15. Some of them, of course, had occasionally lost
the 6-15, and that was where the trouble began.
It is grossly unfair to the aristocracy to say that it is they who keep
the divorce court going. “Aristocratic divorce cases,” as the Radical
papers absurdly call them, make not one per cent. of the whole. It is the
dull, stodgy middle-class among whom immorality is rampant! And it is
just because they are dull, stodgy, and middle-class.
The pleasures, the emotional outlets of art, the distractions which
intelligence can always find in the world, are closed against them.
Meanwhile, beneath their commonplace domesticity the passion for Romance,
though smothered, smoulders on. One fine day, on the most ridiculously
inadequate provocation, it bursts into a flame and then—“decree _nisi_
with costs.”
Poor devils, poor, poor devils, they haven’t brains enough to outwit a
Slaters’ detective or even a prying housemaid.
Brains, ah! yes. Brains are your stand-by in marriage as in most other
of life’s perplexities, Alexa. It is brains that keep you out of
matrimonial troubles, and even, when in a slack moment, you do get into
difficulties, it is brains that will pull you out of them.
Looking at those of my personal acquaintances who have come bad croppers
over their marriages, I find that in every case there has been want of
wit on one side or the other, often on both. Brains! That is why I have
considerable confidence in your future, my daughter.
One word more. Romance, in-loveness, cannot survive six weeks of the
appalling intimacy of marriage. That is past praying for. What shall
follow its departure then? Mere emptiness, a tramp across a sandy desert
or a treacherous bog? That depends. The thing that should follow is
friendship, friendship of a peculiar, a unique, sort; friendship touched
by tenderness, mixed with memories, coloured by emotion.
But again remember this—it takes as much brains to build up and to
maintain a friendship of that kind as it does to ... well ... more than
it does to do anything else in the world so well worth doing. Fools may
make satisfactory lovers, only the wise can be lasting friends.
You return on Friday, isn’t it? I shall be at Paddington to meet you. See
to it that He is not there—just for this once!
Your
FATHER.
THE SUBTLE SOMETHING
THE SUBTLE SOMETHING
_June 5, 19—._