Part 1

LETTERS TO A DAUGHTER

THIRD AND POPULAR EDITION

LETTERS TO A DAUGHTER

BY HUBERT BLAND (“HUBERT” OF THE “SUNDAY CHRONICLE”)

Author of “With the Eyes of a Man”

T. WERNER LAURIE CLIFFORD’S INN LONDON

TO

ROSAMUND

“More dear to me than are the ruddy drops That visit my sad heart.”

CONTENTS

PAGE

ON LIFE AT LARGE 1

ON GOING TO CHURCH 15

ON BEING DELIGHTFUL 27

THE GLAMOUR OF THE FOOTLIGHTS 39

THE RUDENESS OF WOMEN 51

DRESS AND FASHION 65

A MORAL QUESTION 79

THE LIMITS OF FLIRTATION 91

MEN’S LOVE 107

THE MAN’S POINT OF VIEW 121

THE DOMESTIC HEARTH 135

THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE 149

THE RIGHT SORT OF MAN 163

MODERN MARRIAGE 179

THE SUBTLE SOMETHING 195

LETTERS TO A DAUGHTER

ON LIFE AT LARGE

_Oct. 17, 19—._

MY DEAR ALEXA,—

You asked me to write to you while you were away—“long letters,” you said; and the request set me wondering a little. I think I understand now. Comprehension came to me in a flash as I was stropping my razor this morning: the sharpening of one thing helped to sharpen another—my wits. You felt, didn’t you, that as I am a writing sort of man, I might, in long letters, find it possible to say things that an impalpable something had hitherto made it difficult for me to say when you and I were face to face? I think, perhaps, you were right; these long letters will show. All the same, we have been as intimate as most fathers and daughters; more intimate, I fondly think.

I should like to write at length to-day; about 2000 words—forgive the jargon of the trade—on the relations of father and grown-up daughter, but you asked for letters, not essays. Still, I might point out this, in case it has not occurred to you before:—Those relations are peculiar, more than that, unique. His daughter is the only woman in all the world for whom a man five-and-twenty years her senior can feel no stir of passion, no trace of that complex emotion that modern novelists and people of that sort are so pleased to call sex-love; the only woman from whom he cannot possibly evoke passion in return. That fact of itself gives his daughter a chamber all to herself in the man’s heart, a chamber guarded by an angel with a flaming sword.

To talk of love is the next thing to making love, they say, or something like that. It is probably not quite true; but now that I come to think of it, when I have talked of love to women whom I knew well, after a quarter of an hour or so a certain tartness, a certain uncomfortableness has come into the talk, also one felt oneself becoming just a trifle artificial, less entirely frank, less spontaneous, than one likes to be. Such talks have ended not infrequently in tears and temper. I need not assure you, Alexa, that the tears were not mine: as for the temper! And when I have talked of love to women whom I have not known well I have sensed a sort of agitation on both sides which seemed to portend danger in the not dim distance. One never felt quite sure as to what might happen in the next five minutes. Of course, all this refers to a long time ago. You will understand that. There is some truth in the old saying evidently. You might remember it. But the point of these remarks, as Mr. Bunsby says (it is one of your merits that you are not ashamed to love Dickens), lies in the application of them. His daughter is the one young woman to whom a man can talk of love quit of the faintest fear of being led into making it. I probably shall talk of love in these long letters you asked me to write. I am not sure but what, in any other mood and on any other day but this, I should have said that between men and women there is nothing else worth talking about. But if I said that now, I should be insincere, for I don’t feel it. This autumn weather, this dismal lingering death of summer, oppress my soul, and one should be in high fettle to talk intelligently of love. Now I am not that to-day as I look out of the library window and see those big funereal cedars lords of all, the whole garden subdued to their sombre humour. Day and night the piteous leaves of all the other trees are falling, falling like slow rain-drops; and at twilight they sound upon the garden paths as the footsteps of ghosts might sound—creepy, creepy. This morning I picked a rose for sheer pity of it, and in half an hour its charm was gone; its very colour had changed, its pink shell-like petals (it was the last of the Maman Cochets) had turned livid as the lips of a corpse; it exhaled, not perfume, but an odour of death. The birds flutter about aimlessly, they seem to feel there is nothing left for them to do in a world so full of sadness, no nests to be builded, no broods to be reared; and they haven’t the heart to sing. To add the last touch of sable to the whole mumpish outlook, you are away. Don’t think that insincere: it is not a bit. I wandered moodily, and with no definite object, into your room to-day. It was in shocking disorder, untidiness appalling, of course, or it had not been yours; but somehow the chaos did not irritate me as it usually does. Somehow I was glad of it. Had it been otherwise—as neat as my own study, for instance—I had been plunged into still deeper gloom. It was like an empty nursery in which the toys were still lying scattered all about. Oh, the deathly chill of an empty and tidy nursery!

Let me see, you are nineteen or a trifle more, aren’t you? And Love must be lying in wait for you somewhere very near by. I wonder whether you will know him when you see him. If you do, then will you be the cleverest of your sex, and much cleverer than any one of mine. If he is anything at all like the Love of the Christmas cards and the funny little poets who like to display a smattering of classic knowledge—have no fear of him whatever. He won’t hurt, that chubby child with the toy bow and arrows. Of what drivelling folly, what stupendous ignorance were they guilty who personified Love as a pink and pulpy baby nourished on Pott’s Emulsion! Don’t believe them, dear. When Love’s self comes he comes always a strong man armed—a warrior with old scars upon his forehead and dints upon his shield. And there is another mailed adventurer, too, who may likely spring upon you unawares. He is so like Love in his equipment and in the manner of his attack, this one, that it is not until forty years have passed that one can see through his disguise. He is, by the most, held to be unmentionable between men of my age and women of yours, but the name of him is Passion. If I were an ideal instead of a practicable, work-a-day parent, I should warn you against him in the solemnest way, or I should pretend that there was no such a person. But I don’t do either; first because I know the warning and the conventional lie would be futile, and next, because I don’t think either would be quite fair to you. This world is an interesting place; it would be considerably less interesting but for Passion’s vagaries, his adroit ambushes, his sudden swift assaults, his slow retirements, and, sometimes, his unexpected defeats. And I want you to find life interesting—you are sure not to find it happy, folk of our temperament never do. Here I should like to drop metaphor and dissertate for a while in the plain language of what some modern writers call “psycho-physiology,” but I don’t want to startle you, much less to shock, so I will reserve psycho-physiology for another time. This, however, I may say: you will know Love from Passion just by this—that Love wants ever to give; Passion, to take. When the two appear as close allies—well, then you will be upon the eve of certainly the most momentous and, perhaps, the most catastrophic event of all your life. There is really no saying what may happen then, and you had better come and talk it over quietly with me. Don’t be afraid of Passion because you have heard him called by uglier names, and remember always this—that come he by tempestuous assault or by patient siege he never wins of his own strength alone. It is always a traitor within the gates that gives the citadel away. That’s the one you have to keep an eye on—the traitor inside.

I have often heard you say (you are the only woman I have heard say it) that you would not, if you could, be a man. I like you the better for saying it, but you are wrong all the same; at least I think so. Whether men or women have the better time I don’t know, but I do know that men have the safer. They get more out of life, and they risk infinitely less in the getting thereof. In this matter of Passion, for instance (the metaphor’s changed now), the handicap is quite infernally unfair. It almost makes a just man blaspheme the handicapper. It is as though the two sexes were skating. Each equally enjoys the exhilarating exercise. To mine a slip means, at the worst, a ridiculous posture for a moment or two and a few bruises; to yours, the almost certainty of a compound fracture, possibly of a broken back. But perhaps in a sporting spirit you will reply, the deadlier peril carries with it the keener thrill; and really there may be something in that. My observation of life, however, convinces me to the contrary. For me the chances of the undignified tumble and the bruises are enough. Some of your advanced sisters (you’ll meet them presently, if not in the flesh, then in books) will tell you that the tendencies of the times are all in favour of equalising the chances. Maybe; but put not your trust in tendencies, Alexa. Think what you like, but act as though the world were going to be always just what it is now. Pioneers are always uncomfortable, and for that reason, mostly unpleasant. Your business is to make life interesting, and in so far as you do that you yourself will be an interesting woman. At the same time, an you love me, don’t imagine that I am counselling cowardice or even prudence. If cowardice be a positive vice, prudence is but a negative virtue, and the line that divides the two is so thin as to be often imperceptible. As you travel through life you will find the negative virtues, the cloistered virtues, as Milton, I think it is, calls them, about the least amiable and the most irritating things you will encounter. No, don’t be a coward. No woman with a chin like yours, and the brain I feel sure you have inherited, need be that. No end of obstacles and hindrances will go down before that chin of yours if only you thrust it forward at the exactly right moment; realities as well as unrealities, your living fellow creatures and the ghosts of dead ideas. Before such a chin many a seeming lion in the path will turn into naught more fearsome than a spitting kitten after all; still kittens, it is worth remembering, can scratch. And scratches disfigure.

Try to avoid scratches: they smart, and there is no honour in the scars thereof. Make the world interesting to yourself, as I charged you before, and make it comfortable. To do that is about the most one can hope to do ’twixt swaddling clothes and shroud. I don’t ask you to venerate other people’s prejudices—scorn them as much as you like; but I do advise you to respect their power. Bow reverentially in the House of Rimmon. Try to imagine yourself (the effort will not be very great after you have looked around you for a while) a civilised being cast among savages. The savages have, of course, some rigid rules of conduct, of the origin of which they know nothing and which, for that very reason, they hold in the deeper awe. The breaking of a rule involves a slow scraping to death with oyster shells, and yet such breaking gives a good deal of comfort and satisfaction to you; there is a thrill about it somewhere. “_Que faire_” then? Stick to the rules like the most besotted savage of them all? Not a bit of it; break them just when and how it suits you and then use your superior intelligence. You will get a poignant and penetrating pleasure from the mere exercise of your higher faculty. I am not sure but that that alone will not be reward sufficient. All this sounds like a lengthy way of restating the old eleventh commandment, I know; but, indeed, it is something more than that, it is rather an intelligent criticism of some of the ten and a reasonable justification of that odd one.

My advice assumes, of course, that you are a Superior Person. I think I have noted certain traits in you which convince me that that is rather your view of yourself. Well, even so, you probably know little of yourself, but yet more than any one else knows of you. You see you are the one most nearly interested in the diagnosis. Time will test the correctness of your judgment; but when he has had long enough to form an opinion it will not matter much to you what his opinion is. But of Time’s dealings with your sex I shall have something to say anon. Some one has said that the bitterest of all regrets is that for the sins we have not committed. That is mere cynical ineptitude.

It is not the memory of omitted sins, but the recollection of lost chances that writhes and rankles.

Always, my dear Alexa,

Your didactic but most affectionate friend and

FATHER.

ON GOING TO CHURCH

ON GOING TO CHURCH

_Oct. 28, 19—_

MY DEAR ALEXA,—

Some commonplace person has said that the really important part of a woman’s letter is always in the postscript. It pains me to recognise how often the commonplace is also the true. It is the postscript of your pleasant letter that I must answer to-day. “Ought I to go to church?” you ask, and I can’t think why you say “ought.” “Ought” is a word which you know irritates me. It suggests Ethical Societies and their preposterous hymns. It raises questions of “right and wrong,” and I feel that at my age one should be done with questions of that disturbing kind. And the worst of it is I don’t quite know what you mean, for you may mean one of two things. It may be a very little question or a very big one you are putting. Well, I will try to deal with both. If you mean ought you to go to church on Sunday just now, when you are staying with correct people who go themselves, then I answer most emphatically “Yes.” To begin with it is a mere act of politeness. You might as well ask “Ought I to dress for dinner?” But it is something more than that. To stay away from church when your host and his friends go is to challenge after-luncheon controversy, to invite a religious polemic. It is to advertise in the most vulgar and objectionable way possible your irreligion, or, if not that exactly, at least your religious doubts. It is to make yourself prominent and prickly.

But I can’t believe you mean that. A child of mine may have prickles, but I am happily confident that she would carefully conceal them. What I think you do mean is, “Is it wise, in order to make the best of life, to cultivate the religious emotions?” That was it, wasn’t it? “Ought I to go to church?” was only your succinct and symbolical way of putting it. It was neatly put, and I congratulate you, Alexa.

Well, it is a big question, as I said, but one that is comparatively easy to answer, for the answer is obvious. It may take a long time answering but that is the worst of the obvious: it always does take such a long time stating, whereas the non-obvious may generally be put into an epigram. Who are the nicest people you know, Alexa; the people you like best to talk to; the people whose judgment you most rely on; the gayest people; the people who have the art of treating serious things lightly and light things with a becoming seriousness; the _all round_ people; the people whose opinion you would most value of a poem, a novel, a symphony, a landscape; the people whose taste you trust? Think now, are they not in almost every case people with some sort of religious belief? Or, to put it otherwise, have you ever met a really delightful Atheist, man or woman? You have met many worthy Atheists, I know, persons whose moral code was as conspicuous as a red nose, whose admirable qualities stuck out of them like hat-pins, persons you are almost bound in common decency to respect; but have they been delightful? Were you not always conscious of a _want_ in them somewhere, just as you are conscious of something lacking in a person who has no ear for music, or who does not like olives?

The religious instinct, the craving to get into touch with something outside the material world, beyond _the things we see_ or apprehend with any of our five senses is born in us just like any other instinct. The history of mankind is proof positive of the fact. We have never yet caught a primitive man—most savages are degenerates they say; but, depend upon it, if ever we do we shall find him going “to church,” as you would put it. Even if we didn’t, even if it could be demonstrated beyond possibility of doubt that our arboreal ancestor knew naught of religious emotion, but was contented with his wives and his cocoanuts, it would be no disproof of my assertion that _we_, the people of 19—, are born with the religious instinct. There are exceptions of course, freaks, just as there are unfortunates born without drums to their ears and without a liking for the scent of tonkin beans; but we need not bother about them. You, my child, have drums to your ears, you keep a tonkin bean in your glove-box, and you have the religious instinct. The question I am answering, remember, is: ought _you_, Alexa, to go to church? In other words, then, it amounts to this: ought you to suppress an instinct? It is a question surely which answers itself. The pleasures of life consist in the gratification of instincts, either inherited or cultivated. To suppress an instinct, then, or to allow it to atrophy by disuse, is to shut oneself off from an opportunity of pleasure, to narrow the range of one’s emotions and one’s intellect, to diminish the number of one’s sensations; it is to be incomplete, and if you are incomplete, you cannot be delightful, Alexa. Your favourite Heine says somewhere that a charming woman without religion is like a beautiful flower without perfume. He was always right when he wrote of women. So am I.

But I think I hear you asking, is it true that the religious emotions are necessarily always pleasurable? Was it pleasure that St Simeon Stylites felt upon his pillar? Does the missionary experience a delightful thrill while the savage is skinning him alive? Well, I am not sure. I am inclined to think that St Simeon did enjoy that cold eminence of his, at any rate more than he was capable of enjoying anything else. As for the missionary, I did meet one once who had been partially skinned, and strangely enough, he was just on the eve of starting to pay another visit to the interesting island folk who had flayed him; so we must presume it was not so bad after all. But even were it otherwise, my reply would be that persons like St Simeon have cultivated their religious emotions overmuch, and have paid insufficient attention to the other sides of their nature. They are like gluttons, or drunkards, or profligates, or the musically mad. They are religious debauchees. To spend all one’s time in religious exercises is as bad, and as foolish in its way, as to be perpetually playing the piano: it is wasting your own life and making yourself a nuisance to your neighbours. Prayer is good, my child, but really I think I would as soon see you always on your head as always on your knees. There is a line of a hymn which speaks of Heaven as a place

“Where congregations ne’er break up And Sabbaths have no end.”

but that was written, we may be sure, by a religious debauchee. He was a glutton, that fellow. Now, in this, as in all other things, I would have my daughter be an epicure—not a greedy pig. Talking of Epicurus, by the way, I feel sure that if Epicurus were alive in London to-day he would attend the services in the Chapter House of the New Cathedral almost daily. Yes, and not as a mere listener to music: he would absorb the atmosphere of the place; he would be of the most devout. After all, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, isn’t it?—and in the eupeptic tranquillity that follows. You can put the thing to a practical and a personal test if you will. Go, sit as much by yourself as you can in some great church—a cathedral for choice, of course; choose some corner where the light is broken by a stained-glass window—the glass must not be of date later than the end of the sixteenth century—and stay there quietly until after the service ends. Let the music of the organ, the clear voices of the choir boys, the penetrating odour of the incense, work their will upon you. Surrender yourself wholly, uncritically, to the influence of the place, and then, when it is all over, and you are the last to leave, or the last but one, say—for it were well, it were perfect if, as you cross the chancel, you should see one wimpled nun “breathless in adoration” before the altar—write and ask me again, if you can, ought you to go to church!

Ah, but you, or some other girl who, unlike you, is a little agnostic Philistine, might say, those emotional experiences are æsthetic, not religious. It is the music itself that thrills, not the devotion that the music seeks to express; it is the particles of the incense that titillate the nostrils, not the odour of prayer that penetrates to the soul. Not a bit of it, Alexa, that is a callow observation worthy only a Hall of Science lecturer. Listen to exactly the same music played by the same hands, sung by the same voices, in the Queen’s Hall, and see if the emotional effect upon yourself is in any sense the same. It will charm you, of course, but there will be something missing—and that something is the satisfaction of the religious instinct, the response of the Unseen to our craving for relations with it. Yes, but the church itself, the building, the pointed arches, the clustered columns, the groined roof—have not all these much to do with the psychological effect? Of course they have. But then the church was builded of men who had cultivated their religious instincts: men who believed, who felt: the building fits the religious idea as perfectly as I hope your latest frock fits your frame, my kiddie. What is a great cathedral but the religious emotion expressed in stone?

“And yet—it mayn’t be true,” I hear you mutter, with a little sceptical tremor of the lips. I don’t quite know what you mean by “it,” and I don’t greatly care. To define “it,” would require a big book, wouldn’t it? It has already required big libraries full of big books—and still the foolish squabble. There It is all the time. So we will let that question pass. What is true, what is a fact as palpable as, more palpable than, the improvement in the Strand, is the existence in us, in you, of the religious instinct—of a craving for personal relations with the Unseen, as I said. Not to seek to gratify that were as foolish as to refuse to listen to a Beethoven sonata because you feel doubtful whether Beethoven ever lived—whether all his music were not written by another gentleman of the same name.

Your mother asks me to tell you that she thinks you ought sometimes to write to her. “Ought,” and again “ought” and always “ought” in this beast of a world!

Your devoted and truly religious

FATHER.

ON BEING DELIGHTFUL

ON BEING DELIGHTFUL

_Nov. 8, 19—._

MY DEAR ALEXA,—