Part 2

You accuse me of perpetually charging you to be delightful, and of never giving you any detailed and specific instructions as to how to be it. I can’t help feeling that the accusation is more than a little unjust, that is to say, I did suffer under a sense of injustice for a quarter of an hour or so. It seemed to me that although I had never taught you by way of precept, by way of example I had not failed, for I have been extremely charming to you, Alexa. But reflection has caused me to realise that, perhaps, nay certainly, you are right. Many of the qualities that make a man charming are the antipodes of those which render a woman delightful. There are a few, of course, that should be common to both, but they are few. I will not trifle with the subject and do outrage to your common sense by telling you that Nature herself will teach you to be delightful, because I remember that you and I long ago, when you were little more than a kiddie, agreed that delightfulness is the one attribute which Nature never possesses, and, therefore, can never transmit to her children. Nature is all sorts of pleasant things. She is wholesome, for instance, impressive, restorative, not infrequently magnificent—just here and now she is damp and abominably depressing—but she is never delightful. Delightfulness is an achievement of art. One may speak, accurately, of a delightful garden; none but an indiscriminating idiot would talk of a delightful wilderness. An alcove decorated with tact and lighted, or half-lighted—better—with Chinese lanterns, might be delightful: a sunset never could be. Therefore, my daughter, if you follow the promptings of Nature you may be, let us say, astonishing, but you will never be delightful or anything like it.

Personally, I think you are delightful already; but then, I am quite conscious that that view of mine may be a paternal _parti pris_ which other people with blunter perceptions than mine may possibly not share. If you wish to be universally delightful then, you must be prepared to make of yourself a work of Art. Nature, happily for you—I may say this without flattery—has given you the materials; it is for you to work them up, remembering that a naturally-gifted young woman is no more a delightful young woman than a box of colours is a picture.

In the eighties, when the Æsthetic Movement, as it was absurdly called, was on the town, we used to talk a good deal, of “Art for Art’s sake.” It was a phrase that gave grave offence to the Philistine, (that was why we used it so constantly), the Philistine who nosed in it a danger to his own peculiar variety of morals. You don’t often hear it now, for the Philistine was too strong for us, and he has conquered. And yet it was a phrase as innocent as it was apt. It summed up in four words—nay, in three, for one is repeated—a true and imperishable principle. All it meant was that Art should seek no end outside itself: that if you set about painting a picture, say, your aim should be just to paint a beautiful picture, not to inculcate moral habits in a Sunday school, or to boil your own pot by achieving the line in Burlington House, or even the gold medal of the Salon. You see the implication, Alexa? You see how “Art for Art’s sake” applies to you just now? If you are going to practise the art of being delightful you must do it for the sake of being delightful, not with any _arrière pensée_, not with an eye to the best partners at dances or invitations to the mansions of the affluent. To die with the consciousness of all your life long having been a delightful person! Can anything be better than that, save living with the same consciousness? Moreover, I can’t help thinking that the best of all preparations for the next world is to be as nice as one possibly can in this.

You know a good deal; a good deal of many things, I have seen to that. But it would be well rather to conceal than to display your knowledge. There is nothing people in general like so little in woman as knowledge, and when I say people in general I mean people of both sexes. So you must never put all the goods in the shop window, or, at any rate, not all at once. Show just as many as, and those of the sort that, will attract the particular gazer in the window at the time. Therefore, affect an ignorance if you have it not, remembering that the more you really do know the easier is it to appear not to know it. This seems an unreasonable injunction, and therefore I will give you my reason for proffering it. Broadly speaking, human nature suffers from a passion to be instructive. We all love to teach, to tell things. Particularly do men love to tell things to young women. I have often had a man come up to me and say “Miss So-and-So is a charming girl,” just after I have been noticing that the charm for him consisted wholly in the interested and receptive manner with which she had been listening, or affecting to listen, to such information as he had delighted to impart. Whenever a man talks to a young woman he tries his best to appear a little _bigger_ all round than he knows himself to be. Unexpectedly to check his enterprise by showing that you know as much as he does has pretty much the same effect upon his mind as though you were suddenly to add twenty years to your age, to discover wrinkles, or to develop a squint. Of course, I do not mean that when a man is “telling you things” you should sit mumchance and, as it were, dumfounded at his erudition. A few well-directed and intelligent questions will help you vastly. But take care that the questions are such as you feel pretty confident he will be able to answer. Here I can speak to you from the depths of my own experience. When a pretty young woman asks me something that I don’t know, I feel more inclined to box her ears than to kiss her.

Learn early, dear student of life, to suffer bores gladly. Remember that in so doing you are making yourself delightful, not only to the poor bore, but also doubly delightful to the other persons present from whom you have drawn him off.

Get as quickly as possible out of the way of speaking of yourself, even of regarding yourself as “a girl.” You are, I know, only nineteen now, or is it twenty?—and there is not much harm in it so far—but one day you will be five-and-twenty, and then it will sound, and will be, ridiculous. Girlishness of speech, of thought and of manner is a habit easily acquired and with difficulty dropped. Let others think of you and speak of you as a girl if they will, but don’t do it yourself as you hope for delightfulness. There are few things in a small way that give the wise and fastidious man a nastier jar than to hear a woman well away towards the end of her third decade refer to herself as a “girl.” It is the fashion of folks nowadays to try to defer their children’s womanhood as long as possible—one constantly hears it remarked, “how much younger women are than they used to be!” Don’t believe it, Alexa, they are just the same age as ever they were. We cannot, do what we will, keep our daughters young. We can keep them silly, but we can’t keep them young. Great is Art, but Nature beats her there. Besides, this in your ear! Just as it is hateful to hear a mature young woman call herself a girl, so it is delightful to hear one who really is a girl speak of herself as a woman. I cannot tell you why—I think I know, but it would take too long just now, and the psychology of it is subtle extremely—but trust me in this, it is so.

Never if you can help it let a man do for you anything you have reason to believe he will not like doing—anything which you think you would not like to do were you he and were he you. As a practical instance: If you happen to be bicycle-riding with a man, don’t let him drag you up the hills, or against the wind. Even at some inconvenience to yourself refuse the proffered aid of his shoulder, of a bit of rope, or the waistband of his Norfolk jacket. The aid will be proffered as a matter of conventional courtesy, but the fellow’s heart will not be in it. He will like you ever so much the better if you assert your independence; unless, of course, he be intensely young, and then he doesn’t count. When I was a young man I once went skating with a very charming young woman who told me she could skate, and that she enjoyed the fun of it. I found she couldn’t skate—she could only sprawl about and tumble down when unsupported. I had to spend the whole of that glorious afternoon—I can smell the perfume of the pines which stood around the lake even now across nearly half a century of time—in upholding her until my arms and ankles ached. It was the only day of hard ice that winter. That girl was not your mother, my child. After that day she never could by any possibility have become your mother. When I set out on that skating expedition I was half in love with her; when I came home I wasn’t! Selfish? Yes—well!

Now for a really unworldly piece of counsel. Don’t be at too much trouble to acquire or to cultivate the acquaintance or the friendship of the rich. In the mix-up that goes on to-day you will meet them, of course—but they are seldom worth the bother. There is little or nothing worth having to be got from them. And the fact that you have made yourself even a trifle more agreeable to a rich man or woman than you would have done to a poor person, is sure, sooner or later, to inflict upon you a feeling of self-despite, of self-humiliation. It is as well to have as few of those sorts of feelings as possible. A visit to a house much bigger than one’s own, overflowing with butlers, so to speak, is but poor recompense for the very smallest scratch to one’s self-respect. A woman with scars on her self-respect is never quite delightful. You will find it easier to be delightful to men than to women. With men, over and above the cultivated charm of your art, you have always your sex—that potent mystery—to trust to. With women it tells rather against than for you. Therefore double your efforts to be delightful to women. In this matter I can give you none of the specific details you ask for. To them apply the golden rule—do unto women as you would have women do unto you. You will meet many fool-women—whom in your heart and brain you will contemn—but remember that the veriest fool-woman of them all will probably be clever enough to know exactly when and where to stick her claws into the other woman. Avoid those claws, my child.

Your devoted

FATHER.

THE GLAMOUR OF THE FOOTLIGHTS

THE GLAMOUR OF THE FOOTLIGHTS

_Dec. 5, 19—._

MY DEAR ALEXA,—

I was delighted to get your long letter on Monday. It was just the sort of letter I like to have, from a woman especially: a letter with naught impersonal in it, full of the familiar and intimate turns of phrase. I fancied I could hear the very inflection of your voice here and there. That is the way to write; to write to a friend, I mean. Try hard to remember all the time that you are not writing to a newspaper, or labouring to produce what, at school, used to be called “a meritorious composition.” Avoid the _cliché_ as you would the devil; nay, even more; for he, in some of his moods, might be interesting; the _cliché_ is always tiresome. Your letter caught me in a moment of depression, one of those mopish moments which come upon me oftener than they should of late, and lie like shadows upon the spirit’s surface, turning to monotone what should be all iridescence. I went down into the breakfast-room and fired off an epigram. It is true I had already perfected and polished that epigram while I lay wakeful in the dead waste and middle of the night, but I should never have summoned energy enough to part with it so soon had it not been for your letter. It was not appreciated. The bacon had been served on a coldish dish. So you see you are responsible for that wilful waste of a good thing, Alexa; a thing that would have (and mayhap will yet) set the club smoking-room in a titter. At the breakfast-table it raised only an acidulous smile, the merest flicker. The family looked reprovingly at me for beginning the day so frivolously. Had you been there, now! That is one of your chiefest charms, my daughter, that is why I love you so; you always appreciate your father’s efforts to pervert the truth.

There was one thing in your letter that troubled me a little though, because I fancied I saw in it a symptom, a foreshadowing, so to speak, like the sore throat and little dry cough that herald an attack of scarlet fever. Do you remember when you had scarlet fever and what a pale ghost your father was for seven dreadful days until the danger was over and gone? Ah me! But as to this symptom. It was only two lines in which you said something—I don’t remember exactly what, and I have not your letter by me at the moment—about your “favourite actor.” You did not mention the fellow’s name, and I thank you for that. It has probably saved me from the crime of assassination. Think how disgusting it would have been! I don’t mean the assassination itself, that would have been jolly, but the newspaper boys bawling up and down the Strand, “Horrible murder of Cyril, or Claude, or Basil Somebody-or-other!” And your poor mother in tears at home; and then the squalid Old Bailey, and the glib counsel, and the solemn ass on the Bench, and the unsympathetic stodgers in the jury box. I feel I could never survive a criminal trial. My spirit would break through its fleshly casings, and flee away from the deadly commonplaceness of the thing before it was half over. Therefore in the days of your youth look not upon the mimes to admire them, Alexa, and bring not your father’s gray hairs in sorrow to the dock.

But to return to seriousness and that symptom I spoke of. I have noticed lately in several young women of your age, though I am glad to say not in you, an unsalutary tendency to exalt the mummer. I have heard them chatter to each other about him in the drawing-room, here; I am told (Jane tells me in fact, she tells me unblushingly) that they buy his photographs, sometimes as many as three or four of one of him in different costumes; that they stick these photographs up on their bedroom mantelpieces, and that in some desperate cases, they write him letters asking for his autograph, and even go the length of sending him flowers. Flowers! They had far better send onions.

I will not let myself think hardly of these maidens of our day. I feel I must recognise that after all they are but doing what the young males of their species always have done and still do. The glamour of the footlights has always tempted youth to make a donkey of itself. Young men of a like age talk actress over their cheap cigars, spend their sparse shillings on photographs of legs, and go the full length of their limited credit in flower shops. But, then, they _are_ young men, you see, and that makes all the difference. It does, I assure you, and my fondest hope is that the discovery that it does may not come upon you as a shock. There may be no reason, “in justice,” why there should be one law for women and another for men, but just now there is, and if ever there isn’t what a deuce of a world it will be! Let me imagine an instance of what I mean. If a few years hence I were to come upon your brother John with his arm round a dairymaid (I shall not, for dairymaids are buried in the picturesque past) I should give him a talking to, but the amorous incident would not break my night’s rest. But if, oh my child—if I caught you kissing the postman! There, you see. I know quite well you are ill-treating that pretty mobile under-lip of yours at the indelicate suggestion. “Indelicate,” I feel sure that is the word you will use. And it is, that is just what I mean it to be. Well, there is something indelicate in this fuss about the actor fellow.

I don’t like doing it, but for once let me pose before you as _laudator temporis acti_. You were pretty good at Latin a year ago, and you still keep enough of it to translate that. I can’t conceal from myself that there has been a change, and a change not for the better, in the emotional atmosphere of the young woman; it has become soppy, stuffy; if I were to say sniffy I should not say too much, but I won’t say quite that. Young women have always fallen in love—I use the phrase in its widest, vaguest sense—with Man, with just the male creature. Had they not we should none of us be here, I suppose. When that nebulous emotion becomes more definite, concentrates itself and gets directed at a particular member of the species, it becomes Love, the real thing, the motive power of life, the subject matter of poetry, of drama, of legend, of art generally. But in its vague state it hovers over Man, just Man. Obviously it must be over Man in some more or less definite form. Well, now, what I wanted to say was this. Once upon a time, not so long ago either, young women “fell in love” with, made a fuss over, Man in his more heroic, more intensely masculine and vigorous aspects. It was the soldier, the sailor, the adventurer of all sorts, that appealed to their tenderest susceptibilities. Even the highwayman was held a romantic figure. Many a nice girl has tossed a bouquet or waved a damp pocket-handkerchief at a highwayman on his last drive to Tyburn Tree. Women upon whom one must not be too hard have before now eloped with their grooms. I say “upon whom one must not be too hard,” because after all grooming is a _man’s_ trade. Personable prize-fighters, too, have had their share of delicate feminine attentions. Now all these types of manhood,—and, remember, it is the type more than the individual who first appeals to those vague unsettled amatory emotions we are talking about,—were male things who _did something_, something mostly that had danger in it, that called for a spice of hardihood, of courage, of some honest, manly, simple quality in the doing. Venus, you know, ’tis said, gave herself to Mars, and tried it on—the hussy—with a robust young hunter; but scandal does not connect even her name with a mummer’s!

Now, this change in the young woman’s emotional outlook from the hero, of sorts, to the actor, is a change I can’t help feeling to be for the worse. For, you see, the object of the emotional outpouring is no longer a man who does something, but only a man who pretends to do something, who postures and poses and plays at doing something! “The Captain with his whiskers” of whom our grandmothers sang, and at whom our mothers were not allowed to peep through the slats of their Venetian blinds, may have been a bit of a dog, not “a marrying man,” mayhap, as another old song had it; but at least his scarlet jacket and his gold lace stood for something, for something worth having. That scarlet was smoke-blackened at Waterloo, that gold lace lost its lustre on the slopes at Inkerman. Girls don’t sing “The Captain with his whiskers” now, and, to tell you the truth, I’m rather glad of that. May I not live to see the day, though I am afraid I shall, when they will hymn the seductions of “The actor with his grease pot.”

Please understand—but I need not ask that, you always do understand me, you are the only woman who ever has, and consequently made the right allowances—that I do not say one word in contempt of the actor’s profession as such. It is an arduous trade, and as honest as any other whose object is to amuse the public. They call it an “art” now, I notice, and, perhaps it is, a kind of a sort of an art; but my point is that it is not a business that calls out the best, the virile, from a man. On the other hand, it does evoke, by the confession of lots of actors and actresses themselves, the malign qualities of personal vanity, petty jealousy, and peacockiness. The constant assumption of other personalities does and must wipe out such personality as the man may have to begin with. If you are always pretending to be somebody else you must inevitably lose your own self at last. And then, it is so quite awfully an affair of clothes; of clothes and of powdered wigs, and of shaven faces and smirks. Now, I put it to you, Alexa, do you think a delightful woman ought to fall in love with a suit of clothes bought in Covent Garden? Further, do you think she can be really delightful if she does?

After all, perhaps, the change is not so great, or the thing so serious as it seems. Perhaps, when all’s said and done, it is only the actor in his character of hero with whom the young woman “falls in love.” There would be a sharp reaction, I make no doubt, did she see the fellow himself in tweeds guzzling brandy and soda in a Strand bar, or even in evening dress sipping champagne at the Savoy. And, to do him justice, sometimes, on the stage, in the glare of the footlights, an actor does look uncommonly like a gentleman. You might almost fancy he was the Sir Rupert Glenalmond or the Lord Archibald Heavyswell he pretends to be. But still it is, while you are about it, better to “fall in love” with the reality than with the sham, isn’t it? You must fall in love with something, I know; but let it be with the Man, not with the Mimic.

Therefore, Alexa dear, next time you go to the theatre spend the dressing hour in the cultivation of the critical spirit. That shall save you. Be a modern girl by all means; be as modern as ever you can, and count on my support to the utmost extreme of your modernity, but don’t, don’t be a little duffer.

Always your affectionate, if, this time, also

Your admonitory

FATHER.

THE RUDENESS OF WOMEN

THE RUDENESS OF WOMEN

_Dec. 17, 19—._

MY DEAR ALEXA,—

As in your last letter you pose me with no puzzling questions on the subject of conduct, I may take it, I suppose, that for the moment, at least, life has become less problematical to you. That is well. Even the youngest and most intelligent of us should cease from bothering now and then, and be content just to be onlookers, to banish that fearsome word “ought” from our vocabularies and from our minds. Conduct, as Matthew Arnold pointed out a long time ago, is three-fourths of life, a biggish fraction, but, after all, a fraction only; and there come periods when we thank our stars for the comparative restfulness of that odd quarter. I often think that Matthew might, with advantage, slightly have expanded his formula. Had he said that conduct is three-fourths of life _for_ three-fourths of life he had been nearer the mark. Men and women, but more often men than women, I fancy, who have passed the third quarter rarely worry themselves as to what they ought, or ought not, to do. They just go ahead and do it, confident that whether the action turn out for weal or for woe it has been decided for them in that other three-quarters left behind and beyond recall or undoing. We spend the greater part of our life in acquiring habits, and the lesser in acquiescent obedience to them. Therefore, if you are to be a delightful middle-aged lady you must practise sedulously to be a delightful young one. It is worth a bit of hard work to begin with, for middle-age lasts longer than youth, and middle-aged ladies who are not delightful are not anything; they simply don’t count.