Part 5
Dark corners at dances? Well—yes. A dark corner may just be inside the boundary, but a clasped hand in that dark corner is well over it. But by the way, Alexa, on the whole it seems not wise in me to set out these limits for you, because the limits of flirtation are also the perilous edges of—find the word for me in the _Thesaurus_. There is plenty of room well within those limits for you to entertain yourself, and others, in security. Keep away from the limits, for, as I said, they are vague, apt sometimes, in emotional moments, to become blurred, invisible even perhaps. When a girl of your tender years gets near to the limits she is likely to call for the prompt and most disagreeable intervention of a, and particularly of
Your, stern and relentless,
Though never heavy,
FATHER.
MEN’S LOVE
MEN’S LOVE
_Jan. 20, 19—._
MY DEAR ALEXA,—
Your appetite for knowledge does you credit. It is inherited, doubtless. And how comprehensive it is! You wish you knew all about men, do you? A moderate wish; a wish that if realised would make you empress of the world. Yes, that and nothing less than that is the destiny of the woman, when she arrives, who knows all about men. We shall not see her just yet though, and when, if ever we do, then, as Swinburne’s distressful lover says:
“Content you, I shall not be there.”
So as things are I sleep peacefully o’ nights. That masterful lady does not even trouble my dreams.
Don’t you know, child, that men are now, and always have been, combined in a conspiracy not to let women know all about them; nay, more than that, to permit women to know as little as possible? Men are not very clever in other ways, but they are, I fancy, clever enough to make that particular conspiracy a success. They have done very well so far, anyhow.
Women know curiously little about men; curiously little considering the long time they have had to study the subject, and how greatly it has always been to their interest to know as much as possible. Take women novelists, for instance—not the silly sort, but the very best of them, the giantesses of fiction—Georges Sand, George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë—to say nothing of the second string, the women writers of our day, the Mrs Craigies, the Ouidas, the Mrs Humphrey Wardses. Why is it, by the way, that when there was no “Woman Movement” there were great women artists, and that now when woman is clamorous and obtrusive there are none?
But take, as I said, the big women. Scarce one of them has presented us with a real live man. Think of Charlotte Brontë’s Rochester! George Eliot did better. Just now and then some of her men do really think and feel as men feel and think. But that, I suggest, was because George Eliot was herself something more or less than a woman. The men in women’s novels, it is true, act as men act, but they rarely or never think as men think. Women are keenly observant; they see what men do; they don’t know, because men never tell them, what men think.
Now please don’t make, even in your own mind, the obvious and inept reply, “Neither do men know women,” because by the universal consent of women themselves the great men novelists, and some of the small ones, have portrayed veritable women; Balzac, for example, and George Meredith, and Thomas Hardy and Flaubert! Was there ever a realer woman than Madame Bovary?—I am not sure, though, that you have made her acquaintance.
The concealment, conscious and unconscious, begins almost at the beginning. The smallest schoolboy never lets his sisters see him as he sees himself and as he is seen of his fellows. To his sisters he talks a different language even, a different language from the language of the playground, I mean. And it is well for him that he does. If he didn’t, and his father caught him at it, there would be sorrow and soreness for that boy. No novelist, man or woman, has so much as begun to depict the schoolboy as he is. Kipling is nowhere near it, nor Eden Phillpotts, nor the rest. And as for Tom Brown...!
No, not only do women not know men, but they don’t even know boys, and that really is queer, because women themselves are curiously like boys in many ways, and, after all, they do have a good deal to do with the bringing up of boys. But it is wonderful how much a boy manages to hide even from his mother. I don’t think he does it consciously; it is the inherited instinct of his sex—the result of natural selection, probably—explainable on Darwinian principles, like most else in this world.
You see, for you know your Darwin, if a man were to let women know all about him no decently civilised woman would ever be found so fond or so foolish as to mate with him. Consequently he would never reproduce his kind—he would not be the fittest and would not survive.
Rum, isn’t it? I have only just thought of it, but I am quite sure it is a discovery of vast importance—that the continuance of the race depends upon women’s ignorance of men.
Let me give you an example of their colossal ignorance of boys. Mrs Bates was here the other day. You know she is an exceptionally intelligent woman, and really learned also. She had been reading some Italian psychologist’s book on Love; and, judging from what she told me, that foreigner really appears to have known something about it. It seems he gave a case of a lad of fourteen who had a passion for a lady of thirty or thereabouts. And Mrs Bates asked me if such a thing were possible! I enlightened her with frankness and great wealth of detail. But I could see she didn’t believe me; she thought I was talking through my hat all the time; inventing as I went on.
I don’t ask you, Alexa, whence comes this new-born desire of yours to know all about men; but I warn you that I am pretty good at guessing. However, let that pass. Not only will you never know all about men, but at present, my kiddie, you don’t know anything at all. Knowledge of live things is not to be got from books or plays. All you can get from books or plays is—what shall I call it? there is no one word that will do—a sort of vague and deceptive hint of the reality. That is not very well put, but it is the best I can do for the moment. Knowledge of life means knowledge of men and women, just that and naught but that, and knowledge of life can only be got by living. You can learn no more of it from books than you could learn of a country by merely studying a map. You would, of course, learn more of it in five minutes from some intelligent and talkative traveller who had been there, and who chatted freely.
Well, your father is such a traveller, and he has made a longish journey through the territory of life, a territory in which he has looked about him with the eyes of a man. Even so, he can’t do much for his daughter, but he can do something, he has done something, and he will do more if time be granted him.
Bear in mind, then, when you read of love, the love of the sexes, when you hear it talked about, when you see it, apparently going on under your eyes, that this traveller towards the end of his journeyings often catches himself doubting whether there is such a thing as _love_ of the sexes at all, whether, in short, to call the thing “love” is not to do an outrage to language and to common sense.
Of course, you can call any thing by any name you like, but you have no sort of right to call two widely and fundamentally different things by the same name. And to call the emotion I have for you, for instance, by the same name as you call the emotion a man experiences for a woman when he is “in love” with her is monstrous. The two things are dissimilar in almost every respect.
When a man and woman are infected by what some scientific French gentleman seriously declares to be the love-microbe they are, it seems to me, the victims of all sorts of curious delusions and illusions, and they are unable to analyse their own states of mind. The man feels capable of all sorts of heroism and nobility, and the woman of any amount of self-sacrifice. That feeling of theirs is sheer delusion. In point of fact they are both in a state of highly inflamed egoism. Introduce the slightest whiff of jealousy and the heroism and the self-sacrifice are converted into the lowest-down sort of meanness. At once you get base and baseless suspicions, spying, of the opening-letters and listening-outside-doors order, and often, to wind up with, cruelty and savagery more frightful than the beast’s.
Well now, is the thing, this in-loveness which can be so easily transformed into devilry, worthy of the name we give to the feeling of parents for children, or friends towards one another? Yet that first thing is what is meant when one talks of the love of the sexes!
Mind you, there is no avoiding that microbe, the anti-toxin has not yet been found, and I don’t mind predicting that if ever it be found the demand for it will be of the slackest. I don’t mind confessing that if that microbe were swept out of the world, as we hope some day to sweep out the tubercle bacillus, the little chap would leave the world considerably duller than he found it, so dull as to be no place for the likes of me. But still we may as well see the thing for what it is. Because we are all mad sometimes, and enjoy our brief deliriums, there is no reason why in the sane intervals we should not frankly recognise what we were the last time we went mad and what we are likely to be the next.
Please don’t imagine that I have written the above passage by way of a warning to you. The philosopher neither warns against the inevitable nor regrets it. He likes just to look it straight in the face sometimes, that’s all. It amuses him.
But now, apart from this in-loveness—which I will not call love, hang me if I will—do men, men as a whole, men as a sex, love women, women in the lump, women as a sex? As I live, I don’t believe they do! It would be interesting if some leisured and industrious person—you might take on the job, Alexa, when you return—would compile a volume of proverbs, aphorisms, epigrams, from all languages, which have women as their subject. There is scarcely one of them—I don’t remember one—that has a word to say in her praise. As Dick Phenyl used to say in _Sweet Lavender_, ... ah heaven! a senile shudder runs through me when I think what a long time ago that was—“it’s all blame, blame, nothing but blame,” and a good deal more than blame, heavy vituperation, acrid snarling, and, I freely admit it, often disgusting and mendacious slander. But still, there we are; men made these proverbs and aphorisms, men cut and polished these epigrams, and men have kept them as current coin in the world.
Now I put it to you, does one satirise, ironise, slate, bully-rag, and squirt verbal vitriol at the thing one loves?
Then, watch men. You have the opportunity, since I understand you have a full house just now. Watch them, then. Do they, for instance, hurry up to the drawing-room after dinner, or do they linger down there over their wine and their talk till the hostess loses her patience and every feminine eye keeps turning to the door? No doubt if there’s any man there hopelessly “in love” he would sneak up if he dared. But the others? And oh! if you were to see us the moment after the dining-room door has closed behind you, you dears! If you were to see how we draw our chairs up, to note the change in our voices, the air of comfort with which we finger our glasses, the heavy reluctance with which we rise when the host gives the word! Oh!
I suppose there’s a little shooting still going on, isn’t there, or is it all over? But if there is, I dare say some of the women go out with the guns, or at any rate meet the men for luncheon. Well, watch the men’s faces, watch closely (don’t listen to their voices, we know how to school our voices) when the women volunteer. You will see how men pant for “women’s society!”
They won’t have you in their clubs, Alexa; think of that. Some years ago I, greatly daring, did propose at the annual general meeting of my club that women should be admitted—to tea. I could not find a seconder. One old gentleman who, to my great surprise, did rise to second me turned out to be deaf, and thought I was proposing something quite different. That luckless attempt of mine almost ruined my reputation; the memory of it still clings to me like the traces of some fell disease. They thought I was, well—pretty much everything but what I am.
And yet how polite and altogether nice men are to you, aren’t they? How promptly they spring forward to take the lightest parcel from your hand, with what lackey-like deference do they hold open the door that you may pass out! Yes, but then you are a woman, a pretty and attractive woman of their own social standing. Again I say, watch. Do they show quite the same alacrity in the case of a less delightful or of a much older woman than you? Still further, do they show any disposition at all to carry the coal-box upstairs for the housemaid—and the housemaid, after all, is a woman, you know.
No; men do not love women. Or, if they love them they love them as the hawk loves the pigeon, or as you love chocolate almonds. Men, as men, do not, I repeat, love women as women; but I love you, and I am always
Your devoted
FATHER.
THE MAN’S POINT OF VIEW
THE MAN’S POINT OF VIEW
_Feb. 9, 19—._
MY DEAR ALEXA,—
No—that formal greeting inadequately expresses my emotion at the moment—I will say then, Alexa dearest—
I am really sorry that my last letter should have put you into such a flutter; should have ruffled your mind’s plumage so quite unduly. I find I nearly always do come to grief in this way when I neglect the advice given me years and years ago by a wise and wicked old man, when I was a foolish and a passably good young one.
“My boy,” that old rapscallion said—he was holding up a glass of his own port to the candle when he said it, and enjoying the delight of the eye previous to the pleasure of the palate. “My boy, never tell the truth to women. You’ll find it infernally difficult to do any way, and it always turns out badly.” He gave me much other counsel of a similar sort. Sometimes I have acted upon it and sometimes I have not. When I have I have always scored handsomely; when I haven’t I have invariably been sorry for myself.
He was a remarkable old gentleman, old Gillion. He enjoyed the worst reputation of any man of his set. When I say enjoyed I mean enjoyed. He loved it; he cherished it as a collector of books cherishes his rare old editions. He died at the age of eighty-seven in an odour of diabolism, tenderly served and waited upon by a troop of affectionate and expectant grandchildren, to whom he left not a penny. Years before he had invested all his money in an annuity. But they didn’t know that. They say he died with a smile on his lips. I can quite believe it. He always loved irony.
It is, as that sage reprobate said, infernally difficult to tell the truth to women, and that, I make no doubt, is why it so seldom gets told. For one thing the truth, the bare truth, is nearly always unpleasant, and so you see, the temptation to lie attacks us on our softer, our more kindly, side. I am quite sure that nine times out of ten when men deceive women they do it much less for their own sakes than for the sakes of the women. Now, don’t raise your eyebrows and draw down your lip-corners, because that really is so. Moreover, they often feel (if they be of a philosophic cast they know) that the deception comes nearer to the truth than the actual bald fact would be. Bald facts are seldom or never true facts. Truth is ever a thing of atmosphere, of light and shade, of fine gradations. Truth is a point of view, sometimes a very temporary and transient point of view.
A point of view. Yes, that’s it. And that is why it is not only difficult but, I incline to think, impossible for men to tell the truth to women. Suppose you have two persons whose eyes are so constructed that they can only see the world through glasses, and suppose one of these persons is doomed always to wear green glasses and the other pink glasses. How on earth can any object ever look the same to both? A can tell B that a sheet of paper is green, but he may say so for ever, and yet B will always see it pink. And the fun of the thing is that it is really white all the time! And what do I mean by “really”? I don’t know.
But are men and women so different as all that, you will be asking yourself. Yes, they are. Quite as different as all that, and more so. They are wonderfully different. The longer I live and the more I look about me the greater and more distinct do the differences seem to become. I know it’s the fashion just now, especially among strong women and weak men, to deny this, and to declare that as we evolve we grow nearer to, more like, each other. Sheer nonsense, my dear, sheer nonsense!
One of the most notable marks of civilisation is the way in which it differentiates the sexes. A savage father is much nearer to his daughter than I am to you. I am rather sorry for it, but it can’t be helped, and this letter of yours goes some way towards proving it. And yet I don’t know that I am quite honest in saying that I am sorry for it—another instance of how difficult it is to tell the truth, you see—for it seems to me that a good deal of the joy, or at any rate of the excitement, of life is brought about by just that difference. Life has little that is exciting to your civilised man, and if you deprive him of that...!
But to come to your letter. You say that I picture the world to you, the world of men and women, as a place full of ravening beasts of prey, and you add that now whenever two or three men are fluffing round you, you will feel like a defenceless pigeon surrounded by hungry hawks. Well, if my letter has done that for you it must have wrought a transformation indeed. I have seen you more than once with two or three young men fluffing (I like that word fluffing, it is apt; keep it for future use) round you and somehow it never struck me that they in the faintest degree resembled hawks or that there was anything of the silly pigeon about my daughter. They generally, I seem to remember, looked nervous and rather scared, though genuinely anxious to please, very unhawk like; but then they were young, and I dare say a callow hawk is pretty well as timid as a newly hatched chick. Courage comes with age, with the hardening of the beak and the sharpening of the talons.
Yet I am not altogether sorry if my last letter brought to you some realisation of some part of the truth; one aspect of it, let us say. Looked at from one point of view, the world of men and women is full of ravening beasts of prey. But take up another standpoint and you will see that the powers and opportunities of the beasts are often pretty narrowly limited. Limited sometimes by their own ignorance of their own powers, limited always by the social institutions which they themselves have established. It seems rum, but the wolf has filed his own fangs, the hawk has clipped his own claws.
You may be a pigeon, Alexa, but, thanks to many things, you are not a defenceless pigeon. You are defended, for instance, by your own brains, by the knowledge which I have taken good care should be yours, by the customs of the social circle in which you were born, by the institution of marriage, and most of all by the jealousy and suspicion the wolves and hawks have of one another. So on the whole you are tolerably safe, my birdie; you need not flutter a feather. Remember what I once told you in another letter when I was employing a slightly different set of metaphors—it is always the traitor in the citadel who gives the fortress away.
“If men don’t really love women, women as a sex, as distinguished from their own particular women,” you ask, “why is it that they protect them to such an extent, to such a so often unnecessary and troublesome extent? Why do they always rescue them first in shipwrecks and fires, and so on?”
Curiously enough, that was almost exactly the question your friend Stella put to me only yesterday when she called here at tea time and everybody but I was out.
By the way, what a ferociously advanced young woman Stella is becoming! She quite scared me now and then. I never felt at all sure what she was going to say next. She was in a great rage with one of her young men cousins who had taken her to the theatre the night before, or the night before that. I forget for the moment what the play was, but it doesn’t matter. She liked it and was intensely interested in it, but the young man violently disapproved of it—disapproved of it for her, that is. Half way through the second act he insisted on her leaving the theatre there and then. Stella made a fight of it, but she couldn’t make a scene, and so she caved in, and now she swears she will never speak to him again.
The reason he gave her was that he could not bear the idea of his cousin (“_his_ cousin,” you should have heard Stella emphasise the possessive) listening to such a grossly improper thing as that. Stella’s very pretty face wrinkled with wrath when she told me. “_His_ cousin,” she repeated. “As though I were his property. But that’s always the way with men. The man’s point of view! How I hate it! They can’t bear that anything of which they disapprove should come near any woman connected with them. They don’t mind about the others.”
And so, quite against my own will, I was compelled—the while I soothed her with chocolates—to defend, or rather to explain (it comes to the same thing) the Man’s Point of View. My explanation will go some way to answering you.
Stella was right in one thing. She put her finger—what beautiful hands the girl has, by the way, did you ever notice them?—directly on the spot. It is the sense of proprietorship that does it. Men do not love women as women, but they do love, or at any rate have some sort of feeling which serves the purpose of love, their own women kind, the women “connected with them.” There is nothing a bit noble in it to begin with, it is just sheer egoism; the same sort of feeling that makes a child before it can talk hold on tight to a toy that you try to take away from it. I remember you, when you were in your cradle, punched me with one fist while you clung on with the other to a woolly red ball that you would cram into your mouth. Well, just so, but more effectively would I punch a man who tried to take you away from me. And at the root the motive for the punching would be the same. So, Alexa, unless the man be quite of the right sort let him look to himself, for I still keep my punching muscles in trim.
No, in this sense of ownership there is nothing noble, nothing magnificent, nothing to swagger about. But just as a very lovely and exquisite flower may have a very dirty and ugly root, so from this sense of ownership has grown the fine flower of chivalry and the less fine and flowerlike but, for work-a-day purposes, the much more useful plant of men’s protective attitude to all women, or, not to exaggerate, to a good many women.
It is sometimes inconvenient to the women concerned, no doubt, as it was the other night to Stella; but it is thanks to it that they have any sort of a time in the world. That feeling of proprietorship which a man concentrates on his own women folk he extends in a diluted and attenuated form to the women of his own class, and in a form still more attenuated (sometimes very thin indeed) to all women. Roughly put it amounts to this, that each man is ready to protect any woman against any other man. There are occasions, spite of the proverb to the contrary, when hawks do peck out other hawks’ eyes.
So you see on the whole it is a little ungrateful to grumble at the Man’s Point of View, isn’t it?