Part 6

I think I said a page or two back that one of your defences was the institution of marriage. Perhaps, lest you should think I was talking mere conventional rubbish, I had better explain what I meant.

Men are not cowards; lots of them love and choose danger for its own sake. Bernard Shaw is quite wrong when he says in one of his plays that fear is the greatest of all human forces. That remark is only a little feat of intellectual gymnastics, designed to startle. But, valiant and daring blades though men are, there is one thing that they fear with a craven, shrinking, shivering terror. That thing is marriage.

“They marry!” you reply. Why, yes, and so also do they die, though often with somewhat less reluctance; and they marry just as they die, because they can’t help themselves. The impulse to marriage (as things are) is as irresistible as the spear-thrust of Death. It would be interesting if in the vestry after the ceremony one could apply some species of Chinese torture to every bridegroom and extort from him the truth as to whether he did indeed want to marry this woman. He wanted this woman, of course, but did he want, actually want, to take upon himself the life-long responsibilities, the life-long expenses, the life-long risks, the life-long limitation of liberty?

Why the fact, this deep aversion of the man from marriage, this recoil from the altar, is marked in common speech, and anything that is marked in common speech “is so,” as the Americans say. Don’t you often hear it said that Miss So-and-So has “caught,” “hooked,” “captured,” young Thingamy? When do you ever hear that a man has caught, hooked, or captured (in a matrimonial sense) a woman?

The institution of marriage is the highest and the stoutest barrier between the sexes that society has ever set up. That is not a paradox. It is a plain, almost an obvious truth. Thus the pigeon (poor little pigeon!) escapes many attacks from the hawks without the trouble of moving a wing. In other words, a woman meets with far fewer advances, much less pursuit, and consequently much less temptation, from men than she would were it not for this institution of marriage. The boldest and most hungry hawk thinks twice before swooping on the pigeon if he knows that the pigeon, harmless as she looks, may turn and manacle him to her for the rest of his natural life, before he knows where he is.

And so, Alexa, if you sometimes feel that fewer young men fluff around you than your many attractions might warrant, don’t be depressed or self-distrustful. It is not because you are not pretty or fascinating enough; it is because they are afraid you might marry them. Their self-restraint is really the highest compliment they can pay you.

Good-bye, and don’t be offended with your truth-loving

FATHER.

THE DOMESTIC HEARTH

THE DOMESTIC HEARTH

_March 1, 19—._

MY DEAR ALEXA,—

If you have a fault—and far be it from your adoring father to suggest that you have—but if you have a fault, it shows itself in your trick of asking questions beginning with an “ought.” I think my recollection is right when it tells me that your last three letters have, together with a good deal that was both interesting and diverting, contained a query as to whether you or somebody else “ought” or “ought” not to do something or other. When it is a case of You, I feel myself more or less competent to answer; for about You I do know a little, you see; but when you ask me what somebody else ought to do or to leave undone, somebody else of whom I know nothing, why, then I am stricken with a feeling of hopeless futility. I sit here and dither, and cover sheets of letter paper with my illegible handwriting only to tear them up after a miserable half-hour’s boggling. For to know what a person “ought” to do, one must know the person, you see, and the circumstances in which that person is posed. There are no “oughts” unrelated to particular persons and particular circumstances. If there were, what plain sailing life’s perilous voyage would be, wouldn’t it? In point of dismal fact that voyage is made upon an uncharted sea. A few plain general instructions in the principles of navigation are all we get; we have to look out for the rocks and shoals and whirlpools and adverse currents for ourselves.

There are not nearly so many “oughts” in life as you in the solemn ingenuousness of your youth doubtless imagine. As you grow older you will find the “oughts” diminish and the “musts” increase. That is to say what looks like moral freedom gradually, and not so very gradually either, gives way to what in stern fact is practical necessity. But I suppose I must come to the point.

“Ought girls to earn their own livings?” you ask in a postscript, which I can’t help wishing you had forgotten to add. There is no dodging a postscript, there is no pretending one hasn’t noticed it. That is perhaps why women are so fond of it. But—no longer to dodge yours—see how the facts of life limit the scope of your question. See how your “ought” is, for the vast majority of young women, at once converted into a “must.” For the vast majority of young women the question does not so much as arise. They do earn their own livings as it is, and they do it not because they ought or because they choose, but just because they must. The housemaid, for instance, who made your bed this morning, and who, I hope, dusted and put straight your room—a lengthy business, Alexa, for I know your ways—do you suppose that her action was the outcome of any moral questionings or of personal predilection? Do you suppose she did it from a high sense of duty, because she felt that something would go askew with the universe or with her own soul if she left it undone? Of course she didn’t. She did it because she had to do it, to do either that or something just a trifle more objectionable, on the whole. She is probably one of a large and poor family, and as soon as she had passed the Sixth Standard, or whatever it is which the law of her country demands that she should pass, she had to go out to service. There was no “ought” about it. And those young women whom you saw in Fleet Street, at mid-day, when you were there with me, you remember, a day or two before you left home, and whose behaviour struck you as being so vulgar and objectionable! They were binders’ girls; they had already been working several hours in a stuffy atmosphere, and after a quarter-of-an-hour’s rollicking up and down Fleet Street, they were about to return and work several more hours. And do you think that they had decided to do all that work after mature deliberation as to the rights and wrongs of it? Of course they hadn’t. It was for them that, or something infinitely worse than that, and so they chose, if they can be said to choose, that. It was a case of “must,” not of “ought.” And when a thing must be, there is no more reckless waste of honest time possible than that spent in discussing whether it ought to be.

Your question applies then, you see, only to a very limited number of young women. It was not a thoughtfully-framed question, Alexa. It was, if you will forgive me, a middle-class sort of question. When you wrote “girls,” you were thinking of yourself and of young women in a social position similar to yours, and they are rather a small minority of the earth’s inhabitants; delightful, but few, comparatively. So let me frame the question for you as you would have framed it if you had thought a little more about it, and then let’s get to work upon it.

What you meant to ask was, I think, this: Ought a young woman of good education, ordinary health, stature, and capacity (whose parents can afford to keep her in idleness) to live upon their income until such time as she is asked by a nice young gentleman to come and live upon his? That is about as near as we can get to it, isn’t it?

Well, even that very limited interrogative proposition is not altogether easy to tackle. One question leads always directly or indirectly to another, and so we go on asking “Why?” until we come flat up against a dead wall before which we can do nothing but gibber. In the affairs of practical life it is necessary to treat some matters as settled, and one of such matters is this:—If you receive from a person services for which you make no return, you are under an obligation to that person; and to sit quiescent under an obligation, to make no effort to get out of it, is to suffer humiliation and indignity. That, reasonably or unreasonably, is the view of every decently honest man and woman, of every man and woman whose hand you would care to take in friendship. That is your own view, Alexa, when you come to think of it, isn’t it? I have noticed that whenever a friend makes you a present you begin to cast about for some way in which you can make some return without doing it too obviously. Moreover, you would not accept a present at all from one who was not a friend. If one of your fellow-guests now, for instance, were to offer you a diamond bracelet, you would be in no end of a rage, and would probably write to me.

Now then, everybody of full age and capacity who is eating, drinking, dwelling in a house and wearing clothes, and yet doing nothing whatever to provide that food, drink, house and apparel, is suffering that humiliation and indignity of which we have just spoken. He may not be conscious of it. Obviously he is not (for there are many millions of him) conscious of it, but the fact remains. There is just one reply he can make to the charge. He can say, if he likes, “Oh, it is true I do nothing practical, material, in return for the many services which are done for me; but I consent to live. I exist beautifully. I look nice, I talk, when I take the trouble to talk, quite prettily. I wear my clothes with an air. I am an example of what a human being should be. Thus, by merely being, do I recompense the world for all the trouble it takes for me.” If he does say that, then I for my part can think of no adequate rejoinder. If it be a man who talks like that, one kicks him and takes the consequences; if a woman, one (perhaps) kisses her and drops the controversy.

But that tiresome “ought” of yours which I feel buzzing round my head as I write, like a bee, and a bee with a sting, too! To deal with it properly I must assume something to start with, and so here goes. I assume this: One OUGHT to do that which will enable one to live the happiest life attainable in one’s circumstances and to develop one’s capabilities to their fullest. I assume that, and if you query it, Alexa, I will wait until you return home and have a couple of hours’ _tête-à-tête_ with you in my study.

Now then, does a grown-up young woman live the happiest life attainable or develop her natural capacities to their fullest while she lives in her parents’ house, dependent for every penny she spends upon her parents’ bounty or caprice, acting under her parents’ orders in all the great and in the most of the smaller doings of her life, and subject to her parents’ rules, regulations, and discipline?

Judging from my own observation and knowledge of the way in which human nature is composed I haven’t the smallest hesitation in answering “No.” My observation tells me that there may be outward acquiescence, my penetration tells me no less surely that there is always hidden resentment. A thwarted desire for freedom works like poison in the blood; in the long run it sours the finest temper. It gives birth to a fire which, though it may never flame, continually smoulders; and, remember, this desire for freedom, for the power to do what we will, to go where we wish, to say what we like, subject always to the limitations of external circumstances, is inherent in every human breast. The restrictions of external circumstances we most of us accept without over much of rancour. What we do not accept, that against which we are in eternal revolt, is the restriction imposed upon us by other wills than ours. That impulsive desire to break away from pupillage, to strike out “on our own,” is perhaps of all motives the most legitimate that can stir the human soul.

The Home as we so often know it, the Home which consists of father, mother, and grown-up dependent sons or daughters, or both, is not a place wherein such impulses and motives can rightly develop or have anything like free play. Such a Home is necessarily and inevitably a tyranny; at best a benevolent tyranny, at worst a tyranny in which benevolence is far to seek. Don’t imagine that I have joined the cult of Mr Bernard Shaw and am about to say anything so ridiculously untrue as that the Home is the very worst institution in which to bring up a child, except the school. That is a mere paradox of Nihilism distraught. The Home, so far, is the best of all institutions in which to bring up a child—to _bring up a child_, mark, not to support a grown man or woman. It has its analogy in the nests of birds and the lairs of beasts; but Nature, for once in a way, is wiser than modern man. The young bird leaves the nest as soon as it is strong enough on the wing; the young tiger says good-bye to the lair on the day on which he can kill his own prey. The Home of grown-up sons and daughters who are not earning their own livings—even the happiest of such Homes—is a place of continual and constant compromise and surrender, of suppression, of restraint, of concealed (and not always concealed) resentments and silent rebellions. Just now and then maybe (for I want to avoid extremes) it may draw forth the best that is in us; but much more often it evokes the worst. It narrows even when it does not actually distort; it cripples even when it does not actually slay. And there is no help for it, Alexa. The profoundest wisdom, the sincerest love, can do little more than slightly ameliorate the essential, the immutable wrongness of the Thing, the subjection of adult will to adult will. Children of no matter what age who are dependent upon their parents economically, must needs be dependent in all else. The world is so constructed that he who pays the piper calls the tune. And it is well; for even worse than an ordered tyranny is an anarchic republic.

There is just another point. Marriages, Alexa, are not made in Heaven as some are still found to say, nor in Hell, as too many just now are apt to declare. They are made for the most part in the Home. The strongest condemnation of the grown-up Home is the enormous number of young women who marry to get away from it. In the name of my own sex I do resent and protest against that. It is hard upon us that we should be so often regarded by the Beloved as a sort of melancholy alternative to the Home. Girls, in our class at any rate, marry much more often with a view to being their own mistresses, as we say, than to being men’s wives or children’s mothers. And I sometimes fancy they are under no very serious illusions as to the radiant possibilities of the married state, these marrying maidens of ours. There was once a man, you know, who after several days’ suffering from acute earache went out and had a tooth drawn. When he was asked why he supposed that the extraction of a sound tooth would remedy the agony of an unsound ear, he replied that he had never supposed anything of the kind. All he wanted was to change the pain, and that the dentist had done for him! A similar desire, I am sure, will alone account for some recent marriages of your young friends which have caused you so much puzzlement. “I cannot make out what she saw in him,” you have more than once remarked to me. Well, she saw just that—a change in the pain. Not nice for him, is it? Nor so very nice for her.

And now I wonder whether you consider that I have answered your question at all satisfactorily. I daresay not, for this world is a welter, and the wisest of us is bemazed with doubts. It is possible to have doubts about everything—at least I should say about everything but one, and that is that I am always, my own kiddie,

Your loving

FATHER.

THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

_April 2, 19—._

MY DEAR ALEXA,—

The question put in the last paragraph of your last letter, to which I have perhaps been a little overlong in replying, is one which I should have thought I had already answered, answered, too, in the only way in which such questions can be answered satisfactorily—by actual practice. You know me well enough, I take it, to know that, like every other decently-honest man, when I have a conviction I act upon it. Mind, I say a conviction, not a mere opinion. Mere opinions, when they differ widely from the opinions held by those around us, we often do wisely to keep to ourselves. But convictions are of another stuff. When we have them (and we don’t have very many of them as a rule) we must out with them, both in word and deed, or we perish. Concealed convictions set up in the soul a moral and intellectual rot.

Well, now, you ask me, or seem to ask me, what are my views as to the amount of censorship that should be exercised over the reading of young women. That, I gather, was your particular point. More generally you seem to inquire what fruit of the tree of knowledge should still be forbidden to those of your sex after that cardinal day when they have put their hair up and let their skirts down.

Now, for once in a way, I yield to the temptation to reply by the stale rhetorical device of asking another question. What has been my practice with you, child—a practice deliberately adopted and resolutely persevered in, spite of the remonstrances of some who had every right to remonstrate, and of others who had none? Ever since you were sixteen or thereabouts—I don’t remember at what age exactly it was that you began to show unmistakable proofs of marked and hereditary (don’t smile!) intelligence—have you not had a free run of my library? A library, by the way, in which there is only one locked book-case, and that case kept locked, not because of the dangerous character of the contents, but on account of the expensive nature of the bindings. What happened when—but I won’t go on with these tiresome interrogatives. I will just recall to your memory what happened now and then when I saw in your hands a book about which, to express indefinitely my indefinite state of mind, I had my doubts. I just looked up from my table and said, “If I were you, I wouldn’t read that: it is rather dull and rather nasty”; or, “The only points about that book that have any merit are points you wouldn’t understand,” and, like the sensible girl you always were, you invariably put the books back in their shelves again. But I was not always in the library when you came there in search of literary refreshment, and once, only once, I remember I came upon you deep in a book about which I had no doubts at all. I noticed that you were rather more than half-way through it, and that you looked interested, though a little puzzled too. “Do you like that book?” I asked. “No—yes—perhaps—I don’t know—a little,” you stammered, and you blushed. Now, a blush does not in the least imply consciousness of guilt, or even of offence, as is commonly supposed. People blush not when they find themselves in the prisoner’s dock, but, rather, when they are in a tight corner; more often still when they believe themselves to be suspected of something of which they are entirely innocent. When you have to deal with a child, Alexa, and you accuse it of, or question it concerning, some little delinquency, don’t, should it stammer and blush, leap to the conclusion that it is guilty. But this is by the way. “Don’t you wish me to read this book; shall I put it back?” you asked. “Oh, you had better finish it,” I said, and turned away to my work. I did not explain to you then, but I tell you now, because it has a definite bearing on the subject in hand, that I knew that, having already got half-way through it, your interest was awakened and your curiosity excited, and I knew that in a young woman or in a young man either, for the matter of that, excited or only half-gratified curiosity is—well, I can’t use too strong a term, so I will say, the very devil—the most devilish of all the legion of devils that beset the path of youth. I felt sure, too, that if I forbade you the reading of the second half of that book you would attach undue importance to what you had learned from the first half. You would see the thing—the evil thing, let us frankly call it—exaggerated out of all true proportion. You would conceive it to be worse than it really was, you would believe that it played a greater part in life than as a fact it does. Moreover, I did not feel sure—for you were, thank God, a very human girl, that you would not come back to that book when I was not there, and finish it in private, and thus do your own soul a thousand times more harm by the deception than any undesirable knowledge you might acquire could possibly do you.

You tell me that your question to me arose out of a discussion which took place a few nights ago between your host, your fellow-guests, and yourself: that it began an hour after dinner and lasted well away beyond the usual bed-time. Let me congratulate you, Alexa, on staying with such sensible people as the Mauleverers, and on being one of several guests as intelligent as yourself. By “sensible people” I mean people who are able, and who like, to talk after dinner for more than five consecutive minutes on any subject under the sun. Such people in our, or in any other class, are rare, and are, I fancy, growing rarer. It can’t have escaped your intelligent observation, that ninety-nine-hundredths of the talk of to-day is about persons, and, as a rule, about uninteresting persons. The very fact that a subject is important, that it concerns us, that it has some bearing on our lives and thoughts, is sufficient to bar it out of what we ridiculously call “conversation.” Is anybody interested in anything? I often ask myself on my way home from a dinner or an evening out somewhere.