Letters to a daughter

by Hubert Bland

THE RIGHT SORT OF MAN

April 28, 19—.

My surprise is not nearly so great, my dear girlie, as you seemed to anticipate. I told you, you remember, that I was good at guessing, and I had already guessed this, or something very like this. All the same it is a blow, for a blow is none the less a blow because one sees it coming. Indeed, recollections of my sparring days seem to tell me that the blow you see coming, and from which you can escape neither by guard nor duck, is just about the nastiest of all.

Fate is a desperately skilled antagonist. It hammers us and hammers us, and knocks us out at last; but we do manage to get a punch or two back at someone or something now and then ... and that is good to remember. It is curious, isn’t it, that this letter of yours, the subject of which I suppose is Love, should have set me to write about fighting? And yet ... I don’t know ... they are never very far apart, Love and Strife, are they? Love is the great disintegrator, the breaker-up. See how he is coming between you and me now!

You are “not exactly engaged, but ...” I will not quote the end of your sentence, for I know how irritating it is to have one’s words given back to one. Well, it is good of you to refer the final word on the matter to me. Even the most unconventional woman does wisely at great crises to respect the established conventions. Her life is made easier, less stormy so. But there! It was unjust of me to say that. I will—no, will has nothing to do with it—I do believe that in leaving this, to you so intensely personal, matter still open, so that I may have my say on it, you have not been motived by a desire to do the right, the correct thing in such cases, but by a real belief and trust in me. You have done it not because it is always done, but because you are you, and I am I, and we are to each other what we are.

But because you and I and this Third, this Third to me so shadowy, yet so portentous, to you, so substantial, are going to do all the usual things, there is no reason why I should write them to you, is there? So I will not express my gratification and my hopes, and end with a stuffy little lecture inculcating a prudential course of conduct. I will practise up the heavy-father style so as to have it all perfect by the time he (no, I will not give him a capital “h,” though I note that you do) comes to see me. How I hope that at the first glimpse of him I shall feel that I may drop it. Does he expect a heavy father, I wonder. Well, if he does, he shall have one; be sure of that.

The first glimpse of him! And I haven’t had it yet! It is that which has given me this queer indescribable sensation of unreality from which I have been suffering ever since I opened your letter this morning. By the way I posted your other letter to your mother on to her at once; she is staying at Richmond until Friday. One always has that curious, empty feeling when one part of one’s mind fails to realise what another part of one’s mind tells one is a fact. It is thus we feel for the first few moments in the presence of death. We know that it has happened, but we can’t adjust our minds to the knowledge. So to-day with me. I know, or almost know, that your life, the life of all others ... but there, I will not be sentimental, so you fill in the rest ... but your life is to be dominated—well, if not dominated exactly, at anyrate directed for good or ill or half of each, by a man of whom I have never so much as caught sight, of whose very name I am ignorant.

Do you know that you forgot to mention his name? Not that it matters so long as it isn’t anything very distressing. I am not afraid of that, for you know the names to which I object, and which I would rather die than have my name connected with, and I remember that you share my prejudices. We both agreed, didn’t we, that Walter Pater was justified when he refused to vote a Fellowship at Oxford to a man named Juggins or something. So I take it for granted that your future name will be beyond the reach of æsthetic criticism. It ought to be a single syllable name, of course, so as to go rightly with Alexa. Christian names of two or three syllables should always be followed by a surname of one.

But I take it you have seen to that. You could not, I am sure, contemplate a life in which you would suffer from a spasm of artistic horror every time you signed your name.

Whatever he is you know well enough that I shall not be glad of him, don’t you? You know that I shall wish every time I see or think about him that he had never been born. You won’t mind that, because if it were not so you would feel that your father was not one of the right sort of men. Truly, I don’t believe that the right sort of men ever look forward to their daughter’s marriages with anything but fierce distaste. When it comes to the point, I mean. They wouldn’t like them not to be married, and they hate it when they are. From which you will gather what a mistake it is to be the right sort of man, and what supreme folly it is to beget daughters, anyway.

It is rum though, rum and inexplicable, that feeling of savage resentment one has against every other man who aspires to any sort of intimacy with any woman for whom one cares even a little. Of course, one says to oneself that it is because one feels that no other man is half good enough for her. It is quite astonishing how one can lie to oneself. I know, for instance, when I can get myself for a second or two into a reasonable mood, that there must be at least a hundred thousand or so of men in England, not to mention the rest of the world, who are quite half good enough for you, and yet I hate with an incandescent hatred the mere idea, the tenuous probability that you will some day be married. If he, the unnamed and unnamable, were to come into this room now I should, or at least should try to, break him up with my bare hands and send the fragments of him home in a cab.

It was Nero or Caligula, wasn’t it, who expressed the genial wish that humanity had only one head that he might cut it off? Well, I believe that at the bottom of every right-minded man’s heart there is a lurking wish that all femininity were compact and personified in one woman and that she might belong to him. “Turkish?” you smile. Oh, much more than Turkish; primitive rather.

I shall not kill him, Alexa. I shall probably be tremendously nice to him if he wears the right necktie. You might give him a hint about that. One never does do the things one most passionately desires to do—they are always so outrageous those passionately desired things.

Haven’t you often, when sitting at dinner, say, with a lot of depressingly correct people, ached and ached to rip out some hideous, impossible, unspeakable expression, just to watch their shocked, flabbergasted faces; and then to disappear for ever from the cognisance of man? I am sure you have; we all have. But you have never done it, thank heaven, and you know you never will. It is almost irresistible that impulse, isn’t it?

And yet we resist it every time. That is because we are sane. If we yielded we should be mad; that’s all. That is what sanity means, the power to resist the almost irresistible impulse. Well, I am sane, so far. I shall offer him my hand and a chair. Perhaps a cigar. I hope he smokes.

Oh yes, that reminds me. I must say just this. If he does not smoke and if he refuse wine at dinner in favour of water, or even of whisky and soda—a hateful decadent modern habit—then I will have none of him, Alexa, nor shall you. If the worst come to the worst, I will convince him by ocular and tactile demonstration that there is lunacy in our family, and I am quite certain that a fellow who neither smokes nor drinks wine will never have the hardihood or enterprise to face that. It is not that smoking or wine drinking (at dinner) are in themselves virtues, but they are indications of the only temperament and attitude towards life which are compatible with true virtue.

Mind, I will say nothing so widely embracing as that a non-smoker and non-wine drinker is not good for anybody—never mind what I think, but I will not say it. What I will say is that he would not be good enough for you; for one of us. His very presence at dinner and after would be a perpetual reproach, a constant criticism. And you would not like to be faced every evening by a criticism and a reproach.

A man who, in a world of good things, tobacco and wine and other things, abstains, is a man who makes exacting demands upon himself, and a man who makes exacting demands upon himself will inevitably make exacting demands upon his womankind.

And now, while I am about it, I may as well mention one or two other things, one or two other essentials which any man must possess before he can even begin to think of connecting his name with ours. By the way, it is you who will change your name, isn’t it? What an intolerable thought that is. He must be what the Scots call “gleg in the uptak’;” he must divine what you mean almost before you have said it, certainly before you have said it all. He must not, when you happen to speak a trifle elusively, stare at you blankly for half a minute or so, and then say, “I am afraid I don’t quite follow you,” or look it without saying it, perhaps the worst outrage of all, for the remark does at least imply a consciousness of inferiority and a sort of commendable humility.

A truly civilised woman, one of us, would rather live with a Zulu (assegais and all) who understood what she was after, than with a thing in up-and-down collars (and golf sticks) who was for ever asking her to explain herself. Heavens, how I know the look on the face of a woman after she has been married a year or two to that. No, the man who marries you must talk our language, think our thought, or there will be rocks ahead on which you and I and he will get ourselves badly grazed, not to say broken.

Then he must read and admire Henry James. I say must read, not must have read, for if he have not it may be only his misfortune and the fault not of him, but of his upbringing. The novels of Henry James (we have agreed, you remember) are the touchstone of the modern spirit. If a man can’t understand them, or gets bored by them, or wishes they were shorter or less involved, then that man, whatever else he may be, is not of us or even of our time. I would rather see my daughter mated to a megatherium than to a man who could not “make out,” as they put it, the novels of Henry James.

While I was on the subject of tobacco and wine I ought to have added that he must not be “anti” anything to any extent. Not anti-vaccination or anti-vivisection, or anti-clerical, or any of those things about which the faddist rages. I don’t mean that he may not have strong opinions, but he must not carry them to the point of being “anti.” When a man reaches that point it always seems to me he ceases to be human. A husband should be human.

And then—I had nearly forgotten this, that accursed feeling of unreality is so strong upon me to-day—he must be a man whom other women like and who likes all other women, or nearly all, all that count. I know, of course, that his voice changes and takes on another tone when he speaks to you. That is all right. But does it change and take on another tone when he speaks to the other girl? That’s the thing that matters. When he hands a—oh, well, a cup, let us say, to a woman, does he do it in an altogether different way to that in which he would hand a cigar-case to a man? If he doesn’t his wife will soon find herself wishing that he had never handed anything at all to her. A man’s love for “the one woman,” is after all only in a quintessential, concentrated form the emotion he has for all other women, the generalised thing particularised.

I don’t agree with the incorrect saying that reformed rakes make the best of husbands, but I do say that the man who has not in him the potentiality of rakehood should never be trusted with a wife.

But there! What does it all amount to? I write, but all the time I am writing I am conscious that for all practical purposes I might as well go and shoot peas at the sun as direct these wise observations at a girl in the first bloom of what they call love. Of course, I know well enough that just now you see in this intrusive Third all these qualities and attributes upon which I have been insisting. Or if you don’t you think they don’t matter; and that I don’t matter; and that even you don’t matter; that nothing matters but this new magic that bandages your eyes and carries honey to your lips. Could I have chosen for you I would have scaled the heights of heaven if haply I might bring down to you a god, and ... you would not have liked him dear. You would have asked for a man instead. And you would have been right, for you are not a goddess, but a girl and the heart of my heart:—

“And you must twine of common flowers

The wreath that happy women wear,

And bear in desolate darkened hours

The common griefs that all men bear.”

Write to me again soon. Come home soon, very soon. It is a long time that you have been away; twice as long since yesterday.

Your

Father.