Letters to a daughter

by Hubert Bland

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.