Letters to a daughter

by Hubert Bland

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.