Letters to a daughter

by Hubert Bland

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.