Letters to a daughter

by Hubert Bland

THE GLAMOUR OF THE FOOTLIGHTS

Dec. 5, 19—.

My dear Alexa,—

I was delighted to get your long letter on Monday. It was just the sort of letter I like to have, from a woman especially: a letter with naught impersonal in it, full of the familiar and intimate turns of phrase. I fancied I could hear the very inflection of your voice here and there. That is the way to write; to write to a friend, I mean. Try hard to remember all the time that you are not writing to a newspaper, or labouring to produce what, at school, used to be called “a meritorious composition.” Avoid the cliché as you would the devil; nay, even more; for he, in some of his moods, might be interesting; the cliché is always tiresome. Your letter caught me in a moment of depression, one of those mopish moments which come upon me oftener than they should of late, and lie like shadows upon the spirit’s surface, turning to monotone what should be all iridescence. I went down into the breakfast-room and fired off an epigram. It is true I had already perfected and polished that epigram while I lay wakeful in the dead waste and middle of the night, but I should never have summoned energy enough to part with it so soon had it not been for your letter. It was not appreciated. The bacon had been served on a coldish dish. So you see you are responsible for that wilful waste of a good thing, Alexa; a thing that would have (and mayhap will yet) set the club smoking-room in a titter. At the breakfast-table it raised only an acidulous smile, the merest flicker. The family looked reprovingly at me for beginning the day so frivolously. Had you been there, now! That is one of your chiefest charms, my daughter, that is why I love you so; you always appreciate your father’s efforts to pervert the truth.

There was one thing in your letter that troubled me a little though, because I fancied I saw in it a symptom, a foreshadowing, so to speak, like the sore throat and little dry cough that herald an attack of scarlet fever. Do you remember when you had scarlet fever and what a pale ghost your father was for seven dreadful days until the danger was over and gone? Ah me! But as to this symptom. It was only two lines in which you said something—I don’t remember exactly what, and I have not your letter by me at the moment—about your “favourite actor.” You did not mention the fellow’s name, and I thank you for that. It has probably saved me from the crime of assassination. Think how disgusting it would have been! I don’t mean the assassination itself, that would have been jolly, but the newspaper boys bawling up and down the Strand, “Horrible murder of Cyril, or Claude, or Basil Somebody-or-other!” And your poor mother in tears at home; and then the squalid Old Bailey, and the glib counsel, and the solemn ass on the Bench, and the unsympathetic stodgers in the jury box. I feel I could never survive a criminal trial. My spirit would break through its fleshly casings, and flee away from the deadly commonplaceness of the thing before it was half over. Therefore in the days of your youth look not upon the mimes to admire them, Alexa, and bring not your father’s gray hairs in sorrow to the dock.

But to return to seriousness and that symptom I spoke of. I have noticed lately in several young women of your age, though I am glad to say not in you, an unsalutary tendency to exalt the mummer. I have heard them chatter to each other about him in the drawing-room, here; I am told (Jane tells me in fact, she tells me unblushingly) that they buy his photographs, sometimes as many as three or four of one of him in different costumes; that they stick these photographs up on their bedroom mantelpieces, and that in some desperate cases, they write him letters asking for his autograph, and even go the length of sending him flowers. Flowers! They had far better send onions.

I will not let myself think hardly of these maidens of our day. I feel I must recognise that after all they are but doing what the young males of their species always have done and still do. The glamour of the footlights has always tempted youth to make a donkey of itself. Young men of a like age talk actress over their cheap cigars, spend their sparse shillings on photographs of legs, and go the full length of their limited credit in flower shops. But, then, they are young men, you see, and that makes all the difference. It does, I assure you, and my fondest hope is that the discovery that it does may not come upon you as a shock. There may be no reason, “in justice,” why there should be one law for women and another for men, but just now there is, and if ever there isn’t what a deuce of a world it will be! Let me imagine an instance of what I mean. If a few years hence I were to come upon your brother John with his arm round a dairymaid (I shall not, for dairymaids are buried in the picturesque past) I should give him a talking to, but the amorous incident would not break my night’s rest. But if, oh my child—if I caught you kissing the postman! There, you see. I know quite well you are ill-treating that pretty mobile under-lip of yours at the indelicate suggestion. “Indelicate,” I feel sure that is the word you will use. And it is, that is just what I mean it to be. Well, there is something indelicate in this fuss about the actor fellow.

I don’t like doing it, but for once let me pose before you as laudator temporis acti. You were pretty good at Latin a year ago, and you still keep enough of it to translate that. I can’t conceal from myself that there has been a change, and a change not for the better, in the emotional atmosphere of the young woman; it has become soppy, stuffy; if I were to say sniffy I should not say too much, but I won’t say quite that. Young women have always fallen in love—I use the phrase in its widest, vaguest sense—with Man, with just the male creature. Had they not we should none of us be here, I suppose. When that nebulous emotion becomes more definite, concentrates itself and gets directed at a particular member of the species, it becomes Love, the real thing, the motive power of life, the subject matter of poetry, of drama, of legend, of art generally. But in its vague state it hovers over Man, just Man. Obviously it must be over Man in some more or less definite form. Well, now, what I wanted to say was this. Once upon a time, not so long ago either, young women “fell in love” with, made a fuss over, Man in his more heroic, more intensely masculine and vigorous aspects. It was the soldier, the sailor, the adventurer of all sorts, that appealed to their tenderest susceptibilities. Even the highwayman was held a romantic figure. Many a nice girl has tossed a bouquet or waved a damp pocket-handkerchief at a highwayman on his last drive to Tyburn Tree. Women upon whom one must not be too hard have before now eloped with their grooms. I say “upon whom one must not be too hard,” because after all grooming is a man’s trade. Personable prize-fighters, too, have had their share of delicate feminine attentions. Now all these types of manhood,—and, remember, it is the type more than the individual who first appeals to those vague unsettled amatory emotions we are talking about,—were male things who did something, something mostly that had danger in it, that called for a spice of hardihood, of courage, of some honest, manly, simple quality in the doing. Venus, you know, ’tis said, gave herself to Mars, and tried it on—the hussy—with a robust young hunter; but scandal does not connect even her name with a mummer’s!