Chapter IV: Preface (3)

I believe in the promises of Nature. I believe that in every want there is the promise of a possible satisfaction. If we are hungry there is food somewhere, if we are thirsty there is drink. But in the things of the world there is often an indication of order rather than a realization of it, so that in the confusion of accidents the hungry man may be starving in a beleaguered city and the thirsty man parched in the Sahara. All that the wants indicate is that their satisfaction is possible in nature. Let us believe that, for every one, the true mate exists somewhere in the world. She is worth seeking for at any cost of trouble or expense, worth travelling round the globe to find, worth the endurance of labor and pain and privation. Men suffer all this for objects of far inferior importance; they risk life for the chance of a ribbon, and sacrifice leisure and peace for the smallest increase of social position. What are these vanities in comparison with the priceless benefit, the continual blessing, of having with you always the one person whose presence can deliver you from all the evils of solitude without imposing the constraints and hypocrisies of society? With her you are free to be as much yourself as when alone; you say what you think and she understands you. Your silence does not offend her; she only thinks that there will be time enough to talk together afterwards. You know that you can trust her love, which is as unfailing as a law of nature. The differences of idiosyncrasy that exist between you only add interest to your intercourse by preventing her from becoming a mere echo of yourself. She has her own ways, her own thoughts that are not yours and yet are all open to you, so that you no longer dwell in one intellect only but have constant access to a second intellect, probably more refined and elegant, richer in what is delicate and beautiful. There you make unexpected discoveries; you find that the first instinctive preference is more than justified by merits that you had not divined. You had hoped and trusted vaguely that there were certain qualities; but as a painter who looks long at a natural scene is constantly discovering new beauties whilst he is painting it, so the long and loving observation of a beautiful human mind reveals a thousand unexpected excellences. Then come the trials of life, the sudden calamities, the long and wearing anxieties. Each of these will only reveal more clearly the wonderful endurance, fidelity, and fortitude that there is in every noble feminine nature, and so build up on the foundation of your early love an unshakable edifice of esteem and respect and love commingled, for which in our modern tongue we have no single term, but which our forefathers called "worship."

ESSAY V.

FAMILY TIES.

One of the most remarkable differences between the English and some of the Continental nations is the comparative looseness of family ties in England. The apparent difference is certainly very great; the real difference is possibly not so great. It may be that a good deal of that warm family affection which we are constantly hearing of in France is only make-believe, but the keeping-up of a make-believe is often favorable to the reality. In England a great deal of religion is mere outward form; but to be surrounded by the constant observance of outward form is a great practical convenience to the genuine religious sentiment where it exists.

In boyhood we suppose that all gentlemen of mature age who happen to be brothers must naturally have fraternal feelings; in mature life we know the truth, having discovered that there are many brothers between whom no sentiment of fraternity exists. A foreigner who knows England well, and has observed it more carefully than we ourselves do, remarked to me that the fraternal relationship is not generally a cause of attachment in England, though there may be cases of exceptional affection. It certainly often happens that brothers live contentedly apart and do not seem to feel the need of intercourse, or that such intercourse as they have has no appearance of cordiality. A very common cause of estrangement is a natural difference of class. One man is so constituted as to feel more at ease in a higher class, and he rises; his brother feels more at ease in a lower class, adopts its manners, and sinks. After a few years have passed the two will have acquired such different habits, both of thinking and living, that they will be disqualified for equal intercourse. If one brother is a gentleman in tastes and manners and the other not a gentleman, the vulgarity of the coarser nature will be all the more offensive to the refined one that there is the troublesome consciousness of a very near relationship and of a sort of indefinite responsibility.

The frequency of coolness between brothers surprises us less when we observe how widely they may differ from each other in mental and physical constitution. One may be a sportsman, traveller, man of the world; another a religious recluse. One may have a sensitive, imaginative nature and be keenly alive to the influences of literature, painting, and music; his brother may be a hard, practical man of business, with a conviction that an interest in literary and artistic pursuits is only a sign of weakness.

The extreme uncertainty that always exists about what really constitutes suitableness is seen as much between brothers as between other men; for we sometimes see a beautiful fraternal affection between brothers who seem to have nothing whatever in common, and sometimes an equal affection appears to be founded upon likeness.

Jealousy in its various forms is especially likely to arise between brothers, and between sisters also for the same reason, which is that comparisons are constantly suggested and even made with injudicious openness by parents and teachers, and by talkative friends. The development of the faculties in youth is always extremely interesting, and is a constant subject of observation and speculation. If it is interesting to on-lookers, it is still more likely to be so to the young persons most concerned. They feel as young race-horses might be expected to feel towards each other if they could understand the conversations of trainers, stud-owners, and grooms.

If a full account of family life could be generally accessible, if we could read autobiographies written by the several members of the same family, giving a sincere and independent account of their own youth, it would probably be found in most cases that jealousies were easily discoverable. They need not be very intense to create a slight fissure of separation that may be slowly widened afterwards.

If you listen attentively to the conversation of brothers about brothers, of sisters about sisters, you will probably detect such little jealousies without difficulty. "My sister," said a lady in my hearing, "was very much admired when she was young, _but she aged prematurely_." Behind this it was easy to read the comparison with self, with a constitution less attractive to others but more robust and durable, and there was a faint reverberation of girlish jealousy about attentions paid forty years before.

The jealousies of youth are too natural to deserve any serious blame, but they may be a beginning of future coolness. A boy will seem to praise the talents of his brother with the purpose of implying that the facilities given by such talents make industry almost superfluous, whilst his own more strenuous efforts are not appreciated as they deserve. Instead of soothing and calming these natural jealousies some parents irritate and inflame them. They make wounding remarks that produce evil in after years. I have seen a sensitive boy wince under cutting sarcasms that he will remember till his hair is gray.

If there are fraternal jealousies in boyhood, when the material comforts and the outward show of existence are the same for brothers, much more are these jealousies likely to be accentuated in after-life, when differences of worldly success, or of inherited fortune, establish distinctions so obvious as to be visible to all. The operation of the aristocratic custom by which eldest sons are made very much richer than their brethren can scarcely be in favor of fraternal intimacy. No general rule can be established, because characters differ so widely. An eldest brother _may_ be so amiable, so truly fraternal, that the cadets instead of feeling envy of his wealth may take a positive pride in it; still, the natural effect of creating such a vast inequality is to separate the favored heir from the less-favored younger sons. I leave the reader to think over instances that may be known to him. Amongst those known to me I find several cases of complete or partial suspension of intercourse and others of manifest indifference and coolness. One incident recurs to my memory after a lapse of thirty years. I was present at the departure of a young friend for India when his eldest brother was too indifferent to get up a little earlier to see him off, and said, "Oh, you're going, are you? Well, good-by, John!" through his bedroom door. The lad carried a wound in his heart to the distant East.

There is nothing in the mere fact of fraternity to establish friendship. The line of "In Memoriam,"--

"More than my brothers are to me,"

is simply true of every real friend, unless friendship adds itself to brotherhood, in which case the intimacy arising from a thousand details of early life in common, from the thorough knowledge of the same persons and places, and from the memories of parental affection, must give a rare completeness to friendship itself and make it in these respects even superior to marriage, which has the great defect that the associations of early life are not the same. I remember a case of wonderfully strong affection between two brothers who were daily companions till death separated them; but they were younger sons and their incomes were exactly alike; their tastes, too, and all their habits were the same. The only other case that occurs to me as comparable to this one was also of two younger sons, one of whom had an extraordinary talent for business. They were partners in trade, and no dissension ever arose between them, because the superiority of the specially able man was affectionately recognized and deferred to by the other. If, however, they had not been partners it is possible that the brilliant success of one brother might have created a contrast and made intercourse more constrained.

The case of John Bright and his brother may be mentioned, as he has made it public in one of his most charming and interesting speeches. His political work has prevented him from laboring in his business, but his brother and partner has affectionately considered him an active member of the firm, so that Mr. Bright has enjoyed an income sufficient for his political independence. In this instance the comparatively obscure brother has shown real nobility of nature. Free from the jealousy and envy which would have vexed a small mind in such a position he has taken pleasure in the fame of the statesman. It is easy to imagine the view that a mean mind would have taken of a similar situation. Let us add that the statesman himself has shown true fraternal generosity of another kind, and perhaps of a more difficult kind, for it is often easier to confer an obligation than to accept it heartily.

It has often been a subject of astonishment to me that between very near relations a sensitive feeling about pecuniary matters should be so lively as it is. I remember an instance in the last generation of a rich man in Cheshire who made a present of ten thousand pounds to a lady nearly related to him. He was very wealthy, she was not; the sum would never be missed by him, whilst to her it made a great difference. What could be more reasonable than such a correction of the inequalities of fortune? Many people would have refused the present, out of pride, but it was much kinder to accept it in the same good spirit that dictated the offer. On the other hand, there are poor gentlefolks whose only fault is a sense of independence, so _farouche_ that nobody can get them to accept anything of importance, and any good that is done to them has to be plotted with consummate art.

A wonderful light is thrown upon family relations when we become acquainted with the real state of those family pecuniary transactions that are not revealed to the public. The strangest discovery is the widely different ways in which pecuniary obligations are estimated by different persons, especially by different women. Men, I believe, take them rather more equally; but as women go by sentiment they have a tendency to extremes, either exaggerating the importance of an obligation when they like to feel very much obliged, or else adopting the convenient theory that the generous person is fulfilling a simple duty, and that there is no obligation whatever. One woman will go into ecstasies of gratitude because a brother makes her a present of a few pounds; and another will never thank a benefactor who allows her, year by year, an annuity far larger than is justified by his precarious professional income. In one real case a lady lived for many years on her brother's generosity and was openly hostile to him all the time. After her death it was found that she had insulted him in her will. In another case a sister dependent on her brother's bounty never thanked him or even acknowledged the receipt of a sum of money, but if the money was not sent to the day she would at once write a sharp letter full of bitter reproaches for his neglect. The marvel is the incredible patience with which toiling men will go on sending the fruits of their industry to relations who do not even make a pretence of affection.

A frequent cause of hostility between very near relations is the _restriction_ of generosity. So long as you set no limit to your giving it is well, you are doing your duty; but the moment you fix a limit the case is altered; then all past sacrifices go for nothing, your glory has set in gloom, and you will be considered as more niggardly than if you had not begun to be generous. Here is a real case, out of many. A man makes bad speculations, but conceals the full extent of his losses, and by the influence of his wife obtains important sums from a near relation of hers who half ruins himself to save her. When the full disaster is known the relation stops short and declines to ruin himself entirely; she then bitterly reproaches him for his selfishness. A very short time before writing the present Essay I was travelling, and met an old friend, a bachelor of limited means but of a most generous disposition, the kindest and most affectionate nature I ever knew in the male sex. I asked for news about his brother. "I never see him now; a coldness has sprung up between us."--"It must be his fault, then, for I am sure it did not originate with you."--"The truth is, he got into money difficulties, so I gave him a thousand pounds. He thought that under the circumstances I ought to have done more and broke off all intercourse. I really believe that if I had given him nothing we should have been more friendly at this day."

The question how far we are bound to allow family ties to regulate our intercourse is not easily treated in general terms, though it seems plainer in particular cases. Here is one for the reader's consideration.

Owing to natural refinement, and to certain circumstances of which he intelligently availed himself, one member of a family is a cultivated gentleman, whose habitual ways of thinking are of rather an elevated kind, and whose manners and language are invariably faultless. He is blessed with very near relations whose principal characteristic is loud, confident, overwhelming vulgarity. He is always uncomfortable with these relations. He knows that the ways of thinking and speaking which are natural to him will seem cold and uncongenial to them; that not one of his thoughts can be exactly understood by them; that his deficiency in what they consider heartiness is a defect he cannot get over. On the other hand, he takes no interest in what they say, because their opinions on all the subjects he cares about are too crude, and their information too scanty or erroneous. If he said what he felt impelled to say, all his talk would be a perpetual correction of their clumsy blunders. He has, therefore, no resource but to repress himself and try to act a part, the part of a pleased companion; but this is wearisome, especially if prolonged. The end is that he keeps out of their way, and is set down as a proud, conceited person, and an unkind relative. In reality he is simply refined and has a difficulty in accommodating himself to the ways of all vulgar society whatever, whether composed of his own relations or of strangers. Does he deserve to be blamed for this? Certainly not. He has not the flexibility, the dramatic power, to adapt himself to a lower state of civilization; that is his only fault. His relations are persons with whom, if they were not relations, nobody would expect him to associate; but because he and they happen to be descended from a common ancestor he is to maintain an impossible intimacy. He wishes them no harm; he is ready to make sacrifices to help them; his misfortune is that he does not possess the humor of a Dickens that would have enabled him to find amusement in their vulgarity, and he prefers solitude to that infliction.

There is a French proverb, "Les cousins ne sont pas parents." The exact truth would appear to be rather that cousins are relations or not just as it pleases them to acknowledge the relationship, and according to the natural possibilities of companionship between the parties. If they are of the same class in society (which does not always happen), and if they have pursuits in common or can understand each other's interests, and if there is that mysterious suitableness which makes people like to be together, then the fact of cousinship is seized upon as a convenient pretext for making intercourse more frequent, more intimate, and more affectionate; but if there is nothing to attract one cousin to another the relationship is scarcely acknowledged. Cousins are, or are not, relations just as they find it agreeable to themselves. It need hardly be added that it is a general though not an invariable rule that the relationship is better remembered on the humbler side. The cousinly degree may be felt to be very close under peculiar circumstances. An only child looks to his cousins for the brotherly and sisterly affection that fate has denied him at home, and he is not always disappointed. Even distant cousins may be truly fraternal, just as first cousins may happen to be very distant, the relationship is so variable and elastic in its nature.

Unmarried people have often a great vague dread of their future wife's relations, even when the lady has not yet been fixed upon, and married people have sometimes found the reality more terrible even than their gloomy anticipation. And yet it may happen that some of these dreaded new relations will be unexpectedly valuable and supply elements that were grievously wanting. They may bring new life into a dull house, they may enliven the sluggish talk with wit and information, they may take a too thoughtful and studious man out of the weary round of his own ideas. They may even in course of time win such a place in one's affection that if they are taken away by death they will leave a great void and an enduring sorrow. I write these lines from a sweet and sad experience.[5]

Intellectual men are, more than others, liable to a feeling of dissatisfaction with their relations because they want intellectual sympathy and interest, which relations hardly ever give. The reason is extremely simple. Any special intellectual pursuit is understood only by a small select class of its own, and our relations are given us out of the general body of society without any selection, and they are not very numerous, so that the chances against our finding intellectual sympathy amongst them are calculably very great. As we grow older we get accustomed to this absence of sympathy with our pursuits, and take it as a matter of course; but in youth it seems strange that what we feel and know to be so interesting should have no interest for those nearest to us. Authors sometimes feel a little hurt that their nearest relations will not read their books, and are but dimly aware that they have written any books at all; but do they read books of the same class by other writers? As an author you are in the same position that other authors occupy, but with this difference, which is against you, that familiarity has made you a commonplace person in your own circle, and that is a bad opening for the reception of your higher thoughts. This want of intellectual sympathy does not prevent affection, and we ought to appreciate affection at its full value in spite of it. Your brother or your cousin may be strongly attached to you personally, with an old love dating from your boyhood, but he may separate _you_ (the human creature that he knows) from the author of your books, and not feel the slightest curiosity about the books, believing that he knows you perfectly without them, and that they are only a sort of costume in which you perform before the public. A female relative who has given up her mind to the keeping of some clergyman, may scrupulously avoid your literature in order that it may not contaminate her soul, and yet she may love you still in a painful way and be sincerely sorry that you have no other prospect but that of eternal punishment.

I have sometimes heard the question proposed whether relations or friends were the more valuable as a support and consolation. Fate gives us our relations, whilst we select our friends; and therefore it would seem at first sight that the friends must be better adapted for us; but it may happen that we have not selected with great wisdom, or that we have not had good opportunities for making a choice really answering to our deepest needs. Still, there must have been mutual affinity of some kind to make a friendship, whilst relations are all like tickets in a lottery. It may therefore be argued that the more relations we have, the better, because we are more likely to meet with two or three to love us amongst fifty than amongst five.

The peculiar peril of blood-relationship is that those who are closely connected by it often permit themselves an amount of mutual rudeness (especially in the middle and lower classes) which they never would think of inflicting upon a stranger. In some families people really seem to suppose that it does not matter how roughly they treat each other. They utter unmeasured reproaches about trifles not worth a moment's anger; they magnify small differences that only require to be let alone and forgotten, or they relieve the monotony of quarrels with an occasional fit of the sulks. Sometimes it is an irascible father who is always scolding, sometimes a loud-tongued matron shrieks "in her fierce volubility." Some children take up the note and fire back broadside for broadside; others wait for a cessation in contemptuous silence and calmly disregard the thunder. Family life indeed! domestic peace and bliss! Give me, rather, the bachelor's lonely hearth with a noiseless lamp and a book! The manners of the ill-mannered are never so odious, unbearable, exasperating, as they are to their own nearest kindred. How is a lad to enjoy the society of his mother if she is perpetually "nagging" and "nattering" at him? How is he to believe that his coarse father has a tender anxiety for his welfare when everything that he does is judged with unfatherly harshness? Those who are condemned to live with people for whom scolding and quarrelling are a necessary of existence must either be rude in self-defence or take refuge in a sullen and stubborn taciturnity. Young people who have to live in these little domestic hells look forward to any change as a desirable emancipation. They are ready to go to sea, to emigrate. I have heard of one who went into domestic service under a feigned name that he might be out of the range of his brutal father's tongue.

The misery of uncongenial relations is caused mainly by the irksome consciousness that they are obliged to live together. "To think that there is so much space upon the earth, that there are so many houses, so many rooms, and yet that I am so unfortunate as to be compelled to live in the same lodging with this uncivilized, ill-conditioned fellow! To think that there are such vast areas of tranquil silence, and yet that I am compelled to hear the voice of that scolding woman!" This is the feeling, and the relief would be temporary separation. In this, as in almost everything that concerns human intercourse, the rich have an immense advantage, as they can take only just so much of each other's society as they find by experience to be agreeable. They can quietly, and without rudeness, avoid each other by living in different houses, and even in the same house they can have different apartments and be very little together. Imagine the difference between two rich brothers, each with his suite of rooms in a separate tower of the paternal castle, and two very poor ones, inconveniently occupying the same narrow, uncomfortable bed, and unable to remain in the wretched paternal tenement without being constantly in each other's way. Between these extremes are a thousand degrees of more or less inconvenient nearness. Solitude is bad for us, but we need a margin of free space. If we are to be crowded let it be as the stars are crowded. They look as if they were huddled together, but every one of them has his own clear space in the illimitable ether.

ESSAY VI.

FATHERS AND SONS.

There is a certain unsatisfactoriness in this relation in our time which is felt by fathers and often avowed by them when they meet, though it does not occupy any conspicuous place in the literature of life and manners. It has been fully treated by M. Legouvé, the French Academician, in his own lively and elegant way; but he gave it a volume, and I must here confine myself to the few points which can be dealt with in the limits of a short Essay.

We are in an interregnum between two systems. The old system, founded on the stern authority of the father, is felt to be out of harmony with the amenity of general social intercourse in modern times and also with the increasing gentleness of political governors and the freedom of the governed. It is therefore, by common consent, abandoned. Some new system that may be founded upon a clear intelligence of both the paternal and the filial relations has yet to come into force. Meanwhile, we are trying various experiments, suggested by the different characters and circumstances of fathers and sons, each father trying his own experiments, and we communicate to each other such results as we arrive at.

It is obvious that the defect here is the absence of a settled public opinion to which both parties would feel bound to defer. Under the old system the authority of the father was efficiently maintained, not only by the laws, but by that general consensus of opinion which is far more powerful than law. The new system, whatever it may be, will be founded on general opinion again, but our present experimental condition is one of anarchy.

This is the real cause of whatever may be felt as unsatisfactory in the modern paternal and filial relations. It is not that fathers have become more unjust or sons more rebellious.

The position of the father was in old times perfectly defined. He was the commander, not only armed by the law but by religion and custom. Disobedience to his dictates was felt to be out of the question, unless the insurgent was prepared to meet the consequences of open mutiny. The maintenance of the father's authority depended only on himself. If he abdicated it through indolence or weakness he incurred moral reprobation not unmingled with contempt, whilst in the present day reprobation would rather follow a new attempt to vindicate the antique authority.

Besides this change in public opinion there is a new condition of paternal feeling. The modern father, in the most civilized nations and classes, has acquired a sentiment that appears to have been absolutely unknown to his predecessors: he has acquired a dislike for command which increases with the age of the son; so that there is an unfortunate coincidence of increasing strength of will on the son's part with decreasing disposition to restrain it on the father's part. What a modern father really desires is that a son should go right of his own accord, and if not quite of his own accord, then in consequence of a little affectionate persuasion. This feeling would make command unsatisfactory to us, even if it were followed by a military promptitude of obedience. We do not wish to be like captains, and our sons like privates in a company; we care only to exercise a certain beneficent influence over them, and we feel that if we gave military orders we should destroy that peculiar influence which is of the most fragile and delicate nature.

But now see the unexpected consequences of our modern dislike to command! It might be argued that there is a certain advantage on our side from the very rarity of the commands we give, which endows them with extraordinary force. Would it not be more accurate to say that as we give orders less and less our sons become unaccustomed to receive orders from us, and if ever the occasion arises when we _must_ give them a downright order it comes upon their feelings with a harshness so excessive that they are likely to think us tyrannical, whereas if we had kept up the old habits of command such orders would have seemed natural and right, and would not have been less scrupulously obeyed?

The paternal dislike to give orders personally has had a peculiar effect upon education. We are not yet quite imbecile enough to suppose that discipline can be entirely dispensed with; and as there is very little of it in modern houses it has to be sought elsewhere, so boys are placed more and more completely under the authority of schoolmasters, often living at such a distance from the father of the family that for several months at a time he can exercise no direct influence or authority over his own children. This leads to the establishment of a peculiar boyish code of justice. Boys come to think it not unjust that the schoolmaster should exercise authority, when if the father attempted to exercise authority of equal rigor, or anything approaching it, they would look upon him as an odious domestic tyrant, entirely forgetting that any power to enforce obedience which is possessed by the schoolmaster is held by him vicariously as the father's representative and delegate. From this we arrive at the curious and unforeseen conclusion that the modern father only exercises _strong_ authority through another person who is often a perfect stranger and whose interest in the boy's present and future well-being is as nothing in comparison with the father's anxious and continual solicitude.

The custom of placing the education of sons entirely in the hands of strangers is so deadly a blow to parental influence that some fathers have resolutely rebelled against it and tried to become themselves the educators of their children. James Mill is the most conspicuous instance of this, both for persistence and success. His way of educating his illustrious son has often been coarsely misrepresented as a merciless system of cram. The best answer to this is preserved for us in the words of the pupil himself. He said expressly: "Mine was not an education of cram," and that the one cardinal point in it, the cause of the good it effected, was that his father never permitted anything he learnt to degenerate into a mere exercise of memory. He greatly valued the training he had received, and fully appreciated its utility to him in after-life. "If I have accomplished anything," he says, "I owe it, amongst other fortunate circumstances, to the fact that through the early training bestowed on me by my father I started, I may fairly say, with an advantage of a quarter of a century over my contemporaries."

But though in this case the pupil's feeling in after-life was one of gratitude, it may be asked what were his filial sentiments whilst this paternal education was going forward. This question also is clearly and frankly answered by Stuart Mill himself. He says that his father was severe; that his authority was deficient in the demonstration of tenderness, though probably not in the reality of it; that "he resembled most Englishmen in being ashamed of the signs of feeling, and by the absence of demonstration starving the feelings themselves." Then the son goes on to say that it was "impossible not to feel true pity for a father who did, and strove to do, so much for his children, who would have so valued their affection, yet who must have been constantly feeling that fear of him was drying it up at its source." And we probably have the exact truth about Stuart Mill's own sentiments when he says that the younger children loved his father tenderly, "and if I cannot say so much of myself I was always loyally devoted to him."

This contains the central difficulty about paternal education. If the choice were left to boys they would learn nothing, and you cannot make them work vigorously "by the sole force of persuasion and soft words." Therefore a severe discipline has to be established, and this severity is incompatible with tenderness; so that in order to preserve the affection of his children the father intrusts discipline to a delegate.

But if the objection to parental education is clear in Mill's case, so are its advantages, and especially the one inestimable advantage that the father was able to impress himself on his son's mind and to live afterwards in his son's intellectual life. James Mill did not _abdicate_, as fathers generally do. He did not confine paternal duties to the simple one of signing checks. And if it is not in our power to imitate him entirely, if we have not his profound and accurate knowledge, if we have not his marvellous patience, if it is not desirable that we should take upon ourselves alone that immense responsibility which he accepted, may we not imitate him to such a degree as to secure _some_ intellectual and moral influence over our own offspring and not leave them entirely to the teaching of the schoolfellow (that most influential and most dangerous of all teachers), the pedagogue, and the priest?

The only practical way in which this can be done is for the father to act within fixed limits. May he not reserve to himself some speciality? He can do this if he is himself master of some language or science that enters into the training of his son; but here again certain difficulties present themselves.

By the one vigorous resolution to take the entire burden upon his own shoulders James Mill escaped minor embarrassments. It is the _partial_ education by the father that is difficult to carry out with steadiness and consistency. First, as to place of residence. If your son is far away during his months of work, and at home only for vacation pleasures, what, pray, is your hold upon him? He escapes from you in two directions, by work and by play. I have seen a Highland gentleman who, to avoid this and do his duty to his sons, quitted a beautiful residence in magnificent scenery to go and live in the dull and ugly neighborhood of Rugby. It is not convenient or possible for every father to make the same sacrifice, but if you are able to do it other difficulties remain. Any speciality that you may choose will be regarded by your son as a trifling and unimportant accomplishment in comparison with Greek and Latin, because that is the school estimate; and if you choose either Greek or Latin your scholarship will be immediately pitted against the scholarship of professional teachers whose more recent and more perfect methods will place you in a position of inferiority, instantly perceived by your pupil, who will estimate you accordingly. The only two cases I have ever personally known in which a father taught the classical languages failed in the object of increasing the son's affection and respect, because, although the father had been quite a first-rate scholar in his time, his ways of teaching were not so economical of effort as are the professional ways; and the boys perceived that they were not taking the shortest cut to a degree.

If, to avoid this comparison, you choose something outside the school curriculum, the boy will probably consider it an unfair addition to the burden of his work. His view of education is not your view. _You_ think it a valuable training or acquirement; _he_ considers it all task-work, like the making of bricks in Egypt; and his notion of justice is that he ought not to be compelled to make more bricks than his class-fellows, who are happy in having fathers too indolent or too ignorant to trouble them. If, therefore, you teach him something outside of what his school-fellows do, he does not think, "I get the advantage of a wider education than theirs;" but he thinks, "My father lays an imposition upon me, and my school-fellows are lucky to escape it."

In some instances the father chooses a modern language as the thing that he will teach; but he finds that as he cannot apply the school discipline (too harsh and unpaternal for use at home), there is a quiet, passive resistance that will ultimately defeat him unless he has inexhaustible patience. He decrees, let us suppose, that French shall be spoken at table; but the chief effect of his decree is to reveal great and unsuspected powers of taciturnity. Who could be such a tyrant as to find fault with a boy because he so modestly chooses to be silent? Speech may be of silver, but silence is of gold, and it is especially beautiful and becoming in the young.

Seeing that everything in the way of intellectual training is looked upon by boys as an unfair addition to school-work, some fathers abandon that altogether, and try to win influence over their sons by initiating them into sports and pastimes. Just at first these happy projects appear to unite the useful with the agreeable; but as the youthful nature is much better fitted for sports and pastimes than middle-age can pretend to be, it follows that the pupil very soon excels the master in these things, and quite gets the upper hand of him and offers him advice, or else dutifully (but with visible constraint) condescends to accommodate himself to the elder man's inferiority; so that perhaps upon the whole it may be that sports and pastimes are not the field of exertion in which paternal authority is most likely to preserve a dignified preponderance.

It is complacently assumed by men of fifty that over-ripe maturity is the superior of adolescence; but an impartial balance of advantages shows that some very brilliant ones are on the side of youth. At fifty we may be wiser, richer, more famous than a clever boy; but he does not care much for our wisdom, he thinks that expenses are a matter of course, and our little rushlights of reputations are as nothing to the future electric illumination of his own. In bodily activity we are to boyhood what a domestic cow is to a wild antelope; and as boys rightly attach an immense value to such activity they generally look upon us, in their secret thoughts, as miserable old "muffs." I distinctly remember, when a boy, accompanying a middle-aged gentleman to a country railway station. We were a little late, and the distance was long, but my companion could not be induced to go beyond his regular pace. At last we were within half a mile, and the steam of the locomotive became visible. "Now let us run for it," I cried, "and we shall catch the train!" Run?--_he_ run, indeed! I might as well have asked the Pope to run in the streets of Rome! My friend kept in silent solemnity to his own dignified method of motion, and we were left behind. To this day I well remember the feelings of contemptuous pity and disgust that filled me as I looked upon that most respectable gentleman. I said not a word; my demeanor was outwardly decorous; but in my secret heart I despised my unequal companion with the unmitigated contempt of youth.

Even those physical exertions that elderly men are equal to--the ten miles' walk, the ride on a docile hunter, the quiet drive or sail--are so much below the achievements of fiery youth that they bring us no more credit than sitting in a chair. Though our efforts seem so respectable to ourselves that we take a modest pride therein, a young man can only look upon them with indulgence.

In the mental powers elderly men are inferior on the very point that a young man looks to first. His notion of cleverness, by which he estimates all his comrades, is not depth of thought, nor wisdom, nor sagacity; it is simply rapidity in learning, and there his elders are hopelessly behind him. They may extend or deepen an old study, but they cannot attack a new one with the conquering spirit of youth. _Too late! too late! too late!_ is inscribed, for them, on a hundred gates of knowledge. The young man, with his powers of acquisition urging him like unsatisfied appetites, sees the gates all open and believes they are open for him. He believes all knowledge to be his possible province, knowing not yet the chilling, disheartening truth that life is too short for success in any but a very few directions. Confident in his powers, the young man prepares himself for difficult examinations, and he knows that we should be incapable of the same efforts.

Not having succeeded very well with attempts to create intercourse through studies and amusements, the father next consoles himself with the idea that he will convert his son into an intimate friend; but shortly discovers that there are certain difficulties, of which a few may be mentioned here.

Although the relationship between father and son is a very near relationship, it may happen that there is but little likeness of inherited idiosyncrasy, and therefore that the two may have different and even opposite tastes. By the law or accident of atavism a boy may resemble one of his grandfathers or some remoter ancestor, or he may puzzle theorists about heredity by characteristics for which there is no known precedent in his family. Both his mental instincts and processes, and the conclusions to which they lead him, may be entirely different from the habits and conclusions of his father; and if the father is so utterly unphilosophical as to suppose (what vulgar fathers constantly _do_ suppose) that his own mental habits and conclusions are the right ones, and all others wrong, then he will adopt a tone of authority towards his son, on certain occasions, which the young man will excusably consider unbearable and which he will avoid by shunning the paternal society. Even a very mild attempt on the father's part to impose his own tastes and opinions will be quietly resented and felt as a reason for avoiding him, because the son is well aware that he cannot argue on equal terms with a man who, however amiable he chooses to be for the moment, can at any time arm himself with the formidable paternal dignity by simply taking the trouble to assume it.

The mere difference of age is almost an insuperable barrier to comradeship; for though a middle-aged man may be cheerful, his cheerfulness is "as water unto wine" in comparison with the merriment of joyous youth. So exuberant is that youthful gayety that it often needs to utter downright nonsense for the relief of its own high spirits, and feels oppressed in sober society where nonsense is not permitted. Any elderly gentleman who reads this has only to consult his own recollections, and ask himself whether in youth he did not often say and do utterly irrational things. If he never did, he never was really young. I hardly know any author, except Shakspeare, who has ventured to reproduce, in its perfect absurdity, the full flow of youthful nonsense. The criticism of our own age would scarcely tolerate it in books, and might accuse the author himself of being silly; but the thing still exists abundantly in real life, and the wonder is that it is sometimes the most intelligent young men who enjoy the most witless nonsense of all. When we have lost the high spirits that gave it a relish, it becomes very wearisome if prolonged. Young men instinctively know that we are past the appreciation of it.

Another very important reason why fathers and sons have a difficulty in maintaining close friendships is the steady divergence of their experience.

In childhood, the father's knowledge of places, people, and things includes the child's knowledge, as a large circle includes a little one drawn within it. Afterwards the boy goes to school, and has comrades and masters whom his father does not personally know. Later on, he visits many places where his father has never been.

The son's life may socially diverge so completely from that of the father that he may really come to belong to a different class in society. His education, habits, and associates may be different from those of his father. If the family is growing richer they are likely to be (in the worldly sense) of a higher class; if it is becoming poorer they will probably be of a lower class than the father was accustomed to in his youth. The son may feel more at ease than his father does in very refined society, or, on the other hand, he may feel refined society to be a restraint, whilst he only enjoys himself thoroughly and heartily amongst vulgar people that his father would carefully avoid.

Divergence is carried to its utmost by difference of professional training, and by the professional habit of seeing things that follows from it. If a clergyman puts his son into a solicitor's office, he need not expect that the son will long retain those views of the world that prevail in the country parsonage where he was born. He will acquire other views, other mental habits, and he will very soon believe himself to possess a far greater and more accurate knowledge of mankind, and of affairs, than his father ever possessed.

Even if the son is in the father's own profession he will have new views of it derived from the time at which he learns it, and he is likely to consider his father's ideas as not brought down to the latest date. He will also have a tendency to look to strangers as greater authorities than his father, even when they are really on the same level, because they are not lowered in his estimate by domestic intimacy and familiarity. Their opinion will be especially valued by the young man if it has to be paid for, it being an immense depreciation of the paternal counsel that it is always given gratuitously.

If the father has bestowed upon his son what is considered a "complete" education, and if he himself has not received the same "complete" education in his youth, the son is likely to accept the conventional estimate of education because it is in his own favor, and to estimate his father as an "uneducated" or a "half-educated" man, without taking into much account the possibility that his father may have developed his faculties by mental labor in other ways. The conventional division between "educated" and "uneducated" men is so definite that it is easily seen. The educated are those who have taken a degree at one of the Universities; the rest are uneducated, whatever may be their attainments in the sciences, in modern languages, or in the fine arts.

There are differences of education even more serious than this, because more real. A man may be not only conventionally uneducated, but he may be really and truly uneducated, by which I mean that his faculties may never have been drawn out by intellectual discipline of any kind whatever. It is hard indeed for a well-educated young man to live under the authority of a father of that kind, because he has constantly to suppress reasons and motives for opinions and decisions that such a father could not possibly enter into or understand. The relationship is equally hard for the father, who must be aware, with the lively suspicion of the ignorant, that his son is not telling him all his thought but only the portion of it which he thinks fit to reveal, and that much more is kept in reserve. He will ask, "Why this reserve towards _me_?" and then he will either be profoundly hurt and grieved by it at times, or else, if of another temper, he will be irritated, and his irritation may find harsh utterance in words.

An educated man can never rid himself of his education. His views of the most ordinary things are different from the views of the uneducated. If he were to express them in his own language they would say, "Why, how he talks!" and consider him "a queer chap;" and if he keeps them to himself they say he is very "close" and "shut up." There is no way out of the dilemma except this, that kind and tender feelings may exist between people who have nothing in common intellectually, but these are only possible when all pretence to paternal authority is abandoned.

Our forefathers had an idea with regard to the opinions of their children that in these days we must be content to give up. They thought that all opinions were by nature hereditary, and it was considered an act of disloyalty to ancestors if a descendant ventured to differ from them. The profession of any but the family opinions was so rare as to be almost inconceivable; and if in some great crisis the head of a family took a new departure in religion or politics the new faith substituted itself for the old one as the hereditary faith of the family. I remember hearing an old gentleman (who represented old English feeling in great perfection) say that it was totally unintelligible to him that a certain Member of Parliament could sit on the Liberal side of the House of Commons. "I cannot understand it," he said; "I knew his father intimately, and he was always a good Tory." The idea that the son might have opinions of his own was unthinkable.

In our time we are beginning to perceive that opinions cannot be imposed, and that the utmost that can be obtained by brow-beating a son who differs from ourselves is that he shall make false professions to satisfy us. Paternal influence may be better employed than in encouraging habits of dissimulation.

M. Legouvé attaches great importance to the religious question as a cause of division between fathers and sons because in the present day young men so frequently imbibe opinions which are not those of their parents. It is not uncommon, in France, for Catholic parents to have unbelieving sons; and the converse is also seen, but more frequently in the case of daughters. As opinions are very freely expressed in France (except where external conformity is an affair of caste), we find many families in which Catholicism and Agnosticism have each their open and convinced adherents; yet family affection does not appear to suffer from the difference, or is, at least, powerful enough to overcome it. In old times this would have been impossible. The father would have resented a difference of opinion in the son as an offence against himself.

A very common cause of division between father and son, in old times, was the following.