EARLY BOYHOOD
Having now laid down the general principles which we have to recognize
in the moral training of the young, let me endeavor to make some
practical suggestions how these principles may be carried out,
suggestions which, as a matter of fact, I have found to be helpful to
educated mothers in the great and responsible task of training the men
of the future generation.
All I would earnestly ask you to remember is, that in offering these
suggestions I am in no way venturing to dictate to you, only endeavoring
to place a wide experience at your service. Doubtless you will often
modify and, in some cases, very possibly reverse my conclusions. All I
ask is that you should weigh them thoughtfully and prayerfully and with
an open and unprejudiced mind before you finally reject them.
Let us, therefore, begin with the nursery. It is in the nursery that the
roots of the evil we have to contend with are often first planted, and
this in more senses than one. In the more obvious sense all experienced
mothers know what I mean. But I am quite sure that there are a large
number of young wives who become mothers without the smallest knowledge
of the dangers to which even infant boys may be exposed. This ignorance
is painfully shown by the frequent application for nursemaids from our
penitentiaries. At one house where I held a small meeting my young
hostess, an intelligent literary woman, came into my room after the
household had retired to rest to ask me about some curious actions which
she had noticed in her baby boy at night. There could not be a doubt or
a question that her nurse was corrupting her little child before that
hapless young mother's eyes, and forming in him habits which could only
lead to misery hereafter, and only too possibly to idiocy and death; and
that young mother was too ignorant to save her own baby boy! Indeed, I
know of no greater instance of the cruelty of "the conspiracy of
silence" than the fact that in all the orthodox medical manuals for
young mothers the necessary knowledge is withheld.[8] But more
marvellous still is the fact that women should ever have placidly
consented to an ignorance which makes it impossible for them to save
even baby boys from a corrupt nursemaid, who by some evil chance may
have found her way into their service through a false character or under
some other specious disguise, not seeing at once that the so-called
delicacy which shrinks from knowing everything that is necessary in
order to save is not purity but prurience.
I would, therefore, beseech young mothers who are conscious of their own
ignorance to see a lady doctor, if they do not like to consult their own
family physician, and ask her to tell them plainly what they have to
guard against and the best methods to pursue. All I can say here is to
beseech every mother to be absolutely careful about the antecedents of
her nursemaids, and only to admit those of unblemished character into
the precincts of the nursery. Never, if possible, let your baby boy
sleep with any one but yourself, if through illness or any other cause
he cannot sleep in his own little cot. Pyjamas, I think, are generally
recognized now to be the best form of night gear, as keeping the little
limbs warm and covered, when in the restlessness of sleep the child
throws off the bedclothes, as well as for other and more vital reasons.
If through straitened means you cannot afford an experienced nurse--not
that I should altogether allow that even the experienced nurse is to be
implicitly and blindly trusted until she has been well tested--then I
would entreat you not to let sleepiness or ill health or any other
excuse prevent you from being always present at your boy's morning bath.
Often and often evil habits arise from imperfect washing and consequent
irritation; and many a wise mother thinks it best on this account to
revert to the old Jewish rite of initiation by which cleanliness was
secured. Teach them from the first self-reverence in touch, as in word
and deed, and watch even their attitudes in sleep, that the little arms
are folded lightly upwards. Even experienced nurses are not always nice
in their ways. Be vigilantly watchful that the utmost niceness is
observed between the boys and girls in the nursery, and that childish
modesty is never broken down, but, on the contrary, nurtured and
trained. Knowledge and watchfulness are the two cherubim with the
flaming sword turning all ways to guard the young tree of life and bar
the way of every low and creeping thing. If I may venture in some sort
to reverse our Lord's words, I should say His word to all mothers is,
"What I say unto all I say especially unto you, _Watch_."
But there is another and a deeper sense in which the root of the evil is
first planted and nourished in the nursery. If we are to contend with
this deadly peril to soul and body, I cannot but feel that we must bring
about a radical change in the training of our boys. There must be some
radical defect in that training for men to take the attitude they do. I
do not mean bad, dissipated men, but men who in all other relations of
life would be designated fairly good men. Once let such a man be
persuaded--however wrongly--that his health, or his prospect of having
some day a family of his own, will suffer from delayed marriage and he
considers the question settled. He will sacrifice his health to
over-smoking, to excess in athletics, to over-eating or champagne
drinking, to late hours and overwork; but to sacrifice health or future
happiness to save a woman from degradation, bah! it never so much as
enters his mind. Even so high-minded a writer as Mr. Lecky, in his
_History of European Morals_,[9] deliberately proposes that the
difficulty of deferred marriage which advanced civilization
necessitates, at least for the upper classes, should be met by temporary
unions being permitted with a woman of a lower class. The daughters of
workingmen, according to this writer, are good enough as fleshly
stop-gaps, to be flung aside when a sufficient income makes the true
wife possible--an honorable proceeding indeed! to say nothing of the
children of such a temporary union, to whom the father can perform no
duty, and leave no inheritance, save the inestimable one of a mother
with a tainted name. Verily there must be some fault in our training of
men! Certainly an intelligent American mother put her finger on the
blot, so far as we are concerned, when, speaking to me many years ago,
she said what struck her so in our English homes was the way in which
the girls were subordinated to the boys; the boys seemed first
considered, the girls in comparison were nowhere. Doubtless our English
homes are more at fault here than in America; but, as a mother's pride
in her boys is the same all over the world, may not even American homes
admit of a little improvement in this respect as well? And, if we choose
to bring up our boys to look upon their mothers and sisters as more or
less the devoted slaves of their selfishness, can we wonder that they
should grow up to look upon all women as more or less the slaves of
their needs, fleshly or otherwise?
Now, what I want all boys taught from their earliest years is, roughly
speaking, that boys came into the world to take care of girls. Whatever
modification may take place in our view of the relation of the sexes,
Nature's great fact will remain, that the man is the stronger--a
difference which civilization and culture seem to strengthen rather than
diminish; and from his earliest years he ought to be taught that he,
therefore, is the one that has to serve. It is the strong that have to
bear the burden of the weaker, and not to prostitute that strength by
using it to master the weaker into bearing their loads. It is the man
who has to give himself for the woman, not the other way on, as we have
made it. Nay, this is no theory of mine; it is a truth implanted in the
very heart of every true man. "Every true man," as Milton says, "is born
a knight," diligently as we endeavor to stub up this royal root,
constantly, as from the very nursery, we endeavor to train it out of
him. You may deny the truth and go on some theory of your own in the
training of your boys, but the truth cannot deny itself. It is _there_,
whether you will have it or not, a root of the tree of life itself.
Now there is not a day that need pass without opportunities of training
your boys in this their true knightly attitude. You can see, as I have
already said, that they learn in relation to their own sisters what in
after years they have to practise towards all women alike. To give up
the comfortable easy-chair, the favorite book or toy, the warmest place
by the fire, to the little sister--this ought to become a second nature
to a well-trained boy. To carry a parcel for her, to jump up and fetch
anything she wants, to give in to her because he is a boy and the
stronger--all this ought to be a matter of course. As he grows older you
can place him in little positions of responsibility to his sisters,
sending them out on an expedition or to a party under his care. In a
thousand such ways you can see that your boy is not only born but grows
up a knight. I was once in a house where the master always brought up
the heavy evening water-cans and morning coal-scuttles for the maids.
And if these were placed at the foot of the stairs so as to involve no
running in and out of the kitchen, it might be no mean exercise for a
boy's muscles.
I was told only the other day of a little six-year-old boy whose mother
had brought him up from babyhood on these principles. He was playing
with his little sister on a bed, when suddenly he perceived that she
was getting perilously near the edge which was farthest from the wall.
Instantly he dismounted and went round to the other side, and, climbing
up, pushed her gently into the middle of the bed, remarking
sententiously to himself, "I think boys ought always to take the
dangerous side of their sisters." Ah me! if only you mothers would but
train your boys to "take the dangerous side of their sisters,"
especially of those poor little sisters who are thrust forth at so early
an age to earn their own living, alone and unprotected, on the perilous
highways of the world, skirted for them by so terrible a precipice, what
a different world would it be for us women, what a purer and better
world for your sons!
Surely the womanhood in our homes ought to enable us to bring up our
boys in such an habitual attitude of serving a woman, of caring for her,
of giving himself for her, that it would become a moral impossibility
for him ever to lower or degrade a woman in his after-life.
In concluding these suggestions there is one point I must emphasize, the
more so as in treating of one particular moral problem it is difficult
not to seem to ignore a truth which is simply vital to all moral
training. Let us clearly recognize that there is no such thing as moral
specialism. Our moral being, like Wordsworth's cloud, "moveth altogether
if it move at all." You cannot strengthen one particular virtue except
by strengthening the character all round. Cardinal Newman points out--I
think in one of those wonderful Oxford sermons of his--that what our
ancestors would have called "a bosom sin" will often take an underground
course and come to the surface at quite an unexpected point in the
character. Hidden licentiousness, which one would expect to evince
itself in over-ripe sentiment and feeling, manifests itself instead in
cruelty and hardness of heart. The little habit of self-indulgence which
you in your foolish fondness have allowed in that boy of yours may, in
after-life, come out as the very impurity which you have endeavored so
earnestly to guard him against. This mystical interdependence and hidden
correlation of our moral and intellectual being is a solemn thought, and
can only be met by recognizing that the walls of the citadel must be
strengthened at all points in order to resist the foe at one.
Truthfulness, conscientiousness that refuses to scamp work, devotion to
duty, temperance in food and drink, rectitude--these things are the
bastions of purity of life, as well as of all high character.
But in these days I think we have more especially to remember that the
Beautiful Gate of all noble living rests, like the gate of the Jewish
Temple, on two pillars, both of which show signs of being considerably
out of repair. One of these pillars is obedience, or discipline. If you
have not exacted prompt and unhesitating obedience in your boy, from his
earliest childhood, to the parents whom he has seen, do you think that
in after years he will obey the Father of Lights, whom he has not seen?
Do you think, if you have let him set your authority at defiance, he
will in future years, with temptation on one side and opportunity on the
other, bow to the invisible authority of conscience? What is it, I ask,
that makes the army the finest school for character, giving us our
Lawrences, our Havelocks, our Gordons, our Kitcheners, but simply this
habit of implicit obedience, of that discipline which has grown so
grievously lax in so many of our English homes? In Carlyle's strong
words, "Obedience is our universal duty and destiny, wherein whoso will
not bend must break: too early and too thoroughly we cannot be trained
to know that 'would,' in this world of ours, is as mere zero to
'should,' and for most part as the smallest of fractions even to
'shall.'"[10]
The second great pillar of the portal of noble life seems to me to show
still greater signs of being out of repair and in want of restoration,
and that pillar is reverence,--that heaven-eyed quality which Dr.
Martineau rightly places at the very top of the ethical scale. Let that
crumble, and the character which might have been a temple sinks into a
mere counting-house. When in these days children are allowed to call
their father Dick, Jack, or Tom, and nickname their own mother; when
they are allowed to drown the voice of the most honored guest at the
table with their little bald chatter, so that even the cross-questioning
genius of a Socrates would find itself at a discount; when they are
allowed to criticise and contradict their elders in a way that would
have appalled our grandmothers; when they are suffered to make remarks
which are anything but reverent on sacred things--have I not some reason
to fear that the one attribute which touches the character to fine
issues is threatened with extinction? Do you think that the boy who has
never been taught to reverence his own mother's womanhood will reverence
the degraded womanhood of our streets, or hear that Divine Voice
guarding all suffering manhood and all helpless womanhood from wrong at
his hands, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these, ye have
done it unto Me?"
Oh, I would entreat you to set yourself firmly against this evil
tendency of our day, to which I cannot but believe so much of its
agnosticism is due,--that deadening down and stamping out of the
spiritual instincts of our nature, those great intuitions of the soul,
which lie both above and below all reasoning and logic and form their
basis rather than their apex. Once let the springs of reverence be
choked up, once let that window of the soul be overgrown with weeds and
cobwebs, and your most careful training will only produce a character
estimable in many respects, but for the most part without noble
aspirations, without high ideals, with no great enthusiasms--a
character, to use Saint Beuve's expressive phrase, "tout en façade sur
la rue," whose moral judgments are no better than street cries; the type
of man that accepts the degradation of women with blank alacrity as a
necessity of civilization, and would have it regulated, like any other
commodity for the market; that very common type of character which,
whatever its good qualities, spreads an atmosphere of blight around it,
stunting all upward growing things and flattening down our life to the
dead level of desert sands.
If you would not be satisfied at your boy rising no higher than this,
then, again I say, guard the springs of reverence. Do not let your pride
in your child's smartness or any momentary sense of humor make you pass
over any little speech that savors of irreverence; check it instantly.
Exact respect for yourself and for the boy's father, the respect which
is no enemy, but the reverse, to the uttermost of fondness. Insist upon
good manners and respectful attention to the guests of your house. Do
not despise the good old fashion of family prayers because they do not
rise to all that we might wish them to be. At least they form a daily
recognition of "Him in whom the families of the earth are blessed"--a
daily recognition which that keen observer of English life, the late
American Ambassador, Mr. Bayard, pointed out as one of the great secrets
of England's greatness, and which forms a valuable school for habits of
reverence and discipline for the children of the family. Insist upon
the boys being down in time for the worship of God, and do not allow
them to get into the habit indulged in by so many young men of "sloping"
down with slippered feet long after breakfast is done and prayers are
over.
Only let the springs of reverence well up in your child's soul, and
then, and then only, will you be able to give your boy what, after all,
must always be the greatest safeguard from shipwreck in this perilous
world--religious faith, that stops him at the very threshold of
temptation with the words: "How can I do this great wickedness and sin
against God?" Your very attitude as you kneel by his side with bowed
head and folded hands while he says his little evening and morning
prayer will breathe into his soul a sense of a Divine Presence about our
bed and about our path. Your love--so strong to love, and yet so weak to
save--can lead his faltering childish feet to that Love which is deeper
than our deepest fall, "which knows all, but loves us better than it
knows." You can press your child against the very heart of God, and lay
him in the Everlasting Arms, that faint not, neither are weary; and,
with the mother of St. Augustine, you may know that the child of such
prayers and such tears will never perish.
"Happy he
With such a mother! faith in womankind
Beats with his blood, and trust in all things high
Comes easy to him, and though he trip and fall
He shall not blind his soul with clay."
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 8: This is the case with our recognized medical manuals; I do
not know whether it is equally true of American manuals.]
[Footnote 9: Vol. ii. See chapter on "The Position of Women."]
[Footnote 10: _Sartor Resartus_, by Thomas Carlyle, Book II., chap, ii.,
p. 68. Chapman and Hall, 1831.]