We must be reasonable in our domestic ideals. I do not think that life
at a public school is altogether good for a boy any more than barrack
life is altogether good for a soldier. But neither is home life
altogether good. Such good as it does, I should say, is due to its
freedom from the very atmosphere it professes to supply. That atmosphere
is usually described as an atmosphere of love; and this definition
should be sufficient to put any sane person on guard against it. The
people who talk and write as if the highest attainable state is that of
a family stewing in love continuously from the cradle to the grave, can
hardly have given five minutes serious consideration to so outrageous a
proposition. They cannot have even made up their minds as to what they
mean by love; for when they expatiate on their thesis they are sometimes
talking about kindness, and sometimes about mere appetite. In either
sense they are equally far from the realities of life. No healthy man
or animal is occupied with love in any sense for more than a very small
fraction indeed of the time he devotes to business and to recreations
wholly unconnected with love. A wife entirely preoccupied with her
affection for her husband, a mother entirely preoccupied with her
affection for her children, may be all very well in a book (for people
who like that kind of book); but in actual life she is a nuisance.
Husbands may escape from her when their business compels them to be
away from home all day; but young children may be, and quite often are,
killed by her cuddling and coddling and doctoring and preaching: above
all, by her continuous attempts to excite precocious sentimentality,
a practice as objectionable, and possibly as mischievous, as the worst
tricks of the worst nursemaids.