In most healthy families there is a revolt against this tendency. The
exchanging of presents on birthdays and the like is barred by general
consent, and the relations of the parties are placed by express treaty
on an unsentimental footing.
Unfortunately this mitigation of family sentimentality is much more
characteristic of large families than small ones. It used to be said
that members of large families get on in the world; and it is certainly
true that for purposes of social training a household of twenty
surpasses a household of five as an Oxford College surpasses an
eight-roomed house in a cheap street. Ten children, with the necessary
adults, make a community in which an excess of sentimentality is
impossible. Two children make a doll's house, in which both parents and
children become morbid if they keep to themselves. What is more, when
large families were the fashion, they were organized as tyrannies much
more than as "atmospheres of love." Francis Place tells us that he kept
out of his father's way because his father never passed a child within
his reach without striking it; and though the case was an extreme
one, it was an extreme that illustrated a tendency. Sir Walter Scott's
father, when his son incautiously expressed some relish for his
porridge, dashed a handful of salt into it with an instinctive sense
that it was his duty as a father to prevent his son enjoying himself.
Ruskin's mother gratified the sensual side of her maternal passion, not
by cuddling her son, but by whipping him when he fell downstairs or
was slack in learning the Bible off by heart; and this grotesque
safety-valve for voluptuousness, mischievous as it was in many ways,
had at least the advantage that the child did not enjoy it and was not
debauched by it, as he would have been by transports of sentimentality.
But nowadays we cannot depend on these safeguards, such as they were.
We no longer have large families: all the families are too small to give
the children the necessary social training. The Roman father is out of
fashion; and the whip and the cane are becoming discredited, not so much
by the old arguments against corporal punishment (sound as these were)
as by the gradual wearing away of the veil from the fact that flogging
is a form of debauchery. The advocate of flogging as a punishment is now
exposed to very disagreeable suspicions; and ever since Rousseau rose
to the effort of making a certain very ridiculous confession on the
subject, there has been a growing perception that child whipping, even
for the children themselves, is not always the innocent and high-minded
practice it professes to be. At all events there is no getting away
from the facts that families are smaller than they used to be, and
that passions which formerly took effect in tyranny have been largely
diverted into sentimentality. And though a little sentimentality may be
a very good thing, chronic sentimentality is a horror, more dangerous,
because more possible, than the erotomania which we all condemn when we
are not thoughtlessly glorifying it as the ideal married state.