What is more, they are protected from even such discomfort as the
dislike of his prisoners may cause to a gaoler by the hypnotism of the
convention that the natural relation between husband and wife and
parent and child is one of intense affection, and that to feel any other
sentiment towards a member of one's family is to be a monster. Under the
influence of the emotion thus manufactured the most detestable people
are spoilt with entirely undeserved deference, obedience, and even
affection whilst they live, and mourned when they die by those whose
lives they wantonly or maliciously made miserable. And this is what we
call natural conduct. Nothing could well be less natural. That such a
convention should have been established shews that the indissolubility
of marriage creates such intolerable situations that only by beglamoring
the human imagination with a hypnotic suggestion of wholly unnatural
feelings can it be made to keep up appearances.
If the sentimental theory of family relationship encourages bad manners
and personal slovenliness and uncleanness in the home, it also, in
the case of sentimental people, encourages the practice of rousing
and playing on the affections of children prematurely and far too
frequently. The lady who says that as her religion is love, her children
shall be brought up in an atmosphere of love, and institutes a system of
sedulous endearments and exchanges of presents and conscious and studied
acts of artificial kindness, may be defeated in a large family by the
healthy derision and rebellion of children who have acquired hardihood
and common sense in their conflicts with one another. But the small
families, which are the rule just now, succumb more easily; and in
the case of a single sensitive child the effect of being forced in a
hothouse atmosphere of unnatural affection may be disastrous.
In short, whichever way you take it, the convention that marriage and
family relationship produces special feelings which alter the nature of
human intercourse is a mischievous one. The whole difficulty of bringing
up a family well is the difficulty of making its members behave as
considerately at home as on a visit in a strange house, and as frankly,
kindly, and easily in a strange house as at home. In the middle classes,
where the segregation of the artificially limited family in its little
brick box is horribly complete, bad manners, ugly dresses, awkwardness,
cowardice, peevishness, and all the petty vices of unsociability
flourish like mushrooms in a cellar. In the upper class, where families
are not limited for money reasons; where at least two houses and
sometimes three or four are the rule (not to mention the clubs); where
there is travelling and hotel life; and where the men are brought up,
not in the family, but in public schools, universities, and the naval
and military services, besides being constantly in social training in
other people's houses, the result is to produce what may be called, in
comparison with the middle class, something that might almost pass as a
different and much more sociable species. And in the very poorest class,
where people have no homes, only sleeping places, and consequently
live practically in the streets, sociability again appears, leaving
the middle class despised and disliked for its helpless and offensive
unsociability as much by those below it as those above it, and yet
ignorant enough to be proud of it, and to hold itself up as a model
for the reform of the (as it considers) elegantly vicious rich and
profligate poor alike.