THE ETERNAL CHILD 271
BOOK II
_ESSAYS IN PRACTICAL EDUCATION_
CHAPTER I
THE PHILOSOPHER AT HOME 283
CHAPTER II
“ATTENTION” 303
CHAPTER III
AN EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT 312
CHAPTER IV
DOROTHY ELMORE’S ACHIEVEMENT: A FORECAST 320
CHAPTER V
CONSEQUENCES 346
CHAPTER VI
MRS. SEDLEY’S TALE 355
CHAPTER VII
ABILITY 367
CHAPTER VIII
POOR MRS. JUMEAU! 376
CHAPTER IX
“A HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO YOU!” 386
CHAPTER X
PARENTS IN COUNCIL (PART I) 395
CHAPTER XI
PARENTS IN COUNCIL (PART II) 405
CHAPTER XII
A HUNDRED YEARS AFTER 413
NOTE 429
BOOK I
_THEORY_
PARENTS AND CHILDREN
CHAPTER I
_THE FAMILY_
“The family is the unit of the nation.”--F. D. MAURICE.
It is probable that no other educational thinker has succeeded in
affecting parents so profoundly as did Rousseau. _Emile_ is little
read now, but how many current theories of the regimen proper for
children have there their unsuspected source? Everybody knows--and his
contemporaries knew it better than we--that Jean Jacques Rousseau had
not enough sterling character to warrant him to pose as an authority
on any subject, least of all on that of education. He sets himself
down a poor thing, and we see no cause to reject the evidence of his
_Confessions_. We are not carried away by the charm of his style; his
“forcible feebleness” does not dazzle us. No man can _say_ beyond that
which he _is_, and there is a want of grit in his philosophic theories
that removes most of them from the category of available thought.
But Rousseau had the insight to perceive one of those patent truths
which, somehow, it takes a genius to discover; and, because truth is
indeed prized above rubies, the perception of that truth gave him rank
as a great teacher. “Is _Jean Jacques_ also among the prophets?” people
asked, and ask still; and that he had thousands of fervent disciples
amongst the educated parents of Europe, together with the fact that
his teaching has filtered into many a secluded home of our own day,
is answer enough. Indeed, no other educationalist has had a tithe of
the influence exercised by Rousseau. Under the spell of his teaching,
people in the fashionable world, like that Russian Princess Galitzin,
forsook society, and went off with their children to some quiet corner
where they could devote every hour of the day, and every power they
had, to the fulfilment of the duties which devolve upon parents.
Courtly mothers retired from the world, sometimes even left their
husbands, to work hard at the classics, mathematics, sciences, that
they might with their own lips instruct their children. “What else am
I for?” they asked; and the feeling spread that the bringing up of the
children was the one work of primary importance for men and women.
Whatever extravagance he had seen fit to advance, Rousseau would still
have found a following, because he had chanced to touch a spring
that opened many hearts. He was one of the few educationalists who
made his appeal to the parental instincts. He did not say, “We have
no hope of the parents, let us work for the children!” Such are the
faint-hearted and pessimistic things we say to-day. What he said was,
in effect, “Fathers and mothers, this is your work, and you only can do
it. It rests with you, parents of young children, to be the saviours
of society unto a thousand generations. Nothing else matters. The
avocations about which people weary themselves are as foolish child’s
play compared with this one serious business of bringing up our
children in advance of ourselves.”
People listened, as we have seen; the response to his teaching was
such a letting out of the waters of parental enthusiasm as has never
been known before nor since. And Rousseau, weak and little worthy, was
a preacher of righteousness in this, that he turned the hearts of the
fathers to the children, and so far made ready a people prepared for
the Lord. But alas! having secured the foundation, he had little better
than wood, hay, and stubble to offer to the builders.
Rousseau succeeded, as he deserved to succeed, in awaking many parents
to the binding character, the vast range, the profound seriousness of
parental obligations. He failed, and deserved to fail, as he offered
his own crude conceits by way of an educational code. But his success
is very cheering. He perceived that God placed the training of every
child in the hands of two, a father and a mother; and the response to
his teaching proved that, as the waters answer to the drawing of the
moon, so do the hearts of parents rise to the idea of the great work
committed to them.
Though it is true, no doubt, that every parent is conscious of
unwritten laws, more or less definite and noble according to his own
status, yet an attempt, however slight, to codify these laws may be
interesting to parents.
“The family is the unit of the nation.” This pregnant saying suggests
some aspects of the parents’ calling. From time to time, in all ages of
the world, communistic societies have arisen, sometimes for the sake of
co-operation in a great work, social or religious, more recently by way
of protest against inequalities of condition; but, in every case, the
fundamental rule of such societies is, that the members shall have all
things in common. We are apt to think, in our careless way, that such
attempts at communistic association are foredoomed to failure. But that
is not the case. In the United States, perhaps because hired labour
is less easy to obtain than it is with us, they appear to have found
a congenial soil, and there many well-regulated communistic bodies
flourish. There are failures, too, many and disastrous, and it appears
that these may usually be traced to one cause, a government enfeebled
by the attempt to combine democratic and communistic principles, to
dwell together in a common life, while each does what is right in his
own eyes. A communistic body can thrive only under a vigorous and
absolute rule.
A favourite dream of socialism is--or was until the idea of
collectivism obtained--that each State of Europe should be divided into
an infinite number of small self-contained communes. Now, it sometimes
happens that the thing we desire is already realised, had we eyes to
see. The family is, practically, a commune. In the family the undivided
property is enjoyed by all the members in common, and, in the family
there is equality of social condition, with diversity of duties. In
lands where patriarchal practices still obtain, the family merges into
the tribe, and the head of the family is the chief of the tribe--a very
absolute sovereign indeed. In our own country, families are usually
small, parents and their immediate offspring, with the attendants and
belongings which naturally gather to a household, and, let it not be
forgotten, _form part of the family_. The smallness of the family tends
to obscure its character, and we see no force in the phrase at the head
of this chapter; we do not perceive that, if the unit of the nation
is the natural commune, the family, then is the family the social
microcosm, pledged to carry on within itself all the functions of the
State, with the delicacy, precision, and fulness of detail proper to
work done on a small scale.
It by no means follows from this communistic view of the family that
the domestic policy should be a policy of isolation; on the contrary,
it is not too much to say, that a nation is civilised in proportion
as it is able to establish close and friendly relations with other
nations, and that, not with one or two, but with many; and, conversely,
that a nation is barbarous in proportion to its isolation; and does not
a family decline in intelligence and virtue when from generation to
generation it “keeps itself to itself”?
Again, it is probable that a nation is healthy in proportion as it
has its own proper outlets, its colonies and dependencies, which it
is ever solicitous to include in the national life. So of the nation
in miniature, the family; the struggling families at ‘the back,’ the
orphanage, the mission, the necessitous of our acquaintance, are they
not for the sustenance of the family in the higher life?
But it is not enough that the family commune maintain neighbourly
relations with other such communes, and towards the stranger within
the gates. The family is the unit of the nation; and the nation is
an organic whole, a living body, built up, like the natural body, of
an infinite number of living organisms. It is only as it contributes
its quota towards the national life that the life of the family is
complete. Public interests must be shared, public work taken up, the
public welfare cherished--in a word, its integrity with the nation
must be preserved, or the family ceases to be part of a living whole,
and becomes positively injurious, as decayed tissue in the animal
organism.
Nor are the interests of the family limited to those of the nation.
As it is the part of the nation to maintain wider relations, to be in
touch with all the world, to be ever in advance in the great march of
human progress, so is this the attitude which is incumbent on each unit
of the nation, each family, as an integral part of the whole. Here is
the simple and natural realisation of the noble dream of _Fraternity_:
each individual attached to a family by ties of love where not of
blood; the families united in a federal bond to form the nation; the
nations confederate in love and emulous in virtue, and all, nations
and their families, playing their several parts as little children
about the feet and under the smile of the Almighty Father. Here is the
divine order which every family is called upon to fulfil; a little
leaven leaveneth the whole lump, and, therefore, it matters infinitely
that every family should realise the nature and the obligations of the
family bond. As water cannot rise above its source, neither can we live
at a higher level than that of the conception we form of our place
and use in life. Let us ask the question--has this, of regarding all
education and all civil and social relations from the standpoint of
the _family_, any practical outcome? So much so, that perhaps there is
hardly a problem of life for which it does not contain the solution.
For example:--What shall we teach our children? Is there one subject
that claims our attention more than another? Yes, there is a subject
or class of subjects which has an imperative _moral_ claim upon us. It
is the duty of the nation to maintain relations of brotherly kindness
with other nations; therefore, it is the duty of every family, as
an integral part of the nation, to be able to hold brotherly speech
with the families of other nations as opportunities arise; therefore,
to acquire the speech of neighbouring nations is not only to secure
an inlet of knowledge and a means of culture, but is a duty of that
higher morality (the morality of the family) which aims at universal
brotherhood; therefore, every family would do well to cultivate two
languages besides the mother tongue, even in the nursery.
Again; a fair young Englishwoman was staying with her mother at a
German _Kurhaus_. They were the only English people present, and
probably forgot that the Germans are better linguists than we.
The young lady sat through the long meals with her book, hardly
interrupting her reading to eat, and addressing no more than one or
two remarks to her mother, as--“I wonder what that mess is!” or, “How
much longer shall we have to sit with these tiresome people?” Had she
remembered that no family can live to itself, that she and her mother
represented England, _were_ England for that little German community,
she would have imitated the courteous greetings which the German ladies
bestowed on their neighbours.
But we must leave further consideration of this great subject, and
conclude with a striking passage from Mr. Morley’s ‘Appreciation’ of
_Emile_. “Education slowly came to be thought of in connection with
the family. The improvement of ideas upon education was only one phase
of the great general movement towards the restoration of the family,
which was so striking a spectacle in France after the middle of the
century. Education now came to comprehend the whole system of the
relations between parents and their children, from earliest infancy to
maturity. The direction of such wider feeling about these relations
tended strongly towards an increased closeness in them, more intimacy,
and a more continuous suffusion of tenderness and long attachment.”
His labours in this great cause, “the restoration of the family,” give
Rousseau a claim upon the gratitude and respect of mankind. It has
proved a lasting, solid work. To this day, family relations in France
are more gracious, more tender, more close and more inclusive, than
they are with us. They are more expansive too, leading to generally
benign and friendly behaviour; and so strong and satisfying is the
family bond, that the young people find little necessity to ‘fall in
love.’ The mother lays herself out for the friendship of her young
daughters, who respond with entire loyalty and devotion; and, Zola
notwithstanding, French maidens are wonderfully pure, simple, and
sweet, because their affections are abundantly satisfied.
Possibly “the restoration of the family” is a labour that invites us
here in England, each within the radius of our own hearth; for there
is little doubt that the family bond is more lax amongst us than it
was two or three generations ago. Perhaps nowhere is family life of
more idyllic loveliness than where we see it at its best in English
homes. But the wise ever find some new thing to learn. Though a nation,
as an individual, must act on the lines of its own character, and we
are, on the whole, well content with our English homes, yet we might
learn something from the inclusiveness of the French family, where
mother-in-law and father-in-law, aunt and cousins, widow and spinster,
are cherished, and a hundred small offices devised for dependants who
would be in the way in an English home. The result is that the children
have a wider range for the practice of the thousand sweet attentions
and self-restraints which make home life lovely. No doubt the medal has
its obverse; there is probably much in French home life which we should
shrink from; nevertheless, it offers object lessons which we should do
well to study. Again, where family life is most beauteous with us, is
not the family a little apt to become self-centred and self-sufficient,
rather than to cultivate that expansiveness towards other families
which is part of the family code of our neighbours?
CHAPTER II
_PARENTS AS RULERS_
Let us continue our consideration of the family as the nation in
miniature, with the responsibilities, the rights, and the requirements
of the nation. The parents represent the “Government”; but, here, the
government is ever an absolute Monarchy, conditioned very loosely by
the law of the land, but very closely by that law more or less of which
every parent bears engraved on his conscience. Some attain the levels
of high thinking, and come down from the Mount with beaming countenance
and the tables of the law intact; others fail to reach the difficult
heights, and are content with such fragments of the broken tables as
they pick up below. But be his knowledge of the law little or much, no
parent escapes the call to rule.
Now, the first thing we ask for in a ruler is, “Is he able to rule?
Does he know how to maintain his authority?” A ruler who fails to
govern is like an unjust judge, an impious priest, an ignorant
teacher, that is, he fails in the essential attribute of his office.
This is even more true in the family than in the State; the king may
rule by deputy; but, here we see the exigeant nature of the parent’s
functions; he can have no deputy. Helpers he may have, but the moment
he makes over his functions and authority to another, the rights of
parenthood belong to that other, and not to him. Who does not know of
the heart-burnings that arise when Anglo-Indian parents come home, to
find their children’s affections given to others, their duty owing to
others; and they, the parents, sources of pleasure like the godmother
of the fairy tale, but having no authority over their children? And all
this, nobody’s fault, for the guardians at home have done their best to
keep the children loyal to the parents abroad.
Here is indicated a rock upon which the heads of families sometimes
make shipwreck. They regard parental authority as inherent in them, a
property which may lie dormant, but is not to be separated from the
state of parenthood. They may allow their children from infancy upwards
to do what is right in their own eyes; and then, Lear turns and makes
his plaint to the winds, and cries--
“Sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is
To have a thankless child!”
But Lear has been all the time divesting himself of the honour and
authority that belong to him, and giving his rights to the children.
Here he tells us why; the biting anguish is the “_thankless_” child. He
has been laying himself out for the thanks of his children. That they
should think him a fond father, has been more to him than the duty he
owes them; and in proportion as he omits his duty are they oblivious of
theirs. Possibly the unregulated love of approbation in devoted parents
has more share in the undoing of families than any other single cause.
A writer of to-day represents a mother as saying--
“But you are not afraid of me, Bessie?”
“No indeed; who could be afraid of a dear, sweet, soft, little mother
like you?”
And such praise is sweet in the ears of many a fond mother hungering
for the love and liking of her children, and not perceiving that words
like these in the mouth of a child are as treasonable as words of
defiance.
Authority is laid down at other shrines than that of popularity.
Prospero describes himself as,
“all dedicate
To study, and the bettering of my mind.”
And, meantime, the exercise of authority devolves upon Antonio; is it
any wonder that the habit of authority fits the usurper like a glove,
and that Prospero finds himself ousted from the office he failed to
fill? Even so, the busy parent, occupied with many cares, awakes to
find the authority he has failed to wield has dropped out of his hands;
perhaps has been picked up by others less fit, and a daughter is given
over to the charge of a neighbouring family, while father and mother
hunt for rare prints.
In other cases, the love of an easy life tempts parents to let things
take their course; the children are good children, and won’t go far
wrong, we are told; and very likely it is true. But however good the
children be, the parents owe it to society to make them better than
they are, and to bless the world with people, not merely good-natured
and well-disposed, but good of set purpose and endeavour.
The love of ease, the love of favour, the claims of other work,
are only some of the causes which lead to a result disastrous to
society--the _abdication of parents_. When we come to consider the
nature and uses of the parents’ authority, we shall see that such
abdication is as immoral as it is mischievous. Meantime, it is well
worth while to notice that the causes which lead parents to resign the
position of domestic rulers are resolvable into one--the office is too
troublesome, too laborious. The temptation which assails parents is the
same which has led many a crowned head to seek ease in the cloister--
“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,”
if it be the natural crown of parenthood.
The Apostolic counsel of “diligence” in ruling throws light upon the
nature and aim of authority: it is no longer a matter of personal
honour and dignity; authority is for use and service, and the honour
that goes with it is only for the better service of those under
authority. The arbitrary parent, the exacting parent, who claims this
and that of deference and duty because he is a parent, all for his own
honour and glory, is more hopelessly in the wrong than the parent who
practically abdicates; the majesty of parenthood is hedged round with
observances only because it is good for the children to “faithfully
serve, honour, and humbly obey” their natural rulers. Only at home can
children be trained in the chivalrous temper of “proud submission and
dignified obedience;” and if the parents do not inspire and foster
deference, reverence, and loyalty, how shall these crowning graces of
character thrive in a hard and emulous world?
It is perhaps a little difficult to maintain an attitude of authority
in these democratic days, when even educationalists counsel that
children be treated on equal terms from the very beginning; but the
children themselves come to our aid; the sweet humility and dependence
natural to them fosters the gentle dignity, the _soupçon_ of reserve,
which is becoming in parents. It is not open to parents either to lay
aside or to sink under the burden of the honour laid upon them; and,
no doubt, we have all seen the fullest, freest flow of confidence,
sympathy, and love between parent and child, where the mother sits as a
queen among her children and the father is honoured as a crowned head.
The fact that there are two parents, each to lend honour to the other,
yet free from restraint in each other’s presence, makes it the easier
to maintain the impalpable “state” of parenthood. And the presence of
the slight, sweet, undefined feeling of dignity in the household is the
very first condition for the bringing up of loyal, honourable men and
women, capable of reverence and apt to win respect.
The foundation of parental authority lies in the fact that parents
hold office as deputies; and that, in a twofold sense. In the first
place, they are the immediate and personally appointed deputies of the
Almighty King, the sole Ruler of men; they have not only to fulfil
His counsels regarding the children, but to represent His Person; his
parents are as God to the little child, and, yet more constraining
thought, _God is to him what his parents are_; he has no power to
conceive a greater and lovelier personality than that of the royal
heads of his own home; he makes his first approach to the Infinite
through them; they are his measure for the highest; if the measure be
easily within his small compass, how shall he grow up with the reverent
temper which is the condition of spiritual growth?
More; parents hold their children in trust for society. “My own child”
can only be true in a limited sense; the children are held as a public
trust to be trained as is best for the welfare of the community; and
in this sense, also, the parents are persons in authority, with the
dignity of their office to support, and are even liable to deposition.
The one State whose name has passed into a proverb, standing for a
group of virtues which we have no other word to describe, is a State
which practically deprived parents of the functions which they failed
to fulfil to the furtherance of public virtue. No doubt the State
reserves to itself virtually the power to bring up its own children
in its own way, with the least possible co-operation of parents.
Even to-day, a neighbouring nation has elected to charge itself with
the training of its infants. So soon as they can crawl, or sooner,
before ever they run or speak, they are to be brought to the “Maternal
School,” and carefully nurtured, as with mother’s milk, in the virtues
proper for a citizen. The scheme is as yet but in the experimental
stage, but will doubtless be carried through, because the nation in
question has long ago discovered--and acted consistently upon the
discovery--that what you would have the man become, that you must train
the child to be.
Perhaps such public deposition of parents is the last calamity that
can befall a nation. These poor little ones are to grow up in a world
where the name of God is not to be named; to grow up, too, without the
training in filial duty and brotherly love and neighbourly kindness
which falls to the children of all but the few unnatural parents. They
may be returned to their parents at certain hours or after certain
years; but once alienation has been set up, once the strongest and
sweetest tie has been loosened and the parents have been publicly
delivered from their duty, the desecration of the home is complete;
and we shall have the spectacle of a people growing up orphaned
almost from their birth. This is a new thing in the world’s history,
for even Lycurgus left the children to their parents for the first
half-dozen years of life. Certain newspapers commend the example for
our imitation, but God forbid that we should ever lose faith in the
blessedness of family life. Parents who hold their children as, at
the same time, a public trust and a divine trust, and who recognise
the authority they hold as _deputed_ authority, not to be trifled
with, laid aside, or abused--such parents preserve for the nation the
immunities of home, and safeguard the privileges of their order.
Having seen that it does not rest with the parents to use, or to forego
the use of, the authority they hold, let us examine the limitations and
the scope of this authority. In the first place, it is to be maintained
and exercised solely for the advantage of the children, whether in
mind, body, or estate. And here is room for the nice discrimination,
the delicate intuitions, with which parents are blessed. The mother,
who makes her growing-up daughter take the out-of-door exercise she
needs, is acting within her powers. The father of quiet habits,
who discourages society for his young people, is considering his
own tastes, and not their needs, and is making unlawful use of his
authority.
Again, the authority of parents, though the deference it begets remain
to grace the relations of parents and child, is itself a provisional
function, and is only successful as it encourages the _autonomy_, if
we may call it so, of the child. A single decision made by the parents
which the child is, or should be, capable of making for itself, is an
encroachment on the rights of the child, and a transgression on the
part of the parents.
Once more, the authority of parents rests on a secure foundation only
as they keep well before the children that it is deputed authority; the
child who knows that he is being brought up for the service of the
nation, that his parents are acting under a Divine commission, will not
turn out a rebellious son.
Further, though the emancipation of the children is gradual, they
acquiring day by day more of the art and science of self-government,
yet there comes a day when the parents’ right to rule is over; there
is nothing left for the parents but to abdicate gracefully, and leave
their grown-up sons and daughters absolutely free agents, even though
these still live at home; and although, in the eyes of their parents,
they are not fit to be trusted with the ordering of themselves: if
they fail in such self-ordering, whether as regards time, occupations,
money, friends, most likely their parents are to blame for not having
introduced them by degrees to the full liberty which is their right as
men and women. Anyway, it is too late now to keep them in training; fit
or unfit, they must hold the rudder for themselves.
As for the employment of authority, the highest art lies in ruling
without seeming to do so. The law is a terror to evil-doers, but for
the praise of them that do well; and in the family, as in the State,
the best government is that in which peace and happiness, truth and
justice, religion and piety, are maintained without the intervention of
the law. Happy is the household that has few rules, and where “Mother
does not like this,” and “Father wishes that,” are all-constraining.
CHAPTER III
_PARENTS AS INSPIRERS_
PART I
M. Adolf Monod claims that the child must owe to his mother a second
birth--the first into the natural, the second into the spiritual life
of the intelligence and moral sense. Had he not been writing of women
and for women, no doubt he would have affirmed that the long travail
of this second birth must be undergone equally by both parents. Do we
ask how he arrives at this rather startling theory? He observes that
great men have great mothers; mothers, that is, blest with an infinite
capacity for taking pains with their work of bringing up children.
He likens this labour to a second bearing which launches the child
into a higher life; and as this higher life is a more blessed life,
he contends that every child has a right to this birth into completer
being _at the hands of his parents_. Did his conclusions rest solely
upon the deductive methods he pursues, we might afford to let them
pass, and trouble ourselves very little about this second birth, which
parents may, and ofttimes do, withhold from their natural offspring.
We, too, could bring forward our contrary instances of good parents
with bad sons, and indifferent parents with earnest children; and,
pat to our lips, would come the _Cui bono?_ which absolves us from
endeavour.
Be a good mother to your son because great men have good mothers, is
inspiring, stimulating; but is not to be received as the final word.
For an appeal of irresistible urgency, we look to natural science with
her inductive methods; though we are still waiting her last word,
what she has already said is law and gospel for the believing parent.
The parable of Pandora’s box is true to-day; and a woman may in her
heedlessness let fly upon her offspring a thousand ills. But is there
not also “a glass of blessings standing by,” into which parents may
dip, and bring forth for their children health and vigour, justice and
mercy, truth and beauty?
“Surely,” it may be objected, “every good and perfect gift comes
from God above, and the human parent sins presumptuously who thinks
to bestow gifts divine.” Now this lingering superstition has no part
nor lot with true religion, but, on the contrary, brings upon it the
scandal of many an ill-ordered home and ill-regulated family. When
we perceive that God uses men and women, parents above all others,
as vehicles for the transmission of His gifts, and that it is in the
keeping of His law He is honoured--more than in the attitude of the
courtier waiting for exceptional favours--then we shall take the
trouble to comprehend the law, written not only upon tables of stone
and rolls of parchment, but upon the fleshly tablets of the living
organisms of the children; and, understanding the law, we shall see
with thanksgiving and enlargement of heart in what _natural_ ways God
does indeed show mercy unto thousands of them that love Him and keep
His commandments.
But His commandment is exceeding broad; becomes broader year by year
with every revelation of science; and we had need gird up the loins
of our mind to keep pace with this current revelation. We shall be at
pains, too, to keep ourselves in that attitude of expectant attention
wherein we shall be enabled to perceive the unity and continuity of
this revelation with that of the written Word of God. For perhaps it
is only as we are able to receive the two, and harmonise the two in a
willing and obedient heart, that we shall enter on the heritage of glad
and holy living which is the will of God for us.
Let us, for example, consider, in the light of current scientific
thought, the processes and the methods of this second birth, which,
according to M. Monod, the child claims at the hands of his parents.
“Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he
will not depart from it,” is not only a pledge, but is a statement
of a result arrived at by deductive processes. The writer had great
opportunities for collecting data; he had watched many children
grow up, and his experience taught him to divide them into two
classes--the well-brought up, who turned out well; and the ill-brought
up, who turned out ill. No doubt, then, as now, there were startling
exceptions, and--the exception proves the rule.
But, here as elsewhere, the promises and threatenings of the Bible
will bear the searching light of inductive processes. We may ask, Why
should this be so? and not content ourselves with a general answer,
that this is natural and right: we may search until we discover that
this result is inevitable, and no other result conceivable (except for
alien influences), and our obedience will be in exact proportion to our
perception of the inevitableness of the law.
The vast sum of what we understand by heredity is not to be taken
into account in the consideration of this second birth; by the first
natural birth it is, that “his father and mother, his grandfather and
grandmother, are latent or declare themselves in the child; and it is
on the lines thus laid down in his nature that his development will
proceed. It is not by virtue of education so much as by virtue of
inheritance that he is brave or timid, generous or selfish, prudent
or reckless, boastful or modest, quick or placid in temper; the
ground tone of his character is original in him, and it colours all
the subsequently formed emotions and their sympathetic ideas.... The
influence of systematic culture upon any one is no doubt great, but
that which determines the limit, and even in some degree the nature of
the effects of culture, that which forms the foundations upon which all
the modifications of art must rest, is the inherited nature.”
If heredity means so much, if, as would seem at the first glance,
the child comes into the world with his character ready-made, what
remains for the parents to do but to enable him to work out his own
salvation without let or hindrance of their making, upon the lines of
his individuality? The strong naturalism, shall we call it, of our
day, inclines us to take this view of the objects and limitations of
education; and without doubt it is a gospel; it is the truth; but it
is not the whole truth. The child brings with him into the world, not
character, but disposition. He has tendencies which may need only to
be strengthened, or, again, to be diverted, or even repressed. His
character--the efflorescence of the man wherein the fruit of his life
is a-preparing--character is original disposition, modified, directed,
expanded by education, by circumstances, later, by self-control and
self-culture, above all, by the supreme agency of the Holy Ghost, even
where that agency is little suspected, and as little solicited.
How is this great work of character-making--the single effectual labour
possible to human beings--to be carried on? We shall rest our inquiries
on a physiological basis; the lowest, doubtless, but therefore the
foundation of the rest. The first-floor chambers of the psychologist
are pleasant places, but who would begin to build with the first
floor? What would he rear it upon? Surely the arbitrary distinction
between the grey matter of the brain and the “mind” (or thoughts or
feelings) which plays upon it, even as the song upon the vocal chords
of the singer, is more truly materialistic than is the recognition of
the pregnant truth that the brain is the mere organ of the spiritual
part, registering and effecting every movement of thought and feeling,
whether conscious or unconscious, by appreciable molecular movement,
and sustaining the infinite activities of mind by corresponding
enormous activity and enormous waste; that it is the organ of mind,
which, under present conditions, is absolutely inseparable from, and
indispensable to, the quickening spirit. Once we recognise that in the
thinking of a thought there is as distinct motion set up in some tract
of the brain as there is in the muscles of the hand employed in writing
a sentence, we shall see that the behaviour of the grey nerve-substance
of the cerebrum should afford the one possible key to certitude and
system in our attempts at education, using the word in the most worthy
sense--as its concern is the formation of character.
Having heard Dr. Maudsley on the subject of heredity, let us hear him
again on this other subject, which practically enables us to define the
possibilities of education.
“That which has existed with any completeness in consciousness leaves
behind it, after its disappearance therefrom, in the mind or brain,
a functional disposition to its reproduction or reappearance in
consciousness at some future time. Of no mental act can we say that it
is ‘writ in water;’ something remains from it, whereby its recurrence
is facilitated. Every impression of sense upon the brain, every current
of molecular activity from one to another part of the brain, every
cerebral action which passes into muscular movement, leaves behind it
some modification of the nerve elements concerned in its function, some
after-effect, or, so to speak, memory of itself in them which renders
its reproduction an easier matter, the more easy the more often it has
been repeated, and makes it impossible to say that, however trivial, it
shall not under some circumstances recur. Let the excitation take place
in one of two nerve cells lying side by side, and between which there
was not any original specific difference, there will be ever afterwards
a difference between them. This physiological process, whatever be its
nature, is the physical basis of memory, and it is the foundation of
the development of all our mental functions.
“That modification which persists, or is retained, in structure after
functions, has been differently described as a residuum, or relic,
or trace, or disposition, or vestige; or again as potential, latent,
or dormant idea. Not only definite ideas, but all affections of the
nervous system, feelings of pleasure and pain, desire, and even its
outward reactions, thus leave behind them their structural effects, and
lay the foundation of modes of thought, feeling, and action. Particular
talents are sometimes formed quite, or almost quite, involuntarily;
and complex actions, which were first consciously performed by dint
of great application, become automatic by repetition; ideas which were
at first consciously associated, ultimately coalesce and call one
another up without any consciousness, as we see in the quick perception
or intuition of the man of large worldly experience; and feelings,
once active, leave behind them their large unconscious residua, thus
affecting the generation of the character, so that, apart from the
original or inborn nature of the individual, contentment, melancholy,
cowardice, bravery, and even moral feeling are generated as the results
of particular life-experiences.”
Here we have sketched out a magnificent educational charter. It is as
well, perhaps, that we do not realise the extent of our liberties; if
we did, it may be, such a fervour of educational enthusiasm would seize
us, that we should behave as did those early Christians who every day
expected the coming of the Lord. How should a man have patience to buy
and sell and get gain had it been revealed to him that he was able to
paint the greatest picture ever painted? And we, with the enthralling
vision of what our little child might become under our hands, how
should we have patience for common toils? That science should have
revealed the _rationale_ of education in our day is possibly the Divine
recognition that we have become more fit for the task, because we have
come to an increasing sense of moral responsibility. What would it be
for an immoral people to discern fully the possibilities of education?
But how slow we are! how--
“Custom lies upon us with a weight,
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!”
It is now more than five-and-twenty years since these words of Dr.
Maudsley, and many of like force by other physiologists, were
published to the world. We have purposely chosen words that have stood
the test of time; for to-day a hundred eminent scientific men, at home
and abroad, are proclaiming the same truths. Every scientist believes
them! And we? We go on after our use and wont, as if nothing had been
said; dropping, hour by hour, out of careless hands, seeds of corn and
hemlock, of bramble and rose.
Let us run over the charter of our liberties, as Dr. Maudsley sums them
up.
We may lay the physical basis of memory: while the wide-eyed babe
stretches his little person with aimless kickings on his rug, he is
receiving unconsciously those first impressions which form his earliest
memories; and we can order those memories for him: we can see that the
earliest sights he sees are sights of order, neatness, beauty; that
the sounds his ear drinks in are musical and soft, tender and joyous;
that the baby nostrils sniff only delicate purity and sweetness. These
memories remain through life, engraved on the unthinking brain. As we
shall see later, memories have a certain power of accretion--where
there are some others of a like kind gather, and all the life is
ordered on the lines of these first pure and tender memories.
We may lay the foundation of the development of all the mental
functions. Are there children who do not wonder, or revere, or care for
fairy tales, or think wise child-thoughts? Perhaps there are not; but
if there are, it is because the fertilising pollen grain has never been
conveyed to the ovule waiting for it in the child’s soul.
These are some of the things that--according to the citations we have
given from Dr. Maudsley’s _Physiology of Mind_--his parents may settle
for the future man, even in his early childhood:--
His definite ideas upon particular subjects, as, for example, his
relations with other people.
His habits, of neatness or disorder, of punctuality, of moderation.
His general modes of thought, as affected by altruism or egoism.
His consequent modes of feeling and action.
His objects of thought--the small affairs of daily life, the
natural world, the operations or the productions of the human
mind, the ways of God with men.
His distinguishing talent--music, eloquence, invention.
His disposition or tone of character, as it shows itself in and
affects his family and other close relations in life--reserved
or frank, morose or genial, melancholy or cheerful, cowardly or
brave.
CHAPTER IV
_PARENTS AS INSPIRERS_
PART II
“Sow an act, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character;
sow a character, reap a destiny.”--THACKERAY.
The last chapter closed with an imperfect summary of what we may call
the educational functions of parents. We found that it rests with the
parents of the child to settle for the future man his ways of thinking,
behaving, feeling, acting; his disposition, his particular talent;
the manner of things upon which his thoughts shall run. Who shall fix
limitations to the power of parents? The destiny of the child is ruled
by his parents, because they have the virgin soil all to themselves.
The first sowing must be at their hands, or at the hands of such as
they choose to depute.
What do they sow? _Ideas._ We cannot too soon recognise what is the
sole educational instrument we have to work with, and how this one
instrument is to be handled. But how radically wrong is all our thought
upon education! We cannot use the fit words because we do not think
the right thing. For example, an _idea_ is not an “instrument,” but
an agent; is not to be “handled,” but, shall we say, set in motion?
We have perhaps got over the educational misconception of the _tabula
rasa_. No one now looks on the child’s white soul as a tablet prepared
for the exercise of the educator’s supreme art. But the conception
which has succeeded this time-honoured heresy rests on the same false
bases of the august office and the infallible wisdom of the educator.
Here it is in its cruder form: “Pestalozzi aimed more at harmoniously
developing the faculties than at making use of them for the acquirement
of knowledge; he sought to prepare the vase rather than to fill it.”
In the hands of Froebel the figure gains in boldness and beauty; it
is no longer a mere vase to be shaped under the potter’s fingers; but
a flower, say, a perfect rose, to be delicately and consciously and
methodically moulded, petal by petal, curve and curl; for the perfume
and living glory of the flower, why these will come; do you your part
and mould the several petals; wait, too, upon sunshine and shower,
give space and place for your blossom to expand. And so we go to work
with a touch to “imagination” here, and to “judgment” there; now, to
the “perceptive faculties,” now, to the “conceptive;” in this, aiming
at the moral, and in this, at the intellectual nature of the child;
touching into being, petal by petal, the flower of a perfect life under
the genial influences of sunny looks and happy moods. This reading
of the meaning of education and of the work of the educator is very
fascinating, and it calls forth singular zeal and self-devotion on the
part of those gardeners whose plants are the children. Perhaps, indeed,
this of the Kindergarten is the one vital conception of education we
have had hitherto.
But in these days of revolutionary thought, when all along the line--in
geology and anthropology, chemistry, philology, and biology--science
is changing front, it is necessary that we should reconsider our
conception of Education. We are taught, for example, that “heredity” is
by no means the simple and direct transmission, from parent, or remote
ancestor, to child of power and proclivity, virtue and defect; and we
breathe freer, because we had begun to suspect that if this were so,
it would mean to most of us an inheritance of exaggerated defects:
imbecility, insanity, congenital disease--are they utterly removed from
any one of us? So of education, we begin to ask, Is its work so purely
formative as we thought? Is it directly formative at all? How much is
there in this pleasing and easy doctrine, that the drawing forth and
strengthening and directing of the several “faculties” is education?
Parents are very jealous over the individuality of their children;
they mistrust the tendency to develop all on the same plan; and this
instinctive jealousy is right; for, supposing that education really
did consist in systematised efforts to draw out every power that is in
us, why, we should all develop on the same lines, be as like as “two
peas,” and (should we not?) die of weariness of one another! Some of
us have an uneasy sense that things are tending towards this deadly
sameness. But, indeed, the fear is groundless. We may believe that the
personality, the individuality, of each of us, is too dear to God,
and too necessary to a complete humanity, to be left at the mercy of
empirics. We are absolutely safe, and the tenderest child is fortified
against a battering-ram of educational forces.
The problem of education is more complex than it seems at first sight,
and well for us and the world that it is so. “Education is a life;” you
may stunt and starve and kill, or you may cherish and sustain; but the
beating of the heart, the movement of the lungs, and the development
of the faculties (are there any “faculties”?) are only indirectly our
care. The poverty of our thought on the subject of education is shown
by the fact that we have no word which at all implies the sustaining
of a _life_: education (_e_, out, and _ducere_, to lead, to draw) is
very inadequate; it covers no more than those occasional gymnastics of
the mind which correspond with those by which the limbs are trained:
training (_trahere_) is almost synonymous, and upon these two words
rests the misconception that the development and the exercise of the
“faculties” is the object of education (we must needs use the word for
want of a better). Our homely Saxon “bringing up” is nearer the truth,
perhaps because of its very vagueness; any way, “up” implies an _aim_,
and “bringing” an _effort_.
The happy phrase of Mr. Matthew Arnold--“Education is an atmosphere,
a discipline, a life”--is perhaps the most complete and adequate
definition of education we possess. It is a great thing to have said
it; and our wiser posterity may see in that “profound and exquisite
remark” the fruition of a lifetime of critical effort. Observe how
it covers the question from the three conceivable points of view.
Subjectively, in the child, education is a life; objectively, as
affecting the child, education is a discipline; relatively, if we
may introduce a third term, as regards the environment of the child,
education is an atmosphere.
We shall examine each of these postulates later; at present we shall
attempt no more than to clear the ground a little, with a view to the
subject of this paper, “Parents as Inspirers”--not “modellers,” but
“inspirers.”
It is only as we recognise our limitations that our work becomes
effective: when we see definitely what we are to do, what we can do,
and what we cannot do, we set to work with confidence and courage; we
have an end in view, and we make our way intelligently towards that
end, and a _way to an end_ is _method_. It rests with parents not only
to give their children birth into the life of intelligence and moral
power, but to sustain the higher life which they have borne. Now that
life, which we call education, receives only one kind of sustenance; it
grows upon _ideas_. You may go through years of so-called “education”
without getting a single vital idea; and that is why many a well-fed
body carries about a feeble, starved intelligence; and no society for
the prevention of cruelty to children cries shame on the parents. Only
the other day we heard of a girl of fifteen who had spent two years
at a school without taking part in a single lesson, and this by the
express desire of her mother, who wished all her time and all her pains
to be given to “fancy needlework.” This, no doubt, is a survival (not
of the fittest), but it is possible to pass even the Universities’
Local Examinations with credit, without ever having experienced that
vital stir which marks the inception of an idea; and, if we have
succeeded in escaping this disturbing influence, why we have “finished
our education” when we leave school; we shut up our books and our
minds, and remain pigmies in the dark forest of our own dim world of
thought and feeling.
What is an idea? A live thing of the mind, according to the older
philosophers, from Plato to Bacon, from Bacon to Coleridge. We say of
an idea that it strikes us, impresses us, seizes us, takes possession
of us, rules us; and our common speech is, as usual, truer to fact
than the conscious thought which it expresses. We do not in the least
exaggerate in ascribing this sort of action and power to an idea. We
form an _ideal_--a, so to speak, embodied idea--and our ideal exercises
the very strongest formative influence upon us. Why do you devote
yourself to this pursuit, that cause? “Because twenty years ago such
and such an idea _struck_ me,” is the sort of history which might be
given of every purposeful life--every life devoted to the working out
of an idea. Now is it not marvellous that, recognising as we do the
potency of an idea, both the word and the conception it covers enter so
little into our thought of education?
Coleridge brings the conception of an “idea” within the sphere of the
scientific thought of to-day; not as that thought is expressed in
_Psychology_--a term which he himself launched upon the world with an
apology for it as an _insolens verbum_,[1] but in that science of the
correlation and interaction of mind and brain, which is at present
rather clumsily expressed in such terms as “mental physiology” and
“psycho-physiology.”
In his method he gives us the following illustration of the rise and
progress of an idea:--
“We can recall no incident of human history that impresses the
imagination more deeply than the moment when Columbus, on an unknown
ocean, first perceived that startling fact, the change of the magnetic
needle. How many such instances occur in history, when the ideas
of nature (presented to chosen minds by a Higher Power than Nature
herself) suddenly unfold, as it were, in prophetic succession,
systematic views destined to produce the most important revolutions in
the state of man! The clear spirit of Columbus was doubtless eminently
_methodical_. He saw distinctly that great leading _idea_ which
authorised the poor pilot to become a ‘promiser of kingdoms.’”
Notice the genesis of such ideas--“presented to chosen minds by a
Higher Power than Nature;” notice how accurately this history of an
idea fits in with what we know of the history of great inventions
and discoveries, with that of the _ideas_ which rule our own lives;
and how well does it correspond with that key to the origin of
“practical” ideas which we find elsewhere:--
“Doth the plowman plow continually to ... open and break the clods
of his ground? When he hath made plain the face thereof, doth he not
cast abroad the fitches, and scatter the cummin, and put in the wheat
in rows, and the barley in the appointed place, and the spelt in the
border thereof? For his God doth instruct him aright, and doth teach
him....
“Bread corn is ground; for he will not ever be threshing it.... This
also cometh forth from the Lord of hosts, which is wonderful in counsel
and excellent in wisdom.”[2]
Ideas may invest as an atmosphere, rather than strike as a weapon. “The
idea may exist in a clear, distinct definite form, as that of a circle
in the mind of a geometrician; or it may be a mere instinct, a vague
appetency towards something, ... like the impulse which fills the young
poet’s eyes with tears, he knows not why.” To excite this “appetency
towards something”--towards things lovely, honest, and of good report,
is the earliest and most important ministry of the educator. How shall
these indefinite ideas which manifest themselves in appetency be
imparted? They are not to be given of set purpose, nor taken at set
times. They are held in that thought-environment which surrounds the
child as an atmosphere, which he breathes as his breath of life; and
this atmosphere in which the child inspires his unconscious ideas of
right living emanates from his parents. Every look of gentleness and
tone of reverence, every word of kindness and act of help, passes into
the thought-environment, the very atmosphere which the child breathes;
he does not think of these things, may never think of them, but all
his life long they excite that “vague appetency towards something” out
of which most of his actions spring. Oh! the wonderful and dreadful
presence of the little child in the midst.
That he should take direction and inspiration from all the casual life
about him, should make our poor words and ways the starting-point from
which, and in the direction of which, he develops--this is a thought
which makes the most of us hold our breath. There is no way of escape
for parents; they must needs be as “inspirers” to their children,
because about them hangs, as its atmosphere about a planet, the
thought-environment of the child, from which he derives those enduring
ideas which express themselves as a life-long “appetency” towards
things sordid or things lovely, things earthly or divine.
Let us now hear Coleridge on the subject of those _definite_ ideas
which are not inhaled as air, but conveyed as meat to the mind:--[3]
“From the first, or initiative idea, as from a seed, successive ideas
germinate.”
“Events and images, the lively and spirit-stirring machinery of the
external world, are like light, and air, and moisture to the seed of
the mind, which would else rot and perish.”
“The paths in which we may pursue a methodical course are manifold, and
at the head of each stands its peculiar and guiding idea.”
“Those ideas are as regularly subordinate in dignity as the paths to
which they point are various and eccentric in direction. The world has
suffered much, in modern times, from a subversion of the natural and
necessary order of Science ... from summoning reason and faith to the
bar of that limited physical experience to which, by the true laws of
method, they owe no obedience.”
“Progress follows the path of the idea from which it sets out;
requiring, however, a constant wakefulness of mind to keep it within
the due limits of its course. Hence the orbits of thought, so to speak,
must differ among themselves as the initiative ideas differ.”
Have we not here the corollary to, and the explanation of, that law of
unconscious cerebration which results in our “ways of thinking,” which
shapes our character, rules our destiny? Thoughtful minds consider
that the new light which biology is throwing upon the laws of mind is
bringing to the front once more the Platonic doctrine, that “An idea is
a distinguishable power, self-affirmed, and seen in its unity with the
Eternal Essence.”
The whole subject is profound, but as practical as it is profound. We
absolutely must disabuse our minds of the theory that the functions
of education are, in the main, gymnastic. In the early years of the
child’s life it makes, perhaps, little apparent difference whether his
parents start with the notion that to educate is to fill a receptacle,
inscribe a tablet, mould plastic matter, or nourish a life; but in the
end we shall find that only those _ideas_ which have fed his life are
taken into the being of the child; all the rest is thrown away, or
worse, is like sawdust in the system, an impediment and an injury to
the vital processes.
This is, perhaps, how the educational formula should run: Education is
a life; that life is sustained on ideas; ideas are of spiritual origin;
but,
“God has made us so,”
that we get them chiefly as we convey them to one another. The duty of
parents is to sustain a child’s inner life with ideas as they sustain
his body with food. The child is an eclectic; he may choose this or
that; therefore, in the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening
withhold not thy hand, for thou knowest not which shall prosper,
whether this or that, or whether they both shall be alike good.
The child has affinities with evil as well as with good; therefore,
hedge him about from any chance lodgment of evil suggestion.
The initial idea begets subsequent ideas; therefore, take care that
children get right primary ideas on the great relations and duties of
life.
Every study, every line of thought, has its “guiding idea;” therefore
the study of a child makes for living education, as it is quickened by
the guiding idea “which stands at the head.”
In a word, our much boasted “infallible reason”--is it not the
involuntary thought which follows the initial idea upon necessary
logical lines? Given, the starting idea, and the conclusion may be
predicated almost to a certainty. We get into the _way_ of thinking
such and such manner of thoughts, and of coming to such and such
conclusions, ever further and further removed from the starting-point,
but on the same lines. There is structural adaptation in the brain
tissue to the manner of thoughts we think--a plan and a way for them to
run in. Thus we see how the destiny of a life is shaped in the nursery,
by the reverent naming of the Divine Name; by the light scoff at holy
things; by the thought of duty the little child gets who is made to
finish conscientiously his little task; by the hardness of heart that
comes to the child who hears the faults or sorrows of others spoken of
lightly.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] “We beg pardon for the use of this _insolens verbum_,
but it is one of which our language stands in great
need.”--S. T. COLERIDGE.
[2] Isaiah xxviii.
[3] _Method_--S. T. COLERIDGE.
CHAPTER V
_PARENTS AS INSPIRERS_
PART III
It is probable that parents as a class feel more than ever before the
responsibility of their prophetic office. It is as revealers of God to
their children that parents touch their highest limitations; perhaps it
is only as they succeed in this part of their work that they fulfil the
Divine intention in giving them children to bring up--in the nurture
and admonition of the Lord.
How to fortify the children against the doubts of which the air is
full, is an anxious question. Three courses are open--to teach as we of
an older generation have been taught, and to let them bide their time
and their chance; to attempt to deal with the doubts and difficulties
which have turned up, or are likely to turn up; or, to give children
such hold upon vital truth, and, at the same time, such an outlook
upon current thought, that they shall be landed on the safe side of
the controversies of their day, open to truth, in however new a light
presented, and safeguarded against mortal error.
The first course is unfair to the young: when the attack comes, they
find themselves at a disadvantage; they have nothing to reply; their
pride is in arms; they jump to the conclusion that there is no defence
possible of that which they have received as truth; had there been,
would they not have been instructed to make it? They resent being made
out in the wrong, being on the weaker side--so it seems to them,--being
behind their times; and they go over without a struggle to the side of
the most aggressive thinkers of their day.
Let us suppose that, on the other hand, they have been fortified
with “Christian Evidences,” defended by bulwarks of sound dogmatic
teaching. Religion without definite dogmatic teaching degenerates into
sentiment, but dogma, as dogma, offers no defence against the assaults
of unbelief. As for “evidences,” the _rôle_ of the Christian apologist
is open to the imputation conveyed in the keen proverb, _qui s’excuse,
s’accuse_; the truth by which we live must needs be self-evidenced,
admitting of neither proof nor disproof. Children should be taught
Bible history with every elucidation which modern research makes
possible. But they should not be taught to think of the inscriptions on
the Assyrian monuments, for example, as _proofs_ of the truth of the
Bible records, but rather as illustrations, though they are, and cannot
but be subsidiary proofs.
Let us look at the third course; and first, as regards the outlook
upon current thought. Contemporary opinion is the fetish of the young
mind. Young people are eager to know what to think on all the serious
questions of religion and life. They ask what is the opinion of this
and that leading thinker of their day. They by no means confine
themselves to such leaders of thought as their parents have elected
to follow; on the contrary, the “other side” of every question is the
attractive side for them, and they do not choose to be behind the
foremost in the race of thought.
Now, that their young people should thus take to the water need not
come upon parents as a surprise. The whole training from babyhood
upward should be in view of this plunge. When the time comes, there is
nothing to be done; openly, it may be, secretly if the home rule is
rigid, the young folk think their own thoughts; that is, they follow
the leader they have elected; for they are truly modest and humble at
heart, and do not yet venture to think for themselves; only they have
transferred their allegiance. Nor is this transfer of allegiance to be
resented by parents; we all claim this kind of “suffrage” in our turn
when we feel ourselves included in larger interests than those of the
family.
But there is much to be done beforehand, though nothing when the time
comes. The notion that any contemporary authority is infallible may
be steadily undermined from infancy onwards, though at some sacrifice
of ease and glory to the parents. “I don’t know” must take the place
of the vague wise-sounding answer, the random shot which children’s
pertinacious questionings too often provoke. And “I don’t know” should
be followed by the effort to know, the research necessary to find
out. Even then, the possibility of error in a “printed book” must
occasionally be faced. The results of this kind of training in the way
of mental balance and repose are invaluable.
Another safeguard is in the attitude of reservation, shall we say?
which it may be well to preserve towards “Science.” It is well that
the enthusiasm of children should be kindled, that they should see how
glorious it is to devote a lifetime to patient research, how great to
find out a single secret of nature, a key to many riddles. The heroes
of science should be their heroes; the great names, especially of those
who are amongst us, should be household words. But here, again, nice
discrimination should be exercised; two points should be kept well to
the front--the absolute silence of the oracle on all ultimate questions
of origin and life, and the fact that, all along the line, scientific
truth comes in like the tide, with steady advance, but with ebb and
flow of every wavelet of truth; so much so, that, at the present
moment, the teaching of the last twenty years is discredited in at
least half a dozen departments of science. Indeed, it would seem to be
the part of wisdom to wait half a century before fitting the discovery
of to-day into the general scheme of things. And this, not because the
latest discovery is not absolutely true, but because we are not yet
able so to adjust it--according to the “science of the proportion of
things”--that it shall be relatively true.
But all this is surely beyond children? By no means; every walk should
quicken their enthusiasm for the things of nature, and their reverence
for the priests of that temple; but occasion should be taken to mark
the progressive advances of science, and the fact that the teaching
of to-day may be the error of to-morrow, because new light may lead
to new conclusions even from the facts already known. “Until quite
lately, geologists thought ... they now think ... but they may find
reason to think otherwise in the future.” To perceive that knowledge is
_progressive_, and that the next “find” may always alter the bearings
of what went before; that we are waiting, and may have very long to
wait, for the last word; that science also is “revelation,” though we
are not yet able fully to interpret what we know; and that ‘science’
herself contains the promise of great impetus to the spiritual life--to
perceive these things is to be able to rejoice in all truth and to wait
for final certainty.
In another way we may endeavour to secure for the children that
stability of mind which comes of self-knowledge. It is well that they
should know so early, that they will seem to themselves always to have
known, some of the laws of thought which govern their own minds. Let
them know that, once an idea takes possession of them, it will pursue,
so to speak, its own course, will establish its own place in the very
substance of the brain, will draw its own train of ideas after it. One
of the most fertile sources of youthful infidelity is the fact that
thoughtful boys and girls are infinitely surprised when they come to
notice the course of their own thoughts. They read a book or listen to
talk with a tendency to what is to them “free-thought.” And then, the
“fearful joy” of finding that their own thoughts begin with the thought
they have heard, and go on and on to new and startling conclusions on
the same lines! The mental stir of all this gives a delightful sense of
power, and a sense of inevitableness and certainty too; for they do not
intend or try to think this or that. It comes of itself; their reason,
they believe, is acting independently of them, and how can they help
assuming that what comes to them of itself, with an air of absolute
certainty, must of necessity be right?
But what if from childhood they had been warned, “Take care of your
thoughts, and the rest will take care of itself; let a thought in, and
it will stay; will come again to-morrow and the next day, will make a
place for itself in your brain, and will bring many other thoughts like
itself. Your business is to look at the thoughts as they come, to keep
out the wrong thoughts, and let in the right. See that ye _enter not_
into temptation.” This sort of teaching is not so hard to understand
as the rules for the English nominative, and is of infinitively more
profit in the conduct of life. It is a great safeguard to know that
your “reason” is capable of proving any theory you allow yourself to
entertain.
We have touched here only on the negative side of the parent’s work as
prophet, inspirer. There are perhaps few parents to whom the innocence
of the babe in its mother’s arms does not appeal with pathetic force.
“Open me the gates of righteousness, that I may go in unto them,” is
the voice of the little unworldly child; and a wish, anyway, that he
may be kept unspotted from the world is breathed in every kiss of
his mother, in the light of his father’s eyes. But how ready we are
to conclude that children cannot be expected to understand spiritual
things. Our own grasp of the things of the Spirit is all too lax, and
how can we expect that the child’s feeble intelligence can apprehend
the highest mysteries of our being? But here we are altogether wrong.
It is with the advance of years that a materialistic temper settles
upon us. But the children live in the light of the morning-land. The
spirit-world has no mysteries for them; that parable and travesty of
the spirit-world, the fairy-world, where all things are possible, is
it not their favourite dwelling-place? And fairy tales are so dear
to children because their spirits fret against the hard and narrow
limitations of time and place and substance; they cannot breathe
freely in a material world. Think what the vision of God should be
to the little child already peering wistfully through the bars of
his prison-house. Not a far-off God, a cold abstraction, but a warm,
breathing, spiritual Presence about his path and about his bed--a
Presence in which he recognises protection and tenderness in darkness
and danger, towards which he rushes as the timid child to hide his
face in his mother’s skirts.
A friend tells me the following story of her girlhood. It so happened
that extra lessons detained her at school until dark every day during
the winter. She was extremely timid, but, with the unconscious reserve
of youth, never thought of mentioning her fear of “something.” Her way
home lay by a river-side, a solitary path under trees--big trees, with
masses of shadow. The black shadows, in which “something” might lie
hid--the _swsh-sh, swsh-sh_ of the river, which might be whisperings or
the rustle of garments--filled her night by night with unabated terror.
She fled along that river-side path with beating heart; but, quick as
flying steps and beating heart, these words beat in her brain, over,
and over, and over, the whole length of the way, evening by evening,
winter after winter: “Thou art my hiding-place; Thou shalt preserve me
from trouble; Thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance.”
Years after, when the woman might be supposed to have outgrown girlish
terrors, she found herself again walking alone in the early darkness of
a winter’s evening under trees by the _swsh-sh_ of another river. The
old terror returned, and with it the old words came to her, and kept
time the whole length of the way with her hasty steps. Such a place to
hide him in should be the thought of God to every child.
Their keen sensitiveness to spiritual influences is not due to
ignorance on the part of the children. It is we, not they, who are in
error. The whole tendency of modern biological thought is to confirm
the teaching of the Bible: the ideas which quicken come from above; the
mind of the little child is an open field, surely “good ground,” where,
morning by morning, the sower goes forth to sow, and the seed is the
Word. All our teaching of children should be given reverently, with the
humble sense that we are invited in this matter to co-operate with the
Holy Spirit; but it should be given dutifully and diligently, with the
awful sense that our co-operation would appear to be made a condition
of the Divine action; that the Saviour of the world pleads with us to
“Suffer the little children to come unto Me,” as if we had the power to
hinder, as we know that we have.
This thought of the Saviour of the world implies another conception
which we sometimes leave out of sight in dealing with children. Young
faces are not always sunny and lovely; even the brightest children in
the happiest circumstances have their clouded hours. We rightly put the
cloud down to some little disorder, or to the weather, but these are
the secondary causes which reveal a deep-seated discontent. Children
have a sense of sin acute in proportion to their sensitiveness. We are
in danger of trusting too much to a rose-water treatment; we do not
take children seriously enough; brought face to face with a child,
we find he is a very real person, but in our educational theories we
take him as “something between a wax doll and an angel.” He sins; he
is guilty of greediness, falsehood, malice, cruelty, a hundred faults
that would be hateful in a grown-up person; we say he will know better
by-and-by. He will never know better; he is keenly aware of his own
odiousness. How many of us would say about our childhood, if we told
the whole truth, “Oh, I was an odious little thing!” and that, not
because we recollect our faults, but because we recollect our childish
estimate of ourselves. Many a bright and merry child is odious in his
own eyes; and the “peace, peace, where there is no peace,” of fond
parents and friends is little comfort. It is well that we “ask for the
old paths, where is the good way;” it is not well that, in the name of
the old paths, we lead our children into blind alleys, nor that we let
them follow the new into bewildering mazes.
CHAPTER VI
_PARENTS AS INSPIRERS_
PART IV
“One of the little boys gazing upon the terrible desolation
of the scene, so unlike in its savage and inhuman aspects
anything he had ever seen at home, nestled close to his
mother, and asked with bated breath, ‘Mither, is there a
God here?’”--JOHN BURROUGHS.
The last chapter introduced the thought of parents in their highest
function--as revealers of God to their children. To bring the human
race, family by family, child by child, out of the savage and inhuman
desolation where He is not, into the light and warmth and comfort of
the presence of God, is, no doubt, the chief thing we have to do in
the world. And this individual work with each child, being the most
momentous work in the world, is put into the hands of the wisest, most
loving, disciplined, and divinely instructed of human beings. Be ye
perfect _as your Father_ is perfect, is the perfection of parenthood,
perhaps to be attained only in its fulness through parenthood. There
are mistaken parents, ignorant parents, a few indifferent parents,
even, as one in a thousand, callous parents; but the good that is done
upon the earth is done, under God, by parents, whether directly or
indirectly.
Parents, who recognise that their great work is to be done by the
instrumentality of the ideas they are able to introduce into the minds
of their children, will take anxious thought as to those ideas of God
which are most fitting for children, and as to how those ideas may best
be conveyed. Let us consider an idea which is just now causing some
stir in people’s thoughts.
“We read some of the Old Testament history as ‘history of the Jews,’
and Job and Isaiah and the Psalms as poetry--and I am glad to say he
is very fond of them; and parts of the Gospels in Greek, as the life
and character of a hero. It is the greatest mistake to impose them upon
children as authoritative and divine all at once. It at once diminishes
their interest: we ought to work slowly up through the human side.”[4]
Here is a theory which commends itself to many persons because it is
“so reasonable.” But it goes upon the assumption that we are ruled by
Reason, an infallible entity, which is certain, give it fair play, to
bring us to just conclusions. Now the exercise of that function of
the mind which we call reasoning--we must decline to speak of “the
Reason”--does indeed bring us to inevitable conclusions; the process
is definite, the result convincing; but whether that result be right
or wrong depends altogether upon the initial idea which, when we wish
to discredit it, we call a prejudice; when we wish to exalt, we call
an intuition, even an inspiration. It would be idle to illustrate
this position; the whole history of Error is the history of the
logical outcome of what we happily call misconceptions. The history of
Persecution is the tale of how the inevitable conclusions arrived at
by reasoning pass themselves off for truth. The Event of Calvary was
due to no hasty mad outburst of popular feeling. It was a triumph of
reasoning: the inevitable issue of more than one logical sequence;
the Crucifixion was not criminal, but altogether laudable, _if_ that
is right which is reasonable. And this is why the hearts of religious
Jews were hardened and their understanding darkened; they were truly
doing what was _right_ in their own eyes. It is a marvellous thing to
perceive the thoughts within us driving us forward to an inevitable
conclusion, even against our will. How can that conclusion which
presents itself to us in spite of ourselves fail to be right?
Let us place ourselves for one instant in the position of the logical
and conscientious Jew. “‘Jehovah’ is a name of awe, unapproachable
in thought or act except in ways Himself has specified. To attempt
unlawful approach is to blaspheme. As Jehovah is infinitely great,
presumptuous offence is infinitely heinous, is criminal, is the last
crime as committed against Him who is the First. The blasphemer
is worthy of death. This man makes himself equal with God, the
unapproachable. He is a blasphemer, arrogant as Beelzebub. He is doubly
worthy of death. To the people of the Jews is committed in trust the
honoured Name; upon them it is incumbent to exterminate the blasphemer.
The man must die.” Here is the secret of the virulent hatred which
dogged the steps of the blameless Life. These men were following the
dictates of reason, and _knew_, so they would say, that they were doing
right. Here we have the invincible ignorance which the Light of the
world failed to illumine; and He,
“Who knows us as we are,
Yet loves us better than He knows,”
offers for them the true plea, “They know not what they do.” The steps
of the argument are incontrovertible; the error lies in the initial
idea,--such conception of Jehovah as made the conception of Christ
inadmissible, impossible. Thus reasoned the Jew upon whom his religion
had the first claim. The patriotic Jew, to whom religion itself was
subservient to the hopes of his nation, arrived by quite another chain
of _spontaneous_ arguments at the same inevitable conclusion:--“The
Jews are the chosen people. The first duty of a Jew is towards his
nation. These are critical times. A great hope is before us, but we are
in the grip of the Romans; they may crush out the national life before
our hope is realised. Nothing must be done to alarm their suspicions.
This Man? By all accounts He is harmless, perhaps righteous. But He
stirs up the people. It is rumoured that they call Him King of the
Jews. He must not be permitted to ruin the hopes of the nation. He
must die. It is expedient that one man die for the people, and that
the whole nation perish not.” Thus the consummate crime that has been
done upon the earth was done probably without any consciousness of
criminality; on the contrary, with the acquittal of that spurious moral
sense which supports with its approval all _reasonable_ action. The
Crucifixion was the logical and necessary outcome of ideas imbibed from
their cradles by the persecuting Jews. So of every persecution; none
is born of the occasion and the hour, but comes out of the habit of
thought of a lifetime.
It is the primal impulse to these habits of thought which children must
owe to their parents; and, as a man’s thought and action Godward is--
“The very pulse of the machine,”
the introduction of such primal ideas as shall impel the soul to God
is the first duty and the highest privilege of parents. Whatever sin of
unbelief a man is guilty of, are his parents wholly without blame? Let
us consider what is commonly done in the nursery in this respect. No
sooner can the little being lisp than he is taught to kneel up in his
mother’s lap, and say “God bless ...” and then follows a list of the
near and dear, and “God bless ... and make him a good boy, for Jesus’
sake. Amen.” It is very touching and beautiful. I once peeped in at an
open cottage door in a moorland village, and saw a little child in its
nightgown kneeling in its mother’s lap and saying its evening prayer.
The spot has ever since remained to me a sort of shrine. There is no
sight more touching and tender. By-and-by, so soon as he can speak the
words,
“Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,”
is added to the little one’s prayer, and later, “Our Father.” Nothing
could be more suitable and more beautiful than these morning and
evening approaches to God, the little children brought to Him by their
mothers. And most of us can “think back” to the hallowing influence of
these early prayers. But might not more be done? How many times a day
does a mother lift up her heart to God as she goes in and out amongst
her children, and they never know! “To-day I talked to them” (a boy
and girl of four and five) “about Rebekah at the well. They were very
much interested, especially about Eliezer praying in his heart and the
answer coming at once. They said, ‘How did he pray?’ I said, ‘I often
pray in my heart when you know nothing about it. Sometimes you begin
to show a naughty spirit, and I pray for you in my heart, and almost
directly I find the good Spirit comes, and your faces show my prayer
is answered.’ O. stroked my hand and said, ‘Dear mother, I shall think
of that!’ Boy looked thoughtful, but didn’t speak; but when they were
in bed I knelt down to pray for them before leaving them, and when I
got up, Boy said, ‘Mother, God filled my heart with goodness while you
prayed for us; and, mother, I _will_ try to-morrow.’” Is it possible
that the mother could, when alone with her children, occasionally hold
this communing out loud, so that the children might grow up in the
sense of the presence of God? It would probably be difficult for many
mothers to break down the barrier of spiritual reserve in the presence
of even their own children. But could it be done, would it not lead to
glad and natural living in the recognised presence of God?
A mother who remembered a little penny scent-bottle as an early joy of
her own, took three such small bottles home to her three little girls.
They got them next morning at the family breakfast and enjoyed them
all through the meal. Before it ended the mother was called away, and
little M. was sitting rather solitary with her scent-bottle and the
remains of her breakfast. And out of the pure well of the little girl’s
heart came this, intended for nobody’s ear, “Dear mother, you are _too_
good!” Think of the joy of the mother who should overhear her little
child murmuring over the first primrose of the year, “Dear God, you are
_too_ good!” Children are so imitative, that if they hear their parents
speak out continually their joys and fears, their thanks and wishes,
they too will have many things to say.
Another point in this connection: the little German child hears and
speaks many times a day of _der liebe Gott_; to be sure he addresses
Him as “_Du_,” but _du_ is part of his everyday speech; the circle of
the very dear and intimate is hedged in by the magic _du_. So with the
little French child, whose thought and word are ever of _le bon Dieu_;
he also says _Tu_, but that is how he speaks to those most endeared
to him. But the little English child is thrust out in the cold by an
archaic mode of address, reverent in the ears of us older people,
but forbidding, we may be sure, to the child. Then, for the Lord’s
Prayer, what a boon would be a truly reverent translation of it into
the English of to-day. To us, who have learned to spell it out, the
present form is dear, almost sacred; but we must not forget that it is
after all only a translation; and is, perhaps, the most archaic piece
of English in modern use: “which art,”[5] commonly rendered “chart,”
means nothing for a child. “Hallowed” is the speech of a strange tongue
to him--not much more to us; “trespasses” is a semi-legal term, never
likely to come into his everyday talk, and no explanations will make
“Thy” have the same force for him as “your.” To make a child utter
his prayers in a strange speech is to put up a barrier between him
and his “Almighty Lover.” Again, might we not venture to teach our
children to say “dear God”? A parent, surely, can believe that no
austerely reverential style can be so sweet in the Divine Father’s ears
as the appeal to “dear God” for sympathy in joy and help in trouble,
which flows naturally from the little child who is “used to God.”
Let children grow up aware of the constant, immediate, joy-giving,
joy-taking Presence in the midst of them, and you may laugh at all
assaults of “infidelity,” which is foolishness to him who knows his God
as--only far better than--he knows father or mother, wife or child.
Let them grow up, too, with the shout of a King in their midst. There
are, in this poor stuff we call human nature, founts of loyalty,
worship, passionate devotion, glad service, which have, alas! to be
unsealed in the earth-laden older heart, but only ask place to flow
from the child’s. There is no safeguard and no joy like that of being
under orders, being possessed, controlled, continually in the service
of One whom it is gladness to obey.
We lose sight of the fact in our modern civilisation, but a king, a
leader, implies warfare, a foe, victory--possible defeat and disgrace.
And this is the conception of life which cannot too soon be brought
before children.
“After thinking the matter over with some care, I resolved that I
cannot do better than give you my view of what it was that the average
boy carried away from our Rugby of half-a-century ago which stood
him in the best stead--was of the highest value to him--in after
life.... I have been in some doubt as to what to put first, and am by
no means sure that the few who are left of my old schoolfellows would
agree with me; but, speaking for myself, I think this was our most
marked characteristic, the feeling that in school and close we were
in training for a big fight--were, in fact, already engaged in it--a
fight which would last all our lives, and try all our powers, physical,
intellectual, and moral, to the utmost. I need not say that this fight
was the world-old one of good with evil, of light and truth against
darkness and sin, of Christ against the devil.”
So said the author of “Tom Brown” in an address to Rugby School
delivered on a recent Quinquagesima Sunday. This is plain speaking;
education is only worthy of the name as it teaches this lesson; and it
is a lesson which should be learnt in the home or ever the child sets
foot in any other school of life. It is an insult to children to say
they are too young to understand this for which we are sent into the
world. A boy of five, a great-grandson of Dr. Arnold, was sitting at
the piano with his mother, choosing his Sunday hymn; he chose “Thy will
be done,” and, as his special favourite, the verse beginning, “Renew
my will from day to day.” The choice of hymn and verse rather puzzled
his mother, who had a further glimpse into the world of child-thought
when the little fellow said wistfully, “Oh, dear, it’s very hard to do
God’s work!” The difference between doing and bearing was not plain to
him, but the battle and struggle and strain of life already pressed
on the spirit of the “careless, happy child.” That an evil spiritual
personality can get at their thoughts, and incite them to “be naughty,”
children learn all too soon, and understand, perhaps, better than we
do. Then, they are cross, “naughty,” separate, sinful, needing to be
healed as truly as the hoary sinner, and much more aware of their need,
because the tender soul of the child, like an infant’s skin, is fretted
by spiritual soreness. “It’s very kind of God to forgive me so often;
I’ve been naughty so many times to-day,” said a sad little sinner of
six, not at all because any one else had been at the pains to convince
her of naughtiness. Even “Pet Marjorie’s” buoyancy is not proof against
this sad sense of shortcoming:--
“Yesterday I behaved extremely ill in God’s most holy church, for I
would never attend myself nor let Isabella attend, ... and it was the
very same _Devil_ that tempted Job that tempted me, I am sure; but he
resisted Satan, though he had boils and many other misfortunes which I
have escaped.”--(At six!)
We must needs smile at the little “crimes,” but we must not smile too
much, and let children be depressed with much “naughtiness” when they
should live in the instant healing, in the dear Name, of the Saviour of
the world.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] “Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton.” Messrs. Kegan Paul & Co.
[5] Catholics say “who art.”
CHAPTER VII
_THE PARENT AS SCHOOLMASTER_
“The schoolmaster will make him sit up!” “Sit up,” that is, “come when
he’s called,” apparently, for the remark concerned a young person who
went on spinning his top with nonchalance, ignoring an intermittent
stream of objurgations from his mother, whose view was that bedtime
had arrived. Circumstances alter cases, but is it unheard of in higher
ranks of life to trust to the schoolmaster to make a child “sit up,”
after a good deal of mental and moral sprawling about at home?
“Oh, he’s a little fellow yet; he will know better by-and-by.”
“My view is, let children have a delightful childhood. Time enough for
restraint and contradiction when they go to school.”
“We do not hold with punishing children; love your children, and let
them alone, is our principle.”
“They will meet with hardness enough in the world. Childhood shall have
no harsh memories for them.”
“School will break them in. Let them grow like young colts till the
time comes to break them. All young things should be free to kick
about.”
“What’s bred in the bone must come out in the flesh. I do not care much
for all this clipping and shaping of children. Destroys individuality.”
“When he’s older, he will know better. Time cures many faults.”
And so on; we might fill pages with the wise things people say,
who, for one excellent reason or another, prefer to leave it to the
schoolmaster to make a child “sit up.” And does the schoolmaster live
up to his reputation? how far does he succeed with the child who
comes to him with no self-management? His real and proud successes
are with the children who have been trained to “sit up” at home. His
pleasure in such children is unbounded; the pains he takes with them
unlimited; the successful careers he is able to launch them upon exceed
the ambition of those most wildly ambitious of human beings (dare we
say it?)--parents, quiet, sensible, matter-of-fact parents. But the
schoolmaster takes little credit to himself for these happy results.
Schoolmasters and schoolmistresses are modest people, though they are
not always credited with their virtues.
“You can do anything with So-and-so; his parents have turned him out so
well.” Observe, the master takes little credit to himself (by no means
so much as he deserves); and why? Experience makes fools wise; and what
then of those who add experience to wisdom? “People send us their cubs
to lick into shape, and what can we do?” Now the answer to this query
concerns parents rather closely: what and how much can the schoolmaster
do to make the boy “sit up” who has not been to the manner bred?
No suasion will make you “sit up” if you are an oyster; no, nor even if
you are a cod. You must have a backbone, and your backbone must have
learned its work before sitting up is possible to you. No doubt the
human oyster may grow a backbone, and the human cod may get into the
way of sitting up, and some day, perhaps, we shall know of the heroic
endeavours made by schoolmaster and mistress to prop up, and haul up,
and draw up, and anyhow keep alert and sitting up, creatures whose way
it is to sprawl. Sometimes the result is surprising; they sit up in a
row with the rest and look all right; even when the props are removed
they keep to the trick of sitting up for awhile. The schoolmaster
begins to rub his hands, and the parents say, “I told you so. Didn’t I
always say Jack would come right in the end?” Wait a bit. The end is
not yet. The habits of school, as of military life, are more or less
mechanical. The early habits are vital; reversion to these takes place,
and Jack sprawls as a man just as he sprawled as a child, only more so.
Various social props keep him up; he has the wit to seem to “sit up”;
he is lovable and his life is respectable; and no one suspects that
this easy-going Mr. John Brown is a failure; a man who had the elements
of greatness in him, and might have been of use in the world had he
been put under discipline from his infancy.
Sprawling is an ugly word, but the attitude we are thinking of is by no
means always inelegant. Scott gives a delightful illustration of one
kind of mental sprawling in “Waverley”:--
“Edward Waverley’s powers of apprehension were so quick as almost to
resemble intuition, and the chief care of his preceptor was to prevent
him, as a sportsman would phrase it, from overrunning his game; that
is, from acquiring his knowledge in a slight, flimsy, and inadequate
manner. And here the instructor had to combat another propensity too
often united with brilliancy of fancy and vivacity of talent--the
indolence, namely, which can only be stirred by some strong motive
of gratification, and which renounces study as soon as curiosity is
gratified, the pleasure of conquering the first difficulties exhausted,
and the novelty of pursuit at an end.” And the story goes on to show,
without laborious pointing of the moral, how _Waverley_ by name was
_wavering_ by nature, was ever the sport of circumstances because he
had not learned in youth to direct his course. He blunders into many
(most interesting) misadventures because he had failed to get, through
his studies, the alertness of mind and the self-restraint which should
make a man of him. Many pleasant things befall him, but not one of
them, unless we except Rose Bradwardine’s love--and when did woman
study justice in the bestowal of her favours?--not one did he earn
by his own wit or prowess; each advantage and success which came to
him was the earnings of another man. The elder Waverley had not only
fortune but force of character to make friends, so we are not made sad
for the amiable young man for whom we must needs feel affection; he
does nothing to carve out a way for himself, and he does everything to
his own hindrance out of pure want of the power of self-direction, but
his uncle has fortune and friends, and all ends well. For the sake, no
doubt, of young persons less happily situated, and of parents who are
not able to play the part of bountiful Providence to sons and daughters
whom they have failed to fit for the conduct of their own lives, the
great novelist takes care to point out that Edward Waverley’s personal
failure in life was the fault of his education. His abilities were even
brilliant, but “I ought” had waited upon “I like” from his earliest
days, and he had never learned to make himself do the thing he would.
Now it is this sort of “bringing under” that parents are apt to leave
to the schoolmaster. They do not give their children the discipline
which results in self-compelling power, and by-and-by, when they
make over the task to another, the time for training in the art of
self-mastery has gone by, and a fine character is spoiled through
indolence and wilfulness.
But why will it not do to leave it to the schoolmaster to make a
child “sit up”? It is natural for a child to be left free as a bird
in matters of no moral significance. We would not let him tell lies,
but if he hate his lessons, that may be Nature’s way of showing he had
better let them alone.
We must face the facts. We are not meant to grow up in a state of
nature. There is something simple, conclusive, even idyllic, in the
statement that so-and-so is “natural.” What more would you have? Jean
Jacques Rousseau preached the doctrine of natural education, and no
reformer has had a greater following. “It’s human nature,” we say, when
stormy Harry snatches his drum from Jack; when baby Marjorie, who is
not two, screams for Susie’s doll. So it is, and for that very reason
it must be dealt with early. Even Marjorie must be taught better. “I
always finish teaching my children obedience before they are one year
old,” said a wise mother; and any who know the nature of children, and
the possibilities open to the educator, will say, Why not? Obedience
in the first year, and all the virtues of the good life as the years
go on; every year with its own definite work to show in the training
of character. Is Edward a selfish child when his fifth birthday comes?
The fact is noted in his parents’ year-book, with the resolve that by
his sixth birthday he shall, please God, be a generous child. Here, the
reader who has not realised that to exercise discipline is one of the
chief functions of parenthood, smiles and talks about “human nature”
with all the air of an unanswerable argument.
But we live in a redeemed world, and one of the meanings which that
unfathomable phrase bears is, that it is the duty of those who have the
care of childhood to eradicate each vulgar and hateful trait, to plant
and foster the precious fruits of that kingdom in the children who have
been delivered from the kingdom of nature into the kingdom of grace;
that is to say, all children born into this redeemed world. The parent
who believes that the possibilities of virtuous training are unlimited
will set to work with cheerful confidence, will forego the twaddle
about “Nature,” whether as lovely in itself or as an irresistible
force, and will perceive that the first function of the parent is
that function of _discipline_ which is so cheerfully made over to the
schoolmaster.
Now, to begin with, discipline does not mean a birch-rod, nor a corner,
nor a slipper, nor bed, nor any such last resort of the feeble. The
sooner we cease to believe in merely penal suffering as part of the
Divine plan, the sooner will a spasmodic resort to the birch-rod die
out in families. We do not say the rod is never useful; we do say it
should never be necessary. The fact is, many of us do not believe in
education, except as it means the acquirement of a certain amount of
knowledge; but education which shall deal curatively and methodically
with every flaw in character does not enter into our scheme of things
possible. Now, no less than this is what we mean when we say, Education
is a Discipline. Where parents fail, the poor soul has one further
chance in the discipline of life; but we must remember that, while it
is the nature of the child to submit to discipline, it is the nature
of the undisciplined man to run his head in passionate wilfulness
against the circumstances that are for his training; so that the parent
who wilfully chooses to leave his child to be “broken in” by the
schoolmaster or by life leaves him to a fight in which all the odds are
against him. The physique, the temper, the disposition, the career,
the affections, the aspirations of a man are all, more or less, the
outcome of the discipline his parents have brought him under, or of the
lawlessness they have allowed. What is discipline? Look at the word;
there is no hint of punishment in it. A disciple is a follower, and
discipline is the state of the follower, the learner, imitator. Mothers
and fathers do not well to forget that their children are, by the very
order of Nature, their disciples. Now no man sets himself up for a
following of disciples who does not wish to indoctrinate these with
certain principles, maxims, rules of life. So should the parent have at
heart notions of life and duty which he labours without pause to instil
into his children.
He who would draw disciples does not trust to force, but to these three
things--to the attraction of his doctrine, to the persuasion of his
presentation, to the enthusiasm of his disciples; so the parent has
teachings of the perfect life which he knows how to present continually
with winning force until the children are quickened with such zeal for
virtue and holiness as carries them forward with leaps and bounds.
Again, the teacher does not indoctrinate his pupils all at once, but
here a little and there a little, steady progress on a careful plan;
so the parent who would have his child a partaker of the Divine nature
has a scheme, an ascending scale of virtues, in which he is diligent
to practise his young disciple. He adds to the faith with which the
child is so richly dowered virtue, and to virtue, knowledge, and to
knowledge, self-control. Having practised his child in self-control,
he trains him in patience, and to patience he adds godliness, and to
godliness, kindness, and to kindness, love. These, and such as these,
wise parents cultivate as systematically and with as definite results
as if they were teaching the “three R’s.”
But how? The answer covers so wide a field that we must leave it for
another chapter. Only this here--every quality has its defect, every
defect has its quality. Examine your child; he has qualities, he is
generous; see to it that the lovable little fellow, who would give
away his soul, is not also rash, impetuous, self-willed, passionate,
“nobody’s enemy but his own.” It rests with parents to make low the
high places and exalt the valleys, to make straight paths for the feet
of their little son.
CHAPTER VIII
_THE CULTURE OF CHARACTER_
PART I
“What get I from my father?
Lusty life and vigorous will;
What from my gentle mother?
Cheerful days and poet’s skill,”[6]
says Goethe; for poets, like the rest of us, are born, not made, and
get the most of what they are from their parents. But it did not
take poet or modern scientist to discover this; people have known
it time out of mind. Like father, like child, they said, and were
satisfied; for it was not the way in earlier days to thresh out the
great facts of life. Not so now; we talk about it and about it; call
it _heredity_, and take it into count in our notions, at any rate, if
not in our practice. Nobody writes a biography now without attempting
to produce progenitors and early surroundings that shall account for
his man or his woman. This fact of heredity is very much before the
public, and by-and-by will have its bearing on the loose notions
people hold about education. In this sort of way--“Harold is a bright
little boy, but he hasn’t the least power of attention.”
“Oh, I know he hasn’t; but then, poor child, he can’t help it! ‘What’s
bred in the bone,’ you know; and we are feather-brained on both sides
of the house.”
Now the practical educational question of our day is just this, Can he
help it? or, Can his parents help it? or, Must the child sit down for
life with whatever twist he has inherited? The fact is, many of us,
professional teachers, have been taking aim rather beside the mark;
we talk as if the development of certain faculties were the chief
object of education; and we point to our results, intellectual, moral,
æsthetic, physical, with a--“See there, what culture can effect!” But
we forget that the child has inborn cravings after all we have given
him. Just as the healthy child must have his dinner and his bed, so
too does he crave for knowledge, perfection, beauty, power, society;
and all he wants is opportunity. Give him opportunities of loving and
learning, and he will love and learn, for “’tis his nature to.” Whoever
has taken note of the sweet reasonableness, the quick intelligence, the
bright imaginings of a child, will think the fuss we make about the
right studies for developing these is like asking, How shall we get a
hungry man to eat his dinner?
Many a man got his turn for natural science because, as a boy, he
lived in the country, and had a chance to observe living things and
their ways. Nobody took pains to develop his faculty; all he had was
opportunity. If the boy’s mind is crammed with other matters, he
has no opportunity, and you may meet men of culture who have lived
most of their lives in the country, and don’t know a thrush from a
blackbird. I know of a woman who has developed both a metaphysical
and a literary turn, because, as a girl of ten, she was allowed to
browse on old volumes of the _Spectator_, the most telling part of her
education, she thinks. Again, I watched quite lately an extraordinary
educational result of opportunity. A friend, interested in a Working
Boys’ Club, undertook to teach a class to model in clay. There was no
selection made; the boys were mill-boys, taken as they came in, with
no qualifications, except that, as their teacher said, they had not
been spoilt--that is, they had not been taught to draw in the ordinary
way. She gave them clay, a model, one or two modelling tools, and
also, being an artist, the _feeling_ of the object to be copied. After
half-a-dozen lessons, the things they produced cannot be called less
than works of art; and delightful it was to see the vigour and spirit
they worked with, the artistic instinct which caught the sentiment
of the object, as the creases made by a little foot which make a
child’s shoe a thing to kiss. This lady maintains that she only _let
out_ what was in the boys; but she did more, her own art enthusiasm
forced out artistic effort. Even taking into account the enthusiasm
of the teacher--I wish we might always count on that factor--this
remains a fair case to prove our point, which is, give them opportunity
and direction, and children will do the greater part of their own
education, intellectual, æsthetic, even moral, by reason of the
wonderfully balanced desires, powers, and affections which go to make
up human nature.
A cheerful doctrine this, which should help to swell the ranks of
the unemployed. Outlets for their energies, a little direction, a
little control, and then we may sit by with folded hands and see them
do it. But, in fact, there are two things to be done: “powers to be
developed--where a little of our help goes a long way; and character
to be formed”--and here children are as clay in the hands of the
potter, absolutely dependent on their parents. Disposition, intellect,
genius, come pretty much by nature; but character is an achievement,
the one practical achievement possible to us for ourselves and for
our children; and all real advance in family or individual is along
the lines of character. Our great people are great simply by reason
of their force of character. For this, more than for their literary
successes, Carlyle and Johnson are great. Boswell’s “Life” is, and
perhaps deserves to be, more of a literary success than anything of his
master’s; but what figure does he make after all?
Greatness and littleness belong to character, and life would be dull
were we all cast in one mould; but how come we to differ? Surely by
reason of our inherited qualities. It is hereditary tendencies which
result in character. The man who is generous, obstinate, hot-tempered,
devout, is so, on the whole, because that strain of character runs in
his family. Some progenitor got a bent from his circumstances towards
fault or virtue, and that bent will go on repeating itself to the end
of the chapter. To save that single quality from the exaggeration
which would destroy the balance of qualities we call sanity, two
counter-forces are provided: marriage into alien families, and
_education_.
We come round now to the point we started from. If the development of
character rather than of faculty is the main work of education, and
if people are born, so to speak, ready-made, with all the elements of
their after-character in them, certain to be developed by time and
circumstances, what is left for education to do?
Very commonly, the vote is, do nothing; though there are three or four
ways of arriving at that conclusion.
As, What’s the good? The fathers have eaten sour grapes; the children’s
teeth _must_ be set on edge. Tommy is obstinate as a little mule--but
what would you have? So is his father. So have been all the Joneses,
time out of mind; and Tommy’s obstinacy is taken as a fact, not to be
helped nor hindered.
Or, Mary is a butterfly of a child, never constant for five minutes
to anything she has in hand. “That child is just like me!” says her
mother; “but time will steady her.” Fanny, again, sings herself to
sleep with the Sicilian Vesper Hymn (her nurse’s lullaby) before she is
able to speak. “It’s strange how an ear for music runs in our family!”
is the comment, but no particular pains are taken to develop the talent.
Another child asks odd questions, is inclined to make little jokes
about sacred things, to call his father “Tom,” and, generally, to show
a want of reverence. His parents are earnest-minded people--think with
pain of the loose opinions of Uncle Harry, and decide on a policy
of repression. “Do as you’re bid, and make no remarks,” becomes the
child’s rule of life, until he finds outlets little suspected at home.
In another case, common thought is much more on a level with the
science of the day; there is a tendency to lung-trouble: the doctors
undertake to deal with the tendency so long as the _habit_ of delicacy
is not set up. The necessary precautions are taken, and there is no
reason why the child should not die at a good old age.
Once more;--there are parents who are aware of the advance science has
made in education, but doubt the lawfulness of looking to science for
aid in the making of character. They see hereditary defects in their
children, but set them down as of “the natural fault and corruption of
the nature of every man which naturally is engendered of the offspring
of Adam.” This, they believe, it is not their part to remedy; that is,
unless the boy’s fault be of a disturbing kind--a violent temper, for
example--when the mother thinks no harm to whip the offending Adam out
of him. But so surely as we believe the laws of the spiritual life to
have been revealed to us, so, not less, surely, though without the
same sanctity, have been revealed the laws by which body, mind, and
moral nature flourish or decay. These it behoves us to make ourselves
acquainted with; and the Christian parent who is shy of science, and
prefers to bring up his children by the light of Nature when that of
authoritative revelation fails, does so to his children’s irreparable
loss.
If the race is advancing, it is along the lines of character, for each
new generation inherits and adds to the best that has gone before
it. We should have to-day the very flower and fruit that has been
a-preparing through long lines of progenitors. Children have always
been lovely, so far back as that day when a little child in the streets
of Jerusalem was picked up and set in the midst to show of what sort
are the princes in the Kingdom to come:--
“In the Kingdom are the children--
You may read it in their eyes;
All the freedom of the Kingdom
In their careless humour lies.”
And what mother has not bowed before the princely heart of innocence in
her own little child? But apart from this, of their glad living in the
sunshine of the Divine Countenance, surely our children are “more so”
than those of earlier days. Never before was a “Jackanapes” written,
or the “Story of a Short Life.” Shakespeare never made a child, nor
Scott, hardly Dickens, often as he tried; either we are waking up to
what is in them, or the children are indeed advancing in the van of the
times, holding in light grasp the gains of the past, the possibilities
of the future. It is the age of child-worship; and very lovely are the
well-brought-up children of Christian and cultured parents. But, alas!
how many of us degrade the thing we love! Think of the multitude of the
innocents to be launched on the world, already mutilated, spiritually
and morally, at the hands of doting parents.
The duteous father and mother, on the contrary, who discern any lovely
family trait in one of their children, set themselves to nourish and
cherish it as a gardener the peaches he means to show. We know how
“that kiss made me a painter,” that is, warmed into life whatever
art faculty the child had. The choicer the plant, the gardener tells
us, the greater the pains must he take with the rearing of it:
and here is the secret of the loss and waste of some of the most
beauteous and lovable natures the world has seen; they have not had
the pains taken with their rearing that their delicate, sensitive
organisations demanded. Think how Shelley was left to himself! We
live in embarrassing days. It is well to cry, “Give us light--more
light and fuller;” but what if the new light discover to us a maze of
obligations, intricate and tedious?
It is, at first sight, bewildering to perceive that for whatever
distinctive quality, moral or intellectual, we discern in the children,
special culture is demanded; but, after all, our obligation towards
each such quality resolves itself into providing for it these four
things: nourishment, exercise, change, and rest.