PATERNAL AMIABILITIES.
Maria, as we know, loved her father, for she loved every thing that
breathes; but she would not have been human had she not also feared him.
In fact, he was to her a very formidable personage, and one would have
thought any thing but an amiable one. Over Maria's gentle kindness he
could domineer as loftily as he would cringe in cowardly humiliation to
the boisterous effrontery of that unscrupulous and wily stock-jobber,
"my son Jack." With the tyranny proper to a little mind, he would
trample on the neck of a poor meek daughter's filial duty, desiring to
honour its parent by submission; and then, with consistent meanness,
would lick the dust like a slave before an undutiful only son, who had
amply redeemed all possible criminalities by successful (I did not say
honest) gambling in the funds, and otherwise.
Yes! John Dillaway was rich; and, climax to his praise, rich by his own
keen skill, independent of his father, though he condescended still to
bleed him. In this "money century," as Kohl, the graphic traveller, has
called it, riches "cover the multitude of sins;" leaving poor Maria's
charity to cover its own naked virtues, if it can. So John was the
father's darling, notwithstanding the very heartless and unbecoming
conduct he had exhibited daily for these thirty years, and the marked
scorn wherewithal he treated that pudgy city knight, his dear
progenitor; but then, let us repeat it as Sir Thomas did--Jack was
rich--rich, and such a comfort to his father; whereas Maria, poor fool,
with all her cheap unmarketable love and duty, never had earned a
penny--never could, but was born to be a drain upon him. Therefore did
he scorn her, and put aside her kindnesses, because she could not "make
money."
For what end on earth should a man make money! It is reasonable to
reply, for the happiness' sake of others and himself; but, in the
frequent case of a rich and cold Sir Thomas, what can be the object in
such? Not to purchase happiness therewith himself, nor yet to distribute
it to others; a very dog in the manger, he snarls above the hay he
cannot eat, and is full of any thoughts rather than of giving: whilst,
as for his own pleasure, he manifestly will not stop a minute to enjoy a
taste of happiness, even if he finds it in his home; nay, more, if it
meets him by the way, and wishes to cling about his heart, he will be
found often to fling it off with scorn, as a reaper would the wild sweet
corn-flower in some handful of wheat he is cutting. O, Sir Thomas! is
not poor Maria's love worth more than all your rich rude Jack's sudden
flush of money? is it not a deeper, higher, purer, wiser, more abundant
source of pleasure? You have yet to learn the wealth of her affections,
and his poverty of soul.
It was not without heart-sickness, believe me, sore days and weeping
nights, that affectionate Maria saw her father growing more and more
estranged from her. True, he had never met her love so warmly that it
was not somewhat checked and chilled; true, his nature had reversed the
law of reason, by having systematically treated her with less and less
of kindness ever since the nursery; she did seem able to remember
something like affection in him while she was a prattling infant; but as
the mental daylight dawned apace, and she grew (one would fancy)
worthier of a rational creature's love, it strangely had diminished year
by year; moreover, she could scarcely look back upon one solitary
occasion, whereon her father's voice had instructed her in knowledge,
spoken to her in sympathy, or guided her footsteps to religion. Still,
habituated as she long had now become to this daily martyrdom of heart,
and sorely bruised by coarse and common worldliness as had been every
fibre of her feelings, she could not help perceiving that things got
worse and worse, as the knight grew richer and richer; and often-times
her eyes ran over bitterly for coldness and neglect. There was, indeed,
her mother to fly to; but she never had been otherwise than a very quiet
creature, who made but little show of what feeling she possessed; and
then the daughter's loving heart was affectionately jealous of her
father too.
"Why should he be so cold, with all his impetuosity? so formal, in spite
of his rapidity? so little generous of spirit, notwithstanding all his
wonderful prosperity?"
Ah, Maria, if you had not been quite so unsophisticated, you would have
left out the latter "notwithstanding." Nothing hardens the heart, dear
child, like prosperity; and nothing dries up the affections more
effectually than this hot pursuit of wealth. The deeper a man digs into
the gold mine, the less able--ay, less willing--is he to breathe the
sweet air of upper earth, or to bask in the daylight of heaven:
downward, downward still, he casts the anchor of his grovelling
affections, and neither can nor will have a heart for any thing but
gold.
Moreover, have you wondered, dear Maria, at the common fact (one sees it
in every street, in every village), that parental love is oftenest at
its zenith in the nursery, and then falls lower and lower on the
firmament of human life, as the child gets older and older? Look at all
dumb brutes, the lower animals of this our earth; is it not thus by
nature's law with them? The lioness will perish to preserve that very
whelp, whom she will rend a year or two hence, meeting the young lion in
the forest; the hen, so careful of her callow brood, will peck at them,
and buffet them away, directly they are fully fledged; the cow forgets
how much she once loved yonder well-grown heifer; and the terrier-bitch
fights for a bit of gristle with her own two-year-old, whom she used to
nurse so tenderly, and famished her own bowels to feed. And can you
expect that men, who make as little use as possible of Heart, that
unlucrative commodity--who only exercise Reason for shrewd purposes of
gain, not wise purposes of good, and who might as well belong to
Cunningham's "City of O," for any souls they seem to carry about with
them--can you expect that such unaffectioned, unintelligent,
unspiritualized animals, can rise far above the brute in feeling for
their offspring? No, Maria; the nursery plaything grows into the exiled
school-boy; and the poor child, weaned from all he ought to love, soon
comes to be regarded in the light of an expensive youth; he is kept at
arm's length, unblest, uncaressed, unloved, unknown; then he grows up
apace, and tops his father's inches; he is a man now, and may well be
turned adrift; if he can manage to make money, they are friends; but if
he can only contrive to spend it, enemies. Then the complacent father
moans about ingratitude, for he did his duty by the boy in sending him
to school.
O, faults and follies of the by-gone times, which lingered even to a
generation now speedily passing away!--ye are waning with it, and a
better dawn has broken on the world. Happily for man, the multiplication
of his kind, and pervading competition in all manner, of things
mercantile, are breaking down monopolies, and hindering unjust
accumulation, with its necessary love of gain. "Satisfied with little"
is young England's cry; a better motto than the "Craving after much" of
their fathers. No longer immersed, single-handed, in a worldly business,
which seven competitors now relieve him of; no longer engrossed with the
mint of gold gains, which a dozen honest rivals now are sharing with him
eagerly, the parent has leisure to instruct his children's minds, to
take an interest in their pursuits, and to cultivate their best
affections. Home is no longer the place perpetually to be driven from;
the voices of paternal duty and domestic love are thrillingly raised to
lead the tuneful chorus of society; and fathers, as well as mothers, are
beginning to desire that their children may be able to remember them
hereafter as the ever-sympathizing friend, the wisely indulgent teacher,
the guide of their religion, and the guardian of their love; quite as
much as the payer of their bills and the filler of their purses.
The misfortune of a past and passing generation has been, too much money
in too few hands; its faults, neglect of duty; its folly, to expect
therefrom the too-high meed of well-earned gratitude; and from this
triple root has grown up social selfishness, a general lack of Heart. No
parent ever yet, since the world was, did his duty properly, as God
intended him to do it, by the affections of the mind and the yearnings
of the heart, as well as by the welfare of the body with its means, and
lived to complain of an ungrateful child. He may think he did his duty;
oh yes, good easy man! and say so too, very, very bitterly; and the
world may echo his most partial verdict, crying shame on the unnatural
Goneril and Regan, bad daughters who despise the Lear in old age, or on
the dissolute and graceless youth, whose education cost so much, and
yields so very little. But money cannot compensate that maiden or that
youth for early and habitual injustice done to their budding minds,
their sensitive hearts, their craving souls, in higher, deeper, holier
things than even cash could buy. "Home affections"--this was the magic
phrase inscribed upon the talisman they stole from that graceless youth;
and the loss of home affections is scantily counterbalanced at the best
by a critical acquaintance with '_Dawes's Canons_,' and '_Bos on
Ellipses_,' in his ardent spring of life, and by a little more of the
paternal earnings which the legacy-office gives him in his manhood.
But let us not condemn generations past and passing, and wink at our
own-time sins; we have many motes yet in our eyes, not to call them very
beams. The infant school, the factory, the Union, and other wholesale
centralizations, ruin the affections of our poor. O, for the
spinning-wheel again within the homely cottage, and those difficult
spellings by the grand-dame's knee! There is wisdom and stability in a
land thick-set with such early local anchorages; but the other is all
false, republican, and unaffectioned. So, too, the luxurious city club
has cheated many a young pair of their just domestic happiness, for the
husband grew dissatisfied with home and all its poor humilities; whilst
a bad political philosophy, discouraging marriage and denouncing
offspring, has insidiously crept into the very core of private families,
setting children against parents and parents against children, because a
cold expediency winks at the decay of morals, and all united social
influences strike at the sacrifice of Heart.
We are forgetting you, poor affectionate Maria, and yet will it comfort
your charity to listen. For the time is coming--yea, now is--when a more
generous, though poorer age will condemn the Mammon phrensy of that
which has preceded it. Boldly do we push our standards in advance,
pressing on the flying foe, certain that a gallant band will follow.
Fearlessly, here and there, is heard the voice of some solitary zealot,
some isolated missionary for love, and truth, and philanthropic good,
some dauntless apostle in the cause of Heart, denouncing selfish wealth
as the canker of society: and, hark! that voice is not alone; there is a
murmur on the breeze as the sound of many waters; it comes, it comes!
and the young have caught it up; and manhood hears the thrilling strain
that sinks into his soul; and old age, feebly listening, wonders (never
too late) that he had not hitherto been wiser; and the whole social
universe electrically touched from man to man, I hear them in their
new-born generosities, penitently shouting "God and Heart!" even louder
than they execrate the memory of Dagon.