stained shell were to hold a sound nut. All the events of the last
century--the development of the factory system, the Married Women's
Property Act, the birth of Mr. Bernard Shaw, the entry of woman into
professions, the discovery of co-education and of education itself,
eugenics, Christian Science, new music halls and halfpenny papers, the
Russian ballet, cheap travel, woman suffrage, apartment houses--all this
change and stress has lowered the status of one whom Pliny admired--the
father of a family. The family itself tends to disappear, and it is many
years since letters appeared in _The Times_ over the signature, "Mother
of Six." The family is smaller, and, strangely enough, it is sweeter
tempered: would it be fair to conclude, as might an Irishman, that it
would agree perfectly if it disappeared?
I do not think that the family will completely disappear any more than
scarlet fever or the tax collector. But certainly it will change in
character, and its evolution already points toward its new form. The
old-fashioned family sickened because it was a compulsory grouping. The
wife cleaved unto her husband because he paid the bills; the children
cleaved unto their parents because they must cleave unto something.
There was no chance of getting out, for there was nothing to get out to.
For the girl, especially, some fifty years ago, to escape from the
family into the world was much the same thing as burgling a
penitentiary; so she stayed, compulsorily grouped. Personally, I think
all kinds of compulsory groupings bad. If one is compelled to do a
thing, one hates it; possibly the dead warriors in the Elysian Fields
have by this time taken a violent dislike to compulsory chariot races,
and absolutely detest their endless rest on moss-grown banks and their
diet of honey. I do not want to stress the idea too far, but I doubt
whether the denizens of the Elysian Fields, after so many centuries, can
tolerate one another any more, for they are compelled to live all
together in this Paradise, and nothing conceivable will ever get them
out.
Some groupings are worse than others, and I incline to think that
difference of age has most to do with the chafe of family life. For man
is a sociable animal; he loves his fellows, and so one wonders why he
should so generally detest his relations. There are minor reasons.
Relationship amounts to a license to be rude, to the right to exact
respect from the young and service from the old; there is the fact that,
however high you may rise in the world, your aunt will never see it.
There is also the fact that if your aunt does see it, she brags of it
behind your back and insults you about it to your face. There is all
that, but still I believe that one could to a certain extent agree with
one's relations if one met only those who are of one's own age, for
compulsory groupings of people of the same age are not always
unpleasant; boys are happiest at school, and there is fine fellowship
and much merriment in armies. On the other hand, there often reigns a
peculiar dislike in offices. I do not want to conclude too rashly, but I
cannot help being struck by the fact that in a school or in an army the
differences of age are very small, while in an office or a family they
are considerable. Add on to the difference of age compulsory
intercourse, and you have the seeds of hatred.
This applies particularly where the units of a family are adult. The
child loves the grown-ups because he admires them; a little later he
finds them out; still a little later, he lets them see that he has found
them out, and then family life begins. In many cases it is a quite
terrible life, and the more united the family is the more it resembles
the union between the shirt of Nessus and Hercules's back. But it must
be endured because we have no alternative. I think of cases: of such a
one as that of a father and mother, respectively sixty-five and sixty,
who have two sons, one of whom ran away to Australia with a barmaid,
while the other lived on his sisters' patrimony and regrettably stayed
at home; they have four daughters, two of whom have revolted to the
extent of earning their living, but spend the whole of their holidays
with the old people; the other two are unmarried because the father,
imbued with the view that _his_ daughters were too good for any man,
refused to have any man in the house. There is another couple in my
mind, who have five children, four of whom live at home. I think I will
describe this family by quoting one of the father's pronouncements:
"There's only one opinion in this house, and that's mine!" I think of
other cases, of three sisters who have each an income of two hundred
dollars a year on which they would, of course, find it very difficult to
live separately. The total income of six hundred dollars a year enables
them to live--but together. The eldest loves cats; the next hates cats,
but loves dogs; this zooelogical quarrel is the chief occupation of the
household; the third sister's duty is to keep the cats and dogs apart.
Here we have the compulsory grouping; I believe that this lies at the
root of disunion in that united family.
The age problem is twofold. It must not be thought that I hold a brief
against old age, though, being myself young, I tend to dislike old age
as I shall probably dislike youth by and by. On the whole, the attitude
of old age is tyrannical. I have heard dicta as interesting as the one
which I quote a few lines above. I have heard say a mother to a young
man, "You _ought_ to feel affection for me"; another, "It should be
enough for you that this is my wish." That is natural enough. It is the
tradition of the elders, the Biblical, Greek, Roman, savage hierarchies
which, in their time, were sound because, lacking education of any kind,
communities could resort only to the experience of the aged. But a thing
that is natural is not always convenient, and, after all, the chief
mission of the civilizer is to bottle up Nature until she is wanted.
This tyranny breeds in youth a quite horrible hatred, while it hardens
the old, makes them incapable of seeing the point of view of youth
because it is too long since they held it. They insist upon the society
of the young; they take them out to call on old people; they drive them
round and round the park in broughams, and then round again; they
deprive them of entertainments because they themselves cannot bear noise
and late hours, or because they have come to fear expense, or because
they feel weak and are ill. It is tragic to think that so few of us can
hope to die gracefully.
The trouble does not lie entirely with the old; indeed, I think it lies
more with the young, who, crossed and irritated, are given to badgering
the old people because they are slow, because they do not understand the
problems of Lord Kitchener and are still thinking of the problems of Mr.
Gladstone. They are harsh because the old are forgetful, because their
faded memories are sweet, because they will always prefer the late Sir
Henry Irving to Mr. Charles Hawtrey. The young are cruel when the old
people refuse to send a letter without sealing it, or when they insist
upon buying their hats from the milliner who made them in 1890 and makes
them still in the same fashion. They are even harsh to them when they
are deaf or short-sighted and fumbling; they come to think that a wise
child should learn from his sire's errors.
It is a pity, but thus it is; so what is the use of thinking that the
modern family must endure? It is no use to say that the old are right or
that the young are right; they disagree. It is nobody's fault, and it is
everybody's misfortune. They disagree largely because there is too much
propinquity. It is propinquity that brings one to think there is
something rather repulsive in blood relations. It is propinquity that
brings one to love and then later to dislike. Mr. George Moore has put
the case ideally in his _Memoirs of My Dead Life_, where Doris, the girl
who has escaped from her family with the hero says: "This is the first
time I have ever lived alone, that I have ever been free from questions.
It was a pleasure to remember suddenly, as I was dressing, that no one
would ask me where I was going; that I was just like a bird myself, free
to spring off the branch and to fly. At home there are always people
round one; somebody is in the dining room, somebody is in the
drawing-room; and if one goes down the passage with one's hat on, there
is always somebody to ask where one is going, and if you say you don't
know, they say: 'Are you going to the right or to the left? Because, if
you are going to the left, I should like you to stop at the apothecary's
and to ask....'"
Yes, that is what happens. That is the tragedy of the family; it lives
on top of itself. The daughters go too much with their mothers to shop;
there are too many joint holidays, too many compulsory rejoicings at
Christmas or on birthdays. There are not enough private places in the
house. I have heard one young suffragist, sentenced to fourteen days for
breaking windows, say that, quite apart from having struck a blow for
the Cause, it was the first peaceful fortnight she had ever known. This
should not be confounded with the misunderstood offer of a wellknown
leader of the suffrage cause who offered a pound to the funds of the
movement for every day that his wife was kept in jail.
In a family, friendships are difficult, for Maude does not always like
Arabella's dearest friend; or, which is worse, Maude will stand
Arabella's dearest friend, whom she detests, so that next day she may
have the privilege of forcing upon Arabella her own, whom Arabella
cannot bear. That sort of thing is called tolerance and self-sacrifice;
in reality it is mutual tyranny, and amounts to the passing on of
pinches, as it were, from boy to boy on the benches of schools. In a
developing generation this cannot endure; youthful egotism will not
forever tolerate youthful arrogance. As for the old, they cannot
indefinitely remain with the young, for, after all, there are only two
things to talk of with any intensity--the future and the past; they are
the topics of different generations.
Still, for various reasons, this condition is endured. It is cheaper to
live together; it is more convenient socially; it is customary, which,
especially in England, is most important. But it demands an impossible
and unwilling tolerance, sometimes fraudulent exhibitions of love,
sometimes sham charity. It is not pleasant to hear Arabella, returning
from a walk with her father, say to Maude: "Thank Heaven, that's over!
Your turn to-morrow." Perhaps it would not be so if the father did not
by threat or by prayer practically compel his daughters to "take duty."
There are alleviations--games, small social pleasures, dances--but
there is no freedom. A little for the sons, perhaps, but even they are
limited in their comings and goings if they live in their father's
house. As for the girls, they are driven to find the illusion of freedom
in wage labor, unless they marry and develop, as they grow older, the
same problem.
2
Fortunately, and this may save something of the family spirit, times are
changing. It must not be imagined from the foregoing that I am a
resolute enemy of any grouping between men and women, that I view with
hatred the family in a box at the theater or round the Sunday joint. I
am not attracted by the idea of family; a large family collected
together makes me think a little of a rabbit hutch. But I recognize that
couples will to the end want to live together, that they will be fond of
their children, and that their children will be fond of them; also that
it is not socially convenient for husband and wife to live in separate
blocks of flats and to hand over their children to the county council.
There are a great many children to-day who would be happier in the
workhouse than in their homes, but there exists in the human mind a
prejudice against the workhouse, and social psychology must take it into
account. All I ask is that members of a family should not scourge one
another with whips and occasionally with scorpions, and I conceive that
nothing could be more delightful than a group of people, not too far
removed from one another by age, banded together for mutual recreation
and support. So anything that tends to liberalize the family, to
exorcise the ghost of the old patriarch, is agreeable.
Patriarch! What a word--the father as master! He will not be master very
long, and I do not think that he will want to remain master, for his
attitude is changing, not as swiftly as that of his children, but still
changing. He is not so sure of himself now when he doubts the
advisability of pulling down the shed at the back of the garden, and his
youngest daughter quotes from Nietzsche that to build a sanctuary you
must first destroy a sanctuary. And, though he is rather uncomfortable,
he does not say much when in the evening his wife appears dressed in a
Russian ballet frock or even a little less. He is growing used to
education, and he fears it less than he did. In fact, he is beginning to
appreciate it.
His wife is more suspicious, for she belongs to a generation of women
that was ignorant and reveled in its ignorance and called it charm, a
generation when all women were fools except the spitfires and the wits.
She tends to think that she was "finished" as a lady; her daughters
consider that she was done for. The grandmother is a little jealous, but
the mother of to-day, the formed woman of about thirty-five, has made a
great leap and resembles her children much more than she does her
mother. Her offspring do not say: "What is home without a mother? Peace,
perfect peace." She is a little too conscientious, perhaps; she has
turned her back rather rudely upon her mother's pursuits, such as tea
and scandal, and has taken too virulently to lectures or evolution and
proteid. She is too vivid, like a newly painted railing, but, like the
railing, she will tone down. She pretends to be very socialistic or very
fast; on the whole she affects rather the fast style. We must not
complain. Is not brown paint in the dining room worse than pink paint on
the face?
Whatever may be said about revolting daughters, I suspect that the
change in the parent has been greater than that in the child, because
the child in 1830 did not differ so much from the child of to-day as
might appear. Youth then was restless and insurgent, just as it is
to-day; only it was more effectively kept down. If to-day it is less
kept down, this is partly for reasons I will indicate, but largely
because the adult has changed. The patriarch is nearly dead; he is no
longer the polygamous brute who ruled his wives with rods, murdered his
infant sons, and sold his infant daughters; his successor, the knight of
the Middle Ages, who locked up his wife in a tower for seven years while
he crusaded in the Holy Land--he, too, has gone. And the merchant in
broadcloth of Victorian days, who slept vigorously in the dining room on
Sunday afternoon, has been replaced by a man who says he is sorry if
told he snores. He is more liberal; he believes in reason now rather
than in force, and generally would not contradict Milton's lines--
"Who overcomes by force
Hath overcome but half his foe."
He has come to desire love rather than power, and, little by
little--thanks mainly to the "yellow" press--has acquired a chastened
liking for new ideas. The spread of pleasure all round him, the
vaudeville, the theaters, moving-picture shows, excursions to the
seaside--all these have taught him that gaiety may not clash with
respectability. Especially, he is more ready to argue, for a peaceful
century has taught him that a word is better than a blow. There may be a
change in his psychology after this war, for he is being educated by the
million in the point of view that a loaded rifle is worth half a dozen
scraps of paper; it is quite possible that he will carry this view into
his social life. There may, therefore, be a reaction for thirty years or
so, but thirty years is a trifle in questions such as these.
Naturally, women have in this direction developed further than men, for
they had more leeway to make up. Man has so long been the educated
animal that he did not need so much liberalizing. I do not refer to the
Middle Ages, when learning was entirely preempted by the male (with the
exception of poetry and music), for in those days there was no education
save among the priests. I mean rather that the great development of
elementary learning, which took place in the middle of the nineteenth
century, affected men for about a generation before it affected women.
In England, at least, university education for women is very recent, for
Girton was opened only in 1873, Newnham, at Cambridge, in 1875; Miss
Beale made Cheltenham College a power only a little later, and indeed it
may be said that formal education developed only about 1890. Both in
England and in the United States women have not had much more than a
generation to make up the leeway of sixty centuries. It has benefited
them as mothers because they did not start with the prejudices left in
the male mind by the slow evolution from one form of learning to
another; women did not have to live down Plato, Descartes, or Adam
Smith; they began on Haeckel and H. G. Wells. The mothers of to-day have
been flung neck and crop into Paradise; they came in for the new times,
which are always better than the old times and inferior only to
to-morrow. They were made to understand a possible democracy in the
nursery because all round them, even in Russia, even in Turkey,
democracy was growing, some say as a rose, some say as a weed, but
anyhow irrepressibly. Who could be a queen by the cradle when more
august thrones were tottering? So woman quite suddenly became more than
a pretty foil to the educated man, she became something like his
superior and his elder; little by little she has begun to teach him who
once was her master and still in fond delusion believes he is.
It cannot be said that the mother has until very recently liked
education. She has suffered from the prejudice that afflicted her own
mother, who thought that because she had worked samplers all girls must
work samplers; the "old" woman's daughter, because she went to
Cheltenham, tends to think that her little girl ought to go to
Cheltenham. It is human rather than feminine, for generations follow one
another at Eton and at Harvard. But more than feminine, I think it is
masculine because, until very recently, woman has disliked education,
while man has treated it with respect; he has not loved it for its own
sake, but because he thought that _nam et ipsa scientia potestas est_.
Not a very high motive, but still the future will preoccupy itself very
little with the reasons for which we did things; it will be glad enough
if we do them. Perhaps we may yet turn the edges of swords on the blasts
of rhetoric.
An immediate consequence of the growth of education has been a change in
the status of the child. It is no longer property, for how can one
prevent a child from pulling down the window sash at night when it knows
something of ventilation? Or give it an iron tonic when it realizes
that full-blooded people cannot take iron? The child has changed; it is
no longer the creature that, pointing to an animal in the field, said,
"What's that?" and the reply being, "A cow", asked "Why?" The child is
perilously close to asking whether the animal is carnivorous or
herbivorous. That makes coercion very difficult. But I do not think that
the modern parent desires to coerce as much as did his forbear. Rather
he desires to develop the child's personality, and in its early years
this leads to horrid results, to children being "taught to see the
beautiful" or "being made to realize the duties of a citizen." We are in
for a generation made up half of bulbous-headed, bespectacled
precocities, and half of barbarians who are "realizing their
personality" by the continual use of "shall" and "shan't." This will
pass as all things pass, the old child and the rude child, just like the
weak parent after the brute parent, and it is enough that the new
generation points to another generation, for there seldom was a time
that was not better than its father and the herald of a finer son.
Generally the parent will help, for his new attitude can be expressed in
a phrase. He does not say, "I am master", but, "I am responsible." He
has begun to realize that the child is not a regrettable accident or a
little present from Providence; he is beginning to look upon the care of
the child as a duty. He has extended the ideal of citizenship, born in
the middle of the nineteenth century, which was "to leave the world a
little better than he found it"; he has passed on to wanting his son to
be a little richer than he was, and a little more learned; he is coming
to want his son to be a finer and bolder man; he will come in time to
want his daughter to be a finer and bolder woman, which just now he
bears pretty well. His wife is helping him a great deal because she is
escaping from her home ties to the open trades and professions, to the
entertainments of psychic, political, and artistic lectures which make
of her head a waste paper basket of intellect, but still create in that
head a disturbance far better than the ancient and cow-like placidity.
The modern mother is often too much inclined to weigh the baby four
times a day, to feed it on ozoneid, or something equally funny, to
expose as much of its person as possible, to make it gaze at Botticelli
prints when in its bath. She will no doubt want it to mate eugenically,
in which she will probably be disappointed, for love laughs at Galtons;
but still, in her struggle against disease and wooden thinking, she will
have helped the child by giving it something to discard better than the
old respects and fears. The modern mother has begun to consider herself
as a human being as well as a mother; she no longer thinks that
"A mother is a mother still,
The holiest thing alive."
She is coming to look upon herself as a sort of aesthetic school
inspector. She lives round her children rather than in them; she is less
animal. Above all, she is more critical. Having more opportunity of
mixing with people, she ceases to see her child as marvelous because it
is her child. She is losing something of her conceit and has learned to
say, "_the_ baby" instead of "_my_ baby." It is a revolutionary
atmosphere, and the developing child has something to push against when
it wants to earn its parents' approval, for modern parents are fair
judges of excellence; they are educated. The old-time father was
nonplussed by his son, and could not help him in his _delectus_, but the
modern father is not so puzzled when his son wishes to converse of
railway finance. The parent, more capable of comradeship, has come to
want to be a comrade. He is no longer addressed as "sir"; he is often
addressed as "old chap." That is fine, but it is in dead opposition to
the close, hard family idea.
Likewise, man and wife have come to look upon each other rather
differently; not differently enough, but then humanity never does
anything enough; when it comes near to anything drastic it grows afraid.
Man still thinks that "whoso findeth a wife findeth a good thing", but
he is no longer finding the one he sought not so long ago. She is no
longer his property, and it would not occur to the roughest among us to
offer a wife for sale for five shillings in Smithfield market, as was
done now and then as late as the early nineteenth century. Woman is no
longer property; she has been freed; in England she has even been
allowed, by the Married Women's Property Act, to hold that which was her
own. The Married Women's Property Act has modified the attitude of the
mother to her child and to her husband. She is less linked when she has
property, for she can go. If every woman had means, or a trade of her
own, we should have achieved something like free alliance; woman would
be in the position of the woman in "Pygmalion", whom her man could not
beat because, she not being married to him, if he beat her she might
leave him--in its way a very strong argument against marriage.