BOYS AND GIRLS.
There is yet a more critical time for the parents, I think, than even
the schoolroom time, and that is, first of all, when the boys go off to
school; and, secondly, when we have to realise that the small nursery
toddlers are grown up, and really as capable of taking care of
themselves as we are ourselves. Let me speak of the boys first, as,
after all, that terrible wrench is the worst experience of all, and one,
I hope most truly and sincerely, which will be saved for future mothers,
and that before many years have passed; for I maintain, and always shall
maintain most strenuously, that there never was a worse system of
education than the general education that present-day lads must go
through, or be entirely different to the rest of the male sex, though
even that would be a good thing in my eyes, for I cannot allow that the
male half of the world is so good or so perfect at present that it
cannot be improved, neither can I allow that the result of education as
at present given is in any way as perfect as it might be; and as an
example of what I mean it would be well to consider, I think, why the
return of the boys from school is as the letting loose of a horde of
barbarians on a peaceful land; and why, after the first week at all
events, the urchins cease to be regarded as returned angels, and one and
all are spoken of as ‘those dreadful boys.’
As an example of what I mean, I may speak of one household where the
girls are gently ruled and delicately brought up by their dead mother’s
bridesmaid, who gave up her own one chance of wedded happiness because
of her most romantic attachment to her girlhood friend, and who, when
father and mother died within a few years of each other, leaving a young
and turbulent household to ‘Aunt Mary and Providence,’ came to live
among the children, loving them all, but instinctively looking upon the
boys as just one remove from wild animals.
At least the preparations for their return from Rugby would suggest as
much, for in the big country-house drawing-room the beautiful Indian
carpet is rolled up and replaced by a time-worn drugget, the little
brother’s best hat and coat are relegated from the hall to Aunt Mary’s
own room, covers are put on everything that can be covered, and lace
curtains are moved; and, in fact, when prepared for the holidays, the
whole house appears as if ready to stand a heavy and protracted siege.
Even the garden and greenhouses are rigorously locked; wire shades and
iron hurdles protect tender seedlings and grass edges; the head gardener
wears a countenance of mingled dread and determination; and in the
stables nothing is left get-at-able save the boys’ own ponies, a
venerable ‘four-wheel,’ and sundry odds and ends of ancient harness,
which no one could hurt because its condition is quite hopeless already.
And in a town house, when the holidays are within appreciable distance,
over and over again have I not seen similar preparations, though on a
smaller scale? Have I not noted how nurse puts away the children’s best
toys; how the girls in the schoolroom, aided by their agitated
governess, conceal all their beloved possessions, and train their pets
to ‘lie low,’ as ‘Brer Fox’ would say? Does not Paterfamilias rehearse a
long code of laws, all to be enforced, he says, the moment the boys come
home? And is not Materfamilias, after all, the only creature in the
whole establishment who has not one _arrière pensèe_, and who finds
nothing in the least to spoil the rapture of the return of those who
have never for one moment been out of her thoughts since the last time
she saw them off, through her tears, on their return to Dr. Swishey’s
academy for young gentlemen?
Ah, the boys little know what they cause that tender soul to suffer when
an extra hour’s cricket excuses them for forgetting their weekly letter
home; how the omission makes her turn pale when a sudden ring at the
bell comes, lest it should be a telegram summoning her to the bedside
of the dear things, who are most likely rioting in the playground at the
very moment; and how she is only withheld by dread of ridicule and the
largeness of the railway fare from rushing off at once to see for
herself that all is well; and she has to content herself with writing a
loving letter of expostulation, doubtless characterised as ‘a jaw,’ and
thrown aside half read through.
And when they are at home under her own roof she naturally looks forward
to peace, at all events, and safety from dreads and fears such as these;
but, poor soul, she soon finds out her mistake.
Her days are spent in wondering where the boys have gone to, in
painfully concealing the marks of their ravages in library and staircase
and hall from the paternal eye, and in propitiating the outraged
schoolroom and nursery establishments, who do not see, as she does, that
the fact of its being holiday time accounts for all, and that all should
be forgiven those who are only at home for so short a period in the
year.
But even mother begins to tire of acting as a buffer between her sons
and her husband and the other members of the family. And by the time
cook has given warning--heedless that she is the only woman who can cook
the dinner to suit the master--because Reggie will melt lead in her
spoons or playfully drop gunpowder in the fire, or because some pounds
of butter mysteriously disappeared and followers were hinted at--though
the state of her saucepans and George’s trouser pockets pointed out that
toffee, not the policeman, was at the bottom of the loss--Materfamilias
finds herself wondering how Dr. Swishey manages to look so well at the
end of the term, and begins to think that perhaps after all she will not
be quite as sorry as usual when the cab comes round and the boys go off,
leaving her free to go out to dinner without dreading to see flames
issuing out of the drawing-room windows when the carriage turns the
corner of the Square on her return home, or fearing a summons from the
festive board to bid her go back at once because one or other of the
boys has done something dreadful either to himself or some other member
of the family.
Now, granted that this is not an isolated case--and, judging from a
large personal experience of ‘other folks’ children,’ I venture boldly
to state that this is the rule and not the exception--I as boldly remark
that the present manner of dealing with the _genus homo_ as expressed in
the schoolboy is entirely a wrong one, and, waxing bolder yet, I say
that the grown-up youth evolved from such an education as most lads
obtain nowadays is so emphatically unsatisfactory that I am quite sure
some radical change should be made in the way we bring up our boys.
Born into a home where their sisters are sheltered and cared for until
they leave it for one of their own, from their very birth they are
treated in an entirely different manner. As little mites they govern the
house, because they are of the superior sex, and they are finally sent
away from home into the great world of school, where, neither by age nor
experience, can they be in the least fitted for the warfare, or enabled
by careful and judicious training to hold their own, or to choose
between the good and evil that is so freely offered them there. Small
boys are herded with big ones, who alternately bully and confide in
them; tender and sentimental fancies are derided; and the word ‘manly’
is made to express ferocity, cruelty, uncleanness, and a thousand and
one awful things that, when we discover our children are aware of, we
wonder feebly when and how they have acquired their knowledge.
What wonder the return of the boys is dreaded, when they come as
strangers into a home where God placed them for the careful training,
the unceasing supervision, of body and mind? How can a boy join in and
make part of a circle that for half or even three parts of the year is
complete without him? How can he respect and appreciate laws and routine
that are entirely different to all he has been accustomed to more than
two thirds of his time? And how can he help being spoiled, selfish, and
tyrannical, when the very shortness of his residence under the home-roof
is made an excuse for pampering him and making every one, man, woman,
and child, give way to him, because, poor dear lad, he is only at home
for the holidays, while the others are always there?
There is no doubt in my mind that boys ought to go more into the world
and see more of human nature than girls need do; but with all my
strength I would maintain that the ordinary boarding-school plan is a
great and hideous mistake. By all means let them go to school all day;
but let them at night return home, where the mother’s eye can see how
they are, and how they progress with their lessons, and to insure them
that best of all feeling for any one--the certain knowledge that home is
home to them in the fullest sense of the word; and that, far from being
outsiders or honoured guests, feared as well as honoured, they are part
and parcel of the family, and bound to give and take, sharing the rough
with the smooth, and helping in every way they can to aid the weaker
vessels of the family, and becoming gentlemen in the widest sense of the
word.
Of course, parents who keep their boys at home have little time for
rest, and cannot be incessantly in the very middle of society’s whirl;
but is any price too large to pay for the souls of our children--any
sacrifice too great to insure that one’s boys are to the fullest degree
given the benefit of our knowledge and our shielding care? And shall we
not be repaid for anything it may cost us in the wear-and-tear of our
brain-power if, instead of the stage-door-haunting, toothpick-gnawing
‘masher’ of the present day, we rear a race of manly, God-fearing,
home-loving youths, who may restore the age of chivalry and the strong,
pure, tender-hearted men that were once England’s boast?
Like most problems presented to our minds as we go through the world,
there are here other sides to contemplate beyond the one we have just
attempted to sketch. For there are homes where the boy’s one chance of
salvation is given by a good training at school; where the vanity of the
mother and the evil example of the father are worse than anything else
can possibly be; and where the atmosphere is so pernicious that an
honest and true-hearted schoolmaster dreads to send his pupils home, for
they may once more acquire habits that he is only just beginning really
to eradicate. There are also intensely weak and foolish parents who, not
able to refuse themselves any gratification, cannot debar their children
from having their own way, and who, not having been trained themselves,
cannot train others; and there are yet others who send off their
children to rid themselves of the clear-eyed tormentors who ask such
tiresome questions, and will follow the example of their parents, not
content to be put off with the trite remark that grown-up folks can do
and say things little people would be severely punished and reprimanded
for doing and saying.
Still, notwithstanding these sides to the picture, we can boldly state
that if boys were invariably part of a household, if their parents
accept their responsibilities and see they have no right to pay some
careless person--any one, in fact, who wants to make money by
teaching--to take their responsibilities off their hands, we should very
soon have a different state of things as regards the male sex as a
whole; and at all events we should cease to dread the holidays and speak
of our sons as ‘those dreadful boys.’
But the selfishness of the ordinary parent, and the cupidity of the
orthodox schoolmaster, whose real profits are made from the boarders,
and who, therefore, discourages to the best of his power the idea of
home-boarders, are twin giants in the way of those who only ask to be
allowed to bring up their own children in their own way, and I can but
look forward and hope for other mothers all that I have only been able
to demand for myself in part, and that a very small part of all I would
have wished for the boys, who, once given over to school, only return
for good for a few moments, as it were, on their way to the real battle
of life, which soon engulfs them entirely, and so we never really have
our boys our own, nor are allowed to train them for ourselves at a time
when we alone should be able to do it satisfactorily, because we alone
should understand them best and know what they inherit mentally and
bodily; in fact, the nursery and schoolroom once passed through, we have
lost our children, and have only now to think how we can make home
happy for them until they leave us for their own homes, which will
depend on our early training whether they are happy ones or not.
And indeed one of the most abstruse of all our numerous domestic
problems is shadowed forth in the words ‘quite grown-up,’ for there are
few fathers and mothers who realise, it seems to me, that their children
have actually passed through nursery and schoolroom, and are in deed and
truth quite grown-up, and in consequence of this the domestic relations
become strained, and home ceases to be the pleasant retreat it used to
be from the throng and turmoils of the outside world.
There are most certainly households where the relations are more than
strained, where open hostility replaces the old-time affection, and from
whence sons rush to ‘the bad,’ and daughters marry the first man that
asks them, simply because they wish for freedom and to be able to do as
they like.
Naturally, they often enough discover they have exchanged King Log for
King Stork, and wish themselves at home once more over and over again;
but that such cases are not only possible, but are continually occurring
around us, seems to me so sad, that I should like to say a few words on
the subject of ‘The Proper Relations between Parents and Children,’
hoping in some measure to propose a solution to the problem.
In the first place, we are in some measure suffering from the rebound
that has taken place when the severe bonds that bound our parents were
removed. They suffered themselves so greatly from the petty tyrannies
that were considered the right thing in their youth, that, in desiring
to save their children from similar misery, they have gone to the other
extreme, and allowed such laxity of manner that children rule the house,
as in America, and barely condescend in their grown-up stage to consult
their parents at all about their engagements, their occupations, or even
their friendships or their marriages.
Surely there is a medium between the discipline that enforced silence on
the child until all originality was crushed out of him, that thought
severe strictures on the dress and personal appearance of one’s
daughters the sole way of checking vanity, and that refused confidence
because it was lowering oneself from the awful height occupied by a
parent, and that which is conspicuous by its absence, and that results
in an independent race of young people, who respect nothing, and are
certainly not going to make an exception in the case of their father and
mother, who are either ready to go as great lengths as their children,
or else suddenly assert an authority that only exists in their own
imaginations, and that causes a turmoil because opposition is as
unexpected as it is arbitrary.
If we would have authority we must have it from the very beginning, and
I am old-fashioned enough myself to be a great believer in the nursery
and nursery frocks for very little children. I am always angry, I
confess, when I see a small lady of four or five dressed up to the eyes
in a fantastic frock designed to attract attention to the tiny wearer,
of which she is all too conscious, and carried about from this luncheon
to that tea, to the weariness of herself and all who are not connected
with her; and indeed do well to be angry, for did not she, as one of
those specimens, refuse to go into the country because she found it so
extremely dull; and also because I know it is from such a bringing-up as
this that we obtain the emancipated female or the fast girl, who thinks
of nothing but ‘dress’ and ‘the service,’ and which results, all too
often, in making home miserable for the elder folk, who only see in the
pretty child a plaything flattering to their vanity, and do not
recognise the fact that, much sooner than we expect it, she in her turn
will be quite grown-up.
The nursery stage should emphatically be a time for shabby clothes and
dolls and noise, and for healthy natural play. The midday meal should be
the only one taken with the mother, who, however, should make a point of
knowing all about the others, and should also contrive to be often in
the nursery, and have the children with her for not less than an hour or
two a day.
To insure happiness with a grown-up family these tiny beginnings should
be well studied. The mother’s influence should be so much felt, and so
indispensable to the house, that when withdrawn for a while it should
indeed be something more than missed. But familiarity in early childhood
breeds contempt in youth; and it is well known that a child who is
always with grown-up people never knows what childishness is, and never
becomes as healthy-minded as one who has had a little wholesome neglect
from society and from perpetual supervision of its elders.
When we as parents begin to see the children growing up, we should, I
maintain, then carefully see that our own immediate friends are those
whose society and conversation can do our girls no harm. When I have
occasionally heard talk that has brought blushes to my checks at my
mature age, and seen the young girls not only listening but joining in
it, I have almost been tempted to declare my girls shall never go into
society at all; but as I know this is impossible, I have made up my mind
whose houses they shall go to, reserving to myself the right to tell
them boldly why such and such a one is not a desirable acquaintance.
Then, too, their own friends, made at school or at the homes of mutual
acquaintances, should be welcomed emphatically whenever they like to
come. I remember too well feeling much aggrieved at not being able to
ask an occasional friend to tea to refuse this privilege. But if the
friends become too numerous, it is easy to point out that either you
cannot afford such indiscriminate visiting, or to restrict the number of
visitors to a certain number; only let it be understood that their
friends are always welcome in moderation, and that, though you are
delighted to see them, you do not expect them thrown on your hands for
entertainment, and that you assume the right to point out to your
children the desirability or the reverse of any of their acquaintances,
and that you expect them to give due weight to your opinion.
It is more than necessary, in my mind, to keep perpetually before one’s
children that the home into which they were born is their inheritance
that nothing can take from them. And by this I do not mean that I
consider a parent bound to provide fortunes for either sons or
daughters. I have too often seen the great harm of this to advocate it
for one moment; but that they should always not only be welcome there,
but claim as a right the shelter and counsel and affection that are
their due, no matter what they have done or how grievously they have
sinned. For _no_ cause should a father or mother refuse to see their own
child, and they should a thousand times more never allow the unmarried
daughter to feel herself a burden, whose food and shelter are grudged
her, any more than they should continually hint that marriage is a
woman’s only destiny, refusing to the girls the ample education lavished
on the sons, and so depriving them of every means of making their own
living.
But grown-up daughters, in my eyes, are a most precious possession, if
properly brought up. They at last take some of the heavy burdens a
mother has always to bear alone off her shoulders; and if she be
moderately intelligent, and has intelligently brought up the girls,
there is no reason why they should not be a thousand times more valuable
in her eyes than they were as pretty babies and engaging little girls.
But then we must remember that they are grown-up, that they have an
opinion more or less valuable, and that they have idiosyncrasies to be
respected, the while they respect ours, remembering our position towards
them, our fuller experience, and our affectionate care for them. As long
as the parents live, they should be master and mistress in the house;
but the children should be as viceroys, helping their parents in every
way that they can in their social duties and in the routine of the
house. It is trying, we know, to have the piano going and billiard-balls
rolling when we want to read Jones’s speech on Home Rule, or Gladstone’s
latest statements; but it is far more trying not to know where one’s
children are, and to feel they are happier anywhere else than in their
own homes.
It is their home as much as it is ours, and it will be home indeed if by
judicious training in their youth we have made friends of our children,
if we have given them our confidence, our affection, and our best days,
and have not become strangers to them by being perpetually in society
when they were as perpetually sent to school; the while we have not
become too familiar, and make them old before their time, by taking them
with us to gatherings in smart frocks when they ought to have been
disreputably shabby in pinafores in the nursery. Then we shall discover
that our grown-up sons and daughters are not so many cuckoos pushing us
out of the old nest, but intelligent friends and companions--all the
more delightful to us because they are quite grown-up.