The Moral Code
IN attempting to explain and enforce a moral code, the first and most
essential need is to formulate definitely to oneself the code which one
proposes to enforce and to explain. There is nothing from which
children, and subject human beings generally, suffer so much as the
incoherence of the thought of those in authority over them. Before you
can begin to lay down the law you must know what that law is, and your
heart, soul, and spirit must not only know it, but approve it, before
you can gain a willing obedience to it from those on whom you wish to
impose it. By this I do not mean only that we ought to make up our minds
whether this, that, or the other isolated act is right or wrong, as it
occurs, but that we ought to have a clear perception and knowledge of
the things that are right and the things that are wrong, and have a
standard which we can apply to any new action brought under our notice,
so that, measuring the new act by our old standard, we shall be able to
say, with some sort of rough accuracy, "This is wrong," or "This is
right."
And the standard of expediency is not a good one for this purpose, nor
is the standard of custom, nor yet the standard of gentility or the
standard of success in life. Children are not good judges of expediency.
The law of mere custom will not be strong enough to bind them when
desire calls with enchanting voice to forbidden things. Gentility and
the gospel of getting on will leave them cold. You may at first deal
merely with a succession of unrelated particulars, saying, "This is
right," "This is wrong," beating down the children's questionings by
your mere _Ipse dixit_; but a time will come when it will not be enough,
in answer to their "Why is it wrong?" "Why is it right?" to answer
"Because I say so." The child will want some other standard which he
himself can apply. The standard of what you say may be a shifting one,
and anyhow, he cannot be at all sure what you will say unless he knows
what is your standard, the standard by which you will decide whether to
say, in any given case, that a thing is wrong or right. And in order
that you may clearly set before the child your own moral standard you
must first have set it very clearly before yourself. It is not enough
to say, "Stealing is wrong," "Lying is wrong," "Greediness is wrong." If
you feel that these things are wrong because they are contrary to the
will of God, you will not find that that explanation is sufficient for a
child unless he knows very much more about God than His name and certain
miraculous and incomprehensible attributes of His. He will want to know
what is the will of God, to which these wrong things are contrary. And
he will want very much to know the definite right as well as the
definite wrong. You will have to give the child a standard that can be
applied to positives as well as negatives.
There is a very simple standard by which to measure the actions of
children--and, much more severely, our own actions. It is set up in the
words of Christ: "Do unto others as you would they should do unto
you"--a standard so simple that quite little children can understand and
apply it, a standard so severe that were it understood and applied by us
who are no longer children, the warped, tangled, rotten web we call
civilisation could not endure for a day. There is no other standard by
which a child can judge its own actions, and yours, and judge them
justly.
Having fixed your standard it will be necessary to try your own actions
by it as well as the child's. And this standard will give you the only
vital code of morality, because it compels the continual exercise of
imagination, the continual preening and flight of the wings of the soul.
You cannot order your life by that Divine precept without a hundred
times a day asking yourself, "How should _I_ like that, if I were not
myself?" without continually putting yourself, imaginatively, in some
one else's place. And when the child asks, "Why is it wrong to steal?"
you can lead him to see how little he would like to have his own
possessions stolen. When he asks, "Why is it wrong to lie?" you may
teach him to imagine his own bitterness if others should deceive him. It
is, of course, much easier to say, "It is wrong because I say so," or
even "because God says so"; but if you want to mark it right or wrong,
to grave it deeply and ineffaceably on the tables of the heart and the
soul, teach the child to see for himself _how_ things are right and
wrong--and to judge of them by that one Divine and unfailing rule.
Of course even when the child knows what is right he will not always do
it, any more than you do: and one of the questions to be considered is
how you shall deal with those lapses from moral rectitude of which he,
no less than you, will often be guilty. Punishments, the old savage
punishments, were revenge, and nothing but revenge, a desire to "pay
out" the offender, to take an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. More
humane and reasonable legislators have sought to prove that punishment
is curative--that the fear of punishment will deter people from doing
wrong. A distinguished official of the Home Office gave it as his
opinion only the other day that punishment, no matter how severe, will
not act as a deterrent, if there is ever so slight a chance of the
criminal's escaping it. What would deter would be the _certainty_ of
punishment, however slight. Now since you are not omniscient you cannot
pretend to your child that if he does wrong you are certain to know and
to punish him: if you are silly enough to pretend it, he will find you
out immediately, and estimate your lie at its true blackness. You can,
however, without any pretence, assure him that if he does wrong he
himself will know it, that it will make him feel unclean and nasty, and
miserable till he is able to wash himself in the waters of repentance
and forgiveness. That if he acts meanly and dirtily he will feel dirty
and mean, and if he acts bravely and cleanly he will feel clean and
brave. And he will find that what you say is true. But not unless you
shall have succeeded in convincing him that your standard is a true
standard, and that the things which that standard shows to be wrong are
wrong indeed. Here is the highest work of the imagination: to teach the
child so to put himself in the place of the one he has wronged that the
knowledge of that wrong shall be its own punishment.
No one desires, of course, that a child should be always feeling his own
moral pulse: if he has learned that there is a right and a wrong way he
will not be always bothering about which way he may be living--it will
be only when something goes amiss that he will stop and consider. Just
as one does not stop to think whether one is breathing properly, only
when one chokes one knows that one isn't.
[Illustration: ONE HALF OF THE CITY.
72]]
Punishment, however, should not be confused with the consequences of
action, and while children are yet too small to understand all that God
may be to them, it is possible to show them the _consequences_ of their
misdeeds, magnifying these beyond the consequences of the act to be
reprobated and thus pointing the general moral. I mean that one may
honourably apply, to the small wrong-doings of childhood, the _sort_
of consequences--proportioned, of course, to the wrong-doing--which
would result from such wrong-doing on a larger scale by a grown-up
person. It will be exceedingly troublesome and painful for you, but
perhaps its painfulness to you may be the measure of its value to the
child. For instance, Tommy steals a penny, knowing that to steal pennies
is wrong. He is very little, and a penny is very little, and your
impulse, if not to slap him, might be to tell him that he is a very
naughty boy and have done with it. It will go to your heart to bring
home to him the consequences of theft, especially as you cannot do it at
once; but if, next time you are about to send him to the shop for
something, you say, "No: I can't send you because you might steal my
pennies as you did the other day"--this will be hateful for you to
do--but it will show him more plainly than anything else what happens to
people who steal. They are not trusted. And the same with lies. Show him
that those who tell lies are not believed.
But, remembering how it felt to be a child, have pity, and do not teach
him these lessons when any one else is there. Let the humiliation of
them be a secret between you two alone. Only when a wrong has been done
which demands a restitution or an amend should the soul of the child,
shamed with wrong-doing, be exposed to alien eyes.
When we sit in judgment on the aggressions and on the shortcomings of
others the first need is neither justice nor mercy, but imagination with
self-knowledge. The judge should be able to put himself in the place of
the accused, to perceive, by sympathetic vision, the point of view of
the one who stands before the judgment-seat. The judge is an adult human
being, and therefore has some knowledge of the mental and moral
processes of human beings. He should use this knowledge; and when it
comes to a grown-up judging a child, it is no less necessary for the
judge to place himself imaginatively in the place of the small offender.
And this cannot be done by imagination and self-consideration alone.
Memory is needed. Let me say it again: there is only one way of
understanding children; they cannot be understood by imagination, by
observation, nor even by love. They can only be understood by memory.
Only by remembering how you felt and thought when you yourself were a
child can you arrive at any understanding of the thoughts and feelings
of children. When you were a child you suffered intensely from
injustice, from want of understanding, in your grown-up censors. You
were punished when you had not meant to do wrong: you escaped punishment
when you had not meant to do right. The whole scheme of grown-up law
seemed to you, and very likely was, arbitrary and incomprehensible. And
you suffered from it desperately. So much that, even if you have now
forgotten all that you suffered, the mark of that suffering none the
less remains on your soul to this day.
It would seem that the humiliations, the mortifications endured in
childhood leave an ineffaceable brand on the spirit. How then can we not
remember, and, remembering, refrain from hurting other children as we
were hurt?
The spirit of the child is sensitive to the slightest change in the
atmosphere about him. You can convey disapproval quite easily--and
approval also. But while most parents and guardians are constantly alive
to the necessity for expressing disapproval and inflicting punishment,
the other side of the medal seems to be hidden from them.
The most prevalent idea of training children is the idea of prohibition
and punishment. "You are not to do it! You will? Then take that!" the
blow or punishment following, expresses simply and exactly the whole
theory of moral education held by the mass of modern mothers. The vast
mistake, both in the education of children and government of nations, is
the heavy stress laid on the negative virtues. Also the fact that
punishment follows on the failure _not_ to do certain things--whereas no
commensurate reward is offered even for success in _not_ doing, let
alone for success in active and honourable well-doing. The reward of
negative virtue is negative also, and consists simply in non-punishment.
The rewards of active virtue are, in the world of men, money and praise.
But there are deeds for which money cannot pay, and sometimes these are
rewarded by medals and paragraphs in the newspapers--not at all the same
thing as being rewarded by the praise of your fellow-men. Now children,
like all sane human beings, love praise. They love it more keenly
perhaps than other human beings because their natural craving for it has
not been overlaid with false modesties and shames. They have not learned
that
Praise to the face
Is open disgrace.
On the contrary, praise to the face seems to them natural, right, and
altogether desirable. See that they get it.
Do you remember when you were little how you struggled to exercise some
tiresome negative virtue, such as not biting your nails, not teasing the
cat, not executing, with your school-boots, that heavy shuffling
movement, so simply relieving to you, so mysteriously annoying to the
grown-ups? Can you have forgotten how for ages and ages--three or four
days, even--you refrained from drinking water with your mouth full of
food, from leaving your handkerchief about in obvious spots natural and
convenient, how you sternly denied yourself the pleasure of drawing your
hoop stick along the front railings--because, though you enjoyed this
musical exercise, others did not? And how, all through the interminable
period of self-denial, you heartened yourself to these dismal
refrainings by the warm comfortable thought, "_Won't_ they be
pleased?"--and how they never were. They took it all as a matter of
course. To them, because they had forgotten how it felt to be a child,
all your heroic sacrifices and renunciations counted as nothing. To them
it was natural that a child should keep his fingers out of his mouth,
and off the tail of Puss, should keep his feet still and his
handkerchief in his pocket, should do the suitable things with meat,
drink, and hoop-sticks. They never noticed, and so they never praised.
But when, worn out by long abstinence from natural joys, natural
relaxations, you broke one of those rules which seemed to you so useless
and so arbitrary, then they noticed fast enough.
[Illustration: THE TAIL OF PUSS.]
"Can you _never_ remember," they said, "just a simple thing like not
biting your nails?" Bitter aloes following, no doubt. Or, "I really
should have thought," they would say, "that considering the number of
times I've spoken about it you would remember not to make that frightful
noise," with boots or hoop sticks or a blade of wet grass or what not.
They did not pause to think, in their earnest grown-up business of
"bringing the boy up," how many, how very many, and how seemingly silly,
were the "don'ts" which you had to remember. But you will not be like
that: you will notice and approve, and most needful of all, reward with
praise the earnest, difficult refrainings of the child who is trying to
please you: who is trying to learn the long table of your commandments
all beginning with "Thou shalt not," and to practise them, not because
these commandments appeal to him as reasonable or just or useful, but
just because he loves you, wants to please you, and, deepest need of
love, wants you to be pleased with him.
A hasty yet determined effort at putting yourself in his place is the
thing needed every time you have to sit in judgment on the actions of
another human being--most of all when that human being is a little
child. If we cultivated this habit we should not hurt other people as we
do. I have seen cruel things.
A little girl, suffering from a slight affection of the eye, was given
by a sympathetic aunt the run of a box of that aunt's old ball-dresses.
She spent a whole hour in arranging a costume which seemed to her to be
of royal beauty. A crushed pink tulle dress, a many-coloured striped
Roman sash, white satin slippers, put on over the black strapped shoes,
and turning up very much at the toes. White gloves, very dirty and
wrinkled like a tortoise's legs over the plump dimpled arms. Hair
dressed high on the head over a pad of folded stockings, secured by
hairpins borrowed from the housemaid. A wreath, of crushed red calico
roses from somebody's last summer's hat, some pearl beads, the property
of cook, and a blue heart out of a cracker--saved since Christmas.
"I am a beautiful Princess," said the child, and the housemaid responded
heartily: "That you are, ducky, and no mistake. Go and show mother."
But mother, when she was told that this stumbling, long-tailed bundle of
crushed finery was a beautiful Princess, laughed and said, "Princess
Rag-Bag, I should say."
"It's only pretending, you know," the child explained, wondering why
explanations should be needed by mother and not by Eliza.
The mother laughed again. "I shouldn't pretend to be a Princess with
that great stye in my eye," she said, and thought no more about it.
But the child remembers to this day how she slunk away and tore off the
beautiful Princess-clothes, and cried and cried and cried, and wished
that she was dead. Children really do wish that, sometimes.
Another form of cruelty is mere carelessness. A child spends hours in
preparing some surprise for you--decorates your room with flowers, not
in the best taste perhaps, and fading maybe before your impatiently
awaited arrival--or ties scarves and handkerchiefs to the banisters to
represent flags at your home-coming.
"Very pretty, dear," you say carelessly, hardly looking--and the child
sees that you hardly look, "and now clear it all away, there's a dear!"
The child clears it all away, and with the dying flowers something else
is cleared away, something that will no more live again than will the
faded flowers.
Be generous of praise--it is the dew that waters the budding flowers of
kindness and love and unselfishness: it is to all that is best in the
child the true Elixir of Life.