FATHER, MOTHER, AND SON.
Gerald Raymount was a man of an unusual combination of qualities. There
were such contradictions in his character as to give ground for the
suspicion, in which he certainly himself indulged, that there must be in
him at least one strain not far removed from the savage, while on the
other hand there were mental conditions apparently presupposing ages of
culture. At the university he had indulged in large reading outside the
hedge of his required studies, and gained thus an acquaintance with and
developed a faculty in literature destined to stand him in good stead.
Inheriting earthly life and a history--nothing more--from a long line of
ancestors, and a few thousand pounds--less than twenty--from his father,
who was a country attorney, a gentle, quarrelsome man, who yet never,
except upon absolute necessity, carried a case into court, he had found,
as his family increased, that his income was not sufficient for their
maintenance in accustomed ease. With not one expensive personal taste
between them, they had neither of them the faculty for saving
money--often but another phrase for doing mean things. Neither husband
nor wife was capable of _screwing_. Had the latter been, certainly
the free-handedness of the former would have driven her to it; but while
Mrs. Raymount would go without a new bonnet till an outcry arose in the
family that its respectability was in danger, she could not offer two
shillings a day to a sempstress who thought herself worth half-a-crown;
she could not allow a dish to be set on her table which was not as
likely to encourage hunger as allay it; neither because some richer
neighbors gave so little, would she take to herself the spiritual fare
provided in church without making a liberal acknowledgment in carnal
things. The result of this way of life was the deplorable one that Mr.
Raymount was compelled to rouse himself, and, from the chair of a
somewhat self-indulgent reader of many books, betake himself to his
study-table, to prove whether it were not possible for him to become the
writer of such as might add to an income showing scantier every quarter.
Here we may see the natural punishment of liberal habits; for this man
indulging in them, and, instead of checking them in his wife, loving her
the more that she indulged in them also, was for this reason condemned
to labor--the worst evil of life in the judgment of both the man about
Mayfair and the tramp of the casual ward. But there are others who dare
not count that labor an evil which helps to bring out the best elements
of human nature, not even when the necessity for it outlasts any impulse
towards it, and who remember the words of the Lord: "My Father worketh
hitherto, and I work."
For Gerald Raymount, it made a man of him--which he is not who is of no
service to his generation. Doubtless he was driven thereto by necessity;
but the question is not whether a man works upon more or less
compulsion, but whether the work he is thus taught to do he makes good
honest work for which the world is so much the better. In this matter of
work there are many first that shall be last. The work of a baker for
instance must stand higher in the judgment of the universe than that of
a brewer, let his ale be ever so good. Because the one trade brings more
money than the other the judgment of this world counts it more
honorable, but there is the other judgment at hand.
In the exercise of his calling Raymount was compelled to think more
carefully than before, and thus not only his mind took a fresh start,
but his moral and spiritual nature as well. He slid more and more into
writing out the necessities and experiences of his own heart and
history, and so by degrees gained power of the only true kind--that,
namely, of rousing the will, not merely the passions, or even the
aspirations of men. The poetry in which he had disported himself at
college now came to the service of his prose, and the deeper poetic
nature, which is the prophetic in every man, awoke in him. Till after
they had lived together a good many years the wife did not know the
worth of the man she had married, nor indeed was he half the worth when
she married him that he had now grown to be. The longer they lived the
prouder she grew of him and of his work; nor was she the less the
practical wisdom of the house that she looked upon her husband as a
great man. He was not a great man--only a growing man; yet was she
nothing the worse for thinking so highly of him; the object of it was
not such that her admiration caused her to deteriorate.
The daughter of a London barrister, of what is called a good family, she
had opportunity of knowing something of what is called life before she
married, and from mere dissatisfaction had early begun to withdraw from
the show and self-assertion of social life, and seek within herself the
door of that quiet chamber whose existence is unknown to most. For a
time she found thus a measure of quiet--not worthy of the name of rest;
she had not heeded a certain low knocking as of one who would enter and
share it with her; but now for a long time he who thus knocked had been
her companion in the chamber whose walls are the infinite. Why is it
that men and women will welcome any tale of love, devotion, and
sacrifice from one to another of themselves, but turn from the least
hint at the existence of a perfect love at the root of it all? With such
a message to them, a man is a maundering prophet. Is it not that their
natures are yet so far from the ideal, the natural, the true, that the
words of the prophet rouse in them no vision, no poorest perception of
spiritual fact?
Helen Raymount was now a little woman of fifty, clothed in a sweet
dignity, from which the contrast she disliked between her plentiful gray
hair, and her great, clear, dark eyes, took nothing; it was an
opposition without discord. She had but the two daughters and two sons
already introduced, of whom Hester was the eldest.
Wise as was the mother, and far-seeing as was the father, they had made
the mistake common to all but the wisest parents, of putting off to a
period more or less too late the moment of beginning to teach their
children obedience. If this be not commenced at the first possible
moment, there is no better reason why it should be begun at any other,
except that it will be the harder every hour it is postponed. The
spiritual loss and injury caused to the child by their waiting till they
fancy him fit to reason with, is immense; yet there is nothing in which
parents are more stupid and cowardly, if not stiff-necked, than this. I
do not speak of those mere animal parents, whose lasting influence over
their progeny is not a thing to be greatly desired, but of those who,
having a conscience, yet avoid this part of their duty in a manner of
which a good motherly cat would be ashamed. To one who has learned of
all things to desire deliverance from himself, a nursery in which the
children are humored and scolded and punished instead of being taught
obedience, looks like a moral slaughter-house.
The dawn of reason will doubtless help to develop obedience; but
obedience is yet more necessary to the development of reason. To require
of a child only what he can understand the reason of, is simply to help
him to make himself his own God--that is a devil. That some seem so
little injured by their bad training is no argument in presence of the
many in whom one can read as in a book the consequences of their
parents' foolishness.
Cornelius was a youth of good abilities, and with a few good qualities.
Naturally kind-hearted, yet full of self and its poor importance, he had
an admiration of certain easy and showy virtues. He was himself not
incapable of an unthinking generosity; felt pity for picturesque
suffering; was tempted to kindness by the prospect of a responsive
devotion. Unable to bear the sight of suffering, he was yet careless of
causing it where he would not see it; incapable of thwarting himself, he
was full of weak indignation at being thwarted; supremely conceited, he
had yet a regard for the habits and judgments of men of a certain stamp
which towards a great man would have been veneration, and would have
elevated his being. But the sole essentials of life as yet discovered by
Cornelius were a good carriage, good manners, self-confidence, and
seeming carelessness in spending. That the spender was greedy after the
money he yet scorned to work for, made no important difference in
Cornelius's estimate of him. In a word, he fashioned a fine
gentleman-god in his foolish brain, and then fell down and worshipped
him with what worship was possible between them. To all home-excellence
he was so far blind that he looked down upon it; the opinion of father
or mother, though they had reared such a son as himself, was not to be
compared in authority with that of Reginald Vavasor, who, though so poor
as to be one of his fellow-clerks, was heir apparent to an earldom.