BOOKS AND MEN
BY
AGNES REPPLIER
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1899
Copyright, 1888,
BY AGNES REPPLIER.
_All rights reserved._
ELEVENTH IMPRESSION
_The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A._
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
CHILDREN, PAST AND PRESENT 1
ON THE BENEFITS OF SUPERSTITION 33
WHAT CHILDREN READ 64
THE DECAY OF SENTIMENT 94
CURIOSITIES OF CRITICISM 125
SOME ASPECTS OF PESSIMISM 157
THE CAVALIER 191
BOOKS AND MEN.
CHILDREN, PAST AND PRESENT.
As a result of the modern tendency to desert the broad beaten roads of
history for the bridle-paths of biography and memoir, we find a great
many side lights thrown upon matters that the historian was wont to
treat as altogether beneath his consideration. It is by their help
that we study the minute changes of social life that little by little
alter the whole aspect of a people, and it is by their help that we
look straight into the ordinary every-day workings of the past, and
measure the space between its existence and our own. When we read, for
instance, of Lady Cathcart being kept a close prisoner by her husband
for over twenty years, we look with some complacency on the roving
wives of the nineteenth century. When we reflect on the dismal fate
of Uriel Freudenberger, condemned by the Canton of Uri to be burnt
alive in 1760, for rashly proclaiming his disbelief in the legend of
William Tell’s apple, we realize the inconveniences attendant on a too
early development of the critical faculty. We listen entranced while
the learned pastor Dr. Johann Geiler von Keyersperg gravely enlightens
his congregation as to the nature and properties of were-wolves; and we
turn aside to see the half-starved boys at Westminster boiling their
own batter-pudding in a stocking foot, or to hear the little John
Wesley crying softly when he is whipped, not being permitted even then
the luxury of a hearty bellow.
Perhaps the last incident will strike us as the most pathetic of
all, this being essentially the children’s age. Women, workmen, and
skeptics all have reason enough to be grateful they were not born a
few generations earlier; but the children of to-day are favored beyond
their knowledge, and certainly far beyond their deserts. Compare
the modern schoolboy with any of his ill-fated predecessors, from
the days of Spartan discipline down to our grandfathers’ time. Turn
from the free-and-easy school-girl of the period to the miseries of
Mrs. Sherwood’s youth, with its steel collars, its backboards, its
submissive silence and rigorous decorum. Think of the turbulent and
uproarious nurseries we all know, and then go back in spirit to that
severe and occult shrine where Mrs. Wesley ruled over her infant brood
with a code of disciplinary laws as awful and inviolable as those of
the Medes and Persians. Of their supreme efficacy she plainly felt no
doubts, for she has left them carefully written down for the benefit
of succeeding generations, though we fear that few mothers of to-day
would be tempted by their stringent austerity. They are to modern
nursery rules what the Blue Laws of Connecticut are to our more languid
legislation. Each child was expected and required to commemorate its
fifth birthday by learning the entire alphabet by heart. To insure
this all-important matter, the whole house was impressively set in
order the day before; every one’s task was assigned to him; and Mrs.
Wesley, issuing strict commands that no one should penetrate into the
sanctuary while the solemn ordeal was in process, shut herself up for
six hours with the unhappy morsel of a child, and unflinchingly drove
the letters into its bewildered brain. On two occasions only was she
unsuccessful. “Molly and Nancy,” we are told, failed to learn in the
given time, and their mother comforts herself for their tardiness by
reflecting on the still greater incapacity of other people’s bairns.
“When the will of a child is totally subdued, and it is brought to
revere and stand in awe of its parents,” then, and then only, their
rigid judge considers that some little inadvertences and follies may
be safely passed over. Nor would she permit one of them to “be chid
or beaten twice for the same fault,”--a stately assumption of justice
that speaks volumes for the iron-bound code by which they were brought
into subjection. Most children nowadays are sufficiently amazed if a
tardy vengeance overtake them once, and a second penalty for the same
offense is something we should hardly deem it necessary to proscribe.
Yet nothing is more evident than that Mrs. Wesley was neither a cruel
nor an unloving mother. It is plain that she labored hard for her
little flock, and had their welfare and happiness greatly at heart. In
after years they with one accord honored and revered her memory. Only
it is not altogether surprising that her husband, whose ministerial
functions she occasionally usurped, should have thought his wife at
times almost too able a ruler, or that her more famous son should stand
forth as the great champion of human depravity. He too, some forty
years later, promulgated a system of education as unrelaxing in its
methods as that of his own childhood. In his model school he forbade
all association with outside boys, and would receive no child unless
its parents promised not to take it away for even a single day, until
removed for good. Yet after shutting up the lads in this hot-bed of
propriety, and carefully guarding them from every breath of evil, he
ended by expelling part as incorrigible, and ruefully admitting that
the remainder were very “uncommonly wicked.”
The principle of solitary training for a child, in order to shield
it effectually from all outside influences, found other and vastly
different advocates. It is the key-note of Mr. and Miss Edgeworth’s
Practical Education, a book which must have driven over-careful and
scrupulous mothers to the verge of desperation. In it they are
solemnly counseled never to permit their children to walk or talk
with servants, never to let them have a nursery or a school-room,
never to leave them alone either with each other or with strangers,
and never to allow them to read any book of which every sentence has
not been previously examined. In the matter of books, it is indeed
almost impossible to satisfy such searching critics. Even Mrs.
Barbauld’s highly correct and righteous little volumes, which Lamb
has anathematized as the “blights and blasts of all that is human,”
are not quite harmless in their eyes. Evil lurks behind the phrase
“Charles wants his dinner,” which would seem to imply that Charles must
have whatever he desires; while to say flippantly, “The sun has gone
to bed,” is to incur the awful odium of telling a child a deliberate
untruth.
In Miss Edgeworth’s own stories the didactic purpose is only veiled by
the sprightliness of the narrative and the air of amusing reality she
never fails to impart. Who that has ever read them can forget Harry and
Lucy making up their own little beds in the morning, and knocking down
the unbaked bricks to prove that they were soft; or Rosamond choosing
between the famous purple jar and a pair of new boots; or Laura forever
drawing the furniture in perspective? In all these little people say
and do there is conveyed to the young reader a distinct moral lesson,
which we are by no means inclined to reject, when we turn to the
other writers of the time and see how much worse off we are. Day, in
Sandford and Merton, holds up for our edification the dreariest and
most insufferable of pedagogues, and advocates a mode of life wholly
at variance with the instincts and habits of his age. Miss Sewell, in
her Principles of Education, sternly warns young girls against the
sin of chattering with each other, and forbids mothers’ playing with
their children as a piece of frivolity which cannot fail to weaken the
dignity of their position.
To a great many parents, both in England and in France, such advice
would have been unnecessary. Who, for instance, can imagine Lady
Balcarras, with whom it was a word and a blow in quick succession,
stooping to any such weakness; or that august mother of Harriet
Martineau, against whom her daughter has recorded all the slights
and severities of her youth? Not that we think Miss Martineau to have
been much worse off than other children of her day; but as she has
chosen with signal ill-taste to revenge herself upon her family in
her autobiography, we have at least a better opportunity of knowing
all about it. “To one person,” she writes, “I was indeed habitually
untruthful, from fear. To my mother I would in my childhood assert or
deny anything that would bring me through most easily,”--a confession
which, to say the least, reflects as little to her own credit as
to her parent’s. Had Mrs. Martineau been as stern an upholder of
the truth as was Mrs. Wesley, her daughter would have ventured upon
very few fabrications in her presence. When she tells us gravely how
often she meditated suicide in these early days, we are fain to smile
at hearing a fancy so common among morbid and imaginative children
narrated soberly in middle life, as though it were a unique and
horrible experience. No one endowed by nature with so copious a fund
of self-sympathy could ever have stood in need of much pity from the
outside world.
But for real and uncompromising severity towards children we must turn
to France, where for years the traditions of decorum and discipline
were handed down in noble families, and generations of boys and girls
suffered grievously therefrom. Trifling faults were magnified into
grave delinquencies, and relentlessly punished as such. We sometimes
wonder whether the youthful Bertrand du Guesclin were really the
wicked little savage that the old chroniclers delight in painting, or
whether his rude truculence was not very much like that of naughty
and neglected boys the world over. There is, after all, a pathetic
significance in those lines of Cuvelier’s which describe in barbarous
French the lad’s remarkable and unprepossessing ugliness:--
“Il n’ot si lait de Resnes à Disnant,
Camus estoit et noirs, malostru et massant.
Li père et la mère si le héoiant tant,
Que souvent en leurs cuers aloient desirant
Que fust mors, ou noiey en une eaue corant.”
Perhaps, if he had been less flat-nosed and swarthy, his better
qualities might have shone forth more clearly in early life, and it
would not have needed the predictions of a magician or the keen-eyed
sympathy of a nun to evolve the future Constable of France out of
such apparently hopeless material. At any rate, tradition generally
representing him either as languishing in the castle dungeon, or
exiled to the society of the domestics, it is plain he bore but slight
resemblance to the cherished _enfant terrible_ who is his legitimate
successor to-day.
Coming down to more modern times, we are met by such monuments of
stately severity as Madame Quinet and the Marquise de Montmirail,
mother of that fair saint Madame de Rochefoucauld, the trials of whose
later years were ushered in by a childhood of unremitting harshness
and restraint. The marquise was incapable of any faltering or weakness
where discipline was concerned. If carrots were repulsive to her little
daughter’s stomach, then a day spent in seclusion, with a plate of the
obnoxious vegetable before her, was the surest method of proving that
carrots were nevertheless to be eaten. When Augustine and her sister
kissed their mother’s hand each morning, and prepared to con their
tasks in her awful presence, they well knew that not the smallest
dereliction would be passed over by that inexorable judge. Nor might
they aspire, like Harriet Martineau, to shield themselves behind the
barrier of a lie. When from Augustine’s little lips came faltering some
childish evasion, the ten-year-old sinner was hurried as an outcast
from her home, and sent to expiate her crime with six months’ merciful
seclusion in a convent. “You have told me a falsehood, mademoiselle,”
said the marquise, with frigid accuracy; “and you must prepare to leave
my house upon the spot.”
Faults of breeding were quite as offensive to this _grande dame_ as
faults of temper. The fear of her pitiless glance filled her daughters
with timidity, and bred in them a _mauvaise honte_, which in its turn
aroused her deadliest ire. Only a week before her wedding-day Madame
de Rochefoucauld was sent ignominiously to dine at a side table, as a
penance for the awkwardness of her curtsy; while even her fast-growing
beauty became but a fresh source of misfortune. The dressing of her
magnificent hair occupied two long hours every day, and she retained
all her life a most distinct and painful recollection of her sufferings
at the hands of her _coiffeuse_.
To turn from the Marquise de Montmirail to Madame Quinet is to see the
picture intensified. More beautiful, more stately, more unswerving
still, her faith in discipline was unbounded, and her practice in
no wise inconsistent with her belief. It was actually one of the
institutions of her married life that a _garde de ville_ should pay
a domiciliary visit twice a week to chastise the three children. If
by chance they had not been naughty, then the punishment might be
referred to the account of future transgressions,--an arrangement
which, while it insured justice to the culprits, can hardly have
afforded them much encouragement to amend. Her son Jerome, who ran
away when a mere boy to enroll with the volunteers of ’92, reproduced
in later years, for the benefit of his own household, many of his
mother’s most striking characteristics. He was the father of Edgar
Quinet, the poet, a child whose precocious abilities seem never to
have awakened within him either parental affection or parental pride.
Silent, austere, repellent, he offered no caresses, and was obeyed
with timid submission. “The gaze of his large blue eyes,” says Dowden,
“imposed restraint with silent authority. His mockery, the play of an
intellect unsympathetic by resolve and upon principle, was freezing
to a child; and the most distinct consciousness which his presence
produced upon the boy was the assurance that he, Edgar, was infallibly
about to do something which would cause displeasure.” That this was a
common attitude with parents in the old _régime_ may be inferred from
Châteaubriand’s statement that he and his sister, transformed into
statues by their father’s presence, recovered their life only when he
left the room; and by the assertion of Mirabeau that even while at
school, two hundred leagues away from _his_ father, “the mere thought
of him made me dread every youthful amusement which could be followed
by the slightest unfavorable result.”
Yet at the present day we are assured by Mr. Marshall that in France
“the art of spoiling has reached a development which is unknown
elsewhere, and maternal affection not infrequently descends to folly
and imbecility.” But then the clever critic of French Home Life had
never visited America when he wrote those lines, although some of
the stories he tells would do credit to any household in our land.
There is one quite delightful account of a young married couple, who,
being invited to a dinner party of twenty people, failed to make their
appearance until ten o’clock, when they explained urbanely that their
three-year-old daughter would not permit them to depart. Moreover,
being a child of great character and discrimination, she had insisted
on their undressing and going to bed; to which reasonable request they
had rendered a prompt compliance, rather than see her cry. “It would
have been monstrous,” said the fond mother, “to cause her pain simply
for our pleasure; so I begged Henri to cease his efforts to persuade
her, and we took off our clothes and went to bed. As soon as she was
asleep we got up again, redressed, and here we are with a thousand
apologies for being so late.”
This sounds half incredible; but there is a touch of nature in the
mother’s happy indifference to the comfort of her friends, as compared
with the whims of her offspring, that closely appeals to certain past
experiences of our own. It is all very well for an Englishman to
stare aghast at such a reversal of the laws of nature; we Americans,
who have suffered and held our peace, can afford to smile with some
complacency at the thought of another great nation bending its head
beneath the iron yoke.
To return, however, to the days when children were the ruled, and not
the rulers, we find ourselves face to face with the great question
of education. How smooth and easy are the paths of learning made now
for the little feet that tread them! How rough and steep they were
in bygone times, watered with many tears, and not without a line of
victims, whose weak strength failed them in the upward struggle!
We cannot go back to any period when school life was not fraught
with miseries. Classic writers paint in grim colors the harshness
of the pedagogues who ruled in Greece and Rome. Mediæval authors
tell us more than enough of the passionless severity that swayed the
monastic schools,--a severity which seems to have been the result of
an hereditary tradition rather than of individual caprice, and which
seldom interfered with the mutual affection that existed between master
and scholar. When St. Anselm, the future disciple of Lanfranc, and his
successor in the See of Canterbury, begged as a child of four to be
sent to school, his mother, Ermenberg,--the granddaughter of a king,
and the kinswoman of every crowned prince in Christendom,--resisted
his entreaties as long as she dared, knowing too well the sufferings
in store for him. A few years later she was forced to yield, and these
same sufferings very nearly cost her son his life.
The boy was both studious and docile, and his teacher, fully
recognizing his precocious talents, determined to force them to the
utmost. In order that so active a mind should not for a moment be
permitted to relax its tension, he kept the little scholar a ceaseless
prisoner at his desk. Rest and recreation were alike denied him, while
the utmost rigors of a discipline, of which we can form no adequate
conception, wrung from the child’s over-worked brain an unflinching
attention to his tasks. As a result of this cruel folly, “the brightest
star of the eleventh century had been well-nigh quenched in its
rising.”[1] Mind and body alike yielded beneath the strain; and
Anselm, a broken-down little wreck, was returned to his mother’s hands,
to be slowly nursed back to health and reason. “Ah, me! I have lost
my child!” sighed Ermenberg, when she found that not all that he had
suffered could shake the boy’s determination to return; and the mother
of Guibert de Nogent must have echoed the sentiment when her little
son, his back purple with stripes, looked her in the face, and answered
steadily to her lamentations, “If I die of my whippings, I still mean
to be whipped.”
The step from the monastic schools to Eton and Westminster is a long
one, but the gain not so apparent at first sight as might be supposed.
It is hard for the luxurious Etonian of to-day to realize that for
many years his predecessors suffered enough from cold, hunger, and
barbarous ill-treatment to make life a burden on their hands. The
system, while it hardened some into the desired manliness, must have
killed many whose feebler constitutions could ill support its rigor.
Even as late as 1834, we are told by one who had ample opportunity
to study the subject carefully that “the inmates of a workhouse or a
jail were better fed and lodged than were the scholars of Eton. Boys
whose parents could not pay for a private room underwent privations
that might have broken down a cabin-boy, and would be thought inhuman
if inflicted on a galley-slave.” Nor is this sentiment as exaggerated
as it sounds. To get up at five on freezing winter mornings; to sweep
their own floors and make their own beds; to go two by two to the
“children’s pump” for a scanty wash; to eat no mouthful of food until
nine o’clock; to live on an endless round of mutton, potatoes, and
beer, none of them too plentiful or too good; to sleep in a dismal cell
without chair or table; to improvise a candlestick out of paper; to be
starved, frozen, and flogged,--such was the daily life of the scions
of England’s noblest families, of lads tenderly nurtured and sent from
princely homes to win their Greek and Latin at this fearful cost.
Moreover, the picture of one public school is in all essential
particulars the picture of the rest. The miseries might vary somewhat,
but their bulk remained the same. At Westminster the younger boys, hard
pushed by hunger, gladly received the broken victuals left from the
table of the senior election, and tried to supplement their scanty fare
with strange and mysterious concoctions, whose unsavory details have
been handed down among the melancholy traditions of the past.
In 1847 a young brother of Lord Mansfield being very ill at school,
his mother came to visit him. There was but one chair in the room,
upon which the poor invalid was reclining; but his companion, seeing
the dilemma, immediately arose, and with true boyish politeness
offered Lady Mansfield the coal-scuttle, on which he himself had been
sitting. At Winchester, Sydney Smith suffered “many years of misery
and starvation,” while his younger brother, Courtenay, twice ran away,
in the vain effort to escape his wretchedness. “There was never enough
provided of even the coarsest food for the whole school,” writes Lady
Holland; “and the little boys were of course left to fare as well
as they could. Even in his old age my father used to shudder at the
recollections of Winchester, and I have heard him speak with horror of
the misery of the years he spent there. The whole system, he affirmed,
was one of abuse, neglect, and vice.”
In the matter of discipline there was no shadow of choice anywhere.
Capricious cruelty ruled under every scholastic roof. On the one
side, we encounter Dean Colet, of St. Paul’s, whom Erasmus reported
as “delighting in children in a Christian spirit;” which meant that
he never wearied of seeing them suffer, believing that the more they
endured as boys, the more worthy they would grow in manhood. On the
other, we are confronted by the still more awful ghost of Dr. Keate,
who could and did flog eighty boys in succession without a pause; and
who, being given the confirmation list by mistake for the punishment
list, insisted on flogging every one of the catechumens, as a good
preparation for receiving the sacrament. Sir Francis Doyle, almost the
only apologist who has so far ventured to appear in behalf of this
fiery little despot, once remarked to Lord Blachford that Keate did
not much mind a boy’s lying to him. “What he hated was a monotony of
excuses.” “Mind your lying to him!” retorted Lord Blachford, with a
keen recollection of his own juvenile experiences; “why he exacted it
as a token of respect.”
If, sick of the brutality of the schools, we seek those rare cases
in which a home education was substituted, we are generally rewarded
by finding the comforts greater and the cramming worse. It is simply
impossible for a pedagogue to try and wring from a hundred brains the
excess of work which may, under clever treatment, be extracted from
one; and so the Eton boys, with all their manifold miseries, were at
least spared the peculiar experiments which were too often tried upon
solitary scholars. Nowadays anxious parents and guardians seem to labor
under an ill-founded apprehension that their children are going to hurt
themselves by over-application to their books, and we hear a great deal
about the expedience of restraining this inordinate zeal. But a few
generations back such comfortable theories had yet to be evolved, and
the plain duty of a teacher was to goad the student on to every effort
in his power.
Perhaps the two most striking instances of home training that have been
given to the world are those of John Stuart Mill and Giacomo Leopardi;
the principal difference being that, while the English boy was crammed
scientifically by his father, the Italian poet was permitted to
relentlessly cram himself. In both cases we see the same melancholy,
blighted childhood; the same cold indifference to the mother, as to
one who had no part or parcel in their lives; the same joyless routine
of labor; the same unboyish gravity and precocious intelligence. Mill
studied Greek at three, Latin at eight, the Organon at eleven, and Adam
Smith at thirteen. Leopardi at ten was well acquainted with most Latin
authors, and undertook alone and unaided the study of Greek, perfecting
himself in that language before he was fourteen. Mill’s sole recreation
was to walk with his father, narrating to him the substance of his
last day’s reading. Leopardi, being forbidden to go about Recanati
without his tutor, acquiesced with pathetic resignation, and ceased to
wander outside the garden gates. Mill had all boyish enthusiasm and
healthy partisanship crushed out of him by his father’s pitiless logic.
Leopardi’s love for his country burned like a smothered flame, and
added one more to the pangs that eat out his soul in silence. His was
truly a wonderful intellect; and whereas the English lad was merely
forced by training into a precocity foreign to his nature, and which,
according to Mr. Bain, failed to produce any great show of juvenile
scholarship, the Italian boy fed on books with a resistless and craving
appetite, his mind growing warped and morbid as his enfeebled body
sank more and more under the unwholesome strain. In the long lists
of despotically reared children there is no sadder sight than this
undisciplined, eager, impetuous soul, burdened alike with physical and
moral weakness, meeting tyrannical authority with a show of insincere
submission, and laying up in his lonely infancy the seeds of a sorrow
which was to find expression in the key-note of his work, Life is Only
Fit to be Despised.
Between the severe mental training of boys and the education thought
fit and proper for girls, there was throughout the eighteenth century
a broad and purposeless chasm. Before that time, and after it,
too, the majority of women were happily ignorant of many subjects
which every school-girl of to-day aspires to handle; but during the
reigns of Queen Anne and the first three Georges, this ignorance
was considered an essential charm of their sex, and was displayed
with a pretty ostentation that sufficiently proves its value. Such
striking exceptions as Madame de Staël, Mrs. Montagu, and Anne Damer
were not wanting to give points of light to the picture; but they
hardly represent the real womanhood of their time. Femininity was then
based upon shallowness, and girls were solemnly warned not to try
and ape the acquirements of men, but to keep themselves rigorously
within their own ascertained limits. We find a famous school-teacher,
under whose fostering care many a court belle was trained for social
triumphs, laying down the law on this subject with no uncertain hand,
and definitely placing women in their proper station. “Had a _third
order_ been necessary,” she writes naively, “doubtless one would have
been created, a _midway_ kind of being.” In default, however, of this
recognized _via media_, she deprecates all impious attempts to bridge
over the chasm between the two sexes; and “accounts it a misfortune
for a female to be learned, a genius, or in any way a prodigy, as it
removes her from her natural sphere.”
“Those were days,” says a writer in Blackwood, “when superficial
teaching was thought the proper teaching for girls; when every science
had its feminine language, as Hindu ladies talk with a difference
and with softer terminations than their lords: as The Young Ladies’
Geography, which is to be read instead of novels; A Young Ladies’ Guide
to Astronomy; The Use of the Globes for Girls’ Schools; and the Ladies’
Polite Letter-Writer.” What was really necessary for a girl was to
learn how to knit, to dance, to curtsy, and to carve; the last-named
accomplishment being one of her exclusive privileges. Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu received lessons from a professional carving-master, who taught
her the art scientifically; and during her father’s grand dinners her
labors were often so exhausting that translating the Enchiridion must
have seemed by comparison a light and easy task. Indeed, after that
brilliant baby entrance into the Kitcat Club, very little that was
pleasant fell to Lady Mary’s share; and years later she recalls the
dreary memories of her youth in a letter written to her sister, Lady
Mar. “Don’t you remember,” she asks, pathetically, “how miserable we
were in the little parlor at Thoresby?”
Her own education she always protested was of the worst and flimsiest
character, and her girlish scorn at the restraints that cramped and
fettered her is expressed vigorously enough in the well-known letter
to Bishop Burnet. It was considered almost criminal, she complains,
to improve her reason, or even to fancy she had any. To be learned
was to be held up to universal ridicule, and the only line of conduct
open to her was to play the fool in concert with other women of
quality, “whose birth and leisure merely serve to make them the most
useless and worthless part of creation.” Yet viewed alongside of her
contemporaries, Lady Mary’s advantages were really quite unusual. She
had some little guidance in her studies, with no particular opposition
to overcome, and tolerance was as much at any time as a thoughtful
girl could hope for. Nearly a century later we find little Mary
Fairfax--afterwards Mrs. Somerville, and the most learned woman in
England--being taught how to sew, to read her Bible, and to learn the
Shorter Catechism; all else being considered superfluous for a female.
Moreover, the child’s early application to her books was regarded with
great disfavor by her relatives, who plainly thought that no good was
likely to come of it. “I wonder,” said her rigid aunt to Lady Fairfax,
“that you let Mary waste her time in reading!”
“You cannot hammer a girl into anything,” says Ruskin, who has
constituted himself both champion and mentor of the sex; and perhaps
this was the reason that so many of these rigorously drilled and
kept-down girls blossomed perversely into brilliant and scholarly
women. Nevertheless, it is comforting to turn back for a moment, and
see what Holland, in the seventeenth century, could do for her clever
children. Mr. Gosse has shown us a charming picture of the three
daughters of Roemer Visscher, the poetess Tesselschade and her less
famous sisters,--three little girls, whose healthy mental and physical
training was happily free from either narrow contraction or hot-house
pressure. “All of them,” writes Ernestus Brink, “were practiced in
very sweet accomplishments. They could play music, paint, write, and
engrave on glass, make poems, cut emblems, embroider all manner of
fabrics, and swim well; which last thing they had learned in their
father’s garden, where there was a canal with water, outside the city.”
What wonder that these little maidens, with skilled fingers, and clear
heads, and vigorous bodies, grew into three keen-witted and charming
women, around whom we find grouped that rich array of talent which
suddenly raised Holland to a unique literary distinction! What wonder
that their influence, alike refining and strengthening, was felt on
every hand, and was repaid with universal gratitude and love!
There is a story told of Professor Wilson, that one day, listening to
a lecture on education by Dr. Whately, he grew manifestly impatient at
the rules laid down, and finally slipped out of the room, exclaiming
irately to a friend who followed him, “I always thought God Almighty
made man, but _he_ says it was the schoolmaster.”
In like manner many of us have wondered from time to time whether
children are made of such ductile material, and can be as readily
moulded to our wishes, as educators would have us believe. If it be
true that nature counts for nothing and training for everything, then
what a gap between the boys and girls of two hundred years ago and
the boys and girls we know to-day! The rigid bands that once bound
the young to decorum have dwindled to a silver thread that snaps
under every restive movement. To have “perfectly natural” children
seems to be the outspoken ambition of parents, who have succeeded in
retrograding their offspring from artificial civilization to that pure
and wholesome savagery which is too plainly their ideal. “It is assumed
nowadays,” declares an angry critic, “that children have come into the
world to make a noise; and it is the part of every good parent to put
up with it, and to make all household arrangements with a view to their
sole pleasure and convenience.”
That the children brought up under this relaxed discipline acquire
certain merits and charms of their own is an easily acknowledged fact.
We are not now alluding to those spoiled and over-indulged little
people who are the recognized scourges of humanity, but merely to the
boys and girls who have been allowed from infancy that large degree
of freedom which is deemed expedient for enlightened nurseries, and
who regulate their own conduct on the vast majority of occasions. They
are as a rule light-hearted, truthful, affectionate, and occasionally
amusing; but it cannot be denied that they lack that nicety of breeding
which was at one time the distinguishing mark of children of the upper
classes, and which was in a great measure born of the restraints that
surrounded them. The faculty of sitting still without fidgeting, of
walking without rushing, and of speaking without screaming can be
acquired only under tuition; but it is worth some little trouble to
attain. When Sydney Smith remarked that the children of rank were
generally so much better bred than the children of the middle classes,
he recognized the greater need for self-restraint that entered into
their lives. They may have been less natural, perhaps, but they were
infinitely more pleasing to his fastidious eyes; and the unconscious
grace which he admired was merely the reflection of the universal
courtesy that surrounded them. Nor is this all. “The necessity of
self-repression,” says a recent writer in Blackwood, “makes room for
thought, which those children miss who have no formalities to observe,
no customs to respect, who blurt out every irrelevance, who interpose
at will with question and opinion as it enters the brain. Children
don’t learn to talk by chattering to one another, and saying what comes
uppermost. Mere listening with intelligence involves an exercise of
mental speech, and observant silence opens the pores of the mind as
impatient demands for explanation never do.”
This is true, inasmuch as it is not the child who is encouraged to
talk continually who in the end learns how to arrange and express his
ideas. Nor does the fretful desire to be told at once what everything
means imply the active mind which parents so fondly suppose; but rather
a languid percipience, unable to decipher the simplest causes for
itself. Yet where shall we turn to look for the “observant silence,”
so highly recommended? The young people who observed and were silent
have passed away,--little John Ruskin being assuredly the last of the
species,--and their places are filled by those to whom observation
and silence are alike unknown. This is the children’s age, and all
things are subservient to their wishes. Masses of juvenile literature
are published annually for their amusement; conversation is reduced
steadily to their level while they are present; meals are arranged
to suit their hours, and the dishes thereof to suit their palates;
studies are made simpler and toys more elaborate with each succeeding
year. The hardships they once suffered are now happily ended, the
decorum once exacted is fading rapidly away. We accept the situation
with philosophy, and only now and then, under the pressure of some new
development, are startled into asking ourselves where it is likely to
end.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _Life of St. Anselm, Bishop of Canterbury._ By Martin Rule.
ON THE BENEFITS OF SUPERSTITION.
“We in England,” says Mr. Kinglake, “are scarcely sufficiently
conscious of the great debt we owe to the wise and watchful press which
presides over the formation of our opinions, and which brings about
this splendid result, namely, that in matters of belief the humblest
of us are lifted up to the level of the most sagacious; so that really
a simple cornet in the Blues is no more likely to entertain a foolish
belief in ghosts, or witchcraft, or any other supernatural topic, than
the Lord High Chancellor or the leader of the House of Commons.” This
delicate sarcasm, delivered with all the author’s habitual serenity
of mind, is quoted by Mr. Ruskin in his Art of England; assentingly,
indeed, but with a half-concealed dismay that any one could find it
in his heart to be funny upon such a distressing subject. When he,
Mr. Ruskin, hurls his satiric shafts against the spirit of modern
skepticism, the points are touched with caustic, and betray a deep
impatience darkening quickly into wrath. Is it not bad enough that we
ride in steam-cars instead of post-chaises, live amid brick houses
instead of green fields, and pass by some of the “most accomplished
pictures in the world” to stare gaping at the last new machine, with
its network of slow-revolving, wicked-looking wheels? If, in addition
to these too prominent faults, we are going to frown down the old
appealing superstitions, and threaten them, like naughty children, with
the corrective discipline of scientific research, he very properly
turns his back upon us forever, and distinctly says he has no further
message for our ears.
Let us rather, then, approach the subject with the invaluable
humility of Don Bernal Dias del Castillo, that gallant soldier who
followed the fortunes of Cortés into Mexico, and afterwards penned
the Historia Verdadera, an ingenuous narrative of their discoveries,
their hardships, and their many battles. In one of these, it seems,
the blessed Saint Iago appeared in the thickest of the fray, mounted
on a snow-white charger, leading his beloved Spaniards to victory. Now
the _conquestador_ freely admits that he himself did not behold the
saint; on the contrary, what he _did_ see in that particular spot was
a cavalier named Francisco de Morla, riding on a chestnut horse. But
does he, on that account, puff himself up with pride, and declare that
his more fortunate comrades were mistaken? By no means! He is as firmly
convinced of the presence of the vision as if it had been apparent to
his eyes, and with admirable modesty lays all the blame upon his own
unworthiness. “Sinner that I am!” he exclaims devoutly, “why should I
have been permitted to behold the blessed apostle?” In the same spirit,
honest Peter Walker strained his sight in vain for a glimpse of the
ghostly armies that crossed the Clyde in the summer of 1686, and,
seeing nothing, was content to believe in them, all the same, on the
testimony of his neighbors.
Sir Walter Scott, who appears to have wasted a good deal of time
in trying to persuade himself that he put no faith in spirits,
confesses quite humbly, in his old age, that “the tendency to belief
in supernatural agencies seems connected with and deduced from the
invaluable conviction of the certainty of a future state.” And beyond
a doubt this tendency was throughout his life the source of many
pleasurable emotions. So much so, in fact, that, according to Mr.
Pater’s theory of happiness, the loss of these emotions, bred in him
from childhood, would have been very inadequately repaid by a gain in
scientific knowledge. If it be the true wisdom to direct our finest
efforts towards multiplying our sensations, and so expanding the brief
interval we call life, then the old unquestioning credulity was a
more powerful motor in human happiness than any sentiment that fills
its ground to-day. In the first place it was closely associated with
certain types of beauty, and beauty is one of the tonics now most
earnestly recommended to our sick souls. “Les fions d’aut fais” were
charming to the very tips of their dewy, trembling wings; the elfin
people, who danced in the forest glades under the white moonbeams,
danced their way without any difficulty right into the hearts of
men; the swan-maiden, who ventured shyly in the fisher’s path, was
easily transformed into a loving wife; even the mara, most suspicious
and terrible of ghostly visitors, has often laid aside her darker
instincts, and developed into a cheerful spouse, with only a tinge of
mystery to make her more attractive in her husband’s eyes. Melusina
combing her golden hair by the bubbling fountain of Lusignan, Undine
playing in the rain-drenched forest, the nixie dancing at the village
feast with her handsome Flemish lad, and the mermaid reluctantly
leaving her watery home to wed the youth who captured her magic
seal-skin, all belong to the sisterhood of beauty, and their images did
good service in raising the vulgar mind from its enforced contemplation
of the sordid troubles, the droning vexations, of life.
Next, the happy believers in the supernatural owed to their simplicity
delicious throbs of fear,--not craven cowardice, but that more refined
and complex feeling, which is of all sensations the most enthralling,
the most elusive, and the most impossible to define. Fear, like all
other treacherous gifts, must be handled with discrimination: a thought
too much, and we are brutalized and degraded; but within certain
limits it enhances all the pleasures of life. When Captain Forsyth
stood behind a tree on a sultry summer morning, and saw the tigress
step softly through the long jungle grass, and the affrighted monkeys
swing chattering overhead, there must have come upon him that sensation
of awe which alone makes courage possible.[2] He knew that his life
hung trembling in the balance, and that all depended upon the first
shot he fired. He respected, as a sane man would, the mighty strength
of his antagonist, her graceful limbs instinct with power, her cruel
eyes blinking in the yellow dawn. And born of the fear, which stirred
but could not conquer him, came the keen transport of the hunter, who
feels that one such supremely heroic moment is worth a year of ordinary
life. Without that dread, not only would the joy be lessened, and the
glad rebound from danger to a sense of safety lost forever, but the
disciplined and manly courage of the English soldier would degenerate
into a mere brutish audacity, hardly above the level of the beast he
slays.
In children, this delicate emotion of fear, growing out of their
dependent condition, gives dignity and meaning to their courage when
they are brave, and a delicious zest to their youthful delinquencies.
Gray, in his chilly and melancholy manhood, years after he has resigned
himself to never again being “either dirty or amused” as long as he
lives, goes back like a flash to the unlawful delight of a schoolboy’s
stolen freedom:--
“Still as they run they look behind,
They hear a voice in every wind,
And snatch a fearful joy.”
And who that has ever watched a party of children, listening with
bright eyes and parted lips to some weird, uncanny legend,--like that
group of little girls for instance, in Mr. Charles Gregory’s picture
Tales and Wonders,--can doubt for a moment the “fearful joy” that
terror lends them? Nowadays, it is true, their youthful ears are but
too well guarded from such indiscretions until they are old enough to
scoff at all fantastic folly, and the age at which they learn to scoff
is one of the most astonishing things about our modern progress. They
have ceased to read fairy stories, because they no longer believe in
fairies; they find Hans Andersen silly, and the Arabian Nights stupid;
and the very babies, “skeptics in long-coats,” scorn you openly if you
venture to hint at Santa Claus. “What did Kriss Kringle bring you this
Christmas?” I rashly asked a tiny mite of a girl; and her answer was as
emphatic as Betsey Prig’s, when, with folded arms and a contemptuous
mien, she let fall the ever memorable words, “I don’t believe there’s
no sich a person.”
Yet the supernatural, provided it be not too horrible, is legitimate
food for a child’s mind, nourishes its imagination, inspires a
healthy awe, and is death to that precocious pedantry which is the
least pleasing trait that children are wont to manifest. While few
are willing to go as far as Mr. Ruskin, who, having himself been
brought up on fairy legends, confesses that his “first impulse would
be to insist upon every story we tell to a child being untrue, and
every scene we paint for it impossible,” yet a fair proportion of the
untrue and the impossible should enter into its education, and it
should be left to the enjoyment of them as long as may be. Those of
us who have been happy enough to believe that salamanders basked in
the fire and mermaids swam in the deeps, that were-wolves roamed in
the forests and witches rode in the storm, are richer by all these
unfading pictures and unforgotten memories than our more scrupulously
reared neighbors. And what if we could give such things the semblance
of reality once more,--could set foot in spirit within the enchanted
forest of Broceliande, and enjoy the tempestuous gusts of fear that
shook the heart-strings of the Breton peasant, as the great trees
drew their mysterious shadows above his head? On either side lurk
shadowy forms of elf and fairy, half hidden by the swelling trunks; the
wind whispers in the heavy boughs, and he hears their low, malicious
laughter; the dry leaves rustle beneath his feet,--he knows their
stealthy steps are close behind; a broken twig falls on his shoulder,
and he starts trembling, for unseen hands have touched him. Around
his neck hang a silver medal of Our Lady and a bit of ash wood given
him by a wise woman, whom many believe a witch; thus is he doubly
guarded from the powers of evil. Beyond the forest lies the open path,
where wife and children stand waiting by the cottage door. He is a
brave man to wander in the gloaming, and if he reaches home there will
be much to tell of all that he has seen, and heard, and felt. Should
he be devoured by wolves, however,--and there is always this prosaic
danger to be apprehended,--then his comrades will relate how he left
them and went alone into the haunted woods, and his sorrowing widow
will know that the fairies have carried him away, or turned him into
stone. And the wise woman, reproached, perhaps, for the impotence of
her charms, will say how with her own aged eyes she has three times
seen Kourigan, Death’s elder brother, flitting before the doomed man,
and knew that his fate was sealed. So while fresh tales of mystery
cluster round his name, and his children breathe them in trembling
whispers by the fireside, their mother will wait hopefully for the
spell to be broken, and the lost given back to her arms; until Pierrot,
the charcoal-burner, persuades her that a stone remains a stone until
the Judgment Day, and that in the mean time his own hut by the kiln is
empty, and he needs a wife.