THE SOVEREIGN GRACES OF THE HOME
The home lies somewhere between the outer and the inner life of man
and its life touches and is touched by both. It is one of the highways
through which one passes from the inner to the outer life, the place,
to change the figure, where the inner life is touched by the outer
world and by it tested and searched and challenged. The place of the
home in relation to the inner life is shown forth by the truth that
nothing which the world can give balances the hurts and wounds one may
suffer within the home. Yet such is the magic and mystery of the home
that it can heal every wound, which the world without inflicts. It is
in the home that the peace of the inner life most clearly reveals
itself, that one's soul finds itself most nearly invulnerable to the
wounds of the world without. Shakespeare is true to the facts, if
facts they may be called, in his tremendous picture of the storm on
the heath, which in its terror is less terrible than the storm in the
home-life of the banished and broken Lear.
The relations of the home constitute a test which nearly every one of
us must meet and unhappiest is he who is outside of their range. No
school, no testing-place like that of the home! And it is well to bear
in mind that no man greatly succeeds in life, who fails in his own
home, not merely because the rewards of the world cannot compensate
for the failure of home-life, but because no successes without save
from utterly tragic failure him who has failed within the home!
Home may be heavenly in its harmonies or hellish in its discords. To
maintain that the difference is the result of love or lovelessness in
the home does not tell the whole story. Whether home is to be heaven
or hell, wracked by discord or attuned to harmony, depends upon them
that make it, all of them, yea, upon the all of all that make a home.
One alone may mar a home, any one of its members, husband or wife,
parent or child, brother or sister, though all together are needed to
minister to its perfection.
And how are the harmonies to be achieved and the discords to be
avoided? And the answer is,--through courtesy, consideration,
comradeship,--all in turn, alike in the major and minor issues of
life, going back to self-rule not self-will. Courtesy and
consideration together constitute the chivalry of the home, courtesy
its outer token, consideration its inner prompting. The chivalry of
the home is a reminder, occasionally required by both parents and
children, that courtesy is not a grace if reserved for and bestowed
solely upon strangers. The man or child, who is a churl at home and
limits his courtesy extra-murally, is not only a pitiable boor but a
contemptible hypocrite.
And consideration is something more than courtesy, for the latter
springs from it as both are rooted in the sympathy which is the _origo
et fons_ of comradeship. Consideration like an angel comes, moving the
family members to think with and for others, not of themselves as
pitilessly misunderstood but as capable of understanding others
because possessed of the will to understand.
But there can be neither outward courtesy nor inmost consideration,
least of all comradeship, unless there be the grace of avoidance of
those temptations to selfishness, which more than all else blight the
home by leading to conflict irrepressible and irreconcilable.
Unselfishness in its higher or lower sense is the _conditio sine qua
non_ of the parental-filial relation, even as selfishness is deadly
not only to those who are guilty of it but to those who needlessly
endure it. For selfishness it is which more than all else converts the
home into a prison, even a dungeon. Parents have the right to ask of
children that they shall avoid the besetting sin of childhood, namely,
selfishness, though usually the guilt of filial selfishness rests upon
the head of parents who long suffer children to indulge in selfishness
for the sake of parental indulgence. Fostering filial selfishness is
ofttimes little more than a cheap and easy way of holding oneself up
for self-approval and to filial commendation.
Nothing is more important than to teach children, especially the
children of the privileged, the art of unselfishness unless it be for
the parents of privileged children to practice it. The fact that
many, many families in our days are of the one or two-children variety
gives to the child a tremendous impact in the direction of
self-centredness,--toward what I have elsewhere called an egocentric
or "meocentric" world. If, however, as happens too commonly, children
are treated by selfishly and idiotically indulgent parents during the
years of childhood and adolescence as if every one of them were the
center of the universe, it will little avail to cry out against the
child's selfishness just because he or she has reached twenty.
Other-centredness will not be substituted for self-centredness at
twenty, however much parents may be dismayed, if during the first
twenty years the perhaps native selfishness of the child have been
ministered to in every imaginable way.
In order to deepen the spirit of filial unselfishness it is needful to
give or rather to help children to have and to hold an aim bigger than
themselves. Given unselfishness, the freedom from self-seeking and
self-ministration and the presence of the will to minister and to
forbear, that unselfishness which is the exclusive grace neither of
parent nor of child, then comradeship, the hand-in-hand quest of life,
become possible. Then and only then may parent and child become
comrades, not fellow-boarders and roomers and hoarders, but
fellow-travelers and sojourners alike along life's way. Without
comradeship, whatever else there be, there can be no such thing as home.
Comradeship shuts out the sense of possession, prevents the invasion of
personality, averts alike parental tyranny and filial autocracy.
But comradeship is not to be achieved through the word of parents and
children,--Go to, let us be comrades. For comradeship is that which
grows out of the cumulative and united experience of parent and child,
if these have so lived and so labored together that unconsciously and
inevitably there come to pass the fellowship of life's pilgrimage in
real togetherness, comrades with souls "utterly true forever and aye."
No compulsion to sympathy and understanding and forbearance where the
spirit of comradeship dwells! And such comradeship is unaffected by
outward circumstance or by diversities of viewpoint or of educational
opportunity or of worldly possession.
Perhaps comradeship ought to be stressed for a moment, viewing a
tendency not quite uncommon to shelve parents, however politely, on
the part of children once they imagine themselves to have become
mature beings. Parental euthenasia can be practised or attempted in
many and subtle ways. Sir William Osler's forty years as a limit,--of
course the attribution is essentially fallacious,--fit into the notion
of those children who are for an easy and if possible painless
superannuation of lagging parents.
Needless to insist, comradeship means infinitely more than physical
proximity. If children but knew how at last when they are grown and
maturing, parents sometimes hunger for the companionship of son and
daughter, these might be ready to give up some of their comrades
whether first-rate or third-rate to satisfy the hunger of the parental
heart for companionship with the child. True, it is, that parents must
fit themselves throughout life for such comradeship, keeping their
hearts young and their minds unclosed. But frequently the failure is
due to the sheer selfishness of children, that selfishness which
considers not nor forbears, which lightly misunderstands and
unadvisedly rejects the parent as comrade on the way, though the
parent-heart hunger and ache. Children should not require exhortation
to the end that they remember parents are not feeders, clothiers,
stewards, landlords, boarding-house keepers, and that in exceptional
cases these continue to have the right to live after passing the
Methuselah frontier of fifty or sixty.
One is polite in exchange of courteous word even with one's hotel
clerk. Occasionally one confides in the mistress of a boarding-house.
If children but knew the pain some parents feel in that attitude of
children which reduces them in their own sight to the level of utterly
negligible rooming-house keepers for strangers, they could not demean
themselves as they do. This complaint has been voiced to me a number
of times within recent years, alike by people of cultivation and by
simple, untutored folk. In the former case, the filial silences are
generally due to disagreements and misunderstanding. There is such a
thing as the acceptance of hospitality on the part of children which
compels certain reciprocal courtesies. When children for any reason
are unable or unwilling to yield the elementary courtesies of the
home, it is for them in all decency to decide whether they are
justified in accepting its hospitality.
And comradeship must welcome not regret, nurture not stifle, the fine
impatiences of youth, the eager, oft unconsidered, superb, at best
resistless, idealisms of youth. Parents are not to mistake this finely
impatient idealism for unreasoning impetuosity. They are to remember
that, howsoever inconveniently and troublingly, youth represents the
ungainsayable imperiousness of the future. Parental scoffing and
cynicism are more chilling to the heart of youth than the world's
derision. The world's scornful darts fall hurtless upon the shield of
him, armed by parental hand for life's battle with the weapons of
idealism. And in comradeship it is not enough for parents not to mock
nor to be scornful of children's so-called impracticable ideals. Where
these are not, parents must commend them by their own works rather
than command them by their words. Comradeship always means the taking
of counsel and not the giving of commands. But there can be no taking
of counsel with youth at twenty if the parental habit have been one of
command prior to that time. Twenty years of absolutism cannot suddenly
be replaced by the democratic way of holding counsel.
Parents must be willing to forfeit all save honor in pressing upon
youth the categorical and undeniable summons of the ideal. Parents
must sometimes, ofttimes, be immovably firm, so firm as to be ready to
lose the love of children rather than to sacrifice their self-respect.
Men and women are not worthy of the dignity and glory of parenthood
who lack the courage to brave the frown of a child, the strength to
front a child's displeasure. Remembering that parents usually love
their children not wisely but too well and that children love their
parents wisely but not too well, let the gentleness of parents be
lifted up and hallowed by firmness and the firmness of children be
hallowed and glorified by gentleness.
If anything the case is still harder for the uneducated or slightly
educated parents of children, who have been enabled to tread the
highway of education. It seems indecent on the part of these to
treat parents in contemptuous fashion, sitting at table with them but
never exchanging a word of converse. Even when children have virtually
attained the heights of omniscience, it is well for them to remember
that earth's greatest are not too proud to hold converse with the
lowliest, and that one's education is measured not by the number of
languages one speaks but by the fineness of spirit that shines through
one's speech, however ungrammatical and one's acts however unveneered.
Comradeship is not to be bought by parents, neither can it be bribed
by children. It must not mean the forfeiture of standards. The
comradeship that it not suffered to hold the target ever higher is not
comradeship but compromise. The comradeship that dare not press higher
standards is not comradeship. The comradeship that fears to urge the
ennobling ideal is not comradeship but concession.
I have before me as I write a letter or a fragment of a letter written
by a young sergeant of the French army to his parents ere he fared
forth in early August, 1914, to Lorraine,--a youth of promise on the
eve of fulfilment. These are his words, unread until after his death
in the following month, which he gloriously met, fighting to the end
against the overwhelming numbers to which he refused to surrender. "Be
sustained by the contemplation of the beautiful which you cannot fail
to love, and which brings you to the eternal principle to which our
soul returns.... It is not they who pass for whom we must mourn. I
desire but one thing, that I may have a death worthy of the life of my
admirable and truly loved father." No conflict here but perfect
concord, the concord of a perfect comradeship. The father a
distinguished servant of his country in war and peace, the mother a
seeker after God and the highest, had been as his comrades, going just
a little before and teaching him how to live and toil and hope. He
dared all and fell with peace in his heart and faith in his
unconquered soul that all was well, that the comradeship of earth
would merge at last in the comradeship eternal.
The Prophet was right: "And he shall turn the hearts of the fathers to
the children and the hearts of the children to the fathers." For the
Messiah is born when the hearts of parents and children are turned to
each other in reverence and selflessness. For then it is that the home
is brought nearer to the presence of God and that clashing and
conflict end--when, in the word of a noble teacher of our generation,
it is remembered that "the child is itself a gift, first to parents
out of the infinite, then by them to the eternal."
Footnotes
[A] Toward Social Reform, p. 111.
[B] Parenthood and Race Culture, p. 193.
[C] Life of Alice Freeman Palmer, p. 68.
[D] Choice of Books, p. 8.
[E] Emerson, "The Oversoul."
[F] Atlantic Monthly, August, 1921, p. 221.
[G] Our Social Heritage, p. 60.
[H] _Idem_, p. 95.
[I] _Idem_, p. 224.
[J] P. 63.
[K] Getting Married, Preface, pp. 132-133.
[L] The Making of a Teacher, p. 34.
[M] Emerson in Concord (E. W. Emerson) p. 8.
[N] Emerson in Concord, p. 21.
[O] Tucker, Public-Mindedness, p. 133.
[P] Cheerful Yesterdays, p. 123.
[Q] Cheerful Yesterdays, p. 160.
[R] Public-Mindedness, p. 77.
[S] Higginson, Contemporaries, p. 2.
[T] Darmesteter, Life of Renan, p. 45.
[U] _Idem_, p. 103.
[V] History of Israel, Vol. II, p. 163.
[Transcriber's Note:
* The footnotes have been moved to the end of the book.
* Pg 6 Corrected spelling of words "needs limit" to "need limits"
located in the phrase "I must needs limit myself".
* Pg 20 Corrected spelling of word "harrassing" to "harassing" located
in the phrase "out of a harrassing difficulty".
* Pg 43 Corrected spelling of word "relalation" to "relation" located
in the phrase "parental-filial relalation".
* Pg 71 Corrected spelling of word "harrassed" to "harassed" located
in the phrase "however harrassed and unhappy".
* Pg 82 Corrected spelling of word "unharrassed" to "unharassed" located
in the phrase "to live apart, unharrassed".
* Pg 95 Corrected spelling of word "excedingly" to "exceedingly" located
in the phrase "it proves excedingly hard".
* Pg 130 Corrected spelling of word "irreconciliable" to
"irreconcilable" located in the phrase "conflict irrepressible and
irreconciliable".]