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LITTLE ESSAYS
OF
LOVE AND VIRTUE
BY
HAVELOCK ELLIS
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
STUDIES IN THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SEX
Six Volumes
Philadelphia: _F.A. Davis Company_
MAN AND WOMAN
London: _Walter Scott_
New York: _Charles Scribners' Sons_
THE TASK OF SOCIAL HYGIENE
London: _Constable and Company_
Boston: _Houghton Mifflin Company_
IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS
First and Second Series
London: _Constable and Company_
Boston: _Houghton Mifflin Company_
BY MRS. HAVELOCK ELLIS
THE NEW HORIZON IN LOVE AND LIFE
With a Preface by EDWARD CARPENTER
and an Introduction by MARGUERITE TRACY
London: _A. and C. Black, Ltd._
LITTLE ESSAYS
OF
LOVE AND VIRTUE
BY
HAVELOCK ELLIS
A. & C. BLACK, LTD. 4, 5 & 6 SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W. 1 1922
COPYRIGHT 1922
_In Great Britain by A. and G. Black, Ltd., London_
_In America by George H. Doran Co., New York_
PREFACE
In these Essays--little, indeed, as I know them to be, compared to the
magnitude of their subjects--I have tried to set forth, as clearly as I
can, certain fundamental principles, together with their practical
application to the life of our time. Some of these principles were stated,
more briefly and technically, in my larger _Studies_ of sex; others were
therein implied but only to be read between the lines. Here I have
expressed them in simple language and with some detail. It is my hope that
in this way they may more surely come into the hands of young people,
youths and girls at the period of adolescence, who have been present to my
thoughts in all the studies I have written of sex because I was myself of
that age when I first vaguely planned them. I would prefer to leave to
their judgment the question as to whether this book is suitable to be
placed in the hands of older people. It might only give them pain. It is
in youth that the questions of mature age can alone be settled, if they
ever are to be settled, and unless we begin to think about adult problems
when we are young all our thinking is likely to be in vain. There are but
few people who are able when youth is over either on the one hand to
re-mould themselves nearer to those facts of Nature and of Society they
failed to perceive, or had not the courage to accept, when they were
young, or, on the other hand, to mould the facts of the exterior world
nearer to those of their own true interior world. One hesitates to bring
home to them too keenly what they have missed in life. Yet, let us
remember, even for those who have missed most, there always remains the
fortifying and consoling thought that they may at least help to make the
world better for those who come after them, and the possibilities of human
adjustment easier for others than it has been for themselves. They must
still remain true to their own traditions. We could not wish it to be
otherwise.
The art of making love and the art of being virtuous;--two aspects of the
great art of living that are, rightly regarded, harmonious and not at
variance--remain, indeed, when we cease to misunderstand them, essentially
the same in all ages and among all peoples. Yet, always and everywhere,
little modifications become necessary, little, yet, like so many little
things, immense in their significance and results. In this way, if we are
really alive, we flexibly adjust ourselves to the world in which we find
ourselves, and in so doing simultaneously adjust to ourselves that
ever-changing world, ever-changing, though its changes are within such
narrow limits that it yet remains substantially the same. It is with such
modification that we are concerned in these Little Essays.
H.E.
_London, 1921_
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I Children and Parents 13
II The Meaning of Purity 37
III The Objects of Marriage 63
IV Husbands and Wives 75
V The Love-Rights of Women 102
VI The Play-Function of Sex 116
VII The Individual and the Race 134
Index 183
LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE
CHAPTER I
CHILDREN AND PARENTS
The twentieth century, as we know, has frequently been called "the century
of the child." When, however, we turn to the books of Ellen Key, who has
most largely and sympathetically taken this point of view, one asks
oneself whether, after all, the child's century has brought much to the
child. Ellen Key points out, with truth, that, even in our century,
parents may for the most part be divided into two classes: those who act
as if their children existed only for their benefit, and those who act as
if they existed only for their children's benefit, the results, she adds
being alike deplorable. For the first group of parents tyrannise over the
child, seek to destroy its individuality, exercise an arbitrary discipline
too spasmodic to have any of the good effects of discipline and would
model him into a copy of themselves, though really, she adds, it ought to
pain them very much to see themselves exactly copied. The second group of
parents may wish to model their children not after themselves but after
their ideals, yet they differ chiefly from the first class by their
over-indulgence, by their anxiety to pamper the child by yielding to all
his caprices and artificially protecting him from the natural results of
those caprices, so that instead of learning freedom, he has merely
acquired self-will. These parents do not indeed tyrannise over their
children but they do worse; they train their children to be tyrants.
Against these two tendencies of our century Ellen Key declares her own
Alpha and Omega of the art of education. Try to leave the child in peace;
live your own life beautifully, nobly, temperately, and in so living you
will sufficiently teach your children to live.
It is not my purpose here to consider how far this conception of the duty
of parents towards children is justified, and whether or not peace is the
best preparation for a world in which struggle dominates. All these
questions about education are rather idle. There are endless theories of
education but no agreement concerning the value of any of them, and the
whole question of education remains open. I am here concerned less with
the duty of parents in relation to their children than with the duty of
children in relation to their parents, and that means that I am not
concerned with young children, to whom, that duty still presents no
serious problems, since they have not yet developed a personality with
self-conscious individual needs. Certainly the one attitude must condition
the other attitude. The reaction of children against their parents is the
necessary result of the parents' action. So that we have to pay some
attention to the character of parental action.
We cannot expect to find any coherent or uniform action on the part of
parents. But there have been at different historical periods different
general tendencies in the attitude of parents towards their children. Thus
if we go back four or five centuries in English social history we seem to
find a general attitude which scarcely corresponds exactly to either of
Ellen Key's two groups. It seems usually to have been compounded of
severity and independence; children were first strictly compelled to go
their parents' way and then thrust off to their own way. There seems a
certain hardness in this method, yet it is doubtful whether it can fairly
be regarded as more unreasonable than either of the two modern methods
deplored by Ellen Key. On the contrary it had points for admiration. It
was primarily a discipline, but it was regarded, as any fortifying
discipline should be regarded, as a preparation for freedom, and it is
precisely there that the more timid and clinging modern way seems to fail.
We clearly see the old method at work in the chief source of knowledge
concerning old English domestic life, the _Paston Letters_. Here we find
that at an early age the sons of knights and gentlemen were sent to serve
in the houses of other gentlemen: it was here that their education really
took place, an education not in book knowledge, but in knowledge of life.
Such education was considered so necessary for a youth that a father who
kept his sons at home was regarded as negligent of his duty to his family.
A knowledge of the world was a necessary part, indeed the chief part, of a
youth's training for life. The remarkable thing is that this applied also
to a large extent to the daughters. They realised in those days, what is
only beginning to be realised in ours,[1] that, after all, women live in
the world just as much, though differently, as men live in the world, and
that it is quite as necessary for the girl as for the boy to be trained to
the meaning of life. Margaret Paston, towards the end of the fifteenth
century, sent her daughter Ann to live in the house of a gentleman who, a
little later, found that he could not keep her as he was purposing to
decrease the size of his household. The mother writes to her son: "I shall
be fain to send for her and with me she shall but lose her time, and
without she be the better occupied she shall oftentimes move me and put me
to great unquietness. Remember what labour I had with your sister,
therefore do your best to help her forth"; as a result it was planned to
send her to a relative's house in London.
[1] This was illustrated in England when women first began to serve on
juries. The pretext was frequently brought forward that there are
certain kinds of cases and of evidence that do not concern women or that
women ought not to hear. The pretext would have been more plausible if
it had also been argued that there are certain kinds of cases and of
evidence that men ought not to hear. As a matter of fact, whatever
frontier there may be in these matters is not of a sexual kind.
Everything that concerns men ultimately concerns women, and everything
that concerns women ultimately concerns men. Neither women nor men are
entitled to claim dispensation.
It is evident that in the fifteenth century in England there was a wide
prevalence of this method of education, which in France, a century later,
was still regarded as desirable by Montaigne. His reason for it is worth
noting; children should be educated away from home, he remarks, in order
to acquire hardness, for the parents will be too tender to them. "It is an
opinion accepted by all that it is not right to bring up children in their
parents' laps, for natural love softens and relaxes even the wisest."[2]
[2] Montaigne, _Essais_, Bk. I., ch. 25.
In old France indeed the conditions seem similar to those in England. The
great serio-comic novel of Antoine de la Salle, _Petit Jean de Saintré_,
shows us in detail the education and the adventures, which certainly
involved a very early introduction to life, of a page in a great house in
the fifteenth century. We must not take everything in this fine comedy too
solemnly, but in the fourteenth century _Book of the Knight of the
Tour-Landry_ we may be sure that we have at its best the then prevailing
view of the relation of a father to his tenderly loved daughters. Of
harshness and rigour in the relationship it is not easy to find traces in
this lengthy and elaborate book of paternal counsels. But it is clear that
the father takes seriously the right of a daughter to govern herself and
to decide for herself between right and wrong. It is his object, he tells
his girls, "to enable them to govern themselves." In this task he assumes
that they are entitled to full knowledge, and we feel that he is not
instructing them in the mysteries of that knowledge; he is taking for
granted, in the advice he gives and the stories he tells them, that his
"young and small daughters, not, poor things, overburdened with
experience," already possess the most precise knowledge of the intimate
facts of life, and that he may tell them, without turning a hair, the most
outrageous incidents of debauchery. Life already lies naked before them:
that he assumes; he is not imparting knowledge, he is giving good
counsel.[3]
[3] If the Knight went to an extreme in his assumption of his daughters'
knowledge, modern fathers often go to the opposite and more foolish
extreme of assuming in their daughters an ignorance that would be
dangerous even if it really existed. In _A Young Girl's Diary_
(translated from the German by Eden and Cedar Paul), a work that is
highly instructive for parents, and ought to be painful for many, we
find the diarist noting at the age of thirteen that she and a girl
friend of about the same age overheard the father of one of them--both
well brought up and carefully protected, one Catholic and the other
Protestant--referring to "those innocent children." "We did laugh so, WE
and _innocent children_!!! What our fathers really think of us; we
innocent!!! At dinner we did not dare look at one another or we should
have exploded." It need scarcely be added that, at the same time, they
were more innocent than they knew.
It is clear that this kind of education and this attitude towards
children must be regarded as the outcome of the whole mediæval method of
life. In a state of society where roughness and violence, though not, as
we sometimes assume, chronic, were yet always liable to be manifested, it
was necessary for every man and woman to be able to face the crudest facts
of the world and to be able to maintain his or her own rights against
them. The education that best secured that strength and independence was
the best education and it necessarily involved an element of hardness. We
must go back earlier than Montaigne's day, when the conditions were
becoming mitigated, to see the system working in all its vigour.
The lady of the day of the early thirteenth century has been well
described by Luchaire in his scholarly study of French Society in the time
of Philip Augustus. She was, he tells us, as indeed she had been in the
preceding feudal centuries, often what we should nowadays call a virago,
of violent temperament, with vivid passions, broken in from childhood to
all physical exercises, sharing the pleasures and dangers of the knights
around her. Feudal life, fertile in surprises and in risks, demanded even
in women a vigorous temper of soul and body, a masculine air, and habits
also that were almost virile. She accompanied her father or her husband to
the chase, while in war-time, if she became a widow or if her husband was
away at the Crusades, she was ready, if necessary, to direct the defences
of the lordship, and in peace time she was not afraid of the longest and
most dangerous pilgrimages. She might even go to the Crusades on her own
account, and, if circumstances required, conduct a war to come out
victoriously.
We may imagine the robust kind of education required to produce people of
this quality. But as regards the precise way in which parents conducted
that education, we have, as Luchaire admits, little precise knowledge. It
is for the most part only indirectly, by reading between the lines, that
we glean something as to what it was considered befitting to inculcate in
a good household, and as what we thus learn is mostly from the writings of
Churchmen it is doubtless a little one-sided. Thus Adam de Perseigne, an
ecclesiastic, writes to the Countess du Perche to advise her how to live
in a Christian manner; he counsels her to abstain from playing games of
chance and chess, not to take pleasure in the indecent farces of actors,
and to be moderate in dress. Then, as ever, preachers expressed their
horror of the ruinous extravagance of women, their false hair, their
rouge, and their dresses that were too long or too short. They also
reprobated their love of flirtation. It was, however, in those days a
young girl's recognised duty, when a knight arrived in the household, to
exercise the rites of hospitality, to disarm him, give him his bath, and
if necessary massage him to help him to go to sleep. It is not surprising
that the young girl sometimes made love to the knight under these
circumstances, nor is it surprising that he, engaged in an arduous life
and trained to disdain feminine attractions, often failed to respond.
It is easy to understand how this state of things gradually became
transformed into the considerably different position of parents and child
we have known, which doubtless attained its climax nearly a century ago.
Feudal conditions, with the large households so well adapted to act as
seminaries for youth, began to decay, and as education in such seminaries
must have led to frequent mischances both for youths and maidens who
enjoyed the opportunities of education there, the regret for their
disappearance may often have been tempered for parents. Schools, colleges,
and universities began to spring up and develop for one sex, while for the
other home life grew more intimate, and domestic ties closer. Montaigne's
warning against the undue tenderness of a narrow family life no longer
seemed reasonable, and the family became more self-centred and more
enclosed. Beneath this, and more profoundly influential, there was a
general softening in social respects, and a greater expansiveness of
affectional relationships, in reality or in seeming, within the home,
compensating, it may be, the more diffused social feeling within a group
which characterised the previous period.
So was cultivated that undue tenderness, deplored by Montaigne, which we
now regard as almost normal in family life, and solemnly label, if we
happen to be psycho-analysts, the Oedipus-complex or the Electra-complex.
Sexual love is closely related to parental love; the tender emotion, which
is an intimate part of parental love, is also an intimate part of sexual
love, and two emotions which are each closely related to a third emotion
cannot fail to become often closely associated to each other. With a
little thought we might guess beforehand, even while still in complete
ignorance of the matter, that there could not fail to be frequently a
sexual tinge in the affection of a father for his daughter, of a mother
for her son, of a son for his mother, or a daughter for her father.
Needless to say, that does not mean that there is present any physical
desire of sex in the narrow sense; that would be a perversity, and a rare
perversity. We are here on another plane than that of crude physical
desire, and are moving within the sphere of the emotions. But such
emotions are often strong, and all the stronger because conscious of
their own absolute rectitude and often masked under the shape of Duty. Yet
when prolonged beyond the age of childhood they tend to become a clog on
development, and a hindrance to a wholesome life. The child who cherishes
such emotion is likely to suffer infantile arrest of development, and the
parent who is so selfish as to continue to expend such tenderness on a
child who has passed the age of childhood, or to demand it, is guilty of a
serious offence against that child.
That the intimate family life which sometimes resulted--especially when,
as frequently happened, the seeming mutual devotion was also real--might
often be regarded as beautiful and almost ideal, it has been customary to
repeat with an emphasis that in the end has even become nauseous. For it
was usually overlooked that the self-centred and enclosed family, even
when the mutual affection of its members was real enough to bear all
examination, could scarcely be more than partially beautiful, and could
never be ideal. For the family only represents one aspect, however
important an aspect, of a human being's functions and activities. He
cannot, she cannot, be divorced from the life of the social group, and a
life is beautiful and ideal, or the reverse, only when we have taken into
our consideration the social as well as the family relationship. When the
family claims to prevent the free association of an adult member of it
with the larger social organisation, it is claiming that the part is
greater than the whole, and such a claim cannot fail to be morbid and
mischievous.
The old-world method of treating children, we know, has long ago been
displaced as containing an element of harsh tyranny. But it was not
perceived, and it seems indeed not even yet to be generally recognised,
that the system which replaced it, and is only now beginning to pass away,
involved another and more subtle tyranny, the more potent because not
seemingly harsh. Parents no longer whipped their children even when grown
up, or put them in seclusion, or exercised physical force upon them after
they had passed childhood. They felt that that would not be in harmony
with the social customs of a world in which ancient feudal notions were
dead. But they merely replaced the external compulsion by an internal
compulsion which was much more effective. It was based on the moral
assumption of claims and duties which were rarely formulated because
parents found it quite easy and pleasant to avoid formulating them, and
children, on the rare occasions when they formulated them, usually felt a
sense of guilt in challenging their validity. It was in the nineteenth
century that this state of things reached its full development. The sons
of the family were usually able, as they grew up, to escape and elude it,
although they thereby often created an undesirable divorce from the home,
and often suffered, as well as inflicted, much pain in tearing themselves
loose from the spiritual bonds--especially perhaps in matters of
religion--woven by long tradition to bind them to their parents. It was on
the daughters that the chief stress fell. For the working class, indeed,
there was often the possibility of escape into hard labour, if only that
of marriage. But such escape was not possible, immediately or at all, for
a large number. During the nineteenth century many had been so carefully
enclosed in invisible cages, they had been so well drilled in the
reticences and the duties and the subserviences that their parents
silently demanded of them, that we can never know all the tragedies that
took place. In exceptional cases, indeed, they gave a sign. When they
possessed unusual power of intellect, or unusual power of character and
will, they succeeded in breaking loose from their cages, or at least in
giving expression to themselves. This is seen in the stories of nearly all
the women eminent in life and literature during the nineteenth century,
from the days of Mary Wollstonecraft onwards. The Brontës, almost, yet not
quite, strangled by the fetters placed upon them by their stern and
narrow-minded father, and enabled to attain the full stature of their
genius only by that brief sojourn in Brussels, are representative.
Elizabeth Barrett, chained to a couch of invalidism under the eyes of an
imperiously affectionate father until with Robert Browning's aid she
secretly eloped into the open air of freedom and health, and so attained
complete literary expression, is a typical figure. It is only because we
recognise that she is a typical figure among the women who attained
distinction that we are able to guess at the vast number of mute
inglorious Elizabeth Barretts who were never able to escape by their own
efforts and never found a Browning to aid them to escape.
It is sometimes said that those days are long past and that young women,
in all the countries which we are pleased to called civilised, are now
emancipated, indeed, rather too much emancipated. Critics come forward to
complain of their undue freedom, of their irreverent familiarity to their
parents, of their language, of their habits. But there were critics who
said the very same things, in almost the same words, of the grandmothers
of these girls! These incompetent critics are as ignorant of the social
history of the past as they are of the social significance of the history
of the present. We read in _Once a Week_ of sixty years ago (10th August,
1861), the very period when the domestic conditions of girls were the most
oppressive in the sense here understood, that these same critics were
about at that time, and as shocked as they are now at "the young ladies
who talk of 'awful swells' and 'deuced bores,' who smoke and venture upon
free discourse, and try to be like men." The writer of this anonymous
article, who was really (I judge from internal evidence) so distinguished
and so serious a woman as Harriet Martineau, duly snubs these critics,
pointing out that such accusations are at least as old as Addison and
Horace Walpole; she remarks that there have no doubt been so-called "fast
young ladies" in every age, "varying their doings and sayings according to
the fopperies of the time." The question, as she pertinently concludes is,
as indeed it still remains to-day: "Have we more than the average
proportion? I do not know." Nor to-day do we know.
But while to-day, as ever before, we have a certain proportion of these
emancipated girls, and while to-day, as perhaps never before, we are able
to understand that they have an element of reason on their side, it would
be a mistake to suppose that they are more than exceptions. The majority
are unable, and not even anxious, to attain this light-hearted social
emancipation. For the majority, even though they are workers, the
anciently subtle ties of the home are still, as they should be, an element
of natural piety, and, also, as they should not be, clinging fetters which
impede individuality and destroy personal initiative.
We all know so many happy homes beneath whose calm surface this process
is working out. The parents are deeply attached to their children, who
still remain children to them even when they are grown up. They wish to
guide them and mould them and cherish them, to protect them from the
world, to enjoy their society and their aid, and they expect that their
children shall continue indefinitely to remain children. The children, on
their side, remain and always will remain, tenderly attached to their
parents, and it would really pain them to feel that they are harbouring
any unwillingness to stay in the home even after they have grown up, so
long as their parents need their attention. It is, of course, the
daughters who are thus expected to remain in the home and who feel this
compunction about leaving it. It seems to us--although, as we have seen,
so unlike the attitude of former days--a natural, beautiful, and rightful
feeling on both sides.
Yet, in the result, all sorts of evils tend to ensue. The parents often
take as their moral right the services which should only be accepted, if
accepted at all, as the offering of love and gratitude, and even reach a
degree of domineering selfishness in which they refuse to believe that
their children have any adult rights of their own, absorbing and drying up
that physical and spiritual life-blood of their offspring which it is the
parents' part in Nature to feed. If the children are willing there is
nothing to mitigate this process; if they are unwilling the result is
often a disastrous conflict. Their time and energy are not their own;
their tastes are criticised and so far as possible crushed; their
political ideas, if they have any, are treated as pernicious; and--which
is often on both sides the most painful of all--differences in religious
belief lead to bitter controversy and humiliating recrimination. Such
differences in outlook between youth and age are natural and inevitable
and right. The parents themselves, though they may have forgotten it,
often in youth similarly revolted against the cherished doctrines of their
own parents; it has ever been so, the only difference being that to-day,
probably, the opportunities for variation are greater. So it comes about
that what James Hinton said half a century ago is often true to-day: "Our
happy Christian homes are the real dark places of the earth."
It is evident that the problem of the relation of the child to the parent
is still incompletely solved even in what we consider our highest
civilisation. There is here needed an art in which those who have to
exercise it can scarcely possess all the necessary skill and experience.
Among trees and birds and beasts the art is surer because it is exercised
unconsciously, on the foundation of a large tradition in which failure
meant death. In the common procreative profusion of those forms of life
the frequent death of the young was a matter of little concern, but
biologically there was never any sacrifice of the offspring to the
well-being of the parents. Whenever sacrifice is called for it is the
parents who are sacrificed to their offspring. In our superior human
civilisation, in which quantity ever tends to give place to quality, the
higher value of the individual involves an effort to avoid sacrifice which
sometimes proves worse than abortive. An avian philosopher would be
unlikely to feel called upon to denounce nests as the dark places of the
earth, and in laying down our human moral laws we have always to be aware
of forgetting the fundamental biological relationship of parent and child
to which all such moral laws must conform. To some would-be parents that
necessity may seem hard. In such a case it is well for them to remember
that there is no need to become parents and that we live in an age when it
is not difficult to avoid becoming a parent. The world is not dying for
lack of parents. On the contrary we have far too many of them--ignorant
parents, silly parents, unwilling parents, undesirable parents--and those
who aspire to the high dignity of creating the future race, let them be as
few as they will--and perhaps at the present time the fewer the
better--must not refuse the responsibilities of that position, its pains
as well as its joys.
In our human world, as we know, the moral duties laid upon us--the duties
in which, if we fail, we become outcasts in our own eyes or in those of
others or in both--are of three kinds: the duties to oneself, the duties
to the small circle of those we love, and the duties to the larger circle
of mankind to which ultimately we belong, since out of it we proceed, and
to it we owe all that we are. There are no maxims, there is only an art
and a difficult art, to harmonise duties which must often conflict. We
have to be true to all the motives that sanctify our lives. To that extent
George Eliot's Maggie Tulliver was undoubtedly right. But the renunciation
of the Self is not the routine solution of every conflict, any more than
is the absolute failure to renounce. In a certain sense the duty towards
the self comes before all others, because it is the condition on which
duties towards others possess any significance and worth. In that sense,
it is true according to the familiar saying of Shakespeare,--though it was
only Polonius, the man of maxims, who voiced it,--that one cannot be true
to others unless one is first true to oneself, and that one can know
nothing of giving aught that is worthy to give unless one also knows how
to take.
We see that the problem of the place of parents in life, after their
function of parenthood has been adequately fulfilled, a problem which
offers no difficulties among most forms of life, has been found hard to
solve by Man. At some places and periods it has been considered most
merciful to put them, to death; at others they have been almost or quite
deified and allowed to regulate the whole lives of their descendants. Thus
in New Caledonia aged parents, it is said by Mrs. Hadfield, were formerly
taken up to a high mountain and left with enough food to last a few days;
there was at the same time great regard for the aged, as also among the
Hottentots who asked: "Can you see a parent or a relative shaking and
freezing under a cold, dreary, heavy, useless old age, and not think, in
pity of them, of putting an end to their misery?" It was generally the
opinion of the parents themselves, but in some countries the parents have
dominated and overawed their children to the time of their natural death
and even beyond, up to the point of ancestor worship, as in China, where
no man of any age can act for himself in the chief matters of life during
his parents' life-time, and to some extent in ancient Rome, whence an
influence in this direction which still exists in the laws and customs of
France.[4] Both extremes have proved compatible with a beautifully human
life. To steer midway between them seems to-day, however, the wisest
course. There ought to be no reason, and under happy conditions there is
no reason, why the relationship between parent and child, as one of mutual
affection and care, should ever cease to exist. But that the relationship
should continue to exist as a tie is unnatural and tends to be harmful. At
a certain stage in the development of the child the physical tie with the
parent is severed, and the umbilical cord cut. At a later stage in
development, when puberty is attained and adolescence is feeling its way
towards a complete adult maturity, the spiritual tie must be severed. It
is absolutely essential that the young spirit should begin to essay its
own wings. If its energy is not equal to this adventure, then it is the
part of a truly loving parent to push it over the edge of the nest. Of
course there are dangers and risks. But the worst dangers and risks come
of the failure to adventure, of the refusal to face the tasks of the world
and to assume the full function of life. All that Freud has told of the
paralysing and maiming influence of infantile arrest or regression is here
profitable to consider. In order, moreover, that the relationship between
parents and children may retain its early beauty and love, it is essential
that it shall adapt itself to adult conditions and the absence of ties so
rendered necessary. Otherwise there is little likelihood of anything but
friction and pain on one side or the other, and perhaps on both sides.
[4] The varying customs of different peoples in this matter are set
forth by Westermarck, _The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_,
Ch. XXV.
The parents have not only to train their children: it is of at least equal
importance that they should train themselves. It is desirable that
children, as they grow up, should be alive to this necessity, and
consciously assist in the process, since they are in closer touch with a
new world of activities to which their more lethargic parents are often
blind and deaf. For every fresh stage in our lives we need a fresh
education, and there is no stage for which so little educational
preparation is made as that which follows the reproductive period. Yet at
no time--especially in women, who present all the various stages of the
sexual life in so emphatic a form--would education be more valuable. The
great burden of reproduction, with all its absorbing responsibilities, has
suddenly been lifted; at the same time the perpetually recurring rhythm of
physical sex manifestations, so often disturbing in its effect, finally
ceases; with that cessation, very often, after a brief period of
perturbation, there is an increase both in physical and mental energy.
Yet, too often, all that one can see is that a vacuum has been created,
and that there is nothing to fill it. The result is that the mother--for
it is most often of the mother that complaint is made--devotes her own new
found energies to the never-ending task of hampering and crushing her
children's developing energies. How many mothers there are who bring to
our minds that ancient and almost inspired statement concerning those for
whom "Satan finds some mischief still"! They are wasting, worse than
wasting, energies that might be profitably applied to all sorts of social
service in the world. There is nothing that is so much needed as the
"maternal in politics," or in all sorts of non-political channels of
social service, and none can be better fitted for such service than those
who have had an actual experience of motherhood and acquired the varied
knowledge that such experience should give. There are numberless other
ways, besides social service, in which mothers who have passed the age of
forty, providing they possess the necessary aptitudes, can more profitably
apply themselves than in hampering, or pampering, their adult children. It
is by wisely cultivating their activities in a larger sphere that women
whose chief duties in the narrower domestic sphere are over may better
ensure their own happiness and the welfare of others than either by
fretting and obstructing, or by worrying over, their own children who are
no longer children. It is quite true that the children may go astray even
when they have ceased to be children. But the time to implant the seeds of
virtue, the time to convey a knowledge of life, was when they were small.
If it was done well, it only remains to exercise faith and trust. If it
was done ill, nothing done later will compensate, for it is merely foolish
for a mother who could not educate her children when they were small to
imagine that she is able to educate them when they are big.
So it is that the problem of the attitude of the child to its parents
circles round again to that of the parents to the child. The wise parent
realises that childhood is simply a preparation for the free activities of
later life, that the parents exist in order to equip children for life and
not to shelter and protect them from the world into which they must be
cast. Education, whatever else it should or should not be, must be an
inoculation against the poisons of life and an adequate equipment in
knowledge and skill for meeting the chances of life. Beyond that, and no
doubt in the largest part, it is a natural growth and takes place of
itself.