A very distinguished man once assured a mother of my acquaintance that
she would never know what it meant to be hurt until she was hurt through
her children. Children are extremely cruel without intending it; and
in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the reason is that they do not
conceive their elders as having any human feelings. Serve the elders
right, perhaps, for posing as superhuman! The penalty of the impostor
is not that he is found out (he very seldom is) but that he is taken
for what he pretends to be, and treated as such. And to be treated as
anything but what you really are may seem pleasant to the imagination
when the treatment is above your merits; but in actual experience it
is often quite the reverse. When I was a very small boy, my romantic
imagination, stimulated by early doses of fiction, led me to brag to a
still smaller boy so outrageously that he, being a simple soul, really
believed me to be an invincible hero. I cannot remember whether this
pleased me much; but I do remember very distinctly that one day this
admirer of mine, who had a pet goat, found the animal in the hands of a
larger boy than either of us, who mocked him and refused to restore the
animal to his rightful owner. Whereupon, naturally, he came weeping
to me, and demanded that I should rescue the goat and annihilate the
aggressor. My terror was beyond description: fortunately for me, it
imparted such a ghastliness to my voice and aspect as I under the eye of
my poor little dupe, advanced on the enemy with that hideous extremity
of cowardice which is called the courage of despair, and said "You let
go that goat," that he abandoned his prey and fled, to my unforgettable,
unspeakable relief. I have never since exaggerated my prowess in bodily
combat.
Now what happened to me in the adventure of the goat happens very often
to parents, and would happen to schoolmasters if the prison door of the
school did not shut out the trials of life. I remember once, at school,
the resident head master was brought down to earth by the sudden illness
of his wife. In the confusion that ensued it became necessary to
leave one of the schoolrooms without a master. I was in the class that
occupied that schoolroom. To have sent us home would have been to break
the fundamental bargain with our parents by which the school was bound
to keep us out of their way for half the day at all hazards. Therefore
an appeal had to be made to our better feelings: that is, to our common
humanity, not to make a noise. But the head master had never admitted
any common humanity with us. We had been carefully broken in to regard
him as a being quite aloof from and above us: one not subject to error
or suffering or death or illness or mortality. Consequently sympathy was
impossible; and if the unfortunate lady did not perish, it was because,
as I now comfort myself with guessing, she was too much pre-occupied
with her own pains, and possibly making too much noise herself, to be
conscious of the pandemonium downstairs.
A great deal of the fiendishness of schoolboys and the cruelty of
children to their elders is produced just in this way. Elders cannot be
superhuman beings and suffering fellow-creatures at the same time. If
you pose as a little god, you must pose for better for worse.