Until the family as we know it ceases to exist, nobody will dare to
analyze parental affection as distinguished from that general human
sympathy which has secured to many an orphan fonder care in a stranger's
house than it would have received from its actual parents. Not even
Tolstoy, in The Kreutzer Sonata, has said all that we suspect about it.
When it persists beyond the period at which it ceases to be necessary to
the child's welfare, it is apt to be morbid; and we are probably wrong
to inculcate its deliberate cultivation. The natural course is for
the parents and children to cast off the specific parental and filial
relation when they are no longer necessary to one another. The
child does this readily enough to form fresh ties, closer and more
fascinating. Parents are not always excluded from such compensations:
it happens sometimes that when the children go out at the door the lover
comes in at the window. Indeed it happens now oftener than it used to,
because people remain much longer in the sexual arena. The cultivated
Jewess no longer cuts off her hair at her marriage. The British matron
has discarded her cap and her conscientious ugliness; and a bishop's
wife at fifty has more of the air of a _femme galante_ than an actress
had at thirty-five in her grandmother's time. But as people marry later,
the facts of age and time still inexorably condemn most parents to
comparative solitude when their children marry. This may be a privation
and may be a relief: probably in healthy circumstances it is no worse
than a salutary change of habit; but even at that it is, for the moment
at least, a wrench. For though parents and children sometimes dislike
one another, there is an experience of succor and a habit of dependence
and expectation formed in infancy which naturally attaches a child to
its parent or to its nurse (a foster parent) in a quite peculiar way.
A benefit to the child may be a burden to the parent; but people become
attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached
to them; and to "suffer little children" has become an affectionate
impulse deep in our nature.
Now there is no such impulse to suffer our sisters and brothers,
our aunts and uncles, much less our cousins. If we could choose our
relatives, we might, by selecting congenial ones, mitigate the repulsive
effect of the obligation to like them and to admit them to our intimacy.
But to have a person imposed on us as a brother merely because he
happens to have the same parents is unbearable when, as may easily
happen, he is the sort of person we should carefully avoid if he were
anyone else's brother. All Europe (except Scotland, which has clans
instead of families) draws the line at second cousins. Protestantism
draws it still closer by making the first cousin a marriageable
stranger; and the only reason for not drawing it at sisters and brothers
is that the institution of the family compels us to spend our
childhood with them, and thus imposes on us a curious relation in which
familiarity destroys romantic charm, and is yet expected to create a
specially warm affection. Such a relation is dangerously factitious and
unnatural; and the practical moral is that the less said at home about
specific family affection the better. Children, like grown-up people,
get on well enough together if they are not pushed down one another's
throats; and grown-up relatives will get on together in proportion
to their separation and their care not to presume on their blood
relationship. We should let children's feelings take their natural
course without prompting. I have seen a child scolded and called
unfeeling because it did not occur to it to make a theatrical
demonstration of affectionate delight when its mother returned after an
absence: a typical example of the way in which spurious family sentiment
is stoked up. We are, after all, sociable animals; and if we are let
alone in the matter of our affections, and well brought up otherwise,
we shall not get on any the worse with particular people because they
happen to be our brothers and sisters and cousins. The danger lies in
assuming that we shall get on any better.
The main point to grasp here is that families are not kept together at
present by family feeling but by human feeling. The family cultivates
sympathy and mutual help and consolation as any other form of kindly
association cultivates them; but the addition of a dictated compulsory
affection as an attribute of near kinship is not only unnecessary,
but positively detrimental; and the alleged tendency of modern social
development to break up the family need alarm nobody. We cannot break up
the facts of kinship nor eradicate its natural emotional consequences.
What we can do and ought to do is to set people free to behave naturally
and to change their behavior as circumstances change. To impose on
a citizen of London the family duties of a Highland cateran in the
eighteenth century is as absurd as to compel him to carry a claymore and
target instead of an umbrella. The civilized man has no special use
for cousins; and he may presently find that he has no special use for
brothers and sisters. The parent seems likely to remain indispensable;
but there is no reason why that natural tie should be made the excuse
for unnatural aggravations of it, as crushing to the parent as they are
oppressive to the child. The mother and father will not always have
to shoulder the burthen of maintenance which should fall on the Atlas
shoulders of the fatherland and motherland. Pending such reforms and
emancipations, a shattering break-up of the parental home must remain
one of the normal incidents of marriage. The parent is left lonely and
the child is not. Woe to the old if they have no impersonal interests,
no convictions, no public causes to advance, no tastes or hobbies! It is
well to be a mother but not to be a mother-in-law; and if men were cut
off artificially from intellectual and public interests as women are,
the father-in-law would be as deplorable a figure in popular tradition
as the mother-in-law.
It is not to be wondered at that some people hold that blood
relationship should be kept a secret from the persons related, and that
the happiest condition in this respect is that of the foundling who, if
he ever meets his parents or brothers or sisters, passes them by without
knowing them. And for such a view there is this to be said: that our
family system does unquestionably take the natural bond between members
of the same family, which, like all natural bonds, is not too tight to
be borne, and superimposes on it a painful burden of forced, inculcated,
suggested, and altogether unnecessary affection and responsibility which
we should do well to get rid of by making relatives as independent of
one another as possible.