FILIAL RELATIONS
There are many people in every community who have not felt the "social
compunction," who do not share the effort toward a higher social
morality, who are even unable to sympathetically interpret it. Some of
these have been shielded from the inevitable and salutary failures which
the trial of new powers involve, because they are content to attain
standards of virtue demanded by an easy public opinion, and others of
them have exhausted their moral energy in attaining to the current
standard of individual and family righteousness.
Such people, who form the bulk of contented society, demand that the
radical, the reformer, shall be without stain or question in his
personal and family relations, and judge most harshly any deviation
from the established standards. There is a certain justice in this: it
expresses the inherent conservatism of the mass of men, that none of the
established virtues which have been so slowly and hardly acquired shall
be sacrificed for the sake of making problematic advance; that the
individual, in his attempt to develop and use the new and exalted
virtue, shall not fall into the easy temptation of letting the ordinary
ones slip through his fingers.
This instinct to conserve the old standards, combined with a distrust of
the new standard, is a constant difficulty in the way of those
experiments and advances depending upon the initiative of women, both
because women are the more sensitive to the individual and family
claims, and because their training has tended to make them content with
the response to these claims alone.
There is no doubt that, in the effort to sustain the moral energy
necessary to work out a more satisfactory social relation, the
individual often sacrifices the energy which should legitimately go
into the fulfilment of personal and family claims, to what he considers
the higher claim.
In considering the changes which our increasing democracy is constantly
making upon various relationships, it is impossible to ignore the filial
relation. This chapter deals with the relation between parents and their
grown-up daughters, as affording an explicit illustration of the
perplexity and mal-adjustment brought about by the various attempts of
young women to secure a more active share in the community life. We
constantly see parents very much disconcerted and perplexed in regard to
their daughters when these daughters undertake work lying quite outside
of traditional and family interests. These parents insist that the girl
is carried away by a foolish enthusiasm, that she is in search of a
career, that she is restless and does not know what she wants. They will
give any reason, almost, rather than the recognition of a genuine and
dignified claim. Possibly all this is due to the fact that for so many
hundreds of years women have had no larger interests, no participation
in the affairs lying quite outside personal and family claims. Any
attempt that the individual woman formerly made to subordinate or
renounce the family claim was inevitably construed to mean that she was
setting up her own will against that of her family's for selfish ends.
It was concluded that she could have no motive larger than a desire to
serve her family, and her attempt to break away must therefore be wilful
and self-indulgent.
The family logically consented to give her up at her marriage, when she
was enlarging the family tie by founding another family. It was easy to
understand that they permitted and even promoted her going to college,
travelling in Europe, or any other means of self-improvement, because
these merely meant the development and cultivation of one of its own
members. When, however, she responded to her impulse to fulfil the
social or democratic claim, she violated every tradition.
The mind of each one of us reaches back to our first struggles as we
emerged from self-willed childhood into a recognition of family
obligations. We have all gradually learned to respond to them, and yet
most of us have had at least fleeting glimpses of what it might be to
disregard them and the elemental claim they make upon us. We have
yielded at times to the temptation of ignoring them for selfish aims, of
considering the individual and not the family convenience, and we
remember with shame the self-pity which inevitably followed. But just as
we have learned to adjust the personal and family claims, and to find an
orderly development impossible without recognition of both, so perhaps
we are called upon now to make a second adjustment between the family
and the social claim, in which neither shall lose and both be ennobled.
The attempt to bring about a healing compromise in which the two shall
be adjusted in proper relation is not an easy one. It is difficult to
distinguish between the outward act of him who in following one
legitimate claim has been led into the temporary violation of another,
and the outward act of him who deliberately renounces a just claim and
throws aside all obligation for the sake of his own selfish and
individual development. The man, for instance, who deserts his family
that he may cultivate an artistic sensibility, or acquire what he
considers more fulness of life for himself, must always arouse our
contempt. Breaking the marriage tie as Ibsen's "Nora" did, to obtain a
larger self-development, or holding to it as George Eliot's "Romola"
did, because of the larger claim of the state and society, must always
remain two distinct paths. The collision of interests, each of which has
a real moral basis and a right to its own place in life, is bound to be
more or less tragic. It is the struggle between two claims, the
destruction of either of which would bring ruin to the ethical life.
Curiously enough, it is almost exactly this contradiction which is the
tragedy set forth by the Greek dramatist, who asserted that the gods who
watch over the sanctity of the family bond must yield to the higher
claims of the gods of the state. The failure to recognize the social
claim as legitimate causes the trouble; the suspicion constantly remains
that woman's public efforts are merely selfish and captious, and are not
directed to the general good. This suspicion will never be dissipated
until parents, as well as daughters, feel the democratic impulse and
recognize the social claim.
Our democracy is making inroads upon the family, the oldest of human
institutions, and a claim is being advanced which in a certain sense is
larger than the family claim. The claim of the state in time of war has
long been recognized, so that in its name the family has given up sons
and husbands and even the fathers of little children. If we can once see
the claims of society in any such light, if its misery and need can be
made clear and urged as an explicit claim, as the state urges its claims
in the time of danger, then for the first time the daughter who desires
to minister to that need will be recognized as acting conscientiously.
This recognition may easily come first through the emotions, and may be
admitted as a response to pity and mercy long before it is formulated
and perceived by the intellect.
The family as well as the state we are all called upon to maintain as
the highest institutions which the race has evolved for its safeguard
and protection. But merely to preserve these institutions is not enough.
There come periods of reconstruction, during which the task is laid upon
a passing generation, to enlarge the function and carry forward the
ideal of a long-established institution. There is no doubt that many
women, consciously and unconsciously, are struggling with this task. The
family, like every other element of human life, is susceptible of
progress, and from epoch to epoch its tendencies and aspirations are
enlarged, although its duties can never be abrogated and its obligations
can never be cancelled. It is impossible to bring about the higher
development by any self-assertion or breaking away of the individual
will. The new growth in the plant swelling against the sheath, which at
the same time imprisons and protects it, must still be the truest type
of progress. The family in its entirety must be carried out into the
larger life. Its various members together must recognize and acknowledge
the validity of the social obligation. When this does not occur we have
a most flagrant example of the ill-adjustment and misery arising when an
ethical code is applied too rigorously and too conscientiously to
conditions which are no longer the same as when the code was instituted,
and for which it was never designed. We have all seen parental control
and the family claim assert their authority in fields of effort which
belong to the adult judgment of the child and pertain to activity quite
outside the family life. Probably the distinctively family tragedy of
which we all catch glimpses now and then, is the assertion of this
authority through all the entanglements of wounded affection and
misunderstanding. We see parents and children acting from conscientious
motives and with the tenderest affection, yet bringing about a misery
which can scarcely be hidden.
Such glimpses remind us of that tragedy enacted centuries ago in Assisi,
when the eager young noble cast his very clothing at his father's feet,
dramatically renouncing his filial allegiance, and formally subjecting
the narrow family claim to the wider and more universal duty. All the
conflict of tragedy ensued which might have been averted, had the father
recognized the higher claim, and had he been willing to subordinate and
adjust his own claim to it. The father considered his son disrespectful
and hard-hearted, yet we know St. Francis to have been the most tender
and loving of men, responsive to all possible ties, even to those of
inanimate nature. We know that by his affections he freed the frozen
life of his time. The elements of tragedy lay in the narrowness of the
father's mind; in his lack of comprehension and his lack of sympathy
with the power which was moving his son, and which was but part of the
religious revival which swept Europe from end to end in the early part
of the thirteenth century; the same power which built the cathedrals of
the North, and produced the saints and sages of the South. But the
father's situation was nevertheless genuine; he felt his heart sore and
angry, and his dignity covered with disrespect. He could not, indeed,
have felt otherwise, unless he had been touched by the fire of the same
revival, and lifted out of and away from the contemplation of himself
and his narrower claim. It is another proof that the notion of a larger
obligation can only come through the response to an enlarged interest
in life and in the social movements around us.
The grown-up son has so long been considered a citizen with well-defined
duties and a need of "making his way in the world," that the family
claim is urged much less strenuously in his case, and as a matter of
authority, it ceases gradually to be made at all. In the case of the
grown-up daughter, however, who is under no necessity of earning a
living, and who has no strong artistic bent, taking her to Paris to
study painting or to Germany to study music, the years immediately
following her graduation from college are too often filled with a
restlessness and unhappiness which might be avoided by a little clear
thinking, and by an adaptation of our code of family ethics to modern
conditions.
It is always difficult for the family to regard the daughter otherwise
than as a family possession. From her babyhood she has been the charm
and grace of the household, and it is hard to think of her as an
integral part of the social order, hard to believe that she has duties
outside of the family, to the state and to society in the larger sense.
This assumption that the daughter is solely an inspiration and
refinement to the family itself and its own immediate circle, that her
delicacy and polish are but outward symbols of her father's protection
and prosperity, worked very smoothly for the most part so long as her
education was in line with it. When there was absolutely no recognition
of the entity of woman's life beyond the family, when the outside claims
upon her were still wholly unrecognized, the situation was simple, and
the finishing school harmoniously and elegantly answered all
requirements. She was fitted to grace the fireside and to add lustre to
that social circle which her parents selected for her. But this family
assumption has been notably broken into, and educational ideas no longer
fit it. Modern education recognizes woman quite apart from family or
society claims, and gives her the training which for many years has
been deemed successful for highly developing a man's individuality and
freeing his powers for independent action. Perplexities often occur when
the daughter returns from college and finds that this recognition has
been but partially accomplished. When she attempts to act upon the
assumption of its accomplishment, she finds herself jarring upon ideals
which are so entwined with filial piety, so rooted in the tenderest
affections of which the human heart is capable, that both daughter and
parents are shocked and startled when they discover what is happening,
and they scarcely venture to analyze the situation. The ideal for the
education of woman has changed under the pressure of a new claim. The
family has responded to the extent of granting the education, but they
are jealous of the new claim and assert the family claim as over against
it.
The modern woman finds herself educated to recognize a stress of social
obligation which her family did not in the least anticipate when they
sent her to college. She finds herself, in addition, under an impulse to
act her part as a citizen of the world. She accepts her family
inheritance with loyalty and affection, but she has entered into a wider
inheritance as well, which, for lack of a better phrase, we call the
social claim. This claim has been recognized for four years in her
training, but after her return from college the family claim is again
exclusively and strenuously asserted. The situation has all the
discomfort of transition and compromise. The daughter finds a constant
and totally unnecessary conflict between the social and the family
claims. In most cases the former is repressed and gives way to the
family claim, because the latter is concrete and definitely asserted,
while the social demand is vague and unformulated. In such instances the
girl quietly submits, but she feels wronged whenever she allows her mind
to dwell upon the situation. She either hides her hurt, and splendid
reserves of enthusiasm and capacity go to waste, or her zeal and
emotions are turned inward, and the result is an unhappy woman, whose
heart is consumed by vain regrets and desires.
If the college woman is not thus quietly reabsorbed, she is even
reproached for her discontent. She is told to be devoted to her family,
inspiring and responsive to her social circle, and to give the rest of
her time to further self-improvement and enjoyment. She expects to do
this, and responds to these claims to the best of her ability, even
heroically sometimes. But where is the larger life of which she has
dreamed so long? That life which surrounds and completes the individual
and family life? She has been taught that it is her duty to share this
life, and her highest privilege to extend it. This divergence between
her self-centred existence and her best convictions becomes constantly
more apparent. But the situation is not even so simple as a conflict
between her affections and her intellectual convictions, although even
that is tumultuous enough, also the emotional nature is divided against
itself. The social claim is a demand upon the emotions as well as upon
the intellect, and in ignoring it she represses not only her convictions
but lowers her springs of vitality. Her life is full of contradictions.
She looks out into the world, longing that some demand be made upon her
powers, for they are too untrained to furnish an initiative. When her
health gives way under this strain, as it often does, her physician
invariably advises a rest. But to be put to bed and fed on milk is not
what she requires. What she needs is simple, health-giving activity,
which, involving the use of all her faculties, shall be a response to
all the claims which she so keenly feels.
It is quite true that the family often resents her first attempts to be
part of a life quite outside their own, because the college woman
frequently makes these first attempts most awkwardly; her faculties have
not been trained in the line of action. She lacks the ability to apply
her knowledge and theories to life itself and to its complicated
situations. This is largely the fault of her training and of the
one-sidedness of educational methods. The colleges have long been full
of the best ethical teaching, insisting that the good of the whole must
ultimately be the measure of effort, and that the individual can only
secure his own rights as he labors to secure those of others. But while
the teaching has included an ever-broadening range of obligation and has
insisted upon the recognition of the claims of human brotherhood, the
training has been singularly individualistic; it has fostered ambitions
for personal distinction, and has trained the faculties almost
exclusively in the direction of intellectual accumulation. Doubtless,
woman's education is at fault, in that it has failed to recognize
certain needs, and has failed to cultivate and guide the larger desires
of which all generous young hearts are full.
During the most formative years of life, it gives the young girl no
contact with the feebleness of childhood, the pathos of suffering, or
the needs of old age. It gathers together crude youth in contact only
with each other and with mature men and women who are there for the
purpose of their mental direction. The tenderest promptings are bidden
to bide their time. This could only be justifiable if a definite outlet
were provided when they leave college. Doubtless the need does not
differ widely in men and women, but women not absorbed in professional
or business life, in the years immediately following college, are baldly
brought face to face with the deficiencies of their training. Apparently
every obstacle is removed, and the college woman is at last free to
begin the active life, for which, during so many years, she has been
preparing. But during this so-called preparation, her faculties have
been trained solely for accumulation, and she has learned to utterly
distrust the finer impulses of her nature, which would naturally have
connected her with human interests outside of her family and her own
immediate social circle. All through school and college the young soul
dreamed of self-sacrifice, of succor to the helpless and of tenderness
to the unfortunate. We persistently distrust these desires, and, unless
they follow well-defined lines, we repress them with every device of
convention and caution.
One summer the writer went from a two weeks' residence in East London,
where she had become sick and bewildered by the sights and sounds
encountered there, directly to Switzerland. She found the beaten routes
of travel filled with young English men and women who could walk many
miles a day, and who could climb peaks so inaccessible that the feats
received honorable mention in Alpine journals,--a result which filled
their families with joy and pride. These young people knew to a nicety
the proper diet and clothing which would best contribute toward
endurance. Everything was very fine about them save their motive power.
The writer does not refer to the hard-worked men and women who were
taking a vacation, but to the leisured young people, to whom this period
was the most serious of the year, and filled with the most strenuous
exertion. They did not, of course, thoroughly enjoy it, for we are too
complicated to be content with mere exercise. Civilization has bound us
too closely with our brethren for any one of us to be long happy in the
cultivation of mere individual force or in the accumulation of mere
muscular energy.
With Whitechapel constantly in mind, it was difficult not to advise
these young people to use some of this muscular energy of which they
were so proud, in cleaning neglected alleys and paving soggy streets.
Their stores of enthusiasm might stir to energy the listless men and
women of East London and utilize latent social forces. The exercise
would be quite as good, the need of endurance as great, the care for
proper dress and food as important; but the motives for action would be
turned from selfish ones into social ones. Such an appeal would
doubtless be met with a certain response from the young people, but
would never be countenanced by their families for an instant.
Fortunately a beginning has been made in another direction, and a few
parents have already begun to consider even their little children in
relation to society as well as to the family. The young mothers who
attend "Child Study" classes have a larger notion of parenthood and
expect given characteristics from their children, at certain ages and
under certain conditions. They quite calmly watch the various attempts
of a child to assert his individuality, which so often takes the form of
opposition to the wishes of the family and to the rule of the household.
They recognize as acting under the same law of development the little
child of three who persistently runs away and pretends not to hear his
mother's voice, the boy of ten who violently, although temporarily,
resents control of any sort, and the grown-up son who, by an
individualized and trained personality, is drawn into pursuits and
interests quite alien to those of his family.
This attempt to take the parental relation somewhat away from mere
personal experience, as well as the increasing tendency of parents to
share their children's pursuits and interests, will doubtless finally
result in a better understanding of the social obligation. The
understanding, which results from identity of interests, would seem to
confirm the conviction that in the complicated life of to-day there is
no education so admirable as that education which comes from
participation in the constant trend of events. There is no doubt that
most of the misunderstandings of life are due to partial intelligence,
because our experiences have been so unlike that we cannot comprehend
each other. The old difficulties incident to the clash of two codes of
morals must drop away, as the experiences of various members of the
family become larger and more identical.
At the present moment, however, many of those difficulties still exist
and may be seen all about us. In order to illustrate the situation
baldly, and at the same time to put it dramatically, it may be well to
take an instance concerning which we have no personal feeling. The
tragedy of King Lear has been selected, although we have been accustomed
so long to give him our sympathy as the victim of the ingratitude of his
two older daughters, and of the apparent coldness of Cordelia, that we
have not sufficiently considered the weakness of his fatherhood,
revealed by the fact that he should get himself into so entangled and
unhappy a relation to all of his children. In our pity for Lear, we fail
to analyze his character. The King on his throne exhibits utter lack of
self-control. The King in the storm gives way to the same emotion, in
repining over the wickedness of his children, which he formerly
exhibited in his indulgent treatment of them.
It might be illuminating to discover wherein he had failed, and why his
old age found him roofless in spite of the fact that he strenuously
urged the family claim with his whole conscience. At the opening of the
drama he sat upon his throne, ready for the enjoyment which an indulgent
parent expects when he has given gifts to his children. From the two
elder, the responses for the division of his lands were graceful and
fitting, but he longed to hear what Cordelia, his youngest and best
beloved child, would say. He looked toward her expectantly, but instead
of delight and gratitude there was the first dawn of character. Cordelia
made the awkward attempt of an untrained soul to be honest and
scrupulously to express her inmost feeling. The king was baffled and
distressed by this attempt at self-expression. It was new to him that
his daughter should be moved by a principle obtained outside himself,
which even his imagination could not follow; that she had caught the
notion of an existence in which her relation as a daughter played but a
part. She was transformed by a dignity which recast her speech and made
it self-contained. She found herself in the sweep of a feeling so large
that the immediate loss of a kingdom seemed of little consequence to
her. Even an act which might be construed as disrespect to her father
was justified in her eyes, because she was vainly striving to fill out
this larger conception of duty. The test which comes sooner or later to
many parents had come to Lear, to maintain the tenderness of the
relation between father and child, after that relation had become one
between adults, to be content with the responses made by the adult child
to the family claim, while at the same time she responded to the claims
of the rest of life. The mind of Lear was not big enough for this test;
he failed to see anything but the personal slight involved, and the
ingratitude alone reached him. It was impossible for him to calmly watch
his child developing beyond the stretch of his own mind and sympathy.
That a man should be so absorbed in his own indignation as to fail to
apprehend his child's thought, that he should lose his affection in his
anger, simply reveals the fact that his own emotions are dearer to him
than his sense of paternal obligation. Lear apparently also ignored the
common ancestry of Cordelia and himself, and forgot her royal
inheritance of magnanimity. He had thought of himself so long as a noble
and indulgent father that he had lost the faculty by which he might
perceive himself in the wrong. Even in the midst of the storm he
declared himself more sinned against than sinning. He could believe any
amount of kindness and goodness of himself, but could imagine no
fidelity on the part of Cordelia unless she gave him the sign he
demanded.
At length he suffered many hardships; his spirit was buffeted and
broken; he lost his reason as well as his kingdom; but for the first
time his experience was identical with the experience of the men around
him, and he came to a larger conception of life. He put himself in the
place of "the poor naked wretches," and unexpectedly found healing and
comfort. He took poor Tim in his arms from a sheer desire for human
contact and animal warmth, a primitive and genuine need, through which
he suddenly had a view of the world which he had never had from his
throne, and from this moment his heart began to turn toward Cordelia.
In reading the tragedy of King Lear, Cordelia receives a full share of
our censure. Her first words are cold, and we are shocked by her lack of
tenderness. Why should she ignore her father's need for indulgence, and
be unwilling to give him what he so obviously craved? We see in the old
king "the over-mastering desire of being beloved, selfish, and yet
characteristic of the selfishness of a loving and kindly nature alone."
His eagerness produces in us a strange pity for him, and we are
impatient that his youngest and best-beloved child cannot feel this,
even in the midst of her search for truth and her newly acquired sense
of a higher duty. It seems to us a narrow conception that would break
thus abruptly with the past and would assume that her father had no part
in the new life. We want to remind her "that pity, memory, and
faithfulness are natural ties," and surely as much to be prized as is
the development of her own soul. We do not admire the Cordelia who
through her self-absorption deserts her father, as we later admire the
same woman who comes back from France that she may include her father in
her happiness and freer life. The first had selfishly taken her
salvation for herself alone, and it was not until her conscience had
developed in her new life that she was driven back to her father, where
she perished, drawn into the cruelty and wrath which had now become
objective and tragic.
Historically considered, the relation of Lear to his children was
archaic and barbaric, indicating merely the beginning of a family life
since developed. His paternal expression was one of domination and
indulgence, without the perception of the needs of his children, without
any anticipation of their entrance into a wider life, or any belief that
they could have a worthy life apart from him. If that rudimentary
conception of family life ended in such violent disaster, the fact that
we have learned to be more decorous in our conduct does not demonstrate
that by following the same line of theory we may not reach a like
misery.
Wounded affection there is sure to be, but this could be reduced to a
modicum if we could preserve a sense of the relation of the individual
to the family, and of the latter to society, and if we had been given a
code of ethics dealing with these larger relationships, instead of a
code designed to apply so exclusively to relationships obtaining only
between individuals.
Doubtless the clashes and jars which we all feel most keenly are those
which occur when two standards of morals, both honestly held and
believed in, are brought sharply together. The awkwardness and
constraint we experience when two standards of conventions and manners
clash but feebly prefigure this deeper difference.