First—The obedience which must be exacted from a child for its own
physical, intellectual, and moral welfare.
Second—The obedience which the parent may exact for his (the parent’s)
welfare or convenience.
Third—The obedience which parent and child alike owe to the moral law,
and which it is the parent’s duty to teach the child to pay.
If mothers would but keep these three kinds of obedience clear and
distinct in their minds, I think much of the supposed difficulty of
the problem would disappear. And, if children as they grow up would
likewise discriminate between them, many of their troubles would be
relieved.
For the first, the excellent old Dr. Thomas Brown lays down (Lectures
on Ethics, p. 287) a principle which seems to me exactly to fit the
case. He says that parents “should impose no restraint which has
not for its object some good greater than the temporary evil of the
restraint itself.” For an infant, the restraint is no evil; and at
that age everything must be a matter of obedience, the babe possessing
no sense or experience for self-guidance. But, as childhood advances,
so should freedom advance; and, even if the little boy or girl does
now and then learn by sharp experience, the lesson will generally
be well worth the cost: whereas the evils of over-restraint have
no compensation. Each one is bad in itself, checking the proper
development of character, chilling the spirits, and also in a
cumulative way becoming increasingly mischievous, as the miserable
sense of being fettered becomes confirmed.
In all this matter of the child’s own welfare, the mother’s aim ought
to be to become the life-long counselor of her child; and a counselor
is (by the very hypothesis) one who does not persist in claiming
authority. Nobody thinks of _consulting_ another who may conclude their
“advice” by saying, “And now I _order_ you to do as I have advised.” To
drop, as completely and as early as possible, the tone of command, and
assume that of the loving, sympathetic, ever disinterested guide and
friend,—that is, I think, the true wisdom of every mother, as it was
that of my own. Of course, there are cases so grave (especially where
girls who little understand the need of caution are concerned) that it
is absolutely necessary, nay, the mother’s pressing duty, to prohibit
her daughter from running into danger. To apply Brown’s rule, the evil
of the restraint is more than counter-balanced by immunity from deadly
peril. Perhaps it is one of the principal causes of the dissatisfaction
of young girls with parental control that they do not and can not
understand what horrible dangers may overtake them in the still foul
condition of society.
Second—It is too little remembered that a parent has a moral right to
exact obedience as a form of _service_ from his child. The parent has,
in strictest ethical sense, the first of all claims on the child’s
_special benevolence_; _i. e._, on his _will to do good_. The double
ties of gratitude and of closest human relationship make it the duty
of the child to pay that sacred debt from first to last; and it is
entirely fit and greatly for its benefit that the parent should claim
that duty. The parent’s _direction_ in such cases, properly translated,
is not a _command_, to which the response is blind obedience, but
an indication of the way in which the person to whom the debt is
due desires that it should be paid. There ought to be nothing in
the slightest degree harsh or dictatorial in such direction. On the
contrary, I can not but think that the introduction by parents of
much greater courtesy to their children would be an immense advantage
in this and other cases. We all ask our servants politely to do for
us the services which they have contracted to do, and for which we
pay them. How much more kindly and courteously ought we to ask of
our children to perform services due by the blessed and holy debt
of nature and gratitude, and which ought, each one, to be a joy to
the child as well as to the parent! When it is rightly demanded and
cheerfully paid, how excellent and beautiful to both is this kind of
filial duty! When, for example, we see little girls of the working
classes taught to carry their father’s dinner to the field as soon as
they can toddle, and helping their mother to “mind the baby,” even if
it be a “little Moloch” of a baby, we witness both the fulfillment of
a legitimate claim on the part of the parents, and a most beneficent
moral training for the child. I think this sort of service of the
child is sadly lacking among the richer classes, and that it would be
an excellent thing if mothers, however wealthy, found means of making
their children more useful to themselves. Nothing can be worse for a
child than to find everything done for her, and never to be called upon
to do anything for anybody else. Indeed, any fine-natured child, like a
dog, will find much more real pleasure in being of use, or fancying it
is so, than in being perpetually pampered and amused. Of course there
would be moral limits to such claims on the parent’s part, as, _e. g._,
when they would interfere with the child’s health or education. But
there is no natural termination in point of age to the parent’s right
to give such directions for his own service. On the contrary, the time
when the adult son or daughter has come into the full possession of
his or her faculties, while the parent is sinking into the infirmities
of age, is the very time when filial duty is most imperative in its
obligation; and the fact that aged parents rarely attempt to give to
adult sons and daughters the same directions for their comfort as they
gave them when children shows how little the real nature of these
sacred rights and duties is commonly understood.
Third—There is the _obedience_ which both parent and child owe to the
eternal moral law; and this obedience again ought to be kept perfectly
distinct from that which is exacted either for the child’s personal
welfare or the parent’s convenience. The old and most important
distinction between a thing which is _malum in se_ and a thing which is
only _malum prohibitum_ ought never to be lost sight of. Even in a very
little child, I think, a moral fault, such as a lie, or cruelty to an
animal, or vindictiveness toward its companions, ought to be treated
with gravity and sadness; and, as the child grows, an importance ought
to be attached to such faults wholly incommensurate with any other sort
of error, such as indolence about lessons or the like. The one aim of
the parent must be to make profound impression of the awfulness and
solemnity of moral good and moral evil.
But even here the difficulty haunts us, when is this enforcement of
obedience to moral laws to cease? So long as a child is absolutely
compelled to do right by sheer force and terror of punishment, its
moral freedom can have no scope, and its moral life consequently can
not even begin. It can not acquire the _virtue_ which results from
free choice. All that the parent can do (and it is an indispensable
preparation for virtue, though not virtue itself) is first to teach the
child what is right,—to draw out its latent moral sense, and inspire it
with the wish to do right,—and then to help its steps in the path which
has been pointed out. Once a child grasps the idea of duty, and begins
in its little way to try to “be good,” and displays the indescribably
touching phenomena of childlike penitence and restoration, it
becomes surely the most sacred task for the mother to aid such
efforts—silently, indeed, for the most part, and too reverentially to
talk much about it—with tenderest sympathy. It would be no kindness, of
course, but cruelty, to open up hastily ways of liberty before moral
strength has been gained to walk in them. The “hedging up the way with
thorns” is a divine precaution, which a mother may well imitate. But
the principle must be, as in the case of directions in matters not
moral, gradually and systematically to exchange directions and orders
for counsels and exhortations.
And here, in closing these, perhaps, too tedious remarks on the moral
training of children, I shall add a word which may possibly startle
some who hear me,—Beware that, in earnestly seeking your child’s moral
welfare, you do not _force_ the moral nature with hot-house culture.
To be a sturdy plant, it must grow naturally, and not too rapidly. It
seems as if it were not intended by Providence that this supreme part
of our human nature should be developed far in childhood and early
youth, lovely as are the blossoms it sometimes then bears,—too often
to drop into an untimely grave, or wither away in the heat of manhood
without fruit. Dr. Arnold, of Rugby, undoubtedly made a great mistake
in this matter, as one of his very best disciples, Arthur Hugh Clough,
was able in later years to see. Mothers should not be unhappy, if
boys are honorable and kindly and affectionate, if they should, at
fifteen, prefer a game of football to a visit of charity; and I should
not blame at all severely any of my young friends, if such there be
here present, who may be at this moment wishing that she were playing
lawn-tennis, instead of sitting still to hear a dull dissertation on
moral philosophy!
But, when all is done that can be done by human wisdom to help the
moral growth of the young, there is a vast space left for the other and
easier parental duty of _providing for their happiness_. Of course, to
nine parents out of ten, high and low, it is the joy and delight of
their lives to make their children as happy as possible. There is no
virtue in this. Nature (or, let us say frankly, God) has so made us
that in middle life nearly all direct pleasures to be enjoyed on our
own account begin to pall. We are too busy or too indifferent to care
much for a score of things which, when we were younger, we found quite
entrancing.
“It is the one great grief of life to feel all feelings die.”
But, just as our sun goes down to the horizon, a moonlight reflection
of pleasure, purer, calmer than the first, rises to give a sweet
interest to the lives of all who are happy enough to have young
creatures around them. The pleasures we can no longer taste for
ourselves we taste in our children’s enjoyment. Their glee, their
eagerness, their freshness of delight, stir our pulses with tenderness
and sympathy. I do not know anything in the world which pulls one’s
heartstrings so much as the sight of a little blue-eyed, golden-haired,
white-frocked atom of humanity clapping its hands and crowing with
ecstasy at the sight of a kite soaring up into the summer sky.
Are we to ask parents to deny themselves and their children in the
stern old way, and turn their young lives into dreary rounds of duty
and work, till they hate the very name of either one or the other? God
forbid! Does God, the great Parent, Father and Mother of the World,
lead us up to himself by any such harsh, stern tuition? Nay, but has
he not made earth so beautiful, and planted flowers by every wayside,
and gladdened our hearts by ten thousand delights of the intellect, the
senses, the tastes, and the affections? Fear, my friends, to make your
children _unhappy_, and to love them _too little_. But never fear to
make them too happy or to love them too much! There is a great, deep
saying, that we must all enter the kingdom of God as little children.
Surely, the converse of it is true also; and we should prepare in our
homes a kingdom of God,—of peace and love and tenderness and innocent
pleasure,—whenever a little child is sent to us out of heaven to dwell
in it.
We now come to speak of the duties of daughters. The ethical grounds
of the duty of supreme benevolence toward our parents are clear. They
are nearest to us of human beings. We owe them life and (nearly always
also) endless cares and affection. In the case of a mother, her claims
on her child—founded on the bodily agony she has borne on its behalf,
and the ineffably sweet office of nursing (when she has performed it),
her care in infancy, and love and sympathy in later years—make together
such a cumulative title to gratitude and devotion that it is impossible
to place on it any limitation.
This claim is, of course, happily usually admitted in the case of
daughters _who do not marry_. It is understood that they are bound
to do all they can for their mother’s and father’s comfort. But, may
I ask, who absolved the daughters who marry from the same sacred
obligation? In Catholic countries, young women often quit their aged
parents, no matter how much they need them, to enter “religion,” as it
is said; and we Protestants are very indignant with them for so doing.
But, when it comes to our Protestant religion of matrimony, lo! we are
extremely indulgent to the girl who deposits her filial obligations
on what the _Morning Post_ calls the “Hymeneal Altar!” The daughter
practically says to her blind father or bed-ridden mother: “Corban! I
am going off to India with Captain Algernon, who waltzes beautifully,
and whom I met last night at a ball. It is a gift by whatsoever you
might have been profited by me.”
Is this right or justifiable? Public opinion condones it; and the
parent often consents out of the abundance of unselfish affection,
thereby in a certain formal way releasing the daughter from her natural
debt. But I do not think, if the parent really wants her services, that
she can morally withdraw them, even with such consent, and certainly
not _without_ it.
We all see this remarkably clearly when the question is not of
marriage, but of a girl of the higher class devoting herself to charity
or art, or any kind of public work which requires her to quit her
parents’ roof. Then, indeed, even if her parents be in the full vigor
of life, and have half a dozen other daughters, we are pretty sure to
hear the solemn condemnation of the adventurous damsel, “Angelina ought
to attend to her father and mother, and not go here or there for this
or that purpose.”
Surely there is a very obvious rule to cover all these cases. If
either parent _wants_ the daughter she ought not to leave him or her,
_either_ to marry or to go into a nunnery, or for any other purpose. If
her parents do _not_ want her, then, being of age to judge for herself,
she is free _either_ to undertake the duties of a wife, or _any others_
for which she may feel a vocation.
This may sound very hard. It is undoubtedly the demand for a very high
degree of virtue, where the sacrifice may be that of the happiness
of a lifetime. But every duty may sometimes claim such sacrifices.
Parental duty does so perpetually. How many thousands of mothers and
fathers toil all their days and give up health and every enjoyment for
their children’s interests! Why should not filial duties likewise exact
equal sacrifice? The entire devotion to the parent when the parent
really needs it, and the constant devotion of as much care as the
parent requires,—this, and nothing short of this, seems to me to be the
standard of filial duty.
A very difficult question arises in the case of the abnormal and
scarcely sane development of selfishness which we sometimes sadly
witness in old age. I think, in such deplorable cases, the child
is called on to remember that, even in her filial relation, the
_moral welfare_ of the object of benevolence is before all other
considerations, and that she is bound to pause in a course which
obviously is tending to promote a great moral fault. Gently and with
great care and deference, she ought to remind the parent of the needs
of others.
The great difficulty in the lives of hundreds of daughters of the upper
ranks just now lies in this: that they find themselves torn between
two opposing impulses, and know not which they ought to follow. On one
side are the habits of a child, and the assurance of everybody that the
same habits of quiescence and submission ought to be maintained into
womanhood. On the other hand there is the same instinct which we see
in a baby’s limbs, to stir, to change its position, to climb, to run;
to use, in short, the muscles and faculties it possesses. Every young
bird flutters away from its nest, however soft; every little rabbit
quits the comfortable hole in which it was born; and we take it as fit
and right they should do so, even when there are hawks and weasels all
around. Only when a young girl wants to do anything of the analogous
kind, her instinct is treated as a sort of sin. She is asked, “Can
not she be contented, having so nice a home and luxuries provided in
abundance?” Keble’s fine but much-misused lines, about “room to deny
ourselves” and the “common task” and “daily round” being all we ought
to require, are sure to be quoted against her; and, in short, she feels
herself a culprit, and probably at least once a week has a fit of
penitence for her incorrigible “discontent.” I have known this kind of
thing go on for years, and it is repeated in hundreds, in thousands, of
families. I have known it where there were seven miserable, big, young
women in one little house! It is supposed to be the most impossible
thing in the world for a parent to give his son a stone for bread or a
serpent for a fish. But scores of fathers, in the higher ranks, give
their daughters diamonds when they crave for education, and twist round
their necks the serpents of idle luxury and pleasure when they ask for
wholesome employment.
Pardon me if I speak very warmly on this subject, because I think here
lies one of the great evils of the condition of our sex and class at
this time; and I feel intensely for the young spirits whose natural
and whose _noble_ aspirations are so checked and deadened and quenched
through all their youth and years of energy that, when the time for
emancipation comes at last, it is too late for them to make use of
it. They have been dwarfed and stunted, and can never either be or do
anything greatly good.
In short, the complaint we women make against men, that they persist
in treating us as minors when we have attained our majority, is what
daughters too often can justly make against both their fathers and
mothers. They keep them in the swaddling-clothes of childhood, when
they ought to set free and train every limb to its most athletic and
joyous exercise. Dangers, of course, on the other side there are,—of
over-emancipated and ill-advised girls who sorely need more parental
guidance than they obtain; but, so far as my experience goes, these
cases are few compared to those of the young women (ladies, of course,
I mean, for in the lower classes such evils are unknown) whose lives
are spoiled by _over-restraint in innocent things_. They are left free,
and encouraged to plunge into the maelstrom of a fashionable season’s
senseless whirl of dissipation and luxury. They are restrained from
every effort at self-development or rational self-sacrifice, till, for
the very want of some corrective bitter, they go and beat the hassocks
in a church as a pious exercise, or perhaps finally lock themselves up
in a nunnery. Small blame to them! Ritualist nunneries at present offer
the most easily accessible back-door out of fine drawing-rooms into
anything like a field of usefulness.
Now for sisters. That brothers and sisters should give one another in
an ordinary way the first-fruits of their benevolence follows obviously
from the closeness of their propinquity. Usually there has also been
from childhood the blessed interchange of kindnesses which accumulate
on both sides into a claim of reciprocal gratitude.
Miss Bremer remarks that “it is the general characteristic of
affection to make us blind to the faults of those we love, but from
this weakness _fraternal_ love is wholly exempt.” Brothers are indeed
terrible critics of their sisters, and, so far, irritating creatures.
But otherwise, as we all know, they are the very joy and pride of our
lives; and there is probably not one duty in our list which needs less
to be insisted on to women generally than that of bestowing on their
brothers not only love of benevolence, but also a large amount of love
of complacency. It is usually also a truly sound moral sentiment,
causing the sister to take profound interest in the religious and moral
welfare of her brother, as well as in his health and happiness.
One mistake, I think, is often made by sisters, and still more often
by mothers, to which attention should be called. The unselfishness
of the sisters, and the fondness of the mother for her boy, and the
fact that the boy is but rarely at home, all contribute to a habit of
sacrificing everything to the young lad’s pleasure or profit, which
has the worst effect on his character in after-life. Boys receive
from women themselves in the nursery, and when they come home from
school in the holidays, a regular _education in selfishness_. They
acquire the practice of looking on girls and women as persons whose
interests, education, and pleasures must always, as a matter of course,
be postponed to their own. In later life, we rue—and their wives may
rue—the consequences.
The duties of sisters to sisters are even more close and tender than
those of sisters to brothers. I hardly know if there be any salient
fault in the usual behavior of English sisters to one another which
any moral system could set right. Perhaps the one quality oftenest
deficient in this, and other more distant family relationships, to
which we need not further refer,—uncles, aunts, cousins, and so on—is
_courtesy_. “Too much familiarity,” as the proverb says, “breeds
contempt.” The habit of treating one another without the little forms
in use among other friends, and the horrid trick of speaking rudely of
each other’s defects or mishaps, is the underlying source of half the
alienation of relatives. If we are bound to show _special benevolence_
to those nearest to us, why on earth do we give them pain at every
turn, rub them the wrong way, and _froisser_ their natural _amour
propre_ by unflattering remarks or unkind references? For once we can
do them a real service of any kind, we can (if we live with them) hurt,
or else please, them fifty times a day. The individual who thinks she
performs her duty to sister or niece, or cousin, while she waits to do
the exceptional services, and hourly frets and worries and humiliates
her, is certainly exceedingly mistaken. Genuine benevolence—the “_will
to make happy_”—will take a very different course.
It will not be necessary here to pursue further the subject of the
duties arising from the ties of natural relationship, holy and blessed
things that they are! I am persuaded that even the best and happiest of
us only half-apprehend their beautiful meaning, and that we must look
to the life beyond the grave to interpret for us all their significance.