The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons Part 3

CHAPTER V

EARLY BOYHOOD

Having now laid down the general principles which we have to recognize in the moral training of the young, let me endeavor to make some practical suggestions how these principles may be carried out, suggestions which, as a matter of fact, I have found to be helpful to educated mothers in the great and responsible task of training the men of the future generation.

All I would earnestly ask you to remember is, that in offering these suggestions I am in no way venturing to dictate to you, only endeavoring to place a wide experience at your service. Doubtless you will often modify and, in some cases, very possibly reverse my conclusions. All I ask is that you should weigh them thoughtfully and prayerfully and with an open and unprejudiced mind before you finally reject them.

Let us, therefore, begin with the nursery. It is in the nursery that the roots of the evil we have to contend with are often first planted, and this in more senses than one. In the more obvious sense all experienced mothers know what I mean. But I am quite sure that there are a large number of young wives who become mothers without the smallest knowledge of the dangers to which even infant boys may be exposed. This ignorance is painfully shown by the frequent application for nursemaids from our penitentiaries. At one house where I held a small meeting my young hostess, an intelligent literary woman, came into my room after the household had retired to rest to ask me about some curious actions which she had noticed in her baby boy at night. There could not be a doubt or a question that her nurse was corrupting her little child before that hapless young mother's eyes, and forming in him habits which could only lead to misery hereafter, and only too possibly to idiocy and death; and that young mother was too ignorant to save her own baby boy! Indeed, I know of no greater instance of the cruelty of "the conspiracy of silence" than the fact that in all the orthodox medical manuals for young mothers the necessary knowledge is withheld.[8] But more marvellous still is the fact that women should ever have placidly consented to an ignorance which makes it impossible for them to save even baby boys from a corrupt nursemaid, who by some evil chance may have found her way into their service through a false character or under some other specious disguise, not seeing at once that the so-called delicacy which shrinks from knowing everything that is necessary in order to save is not purity but prurience.

I would, therefore, beseech young mothers who are conscious of their own ignorance to see a lady doctor, if they do not like to consult their own family physician, and ask her to tell them plainly what they have to guard against and the best methods to pursue. All I can say here is to beseech every mother to be absolutely careful about the antecedents of her nursemaids, and only to admit those of unblemished character into the precincts of the nursery. Never, if possible, let your baby boy sleep with any one but yourself, if through illness or any other cause he cannot sleep in his own little cot. Pyjamas, I think, are generally recognized now to be the best form of night gear, as keeping the little limbs warm and covered, when in the restlessness of sleep the child throws off the bedclothes, as well as for other and more vital reasons.

If through straitened means you cannot afford an experienced nurse--not that I should altogether allow that even the experienced nurse is to be implicitly and blindly trusted until she has been well tested--then I would entreat you not to let sleepiness or ill health or any other excuse prevent you from being always present at your boy's morning bath.

Often and often evil habits arise from imperfect was.h.i.+ng and consequent irritation; and many a wise mother thinks it best on this account to revert to the old Jewish rite of initiation by which cleanliness was secured. Teach them from the first self-reverence in touch, as in word and deed, and watch even their att.i.tudes in sleep, that the little arms are folded lightly upwards. Even experienced nurses are not always nice in their ways. Be vigilantly watchful that the utmost niceness is observed between the boys and girls in the nursery, and that childish modesty is never broken down, but, on the contrary, nurtured and trained. Knowledge and watchfulness are the two cherubim with the flaming sword turning all ways to guard the young tree of life and bar the way of every low and creeping thing. If I may venture in some sort to reverse our Lord's words, I should say His word to all mothers is, "What I say unto all I say especially unto you, _Watch_."

But there is another and a deeper sense in which the root of the evil is first planted and nourished in the nursery. If we are to contend with this deadly peril to soul and body, I cannot but feel that we must bring about a radical change in the training of our boys. There must be some radical defect in that training for men to take the att.i.tude they do. I do not mean bad, dissipated men, but men who in all other relations of life would be designated fairly good men. Once let such a man be persuaded--however wrongly--that his health, or his prospect of having some day a family of his own, will suffer from delayed marriage and he considers the question settled. He will sacrifice his health to over-smoking, to excess in athletics, to over-eating or champagne drinking, to late hours and overwork; but to sacrifice health or future happiness to save a woman from degradation, bah! it never so much as enters his mind. Even so high-minded a writer as Mr. Lecky, in his _History of European Morals_,[9] deliberately proposes that the difficulty of deferred marriage which advanced civilization necessitates, at least for the upper cla.s.ses, should be met by temporary unions being permitted with a woman of a lower cla.s.s. The daughters of workingmen, according to this writer, are good enough as fleshly stop-gaps, to be flung aside when a sufficient income makes the true wife possible--an honorable proceeding indeed! to say nothing of the children of such a temporary union, to whom the father can perform no duty, and leave no inheritance, save the inestimable one of a mother with a tainted name. Verily there must be some fault in our training of men! Certainly an intelligent American mother put her finger on the blot, so far as we are concerned, when, speaking to me many years ago, she said what struck her so in our English homes was the way in which the girls were subordinated to the boys; the boys seemed first considered, the girls in comparison were nowhere. Doubtless our English homes are more at fault here than in America; but, as a mother's pride in her boys is the same all over the world, may not even American homes admit of a little improvement in this respect as well? And, if we choose to bring up our boys to look upon their mothers and sisters as more or less the devoted slaves of their selfishness, can we wonder that they should grow up to look upon all women as more or less the slaves of their needs, fleshly or otherwise?

Now, what I want all boys taught from their earliest years is, roughly speaking, that boys came into the world to take care of girls. Whatever modification may take place in our view of the relation of the s.e.xes, Nature's great fact will remain, that the man is the stronger--a difference which civilization and culture seem to strengthen rather than diminish; and from his earliest years he ought to be taught that he, therefore, is the one that has to serve. It is the strong that have to bear the burden of the weaker, and not to prost.i.tute that strength by using it to master the weaker into bearing their loads. It is the man who has to give himself for the woman, not the other way on, as we have made it. Nay, this is no theory of mine; it is a truth implanted in the very heart of every true man. "Every true man," as Milton says, "is born a knight," diligently as we endeavor to stub up this royal root, constantly, as from the very nursery, we endeavor to train it out of him. You may deny the truth and go on some theory of your own in the training of your boys, but the truth cannot deny itself. It is _there_, whether you will have it or not, a root of the tree of life itself.

Now there is not a day that need pa.s.s without opportunities of training your boys in this their true knightly att.i.tude. You can see, as I have already said, that they learn in relation to their own sisters what in after years they have to practise towards all women alike. To give up the comfortable easy-chair, the favorite book or toy, the warmest place by the fire, to the little sister--this ought to become a second nature to a well-trained boy. To carry a parcel for her, to jump up and fetch anything she wants, to give in to her because he is a boy and the stronger--all this ought to be a matter of course. As he grows older you can place him in little positions of responsibility to his sisters, sending them out on an expedition or to a party under his care. In a thousand such ways you can see that your boy is not only born but grows up a knight. I was once in a house where the master always brought up the heavy evening water-cans and morning coal-scuttles for the maids.

And if these were placed at the foot of the stairs so as to involve no running in and out of the kitchen, it might be no mean exercise for a boy's muscles.

I was told only the other day of a little six-year-old boy whose mother had brought him up from babyhood on these principles. He was playing with his little sister on a bed, when suddenly he perceived that she was getting perilously near the edge which was farthest from the wall.

Instantly he dismounted and went round to the other side, and, climbing up, pushed her gently into the middle of the bed, remarking sententiously to himself, "I think boys ought always to take the dangerous side of their sisters." Ah me! if only you mothers would but train your boys to "take the dangerous side of their sisters,"

especially of those poor little sisters who are thrust forth at so early an age to earn their own living, alone and unprotected, on the perilous highways of the world, skirted for them by so terrible a precipice, what a different world would it be for us women, what a purer and better world for your sons!

Surely the womanhood in our homes ought to enable us to bring up our boys in such an habitual att.i.tude of serving a woman, of caring for her, of giving himself for her, that it would become a moral impossibility for him ever to lower or degrade a woman in his after-life.

In concluding these suggestions there is one point I must emphasize, the more so as in treating of one particular moral problem it is difficult not to seem to ignore a truth which is simply vital to all moral training. Let us clearly recognize that there is no such thing as moral specialism. Our moral being, like Wordsworth's cloud, "moveth altogether if it move at all." You cannot strengthen one particular virtue except by strengthening the character all round. Cardinal Newman points out--I think in one of those wonderful Oxford sermons of his--that what our ancestors would have called "a bosom sin" will often take an underground course and come to the surface at quite an unexpected point in the character. Hidden licentiousness, which one would expect to evince itself in over-ripe sentiment and feeling, manifests itself instead in cruelty and hardness of heart. The little habit of self-indulgence which you in your foolish fondness have allowed in that boy of yours may, in after-life, come out as the very impurity which you have endeavored so earnestly to guard him against. This mystical interdependence and hidden correlation of our moral and intellectual being is a solemn thought, and can only be met by recognizing that the walls of the citadel must be strengthened at all points in order to resist the foe at one.

Truthfulness, conscientiousness that refuses to scamp work, devotion to duty, temperance in food and drink, rect.i.tude--these things are the bastions of purity of life, as well as of all high character.

But in these days I think we have more especially to remember that the Beautiful Gate of all n.o.ble living rests, like the gate of the Jewish Temple, on two pillars, both of which show signs of being considerably out of repair. One of these pillars is obedience, or discipline. If you have not exacted prompt and unhesitating obedience in your boy, from his earliest childhood, to the parents whom he has seen, do you think that in after years he will obey the Father of Lights, whom he has not seen?

Do you think, if you have let him set your authority at defiance, he will in future years, with temptation on one side and opportunity on the other, bow to the invisible authority of conscience? What is it, I ask, that makes the army the finest school for character, giving us our Lawrences, our Havelocks, our Gordons, our Kitcheners, but simply this habit of implicit obedience, of that discipline which has grown so grievously lax in so many of our English homes? In Carlyle's strong words, "Obedience is our universal duty and destiny, wherein whoso will not bend must break: too early and too thoroughly we cannot be trained to know that 'would,' in this world of ours, is as mere zero to 'should,' and for most part as the smallest of fractions even to 'shall.'"[10]

The second great pillar of the portal of n.o.ble life seems to me to show still greater signs of being out of repair and in want of restoration, and that pillar is reverence,--that heaven-eyed quality which Dr.

Martineau rightly places at the very top of the ethical scale. Let that crumble, and the character which might have been a temple sinks into a mere counting-house. When in these days children are allowed to call their father d.i.c.k, Jack, or Tom, and nickname their own mother; when they are allowed to drown the voice of the most honored guest at the table with their little bald chatter, so that even the cross-questioning genius of a Socrates would find itself at a discount; when they are allowed to criticise and contradict their elders in a way that would have appalled our grandmothers; when they are suffered to make remarks which are anything but reverent on sacred things--have I not some reason to fear that the one attribute which touches the character to fine issues is threatened with extinction? Do you think that the boy who has never been taught to reverence his own mother's womanhood will reverence the degraded womanhood of our streets, or hear that Divine Voice guarding all suffering manhood and all helpless womanhood from wrong at his hands, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these, ye have done it unto Me?"

Oh, I would entreat you to set yourself firmly against this evil tendency of our day, to which I cannot but believe so much of its agnosticism is due,--that deadening down and stamping out of the spiritual instincts of our nature, those great intuitions of the soul, which lie both above and below all reasoning and logic and form their basis rather than their apex. Once let the springs of reverence be choked up, once let that window of the soul be overgrown with weeds and cobwebs, and your most careful training will only produce a character estimable in many respects, but for the most part without n.o.ble aspirations, without high ideals, with no great enthusiasms--a character, to use Saint Beuve's expressive phrase, "tout en facade sur la rue," whose moral judgments are no better than street cries; the type of man that accepts the degradation of women with blank alacrity as a necessity of civilization, and would have it regulated, like any other commodity for the market; that very common type of character which, whatever its good qualities, spreads an atmosphere of blight around it, stunting all upward growing things and flattening down our life to the dead level of desert sands.

If you would not be satisfied at your boy rising no higher than this, then, again I say, guard the springs of reverence. Do not let your pride in your child's smartness or any momentary sense of humor make you pa.s.s over any little speech that savors of irreverence; check it instantly.

Exact respect for yourself and for the boy's father, the respect which is no enemy, but the reverse, to the uttermost of fondness. Insist upon good manners and respectful attention to the guests of your house. Do not despise the good old fas.h.i.+on of family prayers because they do not rise to all that we might wish them to be. At least they form a daily recognition of "Him in whom the families of the earth are blessed"--a daily recognition which that keen observer of English life, the late American Amba.s.sador, Mr. Bayard, pointed out as one of the great secrets of England's greatness, and which forms a valuable school for habits of reverence and discipline for the children of the family. Insist upon the boys being down in time for the wors.h.i.+p of G.o.d, and do not allow them to get into the habit indulged in by so many young men of "sloping"

down with slippered feet long after breakfast is done and prayers are over.

Only let the springs of reverence well up in your child's soul, and then, and then only, will you be able to give your boy what, after all, must always be the greatest safeguard from s.h.i.+pwreck in this perilous world--religious faith, that stops him at the very threshold of temptation with the words: "How can I do this great wickedness and sin against G.o.d?" Your very att.i.tude as you kneel by his side with bowed head and folded hands while he says his little evening and morning prayer will breathe into his soul a sense of a Divine Presence about our bed and about our path. Your love--so strong to love, and yet so weak to save--can lead his faltering childish feet to that Love which is deeper than our deepest fall, "which knows all, but loves us better than it knows." You can press your child against the very heart of G.o.d, and lay him in the Everlasting Arms, that faint not, neither are weary; and, with the mother of St. Augustine, you may know that the child of such prayers and such tears will never perish.

"Happy he With such a mother! faith in womankind Beats with his blood, and trust in all things high Comes easy to him, and though he trip and fall He shall not blind his soul with clay."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 8: This is the case with our recognized medical manuals; I do not know whether it is equally true of American manuals.]

[Footnote 9: Vol. ii. See chapter on "The Position of Women."]

[Footnote 10: _Sartor Resartus_, by Thomas Carlyle, Book II., chap, ii., p. 68. Chapman and Hall, 1831.]

CHAPTER VI

BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL LIFE

I now come to what must always be the great moral crux in a boy's life, that on which all the higher issues of his character will, in all human probability, turn--his school life. One of our great educators took what, looked at superficially, seemed the somewhat retrograde step of giving up the masters.h.i.+p of a college at Oxford to take again the head-masters.h.i.+p of a great public school. But in a conversation I had with him he led me to infer that he had done so from the conviction forced upon him that the whole moral trend of the character must be given, if given at all, prior to university life, at the public school; and to him nothing less than the formation of high moral character seemed worth striving for. Fine scholars.h.i.+p and high mathematics are excellent, but after all, as the apostle of culture, Matthew Arnold, has told us, conduct, and not intellectual attainment, forms seven-tenths of life.

Now, it is in connection with your boy's school life that you will have your greatest dangers to face, your hardest battle to fight.

I am, of course, aware that your school system is in some respects different from ours. You have the mixed day school such as largely obtains in Scotland, but which does not exist, at least for the upper cla.s.ses, in England. You have private boarding-schools, which with us are called preparatory schools, as they form the vestibule to the public school. And you have, lastly, a few large public schools somewhat on the model of Eton and Harrow.

Let us begin with the boarding-school. I do not intend for one moment to deny the advantages of our great English public schools. They are excellent for discipline and the formation of strong character, especially for a ruling race like ours; and their very numerical strength and importance command a splendid set of men as masters. But both public and private boarding-schools labor under one great disadvantage: they remove a boy from all family influence and violate the order of our life, which can never be violated with impunity. Boys and girls are sent into the world in pretty equal proportions, and we were never intended to pile a lot of boys together without girls and largely without any feminine influence whatever. To do so is to insure moral disorder whether in our schools or yours. To quote from an excellent paper of Dr. Butler's: "In giving us sisters," says one of the Hares in _Guesses at Truth_, "G.o.d gave us the best moral antiseptic,"

and it is their absence more than anything else that has produced the moral problems which our boarding-schools present. To be absent from sisters for the greater part of the year, at an age when their companions.h.i.+p is perhaps the most eloquent of silent appeals to purity, is undoubtedly one of the greatest evils to be set against the blessings of our public schools.[11]

For my own part, I can only say that the one thing which has filled me at times with the darkness of despair has not been the facts about our back streets, not those facts to meet which we hold conferences and establish penitentiaries, refuges, preventive homes, etc.--I am full of hopefulness about them--but the facts about our public, and still more about our private, schools, which until lately have been met with dead silence and masterly inactivity on the part of English parents. On the part of mothers I feel sure it is ignorance, not indifference: if they knew what I know, it simply could not be the latter. Even now, when some, at least, of their ignorance has been dispelled, I doubt whether they realize the depth of moral corruption which is to be found in our public and private schools; the existence of heathen vices which by the law of our land are treated as felony, and which we would fain hope, after nineteen centuries of Christianity, might now be relegated to the first chapter of Romans. They do not realize the presence of other and commoner forms of impurity, the self-defilement which taints the moral nature and stimulates the lower nature into unhealthy and abnormal activity. They do not understand the essentially sporadic nature of the evil--that it may exist "as a pestilence that walketh in darkness" in one boarding-school, while another, owing to the influence of a good set of boys, is comparatively free from it; and they will, therefore, take a single denial of its existence, possibly from their own husbands, as conclusive. Even the affirmations of head-masters are not altogether to be trusted here, as mothers cannot betray the confidence of their own boys, and often fail in gaining their consent to let the head-master know what is going on, in the boy's natural dread of being found out as the source of the information and, according to the ruling code, cut, as having "peached." Once I obtained leave to expose an indescribable state of things which was going on in broad daylight in an unsupervised room at one of our great public schools, utterly unsuspected by the head-master, and his subordinate, the house-master. But another case which for long made my life a kind of waking nightmare remained unexposed to the last.

Speaking of those commoner forms of impurity to which I have referred, and which are so mischievous as stimulating immature functions, needing, as Acton over and over again insists, absolute quiet and rest for healthy development, Dr. Dukes, the head physician of one of our best known public schools, states: "The reason why it is so widespread an evil"--computed in 1886 at eighty per cent. of boys at school, a computation accepted by a committee of public schoolmasters--"I believe to be, that the boy leaves home in the first instance without one word of warning from his parents that he will meet with bad boys who will tell him that everybody does it, and thus he falls into evil ways from his innocence and ignorance alone."[12]

Dr. Dukes further states that as the results of his thirty years'

experience he had come to the conclusion that only one per cent. of parents ever warned their boys at all before sending them to school.

These statements were made some fifteen years ago, when first the conspiracy of silence was broken through and the question of the morality of our public and private schools was dragged into the light of day and boldly faced and grappled with, largely owing to the action of Dr. Pusey. Since then a ma.s.s of strenuous effort has been directed against the evil by our high-minded head-masters; and an immense improvement has been effected. It is too short a time for one to hope that the evil has been eradicated; but when parents learn to fulfil their moral duties of teaching and warning their own boys--as Dr. Dukes observes--I feel sure it could be so far removed as to cause the numbers to change places, so that we might obtain a percentage of ninety to ninety-five of those who lead pure lives while at school, as against five per cent, who are impure, reversing the lamentable ratio that now exists. But here again there has been progress, and I feel sure that the percentage of parents who do warn and teach their sons before sending them to school is now incomparably higher than Dr. Dukes's "one per cent." and is steadily rising.

As to other deeper and nameless evils, they have been already reduced to a minimum, and if fathers could only be persuaded to do their duty by their own boys, they might be made wholly to disappear.

I give you these facts about our English schools, that parents may see for themselves what are the consequences of refusing both teaching and warning to their boys, under the delusion that G.o.d's lilies will grow up in the weedy garden of the human heart without strenuous culture and training.

Do not, therefore, I beseech you, take for granted that your boarding-schools are entirely free from such evils. You have the same conditions that we have. Till lately your boys have been as untaught and unwarned as ours. In your boarding-schools, as in ours, they are removed from the purifying influence of mother and sisters. They are just at the age which has neither the delicacy of childhood nor of early manhood.

Rest a.s.sured that conditions will breed like results.

"My belief, not lightly formed," says Dr. Butler,[13] "is, that none of the great schools can congratulate themselves on anything like safety from this danger. And if this is true of the great public schools, it is still more true of private schools, where the evil is admittedly greater. Boys and masters alike may strangely deceive themselves; the evil may hide very close. Many a boy has been known to a.s.sert positively and honestly that nothing of the kind was ever heard of in his time, and that any fellow suspected of it would have been cut, and half killed, when all the time the evil was actively at work even among the circle of his intimate friends."

And yet it is this evil, so pervasive in its influence, so certain to taint the fresh springs of young life with impure knowledge, if not to foul them with unclean acts, that parents still too often elect to ignore. The boy, full of eager curiosity, anxious, above all things, to catch up the ways of the other fellows, afraid, above all things, of being laughed at for his innocence, and elated at being taken up by one of the swells in the shape of an elder boy, and at first set-off wholly ignorant of the motive; exposed to suggestions about the functions of his own body which he has not the knowledge to rebut as the devil's lies--what wonder is it that so many boys, originally good and pure, fall victims? "They blunder like blind puppies into sin," a medical man who has had much to do with boys' schools exclaimed to me in the bitterness of his soul. The small house of the young boy's soul, full of the song of birds, the fresh babble of the voices of sisters, all the innocent sights and sounds of an English or American home, swept and garnished till now by such loving hands, but left empty, unguarded, and unwatched, for the unclean spirit to lift the latch and enter in and take possession--the pity of it! oh, the pity of it! What can the boy think? To quote Dr. Dukes again:

"He will say to himself: 'My father knows of all this vice at schools, and yet has not said one word to me about it. He has warned me about most things. He told me to be truthful, to keep my temper, to be upright and manly, to say my prayers; he pressed me never to get into debt, never to drink, and never to use bad language; and he told me I ought to change my boots and clothes when wet, so as not to get ill; and yet he has not said one syllable about this. My father is a good man and loves me, and if he wanted me not to do this he would surely have told me; it can't be very wrong, else I am sure he would have protected me and told me all about it."

I remember a friend of mine, who had been greatly stirred on the whole subject, endeavoring, with tears in her eyes, to persuade a father to warn his boy before sending him to his first public school, and on his absolutely refusing to do any such thing, she said to him, "At least promise me that you will give him this book," placing in his hands Mr.

George Everett's excellent little book, _Your Innings_. This he consented to do. The next morning my friend met him at breakfast, the boy having been already despatched by an early train. "Well," he said, "I sat up till past twelve last night reading your book; it is excellent, and I gave it to my lad before starting him off. But there is just one chapter in it, called a 'Strange Companion,' which I took the precaution of previously cutting out with my penknife; and my boy in his after years will thank me for not putting any such ideas in his head, but having kept him the pure and innocent lad that he is." I need not say that it was the one chapter that would have put the boy on his guard. Oh, befooled and purblind father! I happened to know that the school to which the boy was sent was swept at that time by a moral epidemic, and before that hapless lad had been a week in its corrupt atmosphere he would have had ideas put into his head with a vengeance.

His father had handed over the ground of his boy's heart for the devil to sow the first crop, and as a rule the devil sows, not wild oats, as we say, but acorns--a dread sowing which it may take years to root up and to extirpate, even if, so far as after-taint is concerned, it can ever be wholly extirpated.