The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons Part 4

In another case a widowed mother came to one of my meetings, and was profoundly alarmed at what I said about the dangers of our schoolboys.

It had never occurred to her that her gentlemanly little lad of twelve could have any temptations of the kind. Unlike the father I have mentioned, she resolved to speak to him that same evening. She found that he was fighting a battle against the whole school, standing up alone for the right, guided by some blind instinct of purity to resist the foul suggestions which were inflicted upon him, threatening him with the most terrible consequences in after-life if he did not yield and do as the other boys did. Think of it, ye mothers! a child of twelve without a hand to guide him, without a voice to cheer him, refused the knowledge that would have saved him from his deadly peril, his own mother deaf and dumb and blind to his struggles, leaving him to fight his little forlorn hope absolutely alone. I need scarcely say how thankfully he poured forth his sore heart to his mother when once she had opened the door, till now kept locked by her own ignorance; and how she was able to explain to him that, far from reaping any evil consequences from doing what is right, like Sir Galahad, "his strength would be the strength of ten" if he kept himself pure. She probably took steps to remove him from so corrupt an atmosphere as prevailed in that preparatory school, but of this I do not know.

But here let me guard myself from being misunderstood. I am not making out that every schoolboy is exposed to these temptations; there are boys so exceptionally endowed that they seem to spread a pure atmosphere around them which is respected by even the coa.r.s.est and loosest boys in the school. All I do maintain, with Dr. Butler, is that no school is safe from this danger, that at any time it may prove an active one in your boy's life, and that at the very least you have to guard him from impure knowledge being thrust upon him before nature has developed the instincts of manhood by which she guards her inner shrine.

And now I come to the question of day schools. As I have already said, I cannot feel but they are more consonant with the order of our life as giving the discipline and compet.i.tion of numbers without removing the boy from family life, nor do they lend themselves to some of the graver evils of our boarding-schools. But, alas! in themselves they form no panacea for the evils we are contemplating. On the contrary, I am told on authority I cannot question that in some places this plague spot is rife among them. In one case the evil had struck so wide and deep that the school had to be temporarily closed. Here, again, the same lesson is emphasized, viz.: that whatever is the form of the school, however excellent the teacher, there is no subst.i.tute in the moral life for the home teaching and training of mothers and fathers.

No mother can read these statements unmoved--statements, remember, not my own, but made by men of the deepest and widest experience, and which, therefore, you are bound to weigh, ponder, and carefully consider. I know that straight from your heart again comes the cry, "What can I do?"

I am inclined to answer this cry in one word, "Everything,"--with G.o.d's help.

I

And now let us enter into practical details. We will begin with the outworks, and work our way inwards to the shrine.

First, as to the all-important choice of a school, should the boy's father decide, for reasons in which you concur to send him to a boarding-school.

As to how to ascertain the real state of a school there is, of course, considerable difficulty. I have always found the best way is through mothers who have gained the confidence of their boys and who know through them what really goes on. In this way, as mothers wake up to the danger their boys run and to their own responsibility in guarding them, we shall be able to help one another more and more. But make a point of yourself, as well as the boy's father, personally seeing the master to whom you think of entrusting your lad, and talking over the matter with him. In this way you will not only satisfy yourself, but you will strengthen his hands by making him feel how vital the whole question is to your heart. What more than anything else weakens the high-minded men who have the tuition of the young is the utter unconcern that is evinced by the parents and the sense that, by the payment of a sum of money down, they can compound with a master for the performance of their inalienable duty of undertaking the moral education of their own children.

Here let me give you two most earnest cautions. Do not attach too much importance to mere mechanical arrangements as moral safeguards. One of our most successful head-masters says:

"I would most seriously warn any parent anxious about the choice of a school not to attach much weight to the apparent excellence of arrangements. Some of the worst schools have these arrangements in the highest perfection. They cannot afford to have them otherwise.

Neat cubicles and spotless dimity have beguiled an uninterrupted sequence of mammas, and have kept alive, and even flouris.h.i.+ng, schools which are in a thoroughly bad moral state and are hopelessly inefficient in every particular. Of course, many a parent feels that he ought to judge for himself, and these mechanical arrangements are too often the only material on which he can form his judgment. Let me a.s.sure him that they are entirely untrustworthy."

Secondly, do not think to find safety in the choice of a so-called "religious" school, even though it reflect the exact shade of your own religious opinions. The worst evils I ever knew went on in a school where the boys implicated held a weekly prayer-meeting! We must boldly face the fact that there is some mysterious connection between the religious emotions and the lower animal nature; and the religious forcing-house, of whatever school of theology, will always be liable to prove a hot-bed of impurity. Choose a school with a high moral tone, with religion as an underlying principle--a practical religion, that inculcates duty rather than fosters emotion, and embodies the wise proverb of Solomon, "In all labor there is profit, but the talk of the lips tendeth to penury."

Only let me beseech you to use your whole influence not to have your boy sent away at too early an age. Do you really think that the exclusive society of little boys, with their childish chatter, their foolish little codes, their crude and often ridiculously false notions of life, and their small curiosities, naturally inquisitive, but not always clean in the researches they inspire, and _always_ false in their results, is morally better for your child than, in Dr. Butler's words,

"the refining and purifying atmosphere of home, with the tenderness of a mother, the grace and playfulness of sisters, the love and loyalty of the family nurse, and lastly--scarcely to be distinguished in its effects from these influences--the sweetness, the simplicity, the flower-picking, the pony-patting of happy, frolicsome younger brothers or sisters in the garden, the paddock, or stable?"

If the boy has got out of hand, I ask, Whose fault is that? and is it fair to the child that your fault should be remedied by sending him away from all that is best and most purifying in child life? I would plead earnestly that eleven or twelve is old enough for the private school, and that a boy should not be sent to a public school before fourteen. In this I think most of our English head-masters would agree with me. Till this age, a day school or a tutor should be had recourse to, and when the time comes for sending him off to school, at least we can refuse to place the boy anywhere, either at a private or public school, where there is not some woman to mother and look after the boys and exert a good womanly influence over them. A head-master keenly alive to moral dangers, with a capable wife ready to use her womanly influence in aiding and abetting his efforts, I have found the best possible combination.

But if it is decided that the boys are to be brought up at the day school, your range of choice will probably be very small. You will have to look wholly to your home influence and teaching to counteract any evil influence they may encounter in their school life. But as your boys will never be separated from you, what may not that home influence and teaching, with knowledge and forewarning to direct it,--what may it not accomplish?

II

Let us, then, think out the best ways in which you can warn and guard your boy and fulfil your responsibility of being his moral teacher.

Let us begin with the simplest measure which you can take, and which can present no difficulty to anyone. Before sending your boy to school get him quietly by himself and say to him some such words as these: "My boy, you know, or will come to know, that when boys get together they often talk of nasty things, and even do nasty things. Give me your word of honor as a Christian and a gentleman that you will never say or do anything that you know you would be ashamed to tell me, that you know would bring a blush to your sister's cheeks. Always remember that dirty talk, and still more dirty deeds, are only fit for cads. Promise me faithfully that you will never let any boy, especially an elder boy, tell you 'secrets.' If you were to consent through curiosity, or because you feel flattered at one of the elder fellows taking you up, be sure he means you no good. Whatever you want to know ask me, and so far as I can I will tell you." Some such words as these said solemnly to a boy the day before he leaves home for the first time, either for a boarding-school, or even a day school, will make your womanhood a sort of external conscience to your boy, to guard him from those first beginnings of impurity, in the shape of what are technically called "secrets," which lead on to all the rest. I know one mother who, from her boy's earliest years, has made a solemn pact with him, on the one hand, if he would promise never to ask any questions about life and birth of anyone but her, she, in her turn, would promise to tell him all he wanted to know; and from first to last there has been that perfect confidence and friends.h.i.+p between mother and son which is, and ever must be, a boy's greatest safeguard.

Only remember that with young boys men who have had the greatest experience are generally agreed that it is better not to put the stress on religious motives. Practically, for a young boy, it is better to treat the whole thing as dirty, nasty, and blackguardly. And the whole subject must always be spoken of with reserve, without any emotion, and with much "dry light."

With most lads I should go a step further; I should give the boy one of the White Cross papers, "A Strange Companion."[14] It is impossible to lay down hard and fast rules; it is impossible to make so many jam-pots of even young humanity, to be tied up and labelled and arranged upon the same shelf. Each individuality has to be dealt with in all its mysterious idiosyncrasy. One boy may be so reserved that it is better to write to him than to talk face to face; another may find the greatest possible strength and comfort in freedom of speech and the feeling that there is no barrier between him and his mother with regard to being able to tell her freely of any temptations that may a.s.sail him. Your mother's instincts will be your best guide as to what method to adopt with each of your boys.

If the father of the lad can be induced, at any rate before he enters a boarding-school, to follow the advice of that remarkable man, Mr.

Thring, the founder of Uppingham School, in his address to our Church Congress, and write a letter of plain warning and counsel to the lad, it would be an unspeakable help. "My first statement," says Mr. Thring, "is that all fathers ought to write such a letter to their sons. It is not difficult, if done in a common-sense way."[15]

But now I come to what on all hands we must allow to be a point of extreme difficulty. I think all head-masters, deeply concerned in the moral welfare of the boys under their charge, would emphatically endorse the following words of Dr. Butler's:

"It is certain, it must needs be, that boys should, at an early period of their boyhood, come to hear of the nature of s.e.xual relations. From whom should they first learn it? Should it be with every accompaniment of coa.r.s.eness, of levity, of obscenity? From some ribald groom in the stables? From some impure maidservant who has stolen into the household and the nursery? From some brother only a year or two older, who has just received his first initiation in impurity at a private school and is too young to understand its danger? Worst of all, from the idlest, and most corrupt, and most worthless set of boys at this same private school, who surround the newcomer within a few days, perhaps a few hours, of his first joining, and, with knowing looks and enticing words, try to probe his childish knowledge, and leave him half-ashamed of himself and keenly inquisitive for full initiation, if he finds that he knows nothing of this engrossing mystery? Is it right, is it fair, is it consistent with religious duty or with common-sense, that a little boy of eight, or ten, or twelve, should be sent at this impressionable age to hear for the first time of facts of human nature which must ere long be known, and are part of G.o.d's appointment? Does not every dictate of humanity and of reason point to the conclusion that the dawn of this knowledge should be invested with all that is tender, and loving, and pure, and sacred, instead of being shrouded in the mists of innuendo or blazoned forth in the shamelessness of b.e.s.t.i.a.lity? There is really no answer but one to such a question, and the plain truth is that fathers, perhaps still more mothers, must recognize the duty which lies upon them to teach their children, at such times, in such words, and with such reservations as the character of each child may suggest, the elements at least of that knowledge which will otherwise be learnt but a very little later from a widely different set of instructors. I lay down the principle as admitting of no exception--I do not antic.i.p.ate even one dissentient voice from any who now hear me--_that no boy ought ever to be allowed to go to school without learning from his father or his mother, or from some brother or tried friend considerably older than himself the simple facts as to the laws of birth and the terrible danger of ever coming to talk of these phenomena as matters of frivolous and filthy conversation_."

I can only beseech you to give due weight to these words of one who had many years' experience of a large public school. Over and over again, at all my meetings of educated mothers, I have reiterated his question in similar words, "Is it right, is it fair, that your boy should learn the sacred mysteries of life and birth from the sources which Dr. Butler enumerates, and to which you abandon him, if you refuse to speak; sources of unclean and lying information by which I have no hesitation in saying that the mind and conscience of many men are more or less permanently defiled, even when the life has been kept outwardly pure?"

Can you hesitate for one moment to allow that the springs of the life which you will be the first to acknowledge comes from G.o.d should well up from a pure source, till, like Wordsworth's stream--

"Crowned with flowers, The mountain infant to the sun laughs forth,"

and that the whole subject should be so bound up in the boy's mind with his father's love for his mother, his mother's love for his father, with his own existence, and that of his sisters, that he would shrink with utter loathing from the filthy so-called "secrets" that are bandied about among schoolboys? I know that the task of conveying this knowledge presents many difficulties, but again I ask, "What is there in our life that is worth doing which is not difficult?" Long ago the definition of a difficulty to me has become "a thing to be overcome." It is not in sitting down helplessly before a difficulty that the way will open. With us, as with the Israelites on the brink of that raging midnight sea, it is in a brave obedience to the Divine command, "Go forward!" that the path opens through the trackless sea, and we find that the great waters that seem ready to overwhelm us are in reality a baptism into new life.

III

Again I seem almost to hear the cry of your heart, "I know I ought to speak to my boy, but how am I to do it?"

Now, it is here that I earnestly desire to give you, if I possibly can, some helpful, practical suggestions, for I feel that it is not in the recognition of a duty, but in its performance, that the difficulty lies which is arresting so many educated mothers at the present time.

With very young children, whether girls or boys, there should be no difficulty whatever. They are too young to understand. Only, when they come to you asking their innocent little questions as to where the little baby brother or sister comes from, I would earnestly ask you never to allow yourself, or your nurse, to inflict on them the usual popular fables, that the baby was brought by the doctor or that it was found under the gooseberry-bush. A child is far quicker than we think to detect that mother is hiding something, and the first tiny seed of evil curiosity is sown. Make no mystery about it; look your child full in the face, and say, "My child, you have asked me a question about what is very, very sacred. If I were to try to explain it to you, you would not be old enough to understand; for the present you must be content to know that the baby comes from G.o.d; how it comes mother will tell you when you grow old enough to understand; only promise me that you will never ask any one but mother about it." The child will then see that you are hiding nothing, and will be satisfied to wait for the explanation that mother has promised.

But what when the child is old enough to understand?--an age which doubtless varies in different children, but which with boys must come before their first school, if you are to occupy the ground of his heart with good seed, which leaves no room for the devil's sowing.

Well, with regard to the facts of birth, I do not think we ought to find much difficulty. You can point out how the baby seed has a soft, downy place provided for it in the pod of the parent plant till it has ripened and is fit to be sown, when the pod opens and lets it fall to the earth, and it becomes a plant in its turn. You can point out that the egg in a similar way is carried in the mother bird's body till the sh.e.l.l has hardened and is fit to be laid, when she warms it with her own breast, patiently sitting on it for days, while the father bird feeds her, till the little chick is strong enough to break the walls of its tiny house, and come forth and peck and fend for itself. You can explain how the little kitten the child plays with has in the same way a safe place provided for it in the mother's body, where it grows and grows till all its organs are formed, and it can breathe and suck, when, like the seed from the pod, and the chick from the egg it leaves the mother's body, and is born, a blind and helpless baby kitten, to be fed and tenderly cared for by the mother cat. You will explain that the baby comes in just the same way so far as its infant body is concerned, growing like the kitten from a tiny cell--borne by the mother till all the organs are formed which it needs for its earthly life, when it also is born and laid in its mother's arms, to be nourished and cared for by the love of both father and mother, not for a few weeks, as with animals, but through long years of helplessness. And you mean to tell me that the sacred truth would not endear you to your child far more than the usual c.o.c.k-and-bull story about the doctor and the gooseberry-bush?

A friend of mine has three boys of widely opposite character and temperament. Owing to circ.u.mstances, the eldest lad had to be sent to school at an early age. Young as he was, she resolved to follow Dr.

Butler's advice and tell him the facts of birth in the way I have suggested. On realizing the truth, the boy flung his arms round her neck and burst into tears. But though she felt that she had done right, she was not wholly without misgivings that she might have introduced some objectionable talk into her nursery. When the time came to send the second lad to school, she repeated the talk that she had had with his elder brother. But to her surprise she found him in total ignorance of the facts: his elder brother had never confided them to him. And so again with the third boy. Evidently the boys had considered it too sacred a thing to talk about--how much too sacred, then, to allow of their joining in with the unclean gossip of schoolboys! Its only result was to give them an added tenderness for their mother, and to make them resent all such unclean talk as so much mud flung at her.

So far, so good. But we all of us realize that it is not the facts of birth, but the facts of the origination of life, that form the perennial source of obscene talk, and often of obscene action, among boys; and it is in explaining these, without violating those instincts of reserve and modesty with which nature herself surrounds the whole subject, that what often seems an insuperable difficulty arises. Yet these functions are, and must be, the very shrine of a body which is a temple of the Lord and Giver of life; and on the face of things, therefore, there must be some method of conveying pure knowledge to the opening mind with regard to them. The difficulty must be with ourselves, and not in the very nature of things themselves.

Has it not been created in a great measure by a wrong method? We begin with human life instead of ending with it; we isolate it from a great system to which it belongs, and treat what is "the roof and crown of things" as a roof that tops no fair edifice, and is therefore anomalous; as a crown that rests on a head which has been severed from its body, and is therefore unmeaning. We obstinately refuse to live--to quote Goethe's words again--not only "in the beautiful and the good," but also "in the whole," which is equally necessary for a well-ordered life. What it seems to me we need is to teach the facts of life-giving, or, in other words, of s.e.x, as a great, wide, open-air law, running right through animated creation, an ever-ascending progression forming a golden ladder leading up to man.

In explaining the facts of reproduction, I would therefore suggest that you should begin with the lowest rung of the ladder, the simplest organisms, such as the amoeba or the volvox. I should show how these multiply by fission, the creature dividing into two, when it is impossible to tell which is the father and which is the mother. I would then pa.s.s upwards to more complex organisms, where two individuals are required to form the offspring. You could explain the whole process by the method of fertilization in plants, as urged in an excellent paper by a lady doctor, published in the _Parents' Review_.[16] Let me quote her words:

"The child can learn the difference of the names, color, and forms of flowers as soon as it can learn anything. The next step would be to simple lessons in the different parts of a plant--the vegetative organs of roots, stem, leaves, pa.s.sing on to the reproductive organs in the flower--calyx, corolla, stamen, and pistil. Let the child be taught to notice that all flowers have not quite the same organs, some bearing stamens only, which shed the powdery pollen and are the male, or little father flowers; while others have the pistil only, furnished with the stigma to catch the pollen, and are the females, or little mothers; that the one sort of flowers is necessary to the other in producing the little seed or baby plant."

Let us take a primrose. Here the mother and father elements are found in the same flower. At the base of the flower, packed in a delicate casket, which is called the ovary, lie a number of small white objects no larger than b.u.t.terfly-eggs. These are the eggs or ova of the primrose. Into this casket, by a secret opening, filmy tubes thrown out by the pollen grains--now enticed from their hiding-place on the stamens and cl.u.s.tered on the stigma--enter and pour a fertilizing fluid, called "spermatozoa,"

through a microscopic gateway, which opens in the wall of the egg and leads to its inmost heart. The ovule, or future seed, is now fertilized and capable of producing a future primrose. Covered with many protecting coats, it becomes a perfect seed. The original casket swells, hardens, is transformed into a rounded capsule or seed-vessel, opening by valves or a deftly constructed hinge. One day this seed-vessel, crowded with seeds, breaks open and completes the cycle of reproduction by dispersing them over the ground, where they sow themselves, and grow and become primrose plants in their turn, starring the gra.s.s with their lovely blossoms.[17]

Sometimes the male and female elements grow upon different plants, as in the catkins children are so fond of gathering in the spring.

"More than two thousand years ago Herodotus observed a remarkable custom in Egypt. At a certain season of the year the Egyptians went into the desert, cut off branches from the wild palms, and bringing them back to their gardens, waved them over the flowers of the date-palm. Why they performed this ceremony they did not know; but they knew that if they neglected it the date-crop would be poor or wholly lost. But the true reason is now explained. Palm-trees, like human beings, are male and female. The garden plants, the date bearers, were females, the desert plants were males; and the waving of the branches over the females meant the transference of the pollen dust from the one to the other."[18]

From these two elements, the spermatozoa, or male element, and the ova, or female element, all life, except in the lowest organisms, is produced.

You could point out how it is by this marvellous process of reproduction, not only that the world is made green and beautiful, but all animal life is fed. Corn and rice, which are only fertilized seeds, form the staple food of a large proportion of mankind; while even the animal in order to live has first to be nourished on corn or gra.s.s before it can become meat for man.

You could go on further to ill.u.s.trate the facts of reproduction by bees and ants, so familiar to children, where the drone or male bee, or the male ant, in just the same way as in the plant, fertilizes the eggs of the queen bee or ant by bringing the spermatozoa into contact with the unfertilized egg in the insect's body, when the eggs thus fertilized are laid and carefully nurtured by the working bee or ant. All children have observed the little neuter,[19] or working ant, carrying in its mandibles an egg almost as large as itself with an air of extreme hurry and absorption, to lay it in the sun till the warmth hatches it into a baby ant.

If it were further pointed out that not the male, but the female, as the mother of the species, is Nature's chief care; that among ants the male is sent into the world so imperfectly endowed that he cannot even feed himself, but is fed by his female relations, and that as soon as he has performed his function of fertilizing the queen ant, Nature apparently dismisses him with contemptuous starvation; or--to take the case of the drone or male bee--he is stung to death by the workers, it might help to modify the preposterous pretensions of the male, especially of the boy, in higher circles.