Little Essays of Love and Virtue. Havelock Ellis
The mother writes to her son: "I shall be fain to send for her and with me she shall but lose her time, and without she be the better occupied she shall oftentimes move me and put me to great unquietness. Remember what labour I had with your sister, therefore do your best to help her forth"; as a result it was planned to send her to a relative's house in London.
[1] This was illustrated in England when women first began to serve on juries. The pretext was frequently brought forward that there are certain kinds of cases and of evidence that do not concern women or that women ought not to hear. The pretext would have been more plausible if it had also been argued that there are certain kinds of cases and of evidence that men ought not to hear. As a matter of fact, whatever frontier there may be in these matters is not of a sexual kind. Everything that concerns men ultimately concerns women, and everything that concerns women ultimately concerns men. Neither women nor men are entitled to claim dispensation.
It is evident that in the fifteenth century in England there was a wide prevalence of this method of education, which in France, a century later, was still regarded as desirable by Montaigne. His reason for it is worth noting; children should be educated away from home, he remarks, in order to acquire hardness, for the parents will be too tender to them. "It is an opinion accepted by all that it is not right to bring up children in their parents' laps, for natural love softens and relaxes even the wisest."[2]
[2] Montaigne, Essais, Bk. I., ch. 25.
In old France indeed the conditions seem similar to those in England. The great serio-comic novel of Antoine de la Salle, Petit Jean de Saintré, shows us in detail the education and the adventures, which certainly involved a very early introduction to life, of a page in a great house in the fifteenth century. We must not take everything in this fine comedy too solemnly, but in the fourteenth century Book of the Knight of the Tour-Landry we may be sure that we have at its best the then prevailing view of the relation of a father to his tenderly loved daughters. Of harshness and rigour in the relationship it is not easy to find traces in this lengthy and elaborate book of paternal counsels. But it is clear that the father takes seriously the right of a daughter to govern herself and to decide for herself between right and wrong. It is his object, he tells his girls, "to enable them to govern themselves." In this task he assumes that they are entitled to full knowledge, and we feel that he is not instructing them in the mysteries of that knowledge; he is taking for granted, in the advice he gives and the stories he tells them, that his "young and small daughters, not, poor things, overburdened with experience," already possess the most precise knowledge of the intimate facts of life, and that he may tell them, without turning a hair, the most outrageous incidents of debauchery. Life already lies naked before them: that he assumes; he is not imparting knowledge, he is giving good counsel.[3]
[3] If the Knight went to an extreme in his assumption of his daughters' knowledge, modern fathers often go to the opposite and more foolish extreme of assuming in their daughters an ignorance that would be dangerous even if it really existed. In A Young Girl's Diary (translated from the German by Eden and Cedar Paul), a work that is highly instructive for parents, and ought to be painful for many, we find the diarist noting at the age of thirteen that she and a girl friend of about the same age overheard the father of one of them—both well brought up and carefully protected, one Catholic and the other Protestant—referring to "those innocent children." "We did laugh so, WE and innocent children!!! What our fathers really think of us; we innocent!!! At dinner we did not dare look at one another or we should have exploded." It need scarcely be added that, at the same time, they were more innocent than they knew.
It is clear that this kind of education and this attitude towards children must be regarded as the outcome of the whole mediæval method of life. In a state of society where roughness and violence, though not, as we sometimes assume, chronic, were yet always liable to be manifested, it was necessary for every man and woman to be able to face the crudest facts of the world and to be able to maintain his or her own rights against them. The education that best secured that strength and independence was the best education and it necessarily involved an element of hardness. We must go back earlier than Montaigne's day, when the conditions were becoming mitigated, to see the system working in all its vigour.
The lady of the day of the early thirteenth century has been well described by Luchaire in his scholarly study of French Society in the time of Philip Augustus. She was, he tells us, as indeed she had been in the preceding feudal centuries, often what we should nowadays call a virago, of violent temperament, with vivid passions, broken in from childhood to all physical exercises, sharing the pleasures and dangers of the knights around her. Feudal life, fertile in surprises and in risks, demanded even in women a vigorous temper of soul and body, a masculine air, and habits also that were almost virile. She accompanied her father or her husband to the chase, while in war-time, if she became a widow or if her husband was away at the Crusades, she was ready, if necessary, to direct the defences of the lordship, and in peace time she was not afraid of the longest and most dangerous pilgrimages. She might even go to the Crusades on her own account, and, if circumstances required, conduct a war to come out victoriously.
We may imagine the robust kind of education required to produce people of this quality. But as regards the precise way in which parents conducted that education, we have, as Luchaire admits, little precise knowledge. It is for the most part only indirectly, by reading between the lines, that we glean something as to what it was considered befitting to inculcate in a good household, and as what we thus learn is mostly from the writings of Churchmen it is doubtless a little one-sided. Thus Adam de Perseigne, an ecclesiastic, writes to the Countess du Perche to advise her how to live in a Christian manner; he counsels her to abstain from playing games of chance and chess, not to take pleasure in the indecent farces of actors, and to be moderate in dress. Then, as ever, preachers expressed their horror of the ruinous extravagance of women, their false hair, their rouge, and their dresses that were too long or too short. They also reprobated their love of flirtation. It was, however, in those days a young girl's recognised duty, when a knight arrived in the household, to exercise the rites of hospitality, to disarm him, give him his bath, and if necessary massage him to help him to go to sleep. It is not surprising that the young girl sometimes made love to the knight under these circumstances, nor is it surprising that he, engaged in an arduous life and trained to disdain feminine attractions, often failed to respond.
It is easy to understand how this state of things gradually became transformed into the considerably different position of parents and child we have known, which doubtless attained its climax nearly a century ago. Feudal conditions, with the large households so well adapted to act as seminaries for youth, began to decay, and as education in such seminaries must have led to frequent mischances both for youths and maidens who enjoyed the opportunities of education there, the regret for their disappearance may often have been tempered for parents. Schools, colleges, and universities began to spring up and develop for one sex, while for the other home life grew more intimate, and domestic ties closer. Montaigne's warning against the undue tenderness of a narrow family life no longer seemed reasonable, and the family became more self-centred and more enclosed. Beneath this, and more profoundly influential, there was a general softening in social respects, and a greater expansiveness of affectional relationships, in reality or in seeming, within the home, compensating, it may be, the more diffused social feeling within a group which characterised the previous period.
So was cultivated that undue tenderness, deplored by Montaigne, which we now regard as almost normal in family life, and solemnly label, if we happen to be psycho-analysts, the Oedipus-complex or the Electra-complex. Sexual love is closely related to parental love; the tender emotion, which is an intimate part of parental love, is also an intimate part of sexual love, and two emotions which are each closely related to a third emotion cannot fail to become often closely associated to each other. With a little thought we might guess beforehand, even while still in complete ignorance