Little Essays of Love and Virtue. Havelock Ellis
for variation are greater. So it comes about that what James Hinton said half a century ago is often true to-day: "Our happy Christian homes are the real dark places of the earth."
It is evident that the problem of the relation of the child to the parent is still incompletely solved even in what we consider our highest civilisation. There is here needed an art in which those who have to exercise it can scarcely possess all the necessary skill and experience. Among trees and birds and beasts the art is surer because it is exercised unconsciously, on the foundation of a large tradition in which failure meant death. In the common procreative profusion of those forms of life the frequent death of the young was a matter of little concern, but biologically there was never any sacrifice of the offspring to the well-being of the parents. Whenever sacrifice is called for it is the parents who are sacrificed to their offspring. In our superior human civilisation, in which quantity ever tends to give place to quality, the higher value of the individual involves an effort to avoid sacrifice which sometimes proves worse than abortive. An avian philosopher would be unlikely to feel called upon to denounce nests as the dark places of the earth, and in laying down our human moral laws we have always to be aware of forgetting the fundamental biological relationship of parent and child to which all such moral laws must conform. To some would-be parents that necessity may seem hard. In such a case it is well for them to remember that there is no need to become parents and that we live in an age when it is not difficult to avoid becoming a parent. The world is not dying for lack of parents. On the contrary we have far too many of them—ignorant parents, silly parents, unwilling parents, undesirable parents—and those who aspire to the high dignity of creating the future race, let them be as few as they will—and perhaps at the present time the fewer the better—must not refuse the responsibilities of that position, its pains as well as its joys.
In our human world, as we know, the moral duties laid upon us—the duties in which, if we fail, we become outcasts in our own eyes or in those of others or in both—are of three kinds: the duties to oneself, the duties to the small circle of those we love, and the duties to the larger circle of mankind to which ultimately we belong, since out of it we proceed, and to it we owe all that we are. There are no maxims, there is only an art and a difficult art, to harmonise duties which must often conflict. We have to be true to all the motives that sanctify our lives. To that extent George Eliot's Maggie Tulliver was undoubtedly right. But the renunciation of the Self is not the routine solution of every conflict, any more than is the absolute failure to renounce. In a certain sense the duty towards the self comes before all others, because it is the condition on which duties towards others possess any significance and worth. In that sense, it is true according to the familiar saying of Shakespeare—though it was only Polonius, the man of maxims, who voiced it—that one cannot be true to others unless one is first true to oneself, and that one can know nothing of giving aught that is worthy to give unless one also knows how to take.
We see that the problem of the place of parents in life, after their function of parenthood has been adequately fulfilled, a problem which offers no difficulties among most forms of life, has been found hard to solve by Man. At some places and periods it has been considered most merciful to put them, to death; at others they have been almost or quite deified and allowed to regulate the whole lives of their descendants. Thus in New Caledonia aged parents, it is said by Mrs. Hadfield, were formerly taken up to a high mountain and left with enough food to last a few days; there was at the same time great regard for the aged, as also among the Hottentots who asked: "Can you see a parent or a relative shaking and freezing under a cold, dreary, heavy, useless old age, and not think, in pity of them, of putting an end to their misery?" It was generally the opinion of the parents themselves, but in some countries the parents have dominated and overawed their children to the time of their natural death and even beyond, up to the point of ancestor worship, as in China, where no man of any age can act for himself in the chief matters of life during his parents' life-time, and to some extent in ancient Rome, whence an influence in this direction which still exists in the laws and customs of France.[4] Both extremes have proved compatible with a beautifully human life. To steer midway between them seems to-day, however, the wisest course. There ought to be no reason, and under happy conditions there is no reason, why the relationship between parent and child, as one of mutual affection and care, should ever cease to exist. But that the relationship should continue to exist as a tie is unnatural and tends to be harmful. At a certain stage in the development of the child the physical tie with the parent is severed, and the umbilical cord cut. At a later stage in development, when puberty is attained and adolescence is feeling its way towards a complete adult maturity, the spiritual tie must be severed. It is absolutely essential that the young spirit should begin to essay its own wings. If its energy is not equal to this adventure, then it is the part of a truly loving parent to push it over the edge of the nest. Of course there are dangers and risks. But the worst dangers and risks come of the failure to adventure, of the refusal to face the tasks of the world and to assume the full function of life. All that Freud has told of the paralysing and maiming influence of infantile arrest or regression is here profitable to consider. In order, moreover, that the relationship between parents and children may retain its early beauty and love, it is essential that it shall adapt itself to adult conditions and the absence of ties so rendered necessary. Otherwise there is little likelihood of anything but friction and pain on one side or the other, and perhaps on both sides.
[4] The varying customs of different peoples in this matter are set forth by Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, Ch. XXV.
The parents have not only to train their children: it is of at least equal importance that they should train themselves. It is desirable that children, as they grow up, should be alive to this necessity, and consciously assist in the process, since they are in closer touch with a new world of activities to which their more lethargic parents are often blind and deaf. For every fresh stage in our lives we need a fresh education, and there is no stage for which so little educational preparation is made as that which follows the reproductive period. Yet at no time—especially in women, who present all the various stages of the sexual life in so emphatic a form—would education be more valuable. The great burden of reproduction, with all its absorbing responsibilities, has suddenly been lifted; at the same time the perpetually recurring rhythm of physical sex manifestations, so often disturbing in its effect, finally ceases; with that cessation, very often, after a brief period of perturbation, there is an increase both in physical and mental energy. Yet, too often, all that one can see is that a vacuum has been created, and that there is nothing to fill it. The result is that the mother—for it is most often of the mother that complaint is made—devotes her own new found energies to the never-ending task of hampering and crushing her children's developing energies. How many mothers there are who bring to our minds that ancient and almost inspired statement concerning those for whom "Satan finds some mischief still"! They are wasting, worse than wasting, energies that might be profitably applied to all sorts of social service in the world. There is nothing that is so much needed as the "maternal in politics," or in all sorts of non-political channels of social service, and none can be better fitted for such service than those who have had an actual experience of motherhood and acquired the varied knowledge that such experience should give. There are numberless other ways, besides social service, in which mothers who have passed the age of forty, providing they possess the necessary aptitudes, can more profitably apply themselves than in hampering, or pampering, their adult children. It is by wisely cultivating their activities in a larger sphere that women whose chief duties in the narrower domestic sphere are over may better ensure their own happiness and the welfare of others than either by fretting and obstructing, or by worrying over, their own children who are no longer children. It is quite true that the children may go astray even when they have ceased to be children. But the time to implant the seeds of virtue, the time to convey a knowledge of life, was when they were small. If it was done well, it only remains to exercise faith and trust. If it was done ill, nothing done later will compensate, for it is merely foolish for a mother who could not educate her children when they were small to imagine that she is able to educate them when they are big.
So it is that the problem of the attitude of the child to its parents circles round again