EDUCATION
Next in importance to the inborn nature is the acquired nature which a person owes to his education and training; not alone to the education which is called learning, but to that development of character which has been evoked by the conditions of life.—Dr. H. Maudsley.
We are beginning to realize the responsibilities that rest on each generation of adults in respect of the life evolving around us. It is not merely the structure and texture of civilization that is affected by every passing generation, it is the intrinsic quality of the human life to follow.
We have seen how the laws of heredity largely decide the physical embodiment of the coming lives as a resultant of the reproductive action of parents whether motived by ethical principle or by unrestrained animal passion. We have now to consider the second great human factor in man’s evolution, viz. nurture or education, which depends in its highest terms upon sound knowledge and the application of that knowledge by men and women of the period. In an advanced scientific age, the reproductive forces of man will be socially controlled and guided to the creation of normal, i.e. healthy, physical life; while the whole apparatus of nurture, or the entire range of influence, playing upon childhood, will manifest a rational adaptation of means to a special end, namely, the elevation of humanity.
Adaptation necessarily becomes more difficult with the growing complexities of evolving humanity, but never has man’s intellect been stronger than to-day to grapple with difficult problems, or so furnished with the facts required in dealing with this problem of education.
The marvellous scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century and the practical uses to which these discoveries are put, have created in man a new attitude towards external nature. All Western nations partake of the scientific bent. They are interpenetrated by reverence for science, and are conscious that its method of close observation and study of nature is the direct road to material progress. This bent is influencing school education. There are few thoughtful teachers to-day who do not recognize that some hours spent at intervals in country lanes and fields, on the sea-shore, or in a farm-yard, with children free to observe according to native impulse, when followed by careful instruction concerning the objects observed, are of far more value than weeks of book-learning indoors.
In many parts of America “nature-studies” on this plan are worked into the public school curriculum.[[6]] But adaptation implies also a fuller knowledge of the rudimentary faculties which are to be scientifically nurtured, and here again America has taken the lead. In its “child-study” movement, now spreading in this country, an effort is made to apprehend nature’s processes in unfolding mental powers; and the inference is that teachers may thwart progress by traversing the true order of mental development. This clearly indicates the entrance of a scientific spirit into the field of education. It shows regard for the order of nature, willingness to be guided by knowledge of that order, and a conviction that the laws of a child’s inner being must be respected and no arbitrary compulsion exercised in bringing him into harmony with the laws of the environment.
[6]. The schools of to-day are made more and more into miniature worlds where children are taught how to live. The actual industries of the world as well as its art galleries, museums and parks are being utilized as part of public school equipment. The children are taken to the shops, the markets, the gardens, etc. The New Spirit of Education, by Arthur Henry, Munsey’s Magazine, 1902.
A child’s capacities, however, are not centred in his intellect. On the passional side of his being, his spontaneous impulses of desire, fear, joy, grief, love, hatred, jealousy, etc., have to be studied, and educative forces found for their guidance and control. Moreover, the ultimate aim is not his subjection to fixed rules of life, but the establishment within the heart of the child of a supreme rule over all his passions. And again, every child has characteristics indicative of the course of development undergone by the special race to which he belongs. The geographical position and primitive industry of that race, its conquests and failures in struggling upwards from savagery to a measure of civilization—all have left an impress in specific effects.
In respect of our formal methods of giving instruction there is much that is open to discussion; but the points usually raised are the best means of teaching grammar, history, geography, arithmetic, and so forth, not the far more important question of how best to achieve an all-round development in face of the organic unity and marvellous multiplicity of qualities in the child of a civilized race. Great improvement has taken place in every branch of school teaching both as regards the knowledge of teachers and the methods they adopt in imparting the knowledge; nevertheless, these improvements are minor matters as compared with the general question before us.
During the rise and progress of our industrial system based on individualism, the constant fluctuations of trade, the competing of machinery against human labour, the perpetual danger of getting thrown out of work, the utter failure of thrift as any protection from intermittent poverty—have been factors eminently calculated to produce a highly nervous type of humanity. Children of that type may happily prove bright and eager amid wretched surroundings, but it were folly to expect them to show any impulse towards a high standard of living, any outlook beyond the immediate present, or any inherent check upon action socially immoral.
On the other hand, our city workers have sprung mainly from an agricultural class whose scattered families presented the defects of a low order of life reared in isolation. Many of these defects have been counteracted by segregation within towns, however unfavourable in other directions that may have proved. The close proximity of beings affected by the same fateful conditions, the actual sorrowing and rejoicing together have expanded the emotional nature and engendered true sympathy. Professor Huxley once said, “It is futile to expect a hungry and squalid population to be anything but violent and gross.” Yet we have an immense population of workers, often hungry, and at all times environed more or less by squalor, whose average character is not violent and gross, but distinctly humane.
Turning from the masses to the classes we find some points of difference between the rich and the poor, viz. differences following from the diverse industrial conditions. Leisure, as commanded by the rich, has made mental development possible wherever desire prompted intellectual effort, and the magnificent record of last century’s achievements in discovery of truth, acquisition of knowledge, and promotion of artistic skill, is a gain to the world at large—a gain made possible by accumulation of wealth unequally distributed. But intellectual faculty has frequently been depraved through its devotion to wealth production. The true aims of life are lost sight of by chiefs of industry whose emotional nature has hardened under the daily spectacle of struggling fellow-beings, on whose labour their fortunes are built up. The dignity of useful labour has had no vogue in general education. An opposite principle—that the highest dignity consists in being served by others and in possessing the means of constraining and exploiting the labour of others, is impressed on the children of our classes by the whole play of circumstance around them. The property-sense has become unduly developed, and a selfish mammon-worship holds the place which an altruistic public spirit ought to hold in the inner life of a civilized people. It is true that a showy charity—a patronage by the rich of the poor—is everywhere present throughout society, but that which creates and supports it is a sentiment wholly different from the simple kindness of the poor to the poor. It is without the essential features of that charity that “vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, seeketh not her own ... thinketh no evil.”
Now the scientific spirit of to-day, in observing the uncontrolled play of middle-class children, has discovered how great is their interest and joy in the spontaneous exercise of the faculty of make-believe. Costly toys will readily be thrown aside to take part in a game of “pretended” housekeeping or shopkeeping, or acting the part of father, mother, nursemaid, or cook. And herein there lies, says one of our advanced teachers, “a powerful hint how to keep children’s attention alive while cultivating to the utmost their imaginative, observing, constructive and correlating faculties. We must dramatize our school education and connect school ideally with real life.” (Mr. Howard Swan; his introductory lecture at the opening of Bedford Park School.)
But the “powerful hint” goes deeper. It points to an instinct or a deeply implanted desire and capacity for actual work on the part of children of a practical race. To play at work is pleasurable, to do work more pleasurable still. Yet in blindness to the fact that in drawing out into action every rudimentary faculty favourable to happy life lies the true path of education or an all-round development, society has shut off middle and upper-class children from the sight and hearing of household labour. In nurseries, amid artificial toys, their daily routine is to seek amusement self-centred; and as in these days of small rather than large families, nursery children are often solitary, there is a systematic repression both of natural activities and infolded natural emotions. The same repressions are carried forward into school life. Dramatized teaching may connect school ideally with real life, but it cannot satisfy a child’s cravings for the real, and the companionship of children of similar age will never call out the complex forces of a many-sided emotional nature. It is not playing at life that is required for education, it is the sharing of life’s duties of service, and constant opportunity given for the practice of varied humanities.
The children of our superior workers may perchance fare better if the mother is a capable woman, and the home not overcrowded. The lighter parts of her work are shared by the little ones, and to help mother in sweeping and dusting, washing cups and saucers, and placing them neatly in the cupboard, etc., are not only interesting and useful occupations, they are educative, for they imply a simultaneous training of the eye, the fingers, the mental faculties and the heart. But overcrowding, the miserable housing of the poor, and the early age at which infant school-life begins, makes such home-training difficult even to the best of mothers, while to the upper classes—frost-bound in artificial domestic customs, all home-training seems impossible.
Nothing, however, should deter a student of evolution from proclaiming that the home-life of our people will largely decide the nation’s future. Unless the great problem of the housing of the poor is rightly solved, and unless educated women become roused to the necessity of a changed home-life in the interests of their children, and set themselves voluntarily to the task of domestic reform within their own circle, the social state can never be greatly improved.
All children born in a civilized nation have a right to education. That this principle has been fully acknowledged is evidenced by our Educational Acts and the innumerable Board Schools that stud the country. But as long as population among the masses rises without check, the highest aim of education, viz. the development and elevation of individual character must, as regards their children, remain in abeyance. The only practicable line of action is to gather them together into large schools, and while bestowing general instruction in reading, writing, arithmetic, etc., to subject them to some hours of systematic guidance and control. This signifies obedience to rule and order—a useful discipline to juveniles of Bohemian nature, and it is the only method of restraining tendencies to licence, without rousing a spirit of revolt. Fresh air, wholesome food, ample bathing, and the play of sunlight and colour upon nerves of sensation—these stimulate bodily health, while music, and the personal influence of high-minded teachers, throw into vibration finer nerves of sensibility, and elevate the mental and moral tone. But beyond this point, large schools are incapable of scientific adaptation to the needs of a modern education in a rapidly socializing community.
It was in the year 1837 that there issued from the press a work on education written by Isaac Taylor, who there lays down this proposition: “If large schools were granted to be generally better adapted to the practical ends of education than private instruction, the welfare of society on the whole demands also the other method. The school-bred man is of one sort, the home-bred man of another—the community has need of both. Hence no tyranny of fashion is more to be resisted than such as would render a public education compulsory and universal.”[[7]] Notwithstanding this warning, the tyranny of fashion is carrying us yearly more and more into the production of school-bred women, as well as school-bred men. Our girls’ high schools are replicas of our boys’ public schools, and society suffers still more from the loss of the home-bred woman than the home-bred man.
[7]. Home Education, p. 22.
Again, the late Professor D’Arcy W. Thompson, in his charmingly-written Day-dreams of a Schoolmaster, gives us the fruits of a ripe experience gained during twelve years of boyhood in a large public school, and many years of manhood as teacher of classics in schools and university. His boyhood, he tells us, was dreary because of the monotonous routine. He was “fed on dull books, and the manuals were in many cases mere tramways to pedantry. His mental training was a continuous sensation of obstruction and pain. His spiritual parts were furrowed.” (Observe, there were no nature-studies at that period.) The incitement to effort was the cane or the tawse, and flogging, he believes, never instils courage, it has transformed many a boy into a sneak. “Let us discard punishment,” says the Professor, “and endeavour to make our pupils love work.” The whole educational system in his day was mechanical and artificial, yet when he strove to initiate new methods the boys were withdrawn from his charge. Parents understood little of true education. They were slaves to custom. “How is it,” he asks, “that fathers with a personal experience like my own send their boys to school?” He answers: “They say to themselves, ‘Depend upon it if there were no virtue in birching and caning, in Latin verses and Greek what-you-may-call-’ems, they would not have held their ground so long amongst a practical people like ourselves!’ So Johnnie is sent to the town grammar school and the great time-honoured gerund-stone turns as before, and will turn to the last syllable of recorded time.” For the gerund-stone he would substitute an easy vivâ voce conversational method of instruction in all elementary classes, and throughout the school; for coercion, the more than hydraulic pressure of a persistent, continuous gentleness.
Thirty years before the Day-dreams was published, one writer at least was open-eyed to the defects of school education. He charged parents with adopting the new boarding-school system because it spared them some responsibility, and children were apt to be teasing and importunate. “Boys advance at school quickly,” he said, “in knowledge of the auxiliary verbs, the mysteries of syntax and the stories of gods and goddesses; but I am confident that the reason why women generally are so much better disposed than men is this: they live domestically and familiarly. They are penetrated with the home-spirit, they are imbued with all its influences, their memory is not fed to plethora while the heart is left to waste and perish. No daughter of mine shall ever be sent to school; at home the heart, wherein are the issues of all good, develops itself from day to day. There children ripen in their affections. There they learn their humanities, not in the academic sense, but in the natural and true one.”[[8]]
[8]. Self-Formation, by Capel Lofft, vol. 1, p. 42.
Where, alas! do we find to-day the daughters of the classes who are not sent to school? Our girls’ high schools overflow; and that, not by the action of State control, but by the voluntarily assumed yoke and tyranny of fashion. Girls emerging from these schools are not “so much better disposed than men.” They are certainly not domesticated and imbued with a home-spirit. They may have gained in refinement—even to fastidiousness! and in the knowledge of Latin and Greek, or what is called the higher culture, but they are characterized generally by a spirit of pleasure-seeking. They become, in many cases, what has aptly been called “nonsense women, prepared only to lead butterfly lives.”
Now, parents who shirk the responsibility and effort entailed in shaping their children’s characters to the best of their ability can only expect their own self-indulgence to become intensified in the lives of their children. Let me not, however, be here misunderstood. The movement for the higher education of women is a step forward in civilization. Many women are born with great mental capacity, and without the specific intellectual culture now obtainable the world would lose much, while the nonexercise of such native powers creates inward misery. But culture, according to Matthew Arnold, implies the study of perfection, and the late Professor Huxley’s ideal is expressed as follows:—“That man has had a liberal education who has been so trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, and does with ease and pleasure all the work that as a mechanism it is capable of; whose intellect is clear, with all its parts of equal strength and in smooth working order; whose mind is stored with a knowledge of the great and fundamental truths of Nature and of the laws of her operations; one who—no stunted ascetic—is full of life and fire, but whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience; who has learnt to love all beauty, to hate all vileness, and to respect others as himself. Such an one and no other has had a liberal education, for he is as completely as man can be in harmony with nature.” (An Address at South London Working Men’s College, January, 1869.)
Childhood is characterized by sensational activity. The reflective and reasoning powers lie comparatively dormant. Mobile sensibility is the distinguishing feature of childhood, and parents and teachers taking advantage of the law of nature whereby pleasurable sensation stimulates growth should train children step by step to the enjoyment of useful activities, to physical and manual dexterity; to simple efforts in pursuit of knowledge; to infantile firmness in discharge of duty; to unconstrained dignity in defence of the right, and sympathetic jealousy over the rights of others; to gentleness towards all mankind; to admiration of all that is noble in character, to veneration of age, experience and virtue; and to the love of truth and justice and personal devotion to both. These are the qualities of human nature that make for real civilization; and further progress requires their steady development in the race.
Now, these qualities cannot be evoked by school methods nor even by the easy vivâ voce conversational instruction proposed by Professor Thompson. An indispensable factor in the process is a rich, full, domestic environment, an atmosphere suffused with affection and vibrating with varied activities—a home-life, in short, where the delicate qualities of noble character will not be commanded to come forth, but will come of themselves through the play of circumstance, i.e. by the action of example and gentle sympathetic co-operation.
In upper-class houses, even where wealth and luxury abound, there are none of the diverse and liberal domestic surroundings conducive to early training. The first essential is that the nurseries be freed from all physical, mental and moral forces that belong to a comparatively primitive stage of evolution. Nurses drawn from the masses—however carefully selected—are incompetent by nurture for training infants in the best way. The authority they have known has been archaic, and elements of barbarism have been near them from babyhood, while education as yet has done little to raise their intelligence to the plane of civilized thought. Hence an ordinary nurse, of kindly and affectionate disposition, may seriously misdirect the budding conscience of a babe, as I have shown in my chapters on Emotional Life.
To women of great attainments and culture the training of infancy properly belongs, and that training in the homes of the classes will be of the highest value to the State. The problem of how to create in childhood a ready obedience to authority without jarring the nerves, or checking freedom unnecessarily, is a very difficult one. It requires a cultured intelligence to grasp the problem and carry out the true method of its solution. The aim in the training of infancy is to develop superior types of men and women by evoking the higher qualities of human nature in a sphere of comparative liberty. A babe in the nursery, let us say, has had his attention caught by the flames leaping up in the well-guarded grate. He creeps towards them and pushes his fingers through the wires of the guard. The educated nurse gently lifts him to a safe distance, but he starts creeping again to the fire. Now there are in the nursery some baskets of different size and depth, all softly lined and weighted. Baby is put into one of these to amuse himself with a toy until the fascinating flames are forgotten.
An older child flings her ball in another child’s face. Nurse tells her the ball might hurt, but on persistence in the selfish amusement she, too, is firmly placed in a larger basket or nursery prison, and must stay there till the impulse to be disobedient has passed off; for the principle which guides nurse in the training of these infants is this: liberty abused must be abridged.
After a few such experiences the little ones feel that a network is around them—a network of authority never physically painful and that has no connection with anger.
As the reasoning powers develop they feel that liberty is theirs in the straight course of obedience to authority, and later they find that this authority represents a knowledge of the laws of nature, for when in garden and field they join in the nature-study lessons, they discover that if plants creep into unfavourable conditions, they languish; if animals run counter to laws of health, they suffer and die.
From nursery to home-training the infants pass forward. Their nerves have never been irritated by harshness, nor their affections repressed, and their impulses to unhurtful activities are of normal strength. In the more advanced training now given, the aim is no longer to impress automatically, but rationally to guide the growing intelligence. Blind obedience is not required, but every command is explained and related to the facts of happy and healthful life. At this point a discriminating judgment is profoundly necessary, and the child should be studied individually, for to each there comes the right moment when self-rule is possible, and unless outward restraints are wisely withdrawn that power of self-rule may be injured.
The human types to be desired are not slavish, but independent beings, capable of noble service to God and man; and choosing to do right because they know true happiness lies that way.
At sixteen or upwards the young thus trained may safely leave home for high school or university, in pursuit of the special instruction required for their future career. An education that has laid the foundation of noble character, comes to no abrupt conclusion. The love of truth when firmly implanted prompts to the acquisition of new knowledge, and knowledge is boundless as the universe. Fields of science become the happy hunting-ground of minds that are markedly intellectual, and although self-culture supersedes formal instruction, and original research supersedes the following of authority, education moves continuously and steadily forward.
“The environment,” says Clifford Harrison, “that lies open to men rationally developed is as vast as the ideal that lies before them. This environment is not a spiritual matter merely; not of the soul alone, but of body, mind, soul and spirit; not of heaven only, but of earth as well; not of eternity and a beyond, but of time and here.”
PART VI
CONDITIONS IN AID OF HAPPY LIFE IN A DEVELOPING CIVILIZATION
CHAPTER I
THE NEEDS OF ADOLESCENCE
The woman’s cause is man’s: they rise or sink
Together, dwarf’d, or godlike, bond or free:
· · · · ·
If she be small, slight-natured, miserable,
How shall men grow?
—Tennyson.
Adolescence is a critical period in the life of an individual. At that period, character, speaking generally, fully manifests, and the life is decided for good or evil. What advanced ethics requires is that each adult generation should deliberately examine its inheritance from the previous, less conscious, less informed epoch, in order to detect and destroy every social snare that entangles unwary feet in adolescence; and to devise the best methods of bringing to the young the wisdom and sympathy of their seniors.
In the autobiography of the late Anthony Trollope (vol. 1, p. 69), some facts of his own adolescence are stated in a spirit as generous as it is candid. His fate, like that of thousands of young men in his day, and in the present day, was to live at that critical time in a town, surrounded by all the attractions that a keen competitive commercialism has created to supplement profits—though at the expense of young men’s money and morals—and with no private retreat save a solitary lodging, a shelter, but in no sense a home. “No allurement to decent respectability,” he says, “came in my way.” For the spending of his evenings, the choice lay between what he calls “questionable resorts” and sitting alone reading or drinking tea. “There was no house in which I could habitually see a lady’s face and hear a lady’s voice, and in these circumstances the temptations of loose life will almost certainly prevail with a young man; at any rate they prevailed with me.”[[9]] Similar evidence may be found in a realistic, powerful novel, Jude the Obscure. Mr. Thomas Hardy there depicts the tragedy of unfulfilled aims, the shipwreck of what might have been a noble life; and the cause of shipwreck is pointed out in the words of the dying Jude: “My impulses and affections were too strong ... a man without advantages should be as cold-blooded as a fish and as selfish as a pig to have a really good chance of being one of his country’s worthies.” Now, affection and the impulse to love purely can never be too strong for the interests of general evolution, therefore we are entitled to assume that the environment is at fault. The fact that thousands of young men deprived of healthy home-life succumb to the temptations of city-life, condemns our industrial competition. Public consciousness has not grasped the needs and dangers of adolescence, and the slowly evolving community-conscience disregards the terrible penalty paid in general degradation for retaining a system of industry that produces among other evils “questionable resorts where young men see life in false, delusive colours.” These and all other injurious outcomes of our tragic struggle for the necessaries and amenities of life, will persist until the individualistic system of industry disappears, i.e. is superseded by a rational collectivist system. Standing as we do on the verge of conscious evolution, that time is not yet, but something may be done by parents and guardians of youth to counteract the evils of a transitional epoch.
[9]. More recently still the world has been afforded a glance into the inner history of a life destined to noble uses and high achievements. In the meridian of his fame Professor Huxley wrote thus to Charles Kingsley: “Kicked into the world a boy without guide or training, or with worse than none, I confess to my shame that few men have drunk deeper of all kinds of sin than I. Happily my course was arrested in time—before I had earned absolute destruction—and for long years I have been slowly and painfully climbing, with many a fall, towards better things.”—Life of Professor Huxley, vol. 1, p. 220.
Progress in an evolving society largely depends upon true union, i.e. mental, emotional and spiritual union of the sexes. But a careful examination of the prominent movements in society, and especially the various divisions of the woman’s emancipation movement, reveals that all are defective through inattention to this fundamental need. They do not aim at social conditions in which solidarity of heart and soul will naturally ensue.
The woman movement is the issue in great measure of pent-up forces of youth in the female sex of the upper classes. It is less the revolt of labour against poverty, injustice, and overtaxed strength, than a revolt from enforced idleness on the part of the victims of wealth. The position is graphically put before us by the late Charles Reade in his amusing tale The Woman Hater.
Fanny Dover, a common enough type of upper-class femininity, appears to the woman-hater a mere shallow-minded, selfish coquette, till suddenly at an unexpected emergency she assumes new and very different colours. “How is this?” he exclaims. “You were always a bright girl and no fool, but not exactly what humdrum people call good ... you are not offended?” “The idea,” says Fanny, “why I have publicly denounced goodness again and again.” “Yes, and yet you turn out as good as gold!... I have watched you; you are all over the house to serve two suffering women. You are cook, housemaid, nurse and friend to both of them. In an interval of your time so creditably employed you cheer me up with your bright little face and give me wise advice! Explain the phenomenon.” “My dear Harrington, if you cannot read so shallow a character as I am, how will you get on with those ladies upstairs ... but there, I will have pity on you. You shall understand one woman before you die ... give me a cigarette.... What women love and can’t do without if they are young and spirited, is excitement. I am one who pines for it. Society is so constructed that to get excitement you must be naughty. Waltzing ... flirting, etc., are excitement, ... dining en famille, going to bed at ten, etc., are stagnation; good girls mean stagnant girls; I hate and despise these tame little wretches; I never was one and never will be. But look here, we have two ladies in love with one villain—that is exciting. One gets nearly killed in the house—that is gloriously exciting; the other is broken-hearted. If I were to be a bad girl and say: ‘It is not my business; I will leave them to themselves and go my little mill-round of selfishness as before, why what a fool I must be! I should lose excitement. Instead of that I run and get things for the Klosking—excitement. I cook for her and nurse her and sit up half the night—excitement. Then I run to Zoe and do my best for her or get snubbed—excitement. Then I sit at the head of your table and order you—excitement. Oh! it is lovely.’ ‘Shall you be sorry when they both get well and routine re-commences?’ Of course I shall; that is the sort of good girl I am.”
This youthful exuberance or restlessness is favourable to social advance, and the woman movement has accomplished good service in claiming and turning it to useful account. But here, as in all partial reforms, new evils dog the footsteps of the new good effected. To-day we have numerous city workers of the female as well as the male sex, compelled by the exigencies of their labour to live far apart from their nearest and dearest, in solitary lodgings like Anthony Trollope, or at best in the make-believe homes limited to inmates of one sex. I do not infer that these girls fall under any special temptations to licence, but, deprived as they are of the immediate influences of early associations and the subtle tendernesses of home-life, I hold it impossible that their emotional human nature should not suffer loss. Their need for the happy and useful exercise of activities which were running into mischievous courses, is satisfactorily met, but at the expense of domestic traits, and these are precisely what lie at the root of human fellowship—that union of heart and soul which is indispensable to true progress.
Some social reformers regard the higher education of women movement as a potent factor in uniting men and women through the mutual interests of cultured thought. A knowledge, however, of Greek, Latin, the classics, etc., accomplishes little so long as the sexes are not educated together, and this form of culture has no direct bearing on elevation of character and development of the emotional side of human nature. Cricket, golf, and all our fashionable out-door sports have done more, in creating mutual interests and furthering progress by securing for girls greater social freedom than was previously theirs, and Mr. H. W. Massingham spoke truly when he said: “No special complications have followed in any marked degree the vast extension that has taken place in the field of girls’ free companionship with men. Yet what would our fathers have thought of it?”[[10]] But sports are for the hours of leisure, and ample leisure belongs only to the idle or to a minor section of female workers. Meanwhile we have thousands of young women, of different calibre to Fanny Dover, whose noblest attribute, viz. their innate capacity for all the finer vibrations of social feeling, is never called into play.
[10]. Ethical World, June, 1900.
Amid all the kaleidoscopic scenes of our transition period, a new figure of womanhood has undoubtedly appeared—a type not characterized by frivolity or love of excitement, but by strenuousness, sincerity, refinement, moral courage, a will-force in short, that breaking through selfish limitations seeks nobler spheres of action. This will-force is subject to constant recoil. It is thrown back on itself by adverse conditions of society, of industry, of private individual life.
In Jude the Obscure this new type of woman is skilfully sketched. Susan Bridehead is a creature of high aspiration, rich inward resources and manifold imperfections. She has foibles and feminine vanities, but the human nature is essentially large-minded, generous, truthful. “I did not flirt,” she says to Jude, “but a craving to attract and captivate, regardless of the injury it might do, was in me ... my liking for you is not as some women’s perhaps, but it is a delight in being with you of a supremely delicate kind ... I did want and long to ennoble some man to high aims.” Here we have love transferred from the lower reaches of pure sensation to a higher level of tender sentiment, and energized from the intellectual plane. This denotes a slow evolution of ages during which all the grossness, i.e. the coarser vibrations of primitive love, are transmuted into the finer vibrations of sympathetic, altruistic feeling.
It is important to see clearly the distinction between primitive and modern love, in order that no confusion may arise in contemplating the ideal social life that scientific meliorism forecasts. The intrinsic quality of primitive love is illustrated in Mrs. Bishop’s description of her favourite horse’s attachment. “I am to him an embodiment of melons, cucumbers, grapes, pears, peaches, biscuits and sugar, with a good deal of petting and ear-rubbing thrown in!” Human attachments based on these pleasurable sensations or simple animal appetites and passions, form the main soldering ingredients in humanity’s mass; but love’s development has marched concurrently with true civilization, and to men and women in the van of civilization one chief cause of misery to-day is repression of the normal, healthy impulse to pure and unselfish love.
Unselfishness is the distinguishing feature of higher forms of love, and an unselfishness that had its origin not in conjugal union but in motherhood. Mr. Finck, in his study of love’s evolution, puts it thus: “The helpless infant could not survive without a mother’s self-sacrificing care, hence there was an important use for womanly sympathy which caused it to survive and grow while man immersed in wars and struggles remained hard of heart and knew not tenderness.... Selfishness in a man is perhaps less offensive because competition and the struggle for existence necessarily foster it.” (Henry Finck’s Primitive Love, pp. 160–161.) The social need for a specialized unselfishness has tended to differentiate the sexes emotionally, and in process of building up the entire structure of social life the pressure of outward forces has carried this differentiation further. I am not then traversing the natural laws of evolution when I assume that all questions relating to women are at this date pre-eminently important.
The population problem, as I have shown, can only be solved through a diminution of the birth-rate, and throughout the British nation the family group is breaking up. It is disintegrating especially in the upper and middle classes.
The movement towards industrial socialism is the outcome of masculine thought and energy. Man is its mainspring, although many thoughtful women take part in it. Conversely, the house-ruler, woman, must be the mainspring of a movement towards domestic socialism, although no success will accrue without the steadfast aid and co-operation of man. That some women are already fitted to begin this great work is evident from much of our female public service. Let me quote some words recently spoken of lady-workers by a male critic, Mr. H. W. Massingham: “They have moral courage and refinement. They do not tire more easily than men; they do not shirk the detail work; they take to drudgery.” Pioneers of the new movement must be religious in the best sense, i.e. their philosophy must bring into touch the worlds seen and unseen, inspiring action conducive to personal and universal happiness.
The task before them is of double intent, viz. of immediate utility and of far-reaching benefit. It will attract inferior natures as well as the superior, for a well-organized modern home will present more convenience, comforts and embellishments than the family homes of the past or present, and at smaller expense. Herein a certain danger lurks. Pioneers will have to guard against dropping out of the enterprise its supreme purpose and main evolutional value, viz. the raising humanity on to higher levels of happiness. There is no other policy to this end than that of domestically uniting the sexes from infancy, in order that in the idealistic period of adolescence soul may meet soul with fearless unreserve and young men and women realize by experience that in the pure realms of thought and feeling the closest union is possible. It is this union manifesting in dual sympathy that will become the liberating force of the world, and in it and through it woman’s emancipation will be complete.
Woman is not undevelopt man
But diverse ...
Yet in the long years liker must they grow;
The man be more of woman, she of man;
He gain in sweetness and in moral height,
She mental breadth, nor fail in child-ward care
Till at the last she set herself to man,
Like perfect music unto noble words;
And so these twain upon the skirts of time,
Sit side by side ...
Dispensing harvest, sowing the To-be,
Self-reverent each and reverencing each
Distinct in individualities,
But like each other ev’n as those who love.
Then comes the statelier Eden back to men;
· · · · ·
Then springs the crowning race of humankind,
May these things be!
The Princess.—Tennyson.
CHAPTER II
DOMESTIC REFORM
The animating spring of all improvement in individuals and in societies is not the knowledge of the actual but the conception of the possible.—H. Martineau.
How shall the new era be inaugurated? By ceasing to strive for self and family; by thinking of both only as instruments of the common weal.—Prof. A. W. Bickerton.
The model family home of the British middle class half a century ago comprised a father and mother of sound constitution and domestic habits with a group of children of both sexes—a group large enough to supply companionship to one another, and a family income sufficient for comfortable maintenance and recreation, occasional travel and the free exercise of hospitality. If homes of this type were widely and firmly established throughout the land they might be competent to breed, nurture and send forth into the world a good average material of human life for repairing waste and building up the British nation. But in the present epoch such homes are exceedingly rare, and the trend of social forces and modern ideas alike make for their becoming still rarer.
To speak only of the more obvious factors of change, State action in reference to the education of the young lifts children of the masses at almost an infantile age out of the effective control of family life, and in our centres of national industry economic forces bring about a hasty pairing and breeding, with an abrupt scattering of the brood that resembles the nesting of birds rather than the home-making of rational beings; while so immature are the heads of these evanescent family homes that the break-up is by no means an unmitigated evil.
Among the classes, forces of a higher, more penetrative order are working similarly. Prudence is acting towards the restraint of population in a manner that narrows the basis of family groups and shortens the natural term of their existence; and under a new impulse of right reason and high resolve the educated section of the female sex is deliberately forsaking the domestic hearth to share the world’s labour with man. These concurrent movements in society are destroying family life on the old lines, and by the homes of the present, individual needs are met only temporarily and provisionally.
One conspicuous result is an ever-increasing discomfort to the aged. They are stranded in homes become empty, or wander abroad seeking touch with their kind. Distinctly are they shunted off the rails of busy life before a lowered vitality prompts to inertia. The British “Philistine” lacks sentiment. Old age makes no special appeal to him, and he is content to bestow on relatives no longer young a brief moment of his precious time, a fragment of his tenderness. At an earlier stage of our social evolution the mature in years were centres of a rich, full, domestic life, and pivots on which turned the wider social life encircling it. At the present stage of that evolution the young and the comparatively young focus and absorb the whole sunshine of life, while the guardians of their infancy pass into declining years enveloped in gloom.
This premature effacement entails on society a double loss—first, the loss interiorly of that individual happiness which intensifies and raises the tide of life; second, the loss of activities guided by and based upon mellow experience.
Society is too materialistic to recognize that human beings physically on the down-grade may be psychically on the up-grade, and pre-eminently fitted to inspire and promote progress. But in thinking of latent possibilities realizable in a better environment we are bound not to judge by average humanity, but by the superior types of the preceding generation. The old age of W. E. Gladstone, Harriet Martineau, Mary Somerville, and others was neither gloomy nor unproductive. The last-mentioned at the age of eighty-one turned her attention to writing a book on microscopic science. “I seemed,” she says, “to resume the perseverance and energy of my youth. I began it with courage, though I did not think I could live to finish it.” She did, however, finish it, and lived to the age of ninety-two, maintaining at all times her habits of study and a full social intercourse with many friends. (From Personal Recollections, by her Daughter.)
It is not intellectual powers only that are running to waste. Under the double pressure of competition in trade and competition in the labour market, good manual workers are found ineffective and dismissed at an earlier age than formerly.
An immense mass of our industrial population is forced by circumstance into the workhouse when still comparatively active, and life there is but a gloomy vacant existence—a complete suppression of the best faculties of body and mind.
Comparing the past with the present in respect of the old age of workers, we are told by Professor Thorold Rodgers that village homes were centres of multifarious occupations, in which naturally the aged, if able, would take part. And in towns, although streets were narrow, at the rear of the houses there were gardens where old and young together spent the long summer evenings. “Not long ago,” says the American Social Science Committee Report of 1878, “the farm found constant employment for the men of the family—the women had abundant employment in the home, there was carding, spinning, weaving.” “And the neverending labour of our grandmothers must not be forgotten, who with nimble needle knit our stockings and mittens. The knitting-needle was in as constant play as their tongues, whose music only ceased under the power of sleep.... Now no more does the knitting-needle keep time to the music of their tongues, for the knitting-machine in the hands of one little girl will do more work than fifty grandmothers. Labour-saving machinery has broken up and destroyed our whole system of household and family manufacture, when all took part in the labour and shared in the product to the comfort of all.”
The system that has superseded that of “household and family manufacture” has been adverse to the aged from the first, and neglect of old age has become a wrong-doing that eats like a canker into our social life.
As Professor Bickerton well remarks: “Unhappiness is the disease of social life, and misery is an indication that there is something wrong with our social system. Just as it is unreasonable to expect bodily health under insanitary conditions, so we cannot look for social concord and joy unless mankind be placed in circumstances that suit his social nature. Man has been considered too exclusively as a producing machine with subsidiary mental capacity, whereas he is essentially a moral being with deep emotions and universal sympathies. The cure for the uncleanliness of society is not difficult. The plans for the edifice of human life are obtainable. What are the plans? Those laws of nature which are concerned in the development of mankind. What is the cure? Such understanding of the principles of evolution and such consonant action as shall restore to the race an environment befitting its humanity.” (The Romance of the Earth.)
Nevertheless, we cannot return to a system of household and family manufacture. To relinquish mechanical aids to production would be contrary to, not consonant with, evolution. A civilized race outgrows its primitive conditions of life and industry—new wine must be put into new bottles.
The immediate step of advance as regards manual labour is this—in our centres of local administration there should be organized municipal employment with shortened hours for elderly people, the wage to be supplemented by pensions ample enough to secure for these workers an honourable social standing instead of a pauper’s dole. But a closer adaptation to humanity’s needs may be quickly achieved by the classes where poverty plays a less part in the social phenomena. Of present conditions Mr. Escott, in his England, its People, Polity and Pursuits, thus speaks: “The nation is only an aggregate of households. Modern society is possessed by a nomadic spirit which is the sure destroyer of home ties. The English aristocracy flit from mansion to mansion during the country-house season; they know no peace during the London season. Existence for the wealthy is one unending whirl of excitement, admitting small opportunity for the cultivation of the domestic affections. The claims of society have continually acquired precedence of the duties of home.”
In the middle class, however, wedged in between the rich and the poor, the greatest factor of change is the servant difficulty, and this difficulty we must glance at in its causal relations.
Civilized communities divide broadly into two parts—productive units whose labour supplies what is needful for existence, and unproductive units whose existence depends on the labour of others. The latter have been correctly termed “parasites.” M. Jean Massart explains in his scientific scrutiny of social phenomena,[[11]] that during the period of our industrial development a force of integration has gradually strengthened the main body of the social organism, giving it power to resist in some degree the burden of parasitism. Consequently arbitrary authority and slavish subserviency have abated, and two movements affecting family life in the middle class are discernible—first, there is an increasing revolt from domestic service as a form of labour directly opposed to the spirit of independence that is growing in workers and to the force of integration which by ranging them shoulder to shoulder is preparing them for a new form of industrial life; second, sons of the aristocracy and daughters of the middle class are joining the ranks of producers with some sense of the dignity of labour and the degradation of a purely parasitic existence. Social parasitism is not organic. It is an extraneous condition induced in a society developing its civilization. No man is necessarily a parasite; he acquires the character in the course of his life history, and happily the young are refusing to acquire it.
[11]. Parasitism, Organic and Social, p. 121.
Observe, then, it is not in one or two sections of our community life, but in all sections that diverse causes are producing one uniform result—the break-up of the family home; and behind all the more superficial causes there is working a profound factor of change in the centripetal or constructive and the centrifugal or destructive forces of nature. Whilst the latter destroys old forms, the former prepares for the new form—prepares, not only by an integration of workers, but by a fresh inspiration of love and desire for work. Hence women and men endowed with reason, knowledge and practical skill may bring the life of their own immediate circle into express and positive line with this constructive, profoundly evolutional, movement.
Domestic reform implies the relinquishment of that whole system of household labour that requires the combination of a subject with a parasitic class. Co-operation among equals takes the place of masterful authority and slavish subjection, and heavy labour will be relieved by scientific appliance. Labour-saving contrivances in family homes hardly exist. There has been little spur to invention on these lines. But, as in industrial fields, a saving of money, material and labour by the use of machinery has followed the introduction of organized co-operation, so, doubtlessly, a similar process will follow the gradual adoption of organized co-operation within the home. This is not the solution of the servant problem merely. It has a far wider significance. Many educated women who are now seeking useful work and economic independence outside of home-life will find these within the domestic circle, and further will find that it is possible to combine such necessary conditions of dignified life with fulfilment of duty alike to the aged and to the young.
Pioneers who aim at social solidarity must in practice recognize labour as the indispensable basis of social life and social institutions. All methods of wage-payment dependent on industrial competition will be repudiated for a system that acknowledges every form of useful work as entitling the worker to financial independence; and in the emotional sphere, with its possibilities of inner union and solidarity, who can measure the impetus towards the desired goal that will be given by the setting of the solitary in families and the re-gathering of the old into the bosom of a rich, full, domestic life.
Let us suppose that from fifteen to twenty groups—they may be families or groups of friends—combine and pass out from their numerous separate houses into one large commodious dwelling built for them or bought and adapted to their purpose. The bedrooms are furnished on the continental plan with accommodation for writing, reading, solitary study, or rest by day, and all the latest improvements in lighting, heating and ventilating, etc. By the rules of the house—except for cleaning—no one enters these rooms uninvited by the inmate, who has there at all times, if wished, perfect privacy and the most thorough personal comfort. Two eating apartments are placed contiguous to the kitchens, and by taking advantage of every invention to facilitate cooking and serving, the lady-cooks and attendants may place prepared food on the table and sit down to partake of it with their friends. One wing of the house is set apart for nurseries and nursery training, another for school teaching, inclusive of indoor kindergarten; a music-room well-deafened enables the musical to practise many instruments without jarring the nerves of others; a playroom for the young and a recreation-room set apart for whist and chess, etc., a billiard room, and if desired, a smoking room; a large drawing-room where social enjoyment is carefully promoted every evening, a library or silent room where no interruption to reading is permitted, these, and a few small boudoirs for intercourse with special friends form the chief outer requirements of the ideal collectivist home.
All the details of household management may safely be left to pioneers of the new woman movement; it belongs only to scientific meliorism to point out the general features and structure of the reformed domestic system and to show its vitally important position in relation to any rational scheme of wide-reaching social reform.
Humanity as a whole has to climb upward in the scale of being and to leave behind it the individual or family selfishness allied with animal passions that are purely anti-social; it has further to develop that self-respect that allied with heart-fellowship brings in its train all the social virtues that distinguish the man from the brute. Germs of that self-respecting life are with us even now, but the soil in which they will spring up to vigorous growth must be created, i.e. brought together by man himself. The fitting of character to a new domestic system should not be difficult in the case of children under wise training, for it is as easy to acquire good habits in childhood as bad habits, and the wholesome atmosphere of a well-regulated superior home will powerfully and painlessly aid in shaping the young. But for the grown-up to alter personal habits, and adapt thought and feeling to a new order of every-day life, the task is not easy. It may press heavily on the ordinary adult at the initial stage of the movement. Happily that task may be rendered easier by mutual criticism kindly and gravely exercised. The method was practised for upwards of thirty years in the Oneida Creek Community with a marked success. Criticism, says one of the members, is a boon to those who seek to live a higher life and only a bugbear to those who lack ambition to improve. It was to the community a bond of love and an appeal to all that is noblest, most refined and elevated in human nature; it helped a man out of his selfishness in the easiest, most kindly way possible. Whereas in ordinary life the interference of the busybody, the tongue of the tale-bearer, the shaft of ridicule, the venom of malice, are unavoidable—in the Community such criticizing was almost unknown. It was bad form for anybody to speak complainingly of anyone else, because criticism was the prerogative of the Community, and was instituted to supersede all evil-speaking or back-biting. Nor was it an occasion for direct fault-finding merely. Those criticizing were always glad to dilate on the good qualities of their subject, and to express their love and appreciation of what they saw to commend. (Abel Easton, Member of the Oneida Community.)
Another member, Allan Estlake, thus speaks: “Criticism was a barrier to the approach of unworthy people from without, and equally a bar to the development of evil influences within.” The practice was not original. Mr. Noyes found it established in a select society of missionaries he had joined previous to his forming the Oneida Community.
One of the weekly exercises of this society, he tells us, was a frank criticism of each other’s character for the purpose of improvement. The mode of proceeding was this: At each meeting the member whose turn it was, according to alphabetic order, to submit to criticism, held his peace while the others one by one told him his faults. This exercise sometimes crucified self-complacency, but it was contrary to the rules of society for any one to complain. I found much benefit in submitting to this ordeal both while I was at Andover and afterward.[[12]] If a number of young men adopted criticism as a means of improvement it should not be more difficult to pioneers of the new domestic life, young and old, provided they have the same desire to improve. It might be irksome to the young, until they had learned to profit by it, as all discipline is at first, but when “our young people,” says Mr. Estlake, “had formed habits in harmony with their means of improvement they learned to love the means by which they had progressed and to rejoice in the results of sufferings that were incident only to their inexperience.”[[13]]
[12]. The Oneida Community, Allan Estlake, p. 65.
[13]. The Oneida Community, Allan Estlake, p. 66.
Personal habits in the new domestic life will be judged in their relation to the general interests of the household, and regulations made to safeguard these interests. Cleanliness, orderliness, punctuality are essential to home comfort, but conventional etiquette destroys the geniality of domestic freedom. While simple rules of a positive kind are strictly observed, the negative rule of non-interference with personal habits that are unhurtful to others will be the most stringent of all, and for this reason—happiness is the great object to attain, and a supreme condition of happiness is the free interaction of social units without intrusive interference.
Committees will be necessary—for organizing labour on a method that will ensure variety to workers and frequent leisure—for consultation on the best means to adopt in training children individually—for management of the finances—for recreative arrangements—and for purposes of general direction and control.
Authority will of course devolve on these committees chosen by members of the household from among themselves. Every relic of primitive despotism must be banished from the home: it is a self-acting republic. Since children reared in the home will be one day responsible citizens of a republican state, it were well to enlist them early in the work of committees. They will learn thereby to subordinate personal desire to the will of the majority, and to co-operate in action for the common weal. The amusements and conduct of children are well within range of their own understanding, and although supervision by adults is necessary, great freedom should be allowed them in the management of their conduct clubs and amusement committees.
The relinquishment of personal property is not desirable at the present stage of social evolution; for individuals—and there may be some—who, however willing, are unable to adapt themselves to the new system, should possess the power to return to the old system without let or hindrance.
Nevertheless, be it sooner or later, the ideal collectivist home of the future will realize, though at first imperfectly, the beautiful conception held by Isaac Taylor of the ideal family home of the past. Here is the picture: “Home is a garden, high-walled towards the blighting northeast of selfish care. In the home we possess a main means of raising the happiest feelings to a high pitch and keeping them there. No disparagement, no privation is to be endured by some for the aggrandizement or ease of others. Along with great inequalities of dignity, power and merit, there is yet a perfect and unconscious equality in regard to comforts, enjoyments and personal consideration. There is no room for grudges or individual solicitude. Whatever may be the measure of good for the whole the sum is distributed without a thought of distinction between one and another. Refined and generous emotions may thus have room to expand, and may become the fixed habits of the mind. Within the circle of home each is known to all, and all respect the same principles of justice and love. There is therefore no need for that caution, reserve or suspicion that in the open world are safeguards against the guile, lawlessness and ferocity of a few.”[[14]] There, too, may be wholly discarded that reticence with which, as with a cloak, the modern, civilized man, says Lucas Mallet, strives to hide the noblest and purest of his thought.
[14]. Home Education, Isaac Taylor, pp. 33 and 34.
The new system fully worked out will make homes permanent instead of transitory. It will check the premature sending of girls out into the world and the tendency of young life generally to drift. It will develop industrial activities and give effective household labour. It will lessen the sordid cares of humanity and increase its social joys. It will create an environment calculated to restrain tempestuous youth and cause every selfish passion to subside in the presence of mutual love. It will perfect education by co-ordinating the life of the young and securing that the entire juvenile orbit is governed by forces of fixed congruity. It will provide every comfort for old age and garner its dearly-bought experience. It will promote healthy propagation causing the birth of the fit; it will facilitate marriage of the affections and make early marriage possible. It will tend infancy in a wholly superior manner, and by scientific breeding, rearing, training, produce future citizens of the State of a higher intellectual, moral and spiritual type.