A cheerful doctrine this, which should help to swell the ranks of the unemployed. Outlets for their energies, a little direction, a little control, and then we may sit by with folded hands and see them do it. But, in fact, there are two things to be done: “powers to be developed—where a little of our help goes a long way; and character to be formed”—and here children are as clay in the hands of the potter, absolutely dependent on their parents. Disposition, intellect, genius, come pretty much by nature; but character is an achievement, the one practical achievement possible to us for ourselves and for our children; and all real advance in family or individual is along the lines of character. Our great people are great simply by reason of their force of character. For this, more than for their literary successes, Carlyle and Johnson are great. Boswell’s “Life” is, and perhaps deserves to be, more of a literary success than anything of his master’s; but what figure does he make after all?
Greatness and littleness belong to character, and life would be dull were we all cast in one mould; but how come we to differ? Surely by reason of our inherited qualities. It is hereditary tendencies which result in character. The man who is generous, obstinate, hot-tempered, devout, is so, on the whole, because that strain of character runs in his family. Some progenitor got a bent from his circumstances towards fault or virtue, and that bent will go on repeating itself to the end of the chapter. To save that single quality from the exaggeration which would destroy the balance of qualities we call sanity, two counter-forces are provided: marriage into alien families, and education.
We come round now to the point we started from. If the development of character rather than of faculty is the main work of education, and if people are born, so to speak, ready-made, with all the elements of their after-character in them, certain to be developed by time and circumstances, what is left for education to do?
Very commonly, the vote is, do nothing; though there are three or four ways of arriving at that conclusion.
As, What’s the good? The fathers have eaten sour grapes; the children’s teeth must be set on edge. Tommy is obstinate as a little mule—but what would you have? So is his father. So have been all the Joneses, time out of mind; and Tommy’s obstinacy is taken as a fact, not to be helped nor hindered.
Or, Mary is a butterfly of a child, never constant for five minutes to anything she has in hand. “That child is just like me!” says her mother; “but time will steady her.” Fanny, again, sings herself to sleep with the Sicilian Vesper Hymn (her nurse’s lullaby) before she is able to speak. “It’s strange how an ear for music runs in our family!” is the comment, but no particular pains are taken to develop the talent.
Another child asks odd questions, is inclined to make little jokes about sacred things, to call his father “Tom,” and, generally, to show a want of reverence. His parents are earnest-minded people—think with pain of the loose opinions of Uncle Harry, and decide on a policy of repression. “Do as you’re bid, and make no remarks,” becomes the child’s rule of life, until he finds outlets little suspected at home.
In another case, common thought is much more on a level with the science of the day; there is a tendency to lung-trouble: the doctors undertake to deal with the tendency so long as the habit of delicacy is not set up. The necessary precautions are taken, and there is no reason why the child should not die at a good old age.
Once more;—there are parents who are aware of the advance science has made in education, but doubt the lawfulness of looking to science for aid in the making of character. They see hereditary defects in their children, but set them down as of “the natural fault and corruption of the nature of every man which naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam.” This, they believe, it is not their part to remedy; that is, unless the boy’s fault be of a disturbing kind—a violent temper, for example—when the mother thinks no harm to whip the offending Adam out of him. But so surely as we believe the laws of the spiritual life to have been revealed to us, so, not less, surely, though without the same sanctity, have been revealed the laws by which body, mind, and moral nature flourish or decay. These it behoves us to make ourselves acquainted with; and the Christian parent who is shy of science, and prefers to bring up his children by the light of Nature when that of authoritative revelation fails, does so to his children’s irreparable loss.
If the race is advancing, it is along the lines of character, for each new generation inherits and adds to the best that has gone before it. We should have to-day the very flower and fruit that has been a-preparing through long lines of progenitors. Children have always been lovely, so far back as that day when a little child in the streets of Jerusalem was picked up and set in the midst to show of what sort are the princes in the Kingdom to come:—