"Where," asks Mr. James Payn, "is the children's fun? Boys are now crammed with knowledge like turkeys (but unfortunately not killed at Christmas), and there is absolutely no room in them for a joke." An idol called "success" is put up for worship, and fathers are ready to sacrifice the health and happiness of their children upon its altar. "The educational abomination of desolation of the present day," says Professor Huxley, "is the stimulation of young people to work at high pressure by incessant examinations." Some wise man (who probably was not an early riser) has said of early risers in general, that they are "conceited all the forenoon, and stupid all the afternoon." Now whether this is true of early risers in the common acceptation of the word or not, I will not pretend to say; but it is too often true of the unhappy children who are forced to rise too early in their classes. They are "conceited all the forenoon of life, and stupid all its afternoon." How much unhappiness might children be spared if fathers would goad them less, and sometimes cheer up that dulness which has fallen to most of us, by saying:
"Be good, dear child, and let who will be clever;
Do noble things—nor dream them all day long;
And so make life, death, and that vast for ever
One grand, sweet song."
What to do with our boys and girls is certainly a serious question, but the last thing we should do with them is to make them miserable. Why not disregard all false notions of gentility, and have each child well taught a manual trade? Then they will have riches in their arms, and you will have escaped the unpleasant alternative of the Jewish proverb, which says that he who does not teach his son a trade teaches him to steal.
We give here a sketch of Canon Kingsley as a father, because we do not remember any home life more beautiful and instructive. Because the Rectory-house was on low ground, the rector of Eversley, who considered violation of the divine laws of health a sort of acted blasphemy, built his children an outdoor nursery on the "Mount," where they kept books, toys, and tea things, spending long, happy days on the highest and loveliest point of moorland in the glebe; and there he would join them when his parish work was done, bringing them some fresh treasure picked up in his walk, a choice wild-flower or fern or rare beetle, sometimes a lizard or a field-mouse; ever waking up their sense of wonder, calling out their powers of observation, and teaching them lessons out of God's great green book, without their knowing they were learning. Out-of-doors and indoors, the Sundays were the happiest days of the week to the children, though to their father the hardest. When his day's work was done, there was always the Sunday walk, in which each bird and plant and brook was pointed out to the children, as preaching sermons to Eyes, such as were not even dreamt of by people of the No-eyes species. Indoors the Sunday picture-books were brought out, and each child chose its subject for the father to draw, either some Bible story, or bird or beast or flower. In all ways he fostered in his children a love of animals. They were taught to handle without disgust toads, frogs, beetles, as works from the hand of a living God. His guests were surprised one morning at breakfast when his little girl ran up to the open window of the dining-room, holding a long, repulsive-looking worm in her hand: "Oh, daddy, look at this delightful worm!"
Kingsley had a horror of corporal punishment, not merely because it tends to produce antagonism between parent and child, but because he considered more than half the lying of children to be the result of fear of punishment. "Do not train a child," he said, "as men train a horse, by letting anger and punishment be the first announcement of his having sinned. If you do, you induce two bad habits: first, the boy regards his parent with a kind of blind dread, as a being who may be offended by actions which to him are innocent, and whose wrath he expects to fall upon him at any moment in his most pure and unselfish happiness. Next, and worst still, the boy learns not to fear sin, but the punishment of it, and thus he learns to lie." He was careful too not to confuse his children by a multiplicity of small rules. "It is difficult enough to keep the Ten Commandments," he would say, "without making an eleventh in every direction." He had no "moods" with his family, for he cultivated, by strict self-discipline in the midst of worries and pressing business, a disengaged temper, that always enabled him to enter into other people's interests, and especially into children's playfulness. "I wonder," he would say, "if there is so much laughing in any other home in England as in ours." He became a light-hearted boy in the presence of his children. When nursery griefs and broken toys were taken to his study, he was never too busy to mend the toy and dry the tears. He held with Jean Paul Richter, that children have their "days and hours of rain," which parents should not take much notice of, either for anxiety or sermons, but should lightly pass over, except when they are symptoms of coming illness. And his knowledge of physiology enabled him to detect such symptoms. He recognized the fact, that weariness at lessons and sudden fits of obstinacy are not hastily to be treated as moral delinquencies, springing as they so often do from physical causes, which are best counteracted by cessation from work and change of scene.
How blessed is the son who can speak of his father as Charles Kingsley's eldest son does. "'Perfect love casteth out fear', was the motto," he says, "on which my father based his theory of bringing up children. From this and from the interests he took in their pursuits, their pleasures, trials, and even the petty details of their everyday life, there sprang up a friendship between father and children, that increased in intensity and depth with years. To speak for myself, he was the best friend—the only true friend I ever had. At once he was the most fatherly and the most unfatherly of fathers—fatherly in that he was our intimate friend and our self-constituted adviser; unfatherly in that our feeling for him lacked that fear and restraint that make boys call their father 'the governor.' Ours was the only household I ever saw in which there was no favouritism. It seemed as if in each of our different characters he took an equal pride, while he fully recognized their different traits of good or evil; for instead of having one code of social, moral, and physical laws laid down for one and all of us, each child became a separate study for him; and its little 'diseases au moral,' as he called them, were treated differently, according to each different temperament.... Perhaps the brightest picture of the past that I look back to now is the drawing-room at Eversley, in the evenings, when we were all at home and by ourselves. There he sat, with one hand in mother's, forgetting his own hard work in leading our fun and frolic, with a kindly smile on his lips, and a loving light in that bright gray eye, that made us feel that, in the broadest sense of the word, he was our father."
Of this son, when he was an undergraduate at Cambridge, his father (then Professor of History) writes: "Ah! what a blessing to be able to help him at last by teaching him something one's self!" And to a learned "F.G.S." he says very seriously: "My eldest son is just going off to try his manhood in Colorado, United States. You will understand, therefore, that it is somewhat important to me just now whether the world be ruled by a just and wise God, or by o. It is also important to me with regard to my own boy's future, whether what is said to have happened to-morrow (Good Friday) be true or false."
Writing to his wife from the seaside, where he had gone in search of health, he says: "This place is perfect; but it seems a dream and imperfect without you. Kiss the darling ducks of children for me. How I long after them and their prattle! I delight in all the little ones in the street, for their sake, and continually I start and fancy I hear their voices outside. You do not know how I love them; nor did I hardly till I came here. Absence quickens love into consciousness. Tell Rose and Maurice that I have got two pair of bucks' horns—one for each of them, huge old fellows, almost as big as baby."
Writing from France to "my dear little man," as he calls his youngest son (for whom he wrote the "Water Babies"), he says: "There is a little Egyptian vulture here in the inn; ask mother to show you his picture in the beginning of the bird-book." There was little danger that the sons of such a clergyman as this would turn out badly.
A companion picture of Dr. Arnold as a father, has been drawn by Dean Stanley: "It is impossible adequately to describe the union of the whole family round him, who was not only the father and guide, but the elder brother and playfellow of his children; the gentleness and tenderness which marked his whole feeling and manner in the privacy of his domestic intercourse. Enough, however, may perhaps be said to recall something at least of its outward aspect. There was the cheerful voice that used to go sounding through the house in the early morning, as he went round to call his children; the new spirits which he seemed to gather from the mere glimpses of them in the midst of his occupations—the increased merriment of all in any game in which he joined—the happy walks on which he would take them in the fields and hedges, hunting for flowers—the yearly excursion to look in the neighbouring clay-pit for the earliest coltsfoot, with the mock siege that followed. Nor, again, was the sense of his authority as a father ever lost in his playfulness as a companion. His personal superintendence of their ordinary instructions was necessarily limited by his other engagements, but it was never wholly laid aside. In the later years of his life it was his custom to read the Psalms and Lessons of the day with his family every morning; and the common reading of a chapter in the Bible every Sunday evening, with repetition of hymns or parts of Scripture by every member of the family—the devotion with which he would himself repeat his favourite poems from the Christian Year, or his favourite passages from the Gospels—the same attitude of deep attention in listening to the questions of his youngest children, the same reverence in answering their difficulties that he would have shown to the most advanced of his friends or his scholars—form a picture not soon to pass away from the mind of any one who was ever present. But his teaching in his family was naturally not confined to any particular occasions; they looked to him for information and advice at all times; and a word of authority from him was a law not to be questioned for a moment. And with the tenderness which seemed to be alive to all their wants and wishes, there was united that peculiar sense of solemnity, with which, in his eyes, the very idea of a family life was invested. The anniversaries of domestic events—the passing away of successive generations—the entrance of his sons on the several stages of their education, struck on the deepest chords of his nature, and made him blend with every prospect of the future the keen sense of the continuance (so to speak) of his own existence in the good and evil fortunes of his children, and to unite the thought of them with the yet more solemn feeling, with which he was at all times wont to regard 'the blessing' of 'a whole house transplanted entire from earth to heaven, without one failure.'"