Where the organization of the family is of the patriarchal kind—old retainers marrying and multiplying about the central home, and carrying on a warm personal attachment from generation to generation—this transfer of maternal care has not such bad effects; but in our present way of life, without love or real relationship between masters and servants, and where service is rendered for just so much money down and for nothing more noble, it is a hideous system, and one that makes the modern mother utterly inexplicable. We wonder where her mere instincts can be, not to speak of her reason, her love, her conscience, her pride. Pleasure and self-indulgence have indeed gained tremendous power, in these later days, when they can thus break down the force of the strongest law of nature—a law stronger even than that of self-preservation.
Folly is the true capillary attraction of the moral world, and penetrates every stratum of society; and the folly of extravagant attire in the drawing-room is reproduced in the nursery. Not content with bewildering men's minds and emptying their husbands' purses for the enhancement of their own charms, women do the same by their children; and the mother who leaves the health and mind and temper and purity of her offspring in the keeping of a hired nurse takes especial care of the colour and cut of the frocks and petticoats. And there is always the same strain after show, and the same endeavour to make a little look a mickle. The children of five hundred a year must look like those of a thousand; and those of a thousand must rival the tenue of little lords and ladies born in the purple; while the amount of money spent on clothes in the tradesman class is a matter of real amazement to those let into the secret. Simplicity of diet, too, is going out with simplicity of dress, with simplicity of habits generally; and stimulants and concentrated food are now the rule in the nursery, where they mar as many constitutions as they make. More than one child of whom we have had personal knowledge has yielded to disease induced by too stimulating and too heating a diet; but artificial habits demand corresponding artificiality of food, and so the candle burns at both ends instead of one.
Again, as for the increasing inability of educated women to nurse their children, even if desirous of doing so, that also is a bodily condition brought about by an unwholesome and unnatural state of life. Late hours, high living, heated blood, and constantly breathing a vitiated atmosphere are the causes of this alarming physical defect. But it would be too much to expect that women should forego their pleasurable indulgences, or do anything disagreeable to their senses, for the sake of their offspring. They are not famous for looking far ahead on any matter; but to expect them to look beyond themselves, and their own present generation, is to expect the great miracle that never comes.
MODERN MOTHERS.
II
There was once a superstition among us that mothers were of use in the world; that they had their functions and duties, without which society would not prosper nor hold together; and that much of the well-being of humanity, present and future, depended on them. Mothers in those bygone days were by no means effete personages or a worn-out institution, but living powers exercising a real and pervading influence; and they were credited with an authority which they did not scruple to use when required.
One of the functions recognized as specially belonging to them was that of guarding their young people from the consequences of their own ignorance—keeping them from dangers both physical and moral until wise enough to take care of themselves, and supplementing by their own experience the want of it in their children. Another was that of preserving the tone of society on a high level, and supplying the antiseptic element by which the rest was kept pure; as, for example, insisting that the language used and the subjects discussed before them were such as should not offend the modesty of virtuous women; that the people with whom they were required to associate should be moderately honest and well conducted; and, in short, as mothers, discountenancing everything in other men and women which they would not like to see imitated by their own sons and daughters.
This was one of the fond superstitions of an elder time. For ourselves, we boast of our freedom from superstition in these later days; of our proud renunciation of restraints and habits which were deemed beneficial by our forefathers; of our indifference to forms and hatred of humbug; and of all that tends to fetter what is called individualism. Hence we have found that we can go on without safeguards for our young; that society does not want its matrons as the preservative ingredient for keeping it pure; and that the world is all the merrier for the loosening of bonds which once it was the duty of women to draw closer. In fact, mothers have gone out, surviving only in the form of chaperons.
More or less on the search for her own pleasure—if by any possibility of artifice she can be taken for less than sixty, still ready for odd snatches of flirting as she can find occasion—or, with her faculties concentrated on the chance of winning the rubber by indifferent play—the chaperon's charge is not a very onerous one; and her daughters know as well as she does that her presence is a blind rather than a protection. They are with mamma as a form of speech; but they are left to themselves as a matter of fact. Anyone who is in the confidence of young people of either sex knows a little of what goes on in the dark corners and on the steps of the stairs—a favourite anchorage for the loosely chaperoned in private houses where two hundred are invited and only a hundred can find room. But then the girls are 'with mamma,' and the young men are contented souls who take what they can get without making wry faces. Mamma, occupied in her own well-seasoned coquetries, or absorbed in the chances of her deep 'finesse' and the winning trick, lets the girls take care of themselves, and would think it an intolerable impertinence should a friend hint to her that her place of chaperon included vigilant personal guardianship, and that she would do better to keep her daughters in her own charge than leave them to themselves.