I place music first, because the most time has been given to it; a weary hour every day, had it not been so broken up by visits to the clock. Practical girls grudge this hour wasted on a weakness they are sure to give up when they marry, for they all think they are as certain to marry as to give up their music. They are healthy and strong and have good voices, but few of them can do more than incomprehensibly murmur a few lines of twaddle to a feeble accompaniment, or sing out of all time the top line of a glee, provided the piano helps them out with the notes. So here is a physical gift thrown aside.
Can anything be made of that pencil-stroking on buff paper, with some splashes of white, which is held to represent a cottage, flanked on one side by a gate-post which could never have been a good gate-post, and on the other side by something smeary which is not at all like a tree, nor any other created thing?
Every willow-pattern plate has a better landscape on it than that. So there are two hours a week gone, for the lop-sided chalk head is of no more use to anybody than was the landscape.
The girl has been taught French and German, but has not learnt enough of either language to enjoy a good book, or to converse with intelligence in either tongue, and her stock of dialogue-book phrases is soon exhausted. Indeed, she can hardly talk better in English when she gets beyond the depth of drawing-room chatter, as her knowledge of facts is of a most uncertain sort; so in general conversation she covers her deficiencies by slang, which, although it distresses us, we forgive in a pretty, lively girl.
She cannot cook, how should she? She was never permitted to peep inside the kitchen, but was kept in an upstairs nursery until she was six years old, under the stultifying dominion of "nurse," whose sole training was "Miss, I'll tell your ma," when wicked or cruel teaching did not replace this feebleness. When she was promoted to the school-room and made over to the care of the governess, the system of instruction was little more satisfactory. The list of the Kings of England superseded standing in the corner as a punishment for weariness, but her chief experience of life was gathered from tales in cheap magazines, read surreptitiously; and as she grew older, the railway novel by a sensational author replaced the serial in the penny paper.
The child saw her parents together for a quarter of an hour in the evening, when she was full dressed to go down to dessert, and her mother for about five minutes in the course of the morning, when she came up to the school-room to find fault with the governess for the children's bad grammar, or awkward behaviour, on the previous evening. The round of the year brings the sea-side visit. Here, although health is gained, there is no education beyond lodging-house gossip. The children are put into the train like so many parcels, and in so many hours are somewhere else; frocks suited to the sea-side are put on them by the nurse, but these might have dropped from the clouds, and the children have been none the wiser. Helplessness is the natural outcome of all this.
The school-room course begins in about six years to be agreeably diversified by the visits of music and drawing-masters; which, if the governess did not sit in the room all the time, trying to attract their admiration, would be a really pleasant change. But nothing comes of the lessons beyond the showy morceau de salon aforesaid, the buff-paper drawing, and the weak rhyme jingled to an accompaniment in quavers; except an increase of energy in borrowing, or hiring, yellow-covered books revealing stirring impossibilities in the lives of Edwin and Angelina, over which a girl, according to her disposition, may weep or rage. For this is the only outlet for her poor imprisoned life, until, on her introduction to society, she is suddenly flung upon the world, to make her way as best, or worst, she can; and now, and now only, does her real education begin.
This manner of bringing up our girls differs from the convent system in this, that it is worldly instead of being religious, and needlework and confectionery are worse taught; other things are about equal. Both we and our continental neighbours imprison our girls in a school-room or convent for twelve years, and yet boast of our superiority over the Turks!
After this, can we wonder at the weakness or the folly of girls, or be surprised that society is at a dead-lock, or that our women eat bitter bread?
Can we marvel that women ruin their husbands by their dress and extravagance; that they drive them to their clubs for companionship, and freedom from the wretchedness of home; that they tyrannize over their milliners, and are in their turn tyrannized over by their servants; that their sons drink the brandy and smoke the tobacco of idleness, and that their daughters grow up the patterns of themselves? Only where the mother is passively useless, the daughter will be actively mischievous; where the mother was merely frivolous, the daughter will be actually wicked.