I daresay you have; but prove it, by showing greater tolerance and clearer insight. You reproach your son; but what have you done for him? You have taken care to develop his faculties, but not to form his character. You have lectured him on what he owed to the honour of his family; but you have not guided and moulded him so that honour became to him an irresistible instinct.
The Chamberlain.
Do you think so?
Fieldbo.
I not only think, I know it. But that is generally the way here: people are bent on learning, not on living. And you see what comes of it; you see hundreds of men with great gifts, who never seem to be more than half ripe; who are one thing in their ideas and feelings, and something quite different in their habits and acts. Just look at Stensgård——
The Chamberlain.
Ah, Stensgård now! What do you make of Stensgård?
Fieldbo.
A patchwork. I have known him from childhood. His father was a mere rag of a man, a withered weed, a nobody. He kept a little huckster’s shop, and eked things out with pawn-broking; or rather his wife did for him. She was a coarse-grained woman, the most unwomanly I ever knew. She had her husband declared incapable;[[21]] she had not an ounce of heart in her. And in that home Stensgård passed his childhood. Then he went to the grammar-school. “He shall go to college,” said his mother; “I’ll make a smart solicitor of him.” Squalor at home, high-pressure at school; soul, temperament, will, talents, all pulling in different ways—what could it lead to but disintegration of character?
The Chamberlain.