‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away!”
That is a moral which we shall do well to remember. All great possessions materially founded come at last to that, and the heart that clings to them must go down after them to the grave.
It is the same when we base our delight of human relationship in an insistence upon possession: it serves only to accentuate the place of death in the world and to give it size. The man, or woman, whose idea of love lies in the claim to possess and to control others, dies many deaths before he reaches his final end, and walks daily with his foot in the grave. These tragedies of possession, so impoverishing to the spirit, are all round us; the world is humanly more full of them than of anything else: Husbands who adore their wives, but cannot let them call their souls their own; parents, possessive of their children, imposing upon them their will up to the legal limit and beyond; homes devouring the independence of womanhood, cramping, constraining, robbing of initiative and force, and doing all these things under cover of the claims of love, of natural affection, of piety! What is all this really but possession masquerading under another name? I remember once reading a remarkable story by Mr. John Gray, called Niggard Truth, of a woman who took masterful possession of a weak husband and “ran” him as an expression, not of his own personality, but of hers. And when at last she had very literally run him to earth, she buried him in a garment of red flannel so that, as she expressed it, she might “see him better” in the grave. And there, at the end of a strenuous life, she sat amid her domestic possessions, her glass shades, her family plate, and her mahogany, with her mental eye fixed upon a corpse, and her heart filled with a Magnificat of self-applause. She was the “Ozymandias” of the domestic hearth; and there are thousands of them in this country to-day. “Look on their works, ye mighty, and despair!”
I have taken for example the domestic relations, because there we get in small, but simple and concise, that demoralising claim to possession which goes forth with missionary zeal to devastate the world; and because here, in the home, the true social service that is owing is, in theory at least, recognised and admitted.
The duty—surely the obvious duty—of parents to their children is to assist them, to the full extent of their means, toward self-development. We have no right to bring children into the world to warp and stunt their growth, to make them merely reflections of ourselves, or to keep them back from independence when they come to man’s or woman’s estate. What the parent needs, perhaps, most to learn is to relax constantly and in ever-increasing degree that hold which was necessary during the early years of childhood, but which, even then, we take too much for granted and employ far too habitually. Parents often claim too great a possession of their own children; they make cages for their characters, and mould them away from their natural bent to what suits their own family pride, their own taste, or their own sense of importance, sometimes conscientiously believing this to be the parental prerogative. But if parents are to use safely their power to impose moral training they must build up first in their children a sense of self-reliance, of initiative, of freedom, and then trust to it. They have no right to rely for their reward on caged characters, or, by any dictation or control, to exact recompense for the services which (with whatever devotion) they have rendered. The same holds good through all human relations, parental, marital, social, racial: it is ignoble to claim loyalty or devotion from those whom you have not first made free. Gratitude—even filial gratitude—has no moral value save if it comes from a free agent. If it comes from one trained to be not free it partakes of servility. And it is better for parents to forgo gratitude than to exact its imitation or substitute, by the imposition of any restrictive conditions or claims after the years of tutelage are over. It may well be that gratitude has far too small a place in the human heart; but I am quite sure that the claim for gratitude has too large a one, and that this in excess brings the very reverse of a remedy when the other is lacking. And what is true in relation to parents and their children is true also in every other human relationship where the claim to possess intrudes to the hindrance of self-realization and self-development. The possessor, in claiming restrictive possession of others, loses possession of himself.
That is what made slavery as an institution so doubly impoverishing to the human race. It impoverished the mind of the slave, but it impoverished quite as much the mind of the slave-owner.