When Caddy Jellaby remarked, “Africa’s a beast!” she was but unconsciously paraphrasing an expression of opinion familiar enough to her contemporaries. How many thousands of girls in those old days have declared, “Berlin wool’s a bother!” And so, indeed, it was. To be able to do what was then called “fancy work” was almost sufficient accomplishment for the young women of the middle classes of those days. Cushions, chair furniture, slippers, and even pictures were produced in this despotic cross-stitch, varied occasionally by a finer and more difficult variety called tent-stitch; and so far from employing fancy or imagination, every row had to be diligently counted—so many brown stitches, so many green, so many red, &c. I have seen hearthrugs worked in this way with Berlin wool in impossibly huge flowers, and the fender-stool was a great favourite in those old days, often made prickly with white beads, in which recumbent lilies were delineated. Fire screens of the hanging banner pattern were esteemed as great ornaments, and I believe I once heard of a carpet worked in sections by an ambitious party of ladies, and afterwards joined together.
Waste of time.
But who wastes time over fancy work now? Only a small minority of women, I fancy. There is a market for beautiful sewing and for fine embroideries, but as for futile and inartistic chairbacks and their tribe, their day is done. The exquisite Church embroideries bring in fair incomes to those skilled in that class of work; but there is no longer any demand for the home-made lace that occupied half the waking hours of many a woman’s life in the sixties and seventies. That nightmare is over. But let us hope that skill with the needle will never be despised among gentlewomen. To put it on the very lowest ground, it is a marvellous economy to be able to sew. The policy and sentiment of the matter.If one had to pay for every little repair in one’s garments, as men have, it would cost a large sum of money in every year, for our dresses are not so durable as men’s coats. And even the richest of women can never be absolutely certain that she will not one day be poor. “Nothing is certain except that nothing is certain,” and the changes of this troublesome world are capable of anything. But, apart from motives of policy, the accomplishment of sewing is a part of refined femininity. And think of the pleasure that women would lose without it. Think of the thoughts sewn into the beautiful little garments fashioned for the babies—the hopes and fears, the love and tenderness, and the far outlook into the future that comes with mother-love. All these are stitched in with the flying needle; and who would be without these long, long thoughts? To be able to sew is utilitarian. It is also conducive to happiness.
MOTHERS AND SONS.
On spoiling boys.
A “Public Schoolman” once said, “If a mother would only harden her boys a little, send them away to a private school at ten and afterwards to a public school, there would then be no complaints of being teased.” There is no doubt that mothers do often err on the side of softness, as any one of us can see by the number of spoiled children we meet in any given twenty-four hours. Widows’ sons are only too often intolerably conceited, spoilt with indulgence, and apt to repay their mother’s tenderness by breaking her heart. She makes life so smooth for them that they can never refuse themselves anything, and sometimes their whole lives are spoiled by their mother’s weakness, which, in its turn, is only a form of self-indulgence. Such a boy, on entering a public school, meets with no mercy, but the discipline is just what he needs to knock the nonsense out of him and make him a man, not a namby-pamby noodle.
First days at school.
But, having acknowledged that the mother is often to blame, let us look at the other side of the shield. The boy of ten who is sent away from home to a private school finds that he has to take absolutely new views of life in almost every particular. Perplexed by the new horizon, the novel atmosphere, and with his young heart aching for home tenderness and affection, he is assisted in adjusting himself to his altered circumstances by bullying and sneers. The treatment is on all fours with that of “hitting a man when he is down,” a practice which is supposed to be repugnant to all British notions of honour and fair play. When a horse falls under a heavy load in the slippery streets, and the driver whips, slashes, and swears at the poor brute, a murmur of indignation goes up from the spectators. But no one sympathises with the boy, who dare not give the faintest sign of the suffering he feels. The injustice of it all is often what rankles most deeply. There are many mothers who train their boys to a fine sense of honour, derived from a much higher source than that which seems to inspire the average schoolboy, and the ordinary man of the world into whom the boy develops. His attitude to his fellow-creatures is one of comradeship, and kindly feeling, when he leaves his mother’s side. Who shall say what storms of rancorous hate and bitter loathing pass over the young soul in the boy’s first term at school? His sense of injustice becomes distorted for life, under such a system as that described in the following.