The relation of mother and son is essentially different from that of mother and daughter; or rather, the son and the daughter stand in different relations to the home. Also the needs of the two sexes during their growth are different. The natural independence of a girl at the school age is smaller than that of the boy, so that, taking all these things into consideration, there is not the same acuteness about the question of her leaving home during her education. The far greater concentration and the far smaller degree of freedom in most girls’ schools, when compared with the public schools for boys, which are complete little worlds in themselves, limit the advantages which they give to compensate for any loss of home influence. Further, women are not, like men, naturally gregarious, and those who are not suited for living in a herd profit little from being placed in it. Certainly there are difficulties of adjustment to be overcome if girls remain entirely at home, but the adjustment is easier than it is for boys, who are so expansive in their energies and want such a deal of room for their exuberant vitalities. Besides, it is at the “awkward age” that a girl, however great a complication she may then become in the life of her parents, is most dependent on the help and support of her mother. Even the most brazen flapper, so I have been told, endures agonies at her first entry into society as one of its fully fledged members. In fine, a girl’s education may very well take place at home, and I support this theory by the fact that, whereas a home-bred boy is always distinguishable from one who has had the advantages of a public school, it is almost impossible to tell whether a girl has been to a boarding school or not, except where she exhibits an exaggerated hoydenism which is one of the less favourable marks of girls’ boarding schools.
The real crux for mothers and daughters comes after this age is past, unless a girl is very early married. It is then that she feels the keen craving for independence and chafes against the restraint of home life. Her degree of satisfaction at her lot when she reaches this stage is one test of the judiciousness of her parents in her whole early upbringing and of their perception how far they can go towards meeting her natural craving for freedom and responsibility. The first question is whether Mary and Emily are going to have a definite occupation or not. Too often before the war it was certain that they were not, but were going to idle away their days reading novels, playing tennis and munching chocolates in cinemas until some admirer plucked them from their peaceful flowerbed. Even when they wanted to do something real and satisfying, their wish was looked on as something foolish and hysterical, not to be tolerated for an instant in a well-conducted family. Certainly Mary and Emily had no excuse for leaving home if they had nothing to leave it for, but to keep young Englishwomen idle perforce so as to curb their independence is a dangerous and a cruel game. Also it leads to an infinity of bickering in the family. The war has, luckily, knocked some sense into people’s heads on the subject of occupations for women. Mary and Emily have tasted the pleasure of regular work and the joy of leisure earned by toil. They are not going to forget it, and the new direction given to their energies is going to serve for the girls of generations to come after them.
But the fact of a regular occupation does not settle all the vexed questions of daughters in the home. They will always be vexed, and individuals will always have to find their own solutions. Mary’s mother cannot understand why Mary is so discontented in her comfortable home: Emily seems contented enough, but Mary is always chafing and tossing her head and sulking in corners, talking with envy of her friends who live unwholesomely in poky little rooms and threatening to join them if she only gets the chance. “What more can the child want?” cries the mother. “She lives far better here than she could ever do on her own. She can go out when she likes and she can bring her friends here where they are always welcome. She gets properly looked after when she is ill, and when things go wrong she is glad enough of my sympathy and comfort.” Well, for one thing, Mary, who is of a more independent temperament than Emily, has not had the opportunity of finding out that living on one’s own is not all that fancy paints it. She is possessed by the idea, and she will only learn how much she misses her home when she has suffered from some of the facts which its realisation entails. It might be almost worth while to let her try for a time: if she comes back with relief, well and good. If she finds independence preferable with all its drawbacks, the wisdom of having ceased to put constraint upon her will be obvious. Mary, no doubt, is often flighty and does not know what she really wants, but Mary’s mother has possibly taken no trouble to study Mary or to find out where the root of her grievances lie.
She does not probably realise how irksome it is to some temperaments to live perpetually in another person’s house, however great their love for that person. A home is controlled by one will alone, it is impossible to make it a republic. If the will is that of Mary’s mother, Mary will often find it tiresome to submit to it: if, by any chance, it comes to be Mary’s will, it is a bad look out for her mother and father. The mere want of privacy in itself is irritating, unless Mary has a den of her own and time of her own which are inviolable. Some parents think that they have an unlimited claim on the time and convenience of their children, forgetting that filial duty, fine and natural a motive as it is, is only one among many motives for human action, and that these motives are in the habit of conflicting. Mary’s mother may be under the apprehension that Mary has complete liberty at home: but Mary knows better. How often is she hindered from sitting down to a solid morning’s work by the knowledge that if she does not do the flowers nobody will. How often when she is just tucking up on a Sunday afternoon for a good read is she not disturbed by the certainty with which the atmosphere is charged that her father will be grieved if he has no companion for his walk? She could, of course, refuse to go, but she would then have to accept all the onus of seeming to be ungracious, and have that absolutely exasperating feeling of having to be apologetic for not doing something of the doing of which there should have been no legitimate expectation, tacit or otherwise. Duty is mostly a repression of one’s own desires, and therefore salutary: but there is a limit to its value, and in some people there is an intense desire to get away from it sometimes, if only for a little. Many a girl who loves her parents and looks with affection on her home, must frequently think with a sigh that even in the squalidest rooms, there would be no flowers to do and nobody to expect one to go on Sunday walks, no feeling that there is somebody to judge one’s friends when they come and to listen to what one says to them, no rigid times for meals, no callers to be entertained when mother is lying down, however absorbed one is in one’s own work, no Emily to play the piano after dinner, in fact no convenience but one’s own to consult at all.
Men feel this longing for privacy and independence, why should it seem strange and regrettable in girls? As a whole, they are less capable of looking after themselves than their brothers, perhaps, but that is partly due to their weaker social position. Also Mary’s case is by no means that of every girl, a fact which unfairly tells against Mary, who does not care a snap of her fingers for Emily’s docility and want of enterprise. Individuals have got to work out their own salvation, a task which is always made far more difficult for Mary than for her brother. Of course, there are infinite degrees of stress and accommodation in this relation of Mary and her mother: circumstances, character, common sense, temper, nerves, compatibility, all play their parts in different admixtures. Where Mary and her mother are both sensible, or arrive at sense by suffering, the final accommodation is generally satisfactory. Where sense is wanting, or passion clouds it, there will always be trouble: and, however much Mary’s mother may have to put up with from Mary, of which Mary may be only vaguely conscious, yet she is in the main to blame for not agreeing to one obvious solution of letting Mary do what she wants. She may be as certain as the snow is white that Mary is really happier under her roof, and that only her own tactful care prevents Mary from making some disastrous mistakes through her own inexperience or defects of character; she may even be more right than wrong in this belief: yet the fact remains that Mary is grown up and is the only person who can, in the long run, be responsible for her life. Is it right to thwart without convincing her, when it is possible to let her obtain conviction by experience? Only on the most antiquated theory of parental authority and filial subordination, a theory which rests upon no observed facts but rather upon a persistent blindness to the truth.
There is no such thing as natural affection: affection has to be won, and, once it is won, to be kept by effort or to be lost again. It is always assumed that parents and children naturally adopt to one another the attitude of beatific charity, as if they could not be the severest critics and the most bitter haters one of another, when the affectionate habits of childhood have frozen into mere formalities through incompatibilities of temper. In England, where the names of mother and father are treated with every outward respect, there is far less real sentiment for them as ideas than in Latin countries. What makes the relation so close and so warm in England is the comradeship of the English and the glow of the English home, which welds a strong bond so early that an overwhelming amount of tension is required for its complete disruption. But the seeds of strife are sown inevitably in the adolescence of every family: the weeds to which they grow are hardy, too, if they are not nipped in the bud. The English mother has got to do the nipping, but with sympathy not with severity, for the tool of severity will turn against her, and she will suffer a thousand fold the pain she has inflicted thoughtlessly on her children.
The truth is that all parents and children must go through a period of storm and stress, and most of the stress falls on the mothers. All young things are more or less ungrateful, and this is perfectly natural: they are following their strongest impulse in pushing their way out to full growth as ruthlessly as shoots of the rose tree. They have no time to be reflective till this irresistible impulse has weakened, so that they cannot realise before full maturity all that they have forced out of their parents in the way of self-denial, self-restraint, nervous irritation and even physical labour. For tangible pleasures and comforts they are grateful enough, but the intangible prevention of pain, the care and watching, the influence and the teaching do not become visible to them until they are almost on the far horizon of past youth. In the sharp momentary irritations of growth children cannot take these things into account, and for them a sense of injustice blots out gratitude like a sudden black fog. When they look back, and suffer from the rough contact of younger life themselves, then they see the vexed questions of their youth in truer proportions: they may not find that the wrong was always on their side, but at least they will sympathise with the pardonable weakness to which it was due, and will weigh it in the balance with benefits felt but not seen. Those families are happy who see these exasperations pass away like a short-lived storm, leaving no devastated tract behind them, but bringing calm and mellow weather in their wake. The English mind, averse from brooding, ever ready for compromise and comradeship, is a temperate climate, rejoicing in these halcyon anti-cyclones after the chilly gust and the grumbling thunder. When the English family barometer is at “set fair,” the atmosphere is delightful, and there is no more charming or sympathetic friendship possible than that between an English mother and her children, when each looks kindly upon the other with the eye of perfect understanding, in mutual pride and love and tolerance. No distance breaks the bond nor does the lapse of time weaken it, and the mother, seeing the runners to whom she has handed on the torch settling into a steady stride, can enjoy contented the sunset of motherhood and matrimony, with the prospect of assuming a benevolent grandmotherhood that will enable her to spoil her children’s children without paying the consequences.
[CHAPTER VI]
THE ENGLISHWOMAN’S MIND
Nobody could fail to be impressed by the physical beauty of young Englishwomen. It is confined to no class, though better preserved in the more leisurely. The ball-room and the village green compete easily with any exhibition of it on the stage. The question now to be presented is whether an honest observer, presuming him competent to observe, would be equally impressed with the mental qualities of our women. The answer, I think, would be extremely doubtful. Our young beauties, in any case, proudly conscious of their triumph in the physical test, would be indifferent to the outcome of the intellectual, if they could even conceive that anyone would be foolish enough to apply it. A quick brain is not in England regarded as an enviable possession, which proves it not to be a national one. In his penetrating first chapter to “Diana of the Crossways” George Meredith pointed out that "English men and women feel toward the quick-witted of their species as to aliens—having the demerits of aliens—wordiness, vanity, shallowness, an empty glitter, the sin of posturing." He might have added that, so far as women are concerned, quick wits were only excused by absence of physical attraction, though he implied this addition in his picture of Diana Warwick in her conflict with public opinion. George du Maurier contrasted with evident approbation the beauty of young Vere-de-Veredom with the consoling hideousness of the three clever Miss Bilderbogies, translating thus into art a thoroughly English point of view. One can respect this point of view without adopting it: the British instinct for safety is illustrated by it. Englishmen may well be suspicious, and Englishwomen jealous, of the combination of beauty and brains: it is too overwhelmingly powerful and likely to be disturbing to the peace.