It has often been a subject of astonishment to me that between very near relations a sensitive feeling about pecuniary matters should be so lively as it is. I remember an instance in the last generation of a rich man in Cheshire who made a present of ten thousand pounds to a lady nearly related to him. He was very wealthy, she was not; the sum would never be missed by him, whilst to her it made a great difference. What could be more reasonable than such a correction of the inequalities of fortune? Many people would have refused the present, out of pride, but it was much kinder to accept it in the same good spirit that dictated the offer. On the other hand, there are poor gentlefolks whose only fault is a sense of independence, so farouche that nobody can get them to accept anything of importance, and any good that is done to them has to be plotted with consummate art.
A wonderful light is thrown upon family relations when we become acquainted with the real state of those family pecuniary transactions that are not revealed to the public. The strangest discovery is the widely different ways in which pecuniary obligations are estimated by different persons, especially by different women. Men, I believe, take them rather more equally; but as women go by sentiment they have a tendency to extremes, either exaggerating the importance of an obligation when they like to feel very much obliged, or else adopting the convenient theory that the generous person is fulfilling a simple duty, and that there is no obligation whatever. One woman will go into ecstasies of gratitude because a brother makes her a present of a few pounds; and another will never thank a benefactor who allows her, year by year, an annuity far larger than is justified by his precarious professional income. In one real case a lady lived for many years on her brother’s generosity and was openly hostile to him all the time. After her death it was found that she had insulted him in her will. In another case a sister dependent on her brother’s bounty never thanked him or even acknowledged the receipt of a sum of money, but if the money was not sent to the day she would at once write a sharp letter full of bitter reproaches for his neglect. The marvel is the incredible patience with which toiling men will go on sending the fruits of their industry to relations who do not even make a pretence of affection.
A frequent cause of hostility between very near relations is the restriction of generosity. So long as you set no limit to your giving it is well, you are doing your duty; but the moment you fix a limit the case is altered; then all past sacrifices go for nothing, your glory has set in gloom, and you will be considered as more niggardly than if you had not begun to be generous. Here is a real case, out of many. A man makes bad speculations, but conceals the full extent of his losses, and by the influence of his wife obtains important sums from a near relation of hers who half ruins himself to save her. When the full disaster is known the relation stops short and declines to ruin himself entirely; she then bitterly reproaches him for his selfishness. A very short time before writing the present Essay I was travelling, and met an old friend, a bachelor of limited means but of a most generous disposition, the kindest and most affectionate nature I ever knew in the male sex. I asked for news about his brother. “I never see him now; a coldness has sprung up between us.”—“It must be his fault, then, for I am sure it did not originate with you.”—“The truth is, he got into money difficulties, so I gave him a thousand pounds. He thought that under the circumstances I ought to have done more and broke off all intercourse. I really believe that if I had given him nothing we should have been more friendly at this day.”
The question how far we are bound to allow family ties to regulate our intercourse is not easily treated in general terms, though it seems plainer in particular cases. Here is one for the reader’s consideration.
Owing to natural refinement, and to certain circumstances of which he intelligently availed himself, one member of a family is a cultivated gentleman, whose habitual ways of thinking are of rather an elevated kind, and whose manners and language are invariably faultless. He is blessed with very near relations whose principal characteristic is loud, confident, overwhelming vulgarity. He is always uncomfortable with these relations. He knows that the ways of thinking and speaking which are natural to him will seem cold and uncongenial to them; that not one of his thoughts can be exactly understood by them; that his deficiency in what they consider heartiness is a defect he cannot get over. On the other hand, he takes no interest in what they say, because their opinions on all the subjects he cares about are too crude, and their information too scanty or erroneous. If he said what he felt impelled to say, all his talk would be a perpetual correction of their clumsy blunders. He has, therefore, no resource but to repress himself and try to act a part, the part of a pleased companion; but this is wearisome, especially if prolonged. The end is that he keeps out of their way, and is set down as a proud, conceited person, and an unkind relative. In reality he is simply refined and has a difficulty in accommodating himself to the ways of all vulgar society whatever, whether composed of his own relations or of strangers. Does he deserve to be blamed for this? Certainly not. He has not the flexibility, the dramatic power, to adapt himself to a lower state of civilization; that is his only fault. His relations are persons with whom, if they were not relations, nobody would expect him to associate; but because he and they happen to be descended from a common ancestor he is to maintain an impossible intimacy. He wishes them no harm; he is ready to make sacrifices to help them; his misfortune is that he does not possess the humor of a Dickens that would have enabled him to find amusement in their vulgarity, and he prefers solitude to that infliction.
There is a French proverb, “Les cousins ne sont pas parents.” The exact truth would appear to be rather that cousins are relations or not just as it pleases them to acknowledge the relationship, and according to the natural possibilities of companionship between the parties. If they are of the same class in society (which does not always happen), and if they have pursuits in common or can understand each other’s interests, and if there is that mysterious suitableness which makes people like to be together, then the fact of cousinship is seized upon as a convenient pretext for making intercourse more frequent, more intimate, and more affectionate; but if there is nothing to attract one cousin to another the relationship is scarcely acknowledged. Cousins are, or are not, relations just as they find it agreeable to themselves. It need hardly be added that it is a general though not an invariable rule that the relationship is better remembered on the humbler side. The cousinly degree may be felt to be very close under peculiar circumstances. An only child looks to his cousins for the brotherly and sisterly affection that fate has denied him at home, and he is not always disappointed. Even distant cousins may be truly fraternal, just as first cousins may happen to be very distant, the relationship is so variable and elastic in its nature.
Unmarried people have often a great vague dread of their future wife’s relations, even when the lady has not yet been fixed upon, and married people have sometimes found the reality more terrible even than their gloomy anticipation. And yet it may happen that some of these dreaded new relations will be unexpectedly valuable and supply elements that were grievously wanting. They may bring new life into a dull house, they may enliven the sluggish talk with wit and information, they may take a too thoughtful and studious man out of the weary round of his own ideas. They may even in course of time win such a place in one’s affection that if they are taken away by death they will leave a great void and an enduring sorrow. I write these lines from a sweet and sad experience.[5]
Intellectual men are, more than others, liable to a feeling of dissatisfaction with their relations because they want intellectual sympathy and interest, which relations hardly ever give. The reason is extremely simple. Any special intellectual pursuit is understood only by a small select class of its own, and our relations are given us out of the general body of society without any selection, and they are not very numerous, so that the chances against our finding intellectual sympathy amongst them are calculably very great. As we grow older we get accustomed to this absence of sympathy with our pursuits, and take it as a matter of course; but in youth it seems strange that what we feel and know to be so interesting should have no interest for those nearest to us. Authors sometimes feel a little hurt that their nearest relations will not read their books, and are but dimly aware that they have written any books at all; but do they read books of the same class by other writers? As an author you are in the same position that other authors occupy, but with this difference, which is against you, that familiarity has made you a commonplace person in your own circle, and that is a bad opening for the reception of your higher thoughts. This want of intellectual sympathy does not prevent affection, and we ought to appreciate affection at its full value in spite of it. Your brother or your cousin may be strongly attached to you personally, with an old love dating from your boyhood, but he may separate you (the human creature that he knows) from the author of your books, and not feel the slightest curiosity about the books, believing that he knows you perfectly without them, and that they are only a sort of costume in which you perform before the public. A female relative who has given up her mind to the keeping of some clergyman, may scrupulously avoid your literature in order that it may not contaminate her soul, and yet she may love you still in a painful way and be sincerely sorry that you have no other prospect but that of eternal punishment.
I have sometimes heard the question proposed whether relations or friends were the more valuable as a support and consolation. Fate gives us our relations, whilst we select our friends; and therefore it would seem at first sight that the friends must be better adapted for us; but it may happen that we have not selected with great wisdom, or that we have not had good opportunities for making a choice really answering to our deepest needs. Still, there must have been mutual affinity of some kind to make a friendship, whilst relations are all like tickets in a lottery. It may therefore be argued that the more relations we have, the better, because we are more likely to meet with two or three to love us amongst fifty than amongst five.
The peculiar peril of blood-relationship is that those who are closely connected by it often permit themselves an amount of mutual rudeness (especially in the middle and lower classes) which they never would think of inflicting upon a stranger. In some families people really seem to suppose that it does not matter how roughly they treat each other. They utter unmeasured reproaches about trifles not worth a moment’s anger; they magnify small differences that only require to be let alone and forgotten, or they relieve the monotony of quarrels with an occasional fit of the sulks. Sometimes it is an irascible father who is always scolding, sometimes a loud-tongued matron shrieks “in her fierce volubility.” Some children take up the note and fire back broadside for broadside; others wait for a cessation in contemptuous silence and calmly disregard the thunder. Family life indeed! domestic peace and bliss! Give me, rather, the bachelor’s lonely hearth with a noiseless lamp and a book! The manners of the ill-mannered are never so odious, unbearable, exasperating, as they are to their own nearest kindred. How is a lad to enjoy the society of his mother if she is perpetually “nagging” and “nattering” at him? How is he to believe that his coarse father has a tender anxiety for his welfare when everything that he does is judged with unfatherly harshness? Those who are condemned to live with people for whom scolding and quarrelling are a necessary of existence must either be rude in self-defence or take refuge in a sullen and stubborn taciturnity. Young people who have to live in these little domestic hells look forward to any change as a desirable emancipation. They are ready to go to sea, to emigrate. I have heard of one who went into domestic service under a feigned name that he might be out of the range of his brutal father’s tongue.