The son’s life may socially diverge so completely from that of the father that he may really come to belong to a different class in society. His education, habits, and associates may be different from those of his father. If the family is growing richer they are likely to be (in the worldly sense) of a higher class; if it is becoming poorer they will probably be of a lower class than the father was accustomed to in his youth. The son may feel more at ease than his father does in very refined society, or, on the other hand, he may feel refined society to be a restraint, whilst he only enjoys himself thoroughly and heartily amongst vulgar people that his father would carefully avoid.
Divergence is carried to its utmost by difference of professional training, and by the professional habit of seeing things that follows from it. If a clergyman puts his son into a solicitor’s office, he need not expect that the son will long retain those views of the world that prevail in the country parsonage where he was born. He will acquire other views, other mental habits, and he will very soon believe himself to possess a far greater and more accurate knowledge of mankind, and of affairs, than his father ever possessed.
Even if the son is in the father’s own profession he will have new views of it derived from the time at which he learns it, and he is likely to consider his father’s ideas as not brought down to the latest date. He will also have a tendency to look to strangers as greater authorities than his father, even when they are really on the same level, because they are not lowered in his estimate by domestic intimacy and familiarity. Their opinion will be especially valued by the young man if it has to be paid for, it being an immense depreciation of the paternal counsel that it is always given gratuitously.
If the father has bestowed upon his son what is considered a “complete” education, and if he himself has not received the same “complete” education in his youth, the son is likely to accept the conventional estimate of education because it is in his own favor, and to estimate his father as an “uneducated” or a “half-educated” man, without taking into much account the possibility that his father may have developed his faculties by mental labor in other ways. The conventional division between “educated” and “uneducated” men is so definite that it is easily seen. The educated are those who have taken a degree at one of the Universities; the rest are uneducated, whatever may be their attainments in the sciences, in modern languages, or in the fine arts.
There are differences of education even more serious than this, because more real. A man may be not only conventionally uneducated, but he may be really and truly uneducated, by which I mean that his faculties may never have been drawn out by intellectual discipline of any kind whatever. It is hard indeed for a well-educated young man to live under the authority of a father of that kind, because he has constantly to suppress reasons and motives for opinions and decisions that such a father could not possibly enter into or understand. The relationship is equally hard for the father, who must be aware, with the lively suspicion of the ignorant, that his son is not telling him all his thought but only the portion of it which he thinks fit to reveal, and that much more is kept in reserve. He will ask, “Why this reserve towards me?” and then he will either be profoundly hurt and grieved by it at times, or else, if of another temper, he will be irritated, and his irritation may find harsh utterance in words.
An educated man can never rid himself of his education. His views of the most ordinary things are different from the views of the uneducated. If he were to express them in his own language they would say, “Why, how he talks!” and consider him “a queer chap;” and if he keeps them to himself they say he is very “close” and “shut up.” There is no way out of the dilemma except this, that kind and tender feelings may exist between people who have nothing in common intellectually, but these are only possible when all pretence to paternal authority is abandoned.
Our forefathers had an idea with regard to the opinions of their children that in these days we must be content to give up. They thought that all opinions were by nature hereditary, and it was considered an act of disloyalty to ancestors if a descendant ventured to differ from them. The profession of any but the family opinions was so rare as to be almost inconceivable; and if in some great crisis the head of a family took a new departure in religion or politics the new faith substituted itself for the old one as the hereditary faith of the family. I remember hearing an old gentleman (who represented old English feeling in great perfection) say that it was totally unintelligible to him that a certain Member of Parliament could sit on the Liberal side of the House of Commons. “I cannot understand it,” he said; “I knew his father intimately, and he was always a good Tory.” The idea that the son might have opinions of his own was unthinkable.
In our time we are beginning to perceive that opinions cannot be imposed, and that the utmost that can be obtained by brow-beating a son who differs from ourselves is that he shall make false professions to satisfy us. Paternal influence may be better employed than in encouraging habits of dissimulation.
M. Legouvé attaches great importance to the religious question as a cause of division between fathers and sons because in the present day young men so frequently imbibe opinions which are not those of their parents. It is not uncommon, in France, for Catholic parents to have unbelieving sons; and the converse is also seen, but more frequently in the case of daughters. As opinions are very freely expressed in France (except where external conformity is an affair of caste), we find many families in which Catholicism and Agnosticism have each their open and convinced adherents; yet family affection does not appear to suffer from the difference, or is, at least, powerful enough to overcome it. In old times this would have been impossible. The father would have resented a difference of opinion in the son as an offence against himself.
A very common cause of division between father and son, in old times, was the following.