I believe that more unhappiness comes from this source than from any other—I mean from the attempt to prolong family connection unduly and to make people hang together artificially who would never naturally do so. The mischief among the lower classes is not so great, but among the middle and upper classes it is killing a large number daily. And the old people do not really like it much better than the young.
ii
On my way down to Shrewsbury some time since I read the Bishop of Carlisle’s Walks in the Regions of Science and Faith, [31] then just published, and found the following on p. 129 in the essay which is entitled “Man’s Place in Nature.” After saying that young sparrows or robins soon lose sight of their fellow-nestlings and leave off caring for them, the bishop continues:—
“Whereas ‘children of one family’ are constantly found joined together by a love which only grows with years, and they part for their posts of duty in the world with the hope of having joyful meetings from time to time, and of meeting in a higher world when their life on earth is finished.”
I am sure my great-grandfather did not look forward to meeting his father in heaven—his father had cut him out of his will; nor can I credit my grandfather with any great longing to rejoin my great-grandfather—a worthy man enough, but one with whom nothing ever prospered. I am certain my father, after he was 40, did not wish to see my grandfather any more—indeed, long before reaching that age he had decided that Dr. Butler’s life should not be written, though R. W. Evans would have been only too glad to write it. Speaking for myself, I have no wish to see my father again, and I think it likely that the Bishop of Carlisle would not be more eager to see his than I mine.
Unconscious Humour
“Writing to the Hon. Mrs. Watson in 1856, Charles Dickens says: ‘I have always observed within my experience that the men who have left home very young have, many long years afterwards, had the tenderest regard for it. That’s a pleasant thing to think of as one of the wise adjustments of this life of ours.’” [32a]
Homer’s Odyssey
From the description of the meeting between Ulysses and Telemachus it is plain that Homer considered it quite as dreadful for relations who had long been separated to come together again as for them to separate in the first instance. And this is about true. [32b]