It may be true, as has lately been suggested by the same wise teacher, that the children of our time are in protest against parents, because these are the authors and agents of the sadly blundering world by them inherited. Is it not also true and by children to be had in mind that parents are fearful of the ruthless urge and, as it seems, relentless drive of the generation to be, which become articulate in the impatiences of youth? Dealing with the difference that arises out of the fact of parents facing pastward and children futureward, Professor Perry declares [I]: "The domestic adult is in a sort of backwash. He is looking toward the past, while the children are thinking the thoughts and speaking the language of tomorrow. They are in closer touch with reality, and cannot fail, however indulgent, to feel that their parents are antiquated.... The children's end of the family is its budding, forward-looking end: the adult's end is, at best, its root. There is a profound law of life by which buds and roots grow in opposite direction."
It were well for parents and in children to remember that past and future meet in the contacts of their common present, and that these conflict-provoking contacts are due neither to parental waywardness nor to filial wilfulness. These are not unlike the seething waters of Hell Gate, the tidal waters of river and sound, meeting and clashing, and out of their meeting growing the eddies and whirlpools which have suggested the name Hell Gate bears. Through these whirling waters there runs a channel of safety, the security of the passerby depending upon the unresting vigilance of the navigator. The whirl of the waters is not less wild because the meeting is the meeting of two related bodies, two arms of the self-same sea.
CHAPTER VII
CONFLICTS IRREPRESSIBLE
If it be true, as true it is, that many of the so-called wars are not wars at all, there are on the other hand conflicts arising between parents and children which cannot be averted, conflicts the consequences of which must be frankly faced. To one of such conflicts we have already alluded,—that which grows out of impatience with what Emerson calls "otherness." But this, while not grave in origin, may and ofttimes does develop into decisive and divisive difference. "Difference of opinion" need not mar the peace of the parental-filial relation, unless parents or children or both are bent upon achieving sameness, even identity of opinion and judgment. It is here that parents and children require to be shown that sameness is not oneness, that, as has often been urged, uniformity is a shoddy substitute for unity, and that it is the cheapest of personal chauvinisms to insist upon undeviating likeness of opinion among the members of one's household. For, when this end is reached, intellectual impoverishment and sterility, bad enough in themselves in the absence of mental stimulus and enrichment, are sure to breed dissension.
An explicable but none the less inexcusable passion on the part of parents or children for sameness—a passion bred of intolerance and unwillingness to suffer one's judgment to be searched—is fatally provocative of conflict and clashing. Let parents seek to bring their judgments to children but any attempt at intellectual coercion is a species of enslavement. It may be good to persuade another of the validity of one's judgments, but such persuasion on the part of parents should be most reluctant lest children feel compelled to adopt untested parental opinion, and the docility of filial agreement finally result in intellectual dishonesty or aridity. Than this nothing could be more ungenerous, utilizing the intimacies of the home and the parental vantage-ground in the interest of enforcement of one's own viewpoints. If I had a son, who, every time he opened his mouth, should say, "Father, you are right," "Quite so, pater," "Daddy, I am with you," I should be tempted to despise him. I would have my son stand on his feet, not mine, nor any chance teacher's or boy comrade's, or favorite author's, but his own, and see with his own eyes and hear with his own ears, nerving me with occasional dissent rather than unnerving me with ceaseless assent.
Children are equally unjustified in attempting to compel parental adoption of filial views, but for many reasons it is much easier for parents to withstand filial coercion than the reverse, and up to this time the latter coercion has been rather rarer than the former. "The idea of the unity of two lives for the sake of achieving through their unsunderable union the unity of the children's lives with their own," citing the fine word of Felix Adler, is a very different thing, however, from lowering the high standards of voluntary unity to the level of compulsory uniformity.
Another cause of clashing may be briefly dealt with, for it is not really clashing that it evokes. They alone can clash who are near to one another, and I am thinking of an unbridgeable remoteness that widens ever more once it obtains between parents and children. Not clash but chasm, when parents and children find not so much that their ideals are so pitted against one another as to occlude the hope of harmonious adjustment, as that in the absence of ideals on one side or the other there has come about an unbridgeable gap. Nothing quite so tragic in the home as the two emptinesses or aridities side by side, with all the poor, mean, morally sordid consequences that are bound to ensue! And the tragedy of inward separation or alienation is heightened rather than lessened by the circumstance that the bond of physical contact persists for the most part unchanged.