His wife is more suspicious, for she belongs to a generation of women that was ignorant and reveled in its ignorance and called it charm, a generation when all women were fools except the spitfires and the wits. She tends to think that she was "finished" as a lady; her daughters consider that she was done for. The grandmother is a little jealous, but the mother of to-day, the formed woman of about thirty-five, has made a great leap and resembles her children much more than she does her mother. Her offspring do not say: "What is home without a mother? Peace, perfect peace." She is a little too conscientious, perhaps; she has turned her back rather rudely upon her mother's pursuits, such as tea and scandal, and has taken too virulently to lectures or evolution and proteid. She is too vivid, like a newly painted railing, but, like the railing, she will tone down. She pretends to be very socialistic or very fast; on the whole she affects rather the fast style. We must not complain. Is not brown paint in the dining room worse than pink paint on the face?
Whatever may be said about revolting daughters, I suspect that the change in the parent has been greater than that in the child, because the child in 1830 did not differ so much from the child of to-day as might appear. Youth then was restless and insurgent, just as it is to-day; only it was more effectively kept down. If to-day it is less kept down, this is partly for reasons I will indicate, but largely because the adult has changed. The patriarch is nearly dead; he is no longer the polygamous brute who ruled his wives with rods, murdered his infant sons, and sold his infant daughters; his successor, the knight of the Middle Ages, who locked up his wife in a tower for seven years while he crusaded in the Holy Land—he, too, has gone. And the merchant in broadcloth of Victorian days, who slept vigorously in the dining room on Sunday afternoon, has been replaced by a man who says he is sorry if told he snores. He is more liberal; he believes in reason now rather than in force, and generally would not contradict Milton's lines—
"Who overcomes by force
Hath overcome but half his foe."
He has come to desire love rather than power, and, little by little—thanks mainly to the "yellow" press—has acquired a chastened liking for new ideas. The spread of pleasure all round him, the vaudeville, the theaters, moving-picture shows, excursions to the seaside—all these have taught him that gaiety may not clash with respectability. Especially, he is more ready to argue, for a peaceful century has taught him that a word is better than a blow. There may be a change in his psychology after this war, for he is being educated by the million in the point of view that a loaded rifle is worth half a dozen scraps of paper; it is quite possible that he will carry this view into his social life. There may, therefore, be a reaction for thirty years or so, but thirty years is a trifle in questions such as these.
Naturally, women have in this direction developed further than men, for they had more leeway to make up. Man has so long been the educated animal that he did not need so much liberalizing. I do not refer to the Middle Ages, when learning was entirely preëmpted by the male (with the exception of poetry and music), for in those days there was no education save among the priests. I mean rather that the great development of elementary learning, which took place in the middle of the nineteenth century, affected men for about a generation before it affected women. In England, at least, university education for women is very recent, for Girton was opened only in 1873, Newnham, at Cambridge, in 1875; Miss Beale made Cheltenham College a power only a little later, and indeed it may be said that formal education developed only about 1890. Both in England and in the United States women have not had much more than a generation to make up the leeway of sixty centuries. It has benefited them as mothers because they did not start with the prejudices left in the male mind by the slow evolution from one form of learning to another; women did not have to live down Plato, Descartes, or Adam Smith; they began on Haeckel and H. G. Wells. The mothers of to-day have been flung neck and crop into Paradise; they came in for the new times, which are always better than the old times and inferior only to to-morrow. They were made to understand a possible democracy in the nursery because all round them, even in Russia, even in Turkey, democracy was growing, some say as a rose, some say as a weed, but anyhow irrepressibly. Who could be a queen by the cradle when more august thrones were tottering? So woman quite suddenly became more than a pretty foil to the educated man, she became something like his superior and his elder; little by little she has begun to teach him who once was her master and still in fond delusion believes he is.
It cannot be said that the mother has until very recently liked education. She has suffered from the prejudice that afflicted her own mother, who thought that because she had worked samplers all girls must work samplers; the "old" woman's daughter, because she went to Cheltenham, tends to think that her little girl ought to go to Cheltenham. It is human rather than feminine, for generations follow one another at Eton and at Harvard. But more than feminine, I think it is masculine because, until very recently, woman has disliked education, while man has treated it with respect; he has not loved it for its own sake, but because he thought that nam et ipsa scientia potestas est. Not a very high motive, but still the future will preoccupy itself very little with the reasons for which we did things; it will be glad enough if we do them. Perhaps we may yet turn the edges of swords on the blasts of rhetoric.
An immediate consequence of the growth of education has been a change in the status of the child. It is no longer property, for how can one prevent a child from pulling down the window sash at night when it knows something of ventilation? Or give it an iron tonic when it realizes that full-blooded people cannot take iron? The child has changed; it is no longer the creature that, pointing to an animal in the field, said, "What's that?" and the reply being, "A cow", asked "Why?" The child is perilously close to asking whether the animal is carnivorous or herbivorous. That makes coercion very difficult. But I do not think that the modern parent desires to coerce as much as did his forbear. Rather he desires to develop the child's personality, and in its early years this leads to horrid results, to children being "taught to see the beautiful" or "being made to realize the duties of a citizen." We are in for a generation made up half of bulbous-headed, bespectacled precocities, and half of barbarians who are "realizing their personality" by the continual use of "shall" and "shan't." This will pass as all things pass, the old child and the rude child, just like the weak parent after the brute parent, and it is enough that the new generation points to another generation, for there seldom was a time that was not better than its father and the herald of a finer son.
Generally the parent will help, for his new attitude can be expressed in a phrase. He does not say, "I am master", but, "I am responsible." He has begun to realize that the child is not a regrettable accident or a little present from Providence; he is beginning to look upon the care of the child as a duty. He has extended the ideal of citizenship, born in the middle of the nineteenth century, which was "to leave the world a little better than he found it"; he has passed on to wanting his son to be a little richer than he was, and a little more learned; he is coming to want his son to be a finer and bolder man; he will come in time to want his daughter to be a finer and bolder woman, which just now he bears pretty well. His wife is helping him a great deal because she is escaping from her home ties to the open trades and professions, to the entertainments of psychic, political, and artistic lectures which make of her head a waste paper basket of intellect, but still create in that head a disturbance far better than the ancient and cow-like placidity. The modern mother is often too much inclined to weigh the baby four times a day, to feed it on ozoneid, or something equally funny, to expose as much of its person as possible, to make it gaze at Botticelli prints when in its bath. She will no doubt want it to mate eugenically, in which she will probably be disappointed, for love laughs at Galtons; but still, in her struggle against disease and wooden thinking, she will have helped the child by giving it something to discard better than the old respects and fears. The modern mother has begun to consider herself as a human being as well as a mother; she no longer thinks that
"A mother is a mother still,
The holiest thing alive."
She is coming to look upon herself as a sort of æsthetic school inspector. She lives round her children rather than in them; she is less animal. Above all, she is more critical. Having more opportunity of mixing with people, she ceases to see her child as marvelous because it is her child. She is losing something of her conceit and has learned to say, "the baby" instead of "my baby." It is a revolutionary atmosphere, and the developing child has something to push against when it wants to earn its parents' approval, for modern parents are fair judges of excellence; they are educated. The old-time father was nonplussed by his son, and could not help him in his delectus, but the modern father is not so puzzled when his son wishes to converse of railway finance. The parent, more capable of comradeship, has come to want to be a comrade. He is no longer addressed as "sir"; he is often addressed as "old chap." That is fine, but it is in dead opposition to the close, hard family idea.