CHAPTER XIAFFECTION AND SYMPATHY
Manyreaders may think that I have hitherto unaccountably neglected affection, which is, in some sense, the essence of a good character. I hold that love and knowledge are the two main requisites for right action, yet, in dealing with moral education, I have hitherto said nothing about love. My reason has been that the right sort of love should be the natural fruit resulting from the proper treatment of the growing child, rather than something consciously aimed at throughout the various stages. We have to be clear as to the kind of affection to be desired, and as to the disposition appropriate to different ages. From ten or twelve years old until puberty, a boy is apt to be very destitute of affection, and there is nothing to be gained by trying to force his nature. Throughout youth, there is less occasion for sympathy than in adult life, both because there is less power of giving effective expression to it, and because a young person has to think of his or her own training for life, largely to the exclusion of other people’s interests.For these reasons, we should be more concerned to produce sympathetic and affectionate adults than to force a precocious development of these qualities in early years. Our problem, like all problems in the education of character, is a scientific one, belonging to what may be called psychological dynamics. Love cannot exist as a duty: to tell a child that itoughtto love its parents and its brothers and sisters is utterly useless, if not worse. Parents who wish to be loved must behave so as to elicit love, and must try to give to their children those physical and mental characteristics which produce expansive affections.
Not only must children not be commanded to love their parents, but nothing must be done which has this result as its object. Parental affection, at its best, differs from sex-love in this respect. It is of the essence of sex-love to seek a response, as is natural, since, without a response, it cannot fulfil its biological function. But it is not of the essence of parental love to seek a response. The natural unsophisticated parental instinct feels towards the child as towards an externalized part of the parent’s body. If your great toe is out of order, you attend to it from self-interest, and you do not expect it to feel grateful. The savage woman, I imagine, has a very similar feeling towards her child. She desires its welfare in just thesame way as she desires her own, especially while it is still very young. She has no more sense of self-denial in looking after the child than in looking after herself; and for that very reason she does not look for gratitude. The child’s need of her is sufficient response so long as it is helpless. Later, when it begins to grow up, her affection diminishes and her demands may increase. In animals, parental affection ceases when the child is adult, and no demands are made upon it; but in human beings, even if they are very primitive, this is not the case. A son who is a lusty warrior is expected to feed and protect his parents when they are old and decrepit; the story of Æneas and Anchises embodies this feeling at a higher level of culture. With the growth of foresight, there is an increasing tendency to exploit children’s affections for the sake of their help when old age comes. Hence the principle of filial piety, which has existed throughout the world and is embodied in the Fifth Commandment. With the development of private property and ordered government, filial piety becomes less important; after some centuries, people become aware of this fact, and the sentiment goes out of fashion. In the modern world, a man of fifty may be financially dependent upon a parent of eighty, so that the important thing is still the affection of the parent for the child rather than of the childfor the parent. This, of course, applies chiefly to the propertied classes; among wage-earners, the older relationship persists. But even there it is being gradually displaced as a result of old-age pensions and similar measures. Affection of children for parents, therefore, is ceasing to deserve a place among cardinal virtues, while affection of parents for children remains of enormous importance.
There is another set of dangers, which has been brought to the fore by the psycho-analysts, though I think their interpretation of the facts may be questioned. The dangers I am thinking of are those connected with undue devotion to one or other parent. An adult, and even an adolescent, ought not to be so overshadowed by either father or mother as to be unable to think or feel independently. This may easily happen if the personality of the parent is stronger than that of the child. I do not believe that there is, except in rare morbid cases, an “Œdipus Complex”, in the sense of a special attraction of sons to mothers and daughters to fathers. The excessive influence of the parent, where it exists, will belong to the parent who has had most to do with the child—generally the mother—without regard to difference of sex. Of course, it may happen that a daughter who dislikes her mother and sees little of her father will idealize the latter; but in that case the influence is exertedby dreams, not by the actual father. Idealization consists of hanging hopes to a peg: the peg is merely convenient, and has nothing to do with the nature of the hopes. Undue parental influence is quite a different thing from this, since it is connected with the actual person, not with an imaginary portrait.
An adult with whom a child is in constant contact may easily become so dominant in the child’s life as to make the child, even in later life, a mental slave. The slavery may be intellectual, or emotional, or both. A good example of the former is John Stuart Mill, who could never bring himself, in the last resort, to admit that his father might have been mistaken. To some degree, intellectual slavery to early environment is normal; very few adults are capable of opinions other than those taught by parents or teachers, except where there is some general drift that carries them along. The children of Mohammedans are Mohammedans, the children of Buddhists are Buddhists, and so on. It may be maintained that intellectual slavery is natural and normal; I am inclined to admit that it can only be avoided by an educationad hoc. This form of excessive parental and scholastic influence ought to be avoided carefully, since, in a rapidly changing world, it is exceedingly dangerous to retain the opinions of a by-gone generation. But for the presentI shall consider only slavery of the emotions and the will, since that is more directly bound up with our present topic.
The evils considered by psycho-analysts under the heading “Œdipus Complex” (which I regard as misleading) arise from an undue desire on the part of parents for an emotional response from their children. As I said a moment ago, I believe that the parental instinct in its purity does not desire an emotional response; it is satisfied by the dependence of the young, and the fact that they look to parents for protection and food. When the dependence ceases, parental affection also ceases. This is the state of affairs among animals, and for their purposes it is entirely satisfactory. But such simplicity of instinct is scarcely possible for human beings. I have already considered the effect of military and economic considerations, as shown in the preaching of filial piety. I am now concerned with two purely psychological sources of confusion in the working of the parental instinct.
The first of these is of a sort which occurs wherever intelligence observes the pleasures to be derived from instinct. Broadly speaking, instinct prompts pleasant acts which have useful consequences, but the consequences may not be pleasant. Eating is pleasant, but digestion is not—especially when it is indigestion. Sex ispleasant, but parturition is not. The dependence of an infant is pleasant, but the independence of a vigorous grown-up son is not. The primitive maternal type of woman derives most pleasure from the infant at the breast, and gradually less pleasure as the child grows less helpless. There is therefore a tendency, for the sake of pleasure, to prolong the period of helplessness, and to put off the time when the child can dispense with parental guidance. This is recognized in conventional phrases, such as being “tied to his mother’s apron-strings”. It was thought impossible to deal with this evil in boys except by sending them away to school. In girls it was not recognized as an evil, because (if they were well-to-do) it was thought desirable to make them helpless and dependent, and it was hoped that after marriage they would cling to their husbands as they had formerly clung to their mothers. This seldom happened, and its failure gave rise to the “mother-in-law” joke. One of the purposes of a joke is to prevent thought—a purpose in which this particular joke was highly successful. No one seemed to realize that a girl brought up to be dependent would naturally be dependent upon her mother, and therefore could not enter into that whole-hearted partnership with a man which is the essence of a happy marriage.
The second psychological complication comesnearer to the orthodox Freudian point of view. It arises where elements appropriate to sex-love enter into parental affection. I do not mean anything necessarily dependent upon difference of sex; I mean merely the desire for a certain kind of emotional response. Part of the psychology of sex—that part, in fact, which has made monogamy a possible institution—is the desire to come first for some one, to feel that oneself is more important than any other human being to the happiness of at least one person in the world. When this desire has produced marriage, it will only produce happiness if a number of other conditions are realized. For one reason or another, a very large proportion of married women in civilized countries fail to have a satisfying sex-life. When this happens to a woman, she is apt to seek from her children an illegitimate and spurious gratification of desires which only men can gratify adequately and naturally. I do not mean anything obvious: I mean merely a certain emotional tension, a certain passionateness of feeling, a pleasure in kissing and fondling to excess. These things used to be thought quite right and proper in an affectionate mother. Indeed, the difference between what is right and what is harmful is very subtle. It is absurd to maintain, as some Freudians do, that parents ought not to kiss and fondle their children at all. Children have aright to warm affection from their parents; it gives them a happy, care-free outlook upon the world, and is essential to healthy psychological development. But it should be something that they take for granted, like the air they breathe, not something to which they are expected to respond. It is this question of response that is the essence of the matter. There will be a certain spontaneous response, which is all to the good; but it will be quite different from the active pursuit of friendship from childish companions. Psychologically, parents should be a background, and the child should not be made to act with a view to giving his parents pleasure. Their pleasure should consist in his growth and progress; anything that he gives them in the way of response should be accepted gratefully as a pure extra, like fine weather in spring, but should not be expected as part of the order of nature.
It is very difficult for a woman to be a perfect mother, or a perfect teacher of young children, unless she is sexually satisfied. Whatever psycho-analysts may say, the parental instinct is essentially different from the sex instinct, and is damaged by the intrusion of emotions appropriate to sex. The habit of employing celibate female teachers is quite wrong psychologically. The right woman to deal with children is a woman whose instinct is not seekingfrom them satisfactions for herself which they ought not to be expected to provide. A woman who is happily married will belong to this type without effort; but any other woman will need an almost impossible subtlety of self-control. Of course, the same thing applies to men in the same circumstances, but the circumstances are far less frequent with men, both because their parental instincts are usually not very strong, and because they are seldom sexually starved.
It is as well to be clear in our own thoughts as regards the attitude we are to expect from children to parents. If parents have the right kind of love for their children, the children’s response will be just what the parents desire. The children will be pleased when their parents come, and sorry when they go, unless they are absorbed in some agreeable pursuit; they will look to their parents for help in any trouble, physical or mental, that may arise; they will dare to be adventurous, because they rely upon their parents’ protection in the background—but this feeling will be hardly conscious except in moments of peril. They will expect their parents to answer their questions, resolve their perplexities, and help them in difficult tasks. Most of what their parents do for them will not enter into their consciousness. They will like their parents, not for providing their board and lodging, but for playing with them, showingthem how to do new things, and telling them stories about the world. They will gradually realize that their parents love them, but this ought to be accepted as a natural fact. The affection that they feel for their parents will be quite a different kind from that which they feel for other children. The parent must act with reference to the child, but the child must act with reference to himself and the outer world. That is the essential difference. The child has no important function to perform in relation to his parents. His function is to grow in wisdom and stature, and so long as he does so a healthy parental instinct is satisfied.
I should be very sorry to convey the impression that I want to diminish the amount of affection in family life, or the spontaneity of its manifestations. That is not at all what I mean. What I do mean is that there are different kinds of affection. The affection of husband and wife is one thing, that of parents for children is another, and that of children for parents is yet another. The harm comes when these different kinds of natural affection are confused. I do not think the Freudians have arrived at the truth, because they do not recognize these instinctive differences. And this makes them, in a sense, ascetic as regards parents and children, because they view any love between them as a sort of inadequate sex-love. I do not believein the need of any fundamental self-denial, provided there are no special unfortunate circumstances. A man and woman who love each other and their children ought to be able to act spontaneously as the heart dictates. They will need much thought and knowledge, but these they will acquire out of parental affection. They must not demand from their children what they get from each other, but if they are happy in each other they will feel no impulse to do so. If the children are properly cared for, they will feel for their parents a natural affection which will be no barrier to independence. What is needed is not ascetic self-denial, but freedom and expansiveness of instinct, adequately informed by intelligence and knowledge.
When my boy was two years and four months old, I went to America, and was absent three months. He was perfectly happy in my absence, but was wild with joy when I returned. I found him waiting impatiently by the garden gate; he seized my hand, and began showing me everything that specially interested him. I wanted to hear, and he wanted to tell; I had no wish to tell, and he had none to hear. The two impulses were different, but harmonious. When it comes to stories, he wishes to hear and I wish to tell, so that again there is harmony. Only once has this situation been reversed. Whenhe was three years and six months old, I had a birthday, and his mother told him that everything was to be done to please me. Stories are his supreme delight; to our surprise, when the time for them came, he announced that he was going to tell me stories, as it was my birthday. He told about a dozen, then jumped down, saying “no more stories to-day”. That was three months ago, but he has never told stories again.
I come now to the wider question of affection and sympathy in general. As between parents and children, there are complications owing to the possibility of abuse of power by parents; it was necessary to deal with these complications before attacking the general question.
There is no possible method ofcompellinga child to feel sympathy or affection; the only possible method is to observe the conditions under which these feelings arise spontaneously, and then endeavour to produce the conditions. Sympathy, undoubtedly, is partly instinctive. Children are worried when their brothers or sisters cry, and often cry too. They will take their part vehemently against the grown-ups when disagreeable things are being done to them. When my boy had a wound on his elbow which had to be dressed, his sister (aged eighteen months) could hear him crying in another room, and was very much upset. She kept onrepeating “Jonny crying, Jonny crying”, until the painful business was finished. When my boy saw his mother extracting a thorn with a needle from her foot, he said anxiously, “It doesn’t hurt, Mummy”. She said it did, wishing to give him a lesson in not making a fuss. He insisted that it didn’t hurt, whereupon she insisted that it did. He then burst into sobs, just as vehement as if it had been his own foot. Such occurrences must spring from instinctive physical sympathy. This is the basis upon which more elaborate forms of sympathy must be built. It is clear that nothing further is needed in the way of positive education except to bring home to the child the fact that people and animals can feel pain, and do feel it under certain circumstances. There is, however, a further negative condition: the child must not see people he respects committing unkind or cruel actions. If the father shoots or the mother speaks rudely to the maids, the child will catch these vices.
It is a difficult question how and when to make a child aware of the evil in the world. It is impossible to grow up ignorant of wars and massacres and poverty and preventable disease which is not prevented. At some stage, the child must know of these things, and must combine the knowledge with a firm conviction thatit is a dreadful thing to inflict, or even permit, any suffering which can be avoided. We are here confronted by a problem similar to that which faces people who wish to preserve female chastity; these people formerly believed in ignorance till marriage, but now adopt more positive methods.
I have known some pacifists who wished history taught without reference to wars, and thought that children should be kept as long as possible ignorant of the cruelty in the world. But I cannot praise the “fugitive and cloistered virtue” that depends upon absence of knowledge. As soon as history is taught at all, it should be taught truthfully. If true history contradicts any moral we wish to teach, our moral must be wrong, and we had better abandon it. I quite admit that many people, including some of the most virtuous, find facts inconvenient, but that is due to a certain feebleness in their virtue. A truly robust morality can only be strengthened by the fullest knowledge of what really happens in the world. We must not run the risk that the young people whom we have educated in ignorance will turn to wickedness with delight as soon as they discover that there is such a thing. Unless we can give them an aversion from cruelty, they will not abstain from it; and they cannot have anaversion from it if they do not know that it exists.
Nevertheless, the right way of giving children a knowledge of evil is not easily found. Of course, those who live in the slums of big cities get to know early all about drunkenness, quarrels, wife-beating, and so on. Perhaps this does them no harm, if it is counteracted by other influences; but no careful parent would deliberately expose a very young child to such sights. I think the great objection is that they rouse fear so vividly as to colour the whole of the rest of life. A child, being defenceless, cannot help feeling terror when it first understands that cruelty to children is possible. I was about fourteen when I first read “Oliver Twist”, but it filled me with emotions of horror which I could scarcely have borne at an earlier age. Dreadful things should not be known to young people until they are old enough to face them with a certain poise. This moment will come sooner with some children than with others: those who are imaginative or timid must be sheltered longer than those who are stolid or endowed with natural courage. A mental habit of fearlessness due to expectation of kindness should be firmly established before the child is made to face the existence of unkindness. To choose the moment and themanner requires tact and understanding; it is not a matter which can be decided by a rule.
There are, however, certain maxims which should be followed. To begin with, stories such as Bluebeard and Jack the Giant Killer do not involve any knowledge of cruelty whatever, and do not raise the problems we are considering. To the child, they are purely fantastic, and he never connects them with the real world in any way. No doubt the pleasure he derives from them is connected with savage instincts, but these are harmless as mere play-impulses in a powerless child, and they tend to die down as the child grows older. But when the child is first introduced to cruelty as a thing in the real world, care must be taken to choose incidents in which he will identify himself with the victim, not with the torturer. Something savage in him will exult in a story in which he identifies himself with the tyrant; a story of this kind tends to produce an imperialist. But the story of Abraham preparing to sacrifice Isaac, or of the she-bears killing the children whom Elisha cursed, naturally rouses the child’s sympathy for another child. If such stories are told, they should be told as showing the depths of cruelty to which men could descend long ago. I once, as a child, heard a sermon of an hour’s duration, entirely devoted to proving that Elishawas right in cursing the children. Fortunately, I was old enough to think the parson a fool; otherwise I should have been driven nearly mad with terror. The story of Abraham and Isaac was even more dreadful, because it was the child’s father who was cruel to him. When such stories are told with the assumption that Abraham and Elisha were virtuous, they must either be ignored or utterly debase a child’s moral standards. But when told as an introduction to human wickedness, they serve a purpose, because they are vivid, remote, and untrue. The story of Hubert putting out little Arthur’s eyes, in “King John”, may be used in the same way.
Then history may be taught, with all its wars. But in telling about wars, sympathy at first should be with the defeated. I should begin with battles in which it is natural to feel on the side of the beaten party—for instance, the battle of Hastings in teaching an English boy. I should emphasize always the wounds and suffering produced. I should gradually lead the child to feel no partisanship in reading about wars, and to regard both sides as silly men who had lost their tempers, and ought to have had nurses to put them to bed till they were good. I should assimilate wars to quarrels among the children in the nursery. In thisway, I believe children could be made to see the truth about war, and to realize that it is silly.
If any actual instance of unkindness or cruelty comes under the child’s notice, it should be fully discussed, with all the moral values which the adult himself attaches to the incident, and always with the suggestion that the people who acted cruelly were foolish, and did not know any better because they had not been well brought up. But I should not call the child’s attention to such things in his real world, if they were not spontaneously observed by him, until after he had grown familiar with them in history and stories. Then I should gradually introduce him to a knowledge of evil in his surroundings. But I should always give him the feeling that the evil can be combated, and results from ignorance and lack of self-control and bad education. I should not encourage him to be indignant with malefactors, but rather to regard them as bunglers, who do not know in what happiness consists.
The cultivation of wide sympathies, given the instinctive germ, is mainly an intellectual matter: it depends upon the right direction of attention, and the realization of facts which militarists and authoritarians suppress. Take, for example, Tolstoy’s description of Napoleon going round the battlefield of Austerlitz afterthe victory. Most histories leave the battlefield as soon as the battle is over; by the simple expedient of lingering on it for another twelve hours, a completely different picture of war is produced. This is done, not by suppressing facts, but by giving more facts. And what applies to battles applies equally to other forms of cruelty. In all cases, it should be quite unnecessary to point the moral; the right telling of the story should be sufficient. Do not moralize, but let the facts produce their own moral in the child’s mind.
It remains to say a few words about affection, which differs from sympathy in being inevitably and essentially selective. I have spoken already of affection between parents and children; it is affection between equals that I now wish to consider.
Affection cannot be created; it can only be liberated. There is a kind of affection which is partly rooted in fear; affection for parents has this element, since parents afford protection. In childhood affections of this sort are natural, but in later life they are undesirable, and even in childhood affection for other children is not of this sort. My little girl is intensely devoted to her brother, although he is the only person in her world who ever treats her unkindly. Affection as to an equal, which is the best kind,is much more likely to exist where there is happiness and absence of fear. Fears, conscious or unconscious, are very apt to produce hatred, because other people are regarded as capable of inflicting injuries. With most people, as things are, envy is a barrier to wide-spread affection. I do not think envy can be prevented except by happiness; moral discipline is powerless to touch its subconscious forms. Happiness, in turn, is largely prevented by fear. Young people who have a chance of happiness are deterred by parents and “friends”, nominally on moral grounds, but really from envy. If the young people have enough fearlessness, they will ignore the croakers; otherwise, they will allow themselves to be made miserable, and join the company of envious moralists. The education of character that we have been considering is designed to produce happiness and courage; I think, therefore, that it does what is possible to liberate the springs of affection. More than this cannot be done. If you tell children that they ought to be affectionate, you run the risk of producing cant and humbug. But if you make them happy and free, if you surround them with kindness, you will find that they become spontaneously friendly with everybody, and that almost everybody responds by being friendly with them. A trustful affectionatedisposition justifies itself, because it gives irresistible charm, and creates the response which it expects. This is one of the most important results to be expected from the right education of character.