THE DOMESTIC HEARTH
THE DOMESTIC HEARTH
March 1, 19—.
My dear Alexa,—
If you have a fault—and far be it from your adoring father to suggest that you have—but if you have a fault, it shows itself in your trick of asking questions beginning with an “ought.†I think my recollection is right when it tells me that your last three letters have, together with a good deal that was both interesting and diverting, contained a query as to whether you or somebody else “ought†or “ought†not to do something or other. When it is a case of You, I feel myself more or less competent to answer; for about You I do know a little, you see; but when you ask me what somebody else ought to do or to leave undone, somebody else of whom I know nothing, why, then I am stricken with a feeling of hopeless futility. I sit here and dither, and cover sheets of letter paper with my illegible handwriting only to tear them up after a miserablehalf-hour’s boggling. For to know what a person “ought†to do, one must know the person, you see, and the circumstances in which that person is posed. There are no “oughts†unrelated to particular persons and particular circumstances. If there were, what plain sailing life’s perilous voyage would be, wouldn’t it? In point of dismal fact that voyage is made upon an uncharted sea. A few plain general instructions in the principles of navigation are all we get; we have to look out for the rocks and shoals and whirlpools and adverse currents for ourselves.
There are not nearly so many “oughts†in life as you in the solemn ingenuousness of your youth doubtless imagine. As you grow older you will find the “oughts†diminish and the “musts†increase. That is to say what looks like moral freedom gradually, and not so very gradually either, gives way to what in stern fact is practical necessity. But I suppose I must come to the point.
“Ought girls to earn their own livings?†you ask in a postscript, which I can’t help wishing you had forgotten to add. There is no dodging a postscript, there is no pretending one hasn’t noticed it. That is perhapswhy women are so fond of it. But—no longer to dodge yours—see how the facts of life limit the scope of your question. See how your “ought†is, for the vast majority of young women, at once converted into a “must.†For the vast majority of young women the question does not so much as arise. They do earn their own livings as it is, and they do it not because they ought or because they choose, but just because they must. The housemaid, for instance, who made your bed this morning, and who, I hope, dusted and put straight your room—a lengthy business, Alexa, for I know your ways—do you suppose that her action was the outcome of any moral questionings or of personal predilection? Do you suppose she did it from a high sense of duty, because she felt that something would go askew with the universe or with her own soul if she left it undone? Of course she didn’t. She did it because she had to do it, to do either that or something just a trifle more objectionable, on the whole. She is probably one of a large and poor family, and as soon as she had passed the Sixth Standard, or whatever it is which the law of her country demands that sheshould pass, she had to go out to service. There was no “ought†about it. And those young women whom you saw in Fleet Street, at mid-day, when you were there with me, you remember, a day or two before you left home, and whose behaviour struck you as being so vulgar and objectionable! They were binders’ girls; they had already been working several hours in a stuffy atmosphere, and after a quarter-of-an-hour’s rollicking up and down Fleet Street, they were about to return and work several more hours. And do you think that they had decided to do all that work after mature deliberation as to the rights and wrongs of it? Of course they hadn’t. It was for them that, or something infinitely worse than that, and so they chose, if they can be said to choose, that. It was a case of “must,†not of “ought.†And when a thing must be, there is no more reckless waste of honest time possible than that spent in discussing whether it ought to be.
Your question applies then, you see, only to a very limited number of young women. It was not a thoughtfully-framed question, Alexa. It was, if you will forgive me, a middle-class sort of question. When youwrote “girls,†you were thinking of yourself and of young women in a social position similar to yours, and they are rather a small minority of the earth’s inhabitants; delightful, but few, comparatively. So let me frame the question for you as you would have framed it if you had thought a little more about it, and then let’s get to work upon it.
What you meant to ask was, I think, this: Ought a young woman of good education, ordinary health, stature, and capacity (whose parents can afford to keep her in idleness) to live upon their income until such time as she is asked by a nice young gentleman to come and live upon his? That is about as near as we can get to it, isn’t it?
Well, even that very limited interrogative proposition is not altogether easy to tackle. One question leads always directly or indirectly to another, and so we go on asking “Why?†until we come flat up against a dead wall before which we can do nothing but gibber. In the affairs of practical life it is necessary to treat some matters as settled, and one of such matters is this:—If you receive from a person services for which you make no return, you are under an obligationto that person; and to sit quiescent under an obligation, to make no effort to get out of it, is to suffer humiliation and indignity. That, reasonably or unreasonably, is the view of every decently honest man and woman, of every man and woman whose hand you would care to take in friendship. That is your own view, Alexa, when you come to think of it, isn’t it? I have noticed that whenever a friend makes you a present you begin to cast about for some way in which you can make some return without doing it too obviously. Moreover, you would not accept a present at all from one who was not a friend. If one of your fellow-guests now, for instance, were to offer you a diamond bracelet, you would be in no end of a rage, and would probably write to me.
Now then, everybody of full age and capacity who is eating, drinking, dwelling in a house and wearing clothes, and yet doing nothing whatever to provide that food, drink, house and apparel, is suffering that humiliation and indignity of which we have just spoken. He may not be conscious of it. Obviously he is not (for there are many millions of him) conscious of it, but the factremains. There is just one reply he can make to the charge. He can say, if he likes, “Oh, it is true I do nothing practical, material, in return for the many services which are done for me; but I consent to live. I exist beautifully. I look nice, I talk, when I take the trouble to talk, quite prettily. I wear my clothes with an air. I am an example of what a human being should be. Thus, by merely being, do I recompense the world for all the trouble it takes for me.†If he does say that, then I for my part can think of no adequate rejoinder. If it be a man who talks like that, one kicks him and takes the consequences; if a woman, one (perhaps) kisses her and drops the controversy.
But that tiresome “ought†of yours which I feel buzzing round my head as I write, like a bee, and a bee with a sting, too! To deal with it properly I must assume something to start with, and so here goes. I assume this: Oneoughtto do that which will enable one to live the happiest life attainable in one’s circumstances and to develop one’s capabilities to their fullest. I assume that, and if you query it, Alexa, I will wait until you return home and have acouple of hours’tête-à -têtewith you in my study.
Now then, does a grown-up young woman live the happiest life attainable or develop her natural capacities to their fullest while she lives in her parents’ house, dependent for every penny she spends upon her parents’ bounty or caprice, acting under her parents’ orders in all the great and in the most of the smaller doings of her life, and subject to her parents’ rules, regulations, and discipline?
Judging from my own observation and knowledge of the way in which human nature is composed I haven’t the smallest hesitation in answering “No.†My observation tells me that there may be outward acquiescence, my penetration tells me no less surely that there is always hidden resentment. A thwarted desire for freedom works like poison in the blood; in the long run it sours the finest temper. It gives birth to a fire which, though it may never flame, continually smoulders; and, remember, this desire for freedom, for the power to do what we will, to go where we wish, to say what we like, subject always to the limitations of external circumstances, is inherent in every humanbreast. The restrictions of external circumstances we most of us accept without over much of rancour. What we do not accept, that against which we are in eternal revolt, is the restriction imposed upon us by other wills than ours. That impulsive desire to break away from pupillage, to strike out “on our own,†is perhaps of all motives the most legitimate that can stir the human soul.
The Home as we so often know it, the Home which consists of father, mother, and grown-up dependent sons or daughters, or both, is not a place wherein such impulses and motives can rightly develop or have anything like free play. Such a Home is necessarily and inevitably a tyranny; at best a benevolent tyranny, at worst a tyranny in which benevolence is far to seek. Don’t imagine that I have joined the cult of Mr Bernard Shaw and am about to say anything so ridiculously untrue as that the Home is the very worst institution in which to bring up a child, except the school. That is a mere paradox of Nihilism distraught. The Home, so far, is the best of all institutions in which to bring up a child—tobring up a child, mark,not to support a grown man or woman. It has its analogy in the nests of birds and the lairs of beasts; but Nature, for once in a way, is wiser than modern man. The young bird leaves the nest as soon as it is strong enough on the wing; the young tiger says good-bye to the lair on the day on which he can kill his own prey. The Home of grown-up sons and daughters who are not earning their own livings—even the happiest of such Homes—is a place of continual and constant compromise and surrender, of suppression, of restraint, of concealed (and not always concealed) resentments and silent rebellions. Just now and then maybe (for I want to avoid extremes) it may draw forth the best that is in us; but much more often it evokes the worst. It narrows even when it does not actually distort; it cripples even when it does not actually slay. And there is no help for it, Alexa. The profoundest wisdom, the sincerest love, can do little more than slightly ameliorate the essential, the immutable wrongness of the Thing, the subjection of adult will to adult will. Children of no matter what age who are dependent upon their parents economically, must needs be dependent in allelse. The world is so constructed that he who pays the piper calls the tune. And it is well; for even worse than an ordered tyranny is an anarchic republic.
There is just another point. Marriages, Alexa, are not made in Heaven as some are still found to say, nor in Hell, as too many just now are apt to declare. They are made for the most part in the Home. The strongest condemnation of the grown-up Home is the enormous number of young women who marry to get away from it. In the name of my own sex I do resent and protest against that. It is hard upon us that we should be so often regarded by the Beloved as a sort of melancholy alternative to the Home. Girls, in our class at any rate, marry much more often with a view to being their own mistresses, as we say, than to being men’s wives or children’s mothers. And I sometimes fancy they are under no very serious illusions as to the radiant possibilities of the married state, these marrying maidens of ours. There was once a man, you know, who after several days’ suffering from acute earache went out and had a tooth drawn. When he was asked why he supposed that theextraction of a sound tooth would remedy the agony of an unsound ear, he replied that he had never supposed anything of the kind. All he wanted was to change the pain, and that the dentist had done for him! A similar desire, I am sure, will alone account for some recent marriages of your young friends which have caused you so much puzzlement. “I cannot make out what she saw in him,†you have more than once remarked to me. Well, she saw just that—a change in the pain. Not nice for him, is it? Nor so very nice for her.
And now I wonder whether you consider that I have answered your question at all satisfactorily. I daresay not, for this world is a welter, and the wisest of us is bemazed with doubts. It is possible to have doubts about everything—at least I should say about everything but one, and that is that I am always, my own kiddie,
Your loving
Father.