As I said one day to the Professor—
But first I must tell you about the Professor. She is a young woman—young even in an era that classes authors among the “younger writers” until they are sixty, and is pushing the “proper age at which to marry” into the period of severe and undebatable maturity. She is young, but she exemplifies that educated precocity tolerated and fostered by our era. She knows the past like a book and the present like a man. She does not vulgarly bristle with knowledge like the first products of the higher education. Her acquirements sit upon her less like starched linen than like a silken gown that flowswith the figure. She is the educated woman in her “second manner,” as the art critics would say. I do not know what the educated woman’s third manner will be. No one acquainted with the charms of the Professor could help hoping that there never would be any.
The Professor graduated and post-graduated. She pottered in laboratories, and at certain intervals wholly disappeared into the very abysses of science. She read law tentatively, and made a feint at going into medicine, but was deterred in each case, I fancy, by the fact, repugnant to her exuberant energy, that a practice had to grow and could not be mastered ready made. At one time there were both hopes and fears that she would enter the ministry. Those who hoped banked on her earnestness and wisdom. Those who feared quailed before her ruthless independence and sense of humor. She delighted in the paradox of not scorning social life, welcoming Emerson’s admonition with regard to solitude and society by keeping her head in one and her hands in the other. Indeed, she dances remarkably well when we consider that here the dexterity is so far removed from the brain, and I have seen her swim like—a mermaid, I suppose. She took a long course in cookery for the pleasure of more pungently abusing certain of her lecture audiences. One day when the plumbers didn’t come I saw her actually “wipe a joint” in lead pipe with her own hands. Heaven knows where she pickedthatup!
When she accepted the position at the Academy, doubtless it was with a view to certain liberties of action in the sociological direction. She was not quite through with the college settlement idea, and I suspect that she had a feeling that city politics at close range might be productive to her in certain ways. Because she is neither erratic nor formidable, she has experienced various offers of marriage, and has shed them all without visible disturbance. Just at present, panoplied in learning, tingling with modernity, yet always charmingly unconscious of her power, she stands, poised and easy, like a sparrow on a live wire.
In other words the Professor is one of those rare women with whom you may enjoy the delights of a purely impersonal quarrel. She can wrangle affectionately and cleave you in twain with a tender sisterly smile. Indeed, she can make you feel of intellectual fisticuffs, and, notwithstanding an occasional effect of too greatly accentuated excitement, that it is, on the whole, a superior pleasure. And you arise again conscious that she has no greater immediate grudge against you than against St. Paul or any other of her historical opponents.
One day I asked the Professor, not with any controversial inflection, what she thought of Herbert Spencer, a bachelor, talking about the rearing of children.
“Well,” said the Professor, “it certainly is no more absurd than the spectacle of Herbert Spencer analyzing love, or Ernest Renan doing the same thing.”
“Mind you,” I went on, “I don’t say that the unmarried may not discuss with entire competency—”
“I hope not,” interrupted the Professor. “I hope you wouldn’t say any such absurd thing. Must a man have robbed a bank to write intelligently of penology?”
“My point is,” I went on—the Professor and I never take the slightest offence at each other’s interruptions—“my point is that it almost seems at times as if the unmarried should, in such an emergency, assume, if they did not feel, a certain diffidence. To tell you the truth, Professor, if it were not for you, I should doubt whether the unmarried had a developed sense of humor.”
“That is simply pitiful,” flung the Professor. “Can you not see that it is a sense of humor that keeps many people from marrying? But that is not the point. Who is better fitted than Mr.Spencer, who has enjoyed freedom from an entangling alliance, who is unbiased by social situation or personal obligation, to discuss with scientific judiciality the problems of child-rearing?”
“Theoretically, Professor, that is all right. But when Mr. Spencer advises more sugar, it is awfully hard to forget that Mr. Spencer never, presumably never, sat up nights with a youngster who had the toothache. It is all very well for Mr. Spencer to suggest that when a child craves more sugar it probably needs more sugar, but the parent who manages his offspring on that basis is going to lose sleep. A good rule, if you will permit me a platitude, is a rule that works. The way that childrenshouldbe brought up is the way theycanbe brought up.”
“My friend,” said the Professor—
Now, I am several years older than the Professor. By sheer age I am entitled to her deference; but the Professor can ignore years as well as sex or previous condition of servitude. Her impersonality is adjusted to time, to space, and to matter. I am simply a Person.
“My friend,” said the Professor, “it is another platitude that there is a right way to do everything,even to bring up children. The way children are brought up probably is not right, and no theory or method of bringing them up is, of course, or could be more than relatively right. But in getting as near the right as we humanly may there is no wisdom in despising the advice of the spectator. The man digging a hole in the ground may be less competent than a man not in the hole to perceive that presently the earth is going to cave in. As a matter of fact, old maids, for example, have been known to bring up children very well indeed, for the reason, possibly, that nothing is more detrimental to successful authority over children than relationship to them. All experience shows that the scientific, the abstract management of children is more successful, in the average, than the traditional parental method. This scientific method, I need not say, is not less kindly than the other; it actually is more kindly. Witness the absolute triumph of kindergartens—”
“Now, Professor,” I interposed, foreseeing the spectacle of Froebel and Plato moving down arm-in-arm between the Professor’s periods, “understand me—”
“A very difficult thing at times,” she murmured.
“Understand me—I am speaking now with my eye on the American child.”
“Andthat,” twinkled the Professor, “requires some dexterity.”
“The American child,” I pursued, “is accused by many of threatening our destruction, and if theAmerican view of rearing children is wrong or requires modification, this radical suggestion of Mr. Spencer, looking to greater rather than less liberty in making terms with the instincts of children, becomes a matter for serious concern. If the American idea has stood for anything it is more sugar—that is to say, yielding something to the instinct, the personality of the child. I think we have gone a long way with it. Our children are becoming very self-possessed. Sometimes I have qualms. Take the American girl child—”
“A vast subject,” commented the Professor.
“The American girl child is getting a good deal of sugar—figuratively. The question comes, Is it good for her? Is her freedom, her undomestic training, her intellectual development, to the advantage of the race? I believe with Mr. Ruskin that you can’t make a girl lovely unless you make her happy. But how can we expect her to know what will make her happy? Aren’t you afraid, Professor, that she is becoming a trifle frivolous? Of course you yourself are a living contradiction—”
“Don’t try to deceive me,” warned the Professor. “I perceive in what you say, not the doubts of an incipient cynic, but the remorse of a doting and indulgent man. Most really typical American men are in the same situation. They are wondering if they haven’t overdone it, and, being too busy to find out for themselves, are eager for outside judgment, upon which they may act,de jure. The viceof the American man is his indulgence of the American girl. The foreigner commiseratingly thinks that the American girl demands this indulgence. The American man in his secret soul knows that he has pampered her for his own pleasure, and because, to a busy man, pampering is easier than regulating.”
“Yes,” I complained, “in the new paradise Adam is always to blame.”
“No,” protested the Professor, “not always; just humanly often. And don’t think that you have invented this modern anxiety for the welfare of girl children. Before and since ‘L’Éducation des Filles,’ they all have been ‘harping on my daughter.’ Women have been even more despairing than men. Hannah More thought that ‘the education of the present race of females’ was ‘not very favorable to domestic happiness.’ Mrs. Stowe thought ‘the race of strong, hearty, graceful girls’ was daily decreasing, and that in its stead was coming ‘the fragile, easily fatigued, languid girls of the modern age, drilled in book learning and ignorant in common things.’ Now that sort of thing has been going on since our race stopped speaking with the arboreal branch of the family. There is perpetual opportunity for a treatise on ‘The Antiquity of New Traits.’ We are apt to think that we of this era have invented the idea of educating girls, but civilized children always have been educated early in something. Nowadays it is in science. In our colonial days it was in piety. Miss Repplier, whohas a most relishable antipathy for prigs, in fiction and in life, reminds us of Cotton Mather’s son, who ‘made a most edifying end in praise and prayer at the age of two years and seven months,’ and of Phoebe Bartlett, who was ‘ostentatiously converted at four.’ You are not sorry to be rid of all that, are you?”
“No,” I assented, “most assuredly I am not. It is pretty hard to find the Juvenile Prig on this soil nowadays outside of the most inhuman ‘books for the young.’ And we all are glad of it. You may remember the passage in the Chesterfield letters in which the father writes to the son: ‘To-morrow, if I am not mistaken, you will attain your ninth year; so that for the future I shall treat you as ayouth. You must now commence a different course of life, a different course of studies. No more levity; childish toys and playthings must be thrown aside, and your mind directed to serious objects. What was not unbecoming of a child would be disgraceful of a youth.’ We certainly have outgrown that view of things, and the American youngster comes nearer being without hypocrisy than any product of civilization that I ever have studied. But what have we in place of the piety and affectation? What is the working result of so much independence? Are not the American girl children, as well as the boys, a trifle irreverent?”
“Yes, I know,” admitted the Professor, “the American child often seems a shade too unawed. Balzac says somewhere that modesty is a relativevirtue—there is ‘that of twenty years, that of thirty years, and that of forty years.’ Our ancestors believed in a severe, hypocritical modesty for the young, trusting that they would get over it. They did worse than that when they asked youth to anticipate the hypocrisies of age. The same elegant person whom you have just quoted once wrote to that same son: ‘Having mentioned laughing, I want most particularly to warn you against it; and I could heartily wish that you may often be seen to smile, but never heard to laugh while you live.’ Although Chesterfield insisted that he was ‘neither of a melancholy or cynical disposition,’ he was proud to be able to say to his boy ‘Since I have had the full use of my reason, nobody has ever heard me laugh.’ The next time you feel inclined to say mean things about the Puritans remember that declaration by the Earl. Now, the American seems to me not only to look at children differently, but to look at life differently, and anynew traits in the American child probably represent one fact as much as the other. The American idea—I say idea, but I mean the American habit; we explain our habits and call the explanation a theory—merely obliterates age discriminations. The American child is simply the diminutive American. The American girl is her mother writ small. I don’t think that she is a whit more independent or irreverent than her mother.”
“You don’t mean to say, Professor, that a child should not, for instance, be taught to keep a proper silence in company.”
“Not an absolute silence. A child either has a right to be in a company or it has not. If it is in the company it has a right to be articulate like the other members of the company. If it is a sensible child it will listen to its elders, not because they are its elders but because they are its betters, because they know more, are more competent to speak. If it is not sensible it will be made to suffer for its foolishness, just as older members of the company aremade to suffer. From my observation, children naturally brought up take their reasonable place very naturally in company.”
“My fear is, Professor, that your naturalistic method overlooks much of what we have become accustomed to think when we speak of ‘breeding.’ Now, children, even American children, do not acquire this instinctively. Breeding includes restraint, externally applied restraint—I don’t mean applied with a slipper or a rattan, though restraint to have a really fine catholicity should, in my opinion, include these symbols—but restraint inculcated by a wise, or at least a wiser, authority. I believe sincerely that we have, in the past, tried to bend the twig too far. But the beneficial results of guiding twigs has been, I think, indisputably proved. Taking away too many guides and supports must have its dangers. I think of these things when I see the unhampered American girl of to-day. She is a lovely spectacle. Yet I sometimes wonder, in a trite and old-fashioned way, if her sort of training or absence of training is going to make her a woman who will know how to manage a household and children. I can see clearly enough that she is going to know how to manage a husband; but the house—and the children—”
The Professor was musing. “Your anxiety makes me think of the early criticisms of the kindergarten. ‘What!’ they used to exclaim, ‘a mob of unmanageable brats and no ferule?’ Yet it is so. Yourmisgivings overlook, I think, the latitudes of training, the obligations of breeding. The American seems to me to be guiding his children as he guides his civic affairs, not by brute force but by giving and taking. If his child is born with the right to the pursuit of happiness, he believes in starting the pursuit early. I suppose that children in the United States have greater liberty than children in any other country. The conferring of liberty has its dangers, and those who confer it cannot expect to escape the obligations that go with the gift. It has cost the American some annoyance to confer liberty and privileges on grown-up folks from various quarters. If he decides—and he does so quite reasonably I think—to include his children, he is bound to stand with the emancipated.”
“Professor,” I said, “your words are soothing. They are alluringly optimistic. I don’t want to reform the American child. I like him—and especially her—as at present conditioned. I believe that the irreverence is largely a seeming irreverence—an irreverence toward traditions rather than toward people and principles; which simply is saying what we should say of grown-up Americans. And I believe that in any case the boy will knock his way out somehow. But the girl—I am not doubting her; I am not believing that she is so petted a darling as Paul Bourget, for instance, seems to think she is. I am not questioning the intrinsic charm of her style, the piquing prophecies of hermind, the perfection of her beauty, the delight of her companionship; I am wondering whether this immediately agreeable sort of product is going to meet the requirements of life as it is opening up to us in this land, if—”
“Well,” swung in the Professor, “if you were going to have a worry, it is a pity you couldn’t have had a new one—the new ones keep us busy enough. You are very trite this time. You sound like a reformer—”
“Heaven forbid!” I cried.
“—and a reformer nowadays has a passion for beginning on the children. Please don’t. Some of these reforming women remind me of the advertisement in the London paper: ‘Bulldog for sale. Will eat anything. Very fond of children.’ These reforming women will reform anything—and they are very fond of children.”
“It is particularly the American girl,” I went on, “who is illustrating the modern yearning to skip intervals, to ignore the ordinary processes of time. She is like Horace Walpole, who found that the deliberation with which trees grow was ‘extremely inconvenient to his natural impatience.’ It doesn’t seem to make any difference how rigidly her ‘coming out’ time is fixed, she is getting to be a woman before her time. Mark me, Professor, she knows too much, she—”
“A strictly masculine anxiety, sir.”
“—she knows too much, to the exclusion of some other things she doesn’t know.”
“Nowdon’tmention the kitchen,” cried the Professor, “I am dreadfully tired of that.”
“No, Professor, her general cleverness always seems to me to make the kitchen anxiety needless to a great extent. I mean that in knowing so much and assuming so much the American girl child may be missing some of that sweetness that for her lies in a more old-fashioned girlhood. As a kind of unbent twig she is losing some of the more dependent happiness belonging to her and not grudged to her. Mind you, Professor, if a crime has been committed, I am accessory—”
“I began with that assumption,” remarked the Professor.
“—and I am hoping that there has been no crime, that the unbent twig is growing all right on its own account, that our spoiled daughters, weary of privilege, may be longing to serve, that if her modesty is not expressed in meek eyes ‘full of wonder,’ her lofty glance is not, Hermes-like, given to lying. Whatever the future may have in store, she at least is what she seems to be. Her sentiments may sometimes be irreverent, but they are her own. Perhaps the reason she seems more of an individual than the archetypal girl is, as you have suggested, that we have stripped her of the hypocrisy by which she pretended not to be a unit but only the mute shadow of a unit.”
“O, you will come around!” chuckled the Professor.
“‘Come around,’ Professor? You mean sink back into the Slough of Idolatry. I feel it in my bones that in spite of a gleam of intelligent interrogation as to the wisdom of pampering the American girl, I am going to keep right on—”
“You mean, if you will be honest,” blurted the Professor, “that you will keep on letting her alone as you do the boy child. That is all. Own up. The most that you have done is cease the special repression of the girl. For better or for worse the American has done simply that: forget sex in rearing his young.”
“Ah, Professor! when we forget sex are we not in danger of a costly transgression? Are we not combating nature?”
“On the contrary, my friend, you are ceasing to combat nature. There is nothing nature is more definitely certain to do than to look out for sex on her own account. Is not all of creation trying toteach us this lesson? Is not all of creation trying to teach us the folly and the futility of meddling? Let nature alone. She knows her business. Sex duality is universal. No amount of sitting up nights will help you to think out a way of successfully interfering.”
I looked at the Professor. She is very much a woman. She suggested a type that had been “let alone.” She is not a freak. Both her body and her mind are well dressed, and she is good to look upon. To look upon her sometimes fills me with a certain misgiving. But it is not a misgiving for her.
“And yet,” it came to me to say, though not precisely in rebuke, “there is such a thing as human humility.”
“Humility?” The Professor looked over at me with affected scorn. “Then illustrate it, please. I cannot see the humility of interference. The American does not repress his daughter. You admit that you like the result. Why wrinkle your brow in contemplation of the future? Why not believe that what seems to be true is true, that the American girl flourishes agreeably in her freedom? Give her the natural privileges bestowed elsewhere throughout creation. Let hergrow. She is not like Jupiter, without seasons. And you must take one of her seasons at a time.”
“Professor,” I said solemnly, “you remember Artemis?”
“Yes,” she returned with equal solemnity, “and I remember the daughters of Pandareas.”