Chapter 1 of 12 · 3931 words · ~20 min read

Part 1

BOOKS AND MEN

AGNES REPPLIER

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BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1899

_All rights reserved._

ELEVENTH IMPRESSION

_The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A._ Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

CHILDREN, PAST AND PRESENT 1

ON THE BENEFITS OF SUPERSTITION 33

WHAT CHILDREN READ 64

THE DECAY OF SENTIMENT 94

CURIOSITIES OF CRITICISM 125

SOME ASPECTS OF PESSIMISM 157

THE CAVALIER 191

BOOKS AND MEN.

CHILDREN, PAST AND PRESENT.

As a result of the modern tendency to desert the broad beaten roads of history for the bridle-paths of biography and memoir, we find a great many side lights thrown upon matters that the historian was wont to treat as altogether beneath his consideration. It is by their help that we study the minute changes of social life that little by little alter the whole aspect of a people, and it is by their help that we look straight into the ordinary every-day workings of the past, and measure the space between its existence and our own. When we read, for instance, of Lady Cathcart being kept a close prisoner by her husband for over twenty years, we look with some complacency on the roving wives of the nineteenth century. When we reflect on the dismal fate of Uriel Freudenberger, condemned by the Canton of Uri to be burnt alive in 1760, for rashly proclaiming his disbelief in the legend of William Tell’s apple, we realize the inconveniences attendant on a too early development of the critical faculty. We listen entranced while the learned pastor Dr. Johann Geiler von Keyersperg gravely enlightens his congregation as to the nature and properties of were-wolves; and we turn aside to see the half-starved boys at Westminster boiling their own batter-pudding in a stocking foot, or to hear the little John Wesley crying softly when he is whipped, not being permitted even then the luxury of a hearty bellow.

Perhaps the last incident will strike us as the most pathetic of all, this being essentially the children’s age. Women, workmen, and skeptics all have reason enough to be grateful they were not born a few generations earlier; but the children of to-day are favored beyond their knowledge, and certainly far beyond their deserts. Compare the modern schoolboy with any of his ill-fated predecessors, from the days of Spartan discipline down to our grandfathers’ time. Turn from the free-and-easy school-girl of the period to the miseries of Mrs. Sherwood’s youth, with its steel collars, its backboards, its submissive silence and rigorous decorum. Think of the turbulent and uproarious nurseries we all know, and then go back in spirit to that severe and occult shrine where Mrs. Wesley ruled over her infant brood with a code of disciplinary laws as awful and inviolable as those of the Medes and Persians. Of their supreme efficacy she plainly felt no doubts, for she has left them carefully written down for the benefit of succeeding generations, though we fear that few mothers of to-day would be tempted by their stringent austerity. They are to modern nursery rules what the Blue Laws of Connecticut are to our more languid legislation. Each child was expected and required to commemorate its fifth birthday by learning the entire alphabet by heart. To insure this all-important matter, the whole house was impressively set in order the day before; every one’s task was assigned to him; and Mrs. Wesley, issuing strict commands that no one should penetrate into the sanctuary while the solemn ordeal was in process, shut herself up for six hours with the unhappy morsel of a child, and unflinchingly drove the letters into its bewildered brain. On two occasions only was she unsuccessful. “Molly and Nancy,” we are told, failed to learn in the given time, and their mother comforts herself for their tardiness by reflecting on the still greater incapacity of other people’s bairns.

“When the will of a child is totally subdued, and it is brought to revere and stand in awe of its parents,” then, and then only, their rigid judge considers that some little inadvertences and follies may be safely passed over. Nor would she permit one of them to “be chid or beaten twice for the same fault,”--a stately assumption of justice that speaks volumes for the iron-bound code by which they were brought into subjection. Most children nowadays are sufficiently amazed if a tardy vengeance overtake them once, and a second penalty for the same offense is something we should hardly deem it necessary to proscribe. Yet nothing is more evident than that Mrs. Wesley was neither a cruel nor an unloving mother. It is plain that she labored hard for her little flock, and had their welfare and happiness greatly at heart. In after years they with one accord honored and revered her memory. Only it is not altogether surprising that her husband, whose ministerial functions she occasionally usurped, should have thought his wife at times almost too able a ruler, or that her more famous son should stand forth as the great champion of human depravity. He too, some forty years later, promulgated a system of education as unrelaxing in its methods as that of his own childhood. In his model school he forbade all association with outside boys, and would receive no child unless its parents promised not to take it away for even a single day, until removed for good. Yet after shutting up the lads in this hot-bed of propriety, and carefully guarding them from every breath of evil, he ended by expelling part as incorrigible, and ruefully admitting that the remainder were very “uncommonly wicked.”

The principle of solitary training for a child, in order to shield it effectually from all outside influences, found other and vastly different advocates. It is the key-note of Mr. and Miss Edgeworth’s Practical Education, a book which must have driven over-careful and scrupulous mothers to the verge of desperation. In it they are solemnly counseled never to permit their children to walk or talk with servants, never to let them have a nursery or a school-room, never to leave them alone either with each other or with strangers, and never to allow them to read any book of which every sentence has not been previously examined. In the matter of books, it is indeed almost impossible to satisfy such searching critics. Even Mrs. Barbauld’s highly correct and righteous little volumes, which Lamb has anathematized as the “blights and blasts of all that is human,” are not quite harmless in their eyes. Evil lurks behind the phrase “Charles wants his dinner,” which would seem to imply that Charles must have whatever he desires; while to say flippantly, “The sun has gone to bed,” is to incur the awful odium of telling a child a deliberate untruth.

In Miss Edgeworth’s own stories the didactic purpose is only veiled by the sprightliness of the narrative and the air of amusing reality she never fails to impart. Who that has ever read them can forget Harry and Lucy making up their own little beds in the morning, and knocking down the unbaked bricks to prove that they were soft; or Rosamond choosing between the famous purple jar and a pair of new boots; or Laura forever drawing the furniture in perspective? In all these little people say and do there is conveyed to the young reader a distinct moral lesson, which we are by no means inclined to reject, when we turn to the other writers of the time and see how much worse off we are. Day, in Sandford and Merton, holds up for our edification the dreariest and most insufferable of pedagogues, and advocates a mode of life wholly at variance with the instincts and habits of his age. Miss Sewell, in her Principles of Education, sternly warns young girls against the sin of chattering with each other, and forbids mothers’ playing with their children as a piece of frivolity which cannot fail to weaken the dignity of their position.

To a great many parents, both in England and in France, such advice would have been unnecessary. Who, for instance, can imagine Lady Balcarras, with whom it was a word and a blow in quick succession, stooping to any such weakness; or that august mother of Harriet Martineau, against whom her daughter has recorded all the slights and severities of her youth? Not that we think Miss Martineau to have been much worse off than other children of her day; but as she has chosen with signal ill-taste to revenge herself upon her family in her autobiography, we have at least a better opportunity of knowing all about it. “To one person,” she writes, “I was indeed habitually untruthful, from fear. To my mother I would in my childhood assert or deny anything that would bring me through most easily,”--a confession which, to say the least, reflects as little to her own credit as to her parent’s. Had Mrs. Martineau been as stern an upholder of the truth as was Mrs. Wesley, her daughter would have ventured upon very few fabrications in her presence. When she tells us gravely how often she meditated suicide in these early days, we are fain to smile at hearing a fancy so common among morbid and imaginative children narrated soberly in middle life, as though it were a unique and horrible experience. No one endowed by nature with so copious a fund of self-sympathy could ever have stood in need of much pity from the outside world.

But for real and uncompromising severity towards children we must turn to France, where for years the traditions of decorum and discipline were handed down in noble families, and generations of boys and girls suffered grievously therefrom. Trifling faults were magnified into grave delinquencies, and relentlessly punished as such. We sometimes wonder whether the youthful Bertrand du Guesclin were really the wicked little savage that the old chroniclers delight in painting, or whether his rude truculence was not very much like that of naughty and neglected boys the world over. There is, after all, a pathetic significance in those lines of Cuvelier’s which describe in barbarous French the lad’s remarkable and unprepossessing ugliness:--

“Il n’ot si lait de Resnes à Disnant, Camus estoit et noirs, malostru et massant. Li père et la mère si le héoiant tant, Que souvent en leurs cuers aloient desirant Que fust mors, ou noiey en une eaue corant.”

Perhaps, if he had been less flat-nosed and swarthy, his better qualities might have shone forth more clearly in early life, and it would not have needed the predictions of a magician or the keen-eyed sympathy of a nun to evolve the future Constable of France out of such apparently hopeless material. At any rate, tradition generally representing him either as languishing in the castle dungeon, or exiled to the society of the domestics, it is plain he bore but slight resemblance to the cherished _enfant terrible_ who is his legitimate successor to-day.

Coming down to more modern times, we are met by such monuments of stately severity as Madame Quinet and the Marquise de Montmirail, mother of that fair saint Madame de Rochefoucauld, the trials of whose later years were ushered in by a childhood of unremitting harshness and restraint. The marquise was incapable of any faltering or weakness where discipline was concerned. If carrots were repulsive to her little daughter’s stomach, then a day spent in seclusion, with a plate of the obnoxious vegetable before her, was the surest method of proving that carrots were nevertheless to be eaten. When Augustine and her sister kissed their mother’s hand each morning, and prepared to con their tasks in her awful presence, they well knew that not the smallest dereliction would be passed over by that inexorable judge. Nor might they aspire, like Harriet Martineau, to shield themselves behind the barrier of a lie. When from Augustine’s little lips came faltering some childish evasion, the ten-year-old sinner was hurried as an outcast from her home, and sent to expiate her crime with six months’ merciful seclusion in a convent. “You have told me a falsehood, mademoiselle,” said the marquise, with frigid accuracy; “and you must prepare to leave my house upon the spot.”

Faults of breeding were quite as offensive to this _grande dame_ as faults of temper. The fear of her pitiless glance filled her daughters with timidity, and bred in them a _mauvaise honte_, which in its turn aroused her deadliest ire. Only a week before her wedding-day Madame de Rochefoucauld was sent ignominiously to dine at a side table, as a penance for the awkwardness of her curtsy; while even her fast-growing beauty became but a fresh source of misfortune. The dressing of her magnificent hair occupied two long hours every day, and she retained all her life a most distinct and painful recollection of her sufferings at the hands of her _coiffeuse_.

To turn from the Marquise de Montmirail to Madame Quinet is to see the picture intensified. More beautiful, more stately, more unswerving still, her faith in discipline was unbounded, and her practice in no wise inconsistent with her belief. It was actually one of the institutions of her married life that a _garde de ville_ should pay a domiciliary visit twice a week to chastise the three children. If by chance they had not been naughty, then the punishment might be referred to the account of future transgressions,--an arrangement which, while it insured justice to the culprits, can hardly have afforded them much encouragement to amend. Her son Jerome, who ran away when a mere boy to enroll with the volunteers of ’92, reproduced in later years, for the benefit of his own household, many of his mother’s most striking characteristics. He was the father of Edgar Quinet, the poet, a child whose precocious abilities seem never to have awakened within him either parental affection or parental pride. Silent, austere, repellent, he offered no caresses, and was obeyed with timid submission. “The gaze of his large blue eyes,” says Dowden, “imposed restraint with silent authority. His mockery, the play of an intellect unsympathetic by resolve and upon principle, was freezing to a child; and the most distinct consciousness which his presence produced upon the boy was the assurance that he, Edgar, was infallibly about to do something which would cause displeasure.” That this was a common attitude with parents in the old _régime_ may be inferred from Châteaubriand’s statement that he and his sister, transformed into statues by their father’s presence, recovered their life only when he left the room; and by the assertion of Mirabeau that even while at school, two hundred leagues away from _his_ father, “the mere thought of him made me dread every youthful amusement which could be followed by the slightest unfavorable result.”

Yet at the present day we are assured by Mr. Marshall that in France “the art of spoiling has reached a development which is unknown elsewhere, and maternal affection not infrequently descends to folly and imbecility.” But then the clever critic of French Home Life had never visited America when he wrote those lines, although some of the stories he tells would do credit to any household in our land. There is one quite delightful account of a young married couple, who, being invited to a dinner party of twenty people, failed to make their appearance until ten o’clock, when they explained urbanely that their three-year-old daughter would not permit them to depart. Moreover, being a child of great character and discrimination, she had insisted on their undressing and going to bed; to which reasonable request they had rendered a prompt compliance, rather than see her cry. “It would have been monstrous,” said the fond mother, “to cause her pain simply for our pleasure; so I begged Henri to cease his efforts to persuade her, and we took off our clothes and went to bed. As soon as she was asleep we got up again, redressed, and here we are with a thousand apologies for being so late.”

This sounds half incredible; but there is a touch of nature in the mother’s happy indifference to the comfort of her friends, as compared with the whims of her offspring, that closely appeals to certain past experiences of our own. It is all very well for an Englishman to stare aghast at such a reversal of the laws of nature; we Americans, who have suffered and held our peace, can afford to smile with some complacency at the thought of another great nation bending its head beneath the iron yoke.

To return, however, to the days when children were the ruled, and not the rulers, we find ourselves face to face with the great question of education. How smooth and easy are the paths of learning made now for the little feet that tread them! How rough and steep they were in bygone times, watered with many tears, and not without a line of victims, whose weak strength failed them in the upward struggle! We cannot go back to any period when school life was not fraught with miseries. Classic writers paint in grim colors the harshness of the pedagogues who ruled in Greece and Rome. Mediæval authors tell us more than enough of the passionless severity that swayed the monastic schools,--a severity which seems to have been the result of an hereditary tradition rather than of individual caprice, and which seldom interfered with the mutual affection that existed between master and scholar. When St. Anselm, the future disciple of Lanfranc, and his successor in the See of Canterbury, begged as a child of four to be sent to school, his mother, Ermenberg,--the granddaughter of a king, and the kinswoman of every crowned prince in Christendom,--resisted his entreaties as long as she dared, knowing too well the sufferings in store for him. A few years later she was forced to yield, and these same sufferings very nearly cost her son his life.

The boy was both studious and docile, and his teacher, fully recognizing his precocious talents, determined to force them to the utmost. In order that so active a mind should not for a moment be permitted to relax its tension, he kept the little scholar a ceaseless prisoner at his desk. Rest and recreation were alike denied him, while the utmost rigors of a discipline, of which we can form no adequate conception, wrung from the child’s over-worked brain an unflinching attention to his tasks. As a result of this cruel folly, “the brightest star of the eleventh century had been well-nigh quenched in its rising.”[1] Mind and body alike yielded beneath the strain; and Anselm, a broken-down little wreck, was returned to his mother’s hands, to be slowly nursed back to health and reason. “Ah, me! I have lost my child!” sighed Ermenberg, when she found that not all that he had suffered could shake the boy’s determination to return; and the mother of Guibert de Nogent must have echoed the sentiment when her little son, his back purple with stripes, looked her in the face, and answered steadily to her lamentations, “If I die of my whippings, I still mean to be whipped.”

The step from the monastic schools to Eton and Westminster is a long one, but the gain not so apparent at first sight as might be supposed. It is hard for the luxurious Etonian of to-day to realize that for many years his predecessors suffered enough from cold, hunger, and barbarous ill-treatment to make life a burden on their hands. The system, while it hardened some into the desired manliness, must have killed many whose feebler constitutions could ill support its rigor. Even as late as 1834, we are told by one who had ample opportunity to study the subject carefully that “the inmates of a workhouse or a jail were better fed and lodged than were the scholars of Eton. Boys whose parents could not pay for a private room underwent privations that might have broken down a cabin-boy, and would be thought inhuman if inflicted on a galley-slave.” Nor is this sentiment as exaggerated as it sounds. To get up at five on freezing winter mornings; to sweep their own floors and make their own beds; to go two by two to the “children’s pump” for a scanty wash; to eat no mouthful of food until nine o’clock; to live on an endless round of mutton, potatoes, and beer, none of them too plentiful or too good; to sleep in a dismal cell without chair or table; to improvise a candlestick out of paper; to be starved, frozen, and flogged,--such was the daily life of the scions of England’s noblest families, of lads tenderly nurtured and sent from princely homes to win their Greek and Latin at this fearful cost.

Moreover, the picture of one public school is in all essential particulars the picture of the rest. The miseries might vary somewhat, but their bulk remained the same. At Westminster the younger boys, hard pushed by hunger, gladly received the broken victuals left from the table of the senior election, and tried to supplement their scanty fare with strange and mysterious concoctions, whose unsavory details have been handed down among the melancholy traditions of the past.

In 1847 a young brother of Lord Mansfield being very ill at school, his mother came to visit him. There was but one chair in the room, upon which the poor invalid was reclining; but his companion, seeing the dilemma, immediately arose, and with true boyish politeness offered Lady Mansfield the coal-scuttle, on which he himself had been sitting. At Winchester, Sydney Smith suffered “many years of misery and starvation,” while his younger brother, Courtenay, twice ran away, in the vain effort to escape his wretchedness. “There was never enough provided of even the coarsest food for the whole school,” writes Lady Holland; “and the little boys were of course left to fare as well as they could. Even in his old age my father used to shudder at the recollections of Winchester, and I have heard him speak with horror of the misery of the years he spent there. The whole system, he affirmed, was one of abuse, neglect, and vice.”

In the matter of discipline there was no shadow of choice anywhere. Capricious cruelty ruled under every scholastic roof. On the one side, we encounter Dean Colet, of St. Paul’s, whom Erasmus reported as “delighting in children in a Christian spirit;” which meant that he never wearied of seeing them suffer, believing that the more they endured as boys, the more worthy they would grow in manhood. On the other, we are confronted by the still more awful ghost of Dr. Keate, who could and did flog eighty boys in succession without a pause; and who, being given the confirmation list by mistake for the punishment list, insisted on flogging every one of the catechumens, as a good preparation for receiving the sacrament. Sir Francis Doyle, almost the only apologist who has so far ventured to appear in behalf of this fiery little despot, once remarked to Lord Blachford that Keate did not much mind a boy’s lying to him. “What he hated was a monotony of excuses.” “Mind your lying to him!” retorted Lord Blachford, with a keen recollection of his own juvenile experiences; “why he exacted it as a token of respect.”