CHAPTER III

THE CHILDREN

Their mission as mothers, thanks to the precautions of which we have spoken, did not weigh very heavily upon the women. The tide was set against large families; in the country, six children were thought an enormous encumbrance, and as a rule the higher the rank the smaller the family. There were not a few houses which had no children at all. Somewhere in Lombardy, indeed, there was an old law granting exemption from taxes to families of twelve children, but it did not result in an embarrassed exchequer.

The physicians questioned on this phenomenon return only evasive explanations. Placing themselves as they did at a special standpoint, they held the women more especially responsible, accusing the detestable experiments some of them indulged in with a view to preserving their figure, such as drinking water or vinegar, eating sour foods, never setting foot to ground; or a life at high pressure, well calculated to develop morbid germs and increase nervous over-excitement; the sort of St. Vitus’s dance which affects some people; and the thousand other causes of moral and cerebral derangement. Evidently, in their view, nothing would be so likely to facilitate motherhood as a life spent in feeding the pigs and the poultry.

Yet women resign themselves better than men to the trials that a family brings upon them.

When they first recognise their condition, even those who do not feel called upon to make too much of their duty heroically accept their lot. No one pities them; it is natural to them to love children,[63] and if there are moments of anguish to fear, there are also blissful moments to look forward to. The husband, on the other hand, is disconsolate; he regrets everything; he sees in the cold light of reason the consequences of the event, and his friends agree that he will reap nothing but worries. A man of fashion collects pictures, antiques, not children. Some charitable souls suggest that children assure a kind of survival, are a pledge of immortality, a security for the continuance of the race; but, for that matter, a much simpler, surer and more comfortable way of achieving immortality is simply to write a sonnet. Hardly any but poor drudges, “chestnut eaters,” can afford the luxury of being fruitful and multiplying, because for them, in their kind of work, with their rigorous enforcement of paternal authority, a swarm of children represents an immediate increase of earning-power and tools at very little cost. A middle-class householder, who loves his ease or is ambitious only to swell his banking account, has nothing to gain by a large family.

Among the middle class, then, the budding father is the subject of sincere commiseration. What cares, what vexations will be his! He regards himself as bound for some time to consider the slightest whim of his wife as sacred. With a flutter at the heart he hies him to the astrologer to ascertain at least if it is a boy or a girl; and when the unfeeling stars announce a girl, he still manages to smile.

One fine day (or fine night, for Nature is whimsical in her choice), see him, lantern in hand, chilled to the marrow, shivering, running off to find the nurse; and then what terrible, what wearing hours follow! In very truth it is he who demands pity, for Providence, having failed to foresee these moments for the man, has forgotten to give him strength equal to them. How ardently he wishes it were all over! “There is no saint in the calendar,” he cries, “but shall have his candle!” The first wail of the newcomer pours balm on the mother’s heart; but what of the husband? Can he spare time to admire this shapeless, unsightly little creature? He seeks nurses for mother and child, he has the room hung with red, covers the floor with velvet rugs; if by good luck he falls asleep in a corner, it is only in his dreams to see a spectral balance-sheet dancing a frantic saraband. No, he has not his wife’s strength.

The red room becomes for the young mother a palace of delight. It was a charity to visit a relative, friend, or neighbour when recovery was assured, and very few women would risk losing paradise for such a trifle. And so the room is never empty. There the lady holds a “regal court,” or what we, with less enthusiasm, should call a woman’s club. We may fancy how they chatter, how often the husband is hauled over the coals, how they cry shame on him. “What! this shabby dress! He wouldn’t give you this or that? Ah, the old skinflint!”

There prevailed in Italy the very amiable practice of sending all sorts of little presents—flowers, fruit, trinkets, nicknacks. The young mother was entitled also to a little tray, painted or chased, of which charming specimens exist, real works of art. All these presents came in a heap. With his grave and masculine brush, Domenico Ghirlandajo has depicted for us a scene at Santa-Maria-Novella: a maidservant is presenting a cordial on the tray, a friend is amusing herself with the baby, a high-born dame is making her entry in great dignity, a message-girl is bringing in a superb basket of fruit. It is a constant stream of visitors, wonderfully picturesque.

As to the husband, he has disappeared among his occupations and his worries; he reappears a fortnight later, to return these civilities with a grand dinner.

The child is to belong to the mother until the eighth year; an exquisite period in which the heart will expand. It is as she clasps in her arms this feeble little creature, this messenger from a new world, that a woman comprehends love; life appears to her all bathed in a mysterious light, golden, and warm, and glad. All women, whether cultivated or illiterate, have this sensation.

For some time, perhaps for several years, a mother can thus find the restfulness that springs from happiness, and, in making all things minister to her inward joy, she steeps her soul in a felicity to which she foresees no end.

No woman, then, ought to deprive herself of the first smiles of her child, his first prattlings, his divine fondlings, which Raphael has depicted and which Erasmus considered so beautiful a thing that he made them a theme for rhetorical exercises.

But from the very first the world interposed with tyrannous hand. In old times a woman had been permitted to nurse her child; suckling constituted a part of the maternal functions, approved by moralists and physicians. But now the fashion had changed; the cry of milk-sellers offering milk for the nursery was added to the morning din in the streets of Paris. The smaller gentry and even a certain number of country magnates[64] sent their children out to nurse; and to meet this need, human cattle-rearing became a recognised agricultural industry, which flourished exceedingly, though it was rather speculative for those engaged in it, for the children were sometimes left in settlement of the bill.

In the great houses, or those of middle station, a nurse was employed, after satisfying moral and medical tests—a stout respectable person from twenty to thirty years of age. She entered the family, and there represented the life of nature, occupying, to the end of her days if she pleased, a privileged situation about her foster-child.

Not infrequently, we must admit, the husband was heartily at one with the ancient principles, and would very readily have authorised his wife to dispense with a nurse. But then some fair friend would take him aside and put him to shame: “What, he actually means to impose that bondage upon his wife! Does he not see already how worn out she is! Ah, he means to compel her to it, and we very well know why, the miser! Really, who would have thought a husband had a soul black enough to inflict such thraldom on a woman, who, thank God, still possesses some attractions!”

And in that last word there is a world of meaning. A wife of fifteen or sixteen years, after a year or two of marriage, had every reason to think that life was not over for her, and that she still had need of her beauty.

Further, etiquette, and in princely houses even politics, intervened: the convenances were opposed to a mother taking too personal a part in her children’s upbringing, for in that case it would not have been worth while to own a whole regiment of servants. There they were, however, and their allotted functions must be respected; and so the mother had to limit her solicitude to a careful superintendence.

Nevertheless, many women ventured to set etiquette at defiance. The Princess of Orange appears just like any other woman when she writes so joyfully to her sister-in-law, Anne of France, that she has just seen her “fair niece,” who called her “mummy and daddy,” and “gave her as sweet a welcome in her little baby-talk as such a baby could.” So, too, Louise of Savoy, when, in 1520, in the midst of preoccupations of every kind, she recalls that, thirty-five years before, Francis I. had cut his first teeth quite unnoticed, “and was not the least little bit ill.”

Up to the age of seven, the children remained under their mother’s fostering wing, in a pure state of vegetation. Moralists and physicians taught that they must be allowed to develop freely, without having to learn anything, and without bothering about anything but good air and a regular life.

The grand principle of education is to let children grow up of themselves, alone, unaided, without grand theories, without dogmatism; and to habituate them to rely on nothing—neither neither fear nor love; to be themselves; and this from the very earliest infancy. Every being entering life brings to it his own individuality for development; he has the free use of his faculties; he observes much, instinctively using eyes and ears, and his soul reflects his environment like a celestial mirror. So the mother has only to help him, direct him, set him good examples.

This careful attention in early days appears of capital importance, because then or never is the time to root up any little weeds one by one as they appear. No strenuous effort is needed; it is work to be done by a woman’s hand, gently.

Hitherto it had been imagined that the first thing needful was to secure a maximum of physical strength, and consequently to harden a child by means almost cruel, such as an exemplary self-repression, a life in the open air, freely exposed to all inclemencies of the weather. If a child wept he was allowed to weep. He was taken sometimes to church, or to see very near relatives, but never to places of amusement, to the theatre, or to the houses of the wealthy. To become ever so little accustomed to comfort, idleness, or an artificial life was considered fatal. People feared to make a mollycoddle of him, and said to themselves that the army and the gymnasium in later years would never eradicate ill habits formed in childhood. They thought only of the children; the mothers were left out of account.

The women regarded this system as much too severe, and one of the first results of their influence was its modification. Why martyr the children under pretext of hardening them? What was the good of exposing them half naked to the cold, or of making little monks of them, and assuming towards them the airs of a policeman? Was it so great a crime to show these poor little creatures some affection, to admit them to some share with their elders in the life they were bound to know, to form their minds and their manners by allowing them a place at the card table, or to give them companions—even at the cost of a black eye?

The old moralists regarded such proceedings as premature and far too unsystematic, and refused to hear of anything but muscle, maintaining that entrance into the world always came soon enough. Women were to divert education into another channel. When they come to gain greater power in the home, we shall find them demanding the right to love their children, enter into their concerns, live with them, take pleasure in them, at least until they attain the classic age of seven.

THE BOYS.

When the seven years were past, a boy became for his mother only an object of anxiety or tribulation. He came under the direct and exclusive authority of his father, who aimed at moulding him on large lines and turning him at fourteen, not into a bookish don, nor perhaps a mere ‘pass-man’ even, but into a man of backbone and individuality, armed at all points for the battle of life. Our ancestors had a particular horror of everything resembling enlistment into brigades, reduction to a uniform pattern. The collegiate system seemed to them detestable, a make-shift in the worst sense; Louis XI., though he took care to send the princes of the younger branch to college, just as carefully avoided sending his son there. College, as Montaigne said, was a “factory of Latinizers,” a “house of preventive correction,” where men worked like day-labourers (of that period) fourteen or fifteen hours a day, until their brains were completely addled and they hated the sight of books; and what, if you please, was the magnificent result? A smattering of Greek and Latin, a certain facility in prating about Jupiter, Venus, Pyramus—without too minute an enquiry, happily, into what those august names stood for. As to ideas, they did no more than stuff the boys with a few stock notions to serve for intelligence,[65] instead of vigorously developing the creative and original faculties.

Thus there was general agreement that college was to be avoided as much as possible, and that a boy should remain at home. But then came the tug-of-war. If he remained at home, the mother, who had in all probability centred precisely on this son all her affection, would claim him as her care, which is just what the father did not wish; he mistrusted her, her kindness, her “shows of love.” It was an axiom that boys must be subjected to thoroughly masculine management, a life of birching, under the firm hand of the father; the father had a perfect right to forbid them to see their mother. How could he succeed in “hardening the soul and the muscles” of a boy, in giving him a physical and moral robustness depending largely on the “thickness of the skin,” if the mother was always at hand, interfering, discovering that her son had been too hot or too cold, petting him, commiserating his slightest hardships? That was not the way to make a man!

Nowhere was the battle against feminism fought more resolutely than on this ground. The adversaries of women may be almost infallibly recognised by this mark, that they insist above all things on keeping in their hands the education of men, because they regard this as the direction in which the influence of women is most manifestly fatal.

They fear family life because of the freedom which reigns there, and because they know nothing worse for a man than a precocious impulse towards sensibility. “When I was twenty,” growls an old man, “I knew nothing about women; in these days, infants in arms are further advanced.” That is a proof, someone will say, of superior intelligence, a guarantee of their virtue. Not at all. Any system, even college, was preferred to the education of men by women. From the moment when tenderness and sympathy become paramount in a house, there is no course open but to get rid of the boys at any cost.

But is not this to push rigour a little too far, and uselessly to lacerate the mother’s heart, this aching heart which thought it had at last found something to fill its void? The mothers are not lacking in arguments to support their claims. They refuse absolutely to acknowledge that kindness necessarily spells weakness. Has it not been understood from time immemorial, by people who could least be suspected of sentimentalism, how important it is to preserve for a man his refuge in the affection of his mother? Have not the names of Saint Monica and so many other devoted mothers always been cited with delight? A rational education ought not to rely solely on the principle of fear: it should be the express image of life; and if brutality and coarseness are to be banished from the world, it will not do to begin by sowing them broadcast. How many men, nobly fashioned by the hands of women, have been brought, by means of love’s training alone, to a perfect perception of authority, reverence, discipline! Affection has a wisdom of its own, secret agencies of its own; a mother’s heart can see as clearly, and obtain as many practical results, as the reason and the despotism of the father. In this, as in other things, force is not everything, and another regimen is possible than that of the “birch,” or indeed of the “filliping,” dear to Montaigne.

Margaret of France offers us on this subject a pertinent object-lesson; she cites herself. Her mother, Louise of Savoy, left a widow, indulged to the utmost the luxury of freely loving her children. When someone spoke to her of handing her son over to men, she made answer by installing the bed of the young Francis in her own room. And the result?

Fille et filz eut, à elle obéyssans, Rempliz d’esprit, de vertuz et bon sens.[66]

We can understand what deep chords were struck by this dispute between the fathers and the mothers, and what echoes it set sounding in the whole life of the women. Separated as they were from their sons by force of custom, it was natural indeed that, eager to imbue the stern spirit of men with love and tenderness, they should turn passionately to the love of their children.

In the first engagement they were often worsted. The son went off to college. Montaigne deplores it. It is within the four walls of a class-room, he says, and by doses of Greek syntax, that a young fellow is to be taught the science of life and given that clear philosophic outlook which comes through history and experience! What professor will teach him the wisdom of holding aloof from the world’s Vanity Fair, swarming with upstart mountebanks and overweening buffoons? His mother would have liked to extract for him the essence of life, the secret of happiness, to impart to him the sacred spark of love. But Montaigne is one of those who regard this as very dangerous; he believes, in short, that “seeing the world” would be still more fatal than “preventive imprisonment.”

In other cases, the father would select a tutor to train his son, and then the crisis lay below the surface.

The father always has some hesitation in determining his course. To begin with, he thinks of the expense, and though enthusiasts represent that there is no better investment, he knits his brows. Then he would like to find a perfect man: a difficult matter. As a rule, he decides on the recommendation of friends, who have seen their nominee at work, and are loud in praise of his tact, his manner, his method, his knowledge; they do not explain that their man finds it necessary to expatriate himself, but he is still young (thirty or thirty-five), and is anxious to make a position.

The candidate himself takes up his pen to speak with becoming modesty of his humble accomplishments. He promises to ride out with his pupil, and “engage in any other exercise that may be desired”; all that he asks is that he may sleep outside the château and not have to dine in the kitchen, like some of his colleagues. This is not enough for the anxious mother; she would like to know if he is a man of honour and a gentleman. Her mind is set at rest.

For a long time these tutors maintained a certain attitude of reserve.

In his _Calandra_, Bibbiena gives an example of one who is completely uninteresting, speaking, acting, and dressing like the rest of men. But these young fellows were men, and what is more, men of education, not so foolish as, after tasting of a life of refinement, to fail long to recognise its advantages. Sometimes, under a guileless demeanour, they suffered temptations the reverse of philosophic: Vegio[67] calls them, without mincing matters, “abominable bucks.” They learnt by experience how hard it is to get on by zeal and earnestness, and how easy by other means. They cultivated literature to some purpose. No one thought any the worse of Antony de la Salle, the austere tutor of the house of Anjou in the 15th century, for writing _The Fifteen Joys of Marriage_ or _The Hundred Novels_, or of Lemaire’s[68] notion of elevating the ideas of the young Charles V. by offering him delicate nourishment in the shape of a _Judgment of Paris_ of photographic realism—a picture of the future reserved by heaven for princes and the great ones of the earth. Such things were read: dissertations on Aristotle were not.

In proportion as the women posed as patrons of literature, the tutor type appears in higher relief. The torrent of invective let loose against them leaves no room for doubt that the tutors had red-letter days. The dramatists and the writers of novels do not condone the airs of proprietorship they assumed in regard to mothers or cousins. They show you a poor devil of a pedagogue, a dried-up anatomy, void of personal merit, ill-featured, grotesque, boorish, dying for love of some fair, rich and distinguished girl, whom he pesters with glowing love-letters, or with sonnets spiced with epicureanism. What peals of laughter there are when he, like many others, comes in due course to taste the rod in pickle!

From the moment when Aretino, in his _Marescalco_, which appeared in 1533, revealed the dramatic possibilities of such a part, the type was fixed.

Before the tutor appears on the scene you know what you are going to see: a spectacled pedant, ungainly, loutish, pretentious, a twaddling bore, full of philology and quotations. His very features have acquired a mechanical cast betraying his habit of holding forth on the obvious, as Montaigne says, or of extinguishing youth by his stupidity, his “hoggish wisdom,” to adopt the words of Rabelais.

Then, in virtue of a law of fate, the glory of the tutor waned and fell. The impulse that went forth towards liberal studies brought so many rivals into the field that, unless he opened a private seminary or obtained a professorial chair, the tutor was ruined. His salary became diminutive, and, as we know, the man who is poorly paid is thought little of. He may take all the pains imaginable, set impositions, rap knuckles, pull ears, but no one is satisfied.

“I know no worse blockhead in the world than the scholar, except it be the pedant.”

And then the poor “pedant,” full of gall and bitterness, withdraws into his shell. After a long day of toil and drudgery, his only pleasure in life is to get back to his solitary room, and there spend the night in collating notes, collecting rare phrases, happy turns of expression, or hammering out verses, love poems addressed to a beauty whom luckily he does not know, or lyrical verses at a white heat of passion. And these productions of his heart (such of them, at least, as Fortune has deigned to preserve) lie to this day, bundles of them, in the dust of archives.

Needless to add that the tutor considers himself martyred by the father. The father, who does not profess to love him, treats him indeed, more or less openly, as a tradesman and a nuisance, and interferes when the whim takes him, finding fault with this and that—the boy’s talkativeness, his pranks, his bad companions. He would like on the one hand less severity, on the other more progress. And then this youngster, who calls him “Sir,” and whom he always regards as a child, assumes mannish ways and threatens to follow at his heels: another serious drain upon his purse! Besides, what is the good of so many courses of study, of this “bookish swagger”? Can’t he learn everything without such a fuss? What, here is a child we are going to launch into actual life, and you stuff him with syllogisms, dates, a world of mere lumber! Did Alexander the Great learn all these things? He had, grant you, a tutor named Aristotle; ay, and with a few good moral principles for his whole kit he conquered the world! True, he respected the arts and sciences, he praised their “excellence and elegance,” but was he ever seen to grow pale and bite his nails over a problem in dialectics? No, indeed![69]

The tutors were never safe from these annoyances, except perhaps in the houses of princes or kings, because then they were important personages, high functionaries, and a numerous body.

The mother, on the contrary, made herself the friend of the tutor, and by this means exercised a perceptible influence upon him. She surrounded him with affectionate attentions. They were two natural allies, two feeble and down-trodden creatures who sought support in high communings which the husband did not understand. As a man of culture the tutor leant towards feminism, and he tasted doubly, for himself and for his pupil, the attentions, the solicitous benevolence, which a mother throws about the work of education. The palace of Louise of Savoy at Amboise thus saw a succession of special tutors who came to imbue Francis I. with aesthetic principles, and they retained the pleasantest recollections of their stay. The young princess indeed spoilt them, pampered them, almost; she had them at her own table, instead of leaving them to the society of chamberlains and playactors: she made them talk, and talked with them.

In spite of all opposition, the education of men thus underwent a gradual transformation in cultivated countries. Instead of maintaining their former attitude of grave reserve, hardly distinguishable from bashfulness, and of regarding everybody, especially persons well on in years, with a distant respect; instead, notably, of showing in their intercourse with women all the shades of respect from profound reverence to profound courtesy, the majority of these young men made their entrance into life without embarrassment and with the most charming manners. They put off the armour of social etiquette, they were docile, pleasant, graceful in bearing, proficient in the art of pleasing. A multitude of books on “civility,” an excellent specimen of which came from the pen of Erasmus, instructed them in the science of good-breeding, formerly somewhat neglected. Moreover, as education is always the great objective of men who desire to exercise a serious influence on thought, they vied with one another in propounding theories and advocating each his own system in regard to the direction of youth, a task which engrossed such men as Cordier,[70] Sadoleto,[71] Vivès,[72] Luther, Calvin, Erasmus, to mention only the chief. We need not follow here their far-reaching discussions, which are but the development of the struggle entered upon between the idealistic and the matter-of-fact spirits. On the extreme frontier of the two realms Zwingle, established so to speak as a mainguard, defends the German tactics. Without denying the amenities of aestheticism, he declares for an education of cloistral severity, for curricula of the exact sciences and logic, and prefers Hebraists or erudite Hellenists to elegant Latinists.

Erasmus, on the contrary, marks out the Roman frontier. He considers that any effort to direct the intelligence of children into one rigid channel only has the effect of drying it up. He appreciates neither the exhibition of truth in its skeleton state, the system which flourished in the schools of the Middle Ages, nor the pure apprenticeship to utilitarianism to which Zwingle inclines. The sentiment of the beautiful, in his view, offers an immense advantage in life—that of sustaining and consoling the spirit; in education there is no other process for widening, refining, elevating the faculties.[73] The new movement has his entire approval.

Indeed, he is ready to go very far. Instead of banishing all thoughts of women from their minds, he is surprisingly ready to explain to young men that there are two loves, a good and a bad, and to set them such subjects for composition as the question “ought a man to marry or not?” Hütten[74] pokes great fun at the coy professors who so carefully expurgate the mythology, who would fain drape the Muses and turn them into angels, or who compare Diana to the Virgin Mother.

In reality, as everybody had his own programme of education, dependent on no one’s theories or whims, all this fine ardour produced little but modifications of detail. So men remained faithful to gymnastics and all the sports—riding, hunting, fishing, tennis, perhaps even to sober philosophic deambulations in the style of St. Gregory of Nazianzen. But they held dancing in less abhorrence, and the love of gaming worked havoc.

Music triumphed over its detractors, who had been wont to represent it as directly tending towards effeminacy and voluptuous impressibility. Now, on the contrary, it was regarded as a child’s most ennobling avocation and a precious resource for forming his mind. Instruction in the principles of design seemed a necessity for men who were called to live among objects of art, and who, without some practical experience, would infallibly fall a prey to pinchbeck.

However, it is impossible to deny that a too exclusive development of the emotional side of their nature did produce, among certain young men, untoward and even disastrous results. Education had become very wide-spread; everybody sought after it, rather out of _amour-propre_ than to supply needs they really felt; and the result was that there was less anxiety to equip solidly a few choice minds than to give the mass a superficial polish. The world was overrun with amiable young men, patterns of social accomplishment, knowing how to bow, dancing well, of excellent table manners, primed moreover with a few tags of Latin or Greek, living in elegant idleness, and thus the pride of the good merchant who had the honour of begetting them and keeping the pot boiling. Their weak point was that they knew too much of life in their beardless youth: aestheticism had brought them neither illusions nor enthusiasm; but they were past-masters in the commercial valuation of some fashionable young lady and her belongings.

At the age of fifteen or sixteen, all these young fellows, good or bad, took flight in the most diverse directions, and escaped from their mother for good and all.

She sees them go! Some, the smartest of them, go to Court as brilliant pages, all ablaze with gold and velvet: the others into some château, where they combine the duties of head-huntsman and stud-groom, and dine in the kitchen, hoping to be mentioned in their master’s will.

Others, maintained by a more subtle father, are commissioned “to attain unto the virtue and honour that knowledge gains for gentlemen.”[75] Ah! the gay young sparks! They proceed, at great expense, to establish themselves at Padua, Bologna, or elsewhere, and there the lore they gather comes from profound study of Signora Angela’s ankles or Signora Camilla’s bright eyes. One of these pious youths, the son of a councillor of Paris, dismissed post-haste the private tutor accompanying him. So long as the lad’s purse holds out, the father proves indulgent, and indeed is secretly not a little proud of his heir’s escapades. Boys will be boys. One facetious father addresses a letter to his son “studying at Padua—or sent to study.”

Many people attributed the wildness of young men to the fact that their education was not directed by women.

Calvin considers that the young men were thrown too much into women’s society; Henri Estienne[76] charges upon aesthetic education all the vices of the age. This is going a little too far: it would be just as reasonable to make the vices of the age responsible for the bad results of education. As a matter of fact, notwithstanding a certain measure of progress, the education of the sixteenth century did commit errors for which it had to pay. Discipline was relaxed.[77] It was a common complaint that studies lost tone as they became more general;[78] the new education took its pupils too young, forced them remorselessly through too extensive curricula, encouraged them to be content with a smattering, gave them the habit of not going deep into anything, and made shallow and paradoxical men.

Two women who were the products of the most opposite principles, Louise of Savoy and Anne of France, were on their guard against this error. The one determined to have her son educated under her own eyes, the other undertook the education of her future son-in-law—a clear proof that all women cannot be charged with particular faults.

However paradoxical the idea may appear, it seems that the system of education ought to have been more completely revolutionised. Either the old principle of bringing boys up so as to make men of them should have been maintained, or a new one should have been boldly and frankly enunciated, namely, that it would be well for a boy to be brought up by his mother, since he is to live with a woman, and a girl by her father, since she is to live with a man. Of this principle, however, we nowhere find the slightest hint.

In this education there would have been something more intimate, more just, more natural, and perhaps more profitable. You can tell among a thousand the men who have been brought up by a serious mother, and the women brought up by a careful father.

Unhappily, the social customs of the time raised an insurmountable obstacle. In addition to the fears of excessive sensibility of which we have spoken, the rigid family principle ordained that the son should belong to the family and not to his mother. He was a man: therefore let him ride and hunt and be a soldier! It was better to err through brutality than through tenderness.

In reality, many mothers exercised but an indirect and ineffective influence on their sons. The sons were too much separated from them and left them too soon. Were the mothers made for the children or the children for the mothers? Judging from the number of households which were only held together by the children, one might think they were made for the mothers; and yet a woman who relied too much on this support was sure to remain in cruel loneliness.