When a woman has begun to speak and think in terms of “your father” as well as of “my husband,” she has not merely extended the sphere of her interpretership, but has assumed a new personality in addition to any that she may have had before, the personality of the mother. The extension of the interpretership, which is one of the responsibilities of the added personality, is in itself not unimportant. In the outer world the wife-interpreter has not to create an entire character, but to give a greater reality to an already well apprehended external appearance, and that only in the direction of increasing its amenity. The mother has to create the father for the children progressively, timing the stages of the structure to the expansion of their intelligence, and she has to awake in them not only a sense of his beauty, goodness and power, but of his displeasure, his wisdom even in denial, and the sanctity of his preoccupations. This task is not too easy, however lightly and inevitably it is undertaken. The beneficent deity, so soon to dwindle in stature to that of an ordinary man, is not hidden, as it is wise for deities to be, so that if the artistic imagination be stretched too far in his creation, the discrepancies between the living person and the created being become sufficiently glaring to strike even a childish apprehension. The woman who creates the father with tact, giving the impression of removing rather than giving false impressions, is a valuable wife and an excellent mother. It is difficult for a man to reveal himself to a child, unless he has a peculiarly expansive disposition, and, with the best will in the world to stand before his offspring on his own legs, he is bound to depend to some extent—though some men are far more lazy than others—upon wifely interpretation. But the interpreter must be wary lest she is caught by keen little eyes in the act of booming out oracles from behind a hollow image, for no discovery is more disillusioning; nor must she officiously intervene if the hardy growing intellect demands a directer communication with the source of all wisdom. The temptation to say: “don’t bother Daddy, he’s busy” is not always due to entirely unselfish promptings. It is better for a child that the direct revelations should come in the shape of mysteriously expressed riddles than that they should be repressed by intervention from the sanctuary, for the riddle, if a good one, may bear unconscious fruit, whereas silence may lead to disappointment and an estrangement which can never afterwards be overcome. There are fathers who, at a certain stage, can step blandly down from the high place, incarnating themselves as it were, and take the novice by the hand which will rest in his as long as may be: there are other fathers who can never quite leave the steps of their own altar. The difference is a matter of temperament. Yet, in either case, the ultimate relations between father and children will depend upon the mother’s tact, sympathy, and power of divination in the earliest stages. Any flaw in her own understanding will here be visited with punishment.

The Englishwoman brings a considerable amount of acumen into her parental interpretership, though it consists, perhaps, more in her acute comprehension of a child’s imagination than in profundity of psychological analysis of her husband’s character. She has a natural gift for attaining the confidence of children, putting things to them in the manner least calculated to cause doubt or dismay. Her own illogical mind protects them from the devastating effects of logic upon too tender susceptibilities. I remember so well a father who set out one winter’s evening in pure kindness of heart to teach two daughters the rudiments of whist. All went well, if rather silently, till an awful moment when in a majestic voice—intended purely as a warning and not as a reproof—the father uttered the words: “Why on earth did you trump your partner’s best card?” The reply was a flood of tears and a hasty call for female intervention. Mother would have conveyed the warning with less emphasis and more prolixity, but she would have preserved a disposition for whist which was then and there for ever shattered. These are the domestic pitfalls against which she has to guard, as the speaking tube through which father and children communicate, a speaking tube shortening ever with the years till its use becomes quite unnecessary.

But motherhood is more than this: it is a new personality put on with pain, worn with mingled joy and anxiety, only to be put off with death. Its qualities are universal, and there would be only idleness in an elaborate attempt to ascribe any particular maternal character to the English, as opposed to any other, mother. She is but one of the world of mothers with all their virtues, pleasures and sorrows, as deeply moved by the mystery, as keenly wounded by the arrows, as proudly equal to the sacrifices of motherhood as a woman of another nation. Nationality does not enter into motherhood, which is a function of universal humanity, so well understood that, instead of being emotionally exhaustive on the subject, I have only to refer each reader to the memories of his or her own heart, where childhood, if not marriage also, has stored some of its most precious secrets. There may be degrees of motherly feeling, for instance between the hen with a brood and the cow with a single calf,—a contrast which has its human counterpart—but for all mothers the essential quality is that of the pelican. I need say no more than that English mothers make the most admirable pelicans, sparing themselves no more and devoting themselves no less than those of other nations. In no country, therefore, is the mother more honoured or cherished: and if the tie that binds a man to his mother in later life is less emotionally strong than with some Latin nations, it is because an Englishman directs his emotions habitually along different channels, not because his heart is devoid of a very precious memory, indelibly enshrined. But it is possible to over-sentimentalise this theme by dwelling on it. Certain passages in “Pendennis” come to my mind as I write the words in which Thackeray pulls out the “vox pathetica” in reflecting on the relations between Arthur and his mother. When one is treated to voluntaries of this kind one has an irresistible inclination to be horrid and realistic, remembering that in England, as in all other countries, there are mothers who do not deserve the name, that baby clinics would be not so urgently necessary in our big towns if all mothering were perfect, and that Samuel Butler wrote a book called “The Way of All Flesh,” which is a strong-tasting antidote to any overdoses of sentiment in the matter of parenthood. How Thackeray would have disliked that book! Yet the truth in it will live as long as “Pendennis.” Lately, however, what with “Fanny’s First Play,” “The Younger Generation” and the like, dilutions of this truth have been a little too freely administered: so I prefer to leave the ultimate moralisings to the individual.

A boy of six whom once I knew, when his mother prepared to teach him to read, countered her with the grave announcement that, in his opinion, “mothers were not meant to teach.” It is a more reasonable view than appears at first sight, at all events for English children. To them the combination of intense love and a desire to teach is too overwhelming: they prefer a more dispassionate interest in a matter which seems to them one in which all emotion may conveniently be avoided. It is too much at an immature age to be called on to respond to an intellectual and an emotional stimulus combined, and it is unfair from a child’s point of view to be made to feel that laziness or inaccuracy, periodical faults in all of us, are not only faults but failures in devotion towards those for whom devotion is a natural habit. Most English parents, though after some ineffectual struggles against this natural reluctance, acquiesce in the truth of it. The time of the Goodchilds has gone by, and education has been much improved. The acquiescence—to tell the truth—is apt to go too far, and the process of education is left to machines called teachers without any interest at all on the part of the parents. The English mother, I think, is little preoccupied about education. To her it is only one of the many processes of equipment necessary for a child in its passage to an age of discretion—a more elaborate process for boys than for girls, but likely to bring more tangible results. About material and physical well-being she will occupy herself endlessly, to the dismay of masters and matrons, but she will pay comparatively small attention to the development of an intellect, unless her own is exceptionally well developed, in comparison to the development of muscle and character. If her children respond feebly to the teaching they are given, she will resign herself, not without a secret sympathy for them, to having stupid children, but without inquiring whether possibly there is some psychological trouble at the bottom of this failure, which a new adjustment and fresh guidance might overcome: if, on the other hand, the response is conspicuously successful, she rather wistfully regards the soaring of their young intellects beyond her ken, wondering “how she came to have such clever children.”

Cleverness is a horrible word, much overworked in England: it may mean nothing but an aptitude for passing examinations with credit. She is certainly right to regard this aptitude as unimportant, but she is wrong where so often she remains indifferent while a really promising mind is slowly ruined by unsuitable teaching or unsuitable food. Few English mothers—I suspect the French of surpassing them here—manage to keep their children’s confidence in this matter. The play-hours and the friendships of school are inexhaustible subjects of conversation, but lessons quickly come under the head of things not talked about, except in a jocular way or in passing, rather embarrassed, reference. Even the best of mothers is at a disadvantage here, at least where a son is concerned, a fact cleverly illustrated in Mr Arnold Lunn’s novel “Loose Ends.” New interests, new views expressed by new human beings seize hold of him with violence, bursting in on the old close community of two, and leaving the more stable of the couple out in the cold, irritatingly faced with inability to “keep up,” though conscious all the while of no difficulty in keeping up anywhere else in the wide world. Here again, it is often her very passion which throws her out of the race with less devoted rivals: boys and girls can be intellectually as well as morally tiresome, and they feel the need for being able to indulge their tiresomeness without giving pain. As one of my friends put it: “I never talk about these things at home, it always leads to ‘Grief’.” Good schoolmasters and all schoolboys know that “grief” is fatal in the realm of ideas. Few parents can repress ‘grief’ with success, and they must pay the penalty for their over-lively concern. Their only remedy, unless they are content to relapse in their children’s eyes into dear old back numbers, is to wait till the ferment has settled down: “grief” will then neither be so frequent nor so difficult to overcome.

It is the mother more than the father who makes, and who is, the home. Her influence upon her children is incalculable, but surely it is going a little too far, especially in the case of boys, to say that during the time of their education they should not leave home or lose the influence of home. During the controversy over Mr Alec Waugh’s “Loom of Youth,” Sir Sydney Olivier wrote to the Nation a letter in which were these words:

“No parent should be allowed to send his boy to school in a boarding house without special excuse any more than to send him to a private lunatic asylum.”

This very dogmatic assertion leaves out of account one of what seem to be the undisputed advantages of public school education, the advantage of living in an orderly and disciplined community for a greater part of the years of later boyhood. There will always be exceptional boys to whom this life is not appropriate, but for the majority of boys it is both beneficial and enjoyable. It might even be said that the majority of boys demand it. Even the holders of opposite views agree that it is an infinitely better system for boys from inadequate homes than the day school. In my opinion, the definition of an inadequate home would be a very wide one, and likely to remain so in spite of all possible advances in the way of greater social equality and uniformity. The Montessori system is based on the belief that the home, which is organised for the convenience of its adult inhabitants, cannot give the requisite attention and liberty to children, who are slow in action, capricious and inexperienced: home life to young children, in this view, is both too protective and too restrictive. For different reasons there is a case to be made out for holding that, as a rule, the home is not properly organised for the advantage, out of school hours, of growing boys between the ages of thirteen and nineteen. All parents are naturally anxious to prepare their children for life in the world, to enlighten them in their difficulties and aid the opening of their minds, but it remains sadly true that most of them find their incapability of fulfilling this natural function only too soon. As a well known man of letters said to me recently: “Yes, the boys have got to go to school. My wife and I started with all sorts of jolly ideas about keeping them at home and educating them ourselves. But we found it was no good. They said they wanted to go to school, and so they must.”

As I said above, there is something antipathetic to the young in learning from those whom they love: they would rather be controlled and taught by those for whom they have no primary affection. Besides, it must be confessed that parents have other shortcomings, all the shortcomings of varied human nature, which are perfectly patent to the uncanny acuteness of children. The father and mother whose influence during the critical years of childhood and adolescence would be nothing but good are extremely rare. Parents, for one thing, can so seldom hit the mean between taking too much interest and too little. Indifference means either undue indulgence or undue restriction; too great interest leads either to jealousy of other influences, to hampering independence, to surrounding a boy with a close atmosphere of emotion from which he would give anything to get away. Boys like to be treated calmly, to be rewarded calmly and to be punished calmly: they are unemotional creatures whom school suits well in this respect. The continued society of ideal parents may be ideal for a boy, but where parents fall short of the ideal, it is questionable whether their continued society is a good thing: and they may be sure that their lapses will be judged by their children with all the cruelty of innocence and ignorance.

Holidays, to which the boys come back full of affection and pleasant anticipation, are quite long enough to give the good mother and father all the chance they need if they will only take it, to say nothing of the influence of letters. How different is the eagerness with which at a boarding school a boy looks for the letters bearing the well known handwriting of his mother to the apathy with which any home bred boy must regard the daily prospect of banalities over the family tea-table! As a matter of fact, the opportunities of the holidays are too often neglected. It is then that enthusiasm may be reinforced and new interests aroused to counteract the routine and convention which is the chief fault of our schools to-day. Too many parents think their duties are limited then to giving their children enjoyment, forgetting that theirs is the responsibility for sending their boys back to school not one whit more developed or improved than when they left its gates some weeks earlier. This very failure shows the difficulty of home education: the boarding school is organised purely for the advantage of the boys, while in the home the convenience of the parents must be competitive, even where it is not paramount. The interests of young and old cannot possibly entirely coincide, and it would be foolish for parents who, after all, have their own lives to lead and their own developments to be pursued, to sacrifice their time and their arrangements altogether for the sake of their children. To what lengths an English mother will go in this direction many a son will confess, remembering his own insensibility at the moment: but it would be bad that she should be tempted to go too far or be forced, on the other hand, into a habit of indifference through having continually to restrain her natural impulse of devotion in the general interests of the whole household.

Another argument for entirely home education is the moral one. It is one of the most powerful in its appeal to mothers, to whom the idea of adolescent impurity is revolting. Personally, I cannot see any reason for supposing that the temptations of an adolescent male, which are absolutely inevitable, will be any less violent at home than at school. The mother of a French boy certainly does not believe that they are, and does not act on that assumption. So far as strength to resist temptations goes, the influence of judicious parents on boys at school is, as I know perfectly well, quite as strong and quite as successful as it could have been if the boys had never left their sight. Besides, there are few mothers who can resist a kind of morbid spying on their children as they first come into contact with physical experience of their sex. Nothing could possibly be more irritating for a boy, and it may lead him into foolishness out of more defiance and desperation. It is a thorny time for both parties to the relationship, and happy are those mothers and sons who come out of it with mutual love and respect undiminished. Sir Sydney Olivier, to judge from another passage in the letter already referred to, would like the morals of boys to be saved and their sentimental education completed by love affairs with mature females. Such affairs are, no doubt, extremely valuable in certain cases. As Rousseau said in his Confessions: “Il est certain que les entretiens intÉressants et sensÉs d’une femme de mÉrite sont plus propres À former un jeune homme que toute la pÉdantesque philosophie des livres.” But he also allowed still closer relations with Madame de Warens to be included in his own scheme of development. It is to be doubted if England is suited to this form of education. Certainly few English mothers would regard without intense suspicion the ideal and elderly Egeria, who is to absorb usefully and harmlessly all the superfluous sentimental energy of their beloved son. Their hearts are so terribly vulnerable in this respect, poor things, for they hate physical truths and love sentimental pruderies. Only the best of them really look things in the face and say to their boys: “Look here, I know how things are. You are growing up and I sympathise deeply with all your feelings and temptations. I have always tried to teach you that the greatest things, and the only things truly valuable, are love and beauty and truth. I think you have learnt what I meant to teach you, and now you will have to begin to put it to the test. I shall trust you to do nothing unworthy. I shall not ask you questions or spy upon you. But, whatever you do, remember there is nobody in the world more ready to hear your troubles or to help you than your mother. That is what mothers are for, even if they suffer in the process. I know you will not make me suffer willingly: but I would rather suffer anything than feel that you were ashamed to turn to me for help and sympathy in any difficulty.” Such confidence breeds strength, the strength in which every good English home should abound. And it must come from that centre of the home—the mother.

The relation of mother and son is essentially different from that of mother and daughter; or rather, the son and the daughter stand in different relations to the home. Also the needs of the two sexes during their growth are different. The natural independence of a girl at the school age is smaller than that of the boy, so that, taking all these things into consideration, there is not the same acuteness about the question of her leaving home during her education. The far greater concentration and the far smaller degree of freedom in most girls’ schools, when compared with the public schools for boys, which are complete little worlds in themselves, limit the advantages which they give to compensate for any loss of home influence. Further, women are not, like men, naturally gregarious, and those who are not suited for living in a herd profit little from being placed in it. Certainly there are difficulties of adjustment to be overcome if girls remain entirely at home, but the adjustment is easier than it is for boys, who are so expansive in their energies and want such a deal of room for their exuberant vitalities. Besides, it is at the “awkward age” that a girl, however great a complication she may then become in the life of her parents, is most dependent on the help and support of her mother. Even the most brazen flapper, so I have been told, endures agonies at her first entry into society as one of its fully fledged members. In fine, a girl’s education may very well take place at home, and I support this theory by the fact that, whereas a home-bred boy is always distinguishable from one who has had the advantages of a public school, it is almost impossible to tell whether a girl has been to a boarding school or not, except where she exhibits an exaggerated hoydenism which is one of the less favourable marks of girls’ boarding schools.

The real crux for mothers and daughters comes after this age is past, unless a girl is very early married. It is then that she feels the keen craving for independence and chafes against the restraint of home life. Her degree of satisfaction at her lot when she reaches this stage is one test of the judiciousness of her parents in her whole early upbringing and of their perception how far they can go towards meeting her natural craving for freedom and responsibility. The first question is whether Mary and Emily are going to have a definite occupation or not. Too often before the war it was certain that they were not, but were going to idle away their days reading novels, playing tennis and munching chocolates in cinemas until some admirer plucked them from their peaceful flowerbed. Even when they wanted to do something real and satisfying, their wish was looked on as something foolish and hysterical, not to be tolerated for an instant in a well-conducted family. Certainly Mary and Emily had no excuse for leaving home if they had nothing to leave it for, but to keep young Englishwomen idle perforce so as to curb their independence is a dangerous and a cruel game. Also it leads to an infinity of bickering in the family. The war has, luckily, knocked some sense into people’s heads on the subject of occupations for women. Mary and Emily have tasted the pleasure of regular work and the joy of leisure earned by toil. They are not going to forget it, and the new direction given to their energies is going to serve for the girls of generations to come after them.

But the fact of a regular occupation does not settle all the vexed questions of daughters in the home. They will always be vexed, and individuals will always have to find their own solutions. Mary’s mother cannot understand why Mary is so discontented in her comfortable home: Emily seems contented enough, but Mary is always chafing and tossing her head and sulking in corners, talking with envy of her friends who live unwholesomely in poky little rooms and threatening to join them if she only gets the chance. “What more can the child want?” cries the mother. “She lives far better here than she could ever do on her own. She can go out when she likes and she can bring her friends here where they are always welcome. She gets properly looked after when she is ill, and when things go wrong she is glad enough of my sympathy and comfort.” Well, for one thing, Mary, who is of a more independent temperament than Emily, has not had the opportunity of finding out that living on one’s own is not all that fancy paints it. She is possessed by the idea, and she will only learn how much she misses her home when she has suffered from some of the facts which its realisation entails. It might be almost worth while to let her try for a time: if she comes back with relief, well and good. If she finds independence preferable with all its drawbacks, the wisdom of having ceased to put constraint upon her will be obvious. Mary, no doubt, is often flighty and does not know what she really wants, but Mary’s mother has possibly taken no trouble to study Mary or to find out where the root of her grievances lie.

She does not probably realise how irksome it is to some temperaments to live perpetually in another person’s house, however great their love for that person. A home is controlled by one will alone, it is impossible to make it a republic. If the will is that of Mary’s mother, Mary will often find it tiresome to submit to it: if, by any chance, it comes to be Mary’s will, it is a bad look out for her mother and father. The mere want of privacy in itself is irritating, unless Mary has a den of her own and time of her own which are inviolable. Some parents think that they have an unlimited claim on the time and convenience of their children, forgetting that filial duty, fine and natural a motive as it is, is only one among many motives for human action, and that these motives are in the habit of conflicting. Mary’s mother may be under the apprehension that Mary has complete liberty at home: but Mary knows better. How often is she hindered from sitting down to a solid morning’s work by the knowledge that if she does not do the flowers nobody will. How often when she is just tucking up on a Sunday afternoon for a good read is she not disturbed by the certainty with which the atmosphere is charged that her father will be grieved if he has no companion for his walk? She could, of course, refuse to go, but she would then have to accept all the onus of seeming to be ungracious, and have that absolutely exasperating feeling of having to be apologetic for not doing something of the doing of which there should have been no legitimate expectation, tacit or otherwise. Duty is mostly a repression of one’s own desires, and therefore salutary: but there is a limit to its value, and in some people there is an intense desire to get away from it sometimes, if only for a little. Many a girl who loves her parents and looks with affection on her home, must frequently think with a sigh that even in the squalidest rooms, there would be no flowers to do and nobody to expect one to go on Sunday walks, no feeling that there is somebody to judge one’s friends when they come and to listen to what one says to them, no rigid times for meals, no callers to be entertained when mother is lying down, however absorbed one is in one’s own work, no Emily to play the piano after dinner, in fact no convenience but one’s own to consult at all.

Men feel this longing for privacy and independence, why should it seem strange and regrettable in girls? As a whole, they are less capable of looking after themselves than their brothers, perhaps, but that is partly due to their weaker social position. Also Mary’s case is by no means that of every girl, a fact which unfairly tells against Mary, who does not care a snap of her fingers for Emily’s docility and want of enterprise. Individuals have got to work out their own salvation, a task which is always made far more difficult for Mary than for her brother. Of course, there are infinite degrees of stress and accommodation in this relation of Mary and her mother: circumstances, character, common sense, temper, nerves, compatibility, all play their parts in different admixtures. Where Mary and her mother are both sensible, or arrive at sense by suffering, the final accommodation is generally satisfactory. Where sense is wanting, or passion clouds it, there will always be trouble: and, however much Mary’s mother may have to put up with from Mary, of which Mary may be only vaguely conscious, yet she is in the main to blame for not agreeing to one obvious solution of letting Mary do what she wants. She may be as certain as the snow is white that Mary is really happier under her roof, and that only her own tactful care prevents Mary from making some disastrous mistakes through her own inexperience or defects of character; she may even be more right than wrong in this belief: yet the fact remains that Mary is grown up and is the only person who can, in the long run, be responsible for her life. Is it right to thwart without convincing her, when it is possible to let her obtain conviction by experience? Only on the most antiquated theory of parental authority and filial subordination, a theory which rests upon no observed facts but rather upon a persistent blindness to the truth.

There is no such thing as natural affection: affection has to be won, and, once it is won, to be kept by effort or to be lost again. It is always assumed that parents and children naturally adopt to one another the attitude of beatific charity, as if they could not be the severest critics and the most bitter haters one of another, when the affectionate habits of childhood have frozen into mere formalities through incompatibilities of temper. In England, where the names of mother and father are treated with every outward respect, there is far less real sentiment for them as ideas than in Latin countries. What makes the relation so close and so warm in England is the comradeship of the English and the glow of the English home, which welds a strong bond so early that an overwhelming amount of tension is required for its complete disruption. But the seeds of strife are sown inevitably in the adolescence of every family: the weeds to which they grow are hardy, too, if they are not nipped in the bud. The English mother has got to do the nipping, but with sympathy not with severity, for the tool of severity will turn against her, and she will suffer a thousand fold the pain she has inflicted thoughtlessly on her children.

The truth is that all parents and children must go through a period of storm and stress, and most of the stress falls on the mothers. All young things are more or less ungrateful, and this is perfectly natural: they are following their strongest impulse in pushing their way out to full growth as ruthlessly as shoots of the rose tree. They have no time to be reflective till this irresistible impulse has weakened, so that they cannot realise before full maturity all that they have forced out of their parents in the way of self-denial, self-restraint, nervous irritation and even physical labour. For tangible pleasures and comforts they are grateful enough, but the intangible prevention of pain, the care and watching, the influence and the teaching do not become visible to them until they are almost on the far horizon of past youth. In the sharp momentary irritations of growth children cannot take these things into account, and for them a sense of injustice blots out gratitude like a sudden black fog. When they look back, and suffer from the rough contact of younger life themselves, then they see the vexed questions of their youth in truer proportions: they may not find that the wrong was always on their side, but at least they will sympathise with the pardonable weakness to which it was due, and will weigh it in the balance with benefits felt but not seen. Those families are happy who see these exasperations pass away like a short-lived storm, leaving no devastated tract behind them, but bringing calm and mellow weather in their wake. The English mind, averse from brooding, ever ready for compromise and comradeship, is a temperate climate, rejoicing in these halcyon anti-cyclones after the chilly gust and the grumbling thunder. When the English family barometer is at “set fair,” the atmosphere is delightful, and there is no more charming or sympathetic friendship possible than that between an English mother and her children, when each looks kindly upon the other with the eye of perfect understanding, in mutual pride and love and tolerance. No distance breaks the bond nor does the lapse of time weaken it, and the mother, seeing the runners to whom she has handed on the torch settling into a steady stride, can enjoy contented the sunset of motherhood and matrimony, with the prospect of assuming a benevolent grandmotherhood that will enable her to spoil her children’s children without paying the consequences.