Human Intercourse

ESSAY VI.

It is obvious that the defect here is the absence of a settled public opinion to which both parties would feel bound to defer. Under the old system the authority of the father was efficiently maintained, not only by the laws, but by that general consensus of opinion which is far more powerful than law. The new system, whatever it may be, will be founded on general opinion again, but our present experimental condition is one of anarchy.

This is the real cause of whatever may be felt as unsatisfactory in the modern paternal and filial relations. It is not that fathers have become more unjust or sons more rebellious.

The position of the father was in old times perfectly defined. He was the commander, not only armed by the law but by religion and custom. Disobedience to his dictates was felt to be out of the question, unless the insurgent was prepared to meet the consequences of open mutiny. The maintenance of the father’s authority depended only on himself. If he abdicated it through indolence or weakness he incurred moral reprobation not unmingled with contempt, whilst in the present day reprobation would rather follow a new attempt to vindicate the antique authority.

Besides this change in public opinion there is a new condition of paternal feeling. The modern father, in the most civilized nations and classes, has acquired a sentiment that appears to have been absolutely unknown to his predecessors: he has acquired a dislike for command which increases with the age of the son; so that there is an unfortunate coincidence of increasing strength of will on the son’s part with decreasing disposition to restrain it on the father’s part. What a modern father really desires is that a son should go right of his own accord, and if not quite of his own accord, then in consequence of a little affectionate persuasion. This feeling would make command unsatisfactory to us, even if it were followed by a military promptitude of obedience. We do not wish to be like captains, and our sons like privates in a company; we care only to exercise a certain beneficent influence over them, and we feel that if we gave military orders we should destroy that peculiar influence which is of the most fragile and delicate nature.

But now see the unexpected consequences of our modern dislike to command! It might be argued that there is a certain advantage on our side from the very rarity of the commands we give, which endows them with extraordinary force. Would it not be more accurate to say that as we give orders less and less our sons become unaccustomed to receive orders from us, and if ever the occasion arises when we must give them a downright order it comes upon their feelings with a harshness so excessive that they are likely to think us tyrannical, whereas if we had kept up the old habits of command such orders would have seemed natural and right, and would not have been less scrupulously obeyed?

The paternal dislike to give orders personally has had a peculiar effect upon education. We are not yet quite imbecile enough to suppose that discipline can be entirely dispensed with; and as there is very little of it in modern houses it has to be sought elsewhere, so boys are placed more and more completely under the authority of schoolmasters, often living at such a distance from the father of the family that for several months at a time he can exercise no direct influence or authority over his own children. This leads to the establishment of a peculiar boyish code of justice. Boys come to think it not unjust that the schoolmaster should exercise authority, when if the father attempted to exercise authority of equal rigor, or anything approaching it, they would look upon him as an odious domestic tyrant, entirely forgetting that any power to enforce obedience which is possessed by the schoolmaster is held by him vicariously as the father’s representative and delegate. From this we arrive at the curious and unforeseen conclusion that the modern father only exercises strong authority through another person who is often a perfect stranger and whose interest in the boy’s present and future well-being is as nothing in comparison with the father’s anxious and continual solicitude.

The custom of placing the education of sons entirely in the hands of strangers is so deadly a blow to parental influence that some fathers have resolutely rebelled against it and tried to become themselves the educators of their children. James Mill is the most conspicuous instance of this, both for persistence and success. His way of educating his illustrious son has often been coarsely misrepresented as a merciless system of cram. The best answer to this is preserved for us in the words of the pupil himself. He said expressly: “Mine was not an education of cram,” and that the one cardinal point in it, the cause of the good it effected, was that his father never permitted anything he learnt to degenerate into a mere exercise of memory. He greatly valued the training he had received, and fully appreciated its utility to him in after-life. “If I have accomplished anything,” he says, “I owe it, amongst other fortunate circumstances, to the fact that through the early training bestowed on me by my father I started, I may fairly say, with an advantage of a quarter of a century over my contemporaries.”

But though in this case the pupil’s feeling in after-life was one of gratitude, it may be asked what were his filial sentiments whilst this paternal education was going forward. This question also is clearly and frankly answered by Stuart Mill himself. He says that his father was severe; that his authority was deficient in the demonstration of tenderness, though probably not in the reality of it; that “he resembled most Englishmen in being ashamed of the signs of feeling, and by the absence of demonstration starving the feelings themselves.” Then the son goes on to say that it was “impossible not to feel true pity for a father who did, and strove to do, so much for his children, who would have so valued their affection, yet who must have been constantly feeling that fear of him was drying it up at its source.” And we probably have the exact truth about Stuart Mill’s own sentiments when he says that the younger children loved his father tenderly, “and if I cannot say so much of myself I was always loyally devoted to him.”

This contains the central difficulty about paternal education. If the choice were left to boys they would learn nothing, and you cannot make them work vigorously “by the sole force of persuasion and soft words.” Therefore a severe discipline has to be established, and this severity is incompatible with tenderness; so that in order to preserve the affection of his children the father intrusts discipline to a delegate.

But if the objection to parental education is clear in Mill’s case, so are its advantages, and especially the one inestimable advantage that the father was able to impress himself on his son’s mind and to live afterwards in his son’s intellectual life. James Mill did not abdicate, as fathers generally do. He did not confine paternal duties to the simple one of signing checks. And if it is not in our power to imitate him entirely, if we have not his profound and accurate knowledge, if we have not his marvellous patience, if it is not desirable that we should take upon ourselves alone that immense responsibility which he accepted, may we not imitate him to such a degree as to secure some intellectual and moral influence over our own offspring and not leave them entirely to the teaching of the schoolfellow (that most influential and most dangerous of all teachers), the pedagogue, and the priest?

The only practical way in which this can be done is for the father to act within fixed limits. May he not reserve to himself some speciality? He can do this if he is himself master of some language or science that enters into the training of his son; but here again certain difficulties present themselves.

By the one vigorous resolution to take the entire burden upon his own shoulders James Mill escaped minor embarrassments. It is the partial education by the father that is difficult to carry out with steadiness and consistency. First, as to place of residence. If your son is far away during his months of work, and at home only for vacation pleasures, what, pray, is your hold upon him? He escapes from you in two directions, by work and by play. I have seen a Highland gentleman who, to avoid this and do his duty to his sons, quitted a beautiful residence in magnificent scenery to go and live in the dull and ugly neighborhood of Rugby. It is not convenient or possible for every father to make the same sacrifice, but if you are able to do it other difficulties remain. Any speciality that you may choose will be regarded by your son as a trifling and unimportant accomplishment in comparison with Greek and Latin, because that is the school estimate; and if you choose either Greek or Latin your scholarship will be immediately pitted against the scholarship of professional teachers whose more recent and more perfect methods will place you in a position of inferiority, instantly perceived by your pupil, who will estimate you accordingly. The only two cases I have ever personally known in which a father taught the classical languages failed in the object of increasing the son’s affection and respect, because, although the father had been quite a first-rate scholar in his time, his ways of teaching were not so economical of effort as are the professional ways; and the boys perceived that they were not taking the shortest cut to a degree.

If, to avoid this comparison, you choose something outside the school curriculum, the boy will probably consider it an unfair addition to the burden of his work. His view of education is not your view. You think it a valuable training or acquirement; he considers it all task-work, like the making of bricks in Egypt; and his notion of justice is that he ought not to be compelled to make more bricks than his class-fellows, who are happy in having fathers too indolent or too ignorant to trouble them. If, therefore, you teach him something outside of what his school-fellows do, he does not think, “I get the advantage of a wider education than theirs;” but he thinks, “My father lays an imposition upon me, and my school-fellows are lucky to escape it.”

In some instances the father chooses a modern language as the thing that he will teach; but he finds that as he cannot apply the school discipline (too harsh and unpaternal for use at home), there is a quiet, passive resistance that will ultimately defeat him unless he has inexhaustible patience. He decrees, let us suppose, that French shall be spoken at table; but the chief effect of his decree is to reveal great and unsuspected powers of taciturnity. Who could be such a tyrant as to find fault with a boy because he so modestly chooses to be silent? Speech may be of silver, but silence is of gold, and it is especially beautiful and becoming in the young.

Seeing that everything in the way of intellectual training is looked upon by boys as an unfair addition to school-work, some fathers abandon that altogether, and try to win influence over their sons by initiating them into sports and pastimes. Just at first these happy projects appear to unite the useful with the agreeable; but as the youthful nature is much better fitted for sports and pastimes than middle-age can pretend to be, it follows that the pupil very soon excels the master in these things, and quite gets the upper hand of him and offers him advice, or else dutifully (but with visible constraint) condescends to accommodate himself to the elder man’s inferiority; so that perhaps upon the whole it may be that sports and pastimes are not the field of exertion in which paternal authority is most likely to preserve a dignified preponderance.

It is complacently assumed by men of fifty that over-ripe maturity is the superior of adolescence; but an impartial balance of advantages shows that some very brilliant ones are on the side of youth. At fifty we may be wiser, richer, more famous than a clever boy; but he does not care much for our wisdom, he thinks that expenses are a matter of course, and our little rushlights of reputations are as nothing to the future electric illumination of his own. In bodily activity we are to boyhood what a domestic cow is to a wild antelope; and as boys rightly attach an immense value to such activity they generally look upon us, in their secret thoughts, as miserable old “muffs.” I distinctly remember, when a boy, accompanying a middle-aged gentleman to a country railway station. We were a little late, and the distance was long, but my companion could not be induced to go beyond his regular pace. At last we were within half a mile, and the steam of the locomotive became visible. “Now let us run for it,” I cried, “and we shall catch the train!” Run?—he run, indeed! I might as well have asked the Pope to run in the streets of Rome! My friend kept in silent solemnity to his own dignified method of motion, and we were left behind. To this day I well remember the feelings of contemptuous pity and disgust that filled me as I looked upon that most respectable gentleman. I said not a word; my demeanor was outwardly decorous; but in my secret heart I despised my unequal companion with the unmitigated contempt of youth.

Even those physical exertions that elderly men are equal to—the ten miles’ walk, the ride on a docile hunter, the quiet drive or sail—are so much below the achievements of fiery youth that they bring us no more credit than sitting in a chair. Though our efforts seem so respectable to ourselves that we take a modest pride therein, a young man can only look upon them with indulgence.

In the mental powers elderly men are inferior on the very point that a young man looks to first. His notion of cleverness, by which he estimates all his comrades, is not depth of thought, nor wisdom, nor sagacity; it is simply rapidity in learning, and there his elders are hopelessly behind him. They may extend or deepen an old study, but they cannot attack a new one with the conquering spirit of youth. Too late! too late! too late! is inscribed, for them, on a hundred gates of knowledge. The young man, with his powers of acquisition urging him like unsatisfied appetites, sees the gates all open and believes they are open for him. He believes all knowledge to be his possible province, knowing not yet the chilling, disheartening truth that life is too short for success in any but a very few directions. Confident in his powers, the young man prepares himself for difficult examinations, and he knows that we should be incapable of the same efforts.

Not having succeeded very well with attempts to create intercourse through studies and amusements, the father next consoles himself with the idea that he will convert his son into an intimate friend; but shortly discovers that there are certain difficulties, of which a few may be mentioned here.

Although the relationship between father and son is a very near relationship, it may happen that there is but little likeness of inherited idiosyncrasy, and therefore that the two may have different and even opposite tastes. By the law or accident of atavism a boy may resemble one of his grandfathers or some remoter ancestor, or he may puzzle theorists about heredity by characteristics for which there is no known precedent in his family. Both his mental instincts and processes, and the conclusions to which they lead him, may be entirely different from the habits and conclusions of his father; and if the father is so utterly unphilosophical as to suppose (what vulgar fathers constantly do suppose) that his own mental habits and conclusions are the right ones, and all others wrong, then he will adopt a tone of authority towards his son, on certain occasions, which the young man will excusably consider unbearable and which he will avoid by shunning the paternal society. Even a very mild attempt on the father’s part to impose his own tastes and opinions will be quietly resented and felt as a reason for avoiding him, because the son is well aware that he cannot argue on equal terms with a man who, however amiable he chooses to be for the moment, can at any time arm himself with the formidable paternal dignity by simply taking the trouble to assume it.

The mere difference of age is almost an insuperable barrier to comradeship; for though a middle-aged man may be cheerful, his cheerfulness is “as water unto wine” in comparison with the merriment of joyous youth. So exuberant is that youthful gayety that it often needs to utter downright nonsense for the relief of its own high spirits, and feels oppressed in sober society where nonsense is not permitted. Any elderly gentleman who reads this has only to consult his own recollections, and ask himself whether in youth he did not often say and do utterly irrational things. If he never did, he never was really young. I hardly know any author, except Shakspeare, who has ventured to reproduce, in its perfect absurdity, the full flow of youthful nonsense. The criticism of our own age would scarcely tolerate it in books, and might accuse the author himself of being silly; but the thing still exists abundantly in real life, and the wonder is that it is sometimes the most intelligent young men who enjoy the most witless nonsense of all. When we have lost the high spirits that gave it a relish, it becomes very wearisome if prolonged. Young men instinctively know that we are past the appreciation of it.

Another very important reason why fathers and sons have a difficulty in maintaining close friendships is the steady divergence of their experience.

In childhood, the father’s knowledge of places, people, and things includes the child’s knowledge, as a large circle includes a little one drawn within it. Afterwards the boy goes to school, and has comrades and masters whom his father does not personally know. Later on, he visits many places where his father has never been.

The son’s life may socially diverge so completely from that of the father that he may really come to belong to a different class in society. His education, habits, and associates may be different from those of his father. If the family is growing richer they are likely to be (in the worldly sense) of a higher class; if it is becoming poorer they will probably be of a lower class than the father was accustomed to in his youth. The son may feel more at ease than his father does in very refined society, or, on the other hand, he may feel refined society to be a restraint, whilst he only enjoys himself thoroughly and heartily amongst vulgar people that his father would carefully avoid.

Divergence is carried to its utmost by difference of professional training, and by the professional habit of seeing things that follows from it. If a clergyman puts his son into a solicitor’s office, he need not expect that the son will long retain those views of the world that prevail in the country parsonage where he was born. He will acquire other views, other mental habits, and he will very soon believe himself to possess a far greater and more accurate knowledge of mankind, and of affairs, than his father ever possessed.

Even if the son is in the father’s own profession he will have new views of it derived from the time at which he learns it, and he is likely to consider his father’s ideas as not brought down to the latest date. He will also have a tendency to look to strangers as greater authorities than his father, even when they are really on the same level, because they are not lowered in his estimate by domestic intimacy and familiarity. Their opinion will be especially valued by the young man if it has to be paid for, it being an immense depreciation of the paternal counsel that it is always given gratuitously.

If the father has bestowed upon his son what is considered a “complete” education, and if he himself has not received the same “complete” education in his youth, the son is likely to accept the conventional estimate of education because it is in his own favor, and to estimate his father as an “uneducated” or a “half-educated” man, without taking into much account the possibility that his father may have developed his faculties by mental labor in other ways. The conventional division between “educated” and “uneducated” men is so definite that it is easily seen. The educated are those who have taken a degree at one of the Universities; the rest are uneducated, whatever may be their attainments in the sciences, in modern languages, or in the fine arts.

There are differences of education even more serious than this, because more real. A man may be not only conventionally uneducated, but he may be really and truly uneducated, by which I mean that his faculties may never have been drawn out by intellectual discipline of any kind whatever. It is hard indeed for a well-educated young man to live under the authority of a father of that kind, because he has constantly to suppress reasons and motives for opinions and decisions that such a father could not possibly enter into or understand. The relationship is equally hard for the father, who must be aware, with the lively suspicion of the ignorant, that his son is not telling him all his thought but only the portion of it which he thinks fit to reveal, and that much more is kept in reserve. He will ask, “Why this reserve towards me?” and then he will either be profoundly hurt and grieved by it at times, or else, if of another temper, he will be irritated, and his irritation may find harsh utterance in words.

An educated man can never rid himself of his education. His views of the most ordinary things are different from the views of the uneducated. If he were to express them in his own language they would say, “Why, how he talks!” and consider him “a queer chap;” and if he keeps them to himself they say he is very “close” and “shut up.” There is no way out of the dilemma except this, that kind and tender feelings may exist between people who have nothing in common intellectually, but these are only possible when all pretence to paternal authority is abandoned.

Our forefathers had an idea with regard to the opinions of their children that in these days we must be content to give up. They thought that all opinions were by nature hereditary, and it was considered an act of disloyalty to ancestors if a descendant ventured to differ from them. The profession of any but the family opinions was so rare as to be almost inconceivable; and if in some great crisis the head of a family took a new departure in religion or politics the new faith substituted itself for the old one as the hereditary faith of the family. I remember hearing an old gentleman (who represented old English feeling in great perfection) say that it was totally unintelligible to him that a certain Member of Parliament could sit on the Liberal side of the House of Commons. “I cannot understand it,” he said; “I knew his father intimately, and he was always a good Tory.” The idea that the son might have opinions of his own was unthinkable.

In our time we are beginning to perceive that opinions cannot be imposed, and that the utmost that can be obtained by brow-beating a son who differs from ourselves is that he shall make false professions to satisfy us. Paternal influence may be better employed than in encouraging habits of dissimulation.

M. Legouvé attaches great importance to the religious question as a cause of division between fathers and sons because in the present day young men so frequently imbibe opinions which are not those of their parents. It is not uncommon, in France, for Catholic parents to have unbelieving sons; and the converse is also seen, but more frequently in the case of daughters. As opinions are very freely expressed in France (except where external conformity is an affair of caste), we find many families in which Catholicism and Agnosticism have each their open and convinced adherents; yet family affection does not appear to suffer from the difference, or is, at least, powerful enough to overcome it. In old times this would have been impossible. The father would have resented a difference of opinion in the son as an offence against himself.

A very common cause of division between father and son, in old times, was the following.

The father expressed a desire of some kind, mildly and kindly perhaps, yet with the full expectation that it should be attended to; but the desire was of an exorbitant nature, in this sense, that it involved something that would affect the whole course of the young man’s future life in a manner contrary to his natural instincts. The father was then grievously hurt and offended because the son did not see his way to the fulfilment of the paternal desire.

The strongest cases of this kind were in relation to profession and marriage. The father wished his son to enter into some trade or profession for which he was completely unsuited, or he desired him to marry some young lady for whom he had not the slightest natural affinity. The son felt the inherent difficulties and refused. Then the father thought, “I only ask of my son this one simple thing, and he denies me.”

In these cases the father was not asking for one thing, but for thousands of things. He was asking his son to undertake many thousands of separate obligations, succeeding each other till the far-distant date of his retirement from the distasteful profession, or his release, by his own death or hers, from the tedious companionship of the unloved wife. Sometimes the concession would have involved a long series of hypocrisies, as for example when a son was asked to take holy orders, though with little faith and no vocation.

Peter the Great is the most conspicuous example in history of a father whose idiosyncrasy was not continued in his son, and who could not understand or tolerate the separateness of his son’s personality. They were not only of independent, but even of opposite natures. “Peter was active, curious, and energetic. Alexis was contemplative and reflective. He was not without intellectual ability, but he liked a quiet life. He preferred reading and thinking. At the age when Peter was making fireworks, building boats, and exercising his comrades in mimic war, Alexis was pondering over the ‘Divine Manna,’ reading the ‘Wonders of God,’ reflecting on Thomas à Kempis’s ‘Imitation of Christ,’ and making excerpts from Baronius. While it sometimes seemed as if Peter was born too soon for the age, Alexis was born too late. He belonged to the past generation. Not only did he take no interest in the work and plans of his father, but he gradually came to dislike and hate them.... He would sometimes even take medicine to make himself ill, so that he might not be called upon to perform duties or to attend to business. Once, when he was obliged to go to the launch of a ship, he said to a friend, ‘I would rather be a galley-slave, or have a burning fever, than be obliged to go there.’”[6]

In this case one is sorry for both father and son. Peter was a great intelligent barbarian of immense muscular strength and rude cerebral energy. Alexis was of the material from which civilization makes priests and students, or quiet conventional kings, but he was even more unlike Peter than gentle Richard Cromwell was unlike authoritative Oliver. The disappointment to Peter, firmly convinced, as all rude natures are, of the perfection of his own personality, and probably quite unable to appreciate a personality of another type, must have been the more bitter that his great plans for the future required a vigorous, practically minded innovator like himself. At length the difference of nature so exasperated the Autocrat that he had his son three times tortured, the third time in his own presence and with a fatal result. This terrible incident is the strongest expression known to us of a father’s vexation because his son was not of his own kind.

Another painful case that will be long remembered, though the character of the father is less known to us, is that of the poet Shelley and Sir Timothy. The little that we do know amounts to this, that there was a total absence of sympathy. Sir Timothy committed the very greatest of paternal mistakes in depriving himself of the means of direct influence over his son by excluding him from his own home. Considering that the supreme grief of unhappy fathers is the feebleness of their influence over their sons, they can but confirm and complete their sorrow by annihilating that influence utterly and depriving themselves of all chance of recovering and increasing it in the future. This Sir Timothy did after the expulsion from Oxford. In his position, a father possessing some skill and tact in the management of young men at the most difficult and wayward period of their lives would have determined above all things to keep his son as much as possible within the range of his own control. Although Shelley afterwards returned to Field Place for a short time, the scission had been made; there was an end of real intercourse between father and son; the poet went his own way, married Harriett Westbrook, and lived through the rest of his short, unsatisfactory existence as a homeless, wandering déclassé.

This Essay has hitherto run upon the discouraging side of the subject, so that it ought not to end without the happier and more hopeful considerations.

Every personality is separate from others, and expects its separateness to be acknowledged. When a son avoids his father it is because he fears that the rights of his own personality will be disregarded. There are fathers who habitually treat their sons with sneering contempt. I have myself seen a young man of fair common abilities treated with constant and undisguised contempt by a clever, sardonic father who went so far as to make brutal allusions to the shape of the young man’s skull! He bore this treatment with admirable patience and unfailing gentleness, but suffered from it silently. Another used to laugh at his son, and called him “Don Quixote” whenever the lad gave expression to some sentiment above the low Philistine level. A third, whom I knew well, had a disagreeable way of putting down his son because he was young, telling him that up to the age of forty a man “might have impressions, but could not possibly have opinions.” “My father,” said a kind-hearted English gentleman to me, “was the most thoroughly unbearable person I ever met with in my life.”

The frank recognition of separate personality, with all its rights, would stop this brutality at once. There still remains the legitimate power of the father, which he ought not to abdicate, and which is of itself enough to prevent the freedom and equality necessary to perfect friendship. This reason, and the difference of age and habits, make it impossible that young men and their fathers should be comrades; but a relation may be established between them which, if rightly understood, is one of the most agreeable in human existence.

To be satisfactory it must be founded, on the father’s side, on the idea that he is repaying to posterity what he has received from his own parents, and not on any selfish hope that the descending stream of benefit will flow upwards again to him. Then he must not count upon affection, nor lay himself out to win it, nor be timidly afraid of losing it, but found his influence upon the firmer ground of respect, and be determined to deserve and have that, along with as much unforced affection as the son is able naturally and easily to give. It is not desirable that the affection between father and son should be so tender, on either side, as to make separation a constant pain, for such is human destiny that the two are generally fated to see but little of each other.

The best satisfaction for a father is to deserve and receive loyal and unfailing respect from his son.

No, this is not quite the best, not quite the supreme satisfaction of paternity. Shall I reveal the secret that lies in silence at the very bottom of the hearts of all worthy and honorable fathers? Their profoundest happiness is to be able themselves to respect their sons.

ESSAY VII.

If, in our day, the barrier of exclusiveness has been in many places broken down, there is all the greater need for us to remember the true principle of hospitality. It might be forgotten with little inconvenience in a very exclusive society, but if it were forgotten in a society that is not exclusive the consequences would be exactly the opposite of what every friend of civilization most earnestly desires. Social intercourse, in that case, so far from being an education in respect for the rights of others, would be an opportunity for violating them. The violation might become habitual; and if it were so this strange result would follow, that society would not be a softening and civilizing influence, but the contrary. It would accustom people to treat each other with disregard, so that men would be hardened and brutalized by it as schoolboys are made ruder by the rough habits of the playground, and urbanity would not be cultivated in cities, but preserved, if at all, in solitude.

The two views concerning the rights of the guest may be stated briefly as follows:—

1. The guest is bound to conform in all things to the tastes and customs of his host. He ought to find or feign enjoyment in everything that his host imposes upon him; and if he is unwilling to do this in every particular it is a breach of good manners on his part, and he must be made to suffer for it.

2. The guest should be left to be happy in his own way, and the business of the host is to arrange things in such a manner that each guest may enjoy as much as possible his own peculiar kind of happiness.

When the first principle was applied in all its rigor, as it often used to be applied, and as I have myself seen it applied, the sensation experienced by the guest on going to stay in certain houses was that of entirely losing the direction of himself. He was not even allowed, in the middle classes, to have any control over his own inside, but had to eat what his host ordered him to eat, and to drink the quantity of wine and spirits that his host had decided to be good for him. Resistance to these dictates was taken as an offence, as a crime against good fellowship, or as a reflection on the quality of the good things provided; and conversation paused whilst the attention of the whole company was attracted to the recalcitrant guest, who was intentionally placed in a situation of extreme annoyance and discomfort in order to compel him to obedience. The victim was perhaps half an invalid, or at least a man who could only keep well and happy on condition of observing a certain strictness of regimen. He was then laughed at for idle fears about his health, told that he was a hypochondriac, and recommended to drink a bottle of port every day to get rid of such idle nonsense. If he declined to eat twice or three times as much as he desired, the hostess expressed her bitter regret that she had not been able to provide food and cookery to his taste, thus placing him in such a position that he must either eat more or seem to condemn her arrangements. It was very common amongst old-fashioned French bourgeois in the last generation for the hostess herself to heap things on the guest’s plate, and to prevent this her poor persecuted neighbor had to remove the plate or turn it upside down. The whole habit of pressing was dictated by selfish feeling in the hosts. They desired to see their guests devour voraciously, in order that their own vanity might be gratified by the seeming appreciation of their things. Temperate men were disliked by a generation of topers because their temperance had the appearance of a silent protest or censure. The discomfort inflicted by these odious usages was so great that many people either injured their health in society or kept out of it in self-defence, though they were not sulky and unsociable by nature, but would have been hearty lovers of human intercourse if they could have enjoyed it on less unacceptable terms.

The wholesome modern reaction against these dreadful old customs has led some hosts into another error. They sometimes fail to understand the great principle that it is the guest alone who ought to be the judge of the quantity that he shall eat and drink. The old pressing hospitality assumed that the guest was a child, too shame-faced to take what it longed for unless it was vigorously encouraged; but the new hospitality, if indeed it still in every case deserves that honored name, does really sometimes appear to assume (I do not say always, or often, but in extreme cases) that the guest is a fool, who would eat and drink more than is good for him if he were not carefully rationed. Such hosts forget that excess is quite a relative term, that each constitution has its own needs. Beyond this, it is well known that the exhilaration of social intercourse enables people who meet convivially to digest and assimilate, without fatigue, a larger amount of nutriment than they could in dull and perhaps dejected solitude. Hence it is a natural and long-established habit to eat and drink more when in company than alone, and the guest should have the possibility of conforming to this not irrational old custom until, in Homer’s phrase, he has “put from him the desire of meat and drink.”

Guests have no right whatever to require that the host should himself eat and drink to keep them in countenance. There used to be a belief (it lingers still in the middle classes and in country places) that the laws of hospitality required the host to set what was considered “a good example,” or, in other words, to commit excesses himself that his friends might not be too much ashamed of theirs. It is said that the Emperor William of Germany never eats in public at all, but sits out every banquet before an empty plate. This, though quite excusable in an old gentleman, obliged to live by rule, must have rather a chilling effect; and yet I like it as a declaration of the one great principle that no person at table, be he host or guest, ought to be compelled to inflict the very slightest injury upon his own health, or even comfort. The rational and civilized idea is that food and wines are simply placed at the disposal of the people present to be used, or abstained from, as they please.

It is clear that every invited guest has a right to expect some slight appearance of festivity in his honor. In coarse and barbarous times the idea of festivity is invariably expressed by abundance, especially by vast quantities of butcher’s meat and wine, as we always find it in Homer, where princes and gentlemen stuff themselves like savages; but in refined times the notion of quantity has lost its attraction, and that of elegance takes its place. In a highly civilized society nothing conveys so much the idea of festivity as plenty of light and flowers, with beautiful table-linen and plate and glass. These, with some extra delicacy in cookery and wines, are our modern way of expressing welcome.

There is a certain kind of hospitality in which the host visibly declines to make any effort either of trouble or expense, but plainly shows by his negligence that he only tolerates the guest. All that can be said of such hospitality as this is that a guest who respects himself may endure it silently for once, but would not be likely to expose himself to it a second time.

There is even a kind of hospitality which seems to find a satisfaction in letting the guest perceive that the best in the house is not offered to him. He is lodged in a poor little room, when there are noble bedchambers, unused, in the same house; or he is allowed to hire a vehicle in the village, to make some excursion, when there are horses in the stables plethoric from want of exercise. In cases of this kind it is not the privation of luxury that is hard to bear, but the indisposition to give honor. The guest feels and knows that if a person of very high rank came to the house everything would be put at his disposal, and he resents the slight put upon his own condition. A rich English lady, long since dead, had a large mansion in the country with fine bedrooms; so she found a pleasure in keeping those rooms empty and sending guests to sleep at the top of the house in little bare and comfortless chambers that the architect had intended for servants. I have heard of a French house where there are fine state apartments, and where all ordinary guests are poorly lodged, and fed in a miserable salle à manger. An aggravation is when the host treats himself better than his guest. Lady B. invited some friends to a country-house; and they drove to another country-house in the neighborhood in two carriages, one containing Lady B. and one friend, the other the remaining guests. Her ladyship was timid and rather selfish, as timid people often are; so when they reached the avenue she began to fancy that both carriages could not safely turn in the garden, and she despatched her footman to the second carriage, with orders that her guests (amongst whom was a lady very near her confinement) were to get out and walk to the house, whilst she drove up to the door in state.

A guest has an absolute right to have his religious and political opinions respected in his presence, and this is not invariably done. The rule more generally followed seems to be that class opinions only deserve respect and not individual opinions. The question is too large to be treated in a paragraph, but I should say that it is a clear breach of hospitality to utter anything in disparagement of any opinion whatever that is known to be held by any one guest present, however humble may be his rank. I have sometimes seen the known opinions of a guest attacked rudely and directly, but the more civilized method is to do it more artfully through some other person who is not present. For example, a guest is known to think, on important subjects, very much as Mr. Herbert Spencer does; then the host will contrive to talk at him in talking about Spencer. A guest ought not to bear this ungenerous kind of attack. If such an occasion arises he should declare his opinions plainly and with firmness, and show his determination to have them respected whilst he is there, whatever may be said against them in his absence. If he cannot obtain this degree of courtesy, which is his right, let him quit the house and satisfy his hunger at some inn. The innkeeper will ask for a little money, but he demands no mental submission.

It sometimes happens that the nationality of a foreign guest is not respected as it ought to be. I remember an example of this which is moderate enough to serve as a kind of type, some attacks upon nationality being much more direct and outrageous. An English lady said at her own table that she would not allow her daughter to be partially educated in a French school, “because she would have to associate with French girls, which, you know, is undesirable.” Amongst the guests was a French lady, and the observation was loud enough for everybody to hear it. I say nothing of the injustice of the imputation. It was, indeed, most unjust, but that is not the point. The point is that a foreigner ought not to hear attacks upon his native land even when they are perfectly well founded.

The host has a sort of judicial function in this way. The guest has a right to look to him for protection on certain occasions, and he is likely to be profoundly grateful when it is given with tact and skill, because the host can say things for him that he cannot even hint at for himself. Suppose the case of a young man who is treated with easy and rather contemptuous familiarity by another guest, simply on account of his youth. He is nettled by the offence, but as it is more in manner than in words he cannot fix upon anything to answer. The host perceives his annoyance, and kindly gives him some degree of importance by alluding to some superiority of his, and by treating him in a manner very different from that which had vexed him.

A witty host is the most powerful ally against an aggressor. I remember dining in a very well-known house in Paris where a celebrated Frenchman repeated the absurd old French calumny against English ladies,—that they all drink. I was going to resent this seriously when a clever Frenchwoman (who knew England well) perceived the danger, and answered the man herself with great decision and ability. I then watched for the first opportunity of making him ridiculous, and seized upon a very delightful one that he unwittingly offered. Our host at once understood that my attack was in revenge for an aggression that had been in bad taste, and he supported me with a wit and pertinacity that produced general merriment at the enemy’s expense. Now in that case I should say that the host was filling one of the most important and most difficult functions of a host.

This Essay has hitherto been written almost entirely on the guest’s side of the question, so that we have still briefly to consider the limitations to his rights.

He has no right to impose any serious inconvenience upon his host. He has no right to disturb the ordinary arrangements of the house, or to inflict any serious pecuniary cost, or to occupy the host’s time to the prejudice of his usual pursuits. He has no right to intrude upon the privacy of his host.

A guest has no right to place the host in such a dilemma that he must either commit a rudeness or put up with an imposition. The very courtesy of an entertainer places him at the mercy of a pushing and unscrupulous guest, and it is only when the provocation has reached such a point as to have become perfectly intolerable that a host will do anything so painful to himself as to abandon his hospitable character and make the guest understand that he must go.

It may be said that difficulties of this kind never occur in civilized society. No doubt they are rare, but they happen just sufficiently often to make it necessary to be prepared for them. Suppose the case of a guest who exceeds his invitation. He has been invited for two nights, plainly and definitely; but he stays a third, fourth, fifth, and seems as if he would stay forever. There are men of that kind in the world, and it is one of their arts to disarm their victims by pleasantness, so that it is not easy to be firm with them. The lady of the house gives a gentle hint, the master follows with broader hints, but the intruder is quite impervious to any but the very plainest language. At last the host has to say, “Your train leaves at such an hour, and the carriage will be ready to take you to the station half an hour earlier.” This, at any rate, is intelligible; and yet I have known one of those clinging limpets whom even this proceeding failed to dislodge. At the approach of the appointed hour he was nowhere to be found! He had gone to hide himself in a wood with no companion but his watch, and by its help he took care to return when it was too late. That is sometimes one of the great uses of a watch.

ESSAY VIII.

Friendship is a certain rapport between two minds during one or more phases of their existence, and the perfection of it is quite as dependent upon what is not in the two minds as upon their positive acquirements and possessions. Hence the extreme facility with which schoolboys form friendships which, for the time, are real, true, and delightful. School friendships are formed so easily because boys in the same class know the same things; and it rarely happens that in addition to what they have in common either one party or the other has any knowledge of importance that is not in common.

Later in life the pair of friends who were once comrades go into different professions that fill the mind with special professional ideas and induce different habits of thought. Each will be conscious, when they meet, that there is a great range of ideas in the other’s mind from which he is excluded, and each will have a difficulty in keeping within the smaller range of ideas that they have now in common; so that they will no longer be able to let their whole minds play together as they used to do, and they will probably feel more at ease with mere acquaintances who have what is now their knowledge, what are now their mental habits, than with the friend of their boyhood who is without them.

This is strongly felt by men who go through a large experience at a distance from their early home and then return for a while to the old place and old associates, and find that it is only a part of themselves that is acceptable. New growths of self have taken place in distant regions, by travel, by study, by intercourse with mankind; and these new growths, though they may be more valuable than any others, are of no practical use, of no social availableness, in the little circle that has remained in the old ways.

Then there are changes of temper that result from the fixing of the character by time. We think we remain the same, but that is one of our many illusions. We change, and we do not always change in the same way. One man becomes mellowed by advancing years, but another is hardened by them; one man’s temper gains in sweetness and serenity as his intellect gains in light, another becomes dogmatic, peremptory, and bitter. Even when the change is the same for both, it may be unfavorable to their intercourse. Two merry young hearts may enjoy each other’s company, when they would find each other dull and flat if the sparkle of the early effervescence were all spent.

I have not yet touched upon change of opinion as a cause of the death of friendship, but it is one of the most common causes. It would be a calumny on the intelligence of the better part of mankind to say that they always desire to hear repeated exactly what they say themselves, though that is really the desire of the unintelligent; but the cleverest people like to hear new and additional reasons in support of the opinions they hold already; and they do not like to hear reasons, hitherto unsuspected, that go to the support of opinions different from their own. Therefore a slow divergence of opinion may carry two friends farther and farther apart by narrowing the subjects of their intercourse, or a sudden intellectual revolution in one of them may effect an immediate and irreparable breach.

“If the character is formed,” says Stuart Mill, “and the mind made up on the few cardinal points of human opinion, agreement of conviction and feeling on these has been felt at all times to be an essential requisite of anything worthy the name of friendship in a really earnest mind.” I do not quote this in the belief that it is absolutely true, but it expresses a general sentiment. We can only be guided by our own experience in these matters. Mine has been that friendship is possible with those whom I respect, however widely they differ from me, and not possible with those whom I am unable to respect, even when on the great matters of opinion their views are identical with my own.

It is certain, however, that the change of opinion itself has a tendency to separate men, even though the difference would not have made friendship impossible if it had existed from the first. Instances of this are often found in biographies, especially in religious biographies, because religious people are more “pained” and “wounded” by difference of opinion than others. We read in such books of the profound distress with which the hero found himself separated from his early friends by his new conviction on this or that point of theology. Political divergence produces the same effect in a minor degree, and with more of irritation than distress. Even divergence of opinion on artistic subjects is enough to produce coolness. Artists and men of letters become estranged from each other by modifications of their critical doctrines.

Differences of prosperity do not prevent the formation of friendship if they have existed previously, and can be taken as established facts; but if they widen afterwards they have a tendency to diminish it. They do so by altering the views of one of the parties about ways of living and about the multitude of things involving questions of expense. If the enriched man lives on a scale corresponding to his newly acquired wealth, he may be regarded by the other as pretentious beyond his station, whilst if he keeps to his old style he may be thought parsimonious. From delicacy he will cease to talk to the other about his money matters, which he spoke of with frankness when he was not so rich. If he has social ambition he will form new alliances with richer men, and the old friend may regard these with a little unconscious jealousy.

It has been observed that young artists often have a great esteem for the work of one of their number so long as its qualities are not recognized and rewarded by the public, but that so soon as the clever young man wins the natural meed of industry and ability his early friendships die. They were often the result of a generous indignation against public injustice, so when that injustice came to an end the kindness that was a protest against it ceased at the same time. In jealous natures it would no doubt be replaced by the conviction that public favor had rewarded merit far beyond its deserts.

In the political life of democracies we see men enthusiastically supported and really admired with sincerity so long as they remain in opposition, and their friends indulge the most favorable anticipations about what they would do if they came to power; but when they accept office they soon lose many of these friends, who are quite sure to be disappointed with the small degree in which their excessive hopes have been realized. There is no country where this is seen more frequently than in France, where Ministers are often criticised with the most unrelenting and uncharitable acerbity by the men and newspapers that helped to raise them.

Changes of physical constitution may be the death of friendship in this way. A friendship may be founded upon some sport that one of the parties becomes unable to follow. After that the two men cease to meet on the particularly pleasant occasions that every sport affords for its real votaries, and they only meet on common occasions, which are not the same because there is not the same jovial and hearty temper. In like manner a friendship may be weakened if one of the parties gives up some indulgence that both used to enjoy together. Many a friendship has been cemented by the habit of smoking, and weakened afterwards when one friend gave up the habit, declined the cigars that the other offered, and either did not accompany him to the smoking-room or sat there in open and vexatious nonconformity.

It is well known, so well known indeed as scarcely to require mention here, that one of the most frequent and powerful causes of the death of bachelor friendships is marriage. One of the two friends takes a wife, and the friendship is at once in peril. The maintenance of it depends upon the lady’s taste and temper. If not quite approved by her, it will languish for a little while and then die, in spite of all painful and visible efforts on the husband’s part to compensate, by extra attention, for the coolness of his wife. I have visited a Continental city where it is always understood that all bachelor friendships are broken off by marriage. This rule has at least the advantage of settling the question unequivocally.

Simple neglect is probably the most common of all causes deadly to friendship,—neglect arising either from real indifference, from constitutional indolence, or from excessive devotion to business. Friendly feelings must be either of extraordinary sincerity, or else strengthened by some extraneous motive of self-interest, to surmount petty inconveniences. The very slightest difficulty in maintaining intercourse is sufficient in most cases to insure its total cessation in a short time. Your house is somewhat difficult of access,—it is on a hill-side or at a little distance from a railway station: only the most sincere friends will be at the trouble to find you unless your rank is so high that it is a glory to visit you.

Poor friends often keep up intercourse with rich ones by sheer force of determination long after it ought to have been allowed to die its own natural death. When they do this without having the courage to require some approach to reciprocity they sink into the condition of mere clients, whom the patron may indeed treat with apparent kindness, but whom he regards with real indifference, taking no trouble whatever to maintain the old connection between them.

Equality of rank and fortune is not at all necessary to friendship, but a certain other kind of equality is. A real friendship can never be maintained unless there is an equal readiness on both sides to be at some pains and trouble for its maintenance; so if you perceive that a person whom you once supposed to be your friend will not put himself to any trouble on your account, the only course consistent with your dignity is to take exactly the same amount of pains to make yourself agreeable to him. After you have done this for a little time you will soon know if the friendship is really dead; for he is sure to perceive your neglect if he does not perceive his own, and he will either renew the intercourse with some empressement or else cease from it altogether.

In early life the right rule is to accept kindness gratefully from one’s elders and not to be sensitive about omissions, because such omissions are then often consistent with the most real and affectionate regard; but as a man advances towards middle-age it is right for him to be somewhat careful of his dignity and to require from friends, whatever may be their station, a certain general reciprocity. This should always be understood in rather a large sense, and not exacted in trifles. If he perceives that there is no reciprocity he cannot do better than drop an acquaintance that is but the phantom and simulacrum of Friendship’s living reality.

It is as natural that many friendships should die and be replaced by others as that our old selves should be replaced by our present selves. The fact seems melancholy when first perceived, but is afterwards accepted as inevitable. There is, however, a death of friendship which is so truly sad and sorrowful as to cast its gloomy shadow on all the years that remain to us. It is when we ourselves, by some unhappy fault of temper that might have been easily avoided, have wounded the kind breast of our friend, and killed the gentle sentiment that was dwelling happily within. The only way to be quite sure of avoiding this great and irretrievable calamity is to remember how very delicate friendly sentiments are and how easy it is to destroy them by an inconsiderate or an ungentle word.