Part 2

It is to be supposed that each mother has a profound belief in her own nurse, and that when she condemns the neglect and harshness shown to other children by the servants in charge, she makes a mental reservation in favour of her own, and is very sure that nothing improper nor cruel takes place in _her_ nursery. Her children do not complain; and she always tells them to come to her when anything is amiss. On which negative evidence she satisfies her soul, and makes sure that all is right because she is too neglectful to see if anything is wrong. She does not remember that her children do not complain because they dare not. Dear and beautiful as all mammas are to the small fry in the nursery, they are always in a certain sense Junos sitting on the top of Mount Olympus, making occasional gracious and benign descents, but practically too far removed for useful interference; while nurse is an ever-present power, capable of sly pinches and secret raids, as well as of more open oppression--a power, therefore, to be propitiated, if only with the grim subservience of a Yezidi too much afraid of the Evil One to oppose him. Wherefore nurse is propitiated, failing the protection of the glorified creature just gone to her grand dinner in a cloud of lace and a blaze of jewels; and the first lesson taught the youthful Christian in short frocks or knickerbockers is not to carry tales down stairs, and by no means to let mamma know what nurse desires should be kept secret.

A great deal of other evil, beside these sly beginnings of deceit, is taught in the nursery; a great deal of vulgar thought, of superstitious fear, of class coarseness. As, indeed, how must it not be when we think of the early habits and education of the women taken into the nursery to give the first strong indelible impressions to the young souls under their care? Many a man with a ruined constitution, and many a woman with shattered nerves, can trace back the beginning of their sorrow to those neglected childish days when nurse had it all her own way because mamma never looked below the surface, and was satisfied with what was said instead of seeing for herself what was done. It is an odd state of society which tolerates this transfer of a mother's holiest and most important duty into the hands of a mere stranger, hired by the month, and never thoroughly known.

Where the organization of the family is of the patriarchal kind--old retainers marrying and multiplying about the central home, and carrying on a warm personal attachment from generation to generation--this transfer of maternal care has not such bad effects; but in our present way of life, without love or real relationship between masters and servants, and where service is rendered for just so much money down and for nothing more noble, it is a hideous system, and one that makes the modern mother utterly inexplicable. We wonder where her mere instincts can be, not to speak of her reason, her love, her conscience, her pride. Pleasure and self-indulgence have indeed gained tremendous power, in these later days, when they can thus break down the force of the strongest law of nature--a law stronger even than that of self-preservation.

Folly is the true capillary attraction of the moral world, and penetrates every stratum of society; and the folly of extravagant attire in the drawing-room is reproduced in the nursery. Not content with bewildering men's minds and emptying their husbands' purses for the enhancement of their own charms, women do the same by their children; and the mother who leaves the health and mind and temper and purity of her offspring in the keeping of a hired nurse takes especial care of the colour and cut of the frocks and petticoats. And there is always the same strain after show, and the same endeavour to make a little look a mickle. The children of five hundred a year must look like those of a thousand; and those of a thousand must rival the _tenue_ of little lords and ladies born in the purple; while the amount of money spent on clothes in the tradesman class is a matter of real amazement to those let into the secret. Simplicity of diet, too, is going out with simplicity of dress, with simplicity of habits generally; and stimulants and concentrated food are now the rule in the nursery, where they mar as many constitutions as they make. More than one child of whom we have had personal knowledge has yielded to disease induced by too stimulating and too heating a diet; but artificial habits demand corresponding artificiality of food, and so the candle burns at both ends instead of one.

Again, as for the increasing inability of educated women to nurse their children, even if desirous of doing so, that also is a bodily condition brought about by an unwholesome and unnatural state of life. Late hours, high living, heated blood, and constantly breathing a vitiated atmosphere are the causes of this alarming physical defect. But it would be too much to expect that women should forego their pleasurable indulgences, or do anything disagreeable to their senses, for the sake of their offspring. They are not famous for looking far ahead on any matter; but to expect them to look beyond themselves, and their own present generation, is to expect the great miracle that never comes.

_MODERN MOTHERS._

II.

There was once a superstition among us that mothers were of use in the world; that they had their functions and duties, without which society would not prosper nor hold together; and that much of the well-being of humanity, present and future, depended on them. Mothers in those bygone days were by no means effete personages or a worn-out institution, but living powers exercising a real and pervading influence; and they were credited with an authority which they did not scruple to use when required.

One of the functions recognized as specially belonging to them was that of guarding their young people from the consequences of their own ignorance--keeping them from dangers both physical and moral until wise enough to take care of themselves, and supplementing by their own experience the want of it in their children. Another was that of preserving the tone of society on a high level, and supplying the antiseptic element by which the rest was kept pure; as, for example, insisting that the language used and the subjects discussed before them were such as should not offend the modesty of virtuous women; that the people with whom they were required to associate should be moderately honest and well conducted; and, in short, as mothers, discountenancing everything in other men and women which they would not like to see imitated by their own sons and daughters.

This was one of the fond superstitions of an elder time. For ourselves, we boast of our freedom from superstition in these later days; of our proud renunciation of restraints and habits which were deemed beneficial by our forefathers; of our indifference to forms and hatred of humbug; and of all that tends to fetter what is called individualism. Hence we have found that we can go on without safeguards for our young; that society does not want its matrons as the preservative ingredient for keeping it pure; and that the world is all the merrier for the loosening of bonds which once it was the duty of women to draw closer. In fact, mothers have gone out, surviving only in the form of chaperons.

More or less on the search for her own pleasure--if by any possibility of artifice she can be taken for less than sixty, still ready for odd snatches of flirting as she can find occasion--or, with her faculties concentrated on the chance of winning the rubber by indifferent play--the chaperon's charge is not a very onerous one; and her daughters know as well as she does that her presence is a blind rather than a protection. They are with mamma as a form of speech; but they are left to themselves as a matter of fact. Anyone who is in the confidence of young people of either sex knows a little of what goes on in the dark corners and on the steps of the stairs--a favourite anchorage for the loosely chaperoned in private houses where two hundred are invited and only a hundred can find room. But then the girls are 'with mamma,' and the young men are contented souls who take what they can get without making wry faces. Mamma, occupied in her own well-seasoned coquetries, or absorbed in the chances of her deep 'finesse' and the winning trick, lets the girls take care of themselves, and would think it an intolerable impertinence should a friend hint to her that her place of chaperon included vigilant personal guardianship, and that she would do better to keep her daughters in her own charge than leave them to themselves.

It is all very well for the advocates of youthful innocence to affect to resent the slur supposed to be cast on girlhood by the advocacy of this closer guardianship; or for those who do not know the world to make their ignorance the measure of another's knowledge, and to deny what they have not proved for themselves. Those who do know the world know what they say when they deprecate the excessive freedom which is too often granted to unmarried girls; and their warning is fully justified by experience when they call mothers back to their duty of stricter watchfulness. If indeed the young are capable of self-protection, then we grant with them that mothers are a mistake:--Let them abdicate without more ado. If license is more desirable than modesty, and liberty better than reticence, the girls may as well be left, as practically they are already, free from the mother's guardianship; but if we have a doubt that way, we may as well give it the benefit of consideration, and think a little on the subject before going further on the present line.

From the first the mother, in the well-to-do classes, acts too much the part of the hen ostrich with her eggs. She trusts to the kindly influences of external circumstances rather than to her own care to make the hatching successful. Nurses, governesses, schools, in turn relieve her of the irksome duties of maternity. She sees her little ones at their stated hour, and for the other twenty-three leaves them to receive their first indelible impress from a class which she is never tired of disparaging.

As the children grow older the women by whom they are moulded become higher in the social and intellectual scale, but they are no more than before subordinated to the mother's personal supervision. She, for her part, cares only that her girls shall be taught the correct shibboleth of their station; and for the rest, if she thinks at all, she cradles herself in a generous trust in the goodness of human nature, or the incorruptibility of her brood beyond that of any other woman's brood. When they come under her own immediate hand, 'finished' and ready to be introduced, she knows about as much of them as she knows of her neighbours' girls in the next square; and in nine cases out of ten the sole duties towards them which are undertaken by her are shirked when possible, as a _corvée_ which she is too wise to bear unnecessarily. When she can, she shuffles them off on some kind neighbourly hands, and lets her daughters 'go about' with the first person who offers, glad to have a little breathing time on her own side, and with always that generous trust in providence and vicarious protection which has marked her maternal career throughout.

In the lower half of the middle class the liberty allowed to young girls grows yearly more and more unchecked. They walk alone, travel alone, visit alone; and the gravest evils have been known to arise from the habit which modern mothers have of sending their daughters of sixteen and upwards unaccompanied in London to colleges and classes. Mamma has grown stout and lazy, and has always some important matter on hand that keeps her at home, half asleep in the easy-chair, while the girls go to and fro, and take the exercise befitting their youthful energies. Of course no harm can befall them. They are _her_ daughters, and the warnings given by the keener-eyed, who have had experience, are mere inventions of the enemy and slanders against the young. So they parade the streets, dressed in the most startling and meretricious costumes of the period; and that fatal doctrine of self-protection counts its victims by the score as the consequence.

The world is fond of throwing the blame of any misfortune that may arise, now on the girl, now on the man concerned; but in honest fact that blame really belongs to the mothers who let their daughters run about the world without guide or guard. A work was given to them by nature and love to do which they have neglected, a duty which they have discarded. Whoever chooses may chaperon, accompany, mould their daughters, so long as they are freed from the trouble; and their dependence on the natural virtue of humanity and the beneficence of circumstance runs exactly parallel with their own indolence and neglect.

In preserving the tone of society pure the modern mother is as far removed from the former ideal as she is in the duty of taking care of her girls. Too often she is found making herself prominent in support of the most objectionable movements; or, when doubtful questions are discussed in mixed society, she forgets that regard for the purity of her daughters should keep her silent, even if her own self-respect were too weak to restrain her. When the conscienceless world, living without a higher aim than that of success and what is known by getting on, condones all kinds of moral obliquity for the sake of financial prosperity and social position, do we find that, as a rule, mothers and matrons protest against opening their houses to this gilded rascality? If they did--if they made demerit and not poverty the cause of exclusion, virtue and not success the title to reception--there would be some check to the corruption which is so insolently rampant now.

Women have this power in their own hands, more especially those women who are mothers. If they would only set themselves to check the inclination for loose talk and doubtful discussions which is characteristic of the present moment, they could put an end to it without delay. So also they might stop in less than a year the torrent of slang with which Young England floods its daily speech; and by setting themselves against the paint and dye and meretricious make-up generally of the modern girl, they might bring next quarter's fashions back to modesty and simplicity.

Women are apt to murmur at their lot as one without influence, variety, stirring purpose, space for action. But it is, on the contrary, a lot full of dignity and importance if properly regarded and fitly undertaken. If they do not lead armies, they make the characters of the men who lead and are led. If they are not State Ministers nor Parliamentary orators, they raise by their nobleness or degrade by their want of delicacy and refinement the souls and minds of the men who are. If they are not in the throng and press of active life, they can cheer others on to high aims, or basely reward the baser methods of existence. As mothers they are the artificers who give the initial touch that lasts for life; and as women they complete what the mother began. Society is moulded mainly by them, and they bring up their daughters on their own pattern.

It is surely weak and silly then to blame society for its ignoble tone, or the young for their disorders. All men want the corrective influence of social opinion, and it is chiefly women who create that opinion. Youth, too, will ever be disorderly if it gets the chance, and the race has not yet been born that carries old heads on young shoulders. It is for the mothers to supplement by their own wisdom the gaps left by the inexperience and ignorance of youth; it is for the mothers to guide aright the steps that are apt, without that guidance, to run astray, and to guard against passions, emotions, desires, which, if left to themselves, bring only evil and disaster, but which, guarded and directed, may be turned to the best ends. For ourselves, we deeply regret to see the rapid extinction of motherhood in its best sense, and decline to accept this modern loose-handed chaperon age as its worthy substitute. We repudiate the plea of the insubordination of the young so often put forward in defence of the new state of things, for it is simply nonsense. The young are what the mothers make them, just as society is what the matrons allow it to be; and if these mothers and matrons did their duty, we should hear no more of the wilfulness of the one or the shameless vagaries of the other. The remedy for each lies in their own hands only.

_PAYING ONE'S SHOT._

It would save much useless striving and needless disappointment if the necessity of paying one's shot were honestly accepted as absolute--if it were understood, once for all, that society, like other manifestations of humanity, is managed on the principle of exchange and barter, and equivalents demanded for value received. The benevolence which gives out of its own impulse, with no hope of reward save in the well-being of the recipient, has no place in the drawing-room code of morals. We may keep a useless creature from starving at the cost of so much of our substance _per diem_, for the sole remuneration of thanks and the consciousness of an equivocal act of charity; but who among us opens his doors, or gives a seat at his table, to drawing-room paupers unable to pay their shot? who cares to cultivate the acquaintance of men or women who are unable to make him any return? It is not necessary that this return should be in kind--a dinner for a dinner, a champagne supper for a champagne supper, and balls with waxed floors for balls with stretched linen; but shot must be paid in some form, whether in kind or not, and the social pauper who cannot pay his quota is Lazarus excluded from the feast. This is a hard saying, but it is a true one. We often hear worthy people who do not understand this law complain that they are neglected--left out of wedding breakfasts--passed over in dinner invitations--and that they find it difficult to keep acquaintances when made. But the fact is, these poor creatures who know so much about the cold-shoulder of society are simply those who cannot pay their shot, according to the currency of the class to which they aspire; and so by degrees they get winnowed through the meshes, and fall to a level where their funds will suffice to meet all demands, triumphantly. For the rejected of one level are not necessarily the rejected of all, and the base metal of one currency is sound coinage in another. People who would find it impossible to enter a drawing-room in Grosvenor Square may have all Bloomsbury at their command; and what was caviare to My Lord will be ambrosia to his valet--all depending on the amount of the shot to be paid and the relative value of coinage wherewith to pay it.

The most simple form of payment is of course by the elemental process of reciprocity in kind; a dinner for a dinner and a supper for a supper:--a form as purely instinctive as an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth--the _lex talionis_ of early jurisprudence administered among wine-cups instead of in the shambles. But there are other modes of payment as efficient if less evident, and as imperative if more subtle. For instance, women pay their shot--when they pay it individually, and not through the vicarious merits of their masculine relations--by dressing well and looking nice; some by being pretty; some by being fashionable; a few by brilliant talk; while all ought to add to their private speciality the generic virtue of pleasant manners. If they are not pretty, pleasant, well-dressed nor well-connected, and if they have no masculine pegs of power by which they can be hooked on to the higher lines, they are let to drop through the social meshes without an effort made to retain them, as little fishes swim away unopposed through the loops which hold the bigger ones. These things are their social duties--the final cause of their drawing-room existence; and if they fail in them they fail in the purpose for which they were created socially, and may die out as soon as convenient. They have other duties, of course, and doubtless of far higher moment and greater worth; but the question now is only of their drawing-room duties--of the qualities which secure their recognition in society--of the special coinage in which they must pay their shot if they would assist at the great banquet of social life. A dowdy, humdrum, well-principled woman, whose toilette looks as if it had been made with the traditionary pitchfork, and whose powers of conversation do not go beyond the strength of _Cobwebs to Catch Flies_, or _Mangnall's Questions_, may be an admirable wife, the painstaking mother of future honest citizens, invaluable by a sick-bed, beyond price in the nursery, a pattern of all household economies, a woman absolutely faultless in her sphere--and that sphere a very sweet and lovely one. But her virtues are not those by which she can pay her shot in society; and the motherly goodness, of so much account in a dressing-jacket and list-slippers, is put out of court when the fee to be paid is liveliness of manner or elegance of appearance. Certainly, worthy women who dress ill and look ungraceful, and whose conversation is about up to the mark of their children's easy-spelling-books, are plentiful in society--unfortunately for those bracketed with them for two hours' penance; but in most cases they have their shot paid for them by the wealth, the importance, the repute, or the desirableness of their relations. They may pay it themselves by their own wealth and consequent liberal tariff of reciprocity; but this is rare; the possession of personal superiority of any kind for the most part acting as a moral stimulus with women whom the superiority of their male belongings does not touch. And, by the way, it is rather hard lines that so many celebrated men have such dowdy wives. Artists, poets, self-made men of all kinds often fail in this special article; and, while they themselves have caught the tone of the circle to which they have risen, and pay their shot by manner as well as by repute, their wives lag behind among the ashes of the past, like Cinderellas before the advent of the fairy godmother. How many of them are carried through society as clogs or excrescences which a polite world is bound to tolerate with more or less equanimity, according to the amount of sensitiveness bestowed by nature and cultivated by art! Sometimes, however, self-made men and their wives are wise in their generation and understand the terms on which society receives its members; in which case the marital Reputation goes to the front alone, and the conjugal Cinderella rests tranquilly in the rear.