4

FATHER AND SON.

feelings were adequately stimulated and nourished; he was kept from falling back within himself, from sinking behind an outwork of reserve and coldness; while as for the son, it was an educational process, a development of his intellectual and moral nature, besides being a source of lasting joy. From a wise and good father we learn more than from all our teachers; nay, such an one is our best and truest teacher, whose lessons we are constantly learning; not only the lessons dropping from his lips, but the lessons inculcated by his life and character. To return for a moment to Dr. Brown. Can we over-estimate the value to him of the years of close companionship which he enjoyed with a man not only of remarkable mental powers but of the highest spiritual gifts? His power of self-control, his patience, his deep and tender nature, his chivalry of feeling, his fine courtesy of manner, his strong, strenuous, fervid piety; all these qualities daily and hourly set before his son's eyes could not but persuade and control and permanently influence. There was much to be gained from his fine literary taste, and the boy's heart and mind both expanded when his father read aloud, with his own admirable elocution, the story of Joseph or passages in David's history, and Psalms vi., xi., and xv., or the 52d, 53d, 54th, 55th, 63d, 64th, and 40th chapters of Isaiah, or the Sermon on the Mount, or the journey to Emmaus, or our Saviour's prayer in John, or Paul's speech on Mars Hill, or the first three chapters of Hebrews and the latter part of the 11th, or Job, or the Apocalypse; or, to pass from these divine themes, Jeremy Taylor or George Herbert, Sir Walter Raleigh or Milton's prose, such as the passage beginning "Come forth out of thy royal chambers, O thou Prince of all the kings of the earth!" and "Truth indeed came once into the world with her Divine Master;" or Charles Wesley's hymns, or, most loved of all, Cowper, from the rapt "Come Thou, and, added to Thy many crowns," or "Oh, that those lips had language!" to the Jackdaw, and his incomparable Letters; or Gray's poems, Burns's "Tam O'Shanter," or Sir Walter's "Eve of St. John" and "The Grey Brother."

But to profit by this domestic and informal teaching there must be a certain "receptiveness" on the part of the listener, an affectionate willingness to learn, a prompt and quick apprehension. It is to be feared that the attitude here indicated is one to which our youth nowadays do not readily adapt themselves. The family bonds have grown looser than they were of old; even into the Home has spread the general tendency to exaggerate individual freedom and the revolt against authority. Our songs and dramas, always a tolerably faithful mirror of the time, show convincingly that the parental and filial relations have of recent years undergone an unfortunate declension; that too often the father has ceased to be the reverenced teacher to whom his sons listen with loving admiration, the trusted friend to whom they resort in any difficulty for the counsel they know to be always helpful and

IDEALS OF PARENTAL AUTHORITY.

5

wholesome, the ruler whose lightest wish they hold as a command. The change that has taken place may easily be understood by comparing some of our modern plays with those of the Elizabethan dramatists. I do not mean that graceless youths are never to be found in Shakespeare or Ben Jonson, any more than that true and faithful sons are never to be found in our Victorian playwrights; but that the dominant conception of the positions occupied by father and son is wholly different. Take, for example, Polonius and Laertes. Hot, boastful, and choleric as is the latter, he never fails in the minutest respect towards his garrulous father, and listens to his shrewd worldly advice as to the utterances of an oracle. Observe, too, in “Cymbeline" the deference exhibited by Guiderius and Arviragus towards Belarius; and in "Lear," while the whole tragedy turns upon the wrong done to a father by his undutiful children, Edgar, with his generous devotion and courageous tenderness, stands forward as the embodiment of the highest filial virtues. Even when the dramatist puts on the stage a wronged and neglected father, he invests him with all a father's natural dignity: the figure is one which demands our attention; we look upon it almost with awe. But in our modern plays the father is usually the target at which the playwright discharges the arrows of his ridicule. He is exposed to the laughter of the audience; like Pantaloon, he is outwitted, maltreated, and dishonoured. To cheat or circumvent him, to defy or insult him, is represented as an exquisite stroke of humour. He is a monster of vulgarity, whom his son treats with open contempt; or a wouldbe despot, whom it is represented as something chivalrous and noble to disobey; or a puny weakling, whom it is necessary to rule with a rod of iron.

Such was not the way of our ancestors. There were bad or foolish fathers and disobedient sons then as there are to-day, but the ideal of parental authority was higher. Sons listened then where they question now. Look at the great Lord Burleigh and his son, or at the two Cokes, or consider the relations that subsisted between Sir Philip Sidney and his father. The hero of Zutphen and author of the "Arcadia” regarded with an affectionate reverence the noble father from whom he derived, in no small degree, his comeliness of person and gallantry of spirit, his vigour of intellect and chivalry of disposition; while the father was lovingly proud of his brilliant son, whom he styled "lumen familiæ suæ.' Lord Lytton, in his "Caxtons," has revived this ideal relationship in the persons of Pisistratus Caxton and his father, the one so full of wisdom and patience and tenderness, the other so full of admiring love and dutifulness. "Often," says the young Pisistratus, "I deserted the more extensive rambles of Uncle Jack, or the greater allurements of a cricketmatch in the village, or a day's fishing in Squire Rollick's preserves, for a quiet stroll with my father by the old peach wall ;

sometimes silent, indeed, and already musing over the future while he was busy with the past, but amply rewarded when, suspending his lecture, he would put forth hoards of varied learning, rendered amusing by his quaint comments and that Socratic satire which only fell short of wit because it never passed into malice." It is to his father that he resorts in all his difficulties, who is his stay in his hours of sorrow, into whose ear he pours all his hopes and aspirations. At the crisis of his greatest trouble, when an immovable cloud seems to his fevered imagination to have settled down on his young life, he sits musing, absorbed, unhappy; and looking up, he sees his father's eyes fixed upon him with quiet watchful tenderness. But then, for a son to have such a father, it is necessary that the father should have such a son! There must be an exchange of sympathy, an equality of affection. And on the part of the son there must be a consideration for the father's years, his greater experience, his trials, and his sacrifices; there must be a frank and loving acknowledgment of the superiority that lies inherent in the parental relationship. There are sons, not wholly bad or disobedient, not wholly wanting in affection, who behave towards their father with an unseemly familiarity, as if he were a boon companion, a member of the same club, addressing him in the slang of the day, and withholding from him the courteous treatment they would probably vouchsafe to a stranger. This ungracious disrespect is almost worse than deliberate defiance, at the bottom of which, it is just possible, some strong principle may be rooted.

I write for young men who desire to live a life worth living, to turn to the best and highest advantage such gifts and endowments as God has bestowed upon them, and to leave the world, when their work is ended, something the better for their existence, so far as their sphere of action, whether large or limited, is concerned. I invite them to begin, if they have not already begun, the noble labour of self-culture, of the education of their faculties and the discipline of their passions. Jeremy Taylor says, "Life is like playing at tables; the luck is not in our own power, but the playing the game is." I invite my readers to learn how to play the game. A distinction is rightly drawn between talents and acquirements; between what we receive from Nature and what by our own efforts we become possessors of. And yet the distinction is frequently a very thin line indeed; so thin that I am sure a young man who wills strongly and acts strenuously may efface it. In other words, a man's talents seem to lie very much in his own power: intelligence may be regarded as the fruit of industry, and a clear, sound judgment as the product of careful training. No doubt this was Dr. Arnold's feeling when he wrote:-"If there be one thing on earth which is truly admirable, it is to see God's wisdom blessing an inferiority

THE EDUCATION OF home.

7

of natural powers, where they have been honestly, truly, and zealously cultivated." So, too, Fowell Buxton says:-"I am sure that a young man may be very much what he pleases." Or take the saying of Ary Scheffer :—“In life nothing bears fruit except by labour of mind or body. With a strong soul and a noble aim one can do what one wishes to do, usually speaking." If many young men fail from presumption and over-confidence, I am persuaded that many more fail from an excess of timidity, a self-mistrust which paralyses all their energies and takes the pith and substance out of their efforts. It is an old adage that one never knows what one can do till one tries. We must make a good start, and then push forward with resolute purpose. We must make a beginning, for it is certain that each one of us can do something, and something we shall do if we are not daunted by our early failures. Palissy would never have discovered the secret of enamelled ware if he had thrown his pots and pipkins aside when they first cracked in the furnace. Lacordaire, the great French preacher, would have been what the Scotch call " a stickit minister" if he had been disheartened by his initial breakdown in the pulpit of San Roch. Look at Edmund Kean; how brilliant a legacy of genius would have been lost to the world if he had abandoned the stage after his provincial defeats and disasters! This, then, is the secret of it all: we must embrace every opportunity we must utilise every faculty-we must advance and ascend in a hopeful, vigorous, unresting spirit. So must the work of self-culture be accomplished.

But on this point more will be said hereafter. Let us now assume that the young man has chosen his part, has resolved to live nobly, and to make the most of "the divine gift of life." He has entered upon the great task of self-education. Well, he must begin at home. He must begin as son and brother. In those capacities he must practise the self-denial, the submissiveness, the truthfulness, the transparent honesty which will prove his best arms and armour in the battle of life. The lessons thus mastered at home will stand him in good stead abroad. The sweet home-influences will accompany him like unseen angels as he fares across the rough bleak desert of the world, will stay his feet from stumbling, will fill his ears with hopeful music, and clothe the sky above him in cheerful sunshine. And for this reason I have opened my book with some illustrations of happy parental relationships, of the intercourse that ought to exist between father and son. The promise made by the man to the woman when he takes her as his wedded wife, the promise to "love, honour, and obey," signalises also the three great duties of the son towards his father-love, honour, obedience. It may, indeed, be asserted that there can be no love where there is neither obedience nor honour; and certainly that half-selfish, halfcustomary affection which is all that many children give to their

8

HOME-CRITICISM.

parents an affection which by no means inclines towards a prompt submission or a ready forethought, which exacts everything and yields nothing has no kinship with that pure, deep, filial love which it is a son's privilege to offer and a father's pride to receive. When a young man grows weary of his home, or when he shrinks from pouring his confidences into his father's ears, let him at once halt in the course on which he has, perhaps insensibly, entered, for assuredly it is one that will lead to ruin. He cannot desire a safer or surer test for any pursuit or pleasure he embraces than this: Can he submit it to the home scrutiny? Can he talk of it to his father and mother? Will it bear to be sifted and examined in the family circle? The component parts of certain chemical substances, when once their union is dissolved, recede farther and farther from each other, as if animated by as strong a repulsion as formerly they were governed by a strong attraction; and so, unhappily, when once youth separates from the home, he rapidly drifts to an everincreasing distance from it. Unless he checks the recession at once, he will have no power to do so at all. The wider the gulf that opens between him and his family, the more reluctance and shame will he feel in attempting to cross it. In going down-hill, the velocity increases as we get farther from the starting-point. When a young man awakes to the consciousness that the old roof-tree has no longer for him the attraction it once possessed, let him immediately look into his heart and seek there the reason why. There is a certain school of "fast young men" whose maxim is the old "Nil admirari" in its worst sense. They reverence nothing, they love nothing. To them a love of home is the sign of weakness of character, and a son who honours his parents is a milksop-that is, if he be not a knave, engaged in subtle and continual deception. With such young men the student who has undertaken the noble work of self-culture, and has formed a high conception of the duties, aims, and opportunities of life, must hold no communion. Their heads will be as empty as their hearts; for a want of reverence is generally accompanied by a deficiency of intellectual power, and from their society he will gain nothing intellectually, while morally his loss will be fatal. I cannot insist too strongly on the fact that the cultivation of the home affections is the best principle of all self-culture, on account of their purity, their elevating influence, their permanency.

When we look around us, the lesson we seem to see written upon everything is-Mutability. Flowers fade and leaves fall; and though fresh blooms live in the lap of spring, and new leaves make green again the woods, they too pass away as others have done. "Withered hopes on hopes are spread." Our feet crush beneath them the promise and fruition of each succeeding year. The days come and go. The present, just as we begin to recognise it and to fancy that it is ours, glides into the past; and we are forced, if we would not look back, to look forward into that future