Early Tendencies in the Child: How to Check Them or Develop.
by Mrs. Edward Sieveking.
Volume 14, 1903, pgs. 495-505
Lecture given at the Wakefield Branch of the P.N.E.U., etc.
Tendencies are the clues to personality. They are a revelation of the tides that govern its waters, that urge them to encroach ever further up on the shore of progress, or to recede little by little on the opposite shore of decadence. In everyone in whom they exist, they show the soul's point of view; even when in a very initial stage, we meet with them in the little child. We come across them daily, hourly, but yet it needs a trained sense to recognise them, to label them, to understand to the full, what their later meaning will be, when the child is a grown human being.
Tendencies are always prophetical for those among us who have eyes, and who use them. They prophesy what they will eventually lead to, if not interfered with, or hindered; and this prophecy is not in evidence once or twice merely, but continually, insistently before us, week in, week out.
We don't stone prophets now as we were accustomed to do in medieval days; instead, we treat them as a rule with silent indifference, with perfect nonchalance; they don't concern us, we say in effect; and so these prophets in the home--these tendencies in our children--speak--very plainly sometimes, so that outsiders hear them, though parents are often deaf to them--and we don't grasp the message until, having lived on the land for the requisite number of years as undisputed possessors, they can claim it incontrovertibly in the end, and we ourselves wake up some day to find ourselves evicted and powerless before them. Then it is too late; the possessors of the land have acted on their rights, their sign is now up over the door, and we have practically no one but ourselves to blame for not having long ago turned them out, while yet there was time and opportunity.
Dispossessing is never an easy task; obliterating an impression firmly stamped wears away the material upon which it is impressed, even if we can succeed in rubbing it out, and even then the surface can never be renewed in quite its early strength and freshness.
There is nothing in the world with such a strong grasp of possession as an evil habit, or indeed a habit of any sort--it is a veritable fact that if you "sow a habit you reap a character." Are there not habits of our own, made carelessly in other days, that take so much dispossessing, so much obliterating, that at times we almost despair of ever really casting them from us for good? We perhaps remember, looking back now into the past, in how seemingly trivial and pleasant a manner they came first to us, as it were, on a little visit; then stayed on and on, making themselves quite at home, and in effect dispossessing us of our birthright, our character--and eventually, till we become at last grimly conscious that now it would require so tremendous an effort that it would shake our house of personality to its foundations if we took them by the shoulders and thrust them out of doors, with all their accumulated possessions, and thus dispossessed them for good and all.
Some of us never make this effort, but realizing how enormous a demand it would make upon our resources, decide weakly, in effect, not to make it, and abjectly let ourselves be thrust into the veriest corner that some possessing habit may have its way, and we allow it to reign supreme in the living-room of our character. But when it comes to seriously considering this point of view with regard to our children, there is not one of us, if we thought carefully and definitely of the matter, but would take any trouble, make any effort, rather than suffer such a dispossessing to happen in their case, through lack of our recognising in their early days the dangerous tendencies against which we could wage continual warfare. For it is then or never with tendencies, with impressions.
If we let evil tendencies, mistaken tendencies, take possession then, we cannot tell when they will be driven out: if we let bad impressions be made then on the soft, as yet unmarked material of the child's mind, it may be years before we can succeed in effacing them, even if we ever succeed in doing so.
Archdeacon Wilburforce says that there is "amongst the curiosities of a continental museum, a brick from the walls of ancient Babylon, which bears the imprint of the cipher of one of Babylon's mighty kings. Right over the centre of the royal cipher is deeply impressed the footprint of one of the pariah dogs which wandered about that ancient city. It was the invariable custom in ancient Babylon to stamp the bricks used for public works with the cipher of the reigning monarch, and while this brick was lying in its soft and plastic state, some wandering dog had, apparently accidentally, trodden upon it. Long ages passed! The king's image and super-scription is visible, but defaced--well nigh illegible, almost obliterated. The name of that mighty ruler cannot be deciphered; the footprint of the dog is clear, sharply defined, deeply impressed, as on the day on which it was made."
What is the suggestion that we should read into this parable? Surely this: that it is for us to be on the watch for these early prophetical beginnings in our boys and girls in nursery days, for it will not do to leave them to chance. It will not do to say comfortably to ourselves, "Oh, he'll grow out of that," if a boy is accustomed to take the biggest share for himself at table, or the lion share of sweets, or the best seat at an entertainment, or the easiest chair in the drawing room, etc. It is a comfortable, easy doctrine, but unfortunately it is not true. He will not grow out of it, but more and more in it, if no effort is made to check the habit. Impressions made on the soft clay of character during nursery days are very, very difficult to eradicate indeed. You remember what Miss Ellice Hopkins says à propos of this:--"That little habit of self-indulgence which you in your foolish fondness have allowed in that boy of yours, may in after life come out as the very impurity which you have endeavoured so earnestly to guard him against." My own conviction about the matter is that the tendencies that show in quite early days remain with us, as weakened or strengthened companions, all through the days of our life. They have in fact "come to stay"; and our business, as fathers and mothers, is just this, as it seems to me, to keep a vigorous look-out for small beginnings: to think nothing too trivial in the way of the a character sign.
You know those splendid word-pictures of Walter Pater's. "How insignificant, at the moment, seem the influences of the sensible things which are tossed and fall and lie about us, so, or so, in the environment of early childhood. How indelibly, as we afterwards discover, they affect us; with what capricious attractions and associations they figure themselves on the white paper, the smooth wax, of our ingenuous souls, as 'with lead in the rock for ever,' giving form and feature, and as it were assigned house-room in our memory to early experiences of feeling and thought, which abide with us ever afterwards, thus and not otherwise. The realities and passions, the rumours of the greater world without, steal in upon us, each by its own special little passage-way through the wall of custom about us; and never afterwards quite detach themselves from this or that accident, or trick, in the mode of their first entrance to us."
Unless we are careful to be on the watch for early tendencies, early impressions, the footprint of some pariah tendency will stamp itself so deeply on the personality of the child that we may never eradicate it, with all our efforts, in later life; never dispossess the alien intruder whose sign has been put up over the door. Faults are the complaints of the soul; and just as we are often disfigured all our lives by the impressions left on face or body by some childish illness, so do faults given in to, and allowed to run riot in the character of a child, leave deep scores.
A case in point rises in my memory as I speak, of a very intellectual, highly educated, thoroughly earnest-minded and good mother, whom I used to know very well years ago. She was absolutely devoted to her son: absolutely self-denying for his sake: absolutely self-less where he was concerned; but with all her love, all the devotion, all the absorption in him that her daily life held, she had, unluckily, no eye for tendencies, and so the tares of his evil tendencies grew fast and loose among the wheat of her careful planting, until it was practically choked out of existence. To go to lunch with her, as I remember doing in childhood days, was to go through a very painful process; he raced round and round the table, pestering her unceasingly for different things to eat, and was most insufferable and unruly,--for whatever impulse came uppermost, he obeyed it at once, and the evidence of her spoiling was written in large letters all over him, though I personally didn't grasp that fact then! Her strongest reprimand was a gentle foolish remonstrance, which the boy brushed aside as easily as he would a gossamer across his path on an autumn morning.
He grew up as might have been expected--spoiling his own life as well as the lives of others: a human wreck: one of those who are at the mercy of their impulses--and impulses, after all, are only grown-up tendencies. The last I heard of him, I remember, was that whenever his own wardrobe was scanty, he used to come home when he knew his younger brother was away, go up into his room and turn out all his drawers, choose the newest of his coats and trousers, ties, &c., that suited his fancy and go back to town with them! And yet with all his flaws of character, and tendencies to run wild, he was brilliantly clever, a fine-looking young man outwardly, and very attractive indeed--and yet a moral wreck!
I give this instance as an example of the position in which neglected evil tendencies in early youth land a man or a woman later in life.
There is one marked bad tendency among children to-day which I think needs considerable checking. It is that of destructiveness. They all have it, boys and girls alike; and we are apt to say weakly, "That is their pleasure in having a toy, that they may break it," and the joy seems to be in taking it to pieces to see how it is made; but that it does not spring from this reason is manifest, as they in very rare cases attempt to put it together again when they have seen how it is constructed. The reason, therefore, is farther to seek. Of old, in our great-grandfathers' days, it apparently was not a nursery impulse, for have there not come down to us cherished toys--may one not say "lavendered" toys?--the flotsam and jetsam of another age--that they played with, cared for, and would let no harm touch.
It is not difficult to see if we do not check this habit of recklessly destroying things in our children, how in after years it will lay waste and destroy other people's happiness, other people's lives, when the boy is a man. But I do not think that we shall be far wrong if we trace the reason of this habit of destructiveness in great part to a habit among many parents to-day of encouraging and providing for the lavish spending of money by their children.
In England to-day we do not inculcate the values of money, or simplicity, or self-denying habits of life, and so we are face to face with these two extremes: excessive luxury in an upper class of society, and excessive poverty and want in another. Look at two of our most fashionable public schools to-day. What can be said of parents who promote such tendencies in their sons at school as that of the lavish expenditure of money on their clothes? Only quite lately I heard of a mother who have her son, as pocket money, £30 to spend on himself when he went back to school after the holidays; and of another who tipped her little boy with £2 10$ after his visit to the dentist.
What do you suppose all this exuberance of pocket money goes in? It fosters three chief tendencies which are already rampant in our midst, viz., want of economy in dress; want of self-restraint in eating, and the greed for adding monies to monies by the excitement of gambling.
What is perhaps the commonest expression to-day on most little boys' lips in talking to one another? Is it not, "I bet you it was such and such a thing"? Does not that show which way the wind sets plainly enough, even though the sentence, in itself, is a trifle?
There is so much lack of proportion in the way we look at things to-day in many matters connected with children. It reminds me of an exemplification of this which I met with a little time ago in an actress friend of mine, a very delightful modern girl, who gave me a vivid description of a certain incident in her career before she achieved success. She and her friend--a fellow-actress--had clubbed together and taken two rooms, and their joint "takings," if one may so call their stage earnings, covered just the cost of the rooms and over very frugal meals besides. One evening this girl came back to her rooms after rehearsal, and the hungry friend exclaimed, "Well, where is our supper?" The reply was, "There is none; I've got it round my waist!"--and she displayed a resplendent yellow silk sash!
To anyone behind the scenes at some of our big public schools, the bills which most boys run up in one term for clothes alone, point to the extravagant habits into which the parents have suffered them to get--nay, into which they have aided and abetted them. For it is first and foremost, undeniably, the parents' fault--may one use a stronger word still and call it one of the blatant sins of the day?--that these things are so. And it is because so many parents to-day will not face things--will not "call a spade a spade," and dig up with it the decadent tendencies in their children, which began, sure enough, in their own nurseries at home. It is because in the home the parents were too greatly "cumbered with much serving" of society "tables," to be able to train their own children; to be able to watch closely--and it must be closely--to recognise rightly in which direction a tendency is leading, that we have to-day to face the results in our public schools. And we must remember this, that the boys in whom these pariah tendencies have already stamped their trade-mark, and who are at school to-day, will be the citizens of to-morrow, with the future of the nation in their hands, and the future of our girls more especially.
Yes, that last is the point one needs to press home as a dominant warning idea. Into what sort of hands are we presently going to entrust the future of the girls of to-day? Surely in the minds of all of us who know and believe in the tremendous force of heredity, grave fears will rise for the children who will be born to them in the days that are coming. Fears for the country, fears for the mothers who bear them. For at any rate, I think most people will agree with me that the girl of to-day is a finer product of the country--more high principled--more enthusiastic over work--far less subject to the evil tendencies besetting the public school--than the boy.
There is no finer material anywhere to-day than the English girl of the upper middle class. She is farther forward in many ways, speaking psychologically, than the average young man of the same age. He is indeed very often quite unable to understand her grip of unseen motive powers for action; therefore, when she begins talking of them, if she does do so, he is completely at sea: her words are practically Hindustanee to him. She is, as a rule, possessed of far keener spiritual sight, and insight also.
Have you ever watched the faces of the boys coming out of school some morning, at one of the great public school centres? I have, often, and the sight is not an inspiring one. I remember one particular morning walking down a certain High Street when they were all pouring out of the classrooms, like so many ants out of an ant-hill. Here and there, it is true, amongst the crowd of faces there were one or two bright and promising; but the owners of them were generally walking apart from the rest, and had what one must call the student expression--dreamy, intellectual. But for the others, and these were by far the greater number,--well, they were greedy-looking, sensual, common; and some were scored rather deeply with the imprint of pariah tendencies.
Another day, I went up to a conference in town, and sitting quietly by myself at the far end of the hall, thinking of nothing in particular, except that I feared I had not brought a sufficient stock of thought-out questions in readiness for the coming discussions, I was struck into keen, immediate enthusiasm by the entrance at the door beside me of a group of girls. They paused a moment and then walked up to the platform: and on my asking one of the conference secretaries, I found they were students who had come to give addresses in connection with the conference.
What had struck me into such keen admiration was not so much their splendid physique--they were all fine examples of the girl of to-day--and all were differently fine, and, without exception, they were all very striking-looking; but it was not that, it was the look in their faces, it was what I call the "enthusiasm look" as of a human being trained to act--and lighted by the spirit of enthusiasm within--perfectly alert. Each one was a girl who, at the call of emergency, would answer promptly--"Ready!" In every one of the faces there was the light of strong-trained tendencies for good--the most absolute opposite to the boys which it were possible to conceive.
If one tries in thought to imagine these two direct opposites brought together in marriage later on, one is inevitably forced into the question: "How will it answer?"
What will be the effect on the girl when, in the future, she drifts into being married to one of them--married, but not mated? For one can only "mate" with one's equal, and the decadent boy will by now be grown into the decadent young man, and he further still from the goal at which the woman is aiming. He will be a decade behind her in thought, in point of view, in aim. He has used himself up in boyhood--he is blasé before his time--she is turning her face towards the sunrise, and he is not turning his thither simply because he not only does not believe in one, but does not want to believe in one.
How can the girl "look up" to a man such as he is? What has caused his different outlook? It may be his home training; it may be that he and the girl have been brought up in most cases with diametrically opposite methods of education (for, practically, the lines of education in our public schools are much the same as they were three hundred years ago); but whatever the reason may be, they are too diverse to meet on the same grounds. How can she do otherwise than feel the drag of the chain that binds her to him? She "is mated to a clown, and the coarseness of his nature will have power to drag her down." [paraphrased from Tennyson's poem, Locksley Hall: "thou art mated with a clown, and the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee down."] What can be the effect he will have on her but a lowering one, a decadent one? If she keeps to her old ideals she will be alone, and whenever he turns, so to speak, she will be conscious of a jarring jerk to the marriage chain. There is nothing in all the world that is so separating, so disintegrating as regards all intimate mental intercourse, as fundamental misunderstanding between two people.
To be understood is to be saved--it is the supremest need of human beings. Unless you are understood you cannot do yourself full justice, you cannot rise to the heights to which you would otherwise rise. Unless you are understood you are walking on the blind side of people; you are strangers still to each other--yes, even if the other is your nearest relation.
As a girl said to me the other day, "The wrong impressions which people give are among the curses of life." And this is the truth, for wrong impressions are the reverse side of understanding and recognition. So that it is above all things necessary that in the case of our children, we should be on the watch for tendencies in nursery days; necessary, too, that we should have the right judgment for them when they come before us, that we should not decide hastily and treat them wrongly, for the checking or developing of them must all be done--as an old hospital nurse used to say to me--"by littles," that is to say, consistently, regularly, and with intention. For, as a modern doctor [Joseph Bell, speaking of germs] says, "The importance of the infinitely little is incalculable." And if we are not in touch, as it were, with our children (and how can this be managed effectually and practically if we are not constantly with them in their work and in their play, whenever possible?) we shall not be in sympathy with those developments, those tendencies, which require the sunshine of sympathy and intuitive understanding in which to grow and expand.
Playing at sympathy is no good at all: it is moreover a very dangerous game; for a child being almost always an actor at heart, recognises without hesitation that it is not real, only simulated, and your chance with him is gone.
There is one thing worse even than this recognition, and this is the keen disappointment which some sensitive children feel at the failure of a "venture," if one may so call it, with the mother or father in whom their childish hopes centre; when they feel instinctively--though such a child would never own this to anyone--that the mother or father has failed in sympathy.
I remember such a case in a little boy who, being very delicate, had always been kept much at home. One afternoon he had been working hard at some painting with his governess in the schoolroom, and after he had taken special pains in finishing it off carefully (it being intended for his mother) he and the governess took it to the mother's boudoir.
The little boy gave a timid knock, and when she called out "Come in," he went up to her chair where she was sitting writing busily at her desk, and said, shyly, "I've been painting this for you, mother," holding out, as he spoke, the painting.
She, with easy conventionalism of manner and without turning round, said, "Oh, have you, dear? Thank you so much."
The little boy waited by her chair:--"Won't you look at it, mother?" he asked, after a moment, tentatively.
She turned round in that unseeing, hurried way which deceives no one, which is therefore always a needless expenditure of--untruth (!) and said "Very pretty, dear; now run away, for I'm busy."
The boy said nothing, but moved away from the desk, and as the door of the room closed behind him, he looked up at the governess, his eyes full of unshed tears, and said, "Poor mother, I oughtn't to have worried her with this--she's so busy." No other word came from him; no complaint of her lack of sympathy, he was far too loyal even to allow to himself that she had failed in sympathy.
But there it was nevertheless--she had failed. She hadn't understood her child--she was out of touch with him, she had mixed up her duties, for surely her first duty of all was to her child, and whatever the writing was, it could and should have waited.
Children, after all, do not ask for so very much from us in the way of sympathy; but they do want it "little and strong!" It must never be feigned, it must never by flummery, it must be the genuine article, for there is not one quicker than a child at recognising genuineness in an adult or the reverse; they may not always know how to explain to you that they've found you out--that's another matter altogether, and is because, as a rule, they are as yet unfledged as to their conversational pinions, and so are practically dumb; but you need not flatter yourself they have not seen the trade-mark in the corner of your offered gift of sympathy, and know it for what it is worth.
(To be continued.)
Proofread by LNL, Nov. 2008