III Parenthood: The Highest Destiny
‘O happy husband! happy wife!
The rarest blessing Heaven drops down
The sweetest treasure in spring’s crown,
Starts in the furrow of your life.’
—Gerald Massey.
Perhaps I may be accused of dealing with marriage in a too flippant manner. Most of the treatises that I have read have erred in the opposite direction and have treated the subject from a tediously transcendental point of view. I have purposely tried to deal with realities, with facts, with matrimony as it really is—I mean as it really appears to me—in this very workaday world, and not as it might be in a glorious ideal world of noble spirits.
In truth, marriage, as it is carried out by the large majority does not seem to me to possess much of a sacred element. What is there holy in the fact of two human beings agreeing to live together to suit their own convenience, for purely social and domestic reasons, and very often with a strong commercial motive? There is, of course, a certain sanctity about all love, but, of the various kinds of human love, the sexual variety seems the least holy in itself. Family love, where the tie of blood exists, the love between friends—purest of all affections—is often more essentially sacred than the so-called holy love between husband and wife. Marriage, the mere social and physical union of men and women, apart from parenthood, is simply a partnership—resulting, if you like, in an enormous increase of happiness and good to the contracting parties—essentially an excellent contract, but a mere mundane contract for all that. But when the children come, when the divine and wonderful miracle is accomplished, then, indeed, is marriage placed on a wholly different basis, and in dealing with it, I willingly take my shoes from off my feet, for it is holy ground.
On the birth of a child the union that produced it acquires an immortal significance. Formerly of importance only to the two people concerned, the union is now of importance to the State and to posterity, and consequently a truly awful responsibility devolves on the parents. On the physique, the character, the intelligence of each child the fate of future generations may depend. If we do not feed our child properly he may be rickety, and a future generation may be deformed for our carelessness. If we do not teach him thoroughly the duty of self-control he may become a drunkard or a libertine, and a thousand subsequent evils may curse our grandchildren. ‘The responsibilities of perpetuating the existence of a race, with all its immeasurable possibilities of sin and suffering, is one from which the boldest might recoil. But the only effective way of improving the lot of man is to rear up a new generation of better stock. For the reflecting to shirk parentage is to make over the future to the spawn of unreflecting indulgence. In the world’s great field of battle no duty is higher than to keep the ranks of the forces of Light well filled with recruits. It is to no holiday that our offspring are called—rather it is to a combat long and stern, ending in inevitable death.’5
It has been truly said that children are the wealth of nations: if we were to take our parenthood very seriously indeed—far, far more seriously than we now do, surely this would prove the strongest defence against the moral and physical decay of which we hear so much. I would like to see parenthood elevated to the dignity of a great spiritual ideal. Not that I advocate the ultra-glorification of mere procreation in itself, though to bring fine and healthy children into the world is an excellent service, and one that men and women ought to take the highest pride in, but ‘to summon an immortal soul into being—what act is comparable to this?’ To train the new-born spirit to grow towards the sun, striving to develop in it the nobler possibilities of the complex human organism and make of it an ‘upright, heaven-facing speaker’—what better lifework can a man or woman hope to achieve, what greater monument to leave behind?
If parenthood were to become a great ideal, in time public opinion—that mighty weapon—would grow so strong that unworthy parenthood would be regarded with disfavour by all decent people. The unfit would not dare to commit the crime of perpetuating their kind, and the stigma attached to this sin against the community might eventually even equal the stigma attached nowadays to the awful crime of cheating at cards!
Inspired by the ideal of noble parenthood, maidens would look for the father’s heart in their lovers; men would seek the beautiful maternal qualities in the girls they were wooing, and the material considerations that now so largely influence both would obtain less and less. The bond of marriage would be strengthened a hundredfold. Infidelity would be rarer, for the husband and wife who had been blessed with children would feel that their union had been dignified, made truly indissoluble. The father and mother who had embraced for the first time over the form of their first-born could never forget that ineffable moment. The man and woman who had shared a baby between them, taught it to talk and to play and guided its first faltering steps, could never lightly set aside the vows that bound them. The soft hands of little children were made to link men and women’s hearts together, and wonderfully they fulfil the task!
‘Only when we become fathers and mothers do we realise all that our fathers and mothers have done for us’—and what a revelation it is! What a new heaven and a new earth are opened to us by the magic of a little child’s presence in our home—the little body that has been mysteriously fashioned in our image, the little soul given into our keeping.
But for the children, marriage would indeed be a universal failure. In their interest it was instituted and it is they who make it possible. Children make a happy union perfect and an indifferent one happy. Very often they patch up an utter failure into at least an endurable partnership. When a childless marriage proves happy—really happy—it is generally because the man and woman are particularly attached to each other, or are people of unusual character.
One knows of rare instances where husband and wife have grown dearer and more closely knit by reason of having no other object to divide their affection. The wife, with lesser cares, not needing to merge the sweetheart in the mother, remains more youthful in her husband’s eyes than would otherwise be possible, whilst on the man is lavished her maternal as well as her wifely devotion, and he is at once husband and child to her. In such a union one can see the sacred element, although it has produced no children; a couple of this kind does not seem to miss the little ones that never come. The same is sometimes the case with artists, whose whole interest and creative energies are absorbed in their work.
With all my heart I despise those married people in full possession of health and strength who deliberately elect to remain childless. With all my heart I pity the celibate and those to whom children are denied. Yet they have compensations—though they lose the rapture, they miss also the infinite anxieties, the innumerable worries, the constant self-denial, the often bitter disappointments. Children bring many other pains than those of birth. Tennyson says, ‘the saddest soul in all the world is she that has a child and sees him err.’ Yet by some subtle alchemy of nature, the strings of mother hearts are sometimes attuned even more tenderly to the children who err. I think one of the most beautiful lines ever written occurs in Stephen Philips’ Marpessa. When the maid Marpessa rejects the god in favour of the humble mortal lover, of the latter she says:
‘And he shall give me passionate children, not
Some radiant god that will despise me quite,
But clamouring limbs, and little hearts that err.’
But the clamouring limbs soon wax great, alas! out of all recognition; the little hearts become wise and worldly and err in a less pleasing manner—our passionate children outgrow us quickly nowadays. That is the real tragedy of motherhood—to be outgrown.