FATHERS AND CHILDREN.
MR. D1SRAELPS hint as to the true reason why fathers and 1 mothers make so many mistakes about their children is a very valuable one, though we should dispute his method of arriving at it. It is not fair to say that in the family circle perception of character does not exist. It exists there, as well as everywhere else, but is much more common. Not many people, indeed, are pos- sessed of the power which makes statesmen and kings efficient, that of discerning character almost at a glance, or, at all events, upon evidence which to other men seems totally insufficient. Still the power must belong to every head of a great business, say a suc- cessful traffic-manager or successful shipowner ; and as there is uo want of such persons, the power is not quite so rare as those think who always test a man by his success in politics. But the number of persons who can understand a man upon very complete and long-continued masses of evidence, can limit and define his capacities, and form a fair judgment of his chances in life, is very great, or business could not go on so well as it does, or so few complaints be heard, except in fiction, of children being forced into wrong grooves. We suspect most wives understand their husbands and most fathers their children very well indeed, and that the popular phrase about the blindness of parents is merely a popular phrase. The blindness of parents about grown-up children is, it is true, frequently very marked ; but that is the effect of long habit, which would blind them equally to the merits and defects of anybody else. Most parents, we suspect, see through their children clearly enough, their failures being only apparent failures, because they see and admire or dis- like qualities invisible to the outer world. Unselfishness, for example, is a quality scarcely to be detected beyond the domestic circle, because outside that it becomes mere politeness ; while there are varieties of temper which seem to outsiders in- tolerable, but which to those who live within are known to be independent of the character,—the temporary result, perhaps, of temporary disease. It is always assumed that affec- tion blinds people, but that is an error derived mainly from the experience of love, into which passion largely enters, If that were the blinding force, then all people would love all their children equally, which they always affect to do, and very often strive hard to do, but never, if the truth were known, succeed in doing. Nor is the blinding force vanity, for though, no doubt, a father may see himself reproduced in his son, and so be as blind about him as about himself, he can hardly be blinder ; and the number of people who are really blind about themselves, except as to some special capacity, is exceedingly small. Every man is mad, people say, on some one point or another ; but it is only on one point, and Gibbon, who esteemed himself a lady- killer, was no more blind about his mental defects than any other very successful person. People think parents silly about their children because they talk so much about them, but that is only the result of the fact that no talk bores so grievously as talk about characters in which you feel no interest whatever. You at once, having no data, suspect the analysis to be untrue ; and, if it is favourable, wish it to be, because its truth would imply a superiority in your friend. The truth is, that the watchfulness over children which is the distinctive mark of our
modern society could not be exercised at all without very con- siderable knowledge.
No. Mr. Disraeli gives the right clue when be says the child who fails in after life probably " has shown. no deficiency in the qualities which obtained him his early repute, but has been wanting in the capacity adapted to subsequent opportunities." The parents have judged rightly in their inner estimate of their children—remember, the outward estimate is frequently mere acting—but they have not been able or competent to make that estimate good by surrounding thechild with favourable circumstances, to place him on a line which suits the breadth between his axletrees. The boy is the boy under the influence of home, the man is the boy under circumstances so strong as to have changed his whole character. When old Mr. Clive set his son down as a troublesome, disobedient, dangerous dullard; he was not wrong, but right, the astounding difference between the boy and the man being due only to circumstances. Clive never was anything but disobedient and dangerous, but it happened that being at the top, his vice only manifested itself once, in his challenge to his colonel, and that his dangerousness found scope against the enemies of his country. He showed himself in England rather a stupid, heavy man, fond of fine clothes and waste generally, who the moment he began to brood shot himself, his only faculty being the one his father could not test, or his colonel either,—a genius for command, whether in the council-room or the field. Do you suppose Chesterfield mis- took his illegitimate son? Then why did he write to him only on the points in which, by universal testimony, the young man failed? A mother praises a girl's wit, and the neighbours think her a fool, but the wit is there, only wealth, and its consequence, refining education, are required to save her from seeming and being pert. The father is mad about some bright child's powers, and in life the child fails utterly. What a fool is the father ! Not a bit of it. The brightness was there, but the child is out of the only groove in which he could employ It fully ; or his nature demanded a certain gentleness of life for its development, and as circumstances went wrong, the character had to re- mould itself into something different and very ordinary. Set Clive to a banker's desk, and what a bad lout he would have been ! The mere difference between out-door and in-door life will make boys fail or succeed as men, if they miss the one of the two which would have suited them, a fact upon which, by the way, Lord Lytton in his later novels was always dilating; while to girls, outward surroundings appear sometimes to be literally everything. The boy may be "the father of the man," but Circumstance is the mother, and the combi- nation admits of endless permutations. The little draftsman is no artist, because the wish which made him draw has been super- seded by another ; and the bright child is the sober or sad woman, because circumstance, or some previously undeveloped capacity for melancholy, has made her such. There is nothing, or next to nothing, to be predicted from childhood, not because parents are fools, but because circumstances not oily influence, but in many cases actually alter character. The English people, usually speak- ing, have discerned Mr. Disraeli's remedy, and reduce all his phrases about introspection into the order, "Choose for yourself;" but of what use is that to a lad who has no test by which to try his own powers, except life itself, in which a blunder may be fatal ? Mr. Disraeli's introspection, as he admits, never tells a lad anything till he has failed, when it is either too late, or cir- cumstances have happened to limit the area of choice. The truth is, there is no teat whatever, and it is because there is none, not because parents are fond fools, that we see so many unlooked-for failures and unhoped-for triumphs. The only thing that can help children, especially boys, to make life certain, is to cultivate in them that patience, bright or dull, which we call fortitude or perseverance, and whicb, if it does not command success, at least enables a boy to endure failure. " It is dogged as does it," said Mr. Trollope's old brickmaker to Mr. Crawley, and nine times out of ten in this life the brickmaker suggests the only remedy.
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