Читать книгу The Friendships of Women - William Rounseville Alger - Страница 16

PARENTS and children furnish the first class of examples in which the fondness of a close attachment by nature is elevated into a freer and more comprehensive connection by intelligent sympathy; in which the affection of instinct and custom is transformed into the loftier and richer affection of friendship. This high and benign transformation takes place in due season between all mothers and sons, all daughters and fathers, who afford the requisite conditions for it; that is, in all cases where they remain long enough together, and their characters and manners are such as naturally command respect and love from each other. Even when children are ignoble and unworthy, their fathers and mothers may yearn over them with every strictly parental affection; and even when parents are vicious and degraded, their children may regard them with every strictly filial affection; but friendship between them is generally impossible without the co-existence, on both sides, of intrinsic worth, of those responsive virtues which elicit esteem and dominate sympathy. The great reason of the failure of a broad, glowing friendship between parents and children a failure o deplorably common in our homes is the lack, in heir characters, of that wealth, nobleness, sweetness, patience, aspiration, which would irresistibly draw them to each other in mutual honor, love, and joy. The only remedy for this unhappy failure is the cure of its unhappier cause. Whatever makes characters deep, rich, pure, and gentle in themselves, tends to make them pleasing to each other.

It is absurd to suppose, that mean, hateful, and miserable souls will love each other simply because they are connected by ties of consanguinity, of interest, or of duty.

Whatever makes us suffer, especially whatever injures our finer emotions, naturally tends to become repulsive to us, an object of dislike gathering disagreeable associations. Even a mother, a son, a father, a daughter, may become such an object, as is illustrated with melancholy frequency. But when parents and children possess those high qualities of soul which naturally give pleasure, create affection, and evoke homage; and when they are not too early separated, or too much distracted in alien pursuits, a firm and ardent friendship must spring up between them. The mere parental and filial relation will become subordinated, as a sober central thread in a wide web of colored embroidery. The parental instinct and the filial instinct, weaned from their organic directness, will grow more complex and mental; and, parallel with this process, the gracious guardians and the clinging dependants will gradually change into companions and friends, still retaining, however, sacred vestiges and memories of the original cords of their union. When we have allowed proper abatement for the thousands of instances in which this precious result is not reached, the general statement now made opens to us a large class of beautiful friendships. In all ages there have been myriads of mothers and sons, myriads of daughters and fathers, who were models of devoted, happy friends. Before paying attention to these, it will be profitable for us to notice the other cases.

Considered with reference to our subject, there are four classes of parents and children. First, Those who are positive enemies, their main relation being one of opposition, dislike, and pain. Undoubtedly a chief reason for this unfortunate result is carelessness, failure to understand and feel in advance the inestimable importance of a right rule and fruition of the home. But a cause working more strongly still arises from prominent vices of character, base and wicked qualities of soul, which make harmony impossible, friction and alienation inevitable. Disorder, fretfullness, antagonism, and misery, pervading the house, compel its members to detest each other. Then hatred occupies the place which should be occupied by friendship. This is a melancholy and odious sight to see. It is a horrible evil for its sufferers to endure. It is a terrible misfortune and wretchedness to all concerned.

Secondly, There are parents and children who live in entire unconcern and neglect of each other, in a mere routine of external connections and associations. This absence of all deep personal sensibility, either sympathetic or hostile, is not so frightful a calamity as the rankling resentment of a rooted and conscious enmity; but it is a lamentable misfortune. It is a sad loss, however little they may think of it. Absorbed in other matters, giving all their affection to business, fashion, ambition, dissipation, or to persons outside of the home-circle, they overlook the thing most indispensable for placid and permanent contentment; and are sure, sooner or later, to rue their folly, in an experience of bitter disappointment.

Thirdly, there are those who, so far from cherishing hatred or indifference, deeply love each other, and passionately long to enjoy an intimate union in reciprocal confidence, esteem, and sympathy, but are prevented by some unhappy impediment, some disastrous misunderstanding or morbid pique. Many a parent yearns with unspeakable fondness towards a disobedient and ungrateful child; the heart breaking with agony for the reconciliation, the embrace, the sweet communion fate withholds. Many a child profoundly desires to fall at the feet of a cold, hard, careless parent, and with supplicating tears win the notice, the affection, that would be so priceless; and, sadder still, there is many an instance where both parent and child are truly noble and affectionate, and would give the world if they could break through the separating barrier, and lavish their whole hearts on each other; but, in spite of these generous qualities, their common desires and their bitter suffering, some falsehood, some pride, some shyness, some suspicion, some chill, intangible phantom, is set fatally between them. In every community there are piteous tragedies of this sort, little dreamed of by those outside, but which the bleeding hearts concerned in them feel as a deadly drain, hastening them towards the grave.

Fourthly, Besides the parents and children who are open enemies, who are utter indifferentists, or who, while loving each other, are kept apart by some obstacle, there is another class, who, as free and cordial friends, happily realize in their relation all that is to be desired. In these examples there are ample wisdom, considerateness, tender sympathy, and guardian strength, on the one side; ready docility, attentiveness, obedience, reverence, and fondness, on the other; with an exuberance of indescribable comfort and peace on both sides. What a treasure, what an inestimable boon, what a divine trust, what an inexhaustible delight, is such an affection between a parent and a child! What a paradise any country would be, if such an experience were welling up, a pure fountain of life, in every home throughout its borders!

Few inquiries can have greater interest or importance than the inquiry, why there is not more generally between parents and children that warm, ingenuous, abiding affection which produces a full and joyous friendship. A clear perception and statement of the difficulties in the way of it may suggest the means of removing them. And, in the outset, is it not obvious that the home affections flourish so scantily because scanty attention is paid to the cultivation of them? It is forever the fallacy and folly of man to think least of that which lies nearest to him, and is the most indissolubly bound up with his being as a cause of happiness or of misery. He thinks most eagerly on those comparatively exceptional and remote things, which, in consequence of their greatness or their rarity, are the strangest and the most impressive to him. He ought to pay the keenest heed to that which is the most important in its influence on his life, not to that which is the most startling to his fancy. Now, it is unquestionably true, that while there is nothing which contributes so much to enrich or to impoverish us, to bless or to curse us, as our domestic relations, there is scarcely any thing which we take less pains to cultivate into all that it is capable of becoming. In most instances, the life of the home is so close to us, so identified with ourselves, accepted with such a matter of course security, that we overlook the delicate conditions for preserving its freshness and securing its increase. But, in every relation of persons, there are two sets of conditions, corresponding with the two sides, neither of which can be neglected with impunity. There are a multitude of homes which are centres of irritation and wretchedness, miniature hells to their occupants.

The first thing to be done is to turn thought to the subject, break up the apathy of routine, secure an earnest appreciation of the facts in the case, and then study the remedy.

One great obstacle to the desired friendships of parents and children consists in the difficulty of a perfect sympathy between persons marked by such differences of age, position, interest, and experience. Those of the same years, passions, pleasures, duties, will naturally sympathize the most easily. But in all these respects the disparities of parent and child are equally numerous and striking.

They look at things from opposed points of view; they judge of subjects in the light respectively of experience and of inexperience. This great and constant contrast must give rise to innumerable discrepancies of opinion and of desire, provocative of disagreements, if not of dislikes. Nature has, however, provided powerful neutralizers for this obstacle to sympathy between those who are so widely unlike, counteractives which forcibly tend to prevent disagreements from breeding hostilities. These counteractives are the profound instincts of parental fondness and filial reverence, the first of which tends to make the parents enter into the spiritual states of their children, and to look at things from their point of view; and the second, to make the children, with docile duteousness, adopt as their own the conclusions of their parents. These counteractives ought to be carefully fostered, neither party forgetting the differences between himself and the other, but endeavoring to bridge those differences by the identifying powers of imagination and sympathy. Another frequent destroyer or lessener of the natural love of parents and children is the conflict between the rightful authority of the former and the wilful impulses of the latter.

Maturity, having accumulated knowledge and wisdom out of long experience, and being set by God and nature in charge over the headstrong instincts of ignorant or capricious youth, cannot avoid the duty of frequently applying the curb to excessive desires, and the spur to defective ones. A sense of chafing, an impulse to resent and rebel, will naturally often arise. And, in every such collision of passion and rule, there is a tendency to hostility. It is needless to say how lamentably frequent are the examples in which this tendency makes actual foes of those between whom the natural bonds of love and reverence are of the most sacred character. It is evident that parental authority is a divine trust which must be exercised over childhood and youth. Only it should be exercised on principle, not from caprice; for the good of the ruled, not for the gratification of a despotic self-assertion in the ruler; with fond gentleness, not with harshness or cruelty. And the authority of the parent should be vindicated as far as possible by force of wisdom, weight of character, power of persuasion; avoiding, as far as can properly be done, every occasion of conflict, every need of a violent issue. The child, on the other hand, ought to remember the rightful authority of his parents, consider their greater experience, take for granted their benignant intention, cultivate a grateful sense of dependence and duty towards them, and foster the habit of prompt and hearty submission to their wishes. It is a safe rule, in general, for a boy or girl to respect and obey the father and mother, and not to think, when they oppose the thoughtless spirit of self-indulgence, that this parental opposition is unreasonable or unkind. To honor one's parents is the first scriptural commandment with promise.