FRENCH CHILDREN.
TUE well-informed essayist who in last month's Blackwood discoursed to us all so amusingly about French servants gives UB this month a lecture on French children, less amusing perhaps, hut to the average English reader quite as instructive, if only because it will disabuse him of one or two of his most cherished prejudices. It is still, we believe, a rooted idea in this country that home life does not exist in France ; that fathers are always abroad and mothers always seeking amusement, usually in the society of lovers ; that French children are brought up by Lonna, and that domestic affection is treated with ridicule in society as well as in Parisian literature. Considering that in France the family is the basis of society and in England the individual, that the patria potestas in its legal form has ended here and is vigorously alive there, that a Frenchman detests quitting home and that an Englishman goes stumbling
about the world wherever his interest leads him, we should have thought these prejudices would have exploded of themselves, and so perhaps they would, but that they are con- firmed by what Englishmen see, or think they see, in Paris, where life among the visible class is arranged on very different principles f rem life in the remainder of France. French novelists, too, Balzae perhaps excepted, depict this latter life only, and Englishmen otherwise well informed will read with surprise, perhaps with in- credulity, the statement of a close observer that the French of this generation have sacrificed too much to the home, have suppressed many of the rougher and more useful virtues in the effort to cultivate the domestic affections, an effort which has been singu- larly successful. Among women, indeed, the effort may be said to have achieved a complete success, though purchased at what might appear to English minds a very heavy price, that of turning all mothers into nursemaids and resident governesses. From the moment French girls arc born to the moment they are married they never quit their mothers. Nurseries in the English sense, upper rooms where the children are kept away from their parents, in order to leave the latter some opportunity for thought, are absolutely unknown. " The direct action of the mother be- comes all the stronger from the almost universal custom of keeping her children with her day and night. Many a girl in France has never slept outside her mother's chamber until she leaves it to be married, and at the worst, she is no farther off than the next room, with an open door between. Such unceasing neighbourhood brings about an action which may be not only intellectual and moral, but possibly physical and magnetic too. The mother passes into the daughter, the daughter absorbs the mother, their essences get mixed ; and hence it is that Frenchwomen exercise such singular power over their girls, and that the girls so generally become an exact reproduction of the mother under whose constant eye they have grown to womanhood If there be one undoubted, indisputable merit of a Frenchwotnan, it is her devotion to her girls, and her resolute effort to keep them pure." The watchful- ness never ends, and is carried into the domains of thought and feeling, as well as into the actual details of life. Girls are encouraged to be naive, to be emotional, to show instead of hiding their thoughts. " Girls, from their very babyhood live side by side with demonstrative mothers, who show and say what they think and feel with a natural frankness of which they are scarcely conscious. The children not only inherit this disposition, but are aided to develop it in their own little hearts by example, contact, and advice. They are born impulsive. They are shown how to be so ; and they are told that, provided impulse be well expressed and be directed to worthy objects, it is a source of joy, of tender- ness, and of charm Young French girls have it to an astonishing extent, particularly in the upper ranks. Their heads and hearts live in the open air ; their natures are all outside. They have no place where they can hide away a thought from their mother's sight ; it must come out." The result of all this is that the mothers have in their hands all the springs of their daughters' natures, and that girls reproduce their mothers from generation to generation with amazing exactness ; that their religious impres- sions, their thoughts about life and its duties, and their social 'prejudices llecome absolutely immovable ; and that the women, besides being better morally than the men, tend to become radi- cally different from them. Nowhere, urges the writer, is the differ- ence in the inner mind of the two sexes so radical as in France. "it is not going too far to say—though the question must be approached with infinite prudence, in order to avoid exaggeration —that the salient dispositions of the French man and the French 'woman drift in opposite directions. The sexes are held together by a common bond of interest and affection, but their tendencies are not the same ; and they live, as a whole, in a chronic condi- tion of discord on many of the main theories, obligations, and even pleasures of existence." The immensity of this divergence has been pointed out by many Liberal writers as one of the dangers of France, the women losing their healthful influence over the men from the want of a common stand-point, especially upon all religious matters ; but there can be no doubt that it keeps many things sweet in France which might otherwise grow rotten, and leaves more hope for the future than absolute harmony between the sexes would do, while it tends to create that wonder-
ful affection which so softens life in France, which enables whole generations to live together under one roof, till the eseayist an say truly, " What we call 'united families ' are the rule there, and the unity goes far beyond our usual interpretation of the word. It means not only affection and mutual devotion, but it affects the instincts of the nation to such a point that colonizing, and even, to a certain degree, foreign travel, are rendered impossible by it. Neither sons nor daughters will consent to leave their parents ; the shortest absence is regarded as a calamity ; and the population, as a whole, shrinks from expatriation; not because it is unfit to create new positions for itself (on the contrary, its adaptability is notori- ous), but because it cannot face a rupture of habits and attach- ments which date from childhood."
Unfortunately, this family life is purchased at the price of a system of supervision which, carried thoroughly out, as it is in all schools, succeeds with the girls, but makes the boys girlish, sneaking, and sceptical. They are bred to be girls, and as they were not meant by nature to. be girls, and life will not pSitnit them to remain girls, the artificial girlishness rapidly degenerates into a kind of moral effeminacy. "They generally have good manners (they beat us there) ; they are almost always tender-hearted and loving, —they are even toler- ably obedient ; and, judging solely from the outside, it might be imagined that they promise well. They are devoted sons and faithful brothers ; they work hard at books ; while they are little, they say their prayers ; but there is no stuff in them. Discipline makes them brave if they should become soldiers ; honour and tradition do the same for the better-born amongst them ; but it is wonderful that such boys should have any latent courage at all, for their whole early teaching seems to us to be invented on pur- pose to drive it out. They are forbidden to fight, and scarcely ever get beyond scratching." A French boy is 'pretty nearly as expe,n- sive and demonstrative as the girls," he thinks tears are " natural " even to boys ; no "one tells him that emotions which are attrac- tive in women become ridiculous in men "; in one word, lie loses masculine individuality. The parents are to a great degree con- scious of all this, but " when the subject of education is discussed, French parents always urge that the object of all teaching being to fit the young for the particular career which they have to follow, their boys ought necessarily to be prepared for social and family duties, rather than for the rougher and hardier tasks which other nations love." The boys are, in fact, enfeebled by too much " nesting," by too much effort to communicate to them those domestic virtues of which their mothers not un- naturally think so highly. We say not unnaturally, for much of all this pressure comes from the laws and from social institutions which, by forcing families to live together, make all angularities and eccentricities of character so exceedingly unpleasant. Fill a house with three generations, make their property practically 'common, compel them to incessant personal intercourse, leave female influence virtually predominant and half-a-dozen children
self -dependent, strong-willed, angular Christian do but make himself a despot or a nuisance? The object of French education is to avoid either result, and devised as it is by women and conducted by priests, it succeeds, but at the price of stereotyping the women —no particular harm, as the original type was excellent—and creating in the men a tendency to intellectual and moral hysteria, shown first of all in the grand defect of modern French character, a sort of feminine inability to look facts in the face ; passionate desire to live in an intellectual fairyland, where every- thing that occurs redounds in some way to the glorification of that very clever and amusing child, the average Frenchman.
We believe the evil as described by the writer is real, but the remedy she suggests does not commend itself to our minds. She wants the boys to be allowed, or as we gather, taught, to fight whenever they are provoked, advice which is very like that of some old officers, who advocate the reintroduction of duelling because it makes men brave. German boys do not fight as boys any more than French boys, and fighting is not the lesson taught in the Eng- lish middle-class schools. What is needed would seem to be not so much a change in the method of education as a change in its whole idea, a wish among educators to make strong men, instead of good members of the domestic circle. Such a change, to be effective, must be accompanied by a change in the whole social system of France, by an abolition of all the laws which make of the family a unit, and consequently by a return to simple, unprotected in- dividualism. Frenchmen will not coneent to any such revolution, would declare, if it were attempted, that life under such a suc- cession of east winds was not worth having, and would either end it as homeless Frenchmen usually do, or endure it in heartless dissipation. The only chance is to use what is good in the system—and there is very much in it that is good—and see if we cannot instil a love of truth without making individuality unbearable, and create habits of manliness without roughening manners too much. The writer admits that this is done for the upper class by their out-of-door life, and we incline to think it could be done for all classes by adopting a military discipline in schools intended to cultivate the military rather than the domestic virtues, to make Spartans rather than pleasant men, by assimilating the LyeiSes more and more closely to the Polytechnic, which sends out yearly lads whose deficiency certainly is not manliness. Neither, as we are told, is that the defect in the French-speaking Swiss schools. Discipline has made French lads too tame, but discipline can also make them individual, can bring out instead of effacing strength of character. It does it in the British Navy, where all men obey, and all are individual to eccentricity.
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