The Way of All Flesh

Mr Pontifex was not the man to trouble himself much about his motives.  People were not so introspective then as we are now; they lived more according to a rule of thumb.  Dr Arnold had not yet sown that crop of earnest thinkers which we are now harvesting, and men did not see why they should not have their own way if no evil consequences to themselves seemed likely to follow upon their doing so.  Then as now, however, they sometimes let themselves in for more evil consequences than they had bargained for.

Like other rich men at the beginning of this century he ate and drank a good deal more than was enough to keep him in health.  Even his excellent constitution was not proof against a prolonged course of overfeeding and what we should now consider overdrinking.  His liver would not unfrequently get out of order, and he would come down to breakfast looking yellow about the eyes.  Then the young people knew that they had better look out.  It is not as a general rule the eating of sour grapes that causes the children’s teeth to be set on edge.  Well-to-do parents seldom eat many sour grapes; the danger to the children lies in the parents eating too many sweet ones.

I grant that at first sight it seems very unjust, that the parents should have the fun and the children be punished for it, but young people should remember that for many years they were part and parcel of their parents and therefore had a good deal of the fun in the person of their parents.  If they have forgotten the fun now, that is no more than people do who have a headache after having been tipsy overnight.  The man with a headache does not pretend to be a different person from the man who got drunk, and claim that it is his self of the preceding night and not his self of this morning who should be punished; no more should offspring complain of the headache which it has earned when in the person of its parents, for the continuation of identity, though not so immediately apparent, is just as real in one case as in the other.  What is really hard is when the parents have the fun after the children have been born, and the children are punished for this.

On these, his black days, he would take very gloomy views of things and say to himself that in spite of all his goodness to them his children did not love him.  But who can love any man whose liver is out of order?  How base, he would exclaim to himself, was such ingratitude!  How especially hard upon himself, who had been such a model son, and always honoured and obeyed his parents though they had not spent one hundredth part of the money upon him which he had lavished upon his own children.  “It is always the same story,” he would say to himself, “the more young people have the more they want, and the less thanks one gets; I have made a great mistake; I have been far too lenient with my children; never mind, I have done my duty by them, and more; if they fail in theirs to me it is a matter between God and them.  I, at any rate, am guiltless.  Why, I might have married again and become the father of a second and perhaps more affectionate family, etc., etc.”  He pitied himself for the expensive education which he was giving his children; he did not see that the education cost the children far more than it cost him, inasmuch as it cost them the power of earning their living easily rather than helped them towards it, and ensured their being at the mercy of their father for years after they had come to an age when they should be independent.  A public school education cuts off a boy’s retreat; he can no longer become a labourer or a mechanic, and these are the only people whose tenure of independence is not precarious—­with the exception of course of those who are born inheritors of money or who are placed young in some safe and deep groove.  Mr Pontifex saw nothing of this; all he saw was that he was spending much more money upon his children than the law would have compelled him to do, and what more could you have?  Might he not have apprenticed both his sons to greengrocers?  Might he not even yet do so to-morrow morning if he were so minded?  The possibility of this course being adopted was a favourite topic with him when he was out of temper; true, he never did apprentice either of his sons to greengrocers, but his boys comparing notes together had sometimes come to the conclusion that they wished he would.

At other times when not quite well he would have them in for the fun of shaking his will at them.  He would in his imagination cut them all out one after another and leave his money to found almshouses, till at last he was obliged to put them back, so that he might have the pleasure of cutting them out again the next time he was in a passion.

Of course if young people allow their conduct to be in any way influenced by regard to the wills of living persons they are doing very wrong and must expect to be sufferers in the end, nevertheless the powers of will-dangling and will-shaking are so liable to abuse and are continually made so great an engine of torture that I would pass a law, if I could, to incapacitate any man from making a will for three months from the date of each offence in either of the above respects and let the bench of magistrates or judge, before whom he has been convicted, dispose of his property as they shall think right and reasonable if he dies during the time that his will-making power is suspended.

Mr Pontifex would have the boys into the dining-room.  “My dear John, my dear Theobald,” he would say, “look at me.  I began life with nothing but the clothes with which my father and mother sent me up to London.  My father gave me ten shillings and my mother five for pocket money and I thought them munificent.  I never asked my father for a shilling in the whole course of my life, nor took aught from him beyond the small sum he used to allow me monthly till I was in receipt of a salary.  I made my own way and I shall expect my sons to do the same.  Pray don’t take it into your heads that I am going to wear my life out making money that my sons may spend it for me.  If you want money you must make it for yourselves as I did, for I give you my word I will not leave a penny to either of you unless you show that you deserve it.  Young people seem nowadays to expect all kinds of luxuries and indulgences which were never heard of when I was a boy.  Why, my father was a common carpenter, and here you are both of you at public schools, costing me ever so many hundreds a year, while I at your age was plodding away behind a desk in my Uncle Fairlie’s counting house.  What should I not have done if I had had one half of your advantages?  You should become dukes or found new empires in undiscovered countries, and even then I doubt whether you would have done proportionately so much as I have done.  No, no, I shall see you through school and college and then, if you please, you will make your own way in the world.”

In this manner he would work himself up into such a state of virtuous indignation that he would sometimes thrash the boys then and there upon some pretext invented at the moment.

And yet, as children went, the young Pontifexes were fortunate; there would be ten families of young people worse off for one better; they ate and drank good wholesome food, slept in comfortable beds, had the best doctors to attend them when they were ill and the best education that could be had for money.  The want of fresh air does not seem much to affect the happiness of children in a London alley:  the greater part of them sing and play as though they were on a moor in Scotland.  So the absence of a genial mental atmosphere is not commonly recognised by children who have never known it.  Young people have a marvellous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances.  Even if they are unhappy—­very unhappy—­it is astonishing how easily they can be prevented from finding it out, or at any rate from attributing it to any other cause than their own sinfulness.

To parents who wish to lead a quiet life I would say:  Tell your children that they are very naughty—­much naughtier than most children.  Point to the young people of some acquaintances as models of perfection and impress your own children with a deep sense of their own inferiority.  You carry so many more guns than they do that they cannot fight you.  This is called moral influence, and it will enable you to bounce them as much as you please.  They think you know and they will not have yet caught you lying often enough to suspect that you are not the unworldly and scrupulously truthful person which you represent yourself to be; nor yet will they know how great a coward you are, nor how soon you will run away, if they fight you with persistency and judgement.  You keep the dice and throw them both for your children and yourself.  Load them then, for you can easily manage to stop your children from examining them.  Tell them how singularly indulgent you are; insist on the incalculable benefit you conferred upon them, firstly in bringing them into the world at all, but more particularly in bringing them into it as your own children rather than anyone else’s.  Say that you have their highest interests at stake whenever you are out of temper and wish to make yourself unpleasant by way of balm to your soul.  Harp much upon these highest interests.  Feed them spiritually upon such brimstone and treacle as the late Bishop of Winchester’s Sunday stories.  You hold all the trump cards, or if you do not you can filch them; if you play them with anything like judgement you will find yourselves heads of happy, united, God-fearing families, even as did my old friend Mr Pontifex.  True, your children will probably find out all about it some day, but not until too late to be of much service to them or inconvenience to yourself.

Some satirists have complained of life inasmuch as all the pleasures belong to the fore part of it and we must see them dwindle till we are left, it may be, with the miseries of a decrepit old age.

To me it seems that youth is like spring, an overpraised season—­delightful if it happen to be a favoured one, but in practice very rarely favoured and more remarkable, as a general rule, for biting east winds than genial breezes.  Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.  Fontenelle at the age of ninety, being asked what was the happiest time of his life, said he did not know that he had ever been much happier than he then was, but that perhaps his best years had been those when he was between fifty-five and seventy-five, and Dr Johnson placed the pleasures of old age far higher than those of youth.  True, in old age we live under the shadow of Death, which, like a sword of Damocles, may descend at any moment, but we have so long found life to be an affair of being rather frightened than hurt that we have become like the people who live under Vesuvius, and chance it without much misgiving.