Littell's Living Age/Volume 129/Issue 1661/The Tree of Knowledge
THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE.
Certain things, once the possession of humanity, have been lost to the world forever — books, arts, and even lands; but we are in danger now of losing something more valuable than any of these — namely, the childhood of our children, the maidenliness of our maidens. Where are the children, as we knew them in days gone by, when simplicity and innocence were part of their charter, and to be a child meant to be fresh, unspoiled, and free from the taint of dangerous knowledge? Gone with the dream of the things that were and are not. They are not to be found in the precocious fledglings dragged about the Continent on autumn tours, or sitting at tables d'hôte with the governess at Nice while the father and mother are killing time and something more at Monaco. They are not among the miniature men and women who honour us with their presence when we give a juvenile entertainment, who come to criticise our Christmas-tree, which they seldom find good enough to praise, to pronounce our dance a bore, and our supper a sell; not among those unhappy little ones whom fond parents dress up in picturesque costumes for fancy balls, teaching them a self-complacency, a self-consideration far beyond their years, and only too easily learnt; and least of all are they among those still more unhappy little ones who act plays for the amusement of a grave and grown-up audience, and are stimulated by applause and excitement into a state of moral intoxication wherein all that makes youth lovely is lost forever. For the cleverer they are for their years, the more disastrously their talent works on their natures; and one of the saddest sights known to us is that of a bright, pretty, vivacious little girl acting her saucy part with aplomb and assurance, failing in all that makes childhood most lovely just in proportion as she succeeds in her attempt to be some one else than herself.
By the very nature of things it is difficult for the children of the London fashionable world to preserve their innocence and childishness, victims as they are, now by association and now by exclusion, to the fast social life of their parents. From their cradles they are subjected to the closest intercourse with nurses highly recommended by ladies anxious to get rid of them, and whose relations are to be found mainly in doubtful circumstances and shady quarters. Admitted to the questionable gossip of the monthly nurse when she enters the nursery circle on authorized occasions, and to the continued confidences of the resident nurses, who perhaps are gross through ignorance rather than through vice, the children are reared from the beginning under the shadow of the tree of knowledge, and are made free of the blossoms before their time comes to eat of the fruit. But if the nurses are not the wisest or best rearers of our children, fine-lady mothers are not much better; and the dressed-up dolls whose velvet and point-lace are shown off to visitors in the drawing-room not unfrequently hear there more than is good for them of what, if they do not understand it to its fullest extent now, they think of hereafter and meditate on till they have found out the riddle. One kind of fine-lady mother certainly leaves her children to be brought up by nurses without much assistance from her even for the show-hour in the drawing-room. They are circumstances of her existence which she takes care shall give her no trouble — conditions of her married life which represent a certain loss of time and so much personal annoyance, reduced by wise management to a minimum; and she has no desire to inflict on her friends a corvée repudiated by herself. So far her visiting world has cause for gratitude. But the mother whose maternal instinct is large and her reasoning faculties small, who prides herself on her love for her offspring, and insists that her acquaintances shall partake in her glory, adopts the foolish plan of having the children brought down to see all her visitors, and of converting her drawing-room into a small bear-garden, where every one is uncomfortable alike. The children are the axis on which all the conversation turns. You are expected to be interested when you are told of their gifts and graces — how Mary writes verses and Tommy makes music, and how sweetly Ellen and Harry repeat their poetry — just as you are expected to be polite when they pull your whiskers and fight for your watch, and to smile, as at a good acrobatic feat, when Jacky makes a flying leap into your hat, Harry scrambles on to your knee and informs the company that you wear a wig, and that he can see gold in your mouth. The natural sequel to such a course is that the position becomes untenable even for the most indulgent mother, and that the darlings are sent in the end to school, there to continue their education.
After the forcing-houses of the nursery and the drawing-room, their minds are now sufficiently matured to develop any seeds for evil and precocious knowledge that may drop into the untitled soil; and, on getting to their first school, it is generally enough for children to unite their experiences to get all the doubtful points cleared up which have exercised the youthful mind ever since the days of the first man. It is at this stage of their existence that we hear of mothers being shocked at the revelations made by their own children. Things which a generation ago were known only at the proper age, and when ignorance would have been folly, are whispered in corners among these callow investigators; and the one who has most to tell is the one who is king or queen of the rest. When the mother snatches her child from this unsatisfactory school, and that undesirable companion, she thinks perhaps that she has saved it; but the fruit of the tree of knowledge when eaten opens the eyes so that they can I never close again, and what the mind has once received the memory can never reject. In the more advanced schools the dangers attached to unlimited confidences are so well understood that experienced matrons have recourse to various stratagems to prevent their possibility. Two girls will not be allowed to consort together for any length of time; and whispering and low voices are expressly forbidden. In walking out they must go in threes, or with a different companion for each day. Governesses have directions to watch all preferential couplings, and to break them up by adding a third to the party; not ostentatiously, so as to cause suspicion of motives, which would be as bad perhaps as the evil sought to be prevented, but with the craft of quietness, the hypocrisy of concealment — which we may cite as one instance of the lawfulness of doing good by underhand methods. Those schools are the best where the social feeling is most encouraged in contradistinction to the personal and individual; and in saying this we say all that need be told. Add to this, unresting occupation, whether it be learning or amusement, business or play — at all events, the disallowance of sloth and self-indulgence in every form — and the dangers of school-life are reduced to their lowest possible sum, with so much good to come from wise guardianship and well-chosen employments as shall go far to neutralize what remains and keep the girls as fresh and pure as is possible in these odd days of ours.
Emerging then from a life of full occupation at school, girls are more to be pitied then envied on their first acknowledged entrance into society. They are scolded by captious fathers weary of milliners' bills and midnight revels; measured with a commercial eye by mercenary mothers, who regard them as so much stock for profitable sale and barter; snubbed by fastidious brothers, who sometimes find them in their way, and who generally are in the state to compare them unfavourably with some Cynthia of the minute in the ascendant. Competition with other girls, who have passed before them through the fire to Moloch, drives off the lingering shyness of the seminary, and the maiden blush vanishes with the appetite for bread and butter. Rinking on the one hand, and the shrieking sisterhood on the other, divide the young womanhood of London between them, and the previous standards of right and wrong, once held so essential to the well-being of society, are completely overthrown on a little experience of the world and modern life. Idle gossip and questionable conversation are freely indulged in before them as a legitimate source of amusement by their mothers and their mothers' friends. The doubtful topics of the day are not only discussed in their presence, but discussed without reserve in a mixed assemblage of both sexes. The worst novels of the season lie on the drawing-room table, dogs'-eared at the strong passages; and the daily papers, whatever their contents, are passed freely from hand to hand. Women of advanced views make the drawing-room their forum, where they declaim with alarming minuteness of detail against the iniquities of men, and insist on the need there is of women meeting them on their own ground, with weapons sharpened at the same grindstone. Things which our grandmothers went down to the grave without knowing are discussed in the light of day, and in unmistakable terms, before our unmarried girls; and of all the feminine qualities, shame, delicacy, and reticence are the first to be discarded. The tree of knowledge — that upas-tree of modern times — overshadows us all alike, and the sweetnesses of womanhood droop and die beneath its poisonous shade. Medical studies carried on in company with men; the country stumped in advocacy of woman's rights, which mean nothing more nor less than the revolution of society and violence done to nature; the country stumped too on questions which no woman who respected herself should touch with her little finger — what chance have our girls nowadays? Born, bred, and fostered in a vitiated atmosphere from first to last, can we wonder if men say sorrowfully that the English girl of tradition is a thing of the past, and if their apologists can find nothing better as an excuse than that they are like so many boys, with no harm in them, but no womanhood? For ourselves, we hold to the expediency of ignorance of some matters — ignorance of vice, of the darker facts of human history, of the filthy byways of life, of the seething under-current beneath the tranquil surface of society. We see no good to come of the early initiation of children into the knowledge that belongs properly to maturity, of the participation of women in that which belongs properly to men alone. We think that there is a charm in maiden innocence, in womanly ignorance, which no amount of bold trafficking in the secret verities of life can make up for, and we grieve to see the small account at which these old-fashioned qualities are reckoned. For eating of the tree of knowledge Adam and Eve were flung out of paradise, and perhaps the analogy holds good for the children of men at the present day.