BACK TO THE (FAIRCHILD) FAMILY

Otago Witness, Issue 3743, 8 December 1925, Page 10

BACK TO THE (FAIRCHILD) FAMILY

By Constance Clyde.

(For the Witness.)

Chesterton, I believe is responsible for the slogan that in literature and in He we should go back to the family, and that that family should be of the puritanic or Fairchild kind. Perhaps it would be apposite to point out that in some respet s we have actually done so. Certain theosophical thinkers have told us that world experience goes on a spiral. W e every hundred years to the„ same ethical place, but looking at that place from a different and perhaps higher angle. Inus 1925 is really 1825 or thereabouts over again. We regard human nature in the same way as then, but now, to use a different analogy, through a new haze. A hundred years ago the haze was religion. To-day it is social science or psychology. Some of us can test this theory if we remember reading in our youth that more-than-hundred-years-old classic of Mrs SherWood's, which has survived through its literary charm and the truth of its pictured world as the child sees it—“a world four feet high.” We remember perusing its over-religious pages “for fun” in our early days. It was a comedy book, because of its alleged exaggeration, even then. Reading it later, with an interval perhaps of three or more decades in between, we are amazed at its astonishing inward likeness to ideals held to-day. The language is different, but the thoughts are the same. In 3pite of the father who took his children to see the hanging body of a year-dead murderer (this dates the book, the custom of keeping bodies above ground being abolished in 1834), the “Fairchild Family” is really more modern, and in a way “sensible,” than later productions, such as those of the slimy “Elsie” series or the “Melbourne House Daisy,” and others that had such vogue. These latter productions are more antipathetic to us, because there has occurred since then the Freudian era, leaving a deposit of new-old truth, and thus bringing us back to Mrs Sherwood’s Masterpiece. Thirty years -ago we might be horrified at little Lucy textually murmuring, and encouraged to murmur, that in her heart were “adulteries, blasphemies, and all manner of evil things.” Since then we have been more or less scientifically informed that- the child’s subconscious mind does contain all this unpleasantness, arid, moreover, that it may arise into the conscious much earlier than was once assumed. A generation or two ago, again, we could smile at the “fuss” of the Sherwood parents over “besetting sins”; but what are these to-day but mental complexes that claim to be eradicated as early (not as late) as possible. Says Lucy in her prayer, “Even my dreams upon my bed often show the vileness of my heart,” which is a distinctly Freudian touch. No innocence even in dreams! We are used to that idea nowadays.

It is true that we moderns are inclined also to assume the “beauty” of childhood—an idea that would never have occurred to the Fairchild couple. That, however, is due to our muddled thinking, so that we can believe two quite different things about the young—namely, that they are innately good, and also that they are innately bad. Of these two ideals the Fairchild era possessed but one, manifested, however, in such a way as to make it stingless, as when Mrs Fairchild observes: “I know you have a bad heart, my dear. How can a child of mine be otherwise?” When adulthood assumes hereditary responsibility, and also cannot put forward an unpleasant good child as an example (for there is no good child), we see that the lives of the little Fairchilds can through this very original sin be almost as happy as those of their descendants today. We are not astonished that they got out of their numerous scrapes—even that exhilarating day when they got drunk in the ditch —without any loss of real selfrespect. They are not expected even to be very fond of their parents, much less to “swarm” them in the sickly fashion of the “Elsie” school later, for one prayer given them is “that we will not want to shun our .parents’ company as our sinful hearts would bid us do.” Drunkenness in ditches and avoidance of fathers and mothers were expected of unregenerate young persons when left to- their own devices. To-day, not Satan, but the racial mind is blamed for this; but in both cases the excuse is accepted. I do not think that the little Fairchilds really disliked the regularity and placidity ef their days, interspersed though they wore with “five prayers a day and sometimes more,” as they told the worldly baronet’s children. Between then and now lyw grown the notion that children really like running wild, or that, anyway, they are plants that grow better rather untended, and all the rest of it. Such ideas were common twenty years ago. In theory we still hold them to some extent, but in practice we are back to the Fairchild Family again, for what are our organised games and constant scheduling of a child’s time (as if he were a man of business) but the old, old idea that children aro not quite fit to be left alone. Formerly Qiey were not fit to be loft with one another—the little Fairchilds must wulk separijjely in the garden of a Sunday. To-day is rather that a child is not fit to be Ut to himself.

“It s to keep us from thinking too much about what we shouldn’t think about,” said frankly to me one girl when we were discussing compulsory hockey. Though this idea is not often expressed, it does influence to a certain extent thosw systematised schools and organised sports, which are truly parallel with the systematised home* and organised nurseries of the early century a hundred years ago. That a child should be early faced with reality is another ideal to which we have

come back, though, of course, as in other points, with a difference. The Fairchild had to face the reality of death. “You will have to see death and watch people die, so you cannot begin too early, says Mr Fairchild when inviting his little ones (the eldest is nine), “to see a corpse. You have never, I think, seen a corpse? “No, but we should like to see one, * says Lucy, always tho foremost. “It is a very terrible sight.” “I know, but we should like to see one. So the family turn out after tea, the children romping in front, their steps getting slower only as they approach old Roberts’s cottage. Appalling as such an incident may seem to us—who resent if school children must pass a building where an execution has taken place,—perhaps a still more modern generation than ours will see a likeness between this and our oft-repeated proposal to give children the “facts of life.” The facts of death, after all, may conceivably do them less harm.

When all is said, it may be that parents and writers of child literature are instinctively impelled to put forward tho ideas that will help them in the special world future that is before that age. Just behind this Fairchild family, and thousands of households like them, were the finished Napoleonic wars, the still remembered French Revolution, and some disorder in England, emphasising the evils that come from filial disobedience to the State and over individuality. To be modern then was to upheld regularity and order and obedience to “those placed in authority over us.” We, too, perhaps have been feeling the evil consequence of world-wide disorder, and are instinctively training our young people to self-control, team work, and organisation. Individuality is certainly followed to some extent, but in life the other ideals are prevailing, and literature no doubt will soon follow suit.