II
THE TWIG
Table of Contents As I said one day to the Professor-
But first I must tell you about the Professor. She is a young woman-young even in an era that classes authors among the "younger writers" until they are sixty, and is pushing the "proper age at which to marry" into the period of severe and undebatable maturity. She is young, but she exemplifies that educated precocity tolerated and fostered by our era. She knows the past like a book and the present like a man. She does not vulgarly bristle with knowledge like the first products of the higher education. Her acquirements sit upon her less like starched linen than like a silken gown that flows with the figure. She is the educated woman in her "second manner," as the art critics would say. I do not know what the educated woman's third manner will be. No one acquainted with the charms of the Professor could help hoping that there never would be any.
The Professor graduated and post-graduated. She pottered in laboratories, and at certain intervals wholly disappeared into the very abysses of science. She read law tentatively, and made a feint at going into medicine, but was deterred in each case, I fancy, by the fact, repugnant to her exuberant energy, that a practice had to grow and could not be mastered ready made. At one time there were both hopes and fears that she would enter the ministry. Those who hoped banked on her earnestness and wisdom. Those who feared quailed before her ruthless independence and sense of humor. She delighted in the paradox of not scorning social life, welcoming Emerson's admonition with regard to solitude and society by keeping her head in one and her hands in the other. Indeed, she dances remarkably well when we consider that here the dexterity is so far removed from the brain, and I have seen her swim like-a mermaid, I suppose. She took a long course in cookery for the pleasure of more pungently abusing certain of her lecture audiences. One day when the plumbers didn't come I saw her actually "wipe a joint" in lead pipe with her own hands. Heaven knows where she picked that up!
When she accepted the position at the Academy, doubtless it was with a view to certain liberties of action in the sociological direction. She was not quite through with the college settlement idea, and I suspect that she had a feeling that city politics at close range might be productive to her in certain ways. Because she is neither erratic nor formidable, she has experienced various offers of marriage, and has shed them all without visible disturbance. Just at present, panoplied in learning, tingling with modernity, yet always charmingly unconscious of her power, she stands, poised and easy, like a sparrow on a live wire.
In other words the Professor is one of those rare women with whom you may enjoy the delights of a purely impersonal quarrel. She can wrangle affectionately and cleave you in twain with a tender sisterly smile. Indeed, she can make you feel of intellectual fisticuffs, and, notwithstanding an occasional effect of too greatly accentuated excitement, that it is, on the whole, a superior pleasure. And you arise again conscious that she has no greater immediate grudge against you than against St. Paul or any other of her historical opponents.
One day I asked the Professor, not with any controversial inflection, what she thought of Herbert Spencer, a bachelor, talking about the rearing of children.
"Well," said the Professor, "it certainly is no more absurd than the spectacle of Herbert Spencer analyzing love, or Ernest Renan doing the same thing."
"Mind you," I went on, "I don't say that the unmarried may not discuss with entire competency-"
"I hope not," interrupted the Professor. "I hope you wouldn't say any such absurd thing. Must a man have robbed a bank to write intelligently of penology?"
"My point is," I went on-the Professor and I never take the slightest offence at each other's interruptions-"my point is that it almost seems at times as if the unmarried should, in such an emergency, assume, if they did not feel, a certain diffidence. To tell you the truth, Professor, if it were not for you, I should doubt whether the unmarried had a developed sense of humor."
"That is simply pitiful," flung the Professor. "Can you not see that it is a sense of humor that keeps many people from marrying? But that is not the point. Who is better fitted than Mr. Spencer, who has enjoyed freedom from an entangling alliance, who is unbiased by social situation or personal obligation, to discuss with scientific judiciality the problems of child-rearing?"
"Theoretically, Professor, that is all right. But when Mr. Spencer advises more sugar, it is awfully hard to forget that Mr. Spencer never, presumably never, sat up nights with a youngster who had the toothache. It is all very well for Mr. Spencer to suggest that when a child craves more sugar it probably needs more sugar, but the parent who manages his offspring on that basis is going to lose sleep. A good rule, if you will permit me a platitude, is a rule that works. The way that children should be brought up is the way they can be brought up."
"My friend," said the Professor-
Now, I am several years older than the Professor. By sheer age I am entitled to her deference; but the Professor can ignore years as well as sex or previous condition of servitude. Her impersonality is adjusted to time, to space, and to matter. I am simply a Person.
"My friend," said the Professor, "it is another platitude that there is a right way to do everything, even to bring up children. The way children are brought up probably is not right, and no theory or method of bringing them up is, of course, or could be more than relatively right. But in getting as near the right as we humanly may there is no wisdom in despising the advice of the spectator. The man digging a hole in the ground may be less competent than a man not in the hole to perceive that presently the earth is going to cave in. As a matter of fact, old maids, for example, have been known to bring up children very well indeed, for the reason, possibly, that nothing is more detrimental to successful authority over children than relationship to them. All experience shows that the scientific, the abstract management of children is more successful, in the average, than the traditional parental method. This scientific method, I need not say, is not less kindly than the other; it actually is more kindly. Witness the absolute triumph of kindergartens-"
"Now, Professor," I interposed, foreseeing the spectacle of Froebel and Plato moving down arm-in-arm between the Professor's periods, "understand me-"
"A very difficult thing at times," she murmured.
"Understand me-I am speaking now with my eye on the American child."
"And that," twinkled the Professor, "requires some dexterity."
"The American child," I pursued, "is accused by many of threatening our destruction, and if the American view of rearing children is wrong or requires modification, this radical suggestion of Mr. Spencer, looking to greater rather than less liberty in making terms with the instincts of children, becomes a matter for serious concern. If the American idea has stood for anything it is more sugar-that is to say, yielding something to the instinct, the personality of the child. I think we have gone a long way with it. Our children are becoming very self-possessed. Sometimes I have qualms. Take the American girl child-"
"A vast subject," commented the Professor.
"The American girl child is getting a good deal of sugar-figuratively. The question comes, Is it good for her? Is her freedom, her undomestic training, her intellectual development, to the advantage of the race? I believe with Mr. Ruskin that you can't make a girl lovely unless you make her happy. But how can we expect her to know what will make her happy? Aren't you afraid, Professor, that she is becoming a trifle frivolous? Of course you yourself are a living contradiction-"
"Don't try to deceive me," warned the Professor. "I perceive in what you say, not the doubts of an incipient cynic, but the remorse of a doting and indulgent man. Most really typical American men are in the same situation. They are wondering if they haven't overdone it, and, being too busy to find out for themselves, are eager for outside judgment, upon which they may act, de jure. The vice of the American man is his indulgence of the American girl. The foreigner commiseratingly thinks that the American girl demands this indulgence. The American man in his secret soul knows that he has pampered her for his own pleasure, and because, to a busy man, pampering is easier than regulating."
"Yes," I complained, "in the new paradise Adam is always to blame."
"No," protested the Professor, "not always; just humanly often. And don't think that you have invented this modern anxiety for the welfare of girl children. Before and since 'L'Éducation des Filles,' they all have been 'harping on my daughter.' Women have been even more despairing than men. Hannah More thought that 'the education of the present race of females' was 'not very favorable to domestic happiness.' Mrs. Stowe thought 'the race of strong, hearty, graceful girls' was daily decreasing, and that in its stead was coming 'the fragile, easily fatigued, languid girls of the modern age, drilled in book learning and ignorant in common things.' Now that sort of...
