Pot-pourri from a Surrey garden

When parents are the energetic, hard-working ones, let them remember a passage in a letter of Madame de StaeTs, whose biography is so interesting because she represents in a large sense what most women are in a smaller. She writes from England in 1813 : — ' II n'y a point de ressources dans mes enfants; ils sont e'teints, singulier effet de ma flamme.' So often children by their very natures are only contrasts to ourselves. What our children are born, they remain ; of that I am sure. By this I mean that there are certain qualities of character which we can no more change than we can alter the colour of the hair and eyes. What we can do is to help each one to make the best of what he or she actually is, still better said by an old saint, ' Do not try to be not what you are, but very well what you are ! ' DAUGHTERS 335 How many years ago it is since John Stuart Mill wrote : ' When will education consist, not in repressing any mental faculty or power, from the uncontrolled action of which danger is apprehended, but in training up to its proper strength the corrective and antagonistic power ? ' This is only very old wisdom in other words, as it is Aristotle who says that true virtue is placed at an equal distance between the opposite vices. This quoting the wisdom of others you perhaps will think very cheap philosophy. It is better, however, than trying, like Sydney Smith, to write a book of maxims, and failing to do so, as he himself says he never got further than the following : ' Towards the age of forty, women get tired of being virtuous and men of being honest.' I must, all the same, admit that there are many less true sayings than this one. A tendency of the present day is towards a kind of hardness — at any rate, outwardly. It is not the fashion to be low-spirited, and for a woman to cry in public is thought a shame. I confess I think there is a certain danger in the cultivation of qualities in women that bring forth a sort of glittering brightness which gives out light, not heat, and therefore fails to warm. Perhaps this suppres- sion is the very thing that helps to encourage one of the well-known complications of family life — namely, friend- ships. The difficulty follows us through life, as we all know how hard it often is to appreciate our friends' friends. This, however, is not of much importance, as the friends of our friends we can more or less avoid without discourtesy. But with the friends of our near relations the matter assumes considerable importance, and we absolutely owe it to them to treat their friends with extreme courtesy and kindness, however little may be our sympathy towards them, or however critically we may judge them. 336 POT-POURRI FROM A SURREY GARDEN Some people are born without what Mr. George Meredith so well describes as ' the gift of intimacy.' They would be reserved, even in love, the only key that ever unlocks such hearts. Friendships they have none, either with their own sex or with the other. No doubt life is simpler to such people ; to others it would be unbearably lonely. There are a few women who would have been very glad of friends, but whose loyalty to the disloyal around them forces them into loneliness and silence, for there is no friendship in the world without confidence.