Friendships are safety-valves, and the wisdom of
safety-valves is easy to appreciate. All the same, these
intimacies must be regulated and conducted upon the
rules of civilised society. I love the young who wish to
fight conventionalities and turn and boldly face Mrs.
Grundy ; but I despise the old who do not help the young
to see that they are only making useless martyrs of them-
selves in a cause which is, at the bottom, not noble and
not great, but only a method of giving vent to their own
selfishness and self-indulgence. Before you fight con-
ventionality you must prove that conventionality is
wrong, and this can never be done by the young. To
deny friendships to natures that require them is to force
on them what Mr. Morley calls ' the awful loneliness of
life — a life full of acquaintances as a cake is full of
currants, no two ever touching each other.' It is one of
the great sorrows of a high position that people cannot
have intimates. Froude says somewhere : ' The great are
expected to be universally gracious, and universal
graciousness is perhaps only possible to the insincere
or the commonplace, or to the supremely great and
fortunate.'
We cannot give anyone our experience. This is a
common saying, and quite true from the point of view of
the old. Nevertheless, if the young determine, through
DAUGHTERS 337
independence or pride, to work out their lives for them-
selves, and refuse to be helped, guided, or taught by the
knowledge and experience of those who have gone before
them — in the books of the dead and the speaking of the
living — they throw themselves back in the race in a way
that generally, to my knowledge, has resulted in failure.
Even cases of marked talent and individuality must learn
from others. In art and in music they must all work, at
first, after the manner of someone else. Supposing, for
instance, that Albert Diirer had lived in Venice, he would
have been a Venetian painter, and not have worked on the
lines of the old German painters. This would have been
greatly to his advantage. It is true that circumstances do
not make talent, but they immensely influence it; so
nothing in the lives and training of the young who are
no longer children, especially if they are precocious and
clever, is unimportant.
On looking back, one of the disappointments of my
life, when I recollect how the matter was discussed and
written about in my girlhood, is the little progress that
has been made in the laying-by and organising of
fortunes for girls. I do not only mean leaving them a
few thousand pounds at the death of both parents, but,
as a matter of course, either giving them a sum of money,
as the French do, when they marry, or giving them a
sufficient allowance, according to the fortunes of the
father, if they take to any employment and do not marry.
The modern hack phrase, that children owe their parents
nothing for bringing them into the world without their
leave, is of course ridiculous ; but I do think a right-
minded father ought to realise that a woman who has
not a penny she can call her own, is a kind of
slave. The same thing applies to a husband if a wife
goes to him with nothing. She cannot even give a
present without asking him for the money, I think
338 POT-POURRI FROM A SURREY GARDEN
Page 199
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Friendships are safety-valves, and the wisdom of
safety-valves is easy to appreciate. All the same, these
intimacies must be regulated and conducted upon the
rules of civilised society. I love the young who wish to
fight conventionalities and turn and boldly face Mrs.
Grundy ; but I despise the old who do not help the young
to see that they are only making useless martyrs of them-
selves in a cause which is, at the bottom, not noble and
not great, but only a method of giving vent to their own
selfishness and self-indulgence. Before you fight con-
ventionality you must prove that conventionality is
wrong, and this can never be done by the young. To
deny friendships to natures that require them is to force
on them what Mr. Morley calls ' the awful loneliness of
life — a life full of acquaintances as a cake is full of
currants, no two ever touching each other.' It is one of
the great sorrows of a high position that people cannot
have intimates. Froude says somewhere : ' The great are
expected to be universally gracious, and universal
graciousness is perhaps only possible to the insincere
or the commonplace, or to the supremely great and
fortunate.'
We cannot give anyone our experience. This is a
common saying, and quite true from the point of view of
the old. Nevertheless, if the young determine, through
DAUGHTERS 337
independence or pride, to work out their lives for them-
selves, and refuse to be helped, guided, or taught by the
knowledge and experience of those who have gone before
them — in the books of the dead and the speaking of the
living — they throw themselves back in the race in a way
that generally, to my knowledge, has resulted in failure.
Even cases of marked talent and individuality must learn
from others. In art and in music they must all work, at
first, after the manner of someone else. Supposing, for
instance, that Albert Diirer had lived in Venice, he would
have been a Venetian painter, and not have worked on the
lines of the old German painters. This would have been
greatly to his advantage. It is true that circumstances do
not make talent, but they immensely influence it; so
nothing in the lives and training of the young who are
no longer children, especially if they are precocious and
clever, is unimportant.
On looking back, one of the disappointments of my
life, when I recollect how the matter was discussed and
written about in my girlhood, is the little progress that
has been made in the laying-by and organising of
fortunes for girls. I do not only mean leaving them a
few thousand pounds at the death of both parents, but,
as a matter of course, either giving them a sum of money,
as the French do, when they marry, or giving them a
sufficient allowance, according to the fortunes of the
father, if they take to any employment and do not marry.
The modern hack phrase, that children owe their parents
nothing for bringing them into the world without their
leave, is of course ridiculous ; but I do think a right-
minded father ought to realise that a woman who has
not a penny she can call her own, is a kind of
slave. The same thing applies to a husband if a wife
goes to him with nothing. She cannot even give a
present without asking him for the money, I think
338 POT-POURRI FROM A SURREY GARDEN