Essay No. 13
Endure Hardness
BY
The Rev. and Hon. E. Lyttelton, M.A.
Headmaster of Eton College.
IT is not disputable that a general forgetfulness of St. Paul's precept to Timothy has prevailed recently among all classes of society, and especially in the matter of training boys. Or, if not forgotten, the precept has been vaguely thought of as suitable to other days and other people, but not as a truth vitally necessary to all healthy growth.
We have read, possibly, the admirable booklet, "On Pain," by James Hinton, and have cordially assented to his teaching that an ingredient of pain is necessary to all healthy pleasure; such as fatigue and some hardship to mountain-climbing. But to what does this principle point ?
Not only to the need for a capacity in every man for bearing hardship, in case the need should arise —indeed, many young men say truly they don't see how it can arise in their case—but it points to a certain idea of life which must be planted early or it may never take root at all. Further, it reminds us that every kind of endeavour, if not Prosecuted beyond the point where resistance is first encountered,
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is sure to be nearly fruitless. I will briefly treat of these two points in order.
1. A certain idea of life. According as a child has been led to feel life as a uniformly soft, pleasant thing, or as a thing in which pleasure and pain alternate according to law, he will grow up either as a self-indulgent man or as one who "uses law lawfully." The amount of selfishness "around us and within " is, of course, the essence of the evil we have to combat ; and it has reached a gross bulk by the time a youth is twenty, if up to that time his life has been ordered so as to yield a prevailing impression of things being generally arranged to please him. And this is exactly the impression that apparently is stamped upon a very large number of our young men's minds by the experiences they have undergone through childhood and boyhood at the present day. They resent anything like hardness, as if it were their undeniable prerogative to be quit of it, or they genially and pleasantly shirk it. Hence the many good instincts within them are perverted. Instead of simply asking themselves where they are needed for their country's good, they occupy themselves in avoiding hardness, and fancy they are acting unselfishly in teaching their children to do the same.
2. Fruitlessness of endeavour. We are all of us faced with a fact which requires to be learnt, and it takes a long discipline to learn it. It is that, as a rule, any undertaking begins to be useful just
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where it ceases to be simply pleasant. It is pleasant to read a new book which tells us new things; but it is unpleasant to read it again and painfully note its information and reflect on its new thoughts. Yet, if we stop short of this effort nearly all the good of reading the book at all is lost. Again, we embark on some scheme for bettering the condition of our fellow-men. Before long we encounter the constantly fresh surprise of human prejudice and stupidity. The resistance is considerable, and it is always possible to yield to the maxim that nothing can be done till the psychological moment has arrived; so we assume it has not, and fold the hands again. That means that the initial steps to carry out our design are wasted. If we wish really to better anything or anybody we must push on and overcome resistance; the resistance of stupendous crassness, either in ourselves or others, or probably in both. But overcoming resistance means enduring hardness. And that is just what our modern training has managed to banish from the lives of the young.
This result, I verily believe, is a triumph of the Evil One, because it is a supreme instance of the spoiling of a beautiful thing, parental love. We have been deceived by the arch Deceiver into showing love to our children by humouring them. Suppose we change our ideas and aim at showing them how to overcome unpleasantness of all kinds by the power of a great hope, how vast the difference would be !
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Now, that hope must be based on experience. Life ought to give each child a succession of rewards emerging out of unpromising incidents through effort. If something is wrong with the summerhouse, let the first thought be whether it is possible for the heir to the property to put it right, unaided. If not, then with the minimum of help. So with the trout-stream and the bicycle and the gun, and, above all, the picnic. Sympathy is never superfluous, nor encouragement, but the one fatal thing is to ring and tell the butler to do the job for the child. So it is when in the holidays there comes on a bout of vile weather—nothing more trying—but it may be actually beneficial if the whole household recognises the need of diverting the boy's enjoyment from lawn tennis to some useful work indoors; either making something or reading hard, or seeing that his very juvenile brother is not bored.
If parents' love is of the sort to insist on these things being done, they will be done, and the home life will be a perpetual training in expecting good and happy result from making efforts, instead of shirking them. Nor can this hope be based on edifying talk ; it must be the outgrowth of experience.
How enormous is the influence to be overcome in remedying a too easy fashion of home training, the following extract from a remarkable book may, serve to show.
In his "Social Life at Rome," Dr. Warde Fowler
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traces the deadly effect of Slavery in the hardening of the ordinary Roman against the appeal of widespread suffering. In the case of even the best men, "to disregard misery except when they found it among the privileged classes, had become second nature to them." He then proceeds to remark that, "we can better realise this if we reflect even at the present day, in spite of the absence of slavery and the presence of philanthropical societies, the average man of wealth gives hardly more than a passing thought to the discomfort and distress of the crowded population of our great cities."
If this is approximately true at a time when the claims of patriotic service are loudly and persistently enforced, is it not pretty clear that we have to reckon with a deep delusion as to the meaning of home ? We have to take note that if Englishmen are not to be in one sense hard, that is callous, they must be trained to endure hardness as good soldiers of Christ.
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