Fathers and Sons by H. H. Boyesen

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Oct 1, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 37.

Fathers and Sons.

By H. H. Boyesen

DURING a long career as a teacher, I have come in contact with several thousand young men, and with many of them I have had confidential chats. In this way I have occasionally gotten glimpses of home life which fairly appall me. In nine cases out of ten it is the same story. The father is too busy to look after his sons. He is at his business down town from nine or ten o'clock in the morning until five or six in the afternoon. He comes home for dinner, and, after having had his smoke, and a perfunctory chat with his family, he goes to his club and is invisible for the rest of the evening. He asks his son an occasional question about his college affairs, and scolds him if he spends too much money; but rarely makes an effort to influence him, to give a wholesome direction to his thought, or to point out to him the terrible consequence of vicious indulgence. He expects the young man to "sow his wild oats," perhaps, and thinks he had better explore life for himself, and reap the consequences of his youthful follies.

That this is in no sense a caricature of the fashionable father, every one who has more than a surface knowledge of New York society will readily admit. There are of course, even among the fashionable, many honorable exceptions, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule. The majority of them need an introduction to their own sons. They would be astonished to get a glimpse of the thoughts that live and thrive beneath the polished surface of the young gentlemen who sit opposite to them at the table. They would be startled (though they would have no right to be) at the frank cynicism of these disillusionized philosophers, at the sordid ideals which they profess to worship, at their superior contempt for all that humanity has, in the past, held sacred. If you talk with them, you discover, before long, that their one aim and object in life is to have "fun," and that, in that word, they include the whole catalogue of pleasures, from a base-ball match or a flirtation to a disgraceful debauch. If you tell them that they destroy themselves by such indulgences, and unfit themselves for all future usefulness, they smile and, in their hearts, pronounce you a milk-sop. Some of them will, with vulgar ostentation, tell you that they are rich enough to do what they choose; that they have no ambition to be useful; that they can see no harm in having "a good time" while they are young and capable of enjoyment.

Confessions of this kind, of which I have often been the depositary, have explained to me several social phenomena which before seemed puzzling. The frequent decline and disappearance of old American names in the business world, and the perpetual crowding out of the native element by German and Jewish firms, is unquestionably due to the inability of the generation born and nurtured in luxury to hold its own in the competition with the frugal and industrious foreigner. The son of the self-made man is, by his father's wealth, absolved from the necessity to work. The self-made man himself looks, perhaps, upon work, not as the blessing that it is, but as a more or less unpleasant means of realizing his ambitions; and he is happy in the thought that his son will not have to slave as he slaved in his youth.

Few will deny that this is a legitimate and natural pleasure; and provided the son is duly impressed with his responsibility as the possessor of a large fortune, and has by inheritance, or by education, acquired high and noble aims, his position will, in many respects, be more enviable than his father's. And yet, in spite of all factitious advantages which wealth brings him, he is, from a sociological point of view, to be deplored. The removal of the natural stimulus to work is a very questionable blessing. Just as a limb which is not exercised grows limp and feeble, so a brain which has no serious and absorbing labor deteriorates. Faculties which are not called into play are gradually dulled; latent energies, which are never aroused, languish and disappear. Instead of bequeathing an increased fund of moral and intellectual strength to the next generation, the luxurious man of leisure bequeaths less than he received. He is like the unfaithful servant whom his lord so severely condemned for hiding his talent in the ground, where it benefited no one.

The Russian author, Tourguéneff, in his famous novel, "Fathers and Sons," makes Arcaidi Kirsanoff say to his father, "You and I belong to different generations; therefore you cannot understand me;" and the father is represented as being greatly grieved at the thought of the distance which mentally separates them. I have heard American fathers express the same regret. "Young men are not nowadays what they were in my youth," is the refrain of a hundred lamentations at the degeneracy of the age.

But if, instead of deploring the inevitable, these same fathers would make an earnest effort to bridge the gulf which separates them from their children, they would find that the task is by no means so hopeless. If, instead of leaving the training of the children to their mother (who is, perhaps, not always a wise mother), or to hired teachers, they would sacrifice some hours from their clubs and interest themselves in the games, the lessons, and the general development of the young, they would be rewarded with a love and devotion which are a hundredfold more valuable than the insane pleasures of a club room.

The father who possesses his son's confidence is a happy father; and the son who has in his father an older friend and sympathetic counselor will rarely, if ever, go astray. Instead of insisting upon an undue degree of respect, which often produces distance and estrangement, let the father enter with hearty appreciation into his son's pursuits, and endeavor to guide him gently and imperceptibly, and to store his mind without didactic homilies, with reverence for all that is good, and abhorrence for all that is base. A certain degree of comradeship, so far from interfering with the proper respect, is more apt to deepen the mutual confidence and affection which are, after all, the only safe basis of the parental relation.

Herbert Spencer somewhere relates an imaginary conversation with a British farmer who had been attending a farmers' convention, at which the discussion had turned chiefly on the proper diet for pigs. Spencer asks him how he feeds his children. "The children," exclaims the farmer, contemptuously, "I leave the feeding of them to the women."

This is very à propos of the attitude of fathers to their offspring in general. Mentally as well as physically they "leave them to the women," and they are astounded if the children do not repay them for this indifference with affection and regard. The farmer probably looked upon the pigs as "business;" and, like the American merchant, took it for granted that business ought to take precedence before everything. But, after all, what is more serious business than the moral and physical welfare of those to whom the keeping of all that the parents hold precious—name, wealth, and position—is to be intrusted?

Would it not, then, be good economy to let the down-town business suffer a little, and devote the time thus saved to the cultivation of the mind and heart of him who before long may have the power to scatter the accumulated results of all this anxiety and toil to the four winds of heaven? On purely utilitarian grounds, then, as a matter of business, it would repay fathers to cultivate closer relations with their sons.—H. H. Boyesen, in the Congregationalist.