Note 214 — Chapter XIV · THE ATTITUDE OF PARENTS TO CHILDREN

It may be well to bear in mind in this connection Mr. Bernard Shaw's striking words from his brilliant essay on Parents and Children (the whole of which deserves most careful reading). On the subject of marriage from the point of view of the parents, he writes with his usual penetration and with a generous understanding of the real difficulties of the situation:—"Take a very common instance of this agonizing incompatibility" (between the point of view of parents and that of the children). "A widow brings up her son to manhood. He meets a strange woman, goes off with and marries her, leaving his mother desolate. It does not occur to him that this is at all hard on her; he does it as a matter of course, and actually expects his mother to receive on terms of special affection, the woman for whom she has been abandoned. If he shewed any sense of what he was doing, any remorse; if he mingled his tears with hers, and asked her not to think too hardly of him because he had obeyed the inevitable destiny of a man to leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, she could give him her blessing and accept her bereavement with dignity and without reproach. But the man never dreams of such considerations. To him his mother's feeling in the matter, when she betrays it, is unreasonable, ridiculous and even odious, as shewing a prejudice against his adorable bride.

"I have taken the widow as an extreme and obvious case; but there are many husbands and wives who are tired of their consorts, or disappointed in them, or estranged from them by infidelities; and these parents, in losing a son or a daughter through marriage, may be losing everything they care for. No parent's love is as innocent as the love of a child; the exclusion of all conscious sexual feeling from it does not exclude the bitterness, jealousy, and despair at loss which characterize sexual passion; in fact, what is called a pure love may easily be more selfish and jealous than a carnal one. Anyhow, it is plain matter of fact that naively selfish people sometimes try with fierce jealousy to prevent their children marrying." p. XXXVIII.