Early Influences
Editor’s Note, by Art Middlekauff
In 1929, the PNEU published a small hardcover book entitled Children and the Stress of Life, composed of chapters by Dr. Helen Webb. I was thrilled when I finally got to see this little volume in 2023. Dr. Webb was one of Charlotte Mason’s oldest friends and was endearingly referred to by Mason as “BP,” or “Beloved Physician.” The opening page of the book includes this explanation:
The following papers were originally the substance of lectures given to P.N.E.U. audiences…
Helen Webb’s constant striving was to help parents to respect the personality and the powers of a child…
“She treats the baby with such respect” was her highest praise of a nurse; “He does it with such dignity” of a few months’ old baby. Who would associate respect and dignity with little children but a true child-lover and one whose wisdom and understanding and love were brought to the service of the little children.
There is as much need for Helen Webb’s teaching now as ever and it is hoped that the reprinting of these lectures may help and inspire many generations of parents.
The Foreword of the book was written by Dr. Greville MacDonald, son of the well-known writer George MacDonald. MacDonald knew Webb well and praised her highly:
Although her mind was a veritable text-book of all a wise physician should know of medicine and hygiene, as well as of psychology even in its shallow new nomenclature, it was always dominated by her intrepid spiritual faith. Nor must it be forgotten that this her faith scanned the whole universe quite fearlessly. Little perhaps as she would have accepted the word, she was as much poet as woman of science. To her, Beauty was infinitely real… In spite of her technical mind being as precise and correct as an authorized text-book, she would have us realize how dangerous education may be when built up only upon academic knowledge—medical or artistic, to mention the two extremes; and this just because it may tempt us to belittle what can never be defined in physical law or scholastic formula.
MacDonald then predicted that “all who are concerned in children’s welfare, will read again and again—lest they forget any smallest point—Dr. Webb’s teachings.”
The seventh chapter of the book is entitled “Early Influences,” and it was published multiple times in The Parents’ Review, in 1910, 1939, and 1953. However, though it sheds much light on Charlotte Mason’s understanding of habit, it has not yet been accessible to modern readers. Today we change that. I hope you enjoy this fine piece by the “Beloved Physician” of the PNEU.
by Helen Webb
Children and the Stress of Life, pp. 77-87
“Who knows the individual hour in which
His habits first were sown, even as a seed?”
The more we think over the question of habit the more we realise what an important part it plays in all our lives. Habits begin to form in the first acts of existence, and as life takes up the infant and shapes it into the man, this is the chief power with which she accomplishes her task. In infancy we grow an abundant crop of habits, in childhood more. The boys and girls in their teens are busy at it, and after twenty some of the most important habits of life are formed. Those belonging to each stage of life have, speaking generally, some broad characteristics of their own. The habits which are developed in infancy are greatly physical; in childhood and youth personal, while between twenty and thirty the man tends to take the stamp of his profession or calling. Each season of life thus becomes an opportunity for some special kind of development, and if that time is missed, one doubts if the lost opportunity is ever really regained. At the best the work of one period, even if possible in the future, is done less well, and at the expense of something else which is the rightful business of the later time. Moments have gone past which we can never seize again. Do you know the Greek epigram on the hastening statue of Opportunity? I always think of it in connection with chances missed:—
“Who art thou?
Opportunity, the master of all things.
Why are thou on tiptoe raised?
I am for ever onwards.
Why is thy hair all in front?
For him who meets me to seize.
And why behind bald-headed?
When once with my winged feet I have fled by a man,
never then, though greatly desiring, will he follow
and catch me up.
“And wherefore has thy sculptor made thee?
For thy sake, O Stranger, as a lesson to thee he has set
me up beside the doors.”
“Habit,” says Professor James, “is the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and preserves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to live therein. It keeps the fisherman and the deck-hand at sea during the winter; it holds the miner in his darkness, and nails the countryman to his log cabin and his lonely farm through all the months of snow; it protects us from invasion by the nations of the desert and the frozen zone. It dooms us all to fight out the battles of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted, and it is too late to begin again.”
* * * * *
“Already at the age of twenty-five you see the mannerisms settling down on the young commercial traveller, on the young doctor, on the young minister, and the young councillor-at-law. You see the little lines of cleavage running through the character, the tricks of thought, the prejudices, the ways of the “shop” in a word, from which the man can by and by no more escape than his coat-sleeve can suddenly fall into a new set of folds.”
* * * * *
“If the period between twenty and thirty is the critical one in the formation of intellectual and professional habits, the period below twenty is more important still for the fixing of personal habits, properly so called, such as vocalisation and pronunciation, gesture, motion and address. Hardly ever is a language, learnt after twenty, spoken without a foreign accent; hardly ever can a youth, transferred to the society of his betters, unlearn the nasality or other vices of speech bred in him by the association of his growing years. Hardly ever indeed, no matter how much money there may be in his pocket can he even learn to dress like a gentleman born. … An invisible law, as strong as gravitation, keeps him within his orbit, arrayed this year as he was last; and how his better-bred acquaintances continue to get the things they wear will be a mystery to him till his dying day.”
Still earlier in life, while a child is quite little, other large groups of personal habits are formed, but chief at this period come those which may be called merely vegetative habits, and which are necessary to physical well being. These latter are extremely important, as their normal establishment means that the processes of life will be carried on without hitch. Happy is that country which has no history, and happy is that baby which feeds and sleeps regularly without stomach ache or irritable nerves, because its habits of body are in good working order. The child in whom are early mechanicalised all the little things of every day which are better done regularly without our conscious attention, has made the first firm step on the path of life. The great thing is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy; to fund and capitalise our acquisitions and live at ease upon the interest of the fund. “For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are disadvantageous to us as we should guard against the plague.” The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. “There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual, but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising, and of going to bed every day, the beginning of every bit of fresh work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding or regretting of matters that ought to be so engrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all.”
How, now, does all this come about, and by reason of what properties of our nature does the pressure of life so mould us?
We recognise habit as the result of tendencies which have in some way become so strongly impressed upon the nervous system, and the resulting life processes of the individual as to have been transformed into second nature, or even (as has been often said), into “ten natures.” Such actions, and even thoughts, have become so mechanical as to be easier to do than to leave undone, and not infrequently give rise to no conscious impression. Some association starts the process, which immediately takes the path of least resistance through the nervous system and results in an appropriate action.
In the formation of any habit we recognise two elements:—
(1) An inspiration which starts the habit.
(2) Frequent repetition which confirms it.
These two may bear very varying proportions to each other, and it is a most interesting study to trace their mutual relation in different instances, and individuals. The inspiring idea is like a quickening spirit, frequent repetition like a matter-of-fact body.
In the formation of the physical habits of extreme youth repetition is the preponderating element. Indeed, to find the inspiration in these is like looking for a needle in a bundle of straw—and probably not finding it. The inspiration here is not infrequently some inbred instinct, an influence from the generations behind us, or even from the early history of our race. A preponderance of repetition is a necessity in all those habits which involve the education of muscular co-ordination. Take a common example. The desire to write as beautifully as someone else may be a really inspiring idea, one which will give the child perseverance to carry him through all difficulties. It cannot, however, bridge over the time which must be spent in becoming expert in the management of the pen or pencil, and learning to shape the letters nicely; practice alone can accomplish this. The same may be said of learning to play on any musical instrument, or even when one is very little, of becoming skilful in eating one’s dinner properly with a knife and fork.
Another kind of habit on the other hand, may be formed by some strong impression or idea which at the time results in one action. There may be no repetition, and yet the act may repeat itself quite involuntarily long after, if similar circumstances arise. For instance, I remember a little boy of five going to a wood full of daffodils. His mother said, “Let us run and see who will get first to the daffodils.” Two years later, he went to a field of wild daffodils with some little cousins, and although he had never in the interval seen the flowers growing in this way he at once said, “Come, Harry, let us run and see who will get first to the daffodils. That’s what we always do in our family.”
Again, a strong impression made by some event which changes the whole aspect of life may suddenly inaugurate a new set of habits and actions. Such sudden conversions to some fresh view of life, or aspect of thought (of which the onlooker have seen little promise) show that where the inspiring idea falls upon a mental background ready to select and receive it, practically no repetition may be needed to make it a full-fledged habit of mind. It shows that the accumulated unconscious impressions which preceded the special one, have prepared so good a soil that the latter can take deep and immediate root.
You may remember the Archbishop of Canterbury’s words in Shakespeare’s Henry V.:—
“The courses of his youth promised it not,
The breath no sooner left his father’s body,
But that his wildness, mortified in him,
Seemed to die too: yea, at that very moment,
Consideration, like an angel, came
And whipped the offending Adam out of him,
Leaving his body as a paradise
To envelope and contain celestial spirits.
Never was such a sudden scholar made;
Never came reformation in a flood
With such a heady current, scouring faults;
Nor never Hydra-headed wilfulness
So soon did lose his zeal, and all at once,
As in this King.”
In some of our own habits we can look back to the moment of conception, when the inspiring idea came to us from a phrase in a book, the expression of some other person’s opinion, or from some object in our surroundings upon which our eyes rested. In each such case we have at that moment perceived something to which our minds had hitherto been closed. Can we not all for instance recall something like this: A young person hears an older companion, whom he greatly reveres, say, “Did you ever know such a thing, So-and-So always does such-and-such; isn’t it disgusting?” The hearer knows in his heart that he, too, always does it. He makes some lame reply, but never again repeats the terrible action; the seed has fallen on good ground. Or it may be like Brother Lawrence, who on looking at a tree where the leaves were returning in the Spring, and which he had before noticed to be bare, became so impressed thereby with the love and power of God, that he lived ever after a holy and unselfish life. In the majority of instances, however, we cannot so distinguish the moment of inspiration, and this is especially the case when frequent repetition has been the main factor in building the habit, and subsequent impressions have obliterated the memory of the “first time.”
There are several practical points related to habit which from time to time force themselves upon us. We all know instances of young people in whom unsatisfactory habits have developed at home, where the parents, not having succeeded in their efforts to prepare a son or daughter for life, send him or her away to other surroundings. They hope thereby to counteract unsatisfactory habits which have grown up, they know not how, and to fill gaps in natures which have remained empty, they know not why. We know too, the disappointment so often felt, when the girl or boy (having won golden opinions and high praise in the new environment), on returning home to the old surroundings immediately resumes all the old unsatisfactory ways and reverts exactly to the same condition which led to the short banishment. This difficulty has been called the “local” character of habit, because the explanation of the catastrophe is that local conformity not in harmony with the child’s nature, and exercised for a very short time, is not the same thing as growth of character. In such a case the repetition factor has been very limited, and there has most likely been an almost total lack of inspiring idea. We see the same thing in children sent from poor and miserable surroundings to workhouse schools. They are there surrounded with repetition ad nauseam, but with hardly a scrap of inspiration to give vitality to the daily occupation. The moment they return to squalid homes they take again to dirt as a fish does to water.
The unsatisfactory young man or woman, however, who goes abroad to the Colonies, and stays there, especially if he goes willingly and with interest in an unknown future, and who remains long enough to allow habits of idleness, etc., to atrophy, and be replaced by those of industry, is not likely to show any signs of recurring to his old ways when he comes, years after to visit his old home. He has found plenty both of inspiration and of repetition, and localised his habits in a new situation. He has even had time and experience to weave a halo of memory round the old home, and build the thought of it all into what is most sacred to him.
Habits which parents desire in their children often fail to become formed because of cross currents of natural interest, which neutralise artificial or weak inspiration. Other habits again, are feeble and wither away like the seed on the rock, because they are started by a borrowed thought which had not really been understood. This last evil is one of the inevitable results, if undue personal influence is exercised by those, who have charge of the young. The evil is liable to arise where schwärmerei gives the thoughts, wishes or opinions of some other human being such undue importance that they are adopted as a whole, without being understood, simply from admiration, or to please the beloved person. This wholesale adoption of foreign thought has none of the healthy force of a true inspiring idea, and seldom has the power to give rise directly to habit or become incorporated for good into character.
I remember a lady once telling me of her work in a parish where she obtained great influence, reforming drunkards and thieves, reconciling husbands and wives, and having many other social successes, of which she felt she might be reasonably proud. After a time her health, very naturally, broke down and she had to give up her work. Everybody came to say good-bye, and lament her departure, and nearly all expressed themselves in much the same spirit, saying, “Oh, Miss, now I shall never be able to keep from the drink when you are gone,” or “Molly and I shall never be able to pull along when you are not here to say a word to us,” etc., etc., and what was worse, when she had left, these prophecies in great part became true. The devils entered in, and the second state of that parish was much worse than the first. This all gave my friend such a horror of personal influence, that she resolved that never again would she lend herself to such methods of reform. It is, however, for us a most typical and instructive story. She had not realised to what an extent these people were simply acting differently in order to please her, instead of as a result of higher and more permanent ideals, which would become incorporated into their lives, and strengthen them for the battle of life; and that they had merely been inspired to efforts which, when she had left them, were bound to collapse.
None of this applies to little children; it is quite different with them; and the motive that will as a rule give most inspiration is the personal pleasure of those around them. For permanence of habit in them one relies chiefly upon the repetition factor. Not infrequently a mother thinks that her little girl has special housewifery tastes, because she makes herself useful about the house, when in reality what the child cares for is to please her mother or have things as her father likes them. If any day she felt that something else would bring her more kudos from them, she would very likely turn to that instead of her dusting and tidying.
Quite different from undue “personal influence,” and as strengthening and helpful as the other is enervating, is the true and vitalising inspiration which a fine personality sheds around it. Everyone carries with him something which affects his neighbour, which may be acceptable to one and antagonistic to another. But from the man or woman of single purpose, who lives his own life faithfully, this something flows as a stream of inspiration to others, which can neither be measured nor counted, and which he himself can even less than others realise and estimate. It is something by which those whom it concerns are helped on, as they are by the air or sunlight which surrounds them. It works into their fibre and builds itself into their lives as unrecognisably as the food renews the strength of their bodies. Those, in short, who exercise reticence and who really reverence the individuality of others are alone safe inspirers for the rest of the world.
Let us also have humility and realise that it is not always easy to know what is best for a fellow creature, even if that fellow creature is our own child.
It is well known from the analysis of different kinds of plants that one prefers one kind of soil, and another another, that what peas will flourish upon is not so good for the cabbage; and that the turnip, the onion and the strawberry each makes use of special ingredients. The same applies to the variety of flowers which grow in our gardens. Though this is so, you may have noticed that if, in order to prepare for some newly arrived plant which one has never before cultivated and which one wishes to grow successfully, one takes down a gardener’s Encyclopaedia, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the paragraph on the cultivation of the particular plant in question begins with the advice to “prepare a good garden loam by digging deeply in a well drained situation, with an aspect which has a good proportion of sun daily.” Most vegetation will flourish in such a spot, although one thing may need an excess of phosphates and another must have potash or soda, etc., etc. They all flourish there, because the good loam, aerated by the deep digging, warmed by the sun, and watered by the rain (which the good drainage prevents from lying too long about the roots) provides everything needed by all the plants. One finds its excess of potash, and another its soda; the phosphates and carbonates are ready for those that want them, while those that have no use for one or the other can leave it alone.
In like manner, as every child is a person and a different person, even those born of the same parents in the same circumstances have different needs. We cannot know their inmost requirements, even as well as we do those of the plants, for we cannot reduce the children’s minds to ashes and weigh the elements. All we can do is to supply their intellects and souls with things comparable to the good garden loam, warmed by the sunshine of love and cheerfulness, and let them draw their own nourishment and form their own mental and intellectual habits. There is a little more we can do for the plants; we can set them at right distances apart, or even in ordered rows, when it is a question of vegetable gardens, and give others as much training and support as they need of whatever kind best suits them. When children have to become part of an organised society such as we live in to-day, they, too, need training and schooling, but as the plants each find what they need in the flower beds, so children with their strong powers of imitation, and their naturally conservative outlook, find in any healthy mental atmosphere much that we are quite unconscious of supplying to them.
As the selective power of the mind differs enormously in different individuals, so it varies greatly between the child and the adult. Impressions on young brains are both stronger and weaker than on those of older people, but the selection of inspiring ideas is quite different. This will always be greatly influenced by the mental background and form of experience upon which the idea falls, and how can we (with our complicated consciousness modified by contact with many sides of life) estimate how any new sight or thought will affect a fresh young mind? When memories, in one’s own case, have passed through the filter of years, one often finds queer little remnants which are hard to account for. Any of us who look back to some function at which we were present in our early childhood may know from the testimony of others that we took deep interest at the time in some special aspect of it, but our only recollection may be of some little trifle which no one there could have imagined interested us in the least. Perhaps we remember someone’s shoe lace, or the colour of the books on a certain shelf, whereas, anyone else might suppose that what we should remember were the bride and the bride cake.
“For the first twelve years or so of a child’s life one cannot feel certain what class of emotions will appeal to him most strongly in his future development. It is, therefore, the time for appeal to general motives. All the persons about him, especially those with whom he lives, wish him to be clean, punctual, polite, etc., and things will be made pleasant for him if he does as they wish. This combination of altruism and egoism is a good basis for the formation of the habits of childhood.” It is in adolescence that the motives which will ultimately dominate really stir in consciousness.
Education, we often say, is a discipline, an atmosphere and a life. At no time is this more true than in the growing-up time, that period in which we have said personal habits are especially formed. During these years of active development, while the child is turning into the young adult, habits of manner, and habits of thought are easily substituted for those which were before them. In proper surroundings the bad accent may be improved, and many tricks of manner got rid of; but, above all, at this period habits of thought and views of life take possession of the individual. As a rule, the outlook then taken modifies the whole of life, even if it does not remain unchanged. This is the time when our ideals are formed, and ideals all through life play an important part in the selection of inspiring ideas. If they are high, wide and generous, guided by a love of truth and equity, the individual will naturally gravitate towards high inspirations. If, on the other hand, they are low and narrow, the inspirations of after life, if no miracle occurs, will be low and narrow also.
Badly to blame is that parent who has not established in a little child the habit of speaking the truth, but it is to the girl or boy in their teens that there comes the wide view of ideal truth, and what it means in all its forms, how it interpenetrates all good work, spells accuracy and loyalty, and keeps the feet from straying into the unworthy places of life—what, in short, it means to be true to our ideals and to the best of which we are capable.
“It is not for us to select the motives by which any other human beings, even our own children, shall be dominated.” “As well,” says someone, “might a hatching hen decide that the eggs upon while she is sitting shall develop into partridges, and not into ducks. What does depend to some extent on the hen’s action is whether the development that is going on shall be full and harmonious, or arrested and impotent; whether the ducks or partridges, as the case may be, shall have their limbs in good working order or shall be lopsided and helpless to carry out their own purposes.” “‘If you train up a child in the way he should go,’ said an eminent psychologist of the last generation, ‘when he is old he will not depart from it.’ If he departs from the way in which you have trained him, it is because you have tried to train him in a way that he should never have gone, one in which Nature never intended him to go.”
This relates to individual character and life-work. We have every right to insist upon general habits of truthfulness, of industry, and of punctuality; to exact prompt obedience in the majority of instances. We dare not, however, dictate the shape or life-work of another human being. We shall not go wrong if we do all we can to secure that the thing undertaken is thoroughly done, and that our young people shall realise that as members of society they have no right selfishly to inconvenience those with whom they live. We must also see that each according to his talent and the possibilities at our command is provided with a bread-winning occupation, and that at the same time, through books and friends and other channels, he has the opportunity of giving his mind the food which is as necessary for it, as is physical food for the natural body. Neither should habits for the use of the soul and spirit be neglected. Early habits of church-going, morning and evening prayer, and the learning by heart of psalms and hymns and spiritual songs lay a foundation upon which the religious observances of later life can be built.
The ideal for a perfectly healthy body is that of suppleness with strength and good control. Is not the same the ideal for the mind? “The bread-winning profession of an individual should be of such a kind that he can be deeply interested in it and let habit settle round it, but he should also escape from it entirely when off duty. The basis of ethical habit, on the contrary, firm at the core of his spiritual life, should be some sentiment from which the individual never escapes, which is about his path, and about his bed,—something for the sake of which he is willing to work, and the thought of which makes it easy to rest; which gives life its meaning and robs death of its sting.”
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