3 May: Boreham on Mothers' Day

The White Flower
Her Majesty the Queen has set the seal of her royal approval on the celebration of Mothers' Day, which will be observed tomorrow.[1] Last year, in commemoration of an ancient custom, the promoters of the movement sent Mothering Cakes to the Queen and received a courteous acknowledgment from Buckingham Palace. At different periods and in different places, Mothers' Day has been celebrated in many different ways. It obviously meets a profound human instinct. Herbert Spencer would have said that, keep it in any way you will, it is a survival of ancestor-worship. Spencer was never tired of arguing that ancestor worship, in some form or other, is an essential ingredient in the religious consciousness of the race, and that, however far man may travel from the faiths that satisfied his infancy, he will never shake off all traces of the primitive instinct. The obvious reason is, of course, that the instinct is true. The sentiment that saturated the grotesque cults of a hoary antiquity; the sentiment that expressed itself in the domestic images which, on festive occasions, the Romans arranged about their hearthstones and crowned with wreaths and garlands; the sentiment that perpetuates itself in the spirit-tablets which, believed to be tenanted by the souls of departed ancestors, are treasured as sacred in every Chinese home, enshrines, beneath all that is fantastic and superstitious, a substantial and valuable deposit of truth.

For this reason, as Spencer pointed out, it can never really die. Discarded in one form, it reappears in another. As we have already suggested, it asserted itself in a new and beautiful form in "the spacious days of great Elizabeth," when the youth of England gave itself up once a year to the sacred pastime of going a-mothering. With bunches of violets—emblems of the lovely modesty and fragrant influence of England's noblest womanhood—these young people greeted once a year, the mothers who had guarded their earliest infancy and moulded their plastic characters. Employers of labour cheerfully liberated their apprentices that they might visit their homes and pay their mothers this annual act of homage, whilst the young people themselves thought no journey too long, in days when travelling facilities were unknown, if, by undertaking the trudge, they might join in the beautiful tribute which affection and custom alike dictated. This romantic and picturesque practice, if it added a fresh poignancy to the grief of those whose mothers had passed beyond the reach of such felicitous ministries, deepened the reverence and heightened the appreciation of those who were happy enough to be able to make the annual pilgrimage. In our own time, the celebration has taken a new form. The ancient ritual of violets and simnel-cake having fallen into disuse, it occurred to the ingenious minds of some Americans to revive the custom in a modern garb. A certain Sunday is set aside each year as Mothers' Day, and, on that Sunday, all preachers are asked to dilate on the world's incalculable debt to motherhood, and all men are requested to wear in their buttonholes a white flower as a silent tribute to the purity of that maternal character to which they owe so much. But whether the festival is kept with blue flowers or with white ones; whether it is commemorated as it was commemorated in Shakespeare's time or as it is commemorated in Chicago and New York today; the external drapery of the thing is immaterial. The self same spirit permeates both; and in the persistence of that spirit, expressing itself in different ways in different periods, Herbert Spencer would recognise a striking enforcement of his familiar contention.

The mothers of the ages may have many grounds for complaint. But they cannot justly complain at any lack of recognition of the debt under which the world rests regarding them. There is a sense, and an intensely vital sense, in which our whole literature may be said to represent one vast tribute to the value that we set upon motherhood. It is usual, in this connection, to quote freely from history, from biography, and from the eager testimonies of our greatest men. But is the literature of imagination any less eloquent? Miss Jane Ramsay-Kerr recently declared that all the great heroines of fiction are the creations of man. She cannot recall one really satisfying feminine figure that has been drawn by a woman's hand. This is significant in itself. And when we turn to the work of the great masters, it is instructive to inquire what qualities those are which have endeared their heroines to the millions who have made their acquaintance. And the simplest answer is that, whilst few of those heroines were actually mothers, they are all of them intensely motherly and it is their essential motherliness that wins all our hearts. The maternal instinct is evidenced as clearly in the spectacle of a little girl anxiously nursing her doll as in that of a woman caring for the members of her family. For a pair of illustrations of this amiable quality—the one in prose and the other in poetry—we need not wander beyond Dickens and Shakespeare. The heroines of Dickens are invariably homely and motherly women. Esther, of "Bleak House," may be cited as a fitting representative of them all. She is always looking after something or somebody; a fond solicitude is the normal expression of her countenance; she bustles about to the accompaniment of the jingle of her bunch of household keys. "You are the good little woman of our lives, my dear," said Mr. Jarndyce, "the little old woman of the child's rhyme:
'Little old woman, oh, whither so high?
To sweep the cobwebs out of the sky!’

You will sweep the cobwebs out of our sky, Esther!" "This," adds Esther herself, "was the beginning of my being called Old Woman, and Little Old Woman, and Cobweb, and Mrs. Shipton, and Mother Hubbard, and Dame Durden, and so many names of that sort that my own name soon became quite lost among them." Anybody can see at a glance that it is by the stress that the author lays on the motherly qualities of his heroine that he makes her so lovable.

The same is true of his other creations; and, in a slightly modified sense, the same principle holds good of Shakespeare. It was Ruskin who first pointed out that Shakespeare's fame rests entirely upon his faculty for portraying noble women. So far as his male characters are concerned, there is not, Ruskin affirms, one entirely heroic figure in all his plays. But on the other hand, "there is hardly a play that has not a perfect woman in it, steadfast in grave hope and ceaseless purpose. Cordelia, Desdemona, Isabella, Hermione, Imogen, Queen Catherine, Perdita, Sylvia, Viola, Rosalind, Helena, and, at last, but perhaps loveliest, Virgilia; all are faultless; their characters are conceived in the highest heroic type of humanity." And when Ruskin descends to psychological analysis and detailed criticism, he makes it clear that the elements that impart to these women so much charm are the very characteristics that we instinctively associate with the grace of motherliness. Ruskin is impressed by the fact that Shakespeare's women are "infallibly faithful and wise counsellors—incorruptibly just and pure examples—strong always to sanctify even when they cannot save. The catastrophe of every play," he adds, "is caused always by the fault or folly of a man; the redemption, if there be any, is brought about by the wisdom and virtue of a woman; and, failing that there is none." Dr. Harold Ford, one of our most discerning Shakespearean students, recently pointed out that, of all the poet's heroines, the least satisfactory is Juliet. "Of a beautiful and passionate nature," he says, "love's fever ran riot in her blood, and made the sweet-natured girl a deceitful scheming liar; and the play becomes, in consequence, a tragedy." Speaking generally, the great heroines of literature are homely, lovable, motherly women; women of the stamp that wins all our hearts; and such women we all unite to honour on the return of Mothers' Day.

[1] This editorial appears in the Hobart Mercury on Saturday, May 7, 1932.

F W Boreham

Image: White Flower