Very seriously, however, there is hope in the situation--there is renaissance in the air. And it has its foundation in the sensible and healthy (though so far only tacit) admission that it doesn't matter so much what your child becomes as that he shall _become something_! You can't do much with him, anyhow, and you may as well face it. You can give him, during his first few years, the kind of foundation you think will help him; and for the rest of the time you can do only one thing that he will really need from you: you can develop your own personality as richly as you want him to develop his. You can refuse to worry about him--since that does neither of you any good--and thereby save stores of energy that he may draw upon for _your mutual benefit_. It becomes a sort of game for two, instead of the uninteresting kind in which one player is given all the advantages. Compared with it the old-fashioned game in which the mother sacrificed everything, suffered everything, wore herself out trying to help her child win, looks not only very unfair and very unnecessary, but very _wasteful_. And have you ever noticed how the man who sentimentalizes about the wonderful mothers we used to have--his own in particular--is the one whose life is lived at the opposite pole of the mother's wise direction? If you disagree with all this, there is still one other method by which you may produce a child who will be a credit to himself and to society. You may be so utterly stupid and wrong-headed that he will rebel to the point of becoming something different. If you prefer this course no one need worry much about your child, because he'll probably found a system of child education that will cause him to be famous; and if you have a daughter, she'll probably become a Montessori. The new home is a recognition that the child is not the only factor in society that needs educating. It assumes that no one's education is finished just because he's been made a parent. It means that we can all go on being educated together. It means the elimination of all kinds of domestic follies--for one, the ghastly embarrassment of growing up to discover that you're different from the rest of your family, and for that reason something of a criminal. It means the kind of understanding that develops a child's feeling instead of suppressing it, so that he won't be ashamed, for instance, of having such glorious things as dreams and visions. It means artistic education: and Shaw says that we all grow up stupid or mad to just the extent to which we have not been artistically educated. THE SWAN Under the lily shadow and the gold and the blue and mauve that the whin and the lilac pour down on the water, the fishes quiver.