CHAPTER III. THE MOTHER. ALONE, FOR A LONG TIME, SHE CAN BRING UP HER CHILD. -INTELLECTUAL NOURISHMENT. GESTATION, INCUBATION, AND EDUCATION. THE CHILD GUARANTEES THE MOTHER. -THE MOTHER GUARANTEES THE CHILD. SHE PROTECTS ITS NAPUBLIC EDUCATION MUST LIMIT TURAL ORIGINALITY. THIS ORIGINALITY. EVEN THE FATHER LIMITS IT.THE MOTHER DEFENDS IT. MATERNAL WEAKNESS.THE MOTHER WOULD MAKE HER SON A HERO. HEROIC DISINTERESTEDNESS OF MATERNAL LOVE. - THE We have already said, If you wish your family to resist the foreign influence which dissolves it, keep the child at home as much as possible. Let the mother bring it up under the father's direction, till the moment when it is claimed for public instruction by its great mother, its native land.* If the mother bring up the child, the consequence will be, that she will always remain by her husband's side, needing his advice, and anxious to receive from him fresh supplies of knowledge. The real idea of a family will here be realised, which is for the child to be * And even then it is a great advantage for the mother to see him again every evening. She will see at the first glance every useful or injurious change, many things which the master or even the father would not have remarked till much latter. initiated by the mother, and the wife by the husband. The mother's instinct is just and true; it deserves to be respected. She wishes to keep her child : forcibly separated from him at the moment of birth, she is ever seeking to rejoin that part of herself which a cruel violence snatched from her, but which has its root in her heart. When they take it from her to bring it up at a distance, it is a second separation. The mother and the child weep in common, but their tears are disregarded. This is not right. These tears, in which we think we see only weakness, ought not to be disregarded. They show that the child needs her still. Nursing is not yet finished. Intellectual nourishment, like physical food, ought in the beginning to be administered to the child under the form, as it were, of milk, fluid, tepid, mild, and full of life.* Woman alone can so give it. Men expect too much at once of this new-born babe, whose teeth, scarcely formed, are painful. They want to give it bread, and they beat it if it does not bite. In God's name give him more milk, it will drink willingly. † Who will believe, some future day, that men have thus undertaken to nurse and feed these sucklings? * Which excludes whatever makes a plaything of science, such as the mnemotechnics, &c. &c. † Michael Angelo, the painter of sibyls and prophets, and himself a prophet, has taught us, in his own manner, how initiation belongs especially to woman. Under the feet of the GESTATION, INCUBATION, AND EDUCATION. 247 Ah! leave them alone to women!* A lovely sight Take to see a child rocked in the arms of a man! care, awkward idiot! It is fragile; handling it in your clownish hand, you may break it. This is the dispute between the master and child : man imparts science by methods proper to man, and his state of fixed rules, by very precise classifications, with angular, and, as it were, crystallised forms. Well these crystal prisms, as luminous as they may be, wound by their angles and sharp points. The child, in a soft and tender state, cannot, for a long time, receive any thing which has not the fluidity of life. The master grows angry and impatient at the slowness of the pupil, and knows not how to succeed with him. There is but one person in the world who has the delicate perception of the careful management which the child requires, and this one person is she who has borne it, and who forms for ever with it an identical whole. Gestation, incubation, and education, are three words which have been long synonymous. Much longer than people would believe. The influence of the mother over the child, whose faculties are developing, is greater and more decisive than that which she exercised over the suckling infant. I do terrible virgins in whose mouth thunders the word of God, he has introduced the initiation of children and mothers, in the most ingenuous manner. * A writer, of enlarged ideas, has said, that schools for girls should be founded before those of boys; and that every girl, who will be a wife and mother, will become a school herself. not know whether it be indispensable for the mother to feed it from her breast; but I am very sure it is necessary that she should nourish it from her heart. Chivalry was perfectly aware that love was the most powerful motive for education. That alone did more in the middle ages to advance humanity than all the disputes of school-divinity have been able to retard it. We also have our school-divinity, the spirit of empty distractions and verbal disputes: we shall be able to combat its influence only by prolonging that of the mother, associating her with education, and by giving the child a well-beloved teacher. Love, they say, is a great master. This is especially true of the greatest, the deepest, and the purest of all affections. How blind and imprudent we are! We take the child from its mother, at a time when it was most necessary to her. We deprive her of the dear occupation for which God had formed her; and we are afterwards surprised if this woman, cruelly separated, now languishing and idle, give herself up to vain musings; suffer anew the yoke she formerly bore; and, if, as is often the case, fancying herself to remain faithful, she listen to the tempter, who speaks to her in the name of God. Wo Be prudent, be wise; leave her her son. man must ever be loving. Leave her rather the lover whom nature gives her; him whom she would have preferred to all others, whilst you are occupied with your business (with your passions perhaps). Leave on her arm the tall and slender youth, and she will be proud and happy. You fear, lest, having been kept too long by his mother, he may become effeminate. But, on the contrary, if you left her her son, she would become masculine. Try her, she will change, and you will be astonished yourself. Little excursions on foot, and long ones on horseback no trouble will be too much for her. She begins bravely and heartily the exercises of the young man; she makes herself of his own age, and is born again in this vita nuova; even you on your return will think, when you see your Rosalind *, that you have two sons. It is a general rule to which, at least, I have hardly ever seen any exception, that superior men are all the sons of their mother. She has stamped upon them, and they reproduce, her moral as well as her physical features. I am about to surprise you. I will tell you that without her you will never be a man. The mother alone is patient enough to develope the young creature, by taking proper care of his liberty. We must be on our guard, and take especial care not to place the child, still too weak and pliable, in the hands of strangers. People of the best intentions, by pressing * Shakspeare's "As you Like it." |