When the baby reaches three or four years of age, when his sex shows
itself in his actions, his tastes and his eyes, when he smashes his
wooden horses, cuts open his drums, blows trumpets, breaks the castors
off the furniture, and evinces a decided hostility to crockery; in a
word, when he is a man, it is then that the affection of a father for
his son becomes love. He feels himself invaded by a need of a special
fondness, of which the sweetest recollections of his past life can give
no idea. A deep sentiment envelopes his heart, the countless roots of
which sink into it in all directions. Defects or qualities penetrate
and feed on this sentiment. Thus, we find in paternal love all the
weaknesses and all the greatnesses of humanity. Vanity, abnegation,
pride, and disinterestedness are united together, and man in his
entirety appears in the papa.
It is on the day which the child becomes a mirror in which you recognize
your features, that the heart is moved and awakens. Existence becomes
duplicated, you are no longer one, but one and a half; you feel your
importance increase, and, in the future of the little creature who
belongs to you, you reconstruct your own past; you resuscitate, and are
born again in him. You say to yourself: “I will spare him such and such
a vexation which I had to suffer, I will clear from his path such and
such a stone over which I stumbled, I will make him happy, and he
shall owe all to me; he shall be, thanks to me, full of talents and
attractions.” You give him, in advance, all that you did not get
yourself, and in his future arrange laurels for a little crown for your
own brows.
Human weakness, no doubt; but what matter, provided the sentiment that
gives birth to this weakness is the strongest and purest of all? What
matter if a limpid stream springs up between two paving stones? Are
we to be blamed for being generous out of egotism, and for devoting
ourselves to others for reasons of personal enjoyment?
Thus, in the father, vanity is the leading string. Say to any father:
“Good heavens! how like you he is!” The poor man may hesitate at saying
yes, but I defy him not to smile. He will say, “Perhaps.... Do you think
so?... Well, perhaps so, side face.”
And do not you be mistaken; if he does so, it is that you may reply in
astonishment: “Why, the child is your very image.”
He is pleased, and that is easily explained; for is not this likeness
a visible tie between him and his work? Is it not his signature, his
trade-mark, his title-deed, and, as it were, the sanction of his rights?
To this physical resemblance there soon succeeds a moral likeness,
charming in quite another way. You are moved to tears when you recognize
the first efforts of this little intelligence to grasp your ideas.
Without check or examination it accepts and feeds on them. By degrees
the child shares your tastes, your habits, your ways. He assumes a deep
voice to be like papa, asks for your braces, sighs before your boots,
and sits down with admiration on your hat. He protects his mamma when he
goes out with her, and scolds the dog, although he is very much afraid
of him; all to be like papa. Have you caught him at meals with his large
observant eyes fixed on you, studying your face with open mouth
and spoon in hand, and imitating his model with an expression of
astonishment and respect. Listen to his long gossips, wandering as his
little brain; does he not say:
“When I am big like papa I shall have a moustache and a stick like him,
and I shall not be afraid in the dark, because it is silly to be afraid
in the dark when you are big, and I shall say ‘damn it,’ for I shall
then be grown up.”
“Baby, what did you say, sir?”
“I said just as papa does.”
What would you? He is a faithful mirror. You are for him an ideal,
a model, the type of all that is great and strong, handsome and
intelligent.
Often he makes mistakes, the little dear, but his error is all the more
delicious in its sincerity, and you feel all the more unworthy of such
frank admiration. You console yourself for your own imperfections in
reflecting that he is not conscious of them.
The defects of children are almost always harrowed from their father;
they are the consequences of a too literal copy. Provide, then, against
them. Yes, no doubt, but I ask you what strength of mind is not needed
by a poor man to undeceive his baby, to destroy, with a word, his
innocent confidence, by saying to him: “My child, I am not perfect, and
I have faults to be avoided?”
This species of devotion on the part of the baby for his father reminds
me of the charming remark of one of my little friends. Crossing the
road, the little fellow caught sight of a policeman. He examined him
with respect, and then turning to me, after a moment’s reflection, said,
with an air of conviction: “Papa is stronger than all the policemen,
isn’t he?”
If I had answered “No,” our intimacy would have been broken off short.
Was it not charming? One can truly say, “Like baby, like papa.” Our life
is the threshold of his. It is with our eyes that he has first seen.
Profit, young fathers, by the first moments of candor on the part of
your dear baby, seek to enter his heart when this little heart opens,
and establish yourself in it so thoroughly, that at the moment when the
child is able to judge you, he will love you too well to be severe or to
cease loving. Win his, affection, it is worth the trouble.
To be loved all your life by a being you love--that is the problem to
be solved, and toward the solution of which all your efforts should be
directed. To make yourself loved, is to store up treasures of happiness
for the winter. Each year will take away a scrap of your life, contract
the circle of interests and pleasures in which you live; your mind by
degrees will lose its vigor, and ask for rest, and as you live less
and less by the mind, you will live more and more by the heart. The
affection of others which was only a pleasant whet will become a
necessary food, and whatever you may have been, statesmen or artists,
soldiers or bankers, when your heads are white, you will no longer be
anything but fathers.
But filial love is not born all at once, nor is it necessary it should
be. The voice of nature is a voice rather poetical than truthful. The
affection of children is earned and deserved; it is a consequence, not
a cause, and gratitude is its commencement. At any cost, therefore, your
baby must be made grateful. Do not reckon that he will be grateful to
you for your solicitude, your dreams for his future, the cost of his
nursing, and the splendid dowry that you are amassing for him; such
gratitude would require from his little brain too complicated a
calculation, besides social ideas as yet unknown to him. He will not
be thankful to you for the extreme fondness you have for him; do not be
astonished at it, and do not cry out at his ingratitude. You must first
make him understand your affection; he must appreciate and judge it
before responding to it; he must know his notes before he can play
tunes.
The little man’s gratitude will at first be nothing but a simple,
egotistical and natural calculation. If you have made him laugh, if you
have amused him, he will want you to begin again, he will hold out his
little arms to you, crying: “Do it again.” And the recollection of the
pleasure you have given him becoming impressed upon his mind, he will
soon say to himself: “No one amuses me so well as papa; it is he who
tosses me into the air, plays at hide-and-seek with me and tells me
tales.” So, by degrees, gratitude will be born in him, as thanks spring
to the lips of him who is made happy.
Therefore, learn the art of amusing your child, imitate the crowing
of the cock, and gambol on the carpet, answer his thousand impossible
questions, which are the echo of his endless dreams, and let yourself be
pulled by the beard to imitate a horse. All this is kindness, but also
cleverness, and good King Henry IV did not belie his skilful policy by
walking on all fours on his carpet with his children on his back.
In this way, no doubt, your paternal authority will lose something of
its austere prestige, but will gain the deep and lasting influence that
affection gives. Your baby will fear you less but will love you more.
Where is the harm.
Do not be afraid of anything; become his comrade, in order to have the
right of remaining his friend. Hide your paternal superiority as the
commissary of police does his sash. Ask with kindness for that which you
might rightly insist upon having, and await everything from his heart
if you have known how to touch it. Carefully avoid such ugly words as
discipline, passive obedience and command; let his submission be
gentle to him, and his obedience resemble kindness. Renounce the stupid
pleasure of imposing your fancies upon him, and of giving orders to
prove your infallibility.
Children have a keenness of judgment, and a delicacy of impression which
would not be imagined, unless one has studied them. Justice and equity
are easily born in their minds, for they possess, above all things,
positive logic. Profit by all this. There are unjust and harsh words
which remain graven on a child’s heart, and which he remembers all his
life. Reflect that, in your baby, there is a man whose affection will
cheer your old age; therefore respect him so that he may respect you;
and be sure that there is not a single seed sown in this little heart
which will not sooner or later bear fruit.
But there are, you will say, unmanageable children, rebels from the
cradle. Are you sure that the first word they heard in their lives has
not been the cause of their evil propensities? Where there has been
rebellion, there has been clumsy pressure; for I will not believe in
natural vice. Among evil instincts there is always a good one, of which
an arm can be made to combat the others. This requires, I know, extreme
kindness, perfect tact, and unlimited confidence, but the reward is
sweet. I think, therefore, in conclusion, that a father’s first kiss,
his first look, his first caresses, have an immense influence on
a child’s life. To love is a great deal. To know how to love is
everything.
Even were one not a father, it is impossible to pass by the dear little
ones without feeling touched, and without loving them. Muddy and ragged,
or carefully decked out; running in the roadway and rolling in the dust,
or playing at skipping rope in the gardens of the Tuileries; dabbling
among the ducklings, or building hills of sand beside well-dressed
mammas--babies are charming. In both classes there is the same grace,
the same unembarrassed movements, the same comical seriousness, the same
carelessness as to the effect created, in short, the same charm; the
charm that is called childhood, which one can not understand without
loving--which one finds just the same throughout nature, from the
opening flower and the dawning day to the child entering upon life.
A baby is not an imperfect being, an unfinished sketch--he is a man.
Watch him closely, follow every one of his movements; they will reveal
to you a logical sequence of ideas, a marvellous power of imagination,
such as will not again be found at any period of life. There is more
real poetry in the brain of these dear loves than in twenty epics. They
are surprised and unskilled, no doubt; but nothing equals the vigor of
these minds, unexperienced, fresh, simple, sensible of the slightest
impressions, which make their way through the midst of the unknown.
What immense labor is gone through by them in a few months! To notice
noises, classify them, understand that some of these sounds are words,
and that these words are thoughts; to find out of themselves alone the
meaning of everything, and distinguish the true from the false, the real
from the imaginary; to correct, by observation, the errors of their too
ardent imagination; to unravel a chaos, and during this gigantic task to
render the tongue supple and strengthen the staggering little legs, in
short, to become a man. If ever there was a curious and touching sight
it is that of this little creature setting out upon the conquest of
the world. As yet he knows neither doubt nor fear, and opens his heart
fully. There is something of Don Quixote about a baby. He is as comic as
the Knight, but he has also a sublime side.
Do not laugh too much at the hesitations, the countless gropings, the
preposterous follies of this virgin mind, which a butterfly lifts to
the clouds, to which grains of sand are mountains, which understands the
twittering of birds, ascribes thoughts to flowers, and souls to dolls,
which believes in far-off realms, where the trees are sugar, the fields
chocolate, and the rivers syrup, for which Punch and Mother Hubbard are
real and powerful individuals, a mind which peoples silence and vivifies
night. Do not laugh at his love; his life is a dream, and his mistakes
poetry.
This touching poetry which you find in the infancy of man you also find
in the infancy of nations. It is the same. In both cases there is the
same necessity of idealization, the same tendency to personify the
unknown. And it may be said that between Punch and Jupiter, Mother
Hubbard and Venus, there is only a hair’s breadth.