Part 2 (1/2)
Without care and attention from the moment of its birth, the life of an infant would be reckoned in hours. The higher the organism, the more and for the longer period its infancy exacts unceasing devotion and nurture.
Fish and moth and other species of low order are cast off in the egg.
Chicks scramble out of the sh.e.l.l.
The higher their grade in the scale of organisation and intelligence, the more helpless and incapable young creatures are to feed and to fend for themselves. Kittens are born blind and helpless, but after a few days they see and crawl about. The elephant-mother suckles and safeguards her baby-elephant for two whole years.
Now, were there no purpose in all this--Were it not that such devotion to offspring serves as impulse and spur to the evolution and development of faculty in parents, Nature, in planning the complex human species, would, surely, have endowed the human infant and child with fuller powers of self-preservation.
Were there other functions and apt.i.tudes the exercise whereof would better stimulate and foster human progress, it is inconceivable that children would be, and would be for so long, the helpless, f.e.c.kless, dependent mortals that they are.
For ten long lunar months, the human babe is part of its mother; homed in the nest of her body, warmed by her warmth, fed by her blood. She breathes for it, digests for it, a.s.similates for it, exercises for it.
For ten further lunar months, it is dependent upon her for the food by which it lives. For nearly a year, save for an inept power of creeping, with but small sense of direction, it requires to be moved and carried everywhere. For years it must be washed, dressed, combed, laid down to sleep at night, got up in the morning, taken for rides or for walks, played with, bidden, chidden; comforted, warmed, cooled; defended, cherished, instructed--in a hundred ways to be gently and progressively adapted to life, by way of a more or less highly-specialised environment. Even when no longer helpless, it must be provided for in the matters of housing, food, clothing, education. It must be instructed in a means of livelihood, and started on its young career.
Among the poorer cla.s.ses the child depends upon its hard-worked parents for a period varying between twelve and sixteen years. In the professional cla.s.ses, the young son and daughter are not fully qualified for independent existence before the ages of twenty-three or twenty-five. In ill-health, in brain defect, and in other incapacities, parents must provide for their offspring for life.
And seeing how the demands of the young, and the response and exactions of the parents multiply and amplify proportionally with the higher evolution of both, we are forced to believe that the small survival-value of the child, owing to its native unadaptedness to environment, is part of The Plan, and that it subserves some high and complex purpose in human development.
VII
An essential obligation of Parenthood is, that, in order to fulfil this duly, the parents require to undergo a wholly new and intrinsic adjustment of faculty. Having arrived already at a complex adaptation to a complex civilised environment, in physique and character, in mentality and habit, now, by a revolutionary reversal of their human progress, they must re-adapt to the simplest of all creatures and conditions--a helpless, puling infant in a cradle.
Where they had had a whole world, perhaps, of intellectual interests and social pursuits to engage them, now they forgather beside a cot and--according as they are human or are not--lose themselves, brain and heart and soul, in the puling, impotent thing. They make themselves eyes and ears, arms and legs for it; carriage, chair and bed. They gaze, entranced, upon the marvel of the opening and shutting of its eyes. It yawns; they tremble lest it dislocate a jaw. It sneezes; now they shudder lest it may have taken cold. It gurgles, and they are transported to a seventh heaven.
Never has either been equally fluttered at their recognition by an exalted personage as both exult when flattered by the flicker of an eyelash that it distinguishes its father from its mother; or either from its nurse. Both perhaps are self-contained and philosophic beings, yet its cry distracts them; scatters their composure to the winds. The inept thing cannot even tell them what it wants. Its cry for food is much the same as is its cry when it requires to be laid down, or lifted up. When its milk is not sweet enough, its inarticulate fury is expressed in notes identical--so far as they can judge--with those of its impotent wrath when a pin-point p.r.i.c.ks it.
But whatsoever the cause, to the winds the parental composure is scattered, as. .h.i.ther and thither they scurry, distraught, seeking a reason and a remedy. And this, of course, had been their tyrant's purpose. He had meant to strike panic in his parents' hearts. He was vexed or empty, or was otherwise uneasy. And behold the penalties of those who suffer him to be vexed or empty, or otherwise uneasy!
And whether they are rough, hard-working persons who have neither time nor taste for fuss and nonsense; whether they are the Archbishop of Canterbury and Mrs. Archbishop, Sir Isaac and Lady Newton, or the Emperor and Empress of j.a.pan, it is all the same to Baby. No other uses have they in his absurd judgment than to obey his slightest gurgle.
And the wonder of the business is that they too--provided they be normal, wholesome-minded, natural-hearted persons--are of similar opinion. Even a Professor of Archaeology must feel a twinge of some emotion when his first baby cuts its first tooth. King Lion himself suffers it with patience when his cub scratches his royal countenance, or gets its milk-teeth into his prize-bone.
The whole face of the earth is transformed by the Baby, indeed. And how much it is transformed for the better! It is not too much to say that it is humanised, redeemed. The most grudging of curmudgeons murmurs only a little to surrender his place at the fire to The Baby. The thirsty thief forbears to drink his infant's milk.
In his great story, _The Luck of Roaring Camp_, Bret Harte has shown, and has shown as probable, the uplifting and regenerating influence that ”The Luck”--its mother a sinner, its father, Heaven alone knew who!--exercised upon a rough community of vicious men.
”It wrastled wi' my finger,” says one in an awed whisper. To cover sentiment he adds, ”the durn'd little cuss!” But carefully he segregates the member sanctified by the tiny, satin touch, from the other fingers of his wicked hand.
CHAPTER II
INCREASING DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MALE AND FEMALE s.e.x-CHARACTERISTICS AND FUNCTIONS ARE THE MAIN FEATURE OF HUMAN ADVANCE
”The most beautiful witness to the Evolution of Man is the Mind of a little child.... It was ages before Darwin or Lamarck or Lucretius, that Maternity, bending over the hollowed cradle in the forest for a first smile of recognition from her babe, expressed the earliest trust in the doctrine of development. Every mother since then is an unconscious Evolutionist, and every little child a living witness to Ascent.”--_Professor Drummond._
I