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
Tracing the attribute of Love to its source in the parental function, it becomes clear that this function cannot be dismissed thus in a phrase.
There are two parents. And the parts played by these, respectively, not only differ widely in their nature, but they are signally disproportionate in their share of the labours involved. For while the male bears the brunt of the struggle with environment, for his own and for survival of his mate and offspring, upon the female falls the biological stress of pregnancy and lactation, and the material cares of upbringing.
The reproductive function of the male is but slight and cursory. With the female lies the tax of havening the embryo before birth, of nurturing it with her blood and substance, of suffering the drain it makes upon her vital energy, the burden of its weight; with, finally, the anguish and the dangers of delivery. And having come through all this, the subconscious and involuntary sacrifice is replaced by further--but now voluntary sacrifices. She not only continues to feed it with her living substance, but she employs brain and wit and bodily effort in tending, safeguarding and rearing it.
Meanwhile the sire--among the lower creatures, at all events--detaches himself with lordly indifference from any portion in these later, as he went free of the earlier obligations. He shares his prey with her and with their young. He defends them from the natural enemies of all.
Sometimes he condescends to play for minutes with his cubs. But excepting among birds, the male parent takes little or no part in the upbringing of his family.
As with Love, so with Fatherhood, we take it as matter-of-course that this sprang and has evolved to present developments directly out of natural instinct. But as Love did not evolve out of the s.e.x-instinct, neither did father-love evolve from a paternal instinct inherent in the lower animals and in primal man.
Of this, Professor Drummond says:
"The world was now beginning to fill with Mothers, but there were no Fathers, ... while Nature has succeeded in moulding a human Mother and a human child, he still wanders in the forest, a savage and unblessed soul.
"This time for him is not lost. In his own way he also is at school, and learning lessons which will one day be equally needed by humanity. The acquisitions of the manly life are as necessary to human character as the virtues which gather their sweetness by the cradle; and these robuster elements--strength, courage, manliness, endurance, self-reliance--could only have been secured away from domestic cares.... The Evolution of a Father is not so beautiful a process as the Evolution of a Mother, but it was almost as formidable a problem to attack.... If Maternity was at a feeble level in the lower reaches of Nature, Paternity was non-existent.... When we leave the Birds and pa.s.s on to the Mammals, the Fathers are nearly all backsliders. Many are not only indifferent to their young, but hostile; and among the Carnivora the Mothers have frequently to hide their little ones in case the father eats them."
In place of saying, therefore, that Love sprang in, and has developed from the exercise of the parental function, we must say that Love--in all its higher aspects--sprang and has developed in the _maternal_ function.
But since every attribute, in order to be conscious and realised, is not only rooted but is reared in living function--out of what living function did Mother-love evolve? In the exercise of what vital processes has it been fostered and furthered?
In so far as these involve sacrifice of self in the interests of the child, the maternal ante-natal processes are processes of self-surrender. But these, when once incurred, are subconscious and involuntary. The prospective mother has no choice but to submit to physiological exactions.
And only a few women--those in whom maternal love is deep beyond the average--feel affection for their infants before birth.
Since love must have an object upon which to exercise its faculties and lavish its devotion, it is not, therefore, until the babe is in the mother"s arms that the Love-attribute begins to function. And then the primal fount of all conscious and voluntary human selflessness and sacrifice springs afresh in the individual when, in yearning toward the helpless being in her arms, she wells with tenderness and gives herself to be its life.
In the altruistic tender yearning of the mother to her babe, whereat her blood transforms itself to milk, Human Love first sprang and functioned consciously.
_This is my Body which is given for you.... This is my Blood ... which is shed for you._
Says Goethe, "There is no outward sign of courtesy that does not rest on a deep moral foundation." He might have added "and on a great biological function." Every act of voluntary sacrifice, every impulse of compa.s.sion, mercy, tenderness, devotion, has had its inspiration and its source in this which is discredited by some as being a merely physical, and is despised, accordingly, as being an inferior process; this mystical trans.m.u.tation of the mother"s blood to milk, and the self-forgetting yearning wherein she yields herself as food for offspring. By the evolution, upon ever higher planes of consciousness, of this primarily instinctive sacrifice, not only Motherhood but Fatherhood too, and the Love-pa.s.sion between the s.e.xes have been fructified and purified, and uplifted down the ages. Other acts of devotion arise out of maternal ministry. But this is the intrinsic source of all.
Travelling up through all the rudimentary phases of development, simultaneously and side by side with the male fierce methods for the Survival of _Fitness_, there was evolving in the female, subconsciously and secretly, this sacramental impulse which was to inaugurate a new era--an era wherein charity and ruth were to be born as response to the claims of _Unfitness_.
The first woman who, of her free-will, gave her breast to her babe was the Mother of all the Humanities. She it was who prepared the way for the coming of Christ. By her, Love entered first into human consciousness.
And by countless generations of such willing tender sacrifice upon the part of mothers, human love has climbed out of the darkness of blind subconscious instinct into the Light of a great transfiguration.
It is weighty evidence of the evolutionary impulse inherent in the function of Lactation, that the development of this maternal trait engenders species so far higher in organisation and morale than those of creatures unequipped to suckle offspring, as to set the Mammalia in a cla.s.s by themselves in the van of progressive advance. The higher organisation and morale of such result not only from the self-surrendering instinct in the mothers of species, but doubtless also from the superior nutrition promoted in the developing tissues of the young of species, by the highly-individualised food elements which are secreted by the maternal living cells.
The vital significance of this new potence in blood to transform itself to milk for sustenance of offspring is emphasised by the fact that the Mammalia are warm-blooded creatures. While that this new quickening of Life by the altruistic parental instinct originates in the female shows her as medium of that Divine Influx inspiring Creative Evolution, and evolving faculty by way of living function.
II