“Mamma, I should like to go to bed,” he says, rubbing his eyes.  Baby is coming round.

CHAPTER XXXIV

FAMILY TIES

The exhilaration of success and the fever of life’s struggle take a man away from his family, or cause him to live amid it as a stranger, and soon he no longer finds any attractions in the things which charmed him at the outset.  But let ill luck come, let the cold wind blow rather strongly, and he falls back upon himself, he seeks near him something to support him in his weakness, a sentiment to replace his vanished dream, and he bends toward his child, he takes his wife’s hand and presses it.  He seems to invite these two to share his burden.  Seeing tears in the eyes of those he loves, his own seem diminished to that extent.  It would seem that moral suffering has the same effect as physical pain.  The drowning wretch clutches at straws; in the same way, the man whose heart is breaking clasps his wife and children to him.  He asks in turn for help, protection, and comfort, and it is a touching thing to see the strong shelter himself in the arms of the weak and recover courage in their kiss.  Children have the instinct of all this; and the liveliest emotion they are capable of feeling is that which they experience on seeing their father weep.

Recall, dear reader, your most remote recollections, seek in that past which seems to you all the clearer the farther you are removed from it.  Have you ever seen your father come home and sit down by the fire with a tear in his eye?  Then you dared not draw near him at first, so deeply did you feel his grief.  How unhappy he must be for his eyes to be wet.  Then you felt that a tie attached you to this poor man, that his misfortune struck you too, that a part of it was yours, and that you were smitten because your father was.  And no one understands better than the child this joint responsibility of the family to which he owes everything.  You have felt all this; your heart has swollen as you stood silent in the corner, and sobs have broken forth as, without knowing why, you have held out your arms toward him.  He has turned, he has understood all, he has not been able to restrain his grief any further, and you have remained clasped in one another’s arms, father, mother, and child, without saying anything, but gazing at and understanding one another.  Did you, however, know the cause of the poor man’s grief?

Not at all.

This is why filial love and paternal love have been poetized, why the family is styled holy.  It is because one finds therein the very source of that need of loving, helping and sustaining one another, which from time to time spreads over the whole of society, but in the shape of a weakened echo.  It is only from time to time in history that we see a whole nation gather together, retire within itself and experience the same thrill.

A frightful convulsion is needed to make a million men hold out their hands to one another and understand one another at a glance; it needs a superhuman effort for the family to become the nation, and for the boundaries of the hearth to extend to the frontiers.