Be prudent, be wise; leave her her son. Woman 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 he 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 too much upon him, run the risk of so crushing his faculties, that he will never be able to enjoy the free use of them again. The world is full of men, who remain bondsmen all their lives, from having borne a heavy load too soon. A too solid and too precocious education has injured something within them; their originality, the genius and ingegno, which is the prime part of man.
Who respects in these days the original and free ingenuity of character, that sacred genius which we receive at our birth? This is almost always the part which offends and gets blamed; it is the reason why "this boy is not like everybody else." Hardly does his young nature awake, and flourish in its liberty, than they are all astonished, and all shake their heads: "What is this? we never saw the like."—Shut him up quickly—stifle this living flower. Here are the iron cages.—Ah! you were blooming, and displaying your luxuriant foliage in the sun. Be wise and prudent, O flower! become dry, and shut up your leaves.
But this poor little flower, against which they are all leagued—what is it, I pray you, but the individual, special, and original element by which this being would have distinguished itself from others, and added a new feature to the great variety of human characters—a genius, perhaps, to the series of great minds. The sterile spirit is almost always that plant which, having been tied too fast to the dead wood which serves to support it, has dried upon it, and gradually become like it; there it is, very regular, and well fastened up, you may fear nothing eccentric from it; the tree is, however, dead, and will never bear leaf more.
What do I mean? that the support is useless, and that we must leave the plant to itself? Nothing is further from my thoughts. I believe in the necessity of both educations, that of the family and that of the country. Let us distinguish their influence.
The latter, our public education, which is certainly better in our days than it ever was—what does it require? What is its end and aim? It wishes to harmonise the child with his native land, and with that great country the world. This is what constitutes its legitimacy and necessity. It purposes especially to give him a fund of ideas common to all, to make him a reasonable being, and prevent him from being out of tune with what surrounds him; it hinders him from jarring in the great concert where he is going to take his part, and it checks what may be too irregular in his lively sallies.
So far for public education. Family life is liberty. Yet even here there are obstacles and shackles to his original moral activity. The father regulates this activity: his uneasy foresight imposes on him the duty to bring early this wild young colt to the furrow, where he must soon toil. It too often happens that the father makes a mistake, consults, first of all, his own conveniences, and seeks the profitable and ready traced career, rather than that to which his young and powerful colt was called by nature.
The triumphs of the courser have frequently been lost in the trammels of the riding-school.
Poor liberty! Who then will have eyes to see thee, or a heart to cherish thee? Who will have the patience, the infinite indulgence required to support thy first wanderings, and encourage occasionally what fatigues the stranger, the indifferent person, nay, the father himself? God alone, who has made this creature, and who, having made him, knows him well enough to see and love what is good in him, even in what is bad, God, I say, and with God the mother: for here it is one and the same thing.