In this there is a sure sign. Let us be temperate in our methods of entertaining youth, and especially let us not thoughtlessly create for them artificial needs. Food, dress, nursery, amusements--let all these be as natural and simple as possible. With the idea of making life pleasant for their children, some parents bring them up in habits of gormandizing and idleness, accustom them to sensations not meant for their age, multiply their parties and entertainments. Sorry gifts these! In place of a free man, you are making a slave. Gorged with luxury, he tires of it in time; and yet when for one reason or another his pleasures fail him, he will be miserable, and you with him: and what is worse, perhaps in some capital encounter of life, you will be ready--you and he together--to sacrifice manly dignity, truth, and duty, from sheer sloth.
Let us bring up our children simply, I had almost said rudely. Let us entice them to exercise that gives them endurance--even to privations. Let them belong to those who are better trained to fatigue and the earth for a bed than to the comforts of the table and couches of luxury. So we shall make men of them, independent and staunch, who may be counted on, who will not sell themselves for pottage, and who will have withal the faculty of being happy.
A too easy life brings with it a sort of lassitude in vital energy. One becomes blasé, disillusioned, an old young man, past being diverted. How many young people are in this state! Upon them have been deposited, like a sort of mold, the traces of our decrepitude, our skepticism, our vices, and the bad habits they have contracted in our company. What reflections upon ourselves these youths weary of life force us to make! What announcements are graven on their brows!
These shadows say to us by contrast that happiness lies in a life true, active, spontaneous, ungalled by the yoke of the passions, of unnatural needs, of unhealthy stimulus; keeping intact the physical faculty of enjoying the light of day and the air we breathe, and in the heart, the capacity to thrill with the love of all that is generous, simple and fine.
The artificial life engenders artificial thought, and a speech little sure of itself. Normal habits, deep impressions, the ordinary contact with reality, bring frankness with them. Falsehood is the vice of a slave, the refuge of the cowardly and weak. He who is free and strong is unflinching in speech. We should encourage in our children the hardihood to speak frankly. What do we ordinarily do? We trample on natural disposition, level it down to the uniformity which for the crowd is synonymous with good form. To think with one's own mind, feel with one's own heart, express one's own personality--how unconventional, how rustic!--Oh! the atrocity of an education which consists in the perpetual muzzling of the only thing that gives any of us his reason for being! Of how many soul-murders do we become guilty! Some are struck down with bludgeons, others gently smothered with pillows! Everything conspires against independence of character. When we are little, people wish us to be dolls or graven images; when we grow up, they approve of us on condition that we are like all the rest of the world--automatons: when you have seen one of them you've seen them all. So the lack of originality and initiative is upon us, and platitude and monotony are the distinctions of to-day. Truth can free us from this bondage: let our children be taught to be themselves, to ring clear, without crack or muffle. Make loyalty a need to them, and in their gravest failures, if only they acknowledge them, account it for merit that they have not covered their sin.