With his baby on his knee He's as happy as can be,--
were, to be sure, something in this direction; but they have become so wholly associated with humor, that even the late Mr. Rogers, had he known the ballad, could hardly have found inspiration therein for a group; nor Shakespeare adapted the lines to describe seriously one of his seven ages. He might have scribbled experimentally,--
Then the father, Infant on knee, and happy like the clam,--
but that would have been the end of it. He would have crossed out the experiment, and taken another drink.
Father, in fact, follows Mother, in the mind of the general, so far behind that he is almost invisible, a tiny object on red wheels at the end of a string. But the little fellow carries a pocketbook: when Mother needs money she pulls in the string, and he comes up in a hurry. And, as is usually the case with popular conceptions, this odd, erroneous notion, which most fathers seem cheerfully enough to accept, has no doubt its historic foundation, and derives from the unquestionable supremacy of Mother in the beginning. At that period, indeed, it is hardly to be expected that any father should feel immediately _en rapport_ with his new-born child, or become intimately associated with its helpless, flower-like life. Ever since the idea, which has now so long lost its original element of bewildering surprise, yet remains always somewhat surprising, first dawned upon a human father and mother that _this baby_ belonged to _them_, conditions have inexorably consigned the infant to the care of its mother, while its father pursued elsewhere the equally necessary business of providing sustenance for the family. A division of labor was imperative: somebody must stay at home in the cave and tend the baby, somebody must go out in the woods and hustle for provisions. Maternity was, as it must have been, already a feminine habit, but paternity was something new and unexpected; and although I suspect, in many cases, this astonishing discovery was followed by speedy flight. Trueheart the First took up his responsibilities and his stone axe together.
The horror is recorded with which Dr. Johnson regarded the idea of being left alone in a castle with a new-born child; and this feeling in so civilized a man was no doubt an echo of the emotion with which poor, bewildered, primitive, but faithful Trueheart would have envisaged being left alone in the cave with his new-born baby: the sense of relief, of gayety, of something definite and within his capabilities to do, with which the young father nowadays takes his hat and starts for the office, must be much the same as that with which Trueheart took his stone axe and started for the woods.