Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 28, 1898 - Appendix

REFLECTIONS AND REMARKS
any time criminate another to defend yourself. I have done
it many times, and always had a troubled conscience for my
pains.
II. PARENT AND CHILD.— (1) The love of parents for
their children is, of all natural affections, the most ill-starred.
It is not a love for the person, since it begins before the person
has come into the world, and founds on an imaginary character
and looks. Thus it is foredoomed to disappointment ; and
because the parent either looks for too much, or at least for
something inappropriate, at his offspring's hands, it is too
often insufficiently repaid. The natural bond, besides, is
stronger from parent to child than from child to parent ;
and it is the side which confers benefits, not which receives
them, that thinks most of a relation. (2) What do we
owe our parents ? No man can owe love ; none can owe
obedience. We owe, I think, chiefly pity; for we are the
pledge of their dear and joyful union, we have been the
solicitude of their days and the anxiety of their nights, we
have made them, though by no will of ours, to carry the
burthen of our sins, sorrows, and physical infirmities; and
too many of us grow up at length to disappoint the pur-
pose of their lives and requite their care and piety with
cruel pangs. (3) Mater Dolorosa. It is the particular cross
of parents that when the child grows up and becomes him-
self instead of that pale ideal they had preconceived, they
must accuse their own harshness or indulgence for this natural
result. They have all been like the duck and hatched swan's
eggs, or the other way about ; yet they tell themselves with
miserable penitence that the blame lies with them ; and had
they sat more closely, the swan would have been a duck,
and home-keeping, in spite of all. (4) A good son, who
can fulfil what is expected of him, has done his work in life.
He has to redeem the sins of many, and restore the world's
confidence in children.
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