CHAPTER 26

PRE-NATAL IMPRESSIONS

TALK about mothers being able to influence their unborn children: Here is a portion of a letter just received from a friend of ours in Central America, in which he tells a personal experience that ought to wake every prospective parent to the importance of high thinking and high devotion.

"I have told you that my wife is, or was, a strict Roman Catholic, — never having had the chance to be anything else in this priest-ridden country. Well, as it is impossible to keep house here without a wooden Jesus, and a picture of the Virgin, I gave her a beautiful large picture of the Madonna and Child which the bishop blessed and irrigated with holy water to the detriment of the splendid frame. I bought it as a work of art, and at a big price, attracted to it by the face of the child. It has always hung in my wife's sleeping room, and, Mrs. Towne, no painter living could paint a better picture of our baby than the child this Madonna holds in her arms — hair, eyes, eyebrows, shape of head, all, all a perfect likeness of my boy as he is today, not a line or shade of color lacking. The 'Padres' and piety mongers among my wife's friends are trying to make her believe it's 'a miracle,' and that her child is going to be a great saint. If he does become such he will belie his ancestry on the paternal side! I would like to hear the opinions of these parties twenty years hence.

"Of course I have read of the wonderful effect of the mother's imagination on the offspring, and myself and our doctor have explained to my sweet little wife.

"But this is the first time I ever had a practical illustration of the subject, and to say that I am astonished is putting it mildly. Doctor also, who is bringing some medical friends tomorrow to study this strange similarity. Max has the habit of holding the little index of the right hand up and moving it crosswise before him when he wants to say 'No.' And that is exactly as the hand of the child is painted in the picture. When he does this the expression of the face is an exact counterpart of the Virgin's child in the picture."

Whether environment makes the man may be open to question; but it certainly makes the baby. This devout little lady probably never dreamed of making her baby look like that saint's child. She just adored the whole picture and the high ideals represented therein, never thinking of consequences to any one. And she invoked high heaven to bless her unborn babe. And high heaven within created that which she adored.

I knew a frivolous little butterfly who determined that her first child should be born with yellow curly hair and blue eyes, though all her relatives and her husband's were dark and straight haired. Every day this little woman gazed long and often at the picture of a beautiful child she had seen, and imagined and willed her child to be like it. And he was — the most seraphic little blue-eyed, curly-golden-haired cherub I ever saw.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox attributes her literary talent to pre-natal conditions. And the world knows of thousands of other cases where extraordinary talent or beauty resulted from peculiar mental and emotional conditions of the mother.

And records show plenty of cases of depravity directly traceable to pre-natal influences. There is that of Jesse Pomeroy, serving a life sentence down here in Charlestown, for brutally maltreating and killing several people before he was well in his teens. And then, when the prison guards, out of pity for his loneliness, gave him a kitten to keep him company he skinned it alive. Jesse Pomeroy's father was an employee in one of the great Chicago stockyards, and before Jesse's birth his mother used to go and sit for hours a day watching her husband kill and skin animals. She and her husband were just common, kindly people who loved to be together. The father skinned sheep stolidly and drew his wages every Saturday night. But the mother hated and at the same time was fascinated by his deft killing and skinning. It took hold of her imagination and thought, which at that time were busy creating a baby. And Jesse Pomeroy got it all. He "didn't know why he skinned the cat — he couldn't help it." Poor wretch, only fourteen years old, he couldn't. So society supplies bolts and bars to keep kittens and men out of his reach. He is a middle aged man now, and thinks he could keep from doing such things. His friends think so too, and want to have him come and live with them on a big farm. But the public and the governor think he can't be trusted yet.

The world knows all about many thousands of extreme cases, both good and bad. But it overlooks the every-day cases. I wonder if the world isn't filled with commonplace, prosy people for the sole reason that most mothers live a humdrum hand- to-mouth life, with no devotions beyond the daily grind. It takes large ideals, imagination, devotion to great purposes, to produce great offspring.

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