Motherhood Quote by Augustus Hare

Hare’s barb lands because it flips a sentimental certainty on its head: the doting mother isn’t just a figure of warmth, she’s an engine of myth-making, manufacturing the infant’s sense of being the center of the universe. By calling it “well for us” that we’re “born babies in intellect,” he smuggles in a bleakly funny premise about human vanity. Ignorance isn’t merely a handicap; it’s a safety feature. If we could translate the baby-talk and the ritual devotion - the cooed praise, the exaggerated awe, the constant narration of “genius” in ordinary acts - we’d absorb the message too literally and carry it like a royal charter into adulthood.

The subtext is Victorian and unsentimental in a distinctly Anglican way: a suspicion of self-importance, a preference for humility as social lubricant, and a warning about the moral hazards of excessive attention. Hare, a writer steeped in biography and manners, understands how personality is formed not by grand ideas but by early, intimate performances of love. He’s not attacking mothers so much as diagnosing the theatrics of care: adults must persuade a helpless creature that life is worth staying for, so they speak in absolutes and adoration.

That’s why the line works as social critique. It suggests our later “insupportable” traits aren’t random flaws but the logical extension of being treated, briefly, as the most important person alive. The joke is that civilization depends on us forgetting how much we were worshipped.