i gave a lecture in the village hall on friday night, and many parents came out to hear what i had to say on the subject of children and their parents. after the lecture i invited questions.
"what wud ye hae a man do if his laddie wudna do what he was bidden?" asked brown the joiner.
"i would have the man think very seriously whether he had any right to give the order that was disobeyed. for instance, if you ordered your jim to stop singing while you were reading, you would be taking an unfair advantage of your years and size. from what i know of jim he would certainly stop singing if you asked him to do so as a favour."
"aw dinna believe in askin' favours o' ma laddies," he said.
i smiled.
"yet you ask them of other laddies. you don't collar fred thomson and shout:[pg 151] 'post that letter at once!' you say very nicely: 'you might post that letter like a good laddie,' and fred enjoys posting your letter more than posting a ton of letters for his own father."
the audience laughed, and fred's father cried: "goad! ye're quite richt, dominie!"
"as a boy," i continued, "i hated being set to weed the garden, though i spent hours helping to weed the garden next door. a boy likes to grant favours."
"aye," said brown, "when there's a penny at the tail end o' them!"
"yes," i said after the laughter had died, "but your jim would rather have mr. thomson's penny than your sixpence. the real reason is that you boss your son, and nobody likes to be bossed."
"believe me, ladies and gentlemen, i think that the father is the curse of the home. (laughter.) the father never talks to his son as man to man. as a result a boy suppresses much of his nature, and if he is left alone with his father for five minutes he feels awkward, though not quite so awkward as the father does. you find among the lower animals that the father is of no [pg 152]importance; indeed, he is looked on as a danger. have you ever seen a bitch flare up when the father comes too near her puppies? female spiders, i am told, solve the problem of the father by eating him." (great laughter.)
"what aboot the mothers?" said a voice, and the men cackled.
"mothers are worse," i said. "fathers usually imagine that they have a sense of justice, but mothers have absolutely no sense of justice. it is the mother who cries, 'liz, ye lazy slut, run and clean your brother's boots, the poor laddie! lod, i dinna ken what would happen to you, my poor laddie, if your mother wasna here to look after you.' you mothers make your girls work at nights and on saturdays, and you allow your boys to play outside. that is most unjust. your boys should clean their own boots and mend their own clothes. they should help in the washing of dishes and the sweeping of floors."
"wud ye say that the mother is the curse o' the hame, too?" asked brown.
"no," i said, "she is a necessity, and in spite of her lack of justice, she is nearer to the children than the father is. she is less aloof[pg 153] and less stern. you'll find that a boy will tell his mother much more than he will tell his father. speaking generally, a stupid mother is more dangerous than a stupid father, but a mother of average intelligence is better for a child than a father of average intelligence.
"this is a problem that cannot be solved. the mother must remain with her children, and i cannot see how we are to chuck the father out of the house. as a matter of fact he is usually so henpecked that he is prevented from being too much of an evil to the bairns.
"the truth is that the parents of to-day are not fit to be parents, and the parents of the next generation will be no better. the mothers of the next generation are now in my school. they will leave at the age of fourteen—some of them will be exempted and leave at thirteen—and they will slave in the fields or the factory for five or six years. then society will accept them as legitimate guardians of the morals and spiritual welfare of children. i say that this is a damnable system. a mother who has never learned to think has absolute control of a growing young mind, and an almost absolute control[pg 154] of a growing young body. she can beat her child; she can starve it. she can poison its mind with malice, just as she can poison its body with gin and bitters.
"what can we do? the home is the englishman's castle! anyway, in these days of high explosives, castles are out of date, and it is high time that the castle called home had some airing."
* * *
i cannot flatter myself that i made a single parent think on friday night. most of the villagers treated the affair as a huge joke.
i have just decided to hold an evening school next winter. i see that the code offers the life and duties of a citizen as a subject. i shall have the lads and lasses of sixteen to nineteen in my classroom twice a week, and i guess i'll tell them things about citizenship they won't forget.
it occurs to me that married people are not easily persuaded to think. the village girl considers marriage the end of all things. she dons the bridal white, and at once she rises meteorically in the social scale. yesterday she was mag broon, an outworker at[pg 155] millside; to-day she is mrs. smith with a house of her own.
her mental horizon is widened. she can talk about anything now; the topic of childbirth can now be discussed openly with other married wives. aggressiveness and mental arrogance follow naturally, and with these come a respect for church-going and an abhorrence of atheism.
i refuse to believe those who prate about marriage as an emancipation for a woman. marriage is a prison. it shuts a woman up within her four walls, and she hugs all her prejudices and hypocrisies to her bosom. the men who shout "women's place is the home!" at suffragette meetings are fools. the home isn't good enough for women.
a girl once said to me: "i always think that marriage makes a girl a 'has been.'"
what she meant was that marriage ended flirtation, poor innocent that she was! yet her remark is true in a wider sense. the average married woman is a "has been" in thought, while not a few are "never wasers." hence i have more hope of my evening school lasses than of their mothers. they have not become smug, nor have they concluded that[pg 156] they are past enlightenment. they are not too omniscient to resent the offering of new ideas.
a man's marriage makes no great change in his life. his wife replaces his mother in such matters as cooking and washing and "feeding the brute." he finds that he is allowed to spend less, and he has to keep elders' hours. but in essentials his life is unchanged. he still has his pint on a saturday night, and his evening crack at the brig. he has gained no additional authority, and he is extremely blessed of the gods if he has not lost part of the authority he had.
the revolution in his mental outfit comes later when he becomes a father. he thinks that his education is complete when the midwife whispers: "hi, jock, it's a lassie!" he immediately realises that he is a man of importance, a guide and preacher rolled into one; and he talks dictatorially to the dominie about education. then he discovers that precept must be accompanied by example, and he aspires to be a deacon or an elder.
now i want to get at jock before the midwife gets at him. i don't care tuppence[pg 157] whether he is married or not ... but he mustn't be a father.
* * *
to-day i began to read mary johnston's by order of the company to my bairns. i love the story, and i love the style. it reminds me of malory's style; she has his trick of running on in a breathless string of "ands." when i think of style i am forced to recollect the stylists i had to read at the university. there was sir thomas browne and his urn burial. what the devil is the use of people like browne i don't know. he gives us word music and imagery i admit, but i don't want word music and imagery from prose, i want ideas or a story. i can't think of one idea i got from browne or fisher or ruskin, or any of the stylists, yet i have found many ideas in translations of nietzsche and ibsen. style is the curse of english literature.
when i read mary johnston i forget all about words. i vaguely realise that she is using the right words all the time, but the story is the thing. when i read browne i fail to scrape together the faintest interest[pg 158] in burials; the organ music of his dead march drowns everything else.
when a man writes too musically and ornately i always suspect him of having a paucity of ideas. if you have anything important to say you use plain language. the man who writes to the local paper complaining of "those itinerant denizens of the underworld yclept hawkers, who make the day hideous with raucous cries," is a pompous ass. yet he is no worse than the average stylist in writing. i think it was g. k. chesterton who said that a certain popular authoress said nothing because she believed in words. he might have applied the phrase to 90 per cent of english writers.
poetry cannot be changed. substitute a word for "felicity" in the line: "absent thee from felicity awhile" and you destroy the poetry. but i hold that prose should be able to stand translation. the prose that cannot stand it is the empty stuff produced by our ruskins and our brownes. empty barrels always have made the most sound.
* * *
there must be something in style after all. i had this note from a mother this morning.
[pg 159]
"dear sir,
please change jane's seat for she brings home more than belongs to her."
i refuse to comment on this work of art.
* * *
i must get a cornet. eurhythmics with an artillery bugle is too much for my wind and my dignity. just when the graceful bend is coming forward my wind gives out, and i make a vain attempt to whistle the rest. perhaps a concertina would be better than a cornet. i tried willie hunter with his mouth-organ, but the attempt was stale and unprofitable, and incidentally flat. then tom macintosh brought a comb to the school and offered to perform on it. after that i gave eurhythmics a rest.
when the war is over i hope that the government will retain lloyd george as minister of munitions ... for schools. i haven't got a tenth of the munitions i should have; i want a player-piano, a gramophone, a cinematograph with comic films, a library with magazines and pictures. i want swings and see-saws in the playground, i want rabbits and white mice; i want instruments for a school brass and wood band.
[pg 160]
i like building castles in spain. the truth is that if the school board would yield to my importunities and lay a few loads of gravel on the muddy patch commonly known as the playground i should almost die of surprise and joy. one learns to be content with small mercies when one is serving those ratepayers who control the rates.
