Read Ebook: The Little Review July 1914 (Vol. 1 No. 5) by Various Anderson Margaret C Editor

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MARGARET C. ANDERSON

The home, as such, is rapidly losing its old functions--perhaps it is more accurate to say that it is changing its standards of functioning, and that the present distress merely heralds in a wonderful new conception of family potentiality. But a generalization of this sort can be disputed by any family egotist, so let's get down to particulars. It's all right for the enlightened of the older generation to preach violently that the family is a humbug, as Shaw does; that the child should have all the rights of any other human being, and that there is nothing so futile or so stupid as to try to "control" your children. It's not only all right; it's glorious! But what I'm more interested in, still being of the age that must classify as "daughter," is this:--what are "the children" themselves doing about it? Have their rebellions been anything more than complaints; have they made any real stand for liberty; have they proved themselves worthy of the Shavian championship?

However--not to get lost in personalities--this is the letter the girl showed me and which she allows me to quote from partially:

If we are to continue living together in any sort of happiness and growth the entire basis of our present life will have to be changed. We can do it if we're brave enough to do what people usually do only in books:--face the fact squarely that our family life is and has been a failure, and set about to remedy it. It will mean an entire change of home conditions, and these are the terms of the new arrangement:

My way is simply this: that we three can live together and work in peace and harmony if this awful bugbear of Authority is dropped out of the scheme. Each of us must go her own way; we're all different, and there's no reason why one should impose her authority on the lives of the others. You say that you should because you're our mother. But that's the thing I want to discuss.

You'll say you can't be satisfied to live with us and not give advice and all the other things that are part of a mother's duty. You may give all the advice you want to; the keynote of the new situation will be that we'll take the advice if we believe it's right; if not we'll ignore it, just as a man ignores his friend's advice when he feels it to be wrong. Of course the wise person doesn't give much advice; he simply lives his life the best way he knows how. That's the only bid he can make for emulation. If we tell you that we don't approve of the creed you have made you mustn't be surprised if we try to formulate one of our own. There's no reason for us to ask you to change just because we're your daughters. You must do as you believe. But you must grant us the same privilege.

We disagree about fundamentals. If our beliefs were merely the vague, unformed ideas of children you might try to change them. But it's too late now. So we can live together harmoniously only if we give up the foolish attempts at "influencing."

We're not living three generations ago. We've had Shaw since then, and parents and children aren't doing the insulting things to each other they used to do. Among intelligent people some of the old issues can never raise their heads again. And so, it's for you to decide:--whether we shall build on the new foundation together or separately.

The people against whom children are wholly unprotected are those who devote themselves to the very mischievous and cruel sort of abortion which is called bringing up a child in the way it should go. Now nobody knows the way a child should go.

What is a child? An experiment. A fresh attempt to produce the just man made perfect: that is, to make humanity divine. And you will vitiate the experiment if you make the slightest attempt to abort it into some fancy figure of your own: for example, your notion of a good man or a womanly woman. If you treat it as a little wild beast to be tamed, or as a pet to be played with, or even as a means to save you trouble and to make money for you , it may fight its way through in spite of you and save its soul alive; for all its instincts will resist you, and possibly be strengthened in the resistance; but if you begin with its own holiest aspirations, and suborn them for your own purposes, then there is hardly any limit to the mischief you may do.

Francis Place tells us that his father always struck his children when he found one within his reach.... Francis records the habit with bitterness, having reason to thank his stars that his father respected the inside of his head whilst cuffing the outside of it; and this made it easy for Francis to do yeoman's service to his country as that rare and admirable thing, a Free-thinker: the only sort of thinker, I may remark, whose thoughts, and consequently whose religious convictions, command any respect.

Now Mr. Place, senior, would be described by many as a bad father; and I do not contend that he was a conspicuously good one. But as compared with the conventionally good father who deliberately imposes himself on his son as god; who takes advantage of childish credulity and parent worship to persuade his son that what he approves of is right and what he disapproves of is wrong; who imposes a corresponding conduct on the child by a system of prohibitions and penalties, rewards and eulogies, for which he claims divine sanction; compared to this sort of abortionist and monster maker, I say, Place appears almost as a Providence.

A gentleman once wrote to me and said, with an obvious conviction that he was being most reasonable and high minded, that the only thing he beat his children for was failure in perfect obedience and perfect truthfulness. On these attributes, he said, he must insist. As one of them is not a virtue at all, and the other is the attribute of a god, one can imagine what the lives of this gentleman's children would have been if it had been possible for him to live down to his monstrous and foolish pretensions.

The cruelty must be whitewashed by a moral excuse, and a pretense of reluctance. It must be for the child's good. The assailant must say "This hurts me more than it hurts you." There must be hypocrisy as well as cruelty.

The most excusable parents are those who try to correct their own faults in their offspring. The parent who says to his child: "I am one of the successes of the Almighty: therefore imitate me in every particular or I will have the skin off your back" is a much more absurd figure than the man who, with a pipe in his mouth, thrashes his boy for smoking.

If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson , hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example. But you had much better let the child's character alone. If you once allow yourself to regard a child as so much material for you to manufacture into any shape that happens to suit your fancy you are defeating the experiment of the Life Force. You are assuming that the child does not know its own business, and that you do. In this you are sure to be wrong. The child feels the drive of the Life Force ; and you cannot feel it for him.

Most children can be, and many are, hopelessly warped and wasted by parents who are ignorant and silly enough to suppose that they know what a human being ought to be, and who stick at nothing in their determination to force their children into their moulds.

Experienced parents, when children's rights are preached to them, very naturally ask whether children are to be allowed to do what they like. The best reply is to ask whether adults are to be allowed to do what they like. The two cases are the same. The adult who is nasty is not allowed to do what he likes: neither can the child who likes to be nasty. There is no difference in principle between the rights of a child and those of an adult: the difference in their cases is one of circumstance.

Most working folk today either send their children to day schools or turn them out of doors. This solves the problem for the parents. It does not solve it for the children, any more than the tethering of a goat in the field or the chasing of an unlicensed dog in the streets solves it for the goat or the dog; but it shows that in no class are people willing to endure the society of their children, and consequently it is an error to believe that the family provides children with edifying adult society, or that the family is a social unit.

The family is in that, as in so many other respects, a humbug. Old people and young people cannot walk at the same pace without distress and final loss of health to one of the parties.... And since our system is nevertheless to pack them all into the same house and pretend that they are happy, and that this particular sort of happiness is the foundation of virtue, it is found that in discussing family life we never speak of actual adults or actual children, or of realities of any sort, but always of ideals such as The Home, a Mother's Influence, a Father's Care, Filial Piety, Duty, Affection, Family Life, etc., etc., which are no doubt very comforting phrases, but which beg the question of what a home and a mother's influence and a father's care and so forth really come to.... Women who cannot bear to be separated from their pet dogs send their children to boarding school cheerfully. They may say and even believe that in allowing their children to leave home they are sacrificing themselves for their children's good.... But to allege that children are better continually away from home is to give up the whole popular sentimental theory of the family....

If you compel an adult and a child to live in one another's company either the adult or the child will be miserable. There is nothing whatever unnatural or wrong or shocking in this fact, and there is no harm in it if only it be sensibly faced and provided for. The mischief that it does at present is produced by our efforts to ignore it, or to smother it under a heap of sentimental and false pretenses.

The child's rights, being clearly those of any other human being, are summed up in the right to live.... And the rights of society over it clearly extend to requiring it to qualify itself to live in society without wasting other people's time....

We must reconcile education with liberty. We must find out some means of making men workers and, if need be, warriors, without making them slaves.

In dealing with children what is needed is not logic but sense.

A child should begin to assert itself early, and shift for itself more and more not only in washing and dressing itself, but in opinions and conduct.... And what is a tyrant? Quite simply a person who says to another person, young or old, "You shall do as I tell you."

Children are extremely cruel without intending it; and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the reason is that they do not conceive their elders as having any human feeling. Serve the elders right, perhaps, for posing as superhuman! The penalty of the imposter is not that he is found out but that he is taken for what he pretends to be and treated as such.

The family ideal is a humbug and a nuisance: one might as reasonably talk of the barrack ideal, or the forecastle ideal, or any other substitution of the machinery of social for the end of it, which must always be the fullest and most capable life: in short, the most Godly life.

Even apart from its insufferable pretensions, the family needs hearty discrediting; for there is hardly any vulnerable part of it that could not be amputated with advantage.

Do not for a moment suppose that uncultivated people are merely indifferent to high and noble qualities. They hate them malignantly....

Whether the risks to which liberty exposes us are moral or physical our right to liberty involves the right to run them. A man who is not free to risk his neck as an aviator or his soul as a heretic is not free at all; and the right to liberty begins, not at the age of 21 years, but of 21 seconds.

You may have as much fun at Shaw's expense as you want on the grounds that he has never had to train a child and therefore doesn't know the difficulties. But if you want to laugh last don't read this preface or the play that follows it, because he will make a laughing-stock or a convert of you as surely as he will prove that he is far cleverer than you can ever hope to be.

In view of the number of homes I know of that come legitimately under the Shaw denunciation I feel sometimes that any socialization of home life is more hopeful than an attempt to remodel the hopeless conditions inside the home. Regard the parents you know--the great mass of them outside the exceptions that encourage you to believe spasmodically in the beauty and noble need of parenthood. If they are not cruel or stupid or ignorant or smug or righteous or tyrannical or dishonest or unimaginative or weak or quiet ineffectual, they are something else just as bad. It has come to the point where a good parent is as hard to find as an honest man.

If you disagree with all this, there is still one other method by which you may produce a child who will be a credit to himself and to society. You may be so utterly stupid and wrong-headed that he will rebel to the point of becoming something different. If you prefer this course no one need worry much about your child, because he'll probably found a system of child education that will cause him to be famous; and if you have a daughter, she'll probably become a Montessori.

The new home is a recognition that the child is not the only factor in society that needs educating. It assumes that no one's education is finished just because he's been made a parent. It means that we can all go on being educated together. It means the elimination of all kinds of domestic follies--for one, the ghastly embarrassment of growing up to discover that you're different from the rest of your family, and for that reason something of a criminal. It means the kind of understanding that develops a child's feeling instead of suppressing it, so that he won't be ashamed, for instance, of having such glorious things as dreams and visions. It means artistic education: and Shaw says that we all grow up stupid or mad to just the extent to which we have not been artistically educated.

THE SWAN

Under the lily shadow and the gold and the blue and mauve that the whin and the lilac pour down on the water, the fishes quiver.

Over the green cold leaves and the rippled silver and the tarnished copper of its neck and beak, toward the deep black water beneath the arches, the swan floats slowly.

Into the dark of the arch the swan floats and into the black depth of my sorrow it bears a white rose of flame.

"DES IMAGISTES"

CHARLES ASHLEIGH

Here is a definition by Ezra Pound which helps us: "An Image is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time."

Whitman does it to me. Poe does it to me. Baudelaire and Henley do it. To all of these there is in me a response. I'm awfully sorry, but that's how it is. I think them all poets.

The Imagists believe in the direct presentation of emotion, preferably in terms of objectivity. They abhor an excess of adjectives, and, after a satiety of the pompous Victorian stuff, I am much inclined to sympathize with that tenet of their faith.

I wish, however, to make clear my own position, which is the one that most counts when I am writing. I am an anarchist in poetry: I recognize no rules, no exclusions.

If the expression of a certain thought, vision, or what not, requires twenty adjectives, then let us have them. If it be better expressed without adjectives, then let us abjure them--temporarily.

I am myself a poet . My object as a poet is to express the things which are closest to me. This sounds banal, but is better than rhetoric; words exist not with which to define with superclarity the poet's function, source, and performance.

In the true expression of myself I might write Images which would be worshipped for their perfection by the Imagists. A moment after, I might gloat and wallow in the joy of my cosmic oneness and, perhaps recall Whitman. The next minute, chronicling some shadowy episode of my variegated past, I may out-decay the decadent Baudelaire. But, this is always poetry if, by the magic of its words and the music of its arrangement, it speaks directly and beautifully to you, giving you that indescribable but unmistakeable sense of liberation and soul-expansion which comes on the contemplation of true art.

I think I have made myself clear. There is no quarrel with the Imagists, who have done some beautiful work, as such. But, if they claim monopoly of inspiration or art, as some of them appear to do, then--! Therefore, as a restricted and doctrinaire school, "a bas les Imagistes!" But, as an envigored company of the grand army of poets, "Vivent les Imagistes!"

OF RUPERT BROOKE AND OTHER MATTERS

ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE

Since even to poets--and poets are erroneously supposed to sing their hearts out--there remains a certain right of privacy, I am not sure that we do well in writing so much of their personalities and their individual views of life. When we read a poem, we feel a temperament behind it; but the effort to catalogue and label that mind and its "message" is a little impertinent, and very futile. Mr. Rupert Brooke is an excellent illustration. His fondness for this or that--whether in landscape, food, ideas, or morals--is hardly our concern. He deserves to be treated not as a natural-history specimen,--a peculiar group of likes and dislikes and convictions,--but as an artist.

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