"Poor chap," he said feelingly, "you're daft!"
"Right!" I said, "you aren't a Sadist, anyway, Mac. You must flog
because it is your method of self-assertion. As I've told you many
times, you strap kids because wielding a strap is your childish way of
showing your power."
Then Mac became angry, and when I hinted that my remarks must have hit
the bull's-eye . . . he laughed again. He is a baffling study in
psychology.
"You don't know much about it, old chap," he said genially.
"Hardly anything at all," I said with true modesty, "only I know one
thing about you, and that is that the fault always lies in yourself.
When you flog Tom Murray, you are really chastising the Tom Murray in
yourself . . . that is, the part that your wife knows so well--the part
of you that leaves the new graip out in the rain all night, that rebels
against the authority of the School Board and the inspectorate. Tom is
being crucified for your transgressions."
Barrie, wizard as he is, failed to understand the full significance of
Shakespeare's line: "The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but
in ourselves."
* * * * *
The opposite of the Sadist is the Masochist--the person who finds
sexual gratification in being beaten or bullied. When 'Arriet proudly
boasts about the black eye that 'Arry gave her on Saturday night, she
is being masochistic, and the woman who likes to be bullied by the
strong, silent man is likewise a masochist. I do not say "nothing but"
a masochist, because she is also a Sadist, for Sadism and Masochism are
complementary in the same person.
It is an understood fact that many people find joy in suffering, and I
can recollect feeling something akin to joy when the dentist, before
the days of the local anaesthetic, used to lay hold on my molars.
Hence I look back to the day when I whacked Peter Smith for cruelty to
a calf, and I acknowledge that I was wrong. I recall explaining to him
that I wanted him to realise what suffering meant, but I was completely
mistaken. If Peter were a Sadist in his cruelty, my cruelty to him was
giving unconscious gratification to the Masochistic part of him. If
his cruelty to the calf was due to his self-assertion again I did the
wrong thing, for the fear evoked by my strap merely inhibited his
desire to assert himself in cudgelling calves. I think now that there
was nothing to be done; his cruelty showed that his whole education had
been wrong. Had he been allowed to create all the way up from one week
old he would have applied his interest to making rabbit-hutches instead
of to beating calves.
I remember a questioner at one of my lectures. I had been trying to
elaborate the release theory, and had said that a boy should be
encouraged to make a noise so that he will release all his interest in
noise as power.
"If a boy liked torturing cats, would you encourage him on the theory
that suppression by an adult would cause the child to retain his
interest in torturing cats?"
"Certainly not," I said, and the lady crowed. I do dislike questioners
at any time, but when they crow . . . .! However, I tried to hide the
murder in my heart by smiling.
"What would you do?" she asked sweetly.
"I don't know, madam," I said, "but I can make a rapid guess . . . I
very probably would use the toe of my boot on him, thereby showing that
my own interest in cruelty was still alive. But five minutes later I
should try to discover what was at the back of the boy's mind."
Not long ago I studied a small boy whose chief pleasure was in pulling
bees' wings off. I never mentioned bees to him, but I got him to talk
about himself. He was suffering from a deep hatred of his teacher, and
he had a bad inferiority complex. He feared to play games like
football and hockey because of his sense of inferiority. All that was
wrong with him was that he was regressing. Life was too difficult for
him, and he took refuge in his infantile past; his pulling off wings
was the destructiveness of the infant. But the important thing to
remember is that destructiveness is simply constructiveness gone wrong.
The child is born good, and all his instincts are to do good. Bad
behaviour is the result of thwarted desire to do good. This is shown
in the case of Tommy on page 115.
* * * * *
At one time I was absolutely certain that the Great War was caused by
economic factors; British and German capital were competing, and the
losing party took up the sword. I am not so certain now. It may be
that the cataclysm was a natural ebullition of human nature, and as a
cause the economic rivalry may have been just as insignificant as the
murder of the Archduke.
During the last few decades education has been almost wholly
intellectual and material; intellectual education gave us the don, and
material education gave us the cotton-spinner. The emotional and the
spiritual in mankind had no outlet. In the unconscious of man there is
a God and a Devil, and intellectual activities afford no means of
expression to either. And when any godlike or devilish libido can find
no outlet it regresses to infantile primitive forms; thus, while the
brain of man was concerned with mathematics and logic, the heart of man
was seeking primitive things--cruelty, hate, and blood.
It may be then that the war was the direct result of the world's bad
system of education. No boy will destroy property if he is free to
create property, and no nation will take to killing if it is free to be
creative. Intellectual education allows no freedom for the creative
impulse; it not only starves the creative impulse but it drives it into
rebellion. An outlet is always a door to purification. The old men
who sat at home hated the Hun because their libido was being bottled
up, but the young men who were using up their libido in fighting talked
cheerfully of "Old Fritz." The chained dog soon becomes savage, and
the chained libido reverts to savagery also.
I have often said that the outrages of the German troops in Belgium
became understandable to me when I studied a Scots school where
suppressive discipline turned good boys into demons. The brutality of
the German army was a natural result of the brutality of their
discipline. So is it in the individual soul, and in the national soul.
Intellectualism and materialism were the Prussian drill-sergeants who
enslaved the emotional life of the citizen and of the nation. War was
a means of releasing this pent-up emotion.
The ultimate cure for war is the releasing of the beast in the heart of
mankind . . . not the releasing after chaining him up, but the
releasing of the beast from the beginning. Personally I do not believe
that he is a wild beast until we make him one by chaining him; he is
primitive and animal and amoral, but I believe that by kind treatment
we can make him our ally in living a goodly life. The Devil is merely
a chained God.
The problem for man and for mankind is to reconcile the God and the
Devil in himself. The saint represses the devil; the sinner represses
the god. The atheist cries: "There is no God!" because he has
repressed the God in himself. Then, again, many people project their
personal devil; the men who shouted "Hang the Kaiser!" were
subjectively crying "Hang the Devil in me!"
Who and what is this devil we carry in our hearts? We cannot tame him
unless we can know him. The Freudians would say that he is the
primitive unconscious, the tree-dweller in us. But that explanation is
not enough for me. The tiger has no devil in him, and why should our
remote savage ancestors leave us a devil as legacy? Yet the tiger is a
devil whenever man formulates a law against killing; the man-eater
becomes bad because he is a danger to man, and because the tiger is bad
it is assumed that man is good. The ox that is slaughtered for our
dinners might well look upon man as its special objective devil.
I have often argued that it is Authority that makes the beast in
children a wild beast. That is true, but it does not go down to first
causes. Why do adults exercise authority? To keep down the devil in
themselves, the beast that _their_ parents and teachers made wild by
authority. Truly a vicious circle! But the devil is the cause of
authority in the beginning.
Since there is no devil in the tiger and the ox, the animalism of man
cannot be his devil. But man made his animalism a devil when he began
to have ideals. Then it was that he began to talk of crucifying the
flesh; then it was that the spirit was willing but the flesh was weak.
The devil in man is the negative of man's ego-ideal. The ethical self
says that honesty is good, and dishonesty comes to be of the devil; it
says that love is good, and hate then becomes devilish. No ego-ideal,
no devil. The ox has no ego-ideal; therefore it has no devil. Man
invented the devil to account for his failures.
This brings me to the question: why should man want to have an
ego-ideal? Why should he praise self-sacrifice, love, charity,
honesty, unselfishness, while he contemns hats, murder, cruelty,
stealing, selfishness? It might be argued that he praises those
attributes that make for the good of the herd, but I cannot take this
argument as final. Rather am I inclined to look for the answer in what
we vaguely call the divine. I think that there is a power . . . call
it God or intuition or the superconscious or what-not . . . that draws
man toward higher things. This spark of the divine raises man above
the beast of the field, but yesterday he was the beast of the field,
and like the _nouveau riche_, he scorns his humble origins.
I am forced to conclude that wars will not cease until man realises
that his ego-ideal must be capable of being the working partner of his
primitive animalism. When that time comes man will know that he is
neither god nor devil, but . . . mere man.
* * * * *
I am spending my days wandering round London suburbs looking for a
school. Of an evening I sit and think about how I shall furnish it.
There will be no desks; instead there will be tables for writing and
drawing on, chairs of all descriptions--arm-chairs, deck-chairs,
straight backed chairs, stools. The children will make the tables and
stools, and we may make a combined effort to make and upholster an
arm-chair.
Then we must have at least one typewriter, not for office use, but for
the children's use. The children will use it to type their novels and
poems, and I think they would be tempted to type out poems from Keats
and Coleridge, binding their own anthologies in leather or coloured
paper.
There will be no school readers and no school poetry books. I hope
that with the aid of the typewriter each child will make his own
selection of prose and poetry.
The wall decorations will be left to the children, and if they bring
bad, sentimental prints from the Christmas numbers I shall say nothing
when they hang them up. But as an active member of the community, I
shall bring reproductions of the work of Rembrandt, Velasquez, Angelo,
Augustus John, Cezanne, Nevinson; I shall buy _Colour_ every month.
So with music. I shall sing _Eliza Jane_ with them if they want to
sing _Eliza Jane_, but I shall bring to their notice _To Music_
(Schumann), Blake's _Jerusalem_, and the bonny old English songs like
_Golden Slumbers, Now is the Month of Maying, Polly Oliver_. Then a
gramophone is a necessity, and all kinds of records will be
necessary--Beethoven, Stravinsky, Rimski-Korsikoff, Harry Lauder, Fox
Trots, Sousa. O'Neill told me that his Lancashire kiddies have tired
of ragtime, and are now playing classical music only. Personally, I
haven't reached that standard of taste yet; I still have Fox Trot
moods. I also want a player-piano--an Angelus, if possible.
Now for the library. I shall leave the choice of periodicals to the
community, and I expect to find them select a list of this
kind:--_Scout, Boy's Own Paper, Girl's Own Paper, Popular Mechanics, My
Magazine, Punch, Chips, Comic Cuts, Tit-Bits, Answers, Strand, Sketch,
Sphere_. It will be interesting to watch the career of _Chips_; I will
not be surprised if the community tires of _Chips_ in a month.
Our book library will be stocked from the children's homes, I fancy.
Each child will bring his or her favourite novel, and gladly hand it
round. I shall certainly hand on my own fiction library:--Conan Doyle,
Wells, Jack London, Rider Haggard, Cutcliffe Hyne, Guy Boothby, Barrie,
O. Henry, Leacock, Jacobs, Leonard Merrick, Seton Merriman, Stanley
Weyman, and a host of others.
No, this won't do! How can I furnish before my self-governing school
decides what furniture it will have? The children may demand desks and
time-tables, but I do not think it likely. Anyhow, I am counting my
chickens before they are hatched.