especially lively in their protest against my antiquated prejudices; and
rioted in quite a bean-feast of old beans. The form the argument
generally takes is to ask why parents and children should not be
friends, or as they often put it (I deeply regret to say) pals. Neither
term seems to me to convey a sufficiently distinctive meaning; and I
take it that the best term for what they really mean is that they should
be comrades. Now comradeship is a very real and splendid thing; but this
is simply the cant of comradeship. A boy does not take his mother with
him when he goes bird-nesting; and his affection for his mother is of
another kind unconnected with the idea of her climbing a tree. Three men
do not generally take an aged and beloved aunt with them as part of
their luggage on a walking tour; and if they did, it would not be so
much disrespectful to age as unjust to youth. For this confusion between
two valuable but varied things, like most of such modern confusions, is
quite as liable to obscurantist as to mutinous abuse; and is as easy to
turn into tyranny as into licence. If a boy’s aunts are his comrades,
why should he need any comrades except his aunts? If his father and
mother are perfect and consummate pals, why should he fool away his time
with more ignorant, immature and insufficient pals? As in a good many
other modern things, the end of the old parental dignity would be the
beginning of a new parental tyranny. I would rather the boy loved his
father as his father than feared him as a Frankenstein giant of a
superior and supercilious friend, armed in that unequal friendship with
all the weapons of psychology and psycho-analysis. If he loves him as a
father he loves him as an older man; and if we are to abolish all
differences of tone towards those older than ourselves, we must
presumably do the same to those younger than ourselves. All healthy
people, for instance, feel an instinctive and almost impersonal
affection for a baby. Is a baby a comrade? Is he to climb the tree and
go on the walking tour; or are we on his account to abolish all trees
and tours? Are the grandfather aged ninety, the son aged thirty, and the
grandson aged three, all to set out together on their travels, with the
same knapsacks and knickerbockers? I have read somewhere that in one of
the Ten or Twelve or Two Hundred Types of Filial Piety reverenced by the
Chinese, one was an elderly sage and statesman, who dressed up as a
child of four and danced before his yet more elderly parents, to delight
them with the romantic illusion that they were still quite young. This
in itself could not but attract remark; but this in itself I am prepared
to defend. It was an exceptional and even extraordinary festivity, like
the reversals of the Saturnalia; and I wish we could have seen some
vigorous old gentleman like Lord Halsbury or the Archbishop of
Canterbury performing a similar act of piety. But in the Utopia of
comradeship now commended to us, old and young are expected normally to
think alike, feel alike and talk alike; and may therefore normally and
permanently be supposed to dress alike. Whether the parents dress as
children or the children as parents, it is clear that they must all
dress as pals, whatever be the ceremonial dress of that rank. I imagine
it as something in tweeds, with rather a loud check.
As I considered these things I looked across the kitchen garden of the
cottage, and the association of peas and beans brought the fancy back to
the foolish figure of speech with which the discussion began. There is a
proverb, which is like most of our popular sayings, a country proverb,
about things that are as like as two peas. There is something
significant in the fact that this is as near as the rural imagination
could get to a mere mechanical monotony. For as a matter of fact it is
highly improbable that any two peas are exactly alike. A survey of the
whole world of peas, with all their forms and uses, would probably
reveal every sort of significance between the sweet peas of sentiment
and the dried peas of asceticism. Modern machinery has gone far beyond
such rude rural attempts at dullness. Things are not as like as two peas
in the sense that they are as like as two pins. But the flippant phrase
under discussion does really imply that they are as like as two beans.
It is really part of the low and levelling philosophy that assimilates
all things too much to each other. It does not mean that we see any
fanciful significance in the use of the term, as in a country proverb.
It is not that we see an old gentleman with fine curling white hair and
say to him poetically, “Permit me, venerable cauliflower, to inquire
after your health.” It is not that we address an old farmer with a deep
and rich complexion, saying, “I trust, most admirable of beetroots, that
you are as well as you look.” When we say, “How are you, old bean,” the
error is not so much that we say something rude, but that we say nothing
because we mean nothing.
As I happened to meet at that moment a girl belonging to the family of
the cottage, I showed her the cutting, and asked her opinion upon the
great progressive problem of calling your father an old bean. At which
she laughed derisively, and merely said, “As if anybody would!”
The Fear of the Film
Long lists are being given of particular cases in which children have
suffered in spirits or health from alleged horrors of the kinema. One
child is said to have had a fit after seeing a film; another to have
been sleepless with some fixed idea taken from a film; another to have
killed his father with a carving-knife through having seen a knife used
in a film. This may possibly have occurred; though if it did, anybody of
common sense would prefer to have details about that particular child,
rather than about that particular picture. But what is supposed to be
the practical moral of it, in any case? Is it that the young should
never see a story with a knife in it? Are they to be brought up in
complete ignorance of “The Merchant of Venice” because Shylock
flourishes a knife for a highly disagreeable purpose? Are they never to
hear of Macbeth, lest it should slowly dawn upon their trembling
intelligence that it is a dagger that they see before them? It would be
more practical to propose that a child should never see a real
carving-knife, and still more practical that he should never see a real
father. All that may come; the era of preventive and prophetic science
has only begun. We must not be impatient. But when we come to the cases
of morbid panic after some particular exhibition, there is yet more
reason to clear the mind of cant. It is perfectly true that a child will
have the horrors after seeing some particular detail. It is quite
equally true that nobody can possibly predict what that detail will be.
It certainly need not be anything so obvious as a murder or even a
knife. I should have thought anybody who knew anything about children,
or for that matter anybody who had been a child, would know that these
nightmares are quite incalculable. The hint of horror may come by any
chance in any connexion. If the kinema exhibited nothing but views of
country vicarages or vegetarian restaurants, the ugly fancy is as likely
to be stimulated by these things as by anything else. It is like seeing
a face in the carpet; it makes no difference that it is the carpet at
the vicarage.
I will give two examples from my own most personal circle; I could give
hundreds from hearsay. I know a child who screamed steadily for hours if
he had been taken past the Albert Memorial. This was not a precocious
precision or excellence in his taste in architecture. Nor was it a
premature protest against all that gimcrack German culture which nearly
entangled us in the downfall of the barbaric tyranny. It was the fear of
something which he himself described with lurid simplicity as The Cow
with the India-rubber Tongue. It sounds rather a good title for a creepy
short story. At the base of the Albert Memorial (I may explain for those
who have never enjoyed that monument) are four groups of statuary
representing Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. America especially is
very overwhelming; borne onward on a snorting bison who plunges forward
in a fury of western progress, and is surrounded with Red Indians,
Mexicans, and all sorts of pioneers, O pioneers, armed to the teeth. The
child passed this transatlantic tornado with complete coolness and
indifference. Europe however is seated on a bull so mild as to look like
a cow; the tip of its tongue is showing and happened to be discoloured
by weather; suggesting, I suppose, a living thing coming out of the dead
marble. Now nobody could possibly foretell that a weather-stain would
occur in that particular place, and fill that particular child with that
particular fancy. Nobody is likely to propose meeting it by forbidding
graven images, like the Moslems and the Jews. Nobody has said (as yet)
that it is bad morals to make a picture of a cow. Nobody has even
pleaded that it is bad manners for a cow to put its tongue out. These
things are utterly beyond calculation; they are also beyond counting,
for they occur all over the place, not only to morbid children but to
any children. I knew this particular child very well, being a rather
older child myself at the time. He certainly was not congenitally timid
or feeble-minded; for he risked going to prison to expose the Marconi
Scandal and died fighting in the Great War.
Here is another example out of scores. A little girl, now a very normal
and cheerful young lady, had an insomnia of insane terror entirely
arising from the lyric of “Little Bo-Peep.” After an inquisition like
that of the confessor or the psycho-analyst, it was found that the word
“bleating” had some obscure connexion in her mind with the word
“bleeding.” There was thus perhaps an added horror in the phrase
“heard”; in hearing rather than seeing the flowing of blood. Nobody
could possibly provide against that sort of mistake. Nobody could
prevent the little girl from hearing about sheep, any more than the
little boy from hearing about cows. We might abolish all nursery rhymes;
and as they are happy and popular and used with universal success, it is
very likely that we shall. But the whole point of the mistake about that
phrase is that it might have been a mistake about any phrase. We cannot
foresee all the fancies that might arise, not only out of what we say,
but of what we do not say. We cannot avoid promising a child a caramel
lest he should think we say cannibal, or conceal the very word “hill”
lest it should sound like “hell.”
All the catalogues and calculations offered us by the party of caution
in this controversy are therefore quite worthless. It is perfectly true
that examples can be given of a child being frightened of this, that or
the other. But we can never be certain of his being frightened of the
same thing twice. It is not on the negative side, by making lists of
vetoes, that the danger can be avoided; it can never indeed be entirely
avoided. We can only fortify the child on the positive side by giving
him health and humour and a trust in God; not omitting (what will much
mystify the moderns) an intelligent appreciation of the idea of
authority, which is only the other side of confidence, and which alone
can suddenly and summarily cast out such devils. But we may be sure that
most modern people will not look at it in this way. They will think it
more scientific to attempt to calculate the incalculable. So soon as
they have realized that it is not so simple as it looks, they will try
to map it out, however complicated it may be. When they discover that
the terrible detail need not be a knife, but might just as well be a
fork, they will only say there is a fork complex as well as a knife
complex. And that increasing complexity of complexes is the net in which
liberty will be taken.
Instead of seeing in the odd cases of the cow’s tongue or the bleating
sheep the peril of their past generalizations, they will see them only
as starting points for new generalizations. They will get yet another
theory out of it. And they will begin acting on the theory long before
they have done thinking about it. They will start out with some new and
crude conception that sculpture has made children scream or that nursery
rhymes have made children sleepless; and the thing will be a clause in a
programme of reform before it has begun to be a conclusion in a serious
study of psychology. That is the practical problem about modern liberty
which the critics will not see; of which eugenics is one example and all
this amateur child-psychology is another. So long as an old morality was
in black and white like a chess-board, even a man who wanted more of it
made white was certain that no more of it would be made black. Now he is
never certain what vices may not be released, but neither is he certain
what virtues may be forbidden. Even if he did not think it wrong to run
away with a married woman, he knew that his neighbours only thought it
wrong because the woman was married. They did not think it wrong to run
away with a red-haired woman, or a left-handed woman, or a woman
subject to headaches. But when we let loose a thousand eugenical
speculations, all adopted before they are verified and acted on even
before they are adopted, he is just as likely as not to find himself
separated from the woman for those or any other reasons. Similarly there
was something to be said for restrictions, even rather puritanical and
provincial restrictions, upon what children should read or see, so long
as they fenced in certain fixed departments like sex or sensational
tortures. But when we begin to speculate on whether other sensations may
not stimulate as dangerously as sex, those other sensations may be as
closely controlled as sex. When, let us say, we hear that the eye and
brain are weakened by the rapid turning of wheels as well as by the most
revolting torturing of men, we have come into a world in which
cart-wheels and steam-engines may become as obscene as racks and
thumbscrews. In short, so long as we _combine_ ceaseless and often
reckless scientific speculation with rapid and often random social
reform, the result must inevitably be not anarchy but ever-increasing
tyranny. There must be a ceaseless and almost mechanical multiplication
of things forbidden. The resolution to cure all the ills that flesh is
heir to, combined with the guesswork about all possible ills that flesh
and nerve and brain-cell may be heir to--these two things conducted
simultaneously must inevitably spread a sort of panic of prohibition.
Scientific imagination and social reform between them will quite
logically and almost legitimately have made us slaves. This seems to me
a very clear, a very fair and a very simple point of public criticism;
and I am much mystified about why so many publicists cannot even see
what it is, but take refuge in charges of anarchism, which firstly are
not true, and secondly have nothing to do with it.
Wings and the Housemaid
Among the numberless fictitious things that I have fortunately never
written, there was a little story about a logical maiden lady engaging
apartments in which she was not allowed to keep a cat or dog, who,
nevertheless, stipulated for permission to keep a bird, and who
eventually walked round to her new lodgings accompanied by an ostrich.
There was a moral to the fable, connected with that exaggeration of
small concessions, in which, for instance, the Germans indulged about
espionage, or the Jews about interest. But this faded fancy returned to
my mind in another fashion when a very humane lady suggested the other
day that every domestic servant, including the butler, I presume, should
be described as “a home-bird.” Unless the lady is mis-reported, which is
likely enough, she wanted servants called home-birds because they keep
the home-fires burning, which, as many will be ready to point out, is
hardly the particular form in which the domesticity of the nest commonly
expresses itself. But I am not at all disposed to deride the lady’s real
meaning, still less her real motives, which referred to a real movement
of social conscience and sentiment, however wrongly expressed. She was
troubled about the implied insolence of calling servants servants and
apparently even of talking about “maids” or “the cook.” Therefore she
evolved the ornithological substitute; about which, of course, it would
be easy to evolve a whole aviary of allegorical parodies. It would be
easy to ask whether a private secretary is to be called a secretary
bird, or, perhaps, the telephone girl a humming-bird. But it will be
enough to say generally of the proposal, in its present verbal form,
that one has only to submit it to any living and human housemaid in
order to find that particular home-bird developing rapidly into a
mockingbird. Nevertheless, as I have said, we should not merely dismiss
any social doubts thus suggested, or any impulse towards a warmer
respect for work generally grossly undervalued. Too many people, of the
more snobbish social strata, have treated their servants as home-birds;
as owls, for instance, who can be up all night, or as vultures, who can
eat the refuse fit for the dustbin. I would not throw cold water on any
indignation on this score; but I note it as typical of the time that the
indignation should fail on the side of intelligence. For it is the mark
of our time, above almost everything else, that it goes by associations
and not by arguments; that is why it has a hundred arts and no
philosophy.
Thus, for instance, the lady in question lumps together a number of
terms that have no logical connexion at all. There is at least a meaning
in objecting to one person calling another a servant. As I shall suggest
in a moment, there is not much sense in changing the name when you do
not change the thing; and there is a great deal of nonsense in denying
the status of the servant at the moment when you are making it more
servile. Still, anybody can see how the term might be held to hurt
human dignity; but the other terms mentioned cannot hurt human dignity
at all. I cannot conceive why it should insult a cook to call her a
cook, any more than it insults a cashier to call him a cashier; to say
nothing of the fact that dealing with cookery is far nobler than dealing
with cash. And the third title certainly tells entirely the other way.
The word “maid” is not only a noble old English word, with no note of
social distinction; for a mediæval king might have praised his daughter
as “a good maid.” It is a word loaded with magnificent memories, in
history, literature, and religion. Joan the Maid suggests a little more
than Joan the maid-servant. As it says in Mr. Belloc’s stirring little
poem:--
By God who made the Master Maids,
I know not whence she came;
But the sword she bore to save the soul
Went up like an altar flame.
It is needless here to trace the idea back to its splendid sources; or
to explain how the word maid has been the highest earthly title, not
only on earth but in heaven. “Mother and maiden was never none but she.”
Here at least modern humanitarian criticism has gone curiously astray,
even for its own purposes; any servant may well be satisfied with the
dignity of being called the maid, just as any workman may be rightly
honoured by the accident which calls him the man. For in a modern
industrial dispute, as reported in the papers, I always feel there is a
final verdict and sentence in the very statement of the case of Masters
_versus_ Men.
The true objection lies much farther back. It begins with the simple
fact that the home-bird is not in her own home. When that particular
sparrow stokes the fire, as above described, it is not her own fireside;
when we happen to meet a canary carrying a coalscuttle, the canary is
not generally a coal-owner. In short, wherever we find pelicans,
penguins, or flamingoes keeping the home-fires burning, they may all be
earnestly wishing that they could fly away to their homes. Now a
moderate amount of this temporary and vicarious domesticity is a natural
enough accident in social relations, so long as it does not obscure and
obstruct more individual and direct domesticity. In short, there is no
particular harm in the maid being a housemaid in someone else’s house,
if she normally has a chance of being a housewife in her own. As I shall
suggest in a moment, this is what was really implied in certain older
institutions to which the wisest are now looking back. But in any case
it is odd that the home-bird should thus plume itself at this moment;
for the trend of the time is certainly not towards any domesticity,
direct or indirect. The birds have long been netted or caged, by cold,
fear and hunger, into larger and more terrorist systems. The happy
home-birds are keeping the factory fires burning. The only legal and
industrial tendency seems to be to shut up more and more of the women,
those strange wild fowl, in those colossal cages of iron. Nor is the
change one of mere æsthetic atmosphere; we know now that it is one of
economic fact and may soon be one of legal definition. In a word, it is
queer that we should suddenly grow sensitive about calling people
servants when we are in the act of making them slaves. Indeed, in many
concrete cases we may already be said to be making them convicts. The
true moral meaning of much that is called the improvement of prisons is
not that we are turning prisoners into a better sort of people, but
rather that we are treating a better sort of people as prisoners. The
broad arrow is broadened in so liberal a fashion as to cover those who
would once have been counted respectable; and there is a sense in which
the broad arrow, becoming broader, is bound to become blunter. The
prison becomes utilitarian as well as disciplinary, as the factory
becomes disciplinary as well as utilitarian. The two become simply and
substantially the same; for they have to treat the same sort of
impecunious people in the same sort of impersonal way. People may differ
about the definition of that common condition or status. Some may
eagerly salute persons involved as home-birds. Others may prefer to
describe them as jail-birds.
For the rest, if anybody wants to strike the central stream of moderate
sanity in the servant problem, I recommend him first to read with a
close attention or preferably to sing in a loud voice, the song called
“Sally in Our Alley.” In that great and gloriously English lyric, the
poet does not disguise the accidental discomforts of the great system of
apprenticeship which was part of the glory of the Guilds. He even
exhibits his Christian prejudices by comparing his master to a Turk. He
actually entertains, as every reflective social reformer must, the
hypothetical alternative of the Servile State, and considers the
relative advantages of a slave that rows a galley. But the point is that
what makes him refuse and endure is hope, the sure and certain hope of a
glorious emancipation; not the hopeless hope of a chance in a scramble,
with a general recommendation to get on or get out, but a charter of
knowledge and honour, that “when his seven long years are past,” a door
shall open to him, which our age has shut on the great multitude of
mankind.
The Slavery of Free Verse