"Yet you ask them of other laddies. You don't collar Fred Thomson and
shout: '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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
"DEAR SIR,
Please change Jane's seat for she brings home more than belongs to
her."