THE GLORIOUS ADVENTURE OF GLORIOUS ME
I swim with the tide of life towards the new;
I reach out hungered arms to flowing change.—
I smash the awesome totems of my kind;
My smarting vision bursts its cramping range.
A thousand voices yell within my soul;
A thousand hymns are chanting in my heart.—
I blast the mist of worlds and years apart;
I sense the blending glory of the whole.
The sap of flowers and trees, it mounts in me.
I feel the child within me cry and turn;
The crimson thoughts within me writhe and burn.—
I stand, with craving arms high-flung, before the rimless sea.
And every whirling, passionate star sings melodies to Me;
And every bud and every leaf has sought my private ear;
And to the quickening soul of Me has told its mystery,
As I sit in state in the heart of the world,
As I proudly hug the core of the world,
As I make me a boat of the whole, wide world ...
And then for new worlds steer.
THE RENAISSANCE OF PARENTHOOD
MARGARET C. ANDERSON
There seems to be a kind of renaissance of motherhood in the air. Ellen Key has just done a book with that title which has come to us too late to be reviewed adequately in this issue; Mrs. Gasquoine Hartley has written The Age of Mother Power which will be brought out in the fall; and in Shaw’s new volume of plays (Misalliance, Fanny’s First Play and The Dark Lady of the Sonnets) there is a preface of over a hundred pages devoted to a discussion of parents and children which says some of the most refreshing and important things about that relationship I have ever read.
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?
Well—I got hold recently of a human document which answered these questions quite in the affirmative. It was a rather startling thing because, while it offered nothing new on the theory side of the matter, it showed the theory in thoughtful action—which, for all the talk on the subject, is still rare. It was a letter of some twenty pages written by a girl to her mother at the time of a domestic climax when all the bonds of family affection, family idealism and obligation were tending to smother the human truth of the situation, as the girl put it. She was in her early twenties; she had a sister two or three years younger, and both of them had reached at least a sort of economic independence. She had come to the conclusion, after a good many years of rebellion, that the whole fabric of their family life was wrong; and since it was impossible to talk the thing out sensibly—because, as in all families where the children grow up without being given the necessary revaluations, real talk is no more possible than it is between uncongenial strangers—she had decided to discuss it in a letter. That medium does away with the patronage of the parents’ refusal to listen seriously:—that “Oh, come now, what do you know about these things?” If the child has anything interesting to say, if he puts any of his rebellion into his writing, the chances are that the parent will read the letter through; and the result is that he’ll know more about his child than he has learned in all the years they’ve been trying to talk with each other and not succeeding. I’m enthusiastic about this kind of family correspondence; it’s good training in expression and it clears the air—jolts the “heads” of the family into realizing that the thinking and planning are not all on one side. I once did it myself to my father—put ten pages of closely-written argument on his office desk (so that he’d open it with the same impersonality given to a business communication), in which I explained why I wanted to go away from home and learn to work, and why I thought such a course was an intelligent one. The letter accomplished what no amount of talking would have done, because in our talk we rarely got beyond the “Oh, now, you’re just a little excited, it will look different in the morning” stage. Father said it was rather a shock to him because he didn’t know I had ever figured things out to that extent; but we always understood each other better after that.
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:
When I said to you the other day that things would have to go my way now, you were horrified at the conceit of it. To get to facts, there’s no conceit in it—because my way is simply the practise of not imposing one’s will upon other people. I made the remark merely as a common sense suggestion, and made it out of a seriousness that is desperate. I say “desperate” because I mean that literally: the situation isn’t a question of a mere temporary adjustment—just some sort of superficial arrangement so that we can get on pleasantly for a while before the next outbreak comes. The plans Betty and I have discussed have been made in the interest of our whole future lives:—whether we’re going to submit (either by surrender or compromise or by just drifting along and not doing anything) to an existence of bickering, nagging, hours spent in the discussion of non-essentials, hideous lack of harmony—the whole stupid programme we’ve watched working for years and achieving nothing but unhappiness, folly, and a terrible “human waste.” You ask us to continue in your way; but from at least three points of view that way has been a failure. I ask you to adopt my way—which has not yet failed. That’s why I say it’s not conceit, but common sense.
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.
Motherhood isn’t infallibility. If a woman is a wise woman she’s a wise mother; if she’s a foolish woman she’s a foolish mother. Because you’re our mother doesn’t mean that you must always be right; before being a mother you’re a human being, and any human being is likely to be wrong. To get down to brutal facts, we think you are not right about the whole thing. We’ve thought so for years, but now it’s come to the time when our thinking must be put into action. We’re no longer children; but even as mere infants we thought these things—without having the right to express them. What I’m trying to do now is to express them not as a daughter, but quite impersonally as a human being, as a mere friend, a sister, or anyone who might come to you stating that she believed with all her soul that you were wrong, and also stating, just as impersonally, that she wouldn’t think of modeling her line of conduct after that pattern which appeared to her so wrong. We must face the facts; if you do that squarely it doesn’t seem so bad, and you stop flinching about it. You get to the point where you’re not afraid to face them boldly, and then you begin to construct. And this is the only way to clear up the kind of rottenness and decay that flourishes in our family life.
It’s in the interest of this achievement that I say the thing a girl isn’t supposed to say to her mother—namely, that Betty and I will not any longer subscribe to the things you expect us to. The fact to face just as quickly as possible is this: it’s the starting point. When you realize that we feel it’s a question of doing this or laying a foundation for lives that are just half lives—hideous perverted things which miss all the beauty that you can put into the short life given you—I think you’ll see how serious we are. We’re at least two intelligent human beings, if we’re nothing else. And why should you ask or expect that we’ll submit to a system which to us means stupidity, misery, pettiness—all those things which we’ve seen working out for years and which, being at least intelligent, we want to keep away from?
That much settled, we can continue to live together in just one way—as three sisters or friends; the motherhood, in so far as it means authority or an attempt to mould us to your way, must be eliminated. A complete new family idealism can be built on such a basis. You will say that it’s an abnormal basis for any mother to accept. Of course it is; but the situation is abnormal, and the orthodox remedies aren’t applicable.
The reason I say the situation is abnormal is this: usually when a mother objects to her daughters’ behavior it is on some definite basis of opposing the things they do—like going to too many parties or falling in love with the wrong man. You have very little fault to find with the things we do. Your objections are on a basis of what we are—or, rather, of what we are not: that we are not orthodox, that we are not hypocrites, that we are not the kind of daughters the Victorians approved of. “Hypocrites” will sound paradoxical; but you have confessed that you would rather have us lie to you than to disagree with you; that you would rather have us be sentimental about “the way a girl should treat her mother” than to learn how we ought to treat ourselves. You call that being “respectful” and think that harmony is possible only under such conditions. We call it being “insulting,” and think that it’s the one sure way of destroying any chance of harmony. If we respect you it must be because we think you worthy of the truth: anything else is degrading to both sides.
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.
It might be a play; it’s certainly rather good for reality. And what happened? The mother refused to “accept the terms”—which is not surprising, perhaps; and the household broke up into two establishments with results that will disappoint the conservative who thinks those girls should have been soundly beaten. The first wrench of it, the girl said, reminded her of George’s parting with Marion in Tono-Bungay:—that sense of belonging to each other immensely, that “profound persuasion of irreparable error” in the midst of what seemed profoundly right. “Nothing is simple,” Wells wrote in that connection; “every wrong done has a certain justice in it, and every good deed has dregs of evil.” But the girl and her mother have learned to be friends as a result of that break, and the latter will tell you now that it was the right thing to have done.
The preface to Misalliance has such a wealth of quotable things in it that the only way to get them appreciated is to quote. Shaw has said much of this before, but it is all so valuable that it ought to be shouted from the housetops:
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 (and these are our commonest ways), 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 (of beating a child) 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” (a quite common attitude) 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 (which is not at all necessary), 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 (often called the Will of God); 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 (he very seldom is) 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.
Shaw and Ellen Key preach practically the same doctrine about the home; both are temperamentally incapable of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s programme—education outside the home: Shaw because the school is as big a humbug as the family, and Miss Key because “even if institutions can thus rough-plane the material that is to become a member of society, nevertheless they cannot—if they take in the major part of the child’s education—accomplish that which is needed first of all if we are to lift ourselves to a higher spiritual plane in an economically just society: they cannot deepen the emotional life.” Her insistence is strongly upon the education of the feelings as the most important factor in the soul-life. In her vision of the renaissance of motherhood she begins with Nietzsche’s dictum that “a time will come when men will think of nothing except education.” Not that any one can be educated to motherliness; but that our sentimentalization of motherhood as the ever holy, ever infallible power, must be abandoned, and a quality of intelligent mother-power cultivated by definite courses of training which she lays out in detail.
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.
Very seriously, however, there is hope in the situation—there is renaissance in the air. And it has its foundation in the sensible and healthy (though so far only tacit) admission that it doesn’t matter so much what your child becomes as that he shall become something! You can’t do much with him, anyhow, and you may as well face it. You can give him, during his first few years, the kind of foundation you think will help him; and for the rest of the time you can do only one thing that he will really need from you: you can develop your own personality as richly as you want him to develop his. You can refuse to worry about him—since that does neither of you any good—and thereby save stores of energy that he may draw upon for your mutual benefit. It becomes a sort of game for two, instead of the uninteresting kind in which one player is given all the advantages. Compared with it the old-fashioned game in which the mother sacrificed everything, suffered everything, wore herself out trying to help her child win, looks not only very unfair and very unnecessary, but very wasteful. And have you ever noticed how the man who sentimentalizes about the wonderful mothers we used to have—his own in particular—is the one whose life is lived at the opposite pole of the mother’s wise direction?
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.