A Dominie in Doubt Part 34

The big problem for the heretical teacher is the problem of order, or rather of disorder. When a child is free from authority, he usually leaves his path untidy; he leaves his chisels on the bench or the ground; he strews the floor with papers; he throws his books all over the room. Now O'Neill's school was not untidy, and I marvelled.

"Oh, the kiddies look after that," he explained. "They have voluntary workers among themselves who do all that, and if a child does not do his job, the others naturally complain: 'Why did you take it on if you aren't going to do it properly?'"

But somehow I am not convinced; I want to know more about this business. To find so highly developed a social sense in small children runs dead against all my experience. I must write to O'Neill for further information.

On re-reading the pages of this book I feel like throwing it on the fire. I find myself disagreeing with the statements I made a few weeks ago. When I began to write it I was a more or less complete Freudian, and in an airy fas.h.i.+on I explained away my actions. Why should pale blue be my favourite colour? I asked myself this when I painted my cycle blue, and I found a ready answer in a reminiscence . . . my first sweetheart wore a blue tam-o'-shanter. This is called the "nothing but" psychology. Do I dream of a train? Quite simple! It is merely "nothing but" a s.e.xual symbol!

Life is too complex for a "nothing but" psychology. Last night a girl told me a s.e.xual dream she had had, but when she gave her a.s.sociations we found that the deep meaning of the dream had nothing to do with s.e.x.

Freud says that about every dream is the mark of the beast, but then I think he believes in original sin.

I have been thinking a lot recently about the psychology of flogging.

It is generally stated that the flogger is a s.e.xual pervert, a s.a.d.i.s.t, and undoubtedly there are pathological cases where men find s.e.xual gratification in inflicting or in watching the infliction of pain. In the pathological case the gratification is conscious, but I believe that many respectable parents and teachers find an unconscious gratification. It is absurd to say to a man like Macdonald: "Your punis.h.i.+ng is 'nothing but' Sadism." Yet I think that a little test might decide the matter. If the accused flogger is shocked or indignant at the idea I should be inclined to think that the accusation was a just one.

If I say to Simpson: "Excuse my mentioning it, old man, but I don't think you love your wife," he will laugh heartily, for he has been married for a month only, and is still very much in love. His laugh shows that his love is real; my rude remark touches no chord in his unconscious. But suppose I make a similar remark to Smith, who has been very much married for ten years! He will hit me in the eye, thereby betraying the fact that my remark touched what his unconscious knows to be true. His blow is physically directed to me, but psychically he is. .h.i.tting to defend his conscious from his unconscious.

Hence if a flogger is angry when I accuse him of being a s.a.d.i.s.t, I guess that he is a s.a.d.i.s.t.

I tried the experiment on Macdonald. He shook his head sadly.

"Poor chap," he said feelingly, "you're daft!"

"Right!" I said, "you aren't a s.a.d.i.s.t, anyway, Mac. You must flog because it is your method of self-a.s.sertion. 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 s.a.d.i.s.t is the m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.t--the person who finds s.e.xual gratification in being beaten or bullied. When 'Arriet proudly boasts about the black eye that 'Arry gave her on Sat.u.r.day night, she is being m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic, and the woman who likes to be bullied by the strong, silent man is likewise a m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.t. I do not say "nothing but"

a m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.t, because she is also a s.a.d.i.s.t, 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 s.a.d.i.s.t in his cruelty, my cruelty to him was giving unconscious gratification to the m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic part of him. If his cruelty to the calf was due to his self-a.s.sertion again I did the wrong thing, for the fear evoked by my strap merely inhibited his desire to a.s.sert 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 G.o.d and a Devil, and intellectual activities afford no means of expression to either. And when any G.o.dlike 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 G.o.d.

The problem for man and for mankind is to reconcile the G.o.d and the Devil in himself. The saint represses the devil; the sinner represses the G.o.d. The atheist cries: "There is no G.o.d!" because he has repressed the G.o.d 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 a.s.sumed 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 Lancas.h.i.+re kiddies have tired of ragtime, and are now playing cla.s.sical 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, t.i.t-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.