The Angel and the Author - and Others

CHAPTER XVII

Parents and their Teachers.

My heart has been much torn of late, reading of the wrongs of Children. It has lately been discovered that Children are being hampered and harassed in their career by certain brutal and ignorant persons called, for want of a better name, parents. The parent is a selfish wretch who, out of pure devilment, and without consulting the Child itself upon the subject, lures innocent Children into the world, apparently for the purpose merely of annoying them. The parent does not understand the Child when he has got it; he does not understand anything, not much. The only person who understands the Child is the young gentleman fresh from College and the elderly maiden lady, who, between them, produce most of the literature that explains to us the Child.

The parent does not even know how to dress the Child. The parent will persist in dressing the Child in a long and trailing garment that prevents the Child from kicking. The young gentleman fresh from College grows almost poetical in his contempt. It appears that the one thing essential for the health of a young child is that it should have perfect freedom to kick. Later on the parent dresses the Child in short clothes, and leaves bits of its leg bare. The elderly maiden Understander of Children, quoting medical opinion, denounces us as criminals for leaving any portion of that precious leg uncovered. It appears that the partially uncovered leg of childhood is responsible for most of the disease that flesh is heir to.

“Oh for one hour’s intelligent conversation with a human being who can talk the language.”

“My dear, you are wrong in saying that the children must have boots. That is an exploded theory. The children must not have boots. I refuse to be a party to crushing their delicately fashioned feet into hideous leather instruments of torture. The young gentleman fresh from College and the elderly maiden Understander have decided that the children must not have boots. Do not let me hear again that out-of-date word—boots.”

“Bother the flowers, let them rot. The sooner they are out of the way the better. The seed is the only thing that interests me.”

You can’t produce respectable seed but from carefully cultivated flowers. The philosopher, clamouring for improved Children, will later grasp the fact that the parent is of importance. Then he will change his tactics, and address the Children, and we shall have our time. He will impress on them how necessary it is for their own sakes that they should be careful of us. We shall have books written about misunderstood fathers who were worried into early graves.

The misunderstood Father.

Won’t somebody lend the young gentleman from Cambridge a small and healthy child just for a week or so, and let the bargain be that he lives with it all the time? The young gentleman from Cambridge thinks, when we call up the stairs to say that if we hear another sound from the nursery during the next two hours we will come up and do things to that Child the mere thought of which should appal it, that is silencing the Child. It does not occur to him that two minutes later that Child is yelling again at the top of its voice, having forgotten all we ever said.

The Child of Fiction.

Will not the young gentleman from Cambridge descend to detail? Will he not give us a specimen dialogue?

We injure the health of the Child by enforcing on it silence. We have a stupid formula that children should be seen and not heard. We deny it exercise to its lungs. We discourage its natural and laudable curiosity by telling it not to worry us—not to ask so many questions.

We catch the Child in the morning, and clean it up, and put a little satchel on its back, and pack it off to school; and the maiden lady Understander pictures that Child wasting the all too brief period of youth crowding itself up with knowledge.

There is nothing the parent can do right. You would think that now and then he might, if only by mere accident, blunder into sense. But, no, there seems to be a law against it. He brings home woolly rabbits and indiarubber elephants, and expects the Child to be contented “forsooth” with suchlike aids to its education. As a matter of fact, the Child is content: it bangs its own head with the woolly rabbit and does itself no harm; it tries to swallow the indiarubber elephant; it does not succeed, but continues to hope. With that woolly rabbit and that indiarubber elephant it would be as happy as the day is long if only the young gentleman from Cambridge would leave it alone, and not put new ideas into its head. But the gentleman from Cambridge and the maiden lady Understander are convinced that the future of the race depends upon leaving the Child untrammelled to select its own amusements. A friend of mine, during his wife’s absence once on a visit to her mother, tried the experiment.

Then we put it into boots. We “crush its delicately fashioned feet into hideous leather instruments of torture.” That is the sort of phrase that is hurled at us! The picture conjured up is that of some fiend in human shape, calling itself a father, seizing some helpless cherub by the hair, and, while drowning its pathetic wails for mercy beneath roars of demon laughter, proceeding to bind about its tender bones some ancient curiosity dug from the dungeons of the Inquisition.

The parent does not even know how to talk to his own Child. The Child is yearning to acquire a correct and dignified mode of expression. The parent says: “Did ums. Did naughty table hurt ickle tootsie pootsies? Baby say: ‘’Oo naughty table. Me no love ’oo.’”

The Child, having exhausted all the nourishment the frying-pan contained, sought to develop its brain faculty by thumping itself over the head with the flat of the thing. With the selfishness of the average parent—thinking chiefly of what the Coroner might say, and indifferent to the future of humanity, my friend insisted upon changing the game.

His foolish talk.

The Child selected a frying-pan. How it got the frying-pan remains to this day a mystery. The cook said “frying-pans don’t walk upstairs.” The nurse said she should be sorry to call anyone a liar, but that there was commonsense in everything. The scullery-maid said that if everybody did their own work other people would not be driven beyond the limits of human endurance; and the housekeeper said that she was sick and tired of life. My friend said it did not matter. The Child clung to the frying-pan with passion. The book my friend was reading said that was how the human mind was formed: the Child’s instinct prompted it to seize upon objects tending to develop its brain faculty. What the parent had got to do was to stand aside and watch events.

The Child proceeded to black everything about the nursery with the bottom of the frying-pan. It then set to work to lick the frying-pan clean. The nurse, a woman of narrow ideas, had a presentiment that later on it would be ill. My friend explained to her the error the world had hitherto committed: it had imagined that the parent knew a thing or two that the Child didn’t. In future the Children were to do their bringing up themselves. In the house of the future the parents would be allotted the attics where they would be out of the way. They might occasionally be allowed down to dinner, say, on Sundays.

The Child despairs of ever learning English. What should we think ourselves were we to join a French class, and were the Instructor to commence talking to us French of this description? What the Child, according to the gentleman from Cambridge, says to itself is,

My dear Madam, you take it from me that your tears are being wasted. You wipe your eyes and cheer up. The dear Child is not going to be overworked: he is seeing to that.

Later on, by good fortune, they came across a treatise that said a Child should always be allowed to choose its own position while sleeping, and their friends persuaded them to stop at that—told them they would never strike a better article if they searched the whole British Museum Library. It troubled them to find that Child sometimes sleeping curled up with its toe in its mouth, and sometimes flat on its stomach with its head underneath the pillow. But its health and temper were decidedly improved.

The Parent can do no right.

It is my complaint against so many of our teachers. They scold us for what we do, but so rarely tell us what we ought to do. Tell me how to talk to my baby, and I am willing to try. It is not as if I took a personal pride in the phrase: “Did ums.” I did not even invent it. I found it, so to speak, when I got here, and my experience is that it soothes the Child. When he is howling, and I say “Did ums” with sympathetic intonation, he stops crying. Possibly enough it is astonishment at the ineptitude of the remark that silences him. Maybe it is that minor troubles are lost sight of face to face with the reflection that this is the sort of father with which fate has provided him. But may not even this be useful to him? He has got to meet with stupid people in the world. Let him begin by contemplating me. It will make things easier for him later on. I put forward the idea in the hope of comforting the young gentleman from Cambridge.

If there were only one young gentleman fresh from College, one maiden lady Understander teaching us our duty, life would be simpler. But there are so many young gentlemen from College, so many maiden lady Understanders, on the job—if I may be permitted a vulgarism; and as yet they are not all agreed. It is distracting for the parent anxious to do right. We put the little dears into sandals, and then at once other young gentlemen from College, other maiden lady Understanders, point to us as would-be murderers. Long clothes are fatal, short clothes are deadly, boots are instruments of torture, to allow children to go about with bare feet shows that we regard them as Incumbrances, and, with low cunning, are seeking to be rid of them.

Their first attempt.

If the young gentleman fresh from College or the maiden lady Understander could be, if only for a month or two, a father! If only he or she could guess how gladly the father of limited income would reply,

I know the sort of Child the weeper over Children’s wrongs has in his mind. It has deep, soulful, yearning eyes. It moves about the house softly, shedding an atmosphere of patient resignation. It says: “Yes, dear papa.” “No, dear mamma.” It has but one ambition—to be good and useful. It has beautiful thoughts about the stars. You don’t know whether it is in the house or isn’t: you find it with its little face pressed close against the window-pane watching the golden sunset. Nobody understands it. It blesses the old people and dies. One of these days the young gentleman from Cambridge will, one hopes, have a Baby of his own—a real Child: and serve him darn-well right.

I knew a pair of parents. I am convinced, in spite of all that can be said to the contrary, they were fond of their Child; it was their first. They were anxious to do the right thing. They read with avidity all books and articles written on the subject of Children. They read that a Child should always sleep lying on its back, and took it in turns to sit awake o’ nights to make sure that the Child was always right side up.

But another magazine told them that Children allowed to sleep lying on their backs grew up to be idiots. They were sad they had not read of this before, and started the Child on its right side. The Child, on the contrary, appeared to have a predilection for the left, the result being that neither the parents nor the baby itself for the next three weeks got any sleep worth speaking of.

At present he is labouring under a wrong conception of the article. He says we over-educate it. We clog its wonderful brain with a mass of uninteresting facts and foolish formulas that we call knowledge. He does not know that all this time the Child is alive and kicking. He is under the delusion that the Child is taking all this lying down. We tell the Child it has got to be quiet, or else we will wring its neck. The gentleman from Cambridge pictures the Child as from that moment a silent spirit moving voiceless towards the grave.

As a matter of the fact, the Child of the present day is having, if anything, too good a time. I shall be considered a brute for saying this, but I am thinking of its future, and my opinion is that we are giving it swelled head. The argument just now in the air is that the parent exists merely for the Children. The parent doesn’t count. It is as if a gardener were to say,

A celebrated lady writer, who has made herself the mouthpiece of feminine indignation against male stupidity, took up the cudgels a little while ago on behalf of Mrs. Caudle. She admitted Mrs. Caudle appeared to be a somewhat foolish lady. “But what had Caudle ever done to improve Mrs. Caudle’s mind?” Had he ever sought, with intelligent illuminating conversation, to direct her thoughts towards other topics than lent umbrellas and red-headed minxes?

Fresh Air Funds will be started for sending parents away to the seaside on visits to kind bachelors living in detached houses, miles away from Children. Books will be specially written for us picturing a world where school fees are never demanded and babies never howl o’ nights. Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Parents will arise. Little girls who get their hair entangled and mislay all their clothes just before they are starting for the party—little boys who kick holes in their best shoes will be spanked at the public expense.