Chapter 13

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 Sadist in his cruelty, my cruelty to him was giving unconscious gratification to the Masochistic part of him. If his cruelty to the calf was due to his self-assertion again I did the wrong thing, for the fear evoked by my strap merely inhibited his desire to assert 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 God and a Devil, and intellectual activities afford no means of expression to either. And when any godlike 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 God.

The problem for man and for mankind is to reconcile the God and the Devil in himself. The saint represses the devil; the sinner represses the god. The atheist cries: "There is no God!" because he has repressed the God 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 assumed 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 God 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 god 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 Lancashire kiddies have tired of ragtime, and are now playing classical 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, Tit-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. Each child will bring his or her favourite novel, and gladly hand it round. I shall certainly hand on my own fiction library:--Conan Doyle, Wells, Jack London, Rider Haggard, Cutcliffe Hyne, Guy Boothby, Barrie, O. Henry, Leacock, Jacobs, Leonard Merrick, Seton Merriman, Stanley Weyman, and a host of others.

No, this won't do! How can I furnish before my self-governing school decides what furniture it will have? The children may demand desks and time-tables, but I do not think it likely. Anyhow, I am counting my chickens before they are hatched.

XIV.

I finish this book in the place where I began it, in Forfarshire, but not in Tarbonny Village. Hustling Herbert Jenkins sent me the galley proofs this morning with an urgent demand that I should return them at once. I do dislike publishers. At first I took them at their own valuation: I believed what they said.

"Machines waiting," Jenkins would wire. "Send MS. at once."

And I, simple I, would sit up late correcting proofs. I know better now. I know that Jenkins always divides time by 20. His "at once" means that twenty days hence he will say to his Secretary: "That new book of Neill's . . . has it gone to the printer yet?" And his Secretary will 'phone down to the office secretary and say: "You've got to send Neill's new book to the printer." Then this lady will order the office-boy to take the MS. to the printer . . . and I bet the little devil reads _Deadwood Dick on the Boomerang Prairie_ as he crawls to the printer's office with my masterpiece under his arm.

Hence, understanding Jenkins, I tossed the proofs into a corner this morning, and went out to continue the game of ring quoits that Nellie and I had to give up as darkness fell last night. Nellie is a Dundee lassie of thirteen and she is spending her holidays with her auntie here.

Nellie won, and we sat down on the bank and I began to ask her about her school-life.

"I dinna like the school, and I wish I was left," she said.

"Tell me why you dislike it, Nellie."

"If ye speak ye get the strap."

"What!" I cried, "are you _never_ allowed to speak?"

"Only at playtime," she replied. "And ye never get less than six scuds."

And it was only the other day that a lady wrote me saying that when I preach against Prussianism in schools I am merely resuscitating a dead bogey for the purpose of knocking it down.

I get quite a lot of information of schools from children. I remember when I was in Lyme Regis last Easter I went out sketching one day. As I passed a village school a troupe of happy children came out. Joy lit up their faces.

"The ideal school!" I cried, and stopped to speak to them.

"Tell me, children, tell me why you have laughter in your eyes," I said, "tell me of your happy school."

The oldest boy grinned.

"Master's gone off for the day to a funeral," he said.

I walked on deep in thought.

Nellie dislikes school. What a tragedy. She is a dear sweet child with kind eyes and a bonny smile. She spoke frankly to me at first but when I told her that I was a teacher she looked at me with fear and (I smiled at this) dropped her Dundee dialect and answered me in School English. I had to throw plantain heads at her for a full five minutes before the look of fear left her eyes and her dialect returned.

"I dinna believe ye _are_ a teacher," she said to-night.

"Why not?"

"Ye're no like ane," she said hesitatingly. "Ye're ower--ower daft."

"But why shouldn't a teacher be daft?" I asked.

"They shud be respectable," she said, "or the children winna respect them."

I looked alarmed.

"What!" I cried, "don't you respect me?"

She laughed gaily.

"No!" she cried, then she added seriously: "But I'd like to be at your schule."

She returns to Dundee to-morrow, to a class of fifty, where silence reigns. Poor Nellie! What worries me is that when Nellie's teacher reads this book she will most probably agree with Nellie's remark that I'm "daft". But she won't mean what Nellie meant.

A telegraph girl approached.

"Machines are waiting.--Jenkins."

Nellie looked anxious.

"That's twa telegrams ye've got the day," she said. "Is onybody deid?"

I looked at the words on the telegraph form.

"No, Nellie, unfortunately no!" I said slowly, and I went in to read my galley proofs.

THE END.