Part 2

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.

THE SWAN

Under the lily shadow and the gold and the blue and mauve that the whin and the lilac pour down on the water, the fishes quiver.

Over the green cold leaves and the rippled silver and the tarnished copper of its neck and beak, toward the deep black water beneath the arches, the swan floats slowly.

Into the dark of the arch the swan floats and into the black depth of my sorrow it bears a white rose of flame.

_F. S. Flint._

"DES IMAGISTES"

CHARLES ASHLEIGH

A new and well born recruit has been added to the ranks of the Insurgents. It is true he appeared before we did, but we welcome him before he welcomes us, and thus are things evened. THE LITTLE REVIEW, _The Masses_, _Poetry_, _The International_--all bearers of the sacred fire,--and now cometh _The Glebe_, heralding his approach with the chanting of many-colored strains. And, among the good things which _The Glebe_ has put forth, is a book of portent: _Des Imagistes_.

The Imagistes form one of the latest schools, and it is meet that, before we read their work, we get some idea of their doctrine. Therefore I transcribe here some statements of representative Imagiste poets, which I have culled from _Poetry_, _The Egotist_, and other sources. Richard Aldington gives the following rules:

I. Direct treatment of subject. We convey an emotion by presenting the object and circumstance of the emotion without comment. For example, we do not say, "O how I admire that exquisite, that beautiful, that--25 more adjectives--woman." But we present that woman, we make an "Image" of her, we make the scene convey the emotion....

II. As few adjectives as possible.

III. A hardness as of cut stone. No slop, no sentimentality. When people say the Imagiste poems are "too hard" ... we know we have done something good.

IV. Individuality of rhythm. We make new fashions instead of cutting our clothes on the old models.

V. The exact word. We make quite a heavy stress on that. It is most important. All great poetry is exact. All the dreariness of nineteenth century poetry comes from their not quite knowing what they wanted to say and filling up the gaps with portentous adjectives and idiotic similes.

Here is a definition by Ezra Pound which helps us: "An Image is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time."

The book, _Des Imagistes_, is an anthology, presumably of Imagist (let us, once for all, Anglicize the French word and have done with it) poetry. Yet, one of the foremost imagists, Richard Aldington, in a critique of this book,--comparatively modest, owing to the fact that his own poems formed a sumptuous fraction of the volume,--says that five of those whose poems are there included are not true Imagists. These are Cournos, Hueffer, Upward, Joyce, and Cannell. Mr. Aldington says he doesn't mean that these poems are not beautiful--on the contrary, he admires them immensely--but they are not, "strictly speaking," Imagist poems.

I agree that the poems of these five men are beautiful, especially the _I hear an army_ of James Joyce and the _Nocturnes_ of Skipwith Cannell; and I also maintain that, all unconsciously, the publishers of _The Glebe_ have dealt a deadly blow to sectarian Imagism by including these non-Imagist poems in their anthology. Because, unless a school can prove that it alone has that unnameable wonder which excites us to deepest emotional turmoil, and which we call poetry, it has but little right to isolate itself or to separate its adepts from the bulk of poets. This may sound sententious, but is, nevertheless, true. Speak you in whatever mode or meter you will, if you arouse me to exultation, or to horror, or to the high pitch of any feeling,--if in me there is that responsive vibration that only true art can produce--then are you a poet.

Whitman does it to me. Poe does it to me. Baudelaire and Henley do it. To all of these there is in me a response. I'm awfully sorry, but that's how it is. I think them all poets.

The Imagists believe in the direct presentation of emotion, preferably in terms of objectivity. They abhor an excess of adjectives, and, after a satiety of the pompous Victorian stuff, I am much inclined to sympathize with that tenet of their faith.

I wish, however, to make clear my own position, which is the one that most counts when I am writing. I am an anarchist in poetry: I recognize no rules, no exclusions.

If the expression of a certain thought, vision, or what not, requires twenty adjectives, then let us have them. If it be better expressed without adjectives, then let us abjure them--temporarily.

I am myself a poet (whether performance equals desire is doubtful). My object as a poet is to express the things which are closest to me. This sounds banal, but is better than rhetoric; words exist not with which to define with superclarity the poet's function, source, and performance.

In the true expression of myself I might write Images which would be worshipped for their perfection by the Imagists. A moment after, I might gloat and wallow in the joy of my cosmic oneness (anathema to Imagists!) and, perhaps recall Whitman. The next minute, chronicling some shadowy episode of my variegated past, I may out-decay the decadent Baudelaire. But, this is always poetry if, by the magic of its words and the music of its arrangement, it speaks directly and beautifully to you, giving you that indescribable but unmistakeable sense of liberation and soul-expansion which comes on the contemplation of true art.

I think I have made myself clear. There is no quarrel with the Imagists, who have done some beautiful work, as such. But, if they claim monopoly of inspiration or art, as some of them appear to do, then--! Therefore, as a restricted and doctrinaire school, "a bas les Imagistes!" But, as an envigored company of the grand army of poets, "Vivent les Imagistes!"

OF RUPERT BROOKE AND OTHER MATTERS

ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE

Since even to poets--and poets are erroneously supposed to sing their hearts out--there remains a certain right of privacy, I am not sure that we do well in writing so much of their personalities and their individual views of life. When we read a poem, we feel a temperament behind it; but the effort to catalogue and label that mind and its "message" is a little impertinent, and very futile. Mr. Rupert Brooke is an excellent illustration. His fondness for this or that--whether in landscape, food, ideas, or morals--is hardly our concern. He deserves to be treated not as a natural-history specimen,--a peculiar group of likes and dislikes and convictions,--but as an artist.

Mr. Brooke has the distinction, rare for a young poet, of not having written any bad verse, or of not having printed it. His sole volume, _Poems_ (Sidgwick and Jackson, London, 1913), manifests in even its least notable pieces a creative spirit not allowed to run riot, but chastened and restrained by a keen sense of the obscure laws whose workings turn passion into a decorative pattern, and the emotions of the blood into intelligible designs.

Unless one is deeply concerned with such things, one is not likely to recognize the fundamental difference between those poets whose work is merely a more or less interesting emotional cry, and those nobler and more mature poets in whose work the crude elements of emotion are subordinated to the exigencies of an artistic conception. Only the latter have written fine poetry. The former may move us, as a crying child may move us; but they cannot exalt us to a peak that rises above the region of mere sympathetic response. They can never bring us a wind of revelation, or a flame from beyond the world. They are never the poets to whom other poets--and these are the only final judges--turn for inspiration or for fellowship.

For after all, there is no magic in any theme or in the emotion behind it; what is magical lies wholly in the design, the mould, in which the poet embodies a feeling that is probably common to all. No thought is so profound, no intimation so subtle, that it alone suffices as the stuff of poetry. But any thought, any intimation, if it be justly correlated and moulded into an organic and expressive shape, will serve to awaken echoes of a forgotten or unknown loveliness, and pierce its way into the very soul of the listener.

This sense of design of which I speak is not a hard, formal, conscious thing in the mind of the poet; but rather a carefully trained instinct, like the instinct that guides the hand of a fine draughtsman in the drawing of a curve of unexpected beauty. There is a right place to begin the curve, and a right place to end it; and at every instant of its length it is swayed and governed by a sense of relation to preceding and succeeding moments,--a sense subject to laws that defy mathematical formulation, but are perilously definite nevertheless. This sense of control is a rare thing to find in the work of so young a man as Mr. Brooke. Most young writers seem to approach their work as an unrestrained expression of themselves,--which it should be: but they forget that, for real self-expression, the most scrupulous mastery of the medium of expression is necessary. They regard the writing of verse as something in the nature of a joy-ride with an open throttle,--instead of seeing in it a piece of difficult driving, to be achieved only by the use of every subtlety of modulated speed and controlled steering that the mind is capable of employing.

That Mr. Brooke needs no such warning, let the following fine sonnet bear witness:

SUCCESS

I think if you had loved me when I wanted; If I'd looked up one day, and seen your eyes, And found my wild sick blasphemous prayer granted, And your brown face, that's full of pity and wise, Flushed suddenly; the white godhead in new fear Intollerably so struggling, and so shamed; Most holy and far, if you'd come all too near, If earth had seen Earth's lordliest wild limbs tamed, Shaken, and trapped, and shivering, for _my_ touch-- Myself should I have slain? or that foul you? But this the strange gods, who had given so much, To have seen and known you, this they might not do. One last shame's spared me, one black word's unspoken; And I'm alone; and you have not awoken.

It is significant that for his sonnets Mr. Brooke frequently chooses the Shakesperian form,--a form which, strangely, English poets have generally for at least a century discarded in favor of the Petrarchan model. The common feeling appears to be that the Petrarchan (a-b-b-a, a-b-b-a, c-d-e-c-d-e or some variation on that scheme) is musical and emotional; and that the Shakesperian (a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g) is harsh, cold, mechanical, and incapable of subtle harmonies. The exact reverse of this is the case. It is perhaps too much to ask the reader to write a sequence of a hundred sonnets in each form, as a test; but I am confident that after such an experience, he would agree with me. The Petrarchan form is capable of only one successful effect; a rising on the crest of a wave, whose summit is the end of the eighth line; and a subsidence of the wave, in the course of the last six lines. The Shakesperian form, on the other hand, is capable of a literally infinite variety of effects: no pattern is set arbitrarily in advance, but, as in blank verse, any pattern may be created. The first twelve lines--which are nothing but three quatrains--can be moulded into a contour that fits any shape or size of thought whatsoever; and the couplet at the end--a device despised by the ignorant--may be used either to clinch the purport of the preceding twelve lines, or to blend with them, or startlingly to refute them, or to serve any other end that the genius of the writer is capable of imagining. The mere novice will like this form because of its simple rhyme-scheme and its superficial ease of working; the experienced amateur will prefer the Petrarchan form because, while the more complex rhyme-scheme presents for him no difficulties, the basic inadequacies of his thought-structure are fairly well concealed by the arbitrary sonnet-structure; but the master of imagination and expression is likely to follow Shakespeare and the novice in preferring the true English form, wherein he can with perfect freedom create a subtly modulated movement that will answer to every sway and leap of his thought. Mr. Brooke, whose sense of form is keen, is one of those who can safely and wisely try the more interesting and more dangerous medium.

I have thought it worth while to talk a good deal of the sonnet in connection with Mr. Brooke for the reason that several of his very finest pieces are in this form. The following is one that stands a good chance of being in the anthologies a hundred years from now:

THE HILL

Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill, Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass. You said, "Through glory and ecstasy we pass; Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still, When we are old, are old ..." "And when we die All's over that is ours; and life burns on Through other lovers, other lips," said I, "Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won!"