Sidelight
By COMPTON MACKENZIE JFIFTY years ago in February I played Pheidippides in The Clouds of Aristophanes when it was given by the OUDS in the New Theatre, Oxford. My father trepsiades was admirably Performed by C. W. Mercer, a freshman from 'Univ., who one day was to make a reputa- tion as a romantic novelist under the pseudonym of Dornford Yates. About two-thirds thropigh the play Pheidippides hat to stand alert yet still as a statue while the Just and the Unjust Arguments hold their wordy contest to direct his future education. Heavily expurgated though the text was in order not to shock the dons in front, that contest lasted for about twenty minutes. In the course of it the Just Argument dis- coursed on the superiority of education once upon a time. First and foremost young people used to be seen but not heard. Every morning the boys of the same district used to march off together to the music-master's classroom in good order. Even though it might be snowing fast they were not wrapped up. They, did not loll with crossed legs while the music-master was teaching them popular old songs like `Pallas! Dread Destroyer of Cities.' What is more they had to sing such songs to the traditional accompaniment, and if any of them tried jazzing it in the style of the bandleader Phrynis lie was rapped sharply over the knuckles for spoiling a good tune. And at supper no boy was allowed to eat as much as a radish or a bit of aniseed before his elders gave him permission. When the Unjust Argument scoffed at such old-fashioned notions long out of date, the Just Argument reminded him that this was the discipline on which the men who fought at Marathon had been brought up. It was dis- gusting to see the way boys were being coddled nowadays.
I have been wondering since I read Miss Gladys Kendon's challenging article 'Children of Welfare' whether the Just Argument whom she would support was so entirely right as Anstophanes, whom I revere as much as any writer that ever lived, obviously himself believed.
Miss Kendon told us that she wasted her nervous energy 'in the furious preoccupation of trying to get the forty-five little creatures committed to her to come alive in the spirit.' But did any children at any school ever reward the most enthusiastic teacher by showing signs in class of spiritual life? 'You see such harmony between parents, children and hbme as has perhaps never been in this world before,' Miss Kendon went on. 'But just say the words "immortal soul" or "eternal life" and the bottomless abyss that formed between Dives and Lazarus yawns here.' I look back to Greek Testament at school in first hour every Monday morning, from which boring business a happy minority of Jews, Catholics, and the stricter dissenters like Plymouth Brethren were exempt, and I wonder if at the age of twelve I should have responded to the words 'eternal life' except as a satisfactory translation of the Greek. Miss Kendon looks back to a golden age before 1914 when `thought and life meant something to each other.' But did they mean any more to each other then than now? And if they did I wish Miss Kendon would tell us when that inter- communion began in the education of children. In the eighteenth century and well on into the nineteenth century when a child was put into the witness-box at the Old Bailey it was asked by the judge whether it knew what would happen to it if it told a lie. Whereupon the well-brought-up child piped out, 'I shall go to hell.' Was thought related to life in that child's mind? And the labour of children in mines and factories? What were thought and life then?
I think we must face the fact that modern parents 'spoil' their children 'because they did not have as children what they can now afford to give to their own. Materialistic they may seem, and yet is not that kindness to the young one aspect of the human being's love of God? I do not believe that `shame and guilt feelings' should be the result of young people `undergoing social and religious training in the course of their upbringing.' I am old enough still to hate fiercely the Victorian attitude toward children, and I rejoice that the average child is happier than he or she was when I was born.
And now I shall seem to make a complete volte-face by declaring that I believe no great artist can survive a com- pletely happy, childhood, and I do believe' that there is a danger for children today of what Miss Kendon calls `smothering them with modern comforts, amenities, care and pleasantness,' so that their parents 'kill the soul before it has had time to aspire for itself.' I think that killing the soul is too lurid a phrase: I should prefer to speak of cloying and thus clogging the imagination.
We have been exercised lately about the effect of horror comics on the childish mind, and at first I was in favour of their suppression, but the amount of nonsense that has been printed and spoken about the depraving of the young by novels is making me wonder whether a good deal of nonsense may not have been printed and spoken about the depraving effect of horror comics. I doubt if any child is depraved by what grown-up people think is horror. His reaction to some hideous scene is objective; he looks on with curiosity; he is as incapable of feeling for the sufferings of the victim as a savage. We have to recognise that pious pictures and books have done immense harm to religion and to simple goodness by boring the children to whom they had been shown and read. No doubt I shall be considered deliberately extravagant if I suggest that Children's Hour may have done as much harm to youth as those horror comics which have supplanted the penny dreadful of my childhood as the villain of the piece. Let me hasten to make it clear that I am not reproaching the Children's Hour with corrupting or depraving children's minds. What I dread is its doing so much for a child that the child ought to be doing for itself. The fear of overworking children seems to be unreason- ably rife. Because it was wrong to impose physical tasks on children beyond their strength we have now rushed to the opposite extreme of being afraid of imposing any mental tasks upon them. If you do not start to teach a child concentration by the time it is four years old, concentration will never be learnt. I think that children should be worked hard and then left to amuse themselves. I think that Latin and Greek should be compulsory subjects for matriculating at every university. Education ought to be a bore for any normal child and if in trying to avoid this snippets of information are to be substi- tuted for true education the 'brave new area' of which Miss Kendon wrote will be denied the advantages we are aiming to give it. I realise that the hard-won security of the parents must seem a valuable ideal to offer their children. Yet security was always sweet. 1 look back to a summer morning in 1898 when I was seized with an access of disgust' in the realisation that half my classmates were filled with the warm and comfort- able fepling of aiming at a profession which carried with it the security of a pension. To me at fifteen a pension seemed an ignoble ambition.
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