the word "republican" came up to-day in a lesson, and i asked what it meant. four girls told me that their fathers were republicans, but they had no idea of the meaning of the word. one lassie thought that it meant "a man who is always quarrelling with the tories" ... a fairly penetrating definition.
i explained the meaning of the word, and said that a republican in this country was wasting his time and energy. i pointed to america with its oil kings, steel kings, meat kings, and called it a country worse than russia. i told of the corruption of politics in france.
then i rambled on to kings and kingship. it is a difficult subject to tackle even with children, but i tried to walk warily. i said that the notion of a king was for people in an elementary stage of development. intellectual folk have no use for all the pomp[pg 96] and pageantry of kingship. royalty as it exists to-day is bad for us and for the royal family. the poor princes and princesses are reared in an atmosphere of make-believe. their individuality and their loves are crushed by a system. and it is really a system of lies. "in the king's name!" why make all this pretence when everyone knows that it is "in the cabinet's name"? it is not fair to the king.
i am no republican; i do not want to see monarchy abolished in this land. i recognise that monarchy is necessary to the masses. but i want to bring my bairns to see monarchy stripped of its robes, its pageantry, its remoteness, its circumstance. loyalty is a name to most of us. people sing the national anthem in very much the same way as they say grace before meat. the grace-sayer is thinking of his dinner; the singer is wondering if he'll manage to get out in time to collar a taxi.
i do not blame the kings; i blame their advisers. we are kept in the dark by them. we hear of a monarch's good deeds, but we never hear the truth about him. the unwritten law demands that the truth shall be[pg 97] kept secret until a few generations have passed. i know nothing about the king. i don't know what he thinks of republicanism (in his shoes i should be a red-hot republican), socialism, religion, morals; and i want to know whether he likes locke's novels or galsworthy's drama. in short, i want to know the man that must of necessity be greater than the king. i am tired of processions and functions.
i became a loyalist when first i went to windsor castle. three massed bands were playing in the quadrangle; thousands of visitors wandered around. the king came to the window and bowed. i wanted to go up and take him by the arm and say: "poor king, you are not allowed to enjoy the sensation of being in a crowd, you are an abstraction, you are behind a barrier of nobility through which no commoner can pass. come down and have a smoke with me amongst all these typists and clerks." and i expect that every man and woman in that crowd was thinking: "how nice it must be to be a king!"
yet if a king were to come down from the pedestal on which the courtiers have placed[pg 98] him, i fear that the people would scorn him. they would cry: "he is only a man!" i am forced to the conclusion that pomp and circumstance are necessary after all. the people are to blame. the king is all right; he looks a decent, kindly soul with a good heart. but the people are not interested in good hearts; the fools want gilt coaches and crimson carpets and all the rubbish of show.
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a lady asked me to-day whether i taught my children manners. i told her that i did not. she asked why. i replied that manners were sham, and my chief duty was to get rid of sham. then she asked me why i lifted my hat to her ... and naturally i collapsed incontinently. once again i write the words, "it is a difficult thing to be a theorist ... and an honest man at the same time."
on reflection i think that it is a case of personality versus the whole community. no man can be consistent. were i to carry my convictions to their natural conclusion i should be an outcast ... and an outcast is of no value to the community. i lift my hat to a lady not because i respect her[pg 99] (i occasionally do. i always doff my hat to the school charwoman, but i am rather afraid of her), but because it is not worth while to protest against the little things of life. incidentally, the whole case against hat-lifting is this:—in the lower and lower middle classes the son does not lift his hat to his mother though he does to the minister's wife.
no, i do not teach manners. if a boy "sirs" me, he does it of his own free will. i believe that you cannot teach manners; taught manners are always forced, always overdone. my model of a true gentleman is a man with an innate good taste and artistry. my idea of a lady ... well, one of the truest ladies i have yet known kept a dairy in the canongate of edinburgh.
i try to get my bairns to do to others as they would like others to do to them. shaw says "no: their tastes may not be the same as yours." good old g. b. s.!
i once was in a school where manners were taught religiously. i whacked a boy one day. he said, "thank you, sir."
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i wonder how much influence on [pg 100]observation the so-called nature study has. at one time i attended a saturday class. we went botanising. i learned nothing about botany, but that was because margaret was there. i observed much ... her eyes were grey and her eyelashes long. we generally managed to lose the class in less than no time. yet we did pretend. she was pretending to show me the something or other marks on a horse-chestnut twig when i first kissed her. she is married now. i don't believe in saturday excursions.
i got up my scanty nature study from grant allen's little shilling book on plants. it was a delightful book full of an almost yankee imagination. it theorised all the way ... grass developed a long narrow blade so that it might edge its way to the sun; wild tobacco has a broad blade because it doesn't need to care tuppence for the competition of other plants, it can grow on wet clay of railway bankings. i think now that grant allen was a romancer not a scientist.
i do not see the point in asking bairns to count the stamens of a buttercup (dr. johnson hated the poets who "count the streaks of the tulip"). but i do want to[pg 101] make them grant allens; i want them to make a theory. nature study has but little result unless bairns get a lead. no boy will guess that the lines on a petal are intended to lead bees to the honey; at least, i know i would never have guessed it. i should never have guessed that flowers are beautiful or perfumed in order to attract insects. but i am really no criterion. i could not tell at this moment the colour of my bedroom wallpaper; i can't tell whether my father wears a moustache or side-whiskers. until i began to teach woodwork i never observed a mortise, or if i did, i never wondered how it was made. i never noticed that the tops of houses sloped downward until i took up perspective.
anyway, observation is a poor attainment unless it is combined with genius as in darwin's case. sherlock holmes is a nobody. observation should follow fancy. the average youth has successive hobbies. he takes up photography, and is led (sometimes) to enquire into the action of silver salts; he takes up wood-carving, and begins to find untold discoveries in the easy-chair.
i would advocate the keeping of animals[pg 102] at school. i would have a rabbit run, a pigeon loft, one or two dogs, and a few cats for the girls. let a boy keep homers and fly them, and he will observe much. apart from the observation side of the question i would advocate a live stock school-farm on humanitarian grounds; every child would acquire a sense of duty to animals. i am sure all my bairns would turn out on a sunday to feed their pets. and what a delightful reward for kindness ... make a boy or girl "feeder-in-chief" for the week! incidentally, the study of pigeons and rabbits would conduce to a frank realisation of sex.
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i have just bought the new shilling edition of h. g. wells's new worlds for old, and i have come upon this passage ... " ... socialists turn to the most creative profession of all, to that great calling which, with each generation, renews the world's 'circle of ideas,' the teachers!"
but why he puts the mark of exclamation at the end i do not know.
on the same page he says: "the constructive socialist logically declares the teacher master of the situation."
[pg 103]
if the teachers are masters of the situation i wish every teacher in scotland would get the new age each week. orage's notes of the week are easily the best commentary on the war i have seen. the new age is so very amusing, too; its band of "warm young men" are the kind who "can't stand nietzsche because of his damnable philanthropy" as a journalist friend of mine once phrased it. they despise shaw and wells and webb ... the old back-numbers. the magazine is pulsating with life and youth. every contributor is so cock-sure of himself. it is the only fearless journal i know; it has no advertisements, and with advertisements a journal is muzzled.
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one or two bairns are going to try the bursary competition of the neighbouring secondary school, and i have just got hold of the last year's papers.
"name an important event in british history for each of any eight of the following years:—1314, 1688, 1759, &c." ... and wells says that teaching is the most creative profession of all!
"write an essay of twenty lines or so on[pg 104] any one of these subjects:—school, holidays, examinations, bursaries, books." the examiners might have added a few other bright interesting topics such as truth, morals, faith, courage.
"name the poem to which each of the following lines belongs, and add, if you can, the next line in each case, &c." there are ten lines, and i can only spot six of them. and i am, theoretically, an english scholar; i took an honours english degree under saintsbury. but my degree is only a second class one; that no doubt accounts for my lack of knowledge.
that the compilers of the paper are not fools is shown by the fact that they ask a question like this:—"a man loses a dog, you find it; write and tell him that you have found it."
the arithmetic paper is quite good. my bairns are to fail; i simply cannot teach them to answer papers like these.
