Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)

by D. H. Lawrence

  Has the mind got anything to do with all this? Does there enter any idea of movement into the baby’s head, does the child form any conception of what it is doing? NONE. This whole range of activity and consciousness is non-mental, effective at the primary centres. It is not mere automatism. Far from it. It is spontaneous consciousness, effective and perfect in itself.

  And it is in this spontaneous consciousness that education arises. One of the reasons why uneducated peasant nurses, arc on the whole so much better for infants than over-conscious mothers is that an uneducated nurse does not introduce any idea into her attitude towards the child. When she claps her hands before the child, again and again, nods, smiles, coos, and claps again, she is stimulating the infant to motion, pure, mindless motion. She wants the child to clap too. She wants its one little hand to find the other little hand, she wants to start the quick touch-and-go in the little shoulders. When you see her, time after time, making a fierce, wild gesture with her arm, before the eyes of the baby, and the baby laughing and chuckling, she is rousing the infant to the same fierce, free, reckless geste. Fierce, free, wild, reckless geste! How it excites the child to a quaint reckless chuckle! How it wakes in him the desire, the impulse for free, sheer motion! It starts the proud geste of independence.

  This is the clue to early education: movement, physical motion, the attuning of the kinetic energy of the motor centres to the vast sway of the earth’s centre. Without this we are nothing: clumsy, mechanical clowns, or pinched little automata.

  But if you are going to make use of this form of education you must find teachers full of physical life and zest, of fine, physical, motor intelligence, and mentally rather stupid, or at least quiescent. Above all things, the idea, like a strangling worm, must not creep into the motor centres. It must be excluded. If we move, we must move primarily like a bird in the sky, which swings in supreme adjustment to the multiple forces of the winds of heaven and the pull of earth, mindless, idea-less, a speck of perfect physical animation. That is the whole point of real physical life: its joy in spontaneous mindless animation, in motion sheer and superb, like a leaping fish or a hovering hawk or a deer which bounds away, creatures which have never known the pride and the blight of the idea. The idea is a glorious thing in its place. But interposed in all our living, interpolated into our every gesture, it is like some fatal mildew crept in, some vile blight.

  Let children be taught the pride of clear, clean movement. If it only be putting a cup on the table, or a book on a shelf, let it be a fine pure motion, not a slovenly shove. Parents and teachers should be keen as hawks, watching their young in motion. Do we imagine that a young hawk learns to fly and stoop, does a young swallow learn to skim, or a hare to dash uphill, or a hound to turn and seize him in full course, without long, keen pain of learning? Where there is no pain of effort there is a wretched, drossy degeneration, like the hateful cluttered sheep of our lush pastures. Look at the lambs, how they explode with new life, and skip up into the air. Already a little bit gawky! And then look at their mothers. Whereas a wild sheep is a fleet, fierce thing, leaping and swift like the sun.

  So with our children. We, parents and teachers, must prevent their degenerating into physical cloddishness or mechanical affectation or fluttered nervousness. We must be after them, fiercely, sharpen and chasten their movements, their bearing, their walk. If a boy slouches out of a door, throw a book at him, like lightning. That will make him jump into keen and handsome alertness. And if a girl comes creeping, whining in, seize her by her pigtail and run her out again, full speed. That will bring the fire to her eyes and the poise to her head: if she’s got any fire in her: and if she hasn’t, why, give her a good knock to see if you can drive some in.

  Anything, anything rather than the nervous, twisting, wistful, pathetic, centreless children we are cursed with: or the fat and self- satisfied, sheep-in-the-pasture children who are becoming more common: or the impudent, I’m-as-good-as-anybody smirking children who are far too numerous. But it’s all our own fault. We’re afraid to fight with our children, and so we let them degenerate. Poor loving parents we are!

  There must be a fight. There must be an element of danger, always. How do the wild animals get their grace, their beauty, their allure? Through being on the qui vive, always on the qui vive. A lark on a sand-dune springs up to heaven in song. She leaps up in a pure, fine strength. She trills out in triumph, she is beside herself in mid-heaven. But let her mind her p’s and q’s. In the first place, if she doesn’t flick her wings finely and.rapidly, with exquisite skilful energy, she’ll come a cropper to earth. Let her mind the winds of heaven, in the first place. And in the second, let her mind the shadow of Monsieur the kestrel. And in the third place, let her be wary how she drops. And in the fourth place, let her be wary of who sees her dropping. For, the moment she alights on this bristling earth she’s got to dart to cover, and cut some secret track to her nest, or she’s likely to be in trouble. It’s all very well climbing a ladder of song to heaven. But you’ve got to have your wits about you all the time, even while you’re cock-a-lorying on your ladder: and inevitably you’ve got to climb down. Mind you don’t give your enemies too good a chance, that’s all. And watch it that you don’t indicate where your nest is, or your ladder of song will have been a sore business. On the qui vive, bright lark!

  So with our children. On the qui vive. The old-fashioned parents were right, when they made their children watch what they were about. But old-fashioned parents were a bore, dragging in moral and religious justification. If we are to chase our children, and chasten them too, it must be because they make our blood boil, not because some ethical or religious code sanctifies us.

  “Miss, if you eat in that piggish, mincing fashion, you shall go without a meal or two.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re an objectionable sight/’

  “Well, you needn’t look at me.”

  Here Miss should get a box on the ear.

  “Take that! And know that I need look at you, since I’m responsible for you. And since I’m responsible for you, I’ll watch it you don’t behave like a mincing little pig.”

  Observe, no morals, no “What will people think of you?” or “What would your Daddy say?” or “What if Aunt Lucy saw you now!” or “It’s wrong for little girls to be mincing and ugly!” or “You’ll be sorry for it when you grow up!” or “I thought you were a good little girl!” or “Now, what did teacher say to you in Sunday- school?” — None of all these old dodges for shifting responsibility somewhere else. The plain fact is that parents and teachers are responsible for the bearing and developing of their children, so they may as well accept the responsibility flatly, and without dodges.

  “I am responsible for the way you grow up, milady, and I’ll fulfil my responsibility. So stop pushing your food about on your plate and looking like a self-conscious cockatoo, or leave the table and walk well out of my sight.”

  This is the tone that any honourable parent would take, seeing his little girl mincing and showing off at dinner. Let us keep the bowels of our compassion alive, and also the bowels of our wrath. No priggish brow-beating and mechanical authority, nor any disapproving superiority, but a plain, open anger when anger is aroused, and pleasure when this is waked.

  The parent who sits at table in pained but disapproving silence %vhile the child makes a nuisance of itself, and says: “Dear, I should be so glad if you would try to like your pudding: or if you don’t like it, have a little bread-and-butter,” and who goes on letting the brat be a nuisance, this ideal parent is several times at fault. First she is assuming a pained ideal aloofness which is the worst form of moral bullying, a sort of Of course I won’t interfere, but I am in the right attitude which is insufferable. If a parent is in the right, then she must interfere, otherwise why does she bring up her child at all? If she doesn’t interfere, what right has she to assume any virtue of superiority? Then, when she is angry with the child, what right has she to say “Dear,”
which term implies a state of affectionate communion? This prefixing of the ideal rebuke with the term “Dear” or “Darling” is a hateful travesty of all good feeling. It is using love or affection as a bullying weapon: which vile, sordid act the idealist is never afraid to commit. It is assuming authority of love, when love, as an emotional relationship, can have no authority. Authority must rest on responsible wisdom, and love must be a spontaneous thing, or nothing: an emotional rapport. Love and authority have nothing to do with one another. “Whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth.” True! But the Lord’s love is not supposed to be an emotional business, but a sort of divine responsibility and purpose. And so is parental love, a responsibility and a living purpose, not an emotion. To make the emotion responsible for the purpose is a fine falsification. One says “Dear” or “Darling” when the heart opens with spontaneous cherishment, not when the brow draws with anger or irritation. But the deep purpose and responsibility of parenthood remains unchanged no matter how the emotions flow. The emotions should flow unfalsified, in the very strength of that purpose.

  Therefore parents should never seek justification outside themselves. They should never say, “I do this for your good.” You don’t do it for the child’s good. Parental responsibility is much deeper than an ideal responsibility. It is a vital connexion. Parent and child are polarized together still, somewhat as before birth. When the child in the womb kicks, it may almost hurt the parent. And the reaction is just as direct during all the course of childhood and parenthood. When a child is loose or ugly it is a direct hurt to the parent. The parent reacts and retaliates spontaneously. There is no justification, save the bond of parenthood, and certainly there is no ideal intervention.

  We must accept the bond of parenthood primarily as a vital, mindless conjunction, non-ideal, passional. A parent owes the child all the natural passional reactions provoked. If a child provokes anger, then to deny it this anger, the open, passional anger, is as bad as to deny it food or love. It causes an atrophy in the child, at the volitional centres, and a perversion of the true life-flow.

  Why are we so afraid of anger, of wrath, and clean, fierce rage? What cowardice possesses us? Why would we reduce a child to a nervous, irritable wreck, rather than spank it wholesomely? Why do we make such a fuss about a row? A row, a fierce storm in a family is a natural and healthy thing, which we ought even to have the courage to enjoy and exult in, as we can enjoy and exult in a storm of the elements. What makes us so namby-pamby? We ought all to fight: husbands and wives, parents and children, sisters and brothers and friends, all ought to fight, fiercely, freely, openly: and they ought to enjoy it. It stiffens the backbone and makes the eyes flash. Love without a fight is nothing but degeneracy. But the fight must be spontaneous and natural, without fixities and perversions.

  The same with parenthood: spontaneous and natural, without any ideal taint.

  And this is the beginning of true education: first, the stimulus to physical motion, physical trueness and elan, which is given to theinfant. And this is continued during the years of early childhood not by deliberate instruction, but by the keen, fierce, unremitting swiftness of the parent, whose warm love opens the valves of glad motion in the child, so that the child plays in delicious security and freedom, and whose fierce, vigilant anger sharpens the child to a trueness and boldness of motion and bearing such as are impossible save in children of strong-hearted parents.

  Open the valves of warm love so that your child can play in serene joy by itself, or with others, like young weasels safe in a sunny nook of a wood, or young tiger-cubs whose great parents lie grave and apart, on guard. And open also the sharp valves of wrath, that your child may be alert, keen, proud, and fierce in his turn. Let parenthood and childhood be a spontaneous, animal relationship, non-ideal, swift, a continuous interplay of shadow and light, ever-changing relationship and mood. And, parents, keep in your heart, like tigers, the grave and vivid responsibility of parenthood, remote and natural in you, not fanciful and self-conscious.

  X

  From earliest childhood, let us have independence, independence, self-dependence. Every child to do all it can for itself, wash and dress itself, clean its own boots, brush and fold its own clothes, fetch and carry for itself, mend its own stockings, boy or girl alike, patch its own garments, and as soon as possible make as well as mend for itself. Man and woman are happy when they are busy, and children the same. But there must be the right motive behind the work. It must not always, for a child, be “Help mother” or “Help father” or “Help somebody.” This altruism becomes tiresome, and causes disagreeable reaction. Neither must the motive be the ideal of work. “Work is service, hence work is noble. Laborare est orare.” Never was a more grovelling motto than this, that work is prayer. Work is not prayer at all: not in the same category. Work is a practical business, prayer is the soul’s yearning and desire. Work is not an ideal, save for slaves. But work is quite a pleasant occupation for a human creature, a natural activity.

  And the aim of work is neither the emotional helping of mother and father, nor the ethical-religious service of mankind. Nor is it the greedy piling-up of stupid possessions. An individual works for his own pleasure and independence: but chiefly in the happy pride of personal independence, personal liberty. No man is free who depends on servants. Man can never be quite free. Indeed he doesn’t want to be. But in his personal immediate life he can be vastly freer than he is.

  How? By doing things for himself. Once we wake the quick of personal pride, there is a pleasure in performing our own personal service, every man sweeping his own room, making his own bed, washing his own dishes — or in proportion: just as a soldier does. We have got a mistaken notion of ourselves. We conceive of ourselves as ideal beings, nothing but consciousness, and therefore actual work has become degrading, menial to us. But let us change our notion of ourselves. We are only in part ideal beings. For the rest we are lively physical creatures whose life consists in motion and action. We have two feet which need tending, and which need socks and shoes. This is our own personal affair, and it behoves us to see to it. Let me look after my own socks and shoes, since these are private to me. Let me tend to my own apparel and my own personal service. Every bird builds its own nest and preens its own feathers: save perhaps a cuckoo or a filthy little sparrow which likes to oust a swallow, or a crazy ostrich which squats in the sand. Proud personal privacy, personal liberty, gay individual self-dependence. Awake in a child the gay, proud sense of its own aloof individuality, and it will busy itself about its own affairs happily. It all depends what centre you try to drive from, what motive is at the back of all your movement. It is just as irksome to have a servant as to be a servant: particularly a personal servant. A servant moving about me, or even anybody moving about me, doing things for me, is a horrible drag on my freedom. I feel it as a sort of prostitution. Noli me tangere. It is our motto as it is the motto of a wild wolf or deer. I want about me a clear, cool space across which nobody trespasses. I want to remain intact within my own natural isolation, save at those moments when I am drawn to a rare and significant intimacy. The horrible personal promiscuity of our life is extremely ugly and distasteful. As far as possible, let nobody do anything for me,, personally, save those who are near and dear to me: and even then as little as possible. Let me be by myself, and leave me my native distance. Sono io — and not a thing of public convenience.

  Self-dependence is independence. To be free one must be self- sufficient, particularly in small, material, personal matters. In the great business of love, or friendship, or living human intercourse one meets and communes with another free individual; there is no service. Service is degrading, both to the servant and the one served: a promiscuity, a sort of prostitution. No one should do for me that which I can reasonably do for myself. Two individuals may be intimately interdependent on one another, as man and wife, for example. But even in this relation each should be as self- dependent, as self-supporting as ever possible. We should be each as single
in our independence as the wild animals are. That is the only true pride. To have a dozen servants is to be twelve times prostituted in human relationship, sold and bought and automatized, divested of individual singleness and privacy.

  The actual doing things is in itself a joy. If I wash the dishes I learn a quick, light touch of china and earthenware, the feel of it. the weight and roll and poise of it, the peculiar hotness, the quickness or slowness of its surface. I am at the middle of an infinite complexity of motions and adjustments and quick, apprehensive contacts. Nimble faculties hover and play along my nerves, the primal consciousness is alert in me. Apart from all the moral or practical satisfaction derived from a thing well done, I have the mindless motor activity and reaction in primal consciousness, which is a pure satisfaction. If I am to be well and satisfied, as a human being, a large part of my life must pass in mindless motion, quick, busy activity in which I am neither bought nor sold, but acting alone and free from the centre of my own active isolation. Not self-consciously, however. Not watching my own reactions. If I wash dishes, I wash them to get them clean. Nothing else.

  Every man must learn to be proud and single and alone, and after that, he will be worth knowing. Mankind has degenerated into a conglomerate mass, where everybody strives to look and to be as much as possible an impersonal, non-individual, abstracted unit, a standard. A high standard of perfection: that’s what we talk about. As if there could be any standard among living people, all of whom are separate and single, each one natively distinguished from every other one. Yet we all wear boots made for the abstract “perfect” or standard foot, and coats made as near as possible for the abstract shoulders of Mr. Everyman.

  I object to the abstract Mr. Everyman being clapped over me like an extinguisher. I object to wearing his coat and his boots and his hat. Me, in a pair of “Lotus” boots, and a “Burberry,” and “Oxonian” hat, why, I might just as well be anybody else. And 1 strenuously object. I am myself, and I don’t want to be rigged out as a poor specimen of Mr. Everyman. I don’t want to be standardized, or even idealized.