Seeing Things at Night

H. 3rd – The Review of a Continuous Performance

MARCH 1, 1919. – "Do you know how to keep the child from crying?" began the prospectus. "Do you know how always to obtain cheerful obedience?" it continued. "To suppress the fighting instinct? To teach punctuality? Perseverance? Carefulness? Honesty? Truthfulness? Correct pronunciation?"

We pondered. Obviously, our rejoinder must be: "In reply to questions NOS. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 the answer is in the negative."

The prospectus said that all this would be easy if you bought the book.

"Instead of a hardship," the advertisement said, "child training becomes a genuine pleasure, as the parent shares every confidence, every joy and every sorrow of the child, and at the same time has its unqualified respect. This is a situation rarely possible under the old training methods. And what a source of pride now as well as in after years! To have children whose every action shows culture and refinement – perfect little gentlemen and gentlewomen."

This gave us pause. After all, we were not certain that we wanted a little gentleman who washed behind the ears, wore blue velvet and took his baths with a broad "a." We felt that he might expect too much from us. It might cramp our style to live with a person entirely truthful, punctual, persevering, honest and careful. Also, we were a little abashed about sharing confidences. The privilege of becoming a confidant would involve a return in kind, and it would not be a fair swap. It seemed to us that the confessions of the truthful, honest, careful and persevering child could never be half so interesting as our own.

We were also a little bit discouraged over the promise to suppress the fighting instinct. We did not feel qualified for the job of making it up to him by chastising the parents of the various boys along the block who drubbed him. And yet we were not entirely dissuaded until we read something of the manner in which the new method should be applied. It was hard to thrust aside the knowledge of how to keep the child from crying. But, then, the book said: "No matter whether your child is still in the cradle or is eighteen years old, this course will show how to apply the right methods at once. You merely take up the particular trait, turn to the proper page and apply the lessons to the child. You are told exactly what to do."

It wasn't that we were afraid that somebody else around the house might get hold of the book and turn it on us. That risk we might have faced. But a quotation from Abraham Lincoln in the prospectus itself brought complete disillusion. "All that I am and all that I ever hope to be I owe to my mother." That's what Abraham Lincoln said, according to the prospectus. It seemed, perhaps, like halving the proper acknowledgments, and yet it lay in the right direction. But what of the punctual, persevering and truthful child brought up under the new method? We could see only one acknowledgment open to him. We pictured his first inaugural address, and seemed to hear him say: "All that I am to-day I owe to Professor Tunkhouser's book on The Training of Children. If I am honest you have only to look on page 29 to know the reason. It is true that I have persevered to gain this high office, and why should I not, seeing that I was cradled in page 136?"

Of course, if he had not overlooked the chapter on proper gratitude he might upon maturity return the purchase price of Professor Tunkhouser's volume. That seemed almost the most to be expected.

And so we let him cry, and are going on in the old, careless way, hoping to be able, unscientifically enough, to lick a working amount of truth and general virtue into him at such time as that becomes necessary. However, we did write to the publisher to ask him if by any chance he had a book along the same lines about Airedale puppies.

JUNE 5, 1919. – "Izzie gonna teachie itty cutums English or not?" asks Prudence Brandish in effect in her book Mother Love in Action, and proceeds to protest vigorously against the practice of bringing up children on baby talk. It is true that parents deserve part of the blame, but babies ought to be made to realize that some of the responsibility is theirs. Often they talk the jargon themselves without any encouragement whatever. Indeed, they have been known to cling to muddled words and phrases in spite of the soundest reasoning which all their parents could bring to bear on the matter. H. 3rd, for instance, has been told repeatedly that the word is "button," and yet he goes on calling it "bur" or "but" or something like that.

We feel very strongly that he should get it straight, because it is the only word he knows. He tried "moma" and "dayday" for a while, but abandoned them when he seemed to sense opposition against his attempt to use them broadly enough to include casual friends and total strangers. R., who comes from Virginia, could not be made to abandon a narrow-minded point of view about H.'s conception of his relation to the ashman.

"But" seems much more elastic and does not involve the child in questions of race prejudice and other problems which he does not fully comprehend as yet. The round disks on a coat are "buts," and H. seems satisfied that so are doorknobs and ears and noses. He is, to be sure, not quite content that all should be sewn on so firmly. There seems to be no limit to his conception of the range of his one word "but." If he could get his hands on the Washington Monument or the peak of the Matterhorn, we feel sure that he would also classify these as buttons.

Much may be done with one word if it be used cosmically in this way. For the sake of H. we have been trying to develop a theory that all the problems of the world may be stated in terms of buttons. We intend to point out to him that if he finds a gentleman with two buttons on either hip to which suspenders are attached, he may safely set him down as a conservative. If, in addition, the gentleman wears another gold button tightly wedged into a starched collar just below his chin he may be classified as an exponent of a high protective tariff and a Republican majority in the Senate. From gentlemen with no buttons, either at the hips or the neck, he may expect to hear about the soviet experiment in Russia and the status of free speech in America.

We intend to tell H. that he is not far wrong in his attempt to limit language to the one word "but" or "bur," since all the world struggles in religion, in politics and in economics are between those who believe in buttoning up life a little tighter and those who would cut away all fastenings and let gravity do its worst or best. However, we have told him fairly and squarely that we will not let him in on this simplifying and comforting short cut to knowledge until he can make the word come out clearly and distinctly – "button."

SEPTEMBER 3, 1919. – H. 3rd lay back in his carriage with his arms folded across his stomach and said nothing. I tried to make conversation. I pointed out objects of interest, but met no response. He smiled complacently and was silent. Even carefully rehearsed bits of dialogue such as "Who's a good boy?" to which the answer is "Me," and "Is your face dirty," to which the answer is "No," failed to move him to speech. I tried him in new lands with strange sights and pointed out the camels, and buffaloes and rhinoceri of the zoo, hoping that he would identify some one of them in his all-embracing "dog," which serves for every member of the four-footed family. But still he smiled complacently and was silent. I began to feel as if I were an Atlantic City negro wheeling a tired business man down the Boardwalk.

Suddenly the possible value of suggestion came to me, and I turned to the right and finally brought up at the foot of Shakespeare's statue in the mall. And here again I sought to interest him in the English language. "Man," said I, rather optimistically, pointing to the bronze. H. 3rd looked intently, and taking his hands from his stomach answered "Boy." "Man," I repeated. "Boy," said H. 3rd. And so the argument continued for some time without progress being made by either side. At last I stopped. Is it possible, I thought, that in this curious statue the sculptor has succeeded in giving some suggestion of "sweetest Shakespeare, fancy's child," which is communicated to H. 3rd and fails to reach me? I looked again and gave up this theory for one more simple and rational. Without question it was the doublet and hose which confused him. Never, I suppose, had the child seen me, or the janitor, or the iceman or any of his adult male friends clad in close fitting tights such as Shakespeare wore. And then I looked at the doublet. No, there was no denying that in this particular statue it appeared uncommonly like a diaper.

SEPTEMBER 5, 1919. – W. H. Hudson points the way to an interesting field of speculation in one of the early chapters of Far Away and Long Ago, in which he speaks of his mother.

"When I think of her," he writes, "I remember with gratitude that our parents seldom punished us, and never, unless we went too far in our domestic dissensions or tricks, even chided us. This, I am convinced, is the right attitude for parents to observe, modestly to admit that nature is wiser than they are, and to let their little ones follow, as far as possible, the bent of their own minds, or whatever it is that they have in place of minds. It is the attitude of the sensible hen toward her ducklings, when she has had frequent experience of their incongruous ways, and is satisfied that they know best what is good for them; though, of course, their ways seem peculiar to her, and she can never entirely sympathize with their fancy for going into the water. I need not be told that the hen is, after all, only stepmother to her ducklings, since I am contending that the civilized woman – the artificial product of our self-imposed conditions – cannot have the same relation to her offspring as the uncivilized woman really has to hers. The comparison, therefore, holds good, the mother with us being practically stepmother to children of another race; and if she is sensible, and amenable to nature's teaching, she will attribute their seemingly unsuitable ways and appetites to the right cause, and not to a hypothetical perversity or inherent depravity of heart, about which many authors will have spoken to her in many books:

The very dim race memory of old tribal and even primitive life which is in all of us is much stronger in children than in grown-ups. They are closer to the past than their elders, and although we hear a great deal about maternal instinct, it is probable that it is a much slighter and more limited thing than the instinct of a young child.

I have noticed, for instance, that without any help from me H. 3rd has learned to fall with amazing skill. He can trip over the edge of the carpet, do a somersault ending on the point of his nose and come up smiling, unless some grown-up makes him aware of his danger by crying out in horror. He did not copy it from me. I have never even undertaken to teach him by precept or illustration. The difficult trick of relaxing in midair is his own contribution. He cannot be said to have learned it. He seems always to have had it. At the age of eight months he pitched headlong out of his carriage and landed on top of his head without so much as ruffling his feelings. It may be fantastic, but I rather think that his skill in preparing for the bump by a complete relaxation of every muscle is a legacy from some ancestor back in the days when knowing how to fall was of vital importance, since even the best of us might, upon special occasions, miscalculate the distance from branch to branch.

So strong is my faith in the child's superior memory of primitive life that if the hallboy were to call me up on the telephone to-morrow to say that there was an ichthyosaurus downstairs who wanted to see me, I would not think of deciding what to do about it without first consulting H. 3rd.

Curiously enough, Hudson relates one incident which might well be cited in support of the theory that the child is equipped at birth with certain protective instincts, but he passes it over with a different explanation. He says that on a certain afternoon his baby sister, who could scarcely walk, was left alone in a room, and suddenly came toddling to the door shrieking "ku-ku," an Argentine word for danger, which was almost her single articulate possession. Her parents rushed into the room and found a huge snake coiled up in the middle of the rug. The child had never seen a snake before, and there was much speculation as to how she knew it was dangerous.

"It was conjectured," writes Hudson, "that she had made some gesture to push it away when it came onto the rug, and that it had reared its head and struck viciously at her."

It seems to us that a much more plausible explanation lies in the theory that this child who had never seen a snake profited from some old racial memory of the danger of serpents.

Unfortunately, under modern conditions some restrictions must be put on the liberty of small children. I have been told that a child knows instinctively that he must not put his hand into a fire, but he has no age-grounded instinct not to touch a radiator. Still, it might be fair to say that in most New York apartment houses none of them would be hot enough to hurt him much. I can testify that children of less than two years of age are not equipped with any inherited protective knowledge about matches, pins, cigarette stubs, $5 bills, or even those of larger denominations; bits of glass, current newspapers or magazines, safety razor blades (for which, of course, there is an excuse, since the adjective may well mislead a child), watches or carving knives. But all these articles are too recent to come within the scope of inherited primitive knowledge.

DECEMBER 17, 1919. – We read Floyd Dell's Were You Ever a Child? to-day and found him remarking: "People talk about children being hard to teach and in the next breath deplore the facility with which they acquire the 'vices.' That seems strange. It takes as much patience, energy and faithful application to become proficient in a vice as it does to learn mathematics. Yet consider how much more popular poker is than equations! But did a schoolboy ever drop in on a group of teachers who had sat up all night parsing, say, a sentence in Henry James, or seeing who could draw the best map of the North Atlantic states? And when you come to think of it, it seems extremely improbable that any little boy ever learned to drink beer by seeing somebody take a tablespoonful once a day."

Most of this is true. The only trouble with all the new theories about bringing up children is that it leaves the job just as hard as ever.

We believe in the new theories for all that. They work, we think, but, like most worth while things, they are not always easy. For instance, H. 3rd came into the parlor the other day carrying the carving knife. Twenty years ago I could have taken it away and spanked him, but then along came the psychologists with their talk of breaking the child's will, and sensible people stopped spanking. Ten years ago I could have said, "Put down that carving knife or you'll make God feel very badly. In fact, you'll make dada feel very badly. You'll make dada cry if you don't obey him." But then the psychoanalysts appeared and pointed out that there was danger in that. In trying to punish the child by making him feel that his evil acts directly caused suffering to the parent there was an unavoidable tendency to make the child identify himself with the parent subconsciously. That might lead to all sorts of ructions later on. The child might identify himself so completely with his father that in later life he would use his shirts and neckties as if they were his own.

Of course, I might have gone over to H. 3rd and, after a short struggle, taken the carving knife away from him by main force, but that would have made him mad. He would at length have suppressed his anger and right away a complex would begin in his little square head.

Picture him now at thirty – he has neuralgia. Somebody mentions the theory of blind abscesses and he has all his teeth pulled out. No good comes of it. He goes to a psychoanalyst and the doctor begins to ask questions. He asks a great many over a long period of time. Eventually he gets a clue. He finds that when H. 3rd was eight years old he dreamed three nights in succession of stepping on a June bug.

"Was it a large, rather fat June bug?" asks the doctor carelessly, as if the answer was not important.

"Yes," says H. 3rd, "it was."

"That June bug," says the doctor, "was a symbol of your father. When you were twenty months old he took a Carving knife away from you and you have had a suppressed anger at him ever since. Now that you know about it your neuralgia will disappear."

And the neuralgia would go at that. But by that time I'd be gone and nothing could be done about this suppressed feud of so many years' standing. My mind went through all these possibilities and I decided it would be simpler and safer to let H. 3rd keep the carving knife as long as he attempted nothing aggressive. A wound is not so dangerous as a complex.

"And, anyhow," I thought, "if he can make that carving knife cut anything he's the best swordsman in the flat."

DECEMBER 20, 1919. – Our attitude toward H. 3rd and the carving knife turns out to have been all wrong. We received a letter from Floyd Dell to-day in which he points out that no Freudian could possibly approve our policy of non-interference. Mr. Dell says we should have used force to the utmost.

"Psychoanalytically speaking," he writes, "I think you were wrong about H. 3rd and the carving knife. There is really no Freudian reason why, when he came carrying it into the parlor, you should not have gone over to him and, 'after a short struggle,' taken it away from him by main force. Of course, that would have made him mad. But what harm would that have done?.. Unless, of course, you had previously represented yourself to him as a Divine and Perfect Being. In that case his new conception of you as a big bully would have had to struggle with his other carefully implanted and nourished emotions – and his sense of the injustice of your behavior might have been 'repressed.'

"But you know quite well that you are not a Divine and Perfect Being, and, if you consider it for a moment from the child's point of view, you will concede that his emotional opinion of you under such circumstances, highly colored as it is, has its justification. When you yourself want something very much (whether you are entitled to it or not) and when some one (however righteously) keeps you from getting it, how do you feel? But you know that you live in a world in which such things happen. H. 3rd has still to learn it, and if he learns it at his father's knee he is just that much ahead. The boys at school will teach it to him, anyway. The fact is, parents are unwilling that their children should hate them, however briefly, healthily and harmlessly.

"The Victorian parent spanked his offspring and commanded them to love him any way. The modern parent refrains from spanking (for good reasons) and hopes the child will love him. The Freudian parent does not mind if his children do hate him once or twice a day, so long as they are not ashamed of doing so. If H. 3rd swats his father in an enraged struggle to keep possession of the precious carving knife he is expressing and not repressing his emotions. And so long as he has done his best to win he is fairly well content to lose. What a child doesn't like is to have to struggle with a big bully that he mustn't (for mysterious reasons) even try to lick! The privilege of fighting with one's father, even if it does incidentally involve getting licked, is all that a healthy child asks for. Never fear, the time will come when he can lick you; and awaiting that happy time will give him an incentive for growing up. Quite possibly you don't want him to grow up; but that is only another of the well-known weaknesses of parents!"

DECEMBER 22, 1919. – Concerning H. 3rd and the carving knife I am gratified to find support for my position from Dr. Edward Hiram Reede, the well-known Washington neurologist, who finds that from the point of view of H. 3rd there was soundness in my policy of non-interference.

"Speaking for him," he writes, "I commend your action. Urged as he is by the two chief traits of childhood, at the present time – curiosity and imitation – I see no reason for direct coercion. So long as the modern child is environed by a museum, as the modern home appears, his curiosity must always be on edge, and if each new goal of curiosity is wrested from him by the usual 'Don't!' or the more ancient struggle for possession instead of by a transference of interest, then the contest will be interminable.

"H. 3rd by right of experience looks upon the armamentarium of the kitchen as his indisputable possessions and can hardly be expected to except a carver. The deification of the parent occurs in accord with the ancestor worship of primitive forebears, and the father will remain the god to the child so long as observation daily reveals the parent as a worker of miracles. Parental self-canonization is not at all necessary to produce this."

DECEMBER 23, 1919. – Recently, a reader wrote to inform us that in her opinion we were a "semi-Bolshevist," and added, "your style is cramped by this demi-semi attitude, and your stuff seems a little grotesque both to conservatives and radicals." This seemed fair comment to us and we confessed frankly that we were not a conservative and on clear and pleasant days not quite a radical. This business of sticking to the middle of the road, with perhaps a slight slant to the left, seems ever so difficult. One is ambushed and potted at from either side. Seemingly, even in our confession we have again offended, for Miss Mora M. Deane writes:

"As it happens I have just read your comment on my letter; and since you have turned out to be merely an egotist who twists an adverse criticism to his own advantage, I must now add to my letter that part which I lopped off considerately. This precisely because I did not know you were an egotist. The deleted part which originally closed the letter follows:

"At any rate I have lately heard intelligent persons from both camps saying, 'Heywood Broun is responsible for my going to see some pretty rotten plays and for reading some stupid books.'

"I myself should like to warn you against letting Heywood 3rd ever read Floyd Dell's book. The very idea of his advising about children leaves a bad taste in the mouth. You'll be sorry some day if you ever take him seriously."

Of course, Miss Deane does wisely to let us have the deletion. First impulses are usually sound.

And in one respect Miss Deane has scored more heavily than she could well have realized. Her warning that I should protect H. 3rd from radical literature touches an impending tragedy in my life. Almost by intuition Miss Deane seems to realize that the child and I are not in agreement in our political opinions. Of the fifteen or twenty words in which H. 3rd is proficient one is "mine" and another is "gimme." When he goes to the park he wears a naval uniform with the insignia of an ensign on his left arm. There is gold braid on his cap. Moreover, H. 3rd has in his own right two Liberty bonds, a card of thrift stamps, a rocking-horse, a railroad, a submarine, three picture books, an automobile and a Noah's ark. Any effort to socialize a single one of these holdings is met by a protest so violent that I cannot help but realize that the child's sense of property rights is strongly developed. That is, his own property rights, for he is often inclined to dispute my title to cigarette stumps, safety razor blades and carving knives.