Floyd Dell

“ I cannot be sufficiently grateful to the Theatre for continuing to exist, in however trivial or base a form. Suppose it had perished for ever from the earth! Who would be so daring a theorist as to conceive the project of bringing together the story-teller, the poet, the musician, the singer, the dancer, the pantomimist, the painter, in the co-operative enterprise of creating ‘one common wave of thought and joy lifting mankind again’? ”

“ The extremer sorts of enterprise we call courage and heroism. But though we admire the fireman who risks his life in a burning building, we would not admire the man who deliberately set fire to his own bed in order to suffer the pangs of torture by fire; nor, although we admire the airmen who come down frozen from high altitudes, would we applaud a man who locked himself in a refrigerator over the week-end in order to suffer the torture of great cold. We would feel, in both these hypothetical cases, that there was no relevancy of their action to the world of reality. ”

“ But the artist cannot get along without the world. His art springs from the commonest impulses of the human race, and those impulses are utilitarian at root; the savage who scratched the aurochs on the wall of his cave was hungry for meat and desirous of luck in the hunting tomorrow; the primitive Greeks who danced their seasonal dances from which sprang the glory of dramatic art, wanted the crops to grow; and that which we call great art everywhere is great only because it springs from a communal hunger and fulfils a communal wish. ”

“ But if you insist on knowing what education can do to bring our conduct in the realm of love up to the standard of civilization, I can but answer your question. We have found that in the realm of work, civilization demands of us Enterprise, and Democracy, and Responsibility. And I think that all the demands of civilization upon our conduct in the realm of love might be summed up in the same terms. We despise those persons who are afraid of adventure in love; who in devotion to some mawkish dream-ideal, turn away from the more difficult and poignant realities of courtship and marriage ”

“ But in this chaos each person feels a different rhythm; and, according as he has the power, transmits his sense of it to us through a rhythmic treatment of his medium. In the presence of his work, we feel what he has felt about the world; but we feel something more than that—we feel also the rhythm of the struggle in the artist between his impulse to command and his impulse to obey. Our own impulses of vanity and of reverence go out to welcome his power and his faithfulness. ”

“ Smith’s splendid testimonial to the value of a college education—how it has unlocked for him the ages’ accumulated wealth of literature, of science, of art—how it has put him in vivid touch with the world in which he lives—how it has made him realize his own powers, and given him a serene confidence in his ability to use them wisely—how fully it has equipped him to live in this complex and difficult age—in a word, how it has helped him to become all that a twentieth century American citizen should be! ”

“ In all the critical and important moments of one’s life one is inevitably a leader or a follower. But in adult civilized life, these relationships are fluid; they change and exchange with each other. [Pg 171] And they are fluid because they are free. You and I can choose, though perhaps not consciously, our leaders and our helpers; we are not condemned to stand in any fixed relationship to any other person. And this freedom to be servant of whom we please, and master of whom we can, is equality. ”

“ I’m sorry—I got to thinking of something else, and nearly forgot to come back here. Which brings me at once to the heart of what I want to say. Artists, as I have said, are children—and, children that they are, they forget the errands upon which the world sends them. They forget, because these errands are not part of their own life. You reproach us with being careless and irresponsible—but if you will study the child at play or the artist at work, you will discover that he is not careless or irresponsible in regard to his own concerns. ”

“ A school-teacher must be a pragmatist, madam, or go mad. If you really believed the human brain to be an instrument capable of accurate thinking, your experiences with your pupils and your principal, not to speak of your boards of education, would furnish you a spectacle of human wickedness and folly too horrible to be endured. ”

“ It is all there—the singing and dancing, the make-believe, the whole paraphernalia of child creativity: it is true that the game is played by children who are not free to create their own dreams, who must play always at some one else’s bidding, half children and half slaves! But—and this is its importance to us—the Theatre is the place where [Pg 126] the interests of the child meet and merge into those of the adult. It is the natural transition between dreams and realities. And it is thereby the bridge across the gulf that separates art from the world. ”

“ Once they regard an adult as a person like themselves—which, Heaven knows, he is!—children will discover quickly enough his admirable qualities, and his special abilities, and pay them the tribute of admiration and emulation. There is no human reason why a child should not admire and emulate his teacher’s ability to do sums, rather than the village bum’s ability to whittle sticks and smoke cigarettes; the reason why the child doesn’t is plain enough—the bum has put himself on an equality with them and the teacher has not. ”

“ The School Building, imposing upon our credulity and pretending to be too sacred for these purposes, needs to be taken down from its pedestal. It may be permitted to have a share in the education of our youth if it will but remember that it is no more important in that process than a garden, a swimming tank, a playground, the library around the corner, the woods where the botany class goes, or the sky overhead that exhibits its constellations gladly at the request of the science teacher. ”

“ And that is the task of education: to make a man of him without killing the artist. We must begin, then, before the artist in him is killed; we must begin with the child. So far as I can see, the school as it exists at present is utterly and hopelessly inadequate to the task. It requires a special mechanism, which happily exists in the outside world, and need only be incorporated into the educational system, in order to provide a medium of transition between the dream-creations of childhood and the realistic creativity of adult life. This mechanism is the Theatre. ”

“ That is, incidentally, why so many workers prefer a white collar job to a decent union wage—because it permits them to fancy themselves a part of the master class. And finally, that is why the industrial system is now at the point of breakdown—because a class of workers who have no sense of mastery over their jobs cannot and will not take enough interest in their work to meet the new and stupendous demands upon production. When pressure is put upon them, they revolt—and hell is raised, but not the production-rate. ”

“ When the child refuses to be a slave, he is thenceforth excluded by common consent from the affairs of the grown-up world. And as the breach widens between the artist and the world, as the world becomes more and more committed to slavery, the artist is more consciously and wilfully a child. He is forbidden by the growing public opinion of his group to write or sing about human destinies. ‘The artist must not be a propagandist,’ it is declared indignantly. ”

“ Does not education, then, first of all consist in giving to children a progressive sense of power, through a physical and intellectual mastery of their environment? And would not the acquisition of an adequately increasing mastership deprive the child of any need for those outbursts of rage and malice and mischief which are today [Pg 23] the most characteristic trait of childhood, and which are only his attempt to deny his shameful helplessness? Shall we not try at the outset to make the child feel that he is a useful and important part of our world? ”

“ I will, therefore, only point out that even what we term the civilized part of mankind is far from measuring up to this demand of civilization in the world of love, the demand for equality. It may seem somewhat of an impertinence to blame this fact upon the early influences of the home, when there are so many outstanding customs and laws and economic conditions which are founded on the theory of the inequality of men and women. But these customs and laws and conditions are in process of change—and the home influences of which I speak are not. ”

“ This is as ridiculous as it would be to suppose that equality in other fields of life means that no one shall ever lead and no one ever follow. Equality in love means only the freedom to experience all, instead of compulsion to experience only a part, of the emotional possibilities of love in a single relationship. ”

“ The boy’s passion for his collection of stamps is akin to the passion of the scientist and the poet. Do you desire of children that they should have a similar passion for arithmetic, for geography, for history? Then you must leave them free to find out the interestingness of these things. There is no way to passionate interest save through the gate of curiosity; and curiosity is born of idleness. But doubtless you have a quite wrong notion of what idleness means. Idleness is not doing nothing. Idleness is being free to do anything. ”

“ Parents cannot choose their children, and must serve their helplessness willy-nilly. Children cannot choose their parents, and must obey them anyhow. It is a rare triumph of parenthood—and doubtless also of childhood—when children and parents become friends, and serve and obey each other not because they must but because they really like to. But schools can [Pg 172] easily take up the task which parents are only with the greatest difficulty able to accomplish, and dissolve the infantile tyrant-and-slave relationship to the grown-up world. ”

“ I should have said, during the days of a certain great political and social upheaval which laid the foundations of modern life in general, and of our gallant ally, the French Republic, in particular. The historic festivals of which I speak were in charge of the great artists and composers of the nation, and their art and music were used to express the common emotion and purpose of the People. So it will be with ours. Our artists will unite to express the new ideals of mankind, and together with each other and with the People, will lay the foundations of a new and democratic art. ”

“ II. The School Building IT is clear that what is most of all the matter with the child is his sense of helplessness.... He told us how he lost inevitably his position of King in the magic realm of infancy—a kingship only to be recovered fragmentarily in dreams and in the fantasies of play—how he discovered himself to be little and weak and clumsy and ignorant of the ways of the strange real world. It is clear too that the chief difference which separates us from childhood is the acquisition of a few powers, physical and intellectual, which make us feel to some extent masters of our world. ”

“ The Artist. I was about to say, you wrong the artist if you think that he is not interested in utility. It is only because utility has become bound up with slavery that artists and people with artistic impulses revolt against it and in defiance produce utterly and fantastically useless things. This will be so, as long as being useful means being a slave. But art is not an end in itself; it had its origin, and will find its destiny, in the production of useful things. ”

“ The difference should be sufficiently obvious: in the school-workshops of capitalism the child is taught how to work for somebody else, how to conduct mechanical operations in an industrial process over which he has no control; in the democratic workshops of the school he learns to use those processes to serve his own creative wishes. In the one he is taught to be a wage-slave—and bear in mind that this refers to the children of the poor—for the rich have their own private schools for their own children. In the other, the child learns to be a free man. ”

“ I do not wish to exaggerate the ability of education to dissolve, without the aid of a special psychic technique, any deeply-rooted infantile dispositions of this sort; but, aside from such flagrant cases, there are thousands of well-conducted men and women who just fail to free themselves sufficiently from the emotions of childhood to be happy in love. Besides their own selves, the sensible adult beings that they believe they are, there are within them pathetic and absurd children whose demands upon the relationship well-nigh tear it to pieces. ”

“ The Theatre, as I have said, will take the lead in preparing for the new day by presenting plays which will teach the People courage and confidence in their destiny, teach them to scorn the ideals of the traditional past, deepen their sense of community with the People in all lands in their world-wide struggle for freedom, and make them face the future with a clear and unshakable resolution, an indomitable will to victory. ”

“ This is what the world has done to us; it has made us choose between being children in a tiny sphere all our lives, or going into the larger world of reality as slaves. And I think we have made the right choice. For we have kept alive in our childish folly the flame of a sacred revolt against slavery. ”

“ Children must be granted freedom of opinion—and freedom of opinion means nothing except the freedom to believe a wrong opinion until you are persuaded of a right one. They, moreover, must be the judges of what constitutes persuasion. You have asked me for practical and concrete suggestions in regard to education. I will make this one before I go: when I find an astronomy class in the first grade engaged in earnest debate as to whether the earth is round or flat, I will know that our school system has begun to be concerned for the first time with the inculcation of a love of truth. ”

“ Every production manager knows that even our most efficient industries are producing far less than their maximum; and he knows why. The psychology of slavery does not make for efficiency. There was a time when inefficiency didn’t matter—when infants in agony from lack of sleep and girls terrorized by brutal foremen could produce more than could be sold, and were preferable to workers who had to be bargained with. Capitalism denied the worker the right to dare to think his job his own. ”