The Terror of a Toy
The Terror of a Toy, “Fancies versus Fads”, New York, Dodd, Mead and company, 1923, pages 105 through 110.
The Terror of a Toy
It would be too high and hopeful a compliment to say that the world is becoming absolutely babyish. For its chief weak-mindedness is an inability to appreciate the intelligence of babies. On every side we hear whispers and warnings that would have appeared half-witted to the Wise Men of Gotham. Only this Christmas I was told in a toy-shop that not so many bows and arrows were being made for little goys; because they were considered dangerous. It might in some circumstances be dangerous to have a little bow. It is always dangerous to have a little boy. But no other society, claiming to be sane, would have dreamed of supposing that you could abolish all bows unless you could abolish all boys.
With the merits of the latter reform I will not deal here. There is a great deal to be said for such a course; and perhaps we shall soon have an opportunity of considering it. For the modern mind seems quite incapable of distinguishing between the means and the end, between the organ and the disease, between the use and the abuse; and would doubtless beak the boy along with the boy, as it empties out the baby with the bath.
But let us, by way of a little study in this mournful state of things, consider this case of the dangerous toy. Now the first and most self-evident truth is that, of all the things a child sees and touches, the most dangerous toy is about the least dangerous thing. There is hardly a single domestic utensil that is not much more dangerous than a little bow and arrows. He can burn himself in the fire, he can boil himself in the bath, he can cut his throat with the carving-knife, he can scald himself with the kettle, he can choke himself with anything small enough, he can break his neck off anything high enough. He moves all day long amid a murderous machinery, as capable of killing and maiming as the wheels of the most frightful factory. He plays all day in a house fitted up with of torture like the Spanish Inquisition. And, while he thus dances in the shadow of death, he is to be saved from all the perils of possessing a piece of string, tied to a bent bough or twig. When he is a little boy it generally takes him some time even to learn how to hold the bow. When he does hold it, he is delighted if the arrow flutters for a few yards like a feather or an autumn leaf. But even if he grows a little older and more skilful, and has yet not learned to despise arrows in favour of aeroplanes, the amount of damage he could conceivably do with his little arrows would be about one-hundredth part of the damage he could always in any case have done by simply picking up a stone in the garden.
Now you do not keep a little boy from throwing stones by preventing him from ever seeing tones. You do not do it by locking up all the stones in the Geological Museum, and only issuing tickets of admission to adults. You do not do it by trying to pick up all the pebbles on the beach, for fear he should practise throwing them into the sea You do not even adopt so obvious and even pressing a social reform as forbidding roads to be made of anything but asphalt, or directing that all gardens shall be made on clay and none on gravel. You neglect all these great opportunities opening before you; you neglect all these inspiring vistas of social science and enlightenment. When you want to prevent a child from throwing stones, you fall back on the stalest and most sentimental and even most superstitious methods. You do it by trying to preserve some reasonable authority and influence over the child. You trust to your private relation with the boy, and not to your public relation with the stone. And what is true of the natural missile is just as true, of course, of the artificial missile; especially as it is a very much more ineffectual and therefore innocuous missile. A man could be really killed, like St. Stephen, with the stones in the road. I doubt if he could be really killed, like St. Sebastian, with the arrows in the toyshop. But anyhow the very plain principle is the same. If you can teach a child not to throw a stone, you can teach him when to shoot an arrow; if you cannot teach him anything, he will always have something to throw. If he can be persuaded not to smash the Archdeacon’s hat with a heavy flint, it will probably be possible to dissuade him from transfixing that head-dress with a toy arrow. If his training deters him from heaving half a brick at the postman, it will probably also warn him against constantly loosening shafts of death against the policeman. But the notion that the child depends upon particular implements, labelled dangerous, in order to be a danger to himself and other people, is a notion so nonsensical that it is hard to see how any human mind can entertain it for a moment. The truth is that all sorts of faddism, both official and theoretical, have broken down the natural authority of the domestic institution, especially among the poor; and the faddists are now casting about desperately for a substitute for the thing they have themselves destroyed. The normal thing is for the parents to prevent a boy from doing more than a reasonable amount of damage with his bow and arrow; and for the rest, to leave him to a reasonable enjoyment of them. Officialism cannot thus follow the life of the individual boy, as can the individual guardian. You cannot appoint a particular policeman for each boy, to pursue him when he climbs trees or falls into ponds. So the modern spirit has descended to the indescribably mental degradation of trying to abolish the abuse of things by abolishing the things themselves; which is as if it were to abolish ponds or abolish trees. Perhaps it will have a try at that before long. Thus we have all heard of savages who try a tomahawk for murder, or burn a wooden club for the damage it has done to society. To such intellectual levels may the world return.
There are indeed yet lower levels. There is a story from America about a little boy who gave up his toy cannon to assist the disarmament of the world. I do not know if it is true, but on the whole I prefer to think so; for it is perhaps more tolerable to imagine one small monster who could do such a thing than many more mature monsters who could invent or admire it. There were some doubtless who neither invented nor admired. It is one of the peculiarities of the Americans that they combine a power of producing what they satirize as “sobstuff” with a parallel power of satirizing it. And of the two American tall stories, it is sometimes hard to say which is the story and which the satire. But it seems clear that some people did really repeat this story in a reverential spirit. And it marks, as I have said, another stage of the cerebral decay. You can (with luck) break a window with a toy arrow; but you can hardly bombard a town with a toy guy. If people object to the mere model of a cannon, they must equally object to the picture of a cannon, and so to every picture in the world that depicts a sword or a spear. There would be a splendid clearance of all the great art-galleries of the world. But it would be nothing to the destruction of all the great libraries of the world, if we logically extended the principle to all the literary masterpieces that admit the glory of arms. When this progress had gone on for a century or two, it might begin to dawn on people that there was something wrong with their moral principle. What is wrong with their moral principle is that it is immoral. Arms, like every other adventure of art of man, have two sides according as they are invoked for the infliction or the defiance of wrong. They have also an element of real poetry and an element of realistic and therefore repulsive prose. The child’s symbolic sword and bow are simply the poetry without the prose; the good without the evil. The toy sword is the abstraction and the emanation of the heroic, apart from all its horrible accidents. It is the soul of the sword, that will never be stained with blood.
The Terror of a Toy
The Terror of a Toy, “Fancies versus Fads”, New York, Dodd, Mead and company, 1923, pages 105 through 110.
The Terror of a Toy
It would be too high and hopeful a compliment to say that the world is becoming absolutely babyish. For its chief weak-mindedness is an inability to appreciate the intelligence of babies. On every side we hear whispers and warnings that would have appeared half-witted to the Wise Men of Gotham. Only this Christmas I was told in a toy-shop that not so many bows and arrows were being made for little goys; because they were considered dangerous. It might in some circumstances be dangerous to have a little bow. It is always dangerous to have a little boy. But no other society, claiming to be sane, would have dreamed of supposing that you could abolish all bows unless you could abolish all boys.
With the merits of the latter reform I will not deal here. There is a great deal to be said for such a course; and perhaps we shall soon have an opportunity of considering it. For the modern mind seems quite incapable of distinguishing between the means and the end, between the organ and the disease, between the use and the abuse; and would doubtless beak the boy along with the boy, as it empties out the baby with the bath.
But let us, by way of a little study in this mournful state of things, consider this case of the dangerous toy. Now the first and most self-evident truth is that, of all the things a child sees and touches, the most dangerous toy is about the least dangerous thing. There is hardly a single domestic utensil that is not much more dangerous than a little bow and arrows. He can burn himself in the fire, he can boil himself in the bath, he can cut his throat with the carving-knife, he can scald himself with the kettle, he can choke himself with anything small enough, he can break his neck off anything high enough. He moves all day long amid a murderous machinery, as capable of killing and maiming as the wheels of the most frightful factory. He plays all day in a house fitted up with of torture like the Spanish Inquisition. And, while he thus dances in the shadow of death, he is to be saved from all the perils of possessing a piece of string, tied to a bent bough or twig. When he is a little boy it generally takes him some time even to learn how to hold the bow. When he does hold it, he is delighted if the arrow flutters for a few yards like a feather or an autumn leaf. But even if he grows a little older and more skilful, and has yet not learned to despise arrows in favour of aeroplanes, the amount of damage he could conceivably do with his little arrows would be about one-hundredth part of the damage he could always in any case have done by simply picking up a stone in the garden.
Il terrore di un giocattolo
Il terrore di un giocattolo, “Fancies versus Fads”, New York, Dodd, Mead and company, 1923, pagine da 105 a 110.
Il terrore di un giocattolo
Sarebbe un complimento troppo alto e ottimistico dire che il mondo sta diventando assolutamente infantile. Poiché la sua principale debolezza di mente è un’incapacità di apprezzare l’intelligenza dei bambini. Da ogni parte odiamo sussurri e ammonimenti che sarebbero sembrati da mezzi scemi ai Savi di Gotham. Proprio questo Natale mi è stato detto in un negozio di giocattoli che non si fabbricavano più tanti archi e frecce per i ragazzini; perché erano considerati pericolosi. In certe circostanze potrebbe essere pericoloso possedere un piccolo arco. È sempre pericoloso possedere un piccolo ragazzo. Ma nessun’altra società, che pretenda di essere sana di mente, si sarebbe mai sognata di supporre che si potessero abolire tutti gli archi senza abolire tutti i ragazzi.
Dei meriti di quest’ultima riforma non mi occuperò qui. C’è molto da dire a favore di tale via; e forse ne avremo presto occasione di considerarla. Poiché la mente moderna sembra del tutto incapace di distinguere tra i mezzi e il fine, tra l’organo e la malattia, tra l’uso e l’abuso; e senza dubbio spezzerebbe l’arco insieme al ragazzo, così come rovescia il bambino con l’acqua del bagno.
Ma consideriamo, a mo’ di piccolo studio su questo luttuoso stato di cose, questo caso del giocattolo pericoloso. Ora la prima e più auto-evidente verità è che, di tutte le cose che un bambino vede e tocca, il giocattolo più pericoloso è pressoché la cosa meno pericolosa. Non c’è quasi un solo utensile domestico che non sia molto più pericoloso di un piccolo arco con frecce. Può bruciarsi nel fuoco, può bollirsi nella vasca, può tagliarsi la gola con il coltello da trinciare, può scottarsi con il bollitore, può soffocarsi con qualunque cosa abbastanza piccola, può rompersi il collo cadendo da qualunque cosa abbastanza alta. Si muove tutto il giorno in mezzo a un macchinario micidiale, capace di uccidere e mutilare quanto le ruote della più spaventosa fabbrica. Gioca tutto il giorno in una casa attrezzata di strumenti di tortura come la Inquisizione spagnola. E, mentre così danza all’ombra della morte, lo si dovrebbe salvare da tutti i pericoli del possedere un pezzo di spago, legato a un ramo o a un rametto piegato. Quando è un ragazzino di solito gli occorre un po’ di tempo anche solo per imparare a impugnare l’arco. Quando ci riesce, è deliziato se la freccia svolazza per qualche metro come una piuma o una foglia d’autunno. Ma anche se cresce un po’ più grande e più abile, e non ha ancora imparato a disprezzare le frecce in favore degli aeroplani, la quantità di danno che potrebbe plausibilmente fare con le sue piccole frecce sarebbe circa un centesimo del danno che avrebbe comunque potuto fare in ogni caso semplicemente raccogliendo una pietra nel giardino.
Now you do not keep a little boy from throwing stones by preventing him from ever seeing tones. You do not do it by locking up all the stones in the Geological Museum, and only issuing tickets of admission to adults. You do not do it by trying to pick up all the pebbles on the beach, for fear he should practise throwing them into the sea You do not even adopt so obvious and even pressing a social reform as forbidding roads to be made of anything but asphalt, or directing that all gardens shall be made on clay and none on gravel. You neglect all these great opportunities opening before you; you neglect all these inspiring vistas of social science and enlightenment. When you want to prevent a child from throwing stones, you fall back on the stalest and most sentimental and even most superstitious methods. You do it by trying to preserve some reasonable authority and influence over the child. You trust to your private relation with the boy, and not to your public relation with the stone. And what is true of the natural missile is just as true, of course, of the artificial missile; especially as it is a very much more ineffectual and therefore innocuous missile. A man could be really killed, like St. Stephen, with the stones in the road. I doubt if he could be really killed, like St. Sebastian, with the arrows in the toyshop. But anyhow the very plain principle is the same. If you can teach a child not to throw a stone, you can teach him when to shoot an arrow; if you cannot teach him anything, he will always have something to throw. If he can be persuaded not to smash the Archdeacon’s hat with a heavy flint, it will probably be possible to dissuade him from transfixing that head-dress with a toy arrow. If his training deters him from heaving half a brick at the postman, it will probably also warn him against constantly loosening shafts of death against the policeman. But the notion that the child depends upon particular implements, labelled dangerous, in order to be a danger to himself and other people, is a notion so nonsensical that it is hard to see how any human mind can entertain it for a moment. The truth is that all sorts of faddism, both official and theoretical, have broken down the natural authority of the domestic institution, especially among the poor; and the faddists are now casting about desperately for a substitute for the thing they have themselves destroyed. The normal thing is for the parents to prevent a boy from doing more than a reasonable amount of damage with his bow and arrow; and for the rest, to leave him to a reasonable enjoyment of them. Officialism cannot thus follow the life of the individual boy, as can the individual guardian. You cannot appoint a particular policeman for each boy, to pursue him when he climbs trees or falls into ponds. So the modern spirit has descended to the indescribably mental degradation of trying to abolish the abuse of things by abolishing the things themselves; which is as if it were to abolish ponds or abolish trees. Perhaps it will have a try at that before long. Thus we have all heard of savages who try a tomahawk for murder, or burn a wooden club for the damage it has done to society. To such intellectual levels may the world return.
There are indeed yet lower levels. There is a story from America about a little boy who gave up his toy cannon to assist the disarmament of the world. I do not know if it is true, but on the whole I prefer to think so; for it is perhaps more tolerable to imagine one small monster who could do such a thing than many more mature monsters who could invent or admire it. There were some doubtless who neither invented nor admired. It is one of the peculiarities of the Americans that they combine a power of producing what they satirize as “sobstuff” with a parallel power of satirizing it. And of the two American tall stories, it is sometimes hard to say which is the story and which the satire. But it seems clear that some people did really repeat this story in a reverential spirit. And it marks, as I have said, another stage of the cerebral decay. You can (with luck) break a window with a toy arrow; but you can hardly bombard a town with a toy guy. If people object to the mere model of a cannon, they must equally object to the picture of a cannon, and so to every picture in the world that depicts a sword or a spear. There would be a splendid clearance of all the great art-galleries of the world. But it would be nothing to the destruction of all the great libraries of the world, if we logically extended the principle to all the literary masterpieces that admit the glory of arms. When this progress had gone on for a century or two, it might begin to dawn on people that there was something wrong with their moral principle. What is wrong with their moral principle is that it is immoral. Arms, like every other adventure of art of man, have two sides according as they are invoked for the infliction or the defiance of wrong. They have also an element of real poetry and an element of realistic and therefore repulsive prose. The child’s symbolic sword and bow are simply the poetry without the prose; the good without the evil. The toy sword is the abstraction and the emanation of the heroic, apart from all its horrible accidents. It is the soul of the sword, that will never be stained with blood.
Ora, non si impedisce a un ragazzino di tirare sassi impedendogli di vedere mai dei sassi. Non lo si fa chiudendo a chiave tutti i sassi nel Museo Geologico, e rilasciando biglietti d’ingresso solo agli adulti. Non lo si fa cercando di raccogliere tutti i ciottoli sulla spiaggia, per paura che si eserciti a lanciarli in mare. Non si adotta nemmeno una riforma sociale tanto ovvia e persino pressante quanto proibire che le strade siano fatte d’altro che d’asfalto, o disporre che tutti i giardini siano fatti sull’argilla e nessuno sulla ghiaia. Trascurate tutte queste grandi opportunità che vi si aprono davanti; trascurate tutte queste esaltanti prospettive di scienza sociale e di illuminismo. Quando volete impedire a un bambino di tirare sassi, ripiegate sui metodi più triti e più sentimentali e persino più superstiziosi. Lo fate cercando di conservare una qualche ragionevole autorità e influenza sul bambino. Vi affidate al vostro rapporto privato col ragazzo, e non al vostro rapporto pubblico col sasso. E ciò che è vero del proiettile naturale è altrettanto vero, naturalmente, del proiettile artificiale; tanto più che è un proiettile assai più inefficace e perciò innocuo. Un uomo potrebbe essere davvero ucciso, come san Stefano, con i sassi della strada. Dubito che possa essere davvero ucciso, come san Sebastiano, con le frecce del negozio di giocattoli. Ma comunque il principio, per quanto ovvio, è lo stesso. Se sapete insegnare a un bambino a non tirare un sasso, potete insegnargli quando scoccare una freccia; se non sapete insegnargli nulla, avrà sempre qualcosa da tirare. Se lo si può persuadere a non fracassare il cappello dell’Arcidiacono con una pesante selce, sarà probabilmente possibile dissuaderlo dal trafiggere quel copricapo con una freccia giocattolo. Se il suo addestramento lo trattiene dallo scagliare mezzo mattone contro il postino, probabilmente lo metterà in guardia anche contro il continuo scoccare dardi di morte contro il poliziotto. Ma l’idea che il bambino dipenda da particolari arnesi, etichettati come pericolosi, per essere un pericolo a se stesso e agli altri, è un’idea tanto insensata che è difficile capire come una mente umana possa accarezzarla anche per un istante. La verità è che ogni sorta di fanatismo, sia ufficiale sia teorico, ha demolito l’autorità naturale dell’istituzione domestica, specialmente tra i poveri; e i fanatici vanno ora cercando disperatamente un sostituto per la cosa che hanno essi stessi distrutto. La cosa normale è che i genitori impediscano a un ragazzo di fare più di una ragionevole quantità di danno col suo arco e le sue frecce; e per il resto, di lasciargliene un ragionevole godimento. L’ufficialità non può così seguire la vita del singolo ragazzo, come può il singolo tutore. Non si può nominare un particolare poliziotto per ciascun ragazzo, perché lo insegua quando si arrampica sugli alberi o cade negli stagni. Così lo spirito moderno è disceso all’indescrivibile degradazione mentale di tentare di abolire l’abuso delle cose abolendo le cose stesse; il che è come se volesse abolire gli stagni o abolire gli alberi. Forse fra non molto ci proverà. Così tutti abbiamo sentito di selvaggi che processano un tomahawk per omicidio, o bruciano una clava di legno per il danno che ha arrecato alla società. A tali livelli intellettuali può ritornare il mondo.
Vi sono in verità livelli ancora più bassi. C’è una storia dall’America su un ragazzino che rinunciò al suo cannone giocattolo per contribuire al disarmo del mondo. Non so se sia vera, ma nel complesso preferisco crederlo; poiché è forse più tollerabile immaginare un piccolo mostro capace di fare una cosa simile che molti mostri più maturi capaci di inventarla o di ammirarla. Ve n’erano senza dubbio alcuni che non l’inventarono né l’ammirarono. È una delle peculiarità degli americani il combinare un potere di produrre ciò che essi satireggiano come “roba lacrimosa” con un parallelo potere di satireggiarlo. E delle due storie iperboliche americane, è talvolta difficile dire quale sia la storia e quale la satira. Ma pare chiaro che alcune persone ripeterono davvero questa storia in spirito reverente. E ciò segna, come ho detto, un altro stadio del decadimento cerebrale. Si può (con fortuna) rompere una finestra con una freccia giocattolo; ma difficilmente si può bombardare una città con un pupazzo giocattolo. Se la gente ha da obiettare al semplice modello di un cannone, deve del pari obiettare all’immagine di un cannone, e così a ogni quadro al mondo che raffiguri una spada o una lancia. Ci sarebbe uno splendido sgombero di tutte le grandi pinacoteche del mondo. Ma non sarebbe nulla rispetto alla distruzione di tutte le grandi biblioteche del mondo, se estendessimo logicamente il principio a tutti i capolavori letterari che ammettono la gloria delle armi. Quando questo progresso fosse andato avanti per un secolo o due, potrebbe cominciare ad albeggiare nella gente che c’era qualcosa di sbagliato nel loro principio morale. Ciò che c’è di sbagliato nel loro principio morale è che è immorale. Le armi, come ogni altra avventura dell’arte dell’uomo, hanno due facce, a seconda che siano invocate per l’inflizione o per lo sfidamento del torto. Hanno anche un elemento di vera poesia e un elemento di prosa realistica e perciò repellente. La spada e l’arco simbolici del bambino sono semplicemente la poesia senza la prosa; il bene senza il male. La spada giocattolo è l’astrazione e l’emanazione dell’eroico, a prescindere da tutti i suoi orribili accidenti. È l’anima della spada, che non sarà mai macchiata di sangue.