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<div1 type="essay" id="d3"><head>MOTHER GOOSE, PROPAGANDIST<lb/>BY DON
MARQUIS</head>

<p><hi rend="small-caps">MOTHER GOOSE</hi> has never had the recognition which she
deserves for the part she has played in making the world unsafe for
anti-democracy.

</p><p>A young fellow who will be four years old by the time he is
half a year older, asked me the other day just what a crown is.  I
explained that it is a style of head-dress affected by kings, in their
more formal and regal moods and tenses.
</p><p>He accepted the explanation so readily that I wondered what
he knew about kings, and asked him.
</p><p>Kings, he told me, were persons who stole things.  They stole
meal and made puddings out of it.  Queens were the same as cooks.
</p><p>Queens fry things for breakfast.  He had known about kings
and their thieving propensities for a long time.  Kings were the same
as Arfurs.  There was a picture of a king who was an Arfur in his


<pb n="440"/>

Mother Goose Book stealing a bag of meal.

</p><p>My own introduction to kings was the same as this young
person's. . . .  The King Arthur in my Mother Goose Book who stole
three pecks of barley meal to make a bag pudding was the first king
I ever knew.  I am no Bolshevist by temperament or trade, but to
this day I cannot think of kings as quite honest persons.  Even the
jovial King Cole did not quite reassure me with regard to kings; I
seemed to see a something cunning in his eye.  While ostensibly
occupied with his pipe, his bowl, and his fiddlers three, he was
likely thinking up some scheme to purloin edibles.  The king who
sat in his counting-house, counting out his money, after having had
the four-and-twenty blackbirds baked within a pie, all but confirmed
my youthful suspicion of kings as a class. . . .  I was sure that the
money really belonged to some one else; he counted it, in the
picture, with a guilty air.  Possibly he had stolen the blackbirds, to
begin with.

</p><p>Later, when I read Lanier's version of the Arthurian legend, I
was still unable to banish the thought of King Arthur as a fat rogue
with a sack of meal slung over his shoulder and a hang-dog eye
beneath his crown.
</p><p>Still later, Tennyson could do nothing for me.  The
Tennysonian Arthur was very pure and noble and brave, to the eye,
but beneath the royal mail there was a horrid secret; disguise
himself as he would, I knew that he had once been a meal-stealer;
for me, he could never live it down.  It influenced me in my
judgment of him and Guinevere.  I felt that Guinevere was unable to
forget it, too, and that she justified, in some measure, her relations
with Lancelot, with the reflection that the Arthur whom she
deceived had, after all, the soul of a pudding-thief under his
splendid exterior.
</p><p>As for Guinevere herself, I could never feel so very sorry for
her when she was flung from her place beside the king and
compelled to enter a convent and scar her dainty fingers
embroidering heavy tapestries for the Camelot trade; she had done
rough work before, and she could do rough work again, and get no
pity of mine.  I remembered her from the old kitchen days; at one
time in her career she had fried mush for breakfast -- stolen mush --
with her hair straggling unqueenly down from her coronet, and with
a look upon her face that showed her glad enough to get that mush
to fry.

</p><p>A friend and I once paid a visit to the Eden Musee, and saw in
the Chamber of Horrors we saw two females showing the great
gouts of blood and severed heads to their offspring, nine or ten in
number, and all between the ages of three and eight.  The little boys
and girls were in a state of agreeable hysteria, evidently supposing
all this blood to be real; nothing in after-life would make the
impression upon them that this shambles was making.  "The mind
of youth," quoted my friend, eying the group reflectively, "is wax to
receive and marble to retain."  It is possible that young
Hohenzollerns were trained in a similar manner.

</p><p>It took me a long time to live down an impression of
Welshmen, gained from the same source as the notion about kings .
. . and even now, when I contemplate Mr. Lloyd George and the list
of things that he is taking home from Paris, I murmur that the hand
is quicker than the eye.  But what I started out to say was that the
world of to-morrow is not being made in the school-rooms of
to-day; it is being made before the children get as far as the
school-rooms.  I warn all kings that Mother Goose will bear
watching.</p>
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