The Birmingham age-herald. [volume] (Birmingham, Ala.) 1902-1950, 1919-08-29
MOTHER GOOSE, pRoPAGANDIsT

! MOTHER GOOSE, PRoPAGANDIsT
Don Marquis, in Harpers Magazine for
August.
Mother$oose has never had the rec
| ognition which she deserves for the
! part she has played in making the
! world unsafe for anti-democracy.
A young fellow who will be four
years old by the time he is half year
older. asked me the other day just
what a crown is. l explained that it is
style of headdress affected by kings,
in their more formal and regal moods
and lenses
He accepted the explanation so read
kings. and asked him.
Kings. he told me, were persons who
stole things. They stole meal and
made buildings out of it. Queens were
the same as cooks.
Queens fry things for breakfast. He
had known about kings and their thiev-
ing propensities for long time. Kings
were the same as Aufurs. There was a
picture of a king who was an Aufur in
his Mother Goose book stealing a bag
of meal.
My own introduction to kings was
the same as this young persons. :
The King Arthur in my Mother Goose
book who stole three pecks of barley
meal to make a bag pudding, was the
first king l ever knew. / am no boil
shevist by temperament or trade but
to this day 1 cannot think of kings as
quite honest persons. Even the jovial
King Cole did not quite reassure me
with regard to kings. 1 seemed to see
a something cunning in his eye. While
ostensibly occupied with his pipe, his
bowl, and his fiddles three, he was
likely thinking up some scheme 10 pur-
loin edibles. The king who sat in his
counting house, counting out his money
after having had the -and-twenty
blackbirds baked in a pie, all but con-
firmed my youthful suspicion of kings
as a class. -" 1 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, too.
Later, when l read Lanier's YER
sion of the Arthurian legend, 1 was
King Arthur as a fat rogue with a
sack of meal slung over his shoulder
| and a ang-dog eye beneath his crown.
Still later, Tennyson could do moth
ing for me. The Tennyson Arthur was
very pure and noble and brave, to the
eye, but beneath the royal mail there
was a horrid secret; Disgusting himself
as he would 1 knew that he had once
| been a meal-stealer; for me he could
never live it down. 1t 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 pudding thief under his
\ splendid exterior.
! AS for Guinerve herself, 1 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 embroider-
ing heavy tapestries for the Camelot
! trade; she had done rough work be-
fore and she could do rough work
again. and get no pity of mine. l re-
membered her from the old kitchen
days; at one time in her career she
had fried mush for breakfast-stolen
| mush-with her hair struggling I'M
queenly down from her coronet, and
with look upon her face that show ed
her glad enough to get that much tc
fry.
But what I started out to say was
| that the world of tomorrow is not be-
ing made in the school rooms of today
it is being made before the children
get as far as the school rooms. / war;
all kings that Mother Goose will bear
| watching.