CHAPTER IV.
THE DOCTRINE OF CHILD DEPRAVITY.
Dickens heartily accepted Froebel's view of the doctrine of childdepravity. They did not teach that the child is totally divine, butneither did they believe that a being created in God's image is entirelydepraved.
They recognised very clearly that the doctrine of child depravity was thelogical (or illogical) basis of the theory of corporal punishment and allforms of coercion. What more natural or more logical than the practice ofchecking the outflow of a child's inner life if we believe his inner lifeto be depraved? The firm belief in the doctrine of child depravitycompelled conscientious men to be repressive and coercive in theirdiscipline. Dickens understood this fully, and therefore he gave thedoctrine no place in his philosophy.
Mrs. Pipchin's training was based squarely on the doctrine of childdepravity, for "the secret of her management of children was to give themeverything that they didn't like, and nothing that they did." If thetraining of children under the "good old _regime_," for which somereactionary philosophers are still pleading, is carefully analyzed, itwill be found that Mrs. Pipchin's plan was the commonly approved plan, andit was the perfectly logical outcome of the doctrine that the child, beingwholly depraved, desired everything it should not have and objected toeverything it should have.
That was a touching question addressed by a little boy to his father:"Say, papa, did mamma stop you from doing everything you wished to do when_you_ were a little boy?"
How Dickens despised the awful theology of the Murdstones, who would notlet David play with other children, because they believed "all children tobe a swarm of little vipers [though there _was_ a child once set in themidst of the Disciples], and held that they contaminated one another"!
How he laughed at Mrs. Varden and Miggs, her maid!
"If you hadn't the sweetness of an angel in you, mim, I don't think you could abear it, I raly don't."
"Miggs," said Mrs. Varden, "you're profane."
"Begging your pardon, mim," returned Miggs with shrill rapidity, "such was not my intentions, and such I hope is not my character, though I am but a servant."
"Answering me, Miggs, and providing yourself," retorted her mistress, looking round with dignity, "is one and the same thing. How dare you speak of angels in connection with your sinful fellow-beings--mere"--said Mrs. Varden, glancing at herself in a neighbouring mirror, and arranging the ribbon of her cap in a more becoming fashion--"mere worms and grovellers as we are!"
"I do not intend, mim, if you please, to give offence," said Miggs, confident in the strength of her compliment, and developing strongly in the throat as usual, "and I did not expect it would be took as such. I hope I know my own unworthiness, and that I hate and despise myself and all my fellow-creatures as every practicable Christian should."
Oliver Twist was described by the philanthropists who cared for him as"under the exclusive patronage and protection of the powers of wickedness,and an article direct from the manufactory of the very devil himself."
Mr. Grimwig had no faith in boys, and he tried hard to shake Mr.Brownlow's faith in Oliver.
"He is a nice-looking boy, is he not?" inquired Mr. Brownlow.
"I don't know," replied Mr. Grimwig pettishly.
"Don't know?"
"No. I don't know. I never see any difference in boys. I only know two sorts of boys: mealy boys and beef-faced boys."
"And which is Oliver?"
"Mealy. I know a friend who has a beef-faced boy--a fine boy, they call him; with a round head, and red cheeks, and glaring eyes; a horrid boy; with a body and limbs that appear to be swelling out of the seams of his blue clothes; with the voice of a pilot, and the appetite of a wolf. I know him! The wretch!"
"Come," said Mr. Brownlow, "these are not the characteristics of young Oliver Twist; so he needn't excite your wrath."
"They are not," replied Mr. Grimwig. "He may have worse. He is deceiving you, my good friend."
"I'll swear he is not," replied Mr. Brownlow warmly.
"If he is not," said Mr. Grimwig, "I'll----" and down went the stick.
"I'll answer for that boy's truth with my life!" said Mr. Brownlow, knocking the table.
"And I for his falsehood with my head!" rejoined Mr. Grimwig, knocking the table also.
"We shall see," said Mr. Brownlow, checking his rising anger.
"We will," replied Mr. Grimwig, with a provoking smile; "we will."
Dickens always pleaded for more faith in children.
In Great Expectations poor Pip was continually reminded of the fact thathe was "naterally wicious," and at the great Christmas dinner party Mr.Pumblechook took him as the illustration of his theological discourse on"swine" and Mrs. Hubble commiserated Mrs. Gargery about the trouble he hadcaused her by all his waywardness.
"Trouble?" echoed my sister, "trouble?" And then entered on a fearful catalogue of all the illnesses I had been guilty of, and all the acts of sleeplessness I had committed, and all the high places I had tumbled from, and all the low places I had tumbled into, and all the injuries I had done myself, and all the times she had wished me in my grave, and I had contumaciously refused to go there.
Again, when Pip was just beginning his life away from home his guardian,Mr. Jaggers, said to him at their first interview: "I shall by this meansbe able to check your bills, and to pull you up if I find you outrunningthe constable. Of course you'll go wrong somehow, but that's no fault ofmine."
"Of course you'll go wrong somehow," was an inspiring start in life for ayoung gentleman.
Abel Magwitch, Pip's friend, told him near the close of his career how hecame to lead such a dissipated and criminal life. He evidently had abilityand possessed a deep sense of gratitude, and might have developed theother virtues if he had been treated properly. Dickens used him as anillustration of the fact that society fails often to do the best for a boyand make the most out of him through sheer lack of faith in childhood, andthat this lack of faith results from the belief that a boy is so depravedthat he would rather do wrong than right, and that when he starts to dowrong there is no hope of his reform.
"Dear boy and Pip's comrade. I am not a-going fur to tell you my life, like a song or a story-book. But to give it you short and handy, I'll put it at once into a mouthful of English. In jail and out of jail, in jail and out of jail, in jail and out of jail. There, you've got it. That's _my_ life pretty much, down to such times as I got shipped off, arter Pip stood my friend.
"I've been done everything to, pretty well--except hanged. I've been locked up, as much as a silver teakittle. I've been carted here and carted there, and put out of this town and put out of that town, and stuck in the stocks, and whipped and worried and drove. I've no more notion where I was born, than you have--if so much. I first become aware of myself, down in Essex, a-thieving turnips for my living. Summun had run away from me--a man--a tinker--and he'd took the fire with him, and left me wery cold.
"I know'd my name to be Magwitch, chrisen'd Abel. How did I know it? Much as I know'd the birds' names in the hedges to be chaffinch, sparrer, thrush. I might have thought it was all lies altogether, only as the birds' names come out true, I supposed mine did.
"So fur as I could find, there warn't a soul that see young Abel Magwitch, with as little on him as in him, but wot caught fright at him, and either drove him off or took him up. I was took up, took up, took up, to that extent that I reg'larly grow'd up took up.
"This is the way it was, that when I was a ragged little creetur as much to be pitied as ever I see (not that I looked in the glass, for there warn't many insides of furnished houses known to me), I got the name being hardened. 'This is a terrible hardened one,' they says to prison wisitors, picking out me. 'May be said to live in jails, this boy.' Then they looke
d at me, and I looked at them, and they measured my head, some on 'em--they had better a-measured my stomach--and others on 'em giv' me tracts what I couldn't read, and made me speeches what I couldn't understand. They always went on agen me about the devil."
Poor old Toby Veck, in The Chimes, reflected the theories that Dickenswished to overthrow.
"It seems as if we can't go right, or do right, or be righted," said Toby. "I hadn't much schooling, myself, when I was young; and I can't make out whether we have any business on the face of the earth, or not. Sometimes I think we must have--a little; and sometimes I think we must be intruding. I get so puzzled sometimes that I am not even able to make up my mind whether there is any good at all in us, or whether we are born bad. We seem to be dreadful things; we seem to give a deal of trouble; we are always being complained of and guarded against."
The most realistic picture of the influence of the child-depravity idealon the training of childhood is given in Mrs. Clennam, in Little Dorrit.She was a hard, malignant, dishonest, unsympathetic woman, who haddeliberately driven Arthur's mother to madness and blighted his father'slife in the name of her false religion, and blasphemously claimed that shewas doing it in God's stead, as his devoted servant. Yet she was sure shewas truly religious, and had a pious vanity in the fact that she was"filled with an abhorrence of evil doers." She was filled with gladness,too, at the prospect of marrying a man of like training with herself.Speaking of the training of herself and her husband she said:
"You do not know what it is to be brought up strictly and straitly. I was so brought up. Mine was no light youth of sinful gaiety and pleasure. Mine were days of wholesome repression, punishment, and fear. The corruption of our hearts, the evil of our ways, the curse that is upon us, the terrors that surround us--these were the themes of my childhood. They formed my character, and filled me with an abhorrence of evil doers. When old Mr. Gilbert Clennam proposed his orphan nephew to my father for my husband, my father impressed upon me that his bringing-up had been, like mine, one of severe restraint. He told me, that besides the discipline his spirit had undergone, he had lived in a starved house, where rioting and gaiety were unknown, and where every day was a day of toil and trial like the last. He told me that he had been a man in years long before his uncle had acknowledged him as one; and that from his school days to that hour, his uncle's roof had been a sanctuary to him from the contagion of the irreligious and dissolute."
Speaking of her training of Arthur, she said:
"I devoted myself to reclaim the otherwise predestined and lost boy; to bring him up in fear and trembling, and in a life of practical contrition for the sins that were heavy on his head before his entrance into this condemned world."
Dickens describes her religious character as such as might naturally beexpected to develop in a woman whose childhood revealed to her only theself-abnegation and terrors of religion and the utter contempt forhumanity shrouded in the doctrine of child depravity. She had seen God asan awful character of sleepless watchfulness to see her evil doing andrecord it, of wrathfulness, and of vengeance, but never of loving sympathyand forgiveness. So she fitted her religion to the character that suchtraining had formed in her.
Great need had the rigid woman of her mystical religion, veiled in gloom and darkness, with lightnings of cursing, vengeance, and destruction, flashing through the sable clouds. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors, was a prayer too poor in spirit for her. Smite Thou my debtors, Lord, wither them, crush them; do Thou as I would do, and Thou shalt have my worship: this was the impious tower of stone she built up to scale heaven.
The old discipline and the old training were based on the belief thatchildren like to do wrong better than to do right. There could be nogreater error, or one more certain to lead to false principles oftraining, and prevent the recognition of the true methods of developingcharacter in childhood.
Children do not like to do wrong better than to do right. They like to do.They like to do the things they themselves plan to do. They like to do thethings that are interesting to themselves. Their lack of wisdom leavesthem at the mercy of their interests, and without guidance theirconstructiveness may turn to destructiveness. When it does so, it isbecause of the neglect of their adult guides to surround them with plentyof suitable material for construction or transformation adapted to theirstage of development. With a sufficient variety of material forconstructive plays the child will rarely exhibit destructive tendencies,and when he does so, the wisdom of his adult guide should find littletrouble in changing his interest centre from the wrong to the right. Theskilful trainer changes the interest centre without making the childconscious of adult interference.
It costs little to supply the child with sand and blocks, and soft clay,and colors, and colored paper, and blunt scissors and gum, and othersimilar materials--much less than is usually spent for toys; yet suchmaterials would save parents from much worry, and help them to get rid ofthe wrong ideals, and they would preserve the natural tendency of childrento constructiveness, and afford them an opportunity for the comfort andthe development of real self-activity.
The child's most dominant tendency is activity in using the materialthings of his environment to transform them into new forms orrelationships in harmony with his own plans. This tendency is intended toaccomplish four great purposes in the child's development. It reveals thechild's own powers to himself, it develops his originality, it trains himto use his constructive powers, and it gives him the habit of transforminghis environment to suit his own plans. If he is not supplied with suitablematerial to play with he will appropriate the material he finds mostavailable. In this way, through the absolute neglect of his adult guides,he has acquired a bad reputation.
The instinct that leads the child to transform his material environmentshould lead to the conscious desire and determination to improve thephysical, intellectual, and spiritual conditions around him at maturity.It is therefore a very essential element in his training, and to check orneglect it may weaken and warp his character as much as it was intended tostrengthen and direct it.
Thus the children have been coerced because men believed them to bedepraved, and the coercion has developed the apparent depravity.
The darkest clouds have been lifted from the vision of adults and from thelives of the little ones by the breaking of the power of the doctrine ofchild depravity. The teacher especially has a more hopeful field opened tohim. His great work of training is no longer restricted to puttingblinders on the eyes of children to prevent their seeing evil, and bits intheir mouths to keep them from going wrong. He believes that every childhas an element of divinity, however small and enfeebled by heredity orencrusted by evil environment, and that his chief duty is to arouse thisdivinity (his selfhood or individuality) to consciousness and start it onits conscious growth toward the divine. The revelation of this new andgrander ideal has led to all intelligent child study for the purpose ofdiscovering what adulthood can do, and especially what childhood itselfcan do, in accomplishing its most perfect training for its highestdestiny.
Dickens expressed his general faith in childhood in Mrs. Lirriper's remarkto the Major about Jemmy:
"Ah, Major," I says, drying my eyes, "we needn't have been afraid. We might have known it. Treachery don't come natural to beaming youth; but trust and pity, love and constancy--they do, thank God!"
He taught his philosophy of the origin of many of the evils that areattributed to child depravity in Nobody's Story. "Nobody" means theworkingman. He says to the Master:
"The evil consequences of imperfect instruction, the evil consequences of pernicious neglect, the evil consequences of unnatural restraint and the denial of humanizing enjoyments, will all come from us, and none of them will stop with us. They will spread far and wide. They always do; they always have done--just like the pestilence. I understand so much, I th
ink, at last."
There is profoundness in these doctrines.
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