CHAPTER VIII.
THE CULTURE OF THE IMAGINATION.
In the preface to the first number of Household Words Dickens said thatone of the objects he had in view in publishing the magazine was to aid inthe development of the imagination of children.
From the time of Barnaby Rudge his unconscious recognition of the right ofthe child to have his imagination made freer and stronger can be felt inhis writings. His conscious recognition of the absolute necessity of childfreedom included the ideal of the culture of the imagination.
He reached his educational meridian in Hard Times, and the pedagogy ofthis book was devoted almost entirely to child freedom and theimagination; to revealing the fatal error of Mr. Gradgrind's philosophy,which taught that fact storing was the true way to form a child's mind andcharacter, entirely ignoring the fact that feeling and imagination are thestrongest elements of intellectual power and clearness.
In Bleak House, which immediately preceded Hard Times, he gave a very abledescription of the effects of the neglect of the development of theimagination for several generations in the characteristics of theSmallweed family.
The Smallweeds had strengthened themselves in their practical character, discarded all amusements, discountenanced all storybooks, fairy tales, fictions, and fables, and banished all levities whatsoever. Hence the gratifying fact that it has had no child born to it, and that the complete little men and women it has produced have been observed to bear a likeness to old monkeys with something depressing on their minds.
Mr. Smallweed's grandfather is in a helpless condition as to his lower, and nearly so as to his upper limbs; but his mind is unimpaired. It holds, as well as it ever held, the first four rules of arithmetic, and a certain small collection of the hardest facts. In respect of ideality, reverence, wonder, and other such phrenological attributes, it is no worse off than it used to be. Everything that Mr. Smallweed's grandfather ever put away in his mind was a grub at first, and is a grub at last. In all his life he has never bred a single butterfly.
This alone is a treatise of great suggestiveness on the need of thedevelopment of the imagination and the means by which it should bedeveloped.
Hard Times was evidently intended to show the weakness of the Herbartianpsychology. Dickens believed in the distinctive soul as the real selfhoodof each child, and as the only true reality in his nature, the dominatinginfluence in his life and character. He did not believe that knowledgeformed the soul, but that the soul transformed knowledge. He did notbelieve that knowledge gave form, colour, and tone to the soul, but thatthe soul gave new form, colour, and tone to knowledge. He ridiculed theidea that the educator by using great care in the selection of hisknowledge could produce a man of such a character as he desired; that tenpounds of yellow knowledge and ten pounds of blue knowledge judiciouslymixed in a boy would certainly produce twenty pounds of green manhood.
He believed that in every child there is an element "defying all thecalculations ever made by man, and no more known to his arithmetic thanhis Creator is." He did not agree with the psychology of which Mr.Gradgrind was the impersonation. Mr. Gradgrind believed that he couldreduce human nature in all its complexities to statistics, and that "withhis rule, and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table, he couldweigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what itcomes to."
Mr. Gradgrind had established a school for the training of the children ofCoketown, and had engaged Mr. M'Choakumchild to teach it. Dickenscriticised the normal school training of his time in his description ofMr. M'Choakumchild's preparation for the work of stimulating young lifeto larger, richer growth.
He and some one hundred and forty other schoolmasters had been lately turned at the same time, in the same factory, on the same principles, like so many pianoforte legs. He had been put through an immense variety of paces, and had answered volumes of head-breaking questions. Orthography, etymology, syntax, and prosody, biography, astronomy, geography as general cosmography, the sciences of compound proportion, algebra, land surveying and levelling, vocal music, and drawing from models, were all at the ends of his ten chilled fingers. He had worked his stony way through her Majesty's Most Honourable Privy Council's Schedule B, and had taken the bloom off the higher branches of mathematics and physical science, French, German, Latin, and Greek. He knew all about all the watersheds of all the world (whatever they are), and all the histories of all the peoples, and all the names of all the rivers and mountains, and all the productions, manners, and customs of all the countries, and all their boundaries and bearings on the two-and-thirty points of the compass.
Ah! Mr. M'Choakumchild, rather overdone. If he had only learned a little less, how infinitely better he might have taught much more!
Dickens criticised the lack of professional training, and the fact-storingprocess which subordinated feeling and imagination.
Mr. Gradgrind's school was to be opened. The government officer waspresent to examine it. Mr. Gradgrind made a short opening address:
"Now, what I want is facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon facts; nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to facts, sir!"
The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a schoolroom, and the speaker's square forefinger emphasized his observations by underscoring every sentence with a line on the schoolmaster's sleeve. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's square wall of a forehead, which had his eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious cellarage in two dark caves, overshadowed by the wall. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's voice, which was inflexible, dry, and dictatorial.
"In this life we want nothing but facts, sir; nothing but facts."
The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person present, all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim.
Most of the schoolrooms of the world are yet "plain, bare, monotonousvaults," although nearly fifty years after Dickens pointed out the need ofartistic form and artistic decoration in schools we are beginning to awaketo the idea that the architecture, the colouring, and the art on the wallsand in the cabinets of schools may influence the characters of childrenmore even than the teaching.
Mr. Gradgrind proceeded to ask a few questions of the pupils, who in thisnew school were to be known by numbers--so much more statistical andmathematical--and not by their names.
As he stood before the pupils, who were seated in rows on a gallery, "heseemed a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared toblow them clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge. Heseemed a galvanizing apparatus, too, charged with a grim mechanicalsubstitute for the tender young imaginations that were to be stormedaway."
In the last sentence Dickens reveals the true philosophy of sustaining anddeveloping natural and therefore productive interest, and explains how,after destroying it, teachers try to galvanize it into spasmodic activity.
"Girl number twenty," said Mr. Gradgrind, squarely pointing with his square forefinger. "I don't know that girl. Who is that girl?"
"Sissy Jupe, sir," explained number twenty, blushing, standing up, and courtesying.
"Sissy is not a name," said Mr. Gradgrind. "Don't call yourself Sissy. Call yourself Cecilia."
"It's father as calls me Sissy, sir," returned the young girl in a trembling voice, and with another courtesy.
"Then he has no business to d
o it," said Mr. Gradgrind. "Tell him he mustn't. Cecilia Jupe. Let me see. What is your father?"
"He belongs to the horse riding, if you please, sir."
Mr. Gradgrind frowned and waved off the objectionable calling with his hand.
"We don't want to know anything about that here. You mustn't tell us about that here. Your father breaks horses, don't he?"
"If you please, sir, when they can get any to break, they do break horses in the ring, sir."
"You mustn't tell us about the ring, here. Very well, then, describe your father as a horsebreaker. He doctors sick horses, I dare say?"
"Oh, yes, sir."
"Very well, then. He is a veterinary surgeon, a farrier, and horsebreaker. Give me your definition of a horse."
(Sissy Jupe thrown into the greatest alarm by this demand.)
"Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!" said Mr. Gradgrind for the general behoof of all the little pitchers. "Girl number twenty possessed of no facts in reference to one of the commonest of animals! Some boy's definition of a horse. Bitzer, yours."
Bitzer: "Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely, twenty-four grinders, four eyeteeth, and twelve incisors. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries sheds hoofs too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth----" Thus (and much more) Bitzer.
"Now, girl number twenty," said Mr. Gradgrind, "you know what a horse is."
The keen edge of Dickens's sarcasm will be felt when it is remembered thatSissy Jupe was born among horses, had lived with them, played with them,and ridden them all her life, but was "ignorant of the commonest factsregarding a horse." She could not define a horse.
The government examiner then stepped forward:
"Very well," said this gentleman, briskly smiling, and folding his arms. "That's a horse. Now let me ask you girls and boys, would you paper a room with representations of horses?"
After a pause, one half the children cried in chorus, "Yes, sir!" Upon which the other half, seeing in the gentleman's face that "Yes" was wrong, cried out in chorus, "No, sir!"--as the custom is in these examinations.
"Of course, no. Why wouldn't you?"
A pause. One corpulent slow boy, with a wheezy manner of breathing, ventured the answer, because he wouldn't paper a room at all, but would paint it.
"You _must_ paper it," said the gentleman rather warmly.
"You must paper it," said Thomas Gradgrind, "whether you like it or not. Don't tell _us_ you wouldn't paper it. What do you mean, boy?"
"I'll explain to you, then," said the gentleman, after another and a dismal pause, "why you wouldn't paper a room with representations of horses. Do you ever see horses walking up and down the sides of rooms in reality--in fact? Do you?"
"Yes, sir!" from one half, "No, sir!" from the other.
"Of course, no," said the gentleman, with an indignant look at the wrong half. "Why, then, you are not to see anywhere what you don't see in fact; you are not to have anywhere what you don't have in fact. What is called taste is only another name for fact."
Thomas Gradgrind nodded his approbation.
"This is a new principle, a discovery, a great discovery," said the gentleman. "Now, I'll try you again. Suppose you were going to carpet a room. Would you use a carpet having a representation of flowers upon it?"
There being a general conviction by this time that "No, sir!" was always the right answer to this gentleman, the chorus of "No" was very strong. Only a few feeble stragglers said "Yes," among them Sissy Jupe.
"Girl number twenty," said the gentleman, smiling in the calm strength of knowledge.
Sissy blushed, and stood up.
"So you would carpet your room--or your husband's room, if you were a grown woman and had a husband--with representations of flowers, would you? Why would you?"
"If you please, sir, I am very fond of flowers," said the girl.
"And is that why you would put tables and chairs upon them, and have people walking over them with heavy boots?"
"It wouldn't hurt them, sir. They wouldn't crush and wither, if you please, sir. They would be the pictures of what was very pretty, and pleasant, and I would fancy----"
"Ay, ay, ay! But you mustn't fancy," cried the gentleman, quite elated by coming so happily to this point. "That's it! You are never to fancy."
"Fact, fact, fact," said the gentleman.
"Fact, fact, fact," repeated Mr. Gradgrind.
"You are to be in all things regulated and governed," said the gentleman, "by fact. We hope to have, before long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact. You must discard the word Fancy altogether. You have nothing to do with it. You are not to have, in any object of use or ornament, what would be a contradiction in fact. You don't walk upon flowers in fact; you can not be allowed to walk upon flowers in carpets. You don't find that foreign birds and butterflies come and perch upon your crockery; you can not be permitted to paint foreign birds and butterflies upon your crockery. You must use for all these purposes combinations and modifications (in primary colours) of mathematical figures, which are susceptible of proof and demonstration. This is the new discovery. This is fact. This is taste."
Then Mr. M'Choakumchild was asked to teach his first lesson.
He went to work in this preparatory lesson not unlike Morgiana in the Forty Thieves: looking into all the vessels ranged before him, one after another, to see what they contained. Say, good M'Choakumchild, when from thy boiling store thou shalt fill each jar brim full by and by, dost thou think that thou wilt always kill outright the robber Fancy lurking within--or sometimes only maim him and distort him?
The "maiming and distorting" of the imagination filled Dickens with alarm.He recognised with great clearness the law that all evil springs frommisused good, and he knew that if the imagination is not cultivatedproperly the child not only loses the many intellectual and spiritualadvantages that would result from its true culture, but that it is exposedto the terrible danger of a distorted imagination. Tom Gradgrind is usedas a type of the degradation that results from "the strangling of theimagination." Its ghost lived on to drag him down "in the form ofgrovelling sensualities." That which, truly used, has most power toennoble, has also, when warped or dwarfed, most power to degrade.
As Mr. Varden told his wife, "All good things perverted to evil purposesare worse than those which are naturally bad."
The five young Gradgrinds had little opportunity to develop theirimaginations. They were watched too closely to have any imaginative plays;they were not allowed to read poetry or fiction; they heard no stories;they had no fairies or genii in their lives; they heard nothing of giantsor such false things; no little Boy Blue ever blew his horn for them; noJack Horner took a plum out of any pie in their experience; no suchridiculous person as Santa Claus ever put anything in their stockings; nocow ever performed the impossible feat of jumping over the moon, so far asthey knew; they had never even heard of the cow with the crumpled hornthat tossed the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat that ate themalt that lay in the house that Jack built. They knew, or they could say,that a cow was "a graminivorous ruminating quadruped," and that wasenough, in the philosophy of Mr. Gradgrind.
Sissy Jupe's father got into difficulties in Coketown, and he becamediscouraged and ran away. Mr. Gradgrind was a good man, and meant to doright, so he adopted Sissy.
He told her his intentions rather bluntly:
"Jupe, I have made up my mind to take you into my house, and, when you are not in attendance at the school, to employ you about Mrs. Gradgrind, who is rather an invalid. I have explained to Miss Louisa--this is Miss Louisa--the mi
serable but natural end of your late career; and you are to expressly understand that the whole of that subject is past, and is not to be referred to any more. From this time you begin your history. You are, at present, ignorant, I know."
"Yes, sir, very," she answered, courtesying.
"I shall have the satisfaction of causing you to be strictly educated; and you will be a living proof to all who come into communication with you, of the advantages of the training you will receive. You will be reclaimed and formed. You have been in the habit of reading to your father and those people I found you among, I dare say?" said Mr. Gradgrind, beckoning her nearer to him before he said so, and dropping his voice.
"Only to father and Merrylegs, sir. At least, I mean to father, when Merrylegs was always there."
"Never mind Merrylegs, Jupe," said Mr. Gradgrind with a passing frown. "I don't ask about him. I understand you to have been in the habit of reading to your father?"
"Oh, yes, sir, thousands of times. They were the happiest--oh, of all the happy times we had together, sir!"
It was only now, when her grief broke out, that Louisa looked at her.
"And what," asked Mr. Gradgrind in a still lower voice, "did you read to your father, Jupe?"
"About the Fairies, sir, and the Dwarf, and the Hunchback, and the Genies," she sobbed out.
"There," said Mr. Gradgrind, "that is enough. Never breathe a word of such destructive nonsense any more."
One night, in their study den,
Louisa had been overheard to begin a conversation with her brother by saying, "Tom, I wonder--" upon which Mr. Gradgrind, who was the person overhearing, stepped forth into the light, and said, "Louisa, never wonder!"
Herein lay the spring of the mechanical art and mystery of educating the reason without stooping to the cultivation of the sentiments and affections. Never wonder. By means of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division settle everything somehow, and never wonder. "Bring to me," says Mr. M'Choakumchild, "yonder baby just able to walk, and I will engage that it will never wonder."
Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. M'Choakumchild deliberately planned, as a result ofa false psychology, to destroy all foolish dreamings and imaginings andwonderings by the children. This same wonder power is the mightieststimulus to mental and spiritual effort, the source of all true interest,man's leader in his work of productive investigation.
Wonder power should increase throughout the life of the child.Unfortunately, the Gradgrind philosophy is practised by many educators.The child's natural wonder power is dwarfed, and an unnatural interest issubstituted for it. Teachers kill the natural interest, and then try togalvanize its dead body into temporary activity. The child who was made awonderer and a problem finder by God is made a problem solver by teachers.His dreamings and fancies have been stopped, and he has been stored withfacts and made "practical."
Mr. Gradgrind was much exercised by the fact that the people of Coketowndid not read the scientific and mathematical books in the library so muchas poetry and fiction. It was a melancholy fact that after working forfifteen hours a day "they sat down to read mere fables about men and womenmore or less like themselves, and about children more or less like theirown. They took De Foe to their bosoms instead of Euclid, and seemed to be,on the whole, more comforted by Goldsmith than by Cocker." This was verydiscouraging to Mr. Gradgrind.
One night Louisa and Tom were sitting alone conversing about themselvesand the way they were being trained by their father. In the course oftheir conversation Tom said:
"I am sick of my life, Loo; I hate it altogether, and I hate everybody except you. As to me, I am a donkey, that's what I am. I am as obstinate as one, I am more stupid than one, I get as much pleasure as one, and I should like to kick like one."
"Not me, I hope, Tom."
"No, Loo, I wouldn't hurt _you_. I made an exception of you at first. I don't know what this--jolly old--jaundiced jail"--Tom had paused to find a sufficiently complimentary and expressive name for the parental roof, and seemed to relieve his mind for a moment by the strong alliteration of this one--"would be without you."
"Tom," said his sister, after silently watching the sparks a while, "as I get older, and nearly growing up, I often sit wondering here, and think how unfortunate it is for me that I can't reconcile you to home better than I am able to do. I don't know what other girls know. I can't play to you, or sing to you. I can't talk to you so as to lighten your mind, for I never see any amusing sights or read any amusing books that it would be a pleasure or a relief to you to talk about, when you are tired."
"Well, no more do I. I am as bad as you in that respect; and I am a mule too, which you're not. If father was determined to make me either a prig or a mule, and I am not a prig, why, it stands to reason, I must be a mule. And so I am."
"I wish I could collect all the Facts we hear so much about," said Tom, spitefully setting his teeth, "and all the Figures, and all the people who found them out; and I wish I could put a thousand barrels of gunpowder under them and blow them all up together."
Louisa sat looking at the fire so long that Tom asked, "Have you gone to sleep, Loo?"
"No, Tom, I am looking at the fire."
"What do you see in it?"
"I don't see anything in it, Tom, particularly, but since I have been looking at it I have been wondering about you and me, grown up."
"Wondering again?" said Tom.
"I have such unmanageable thoughts," returned his sister, "that they _will_ wonder."
"Then I beg of you, Louisa," said Mrs. Gradgrind, who had opened the door without being heard, "to do nothing of that description, for goodness' sake, you inconsiderate girl, or I shall never hear the last of it from your father. And, Thomas, it is really shameful, with my poor head continually wearing me out, that a boy brought up as you have been, and whose education has cost what yours has, should be found encouraging his sister to wonder, when he knows his father has expressly said that she was not to do it."
Louisa denied Tom's participation in the offence; but her mother stopped her with the conclusive answer, "Louisa, don't tell me, in my state of health; for unless you had been encouraged, it is morally and physically impossible that you could have done it."
"I was encouraged by nothing, mother, but by looking at the red sparks dropping out of the fire, and whitening and dying. It made me think, after all, how short my life would be, and how little I could hope to do in it."
"Nonsense!" said Mrs. Gradgrind, rendered almost energetic. "Nonsense! Don't stand there and tell me such stuff, Louisa, to my face, when you know very well that if it was ever to reach your father's ears I should never hear the last of it. After all the trouble that has been taken with you! After the lectures you have attended, and the experiments you have seen! After I have heard you myself, when the whole of my right side has been benumbed, going on with your master about combustion, and calcination, and calorification, and I may say every kind of ation that could drive a poor invalid distracted, to hear you talking in this absurd way about sparks and ashes!"
When a boy hates home, and a girl in her teens is rejoicing at theprospect of a short life, there has been some serious blunder in theirtraining.
When her father was proposing to her that she should marry old Bounderby,Louisa said:
"What do _I_ know, father, of tastes and fancies; of aspirations and affections; of all that part of my nature in which such light things might have been nourished? What escape have I had from problems that could be demonstrated, and realities that could be grasped?" As she said it, she unconsciously closed her hand, as if upon a solid object, and slowly opened it as though she were releasing dust or ash.
After her marriage to
Bounderby Louisa rarely came home, and Dickens givesin detail a sequence of thought that passed through her mind on herapproach to the old home after a long absence. None of the true feelingswere stirred in her heart.
The dreams of childhood--its airy fables, its graceful, beautiful, humane, impossible adornments of the world beyond, so good to be believed in once, so good to be remembered when outgrown, for then the least among them rises to the stature of a great charity in the heart, suffering little children to come into the midst of it, and to keep with their pure hands a garden in the stony ways of this world, wherein it were better for all the children of Adam that they should oftener sun themselves, simple and trustful, and not worldly-wise--what had she to do with these? Remembrances of how she had journeyed to the little that she knew by the enchanted roads of what she and millions of innocent creatures had hoped and imagined; of how, first coming upon reason through the tender light of fancy, she had seen it a beneficent god, deferring to gods as great as itself; not a grim idol, cruel and cold, with its victims bound hand to foot, and its big dumb shape set up with a sightless stare, never to be moved by anything but so many calculated tons of leverage--what had she to do with these?
This quotation shows how clearly Dickens saw the relationship between theimagination and the reason. Her imagination had been dwarfed andperverted; and her power to feel, and to think, and to appreciate beauty,and to love, and to see God and understand him, was dwarfed and pervertedas a consequence.
Her poor mother, who had always felt that there was something wrong withher husband's training, but dared not oppose him, and fully supported himfor the sake of peace which never really came, was worn out, and hadalmost become a mental wreck. Her mind was struggling with the one greatquestion. She tried and tried vainly to find what the great defect of herhusband's system was, but she was very sure it had a great weaknesssomewhere. She tried to explain the matter to Louisa when she came to seeher.
"You learned a great deal, Louisa, and so did your brother. Ologies of all kinds, from morning to night. If there is any ology left, of any description, that has not been worn to rags in this house, all I can say is, I hope I shall never hear its name."
"I can hear you, mother, when you have strength to go on." This, to keep her from floating away.
"But there's something--not an ology at all--that your father has missed, or forgotten, Louisa. I don't know what it is. I have often sat with Sissy near me, and thought about it. I shall never get its name now. But your father may. It makes me restless. I want to write to him, to find out, for God's sake, what it is. Give me a pen, give me a pen."
When Louisa, unable to resist alone the temptation to go with Mr.Harthouse, fled to her father and told him in such earnest words that shecursed the hour she had been born to submit to his training, she said:
"I don't reproach you, father. What you have never nurtured in me, you have never nurtured in yourself; but oh! if you had only done so long ago, or if you had only neglected me, what a much better and much happier creature I should have been this day!"
On hearing this, after all his care, he bowed his head upon his hand and groaned aloud.
"Father, if you had known, when we were last together here, what even I feared while I strove against it--as it has been my task from infancy to strive against every natural prompting that has arisen in my heart; if you had known that there lingered in my breast sensibilities, affections, weakness capable of being cherished into strength, defying all the calculations ever made by man, and no more known to his arithmetic than his Creator is--would you have given me to the husband whom I am now sure that I hate?"
He said, "No, no, my poor child."
"Would you have doomed me, at any time, to the frost and blight that have hardened and spoiled me? Would you have robbed me--for no one's enrichment--only for the greater desolation of this world--of the immaterial part of my life, the spring and summer of my belief, my refuge from what is sordid and bad in the real things around me, my school in which I should have learned to be more humble, and more trusting with them, and to hope in my little sphere to make them better?"
"Oh, no, no! No, Louisa."
"Yet, father, if I had been stone blind; if I had groped my way by my sense of touch, and had been free, while I knew the shapes and surfaces of things, to exercise my fancy somewhat in regard to them, I should have been a million times wiser, happier, more loving, more contented, more innocent and human in all good respects, than I am with the eyes I have. Now, hear what I have come to say. With a hunger and thirst upon me, father, which have never been for a moment appeased; with an ardent impulse toward some region where rules, and figures, and definitions were not quite absolute, I have grown up, battling every inch of my way.
"In this strife I have almost repulsed and crushed my better angel into a demon. What I have learned has left me doubting, misbelieving, despising, regretting what I have not learned; and my dismal resource has been to think that life would soon go by, and that nothing in it could be worth the pain and trouble of a contest."
When she had finished the story of her acquaintance with Mr. Harthouse andhis influence over her, she said: "All that I know is, your philosophy andyour teaching will not save me. Now, father, you have brought me to this.Save me by some other means."
Dickens pictured Mr. Gradgrind as a good, earnest man, who desired to doonly good for his family.
In gauging fathomless deeps with his little mean excise rod, and in staggering over the universe with his rusty stiff-legged compasses, he had meant to do great things. Within the limits of his short tether he had tumbled about, annihilating the flowers of existence with greater singleness of purpose than many of the blatant personages whose company he kept.
A careful study of what Louisa said to her father will show that Dickenshad made a profound study of Froebel's philosophy of the feelings and theimagination which is now the dominating theory of psychology, and that heclearly understood what Wordsworth meant when he wrote:
"Whose heart the holy forms of young imagination had kept pure."
Sissy Jupe failed utterly to satisfy Mr. M'Choakumchild at school. Shecould not remember facts and dates. She could not be crammed successfully,and she had a very dense head for figures. "She actually burst into tearswhen required (by the mental process) to name immediately the cost of twohundred and forty-seven muslin caps at fourteen pence halfpenny," so Mr.Gradgrind told her she would have to leave school.
"I can not disguise from you, Jupe," said Mr. Gradgrind, knitting his brow, "that the result of your probation there has disappointed me--has greatly disappointed me. You have not acquired, under Mr. and Mrs. M'Choakumchild, anything like that amount of exact knowledge which I look for. You are extremely deficient in your facts. Your acquaintance with figures is very limited. You are altogether backward, and below the mark."
"I am sorry, sir," she returned; "but I know it is quite true. Yet I have tried hard, sir."
"Yes," said Mr. Gradgrind, "yes, I believe you have tried hard; I have observed you, and I can find no fault in that respect."
"Thank you, sir. I have thought sometimes"--Sissy very timid here--"that perhaps I tried to learn too much, and that if I had asked to be allowed to try a little less, I might have----"
"No, Jupe, no," said Mr. Gradgrind, shaking his head in his profoundest and most eminently practical way. "No. The course you pursued, you pursued according to the system--the system--and there is no more to be said about it. I can only suppose that the circumstances of your early life were too unfavourable to the development of your reasoning powers, and that we began too late. Still, as I have said already, I am disappointed."
"I wish I could have made a better acknowledgment, si
r, of your kindness to a poor forlorn girl who had no claim upon you, and of your protection of her."
"Don't shed tears," said Mr. Gradgrind. "Don't shed tears. I don't complain of you. You are an affectionate, earnest, good young woman, and--and we must make that do."
How blind a man must become when his faith in a system or a philosophy canmake him estimate fact storing so much and character forming so little!Sissy could not learn facts, therefore Mr. Gradgrind mourned. The factthat she was "affectionate, earnest, good," was only a trifling matter--avery poor substitute for brilliant acquirements in dates and facts andmental arithmetic.
Sissy became, however, the good angel of the Gradgrind household. Shehelped Louisa back to a partial hope and sweetness; she gave the youngerchildren, with Mr. Gradgrind's permission, the real childhood of freedomand imagination, which the older children had lost forever; shebrightened the lives even of Mrs. and Mr. Gradgrind, and she helped tosave Tom from the disgrace of his crime.
The closing picture of the book, one of the most beautiful Dickens everpainted, tells the story of Sissy's future:
But happy Sissy's happy children loving her; all children loving her; she, grown learned in childish lore; thinking no innocent and pretty fancy ever to be despised; trying hard to know her humbler fellow-creatures, and to beautify their lives of machinery and reality with those imaginative graces and delights, without which the heart of infancy will wither up, the sturdiest physical manhood will be morally stark death, and the plainest national prosperity figures can show will be the Writing on the Wall--she holding this course as part of no fantastic vow, or bond, or brotherhood, or sisterhood, or pledge, or covenant, or fancy dress, or fancy fair; but simply as a duty to be done. Did Louisa see these things of herself? These things were to be!
Dear reader! It rests with you and me whether, in our two fields of action, similar things shall be or not. Let them be! We shall sit with lighter bosoms on the hearth, to see the ashes of our fires turn gray and cold.
And the educational Gradgrinds of the present time sneer at Dickensbecause he puts the early training of a circus above the early training ofa Christian home like Mr. Gradgrind's. "The logical consequence of suchreasoning," they say, "would be that all children should be trained incircuses."
Oh, no! Dickens did not recommend a circus as a good place to trainchildren. But he did believe that even a circus is a thousand times betterthan a so-called Christian home for the true and complete development of achild, if in the circus the child is free and happy, and is allowed fullplay for her imagination, and is not arrested in her development by rotestoring of facts and too early drill in arithmetic, and has the richproductive love of even one parent, and has blessed opportunities forloving service for her pets and her friends; and if in the so-calledChristian home she is robbed of these privileges even in the name ofreligion.
Sissy had a blessed, free childhood. She lived in her own imaginary worldmost of the time; she had the deep love of her kind-hearted father and ofMerrylegs, the dog; she read poetry and fairy tales; she attended to herfather's needs; she had many opportunities to show her love in lovingservice for Merrylegs and her father; and she was not dwarfed by factcramming and formal drill. Her chances of reaching a true womanhood wereexcellent, and when she got the opportunity for the revelation ofcharacter, she had character to reveal, and her character developed in itsrevelation for the benefit and happiness of others. Hers was the trueChristian training after all. Homes and schools with such training arecentres of great power.
One of the strongest pleas ever made for the cultivation of theimagination, "the fancies and affections," and for the teaching ofliterature, art, and music in the schools was given in Hard Times, whichis an industrial as well as an educational story. Indeed, Dickens saw thatthe true solution of industrial questions was the proper training of therace. No attack on the meanness of utilitarianism and no exposition of itsterrible dangers could be more incisive and philosophical than thefollowing wonderful sentences:
Utilitarian economists, skeletons of schoolmasters, commissioners of fact, genteel and used-up infidels, gabblers of many little dog's-eared creeds, the poor you will have always with you. Cultivate in them, while there is yet time, the utmost graces of the fancies and affections, to adorn their lives so much in need of ornament; or, in the moment of your triumph, when romance is utterly driven out of their souls, and they and a bare existence stand face to face, Reality will take a wolfish turn, and make an end of you!
Altogether Hard Times is one of the most remarkable educational books everwritten.
Dickens made a plea for mental refreshment and recreation for the workingclasses in Nobody's Story, similar to that made in Hard Times:
The workingman appealed to the Bigwig family, and said: "We are a labouring people, and I have a glimmering suspicion in me that labouring people of whatever condition were made--by a higher intelligence than yours, as I poorly understand it--to be in need of mental refreshment and recreation. See what we fall into, when we rest without it. Come! Amuse me harmlessly, show me something, give me an escape!"
Beautiful Lizzie Hexam, one of the latest and highest creations ofDickens, longed to read, but she did not learn to do so because her fatherobjected so bitterly, and she wished to avoid everything that would weakenthe bond of love between them, lest she might lose her influence for goodover him.
Her brother Charley said to her:
"You said you couldn't read a book, Lizzie. Your library of books is the hollow down by the flare, I think."
"I should be very glad to be able to read real books. I feel my want of learning very much, Charley. But I should feel it much more, if I didn't know it to be a tie between me and father."
Dickens was revealing the strange fact that at first many poor andignorant parents strenuously objected to their children being educated;and he was at the same time showing that great character growth could takeplace even without the power to read. Lizzie's self-sacrifice for herfather and Charley was a true revelation of the divinity in her nature.Though she had not read books, she had read a great deal by herimagination from "the hollow down by the flare."
As Dickens grew older he saw more clearly the value of the dreaming ofchildhood while awake, of the deep reveries into which young people oftenfall, and ought to fall, so that they become oblivious to theirenvironment, and sweep through the universe in strange imaginings, thatafter all are very real. He was fond of drawing pictures of young peoplegiving free rein to their imaginations, unchecked by intermeddlingadulthood, while they watched the glowing fire, or the ashes falling awayfrom the dying coals. Lizzie's library from which she got her culture wasin "the hollow down by the flare."
Crippled little Jenny Wren, the doll's dressmaker, said to Lizzie Hexamone day, when Eugene Wrayburn was visiting them:
"I wonder how it happens that when I am work, work, working here, all alone in the summer time, I smell flowers."
"As a commonplace individual, I should say," Eugene suggested languidly--for he was growing weary of the person of the house--"that you smell flowers because you _do_ smell flowers."
"No, I don't," said the little creature, resting one arm upon the elbow of her chair, resting her chin upon that hand, and looking vacantly before her; "this is not a flowery neighbourhood. It's anything but that. And yet, as I sit at work, I smell miles of flowers. I smell roses till I think I see the rose leaves lying in heaps, bushels, on the floor. I smell fallen leaves till I put down my hand--so--and expect to make them rustle. I smell the white and the pink May in the hedges, and all sorts of flowers that I never was among. For I have seen very few flowers indeed in my life."
"Pleasant fancies to have, Jennie dear!" said her friend, with a glance toward Eugene as if she would have asked him whether they were given the child in compensation for her losses.
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"So I think, Lizzie, when they come to me. And the birds I hear! Oh!" cried the little creature, holding out her hand and looking upward, "how they sing!"
How life in any stage might be filled with richness and joy, ifimaginations were stored with apperceptive elements and allowed toreconstruct the universe in our fancies! How truly real our fancies mightbecome!
In A Child's Dream of a Star Dickens gives an exquisite picture of theinfluence of imagination in spiritual evolution.
There was once a child, and he strolled about a good deal, and thought of a number of things. He had a sister, who was a child too, and his constant companion. These two used to wonder all day long. They wondered at the beauty of the flowers; they wondered at the height and blueness of the sky; they wondered at the depth of the bright water; they wondered at the goodness and the power of God who made the lovely world.
They used to say to one another, sometimes, Supposing all the children upon earth were to die, would the flowers, and the water, and the sky be sorry? They believed they would be sorry. For, said they, the buds are the children of the flowers, and the little playful streams that gambol down the hillsides are the children of the water; and the smallest bright specks playing at hide and seek in the sky all night, must surely be the children of the stars; and they would all be grieved to see their playmates, the children of men, no more.
There was one clear shining star that used to come out in the sky before the rest, near the church spire, above the graves. It was larger and more beautiful, they thought, than all the others, and every night they watched for it, standing hand in hand at a window. Whoever saw it first cried out, "I see the star!" And often they cried out both together, knowing so well when it would rise, and where. So they grew to be such friends with it, that, before lying down in their beds, they always looked out once again to bid it good night; and when they were turning round to sleep they used to say, "God bless the star!"
But while she was still very young, oh very, very young, the sister drooped, and came to be so very weak that she could no longer stand in the window at night; and then the child looked sadly out by himself, and when he saw the star, turned round and said to the patient pale face on the bed, "I see the star!" and then a smile would come upon the face, and a little weak voice used to say, "God bless my brother and the star!"
Dickens had shown his recognition of the inestimable value of theimagination, and the importance of giving it free play and of doingeverything possible to stimulate its activity by freedom, and story, andplay, and literature, music, and art, but his description of Jemmy JackmanLirriper's training shows a keener appreciation than any of his otherwritings of the value of the child's games in which personation is theleading characteristic; in which spools, or spoons, or blocks, or sticksare people or animals, with regular names and distinct characteristics andresponsible duties, and in which chairs and tables and boxes are coaches,or steamboats, or railway trains. No friends are ever more real than thoseof the child's creative imagination, with things to represent them; norides ever give greater delight than those rides in trains that move onlyin the imaginations of the children, who construct them by placing thechairs in a row, and who act as engineers, conductors, and brakemen. Suchgames form the best elements out of which the child's life power can bemade, especially if the adulthood of his home sympathizes with him in hisenterprises. They afford an outlet for his imaginative plans. In them heforms new worlds of his own, which are adapted to his stage ofdevelopment, and in which he can be the creator and the centre ofexecutive influence.
Jemmy Jackman Lirriper's training was ideal in most of his home life,though he had no father or mother to love and guide him.
The miles and miles that me and the Major have travelled with Jemmy in the dusk between the lights are not to be calculated, Jemmy driving on the coach box, which is the Major's brass-bound writing desk on the table, me inside in the easy-chair, and the Major Guard up behind with a brown-paper horn doing it really wonderful. I do assure you, my dear, that sometimes when I have taken a few winks in my place inside the coach and have come half awake by the flashing light of the fire and have heard that precious pet driving and the Major blowing up behind to have the change of horses ready when we got to the Inn, I have believed we were on the old North Road that my poor Lirriper knew so well. Then to see that child and the Major both wrapped up getting down to warm their feet and going stamping about and having glasses of ale out of the paper match boxes on the chimney piece, is to see the Major enjoying it fully as much as the child I am very sure, and it's equal to any play when Coachee opens the coach door to look in at me inside and say "Wery 'past that 'tage.--'Prightened old lady?"
Such plays as Dickens here describes make one of the greatest differencesbetween a real childhood and a barren childhood. The lack of opportunitiesfor such perfect plays and such complete sympathy in their plays gives tothe faces of orphan children brought up in institutions the distinctivelook which marks them everywhere, so that they can be easily recognised byexperienced students of happy childhood.
But Jemmy's make believe was not ruthlessly cut short with his earlychildhood. He continued his imaginative operations, or it might make itclearer to say his operative imaginations, after he went to school; andthose beautiful old people, Mrs. Lirriper and Major Jackman, continuedtheir interest, their real, perfectly sympathetic interest in his plans.
Neither should I tell you any news, my dear, in telling you that the Major is still a fixture in the Parlours quite as much so as the roof of the house, and that Jemmy is of boys the best and brightest, and has ever had kept from him the cruel story of his poor pretty young mother, Mrs. Edson, being deserted in the second floor and dying in my arms, fully believing that I am his born Gran and him an orphan; though what with engineering since he took a taste for it, and him and the Major making Locomotives out of parasols, broken iron pots, and cotton reels, and them absolutely a-getting off the line and falling over the table and injuring the passengers almost equal to the originals, it really is quite wonderful. And when I says to the Major, "Major, can't you by _any_ means give us a communication with the guard?" the Major says, quite huffy, "No, madam, it's not to be done"; and when I says, "Why not?" the Major says, "That is between us who are in the Railway Interest, madam, and our friend, the Right Honourable Vice-President of the Board of Trade"; and if you'll believe me, my dear, the Major wrote to Jemmy at School to consult him on the answer I should have before I could get even that amount of unsatisfactoriness out of the man, the reason being that when we first began with the little model and the working signals beautiful and perfect (being in general as wrong as the real), and when I says, laughing, "What appointment am I to hold in this undertaking, gentlemen?" Jemmy hugs me round the neck and tells me, dancing, "You shall be the Public, Gran," and consequently they put upon me just as much as ever they like, and I sit a-growling in my easy-chair.
My dear, whether it is that a grown man as clever as the Major can not give half his heart and mind to anything--even a plaything--but must get into right down earnest with it, whether it is so or whether it is not so, I do not undertake to say; but Jemmy is far outdone by the serious and believing ways of the Major in the management of the United Grand Junction Lirriper and Jackman Great Norfolk Parlour Line, "for," says my Jemmy with the sparkling eyes when it was christened, "we must have a whole mouthful of name, Gran, or our dear old Public"--and there the young rogue kissed me--"won't stump up." So the Public took the shares--ten at ninepence, and immediately when that was spent twelve Preference at one and sixpence--and they were all signed by Jemmy and countersigned by the Major, and between ourselves much better worth the money than some shares I have paid for in my time. In the same holidays the line was
made and worked and opened and ran excursions and collisions and had burst its boilers and all sorts of accidents and offences all most regular, correct, and pretty. The sense of responsibility entertained by the Major as a military style of station master, my dear, starting the down train behind time and ringing one of those little bells that you buy with the little coal scuttles off the tray round the man's neck in the street, did him honour; but noticing the Major of a night when he is writing out his monthly report to Jemmy at school of the state of the Rolling Stock and the Permanent Way, and all the rest of it (the whole kept upon the Major's sideboard and dusted with his own hands every morning before varnishing his boots), I notice him as full of thought and care, as full can be, and frowning in a fearful manner; but, indeed, the Major does nothing by halves, as witness his great delight in going out surveying with Jemmy when he has Jemmy to go with, carrying a chain and a measuring tape, and driving I don't know what improvements right through Westminster Abbey, and fully believed in the streets to be knocking everything upside down by Act of Parliament. As please Heaven will come to pass when Jemmy takes to that as a profession!
The Major's participation in the plans of Jemmy is a good illustration ofthe sympathy that Froebel and Dickens felt for childhood, a sympathy_with_, not _for_, the child. It meant more than approval--it meantco-operation, partnership.
Some educators would criticise Dickens for allowing the Major to make thelocomotives with parasols, broken pots, and cotton reels. They teach thatJemmy should have made these himself. Dickens was away beyond such anarrow view as this. The child at first has much more power to plan thanto execute. To leave him to himself means the failure of his plans and theirritation of his temper. It is a terrible experience for a child to getthe habit of failure. The wise adult will enter into partnership with thechild to aid in carrying out the child's plans. He will not even makesuggestions of changes in plans when he sees how they might be improved.The plans and the leadership should be absolutely the child's own. Theadult should be an assistant, and that only, when skill is required beyondthat possessed by the child--either when the mechanical work is toodifficult for the child or when more than one person is needed to executehis plan.
The adult may sometimes lead the child indirectly to a change of plan, buthe should not do it by direct suggestion. The joy is lost for the childwhen he becomes conscious of the adult as interfering even sympatheticallywith his own personality. There is a great deal of well-intentioneddwarfing of childhood.
The consciousness of partnership, of unity, of sympathetic co-operation,is the best result of such blessed work as the Major did with Jemmy incarrying out Jemmy's plans. He is the child's best friend who most wiselyand most thoroughly develops his imagination as a basis for allintellectual strength and clearness, and for the highest spiritual growth.He is the wealthiest man who sees diamonds in the dewdrops and unsulliedgold in the sunset tints.
David Copperfield tells the names of the wonderful books he found in hisfather's blessed little room, and describes their influence upon his life.
They kept alive my fancy and my hope of something beyond that place and time--they and the Arabian Nights and the Tales of the Genii. It is curious to me how I could ever have consoled myself under my small troubles (which were great troubles to me) by impersonating my favourite characters in them, as I did, and by putting Mr. and Miss Murdstone into all the bad ones, which I did, too. I have been Tom Jones--a child's Tom Jones, a harmless creature--for a week together. I have sustained my own idea of Roderick Random for a month at a stretch, I verily believe.
"Let us end with the Boy's story," said Mrs. Lirriper, "for the Boy's story is the best that is ever told."
There are no other stories so enchanting, or so stimulating, as thestories that fill the imaginations of childhood.
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