Complete Novels of Maria Edgeworth

by Maria Edgeworth

  If all, or any of these reflections, should strike the heart, and convince the understanding, of an anxious, but reasonable mother, she will, probably, immediately determine upon her own conduct in the education of her daughters: she will resolve to avoid the common errours of the frivolous or the interested; she will not be influenced by the importunity of every idle acquaintance, who may talk to her of the necessity of her daughter’s being taken notice of in public, of the chances of an advantageous establishment, of the good fortune of Miss Y —— , or lady Angelina X —— , in meeting with a coxcomb or a spendthrift for a husband; nor will she be moved with maternal emulation when she is further told, that these young ladies owed their success entirely to the superiority of their accomplishments: she will consider, for one moment, what is meant by the word success; she will, perhaps, not be of opinion that “’tis best repenting in a coach and six;” she will, perhaps, reflect, that even the “soft sounds” of titled grandeur lose their power to please, and “salute the ear” almost unobserved. The happiness, the permanent happiness of her child, will be the first, the last object of the good and the enlightened mother: to this all her views and all her efforts will tend; and to this she will make every fashionable, every elegant accomplishment subservient.

  As to the means of acquiring these accomplishments, it would be absurd, and presumptuous, to present here any vague precepts, or tedious details, upon the mode of learning drawing, dancing, and music. These can be best learned from the masters who profess to teach them, as far as the technical part is necessary. But success will not ultimately depend upon any technical instructions that a master can give: he may direct the efforts of industry so as to save much useless labour; he may prevent his pupils from acquiring bad practical habits; he may assist, but he cannot inspire, the spirit of perseverance. A master, who is not expected, or indeed allowed, to interfere in the general education of his pupils, can only diligently attend to them whilst he is giving his lessons; he has not any power, except that pernicious motive, competition, to excite them to excel; his instructions cannot be peculiarly adapted to their tempers or their understandings, because with these he is unacquainted. Now a sensible mother has it in her power to supply all these deficiencies; even if she does not herself excel in any of the accomplishments which her daughters are learning, her knowledge of their minds, her taste, her judgment, her affection, her superintending intelligence, will be of inestimable value to her children. If she has any skill in any accomplishment, she will, for the first years of her daughters’ lives, be undoubtedly the best person to instruct them. By skill, we do not mean superior talents, or proficiency in music or drawing; without these, she may be able to teach all that is necessary in the early part of education. One of the best motives which a woman can have to cultivate her talents after she marries, is the hope and belief, that she may be essentially serviceable in the instruction of her family. And that she may be essentially serviceable, let no false humility lead her to doubt. She need not be anxious for the rapid progress of her little pupils; she need not be terrified if she see their equals in age surpass them under what she thinks more able tuition; she may securely satisfy herself, that if she but inspires her children with a desire to excel, with the habits of attention and industry, they will certainly succeed, sooner or later, in whatever it is desirable that they should learn. The exact age at which the music, dancing, or drawing master, should begin their instructions, need not be fixed. If a mother should not be so situated as to be able to procure the best masters for her daughters whilst they are yet children, she need not be in despair; a rapid progress is made in a short time by well educated young people; those who have not acquired any bad habits, are easily taught: it should, therefore, seem prudent, if the best masters cannot be procured at any given period of education, to wait patiently, than to hazard their first impressions, and the first habits which might be given by any inferiour technical instruction. It is said, that the celebrated musician Timotheus, whose excellence in his art Alexander the conqueror of the world was forced to acknowledge, when pupils flocked to him from all parts of the world, had the prudence to demand double entrance money from every scholar who had had any other music master.

  Besides the advantage of being entirely free from other bad habits, children who are not taught by inferiour masters, will not contract habits of listless application. Under the eye of an indolent person, children seldom give their entire attention to what they are about. They become mere machines, and, without using their own understanding in the least, have recourse to the convenient master upon every occasion. The utmost that children in such circumstances can learn, is all the technical part of the art which the master can teach. When the master is at last dismissed, and her education completed, the pupil is left both fatigued and helpless. “Few have been taught to any purpose, who have not been their own teachers,” says Sir Joshua Reynolds. This reflection upon the art of teaching, may, perhaps, be too general; but those persons who look back upon their education, will, in many respects, allow it to be just. They will perceive that they have been too much taught, that they have learned every thing which they know as an art, and nothing as a science. Few people have sufficient courage to re-commence their own education, and for this reason few people get beyond a certain point of mediocrity. It is easy to them to practise the lessons which they have learned, if they practise them in intellectual darkness; but if you let in upon them one ray of philosophic light, you dazzle and confound them, so that they cannot even perform their customary feats. A young man, who had been blind from his birth, had learned to draw a cross, a circle, and a square, with great accuracy; when he was twenty, his eyes were couched, and when he could see perfectly well, he was desired to draw his circle and square. His new sense of seeing, so far from assisting him in this operation, was extremely troublesome to him; though he took more pains than usual, he performed very ill: confounded by the new difficulty, he concluded that sight was useless in all operations to be performed by the hand, and he thought his eyes would be of no use to him in future. How many people find their reason as useless and troublesome to them as this young man found his eye-sight!

  Whilst we are learning any mechanical operation, or whilst we are acquiring any technical art, the mind is commonly passive. In the first attempts, perhaps, we reason or invent ways of abridging our own labour, and the awkwardness of the unpractised hand is assisted by ingenuity and reflection; but as we improve in manual dexterity, attention and ingenuity are no longer exerted; we go on habitually without thought. — Thought would probably interrupt the operation, and break the chain of associated actions. An artificer stops his hand the moment you ask him to explain what he is about: he can work and talk of indifferent objects; but if he reflects upon the manner in which he performs certain slight of hand parts of his business, it is ten to one but he cannot go on with them. A man, who writes a free running hand, goes on without thinking of the manner in which he writes; fix his attention upon the manner in which he holds his pen, or forms his letters, and he probably will not write quite so fast, or so well, as usual. When a girl first attempts to dress herself at a glass, the glass perplexes, instead of assisting her, because she thinks and reasons about every motion; but when by habit she has learned how to move her hands in obedience to the flugel-image, which performs its exercise in the mirror, no further thought is employed. Make the child observe that she moves her left hand forward when the image in the glass moves in a contrary manner, turn the child’s attention to any of her own motions, and she will make mistakes as she did before her habits were formed.

  Many occupations, which are generally supposed to depend upon the understanding, and which do probably depend in the first instance upon the understanding, become by practice purely mechanical. This is the case in many of the imitative arts. A person unused to drawing, exerts a great deal of attention in copying any new object; but custom soon supplies the place of thought. By custom, as a great artist assures us, he will become
able to draw the human figure tolerably correctly, with as little effort of the mind, as to trace with a pen the letters of the alphabet.

  We must further observe, that the habit of pursuing any occupation, which requires no mental exertion, induces an indolence or incapacity of intellect. Mere artists are commonly as stupid as mere artificers, and these are little more than machines.

  The length of time which is required to obtain practical skill and dexterity in certain accomplishments, is one reason why there are so few people who obtain any thing more than mechanical excellence. They become the slaves of custom, and they become proud of their slavery. At first they might have considered custom as a tyrant; but when they have obeyed her for a certain time, they do her voluntary homage ever after, as to a sovereign by divine right. To prevent this species of intellectual degradation, we must in education be careful to rank mere mechanical talents below the exercise of the mental powers. Thus the ambition of young people will be directed to high objects, and all inferiour qualifications may be attained without contracting the understanding. Praise children for patience, for perseverance, for industry; encourage them to reason and to invent upon all subjects, and you may direct their attention afterwards as you think proper. But if you applaud children merely for drawing a flower neatly, or copying a landscape, without exciting their ambition to any thing higher, you will never create superior talents, or a superior character. The proficiency that is made in any particular accomplishment, at any given age, should not be considered so much, even by those who highly value accomplishments, as the power, the energy, that is excited in the pupil’s mind, from which future progress is ensured. The writing and drawing automaton performs its advertised wonders to the satisfaction of the spectators; but the machine is not “instinct with spirit;” you cannot expect from its pencil the sketch of a Raphael, or from its pen the thoughts of a Shakespeare. It is easy to guide the hand, but who can transfuse a soul into the image?

  It is not an uncommon thing to hear young people, who have been long under the tuition of masters, complain of their own want of genius. They are sensible that they have not made any great progress in any of the accomplishments which they have endeavoured to learn; they see others, who have not, perhaps, had what they call such opportunities and advantages in their education, suddenly surpass them; this they attribute to natural genius, and they say to themselves in despair, “Certainly I have no taste for drawing; I have no genius for music; I have learned so many years, I have had so many lessons from the best masters, and yet here is such and such a one, who has had no master, who has taught herself, and, perhaps, did not begin till late in life, has got before me, because she has a natural genius for these things. She must have a natural taste for them, because she can sit whole hours at these things for her own pleasure. Now I never would take a pencil in my hand from my own choice; and I am glad, at all events, that the time for lessons and masters is over. My education is finished, for I am of age.”

  The disgust and despair, which are thus induced by an injudicious education, absolutely defeat its own trivial purposes. So that, whatever may be the views of parents, whether they consider ornamental accomplishments as essential to their daughter’s success in the world, or whether they value them rather as secondary objects, subordinate to her happiness; whether they wish their daughter actually to excel in any particular accomplishment, or to have the power of excelling in any to which circumstances may direct her, it is in all cases advisable to cultivate the general power of the pupil’s understanding, instead of confining her to technical practices and precepts, under the eye of any master who does not possess that which is the soul of every art.

  We do not mean any illiberal attack upon masters; but in writing upon education, it is necessary to examine the utility of different modes of instruction, without fear of offending any class of men. We acknowledge, that it is seldom found, that those who can communicate their knowledge the best, possess the most, especially if this knowledge be that of an artist or a linguist. Before any person is properly qualified to teach, he must have the power of recollecting exactly how he learned; he must go back step by step to the point at which he began, and he must be able to conduct his pupil through the same path without impatience or precipitation. He must not only have acquired a knowledge of the process by which his own ideas and habits were formed, but he must have extensive experience of the varieties of the human mind. He must not suppose, that the operations of intellect are carried on precisely in the same manner in all minds; he must not imagine, that there is but one method of teaching, which will suit all persons alike. The analogies which strike his own mind, the arrangement of ideas, which to him appears the most perspicuous, to his pupil may appear remote and confused. He must not attribute this to his pupil’s inattention, stupidity, or obstinacy; but he must attribute it to the true causes; the different association of ideas in different minds, the different habits of thinking, which arise from their various tempers and previous education. He must be acquainted with the habits of all tempers: the slow, the quick, the inventive, the investigating; and he must adapt his instructions accordingly. There is something more requisite: a master must not only know what he professes to teach of his own peculiar art or science, but he ought to know all its bearings and dependencies. He must be acquainted not only with the local topography of his own district, but he must have the whole map of human knowledge before him; and whilst he dwells most upon his own province, he must yet be free from local prejudices, and must consider himself as a citizen of the world. Children who study geography in small separate maps, understand, perhaps, the view of each country tolerably well; but we see them quite puzzled when they are to connect these maps in their idea of the world. They do not know the relative size or situation of England or France; they cannot find London or Paris when they look for the first time upon the globe, and every country seems to be turned upside down in their imagination. Young people who learn particular arts and sciences from masters who have confined their view to the boundaries of each, without having given an enlarged idea of the whole, are much in the same situation with these unfortunate geographers.

  The persisting to teach things separately, which ought to be taught as a whole, must prevent the progress of mental cultivation. The division and subdivision of different parts of education, which are monopolised as trades by the masters who profess to teach them, must tend to increase and perpetuate errour. These intellectual casts are pernicious.

  It is said, that the Persians had masters to teach their children each separate virtue: one master to teach justice, another fortitude, another temperance, and so on. How these masters could preserve the boundaries of their several moral territories, it is not easy to imagine, especially if they all insisted upon independent sovereignty. There must have been some danger, surely, of their disputing with one another concerning the importance of their respective professions, like the poor bourgeois gentilhomme’s dancing-master, music-master, master of morality, and master of philosophy, who all fell to blows to settle their pretensions, forgetful of the presence of their pupil. Masters, who are only expected to teach one thing, may be sincerely anxious for the improvement of their pupils in that particular, without being in the least interested for their general character or happiness. Thus the drawing-master has done his part, and is satisfied if he teaches his pupil to draw well: it is no concern of his what her temper may be, any more than what sort of hand she writes, or how she dances. The dancing-master, in his turn, is wholly indifferent about the young lady’s progress in drawing; all he undertakes, is to teach her to dance.

  We mention these circumstances to show parents, that masters, even when they do the utmost that they engage to do, cannot educate their children; they can only partially instruct them in particular arts. Parents must themselves preside over the education of their children, or must entirely give them into the care of some person of an enlarged and philosophic mind, who can supply all the deficiencies of common masters,
and who can take advantage of all the positive good that can be obtained from existing institutions. Such a preceptor or governess must possess extensive knowledge, and that superiority of mind which sees the just proportion and value of every acquisition, which is not to be overawed by authority, or dazzled by fashion. Under the eye of such persons, masters will keep precisely their proper places; they will teach all they can teach, without instilling absurd prejudices, or inspiring a spirit of vain rivalship; nor will masters be suffered to continue their lessons when they have nothing more to teach.

  Parents who do not think that they have leisure, or feel that they have capacity, to take the entire direction of their children’s education upon themselves, will trust this important office to a governess. The inquiry concerning the value of female accomplishments, has been purposely entered into before we could speak of the choice of a governess, because the estimation in which these are held, will very much determine parents in their choice.