Dickens As an Educator Part 19

"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 d.i.c.kens's sarcasm will be felt when it is remembered that Sissy Jupe was born among horses, had lived with them, played with them, and ridden them all her life, but was "ignorant of the commonest facts regarding 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 b.u.t.terflies come and perch upon your crockery; you can not be permitted to paint foreign birds and b.u.t.terflies 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'Choak.u.mchild 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'Choak.u.mchild, 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 d.i.c.kens with alarm.

He recognised with great clearness the law that all evil springs from misused good, and he knew that if the imagination is not cultivated properly the child not only loses the many intellectual and spiritual advantages that would result from its true culture, but that it is exposed to the terrible danger of a distorted imagination. Tom Gradgrind is used as a type of the degradation that results from "the strangling of the imagination." Its ghost lived on to drag him down "in the form of grovelling sensualities." That which, truly used, has most power to enn.o.ble, has also, when warped or dwarfed, most power to degrade.

As Mr. Varden told his wife, "All good things perverted to evil purposes are worse than those which are naturally bad."

The five young Gradgrinds had little opportunity to develop their imaginations. 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 giants or such false things; no little Boy Blue ever blew his horn for them; no Jack Horner took a plum out of any pie in their experience; no such ridiculous person as Santa Claus ever put anything in their stockings; no cow ever performed the impossible feat of jumping over the moon, so far as they knew; they had never even heard of the cow with the crumpled horn that tossed the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built. They knew, or they could say, that a cow was "a graminivorous ruminating quadruped," and that was enough, in the philosophy of Mr. Gradgrind.

Sissy Jupe's father got into difficulties in c.o.ketown, and he became discouraged and ran away. Mr. Gradgrind was a good man, and meant to do right, 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 miserable 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 pa.s.sing 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!"