Dickens As an Educator Part 23

"Vice," sighed the surgeon, replacing the curtain, "takes up her abode in many temples; and who can say that a fair outside shall not enshrine her?"

"But at so early an age!" urged Rose.

"My dear young lady," rejoined the surgeon, mournfully shaking his head, "crime, like death, is not confined to the old and withered alone. The youngest and fairest are too often its chosen victims."

"But can you, oh, can you really believe that this delicate boy has been the voluntary a.s.sociate of the worst outcasts of society?" said Rose.

The surgeon shook his head in a manner which intimated that he feared it was very possible, and, observing that they might disturb the patient, led the way into an adjoining apartment.

"But even if he has been wicked," pursued Rose, "think how young he is; think that he may never have known a mother's love, or the comfort of a home; that ill usage and blows, or the want of bread, may have driven him to herd with men who have forced him to guilt. Aunt, dear aunt, for mercy's sake think of this, before you let them drag this sick child to a prison, which in any case must be the grave of all his chance of amendment. Oh! as you love me, and know that I have never felt the want of parents in your goodness and affection, but that I might have done so, and might have been equally helpless and unprotected with this poor child, have pity upon him before it is too late!"

"My dear love," said the elder lady, as she folded the weeping girl to her bosom, "do you think I would harm a hair of his head?"

"Oh, no," replied Rose eagerly.

"No, surely," said the old lady; "my days are drawing to their close, and may mercy be shown to me as I show it to others. What can I do to save him, sir?"

d.i.c.kens used the doctor to rebuke the large cla.s.s of people who are ever ready to believe the worst about a boy, and who are always looking for his depravity instead of searching for the divinity in him.

Rose's plea for kind treatment for the boy, "even if he has been wicked,"

was a new doctrine propounded by d.i.c.kens. The worst boys at home or in school need most sympathy. Mrs. Maylie's att.i.tude was in harmony with Christ's teaching, but quite out of harmony with much that was called Christian practice at the time d.i.c.kens wrote Oliver Twist. He taught the doctrine that children were turned into evil ways and confirmed in them through lack of sympathy. Poor Nancy said to Rose Maylie:

"Lady," cried the girl, sinking on her knees, "dear, sweet, angel lady, you _are_ the first that ever blessed me with such words as these; and if I had heard them years ago, they might have turned me from a life of sin and sorrow; but it is too late, it is too late!"

In The Old Curiosity Shop d.i.c.kens gave a beautiful picture of a sympathetic teacher in Mr. Marton. His school was not well lighted or properly ventilated, the furniture was poor, there was no apparatus except a dunce's cap, a cane, and a ruler, his methods were old-fas.h.i.+oned, but he possessed the greatest qualification of a good teacher, deep sympathy with childhood. This was shown by the erasure of the blot from the sick boy's writing; by his asking Nell to pray for the boy; by his appreciation of the boy's love; by his hoping for his recovery against the unfavourable reports; by his favourable interpretation of the worst signs; by his absent-mindedness in school; by his giving the boys a half holiday because he could not teach; by his asking them to go away quietly so as not to disturb the sick scholar; by his saying "I'm glad they didn't mind me" when the jolly boys went shouting away; by his telling the sick boy that the flowers missed him and were less gay on account of his absence; by his hanging the boy's handkerchief out of the window at his request, as a token of his remembrance of the boys playing on the green; by the loving way in which he embraced the dying boy, and held his cold hand in his after he was dead, chafing it, as if he could bring back the life into it.

Dombey and Son is full of appeals for the tender sympathy of adulthood for childhood. The story of Florence Dombey longing for the one look of tenderness, the one word of kindly interest, the one sympathetic caress from her father, which never came to her during her childhood, is one of the most touching stories ever written. It was written to show that children in the most wealthy homes need sympathy as much as any other children, and that they are often most cruelly neglected by their parents.

Floy pleaded to be allowed to lay her face beside her baby brother's because "she thought he loved her."

The love that is given back in exchange for loving interest is shown by Paul's loving grat.i.tude to Floy for her interest in him, which led her to spend her pocket money in books, so that she might help him with his studies that confused him so.

And high was her reward, when one Sat.u.r.day evening, as little Paul was sitting down as usual to "resume his studies," she sat down by his side and showed him all that was rough made smooth, and all that was so dark made clear and plain, before him. It was nothing but a startled look in Paul's wan face--a flush--a smile--and then a close embrace; but G.o.d knows how her heart leaped up at this rich payment for her trouble.

"Oh, Floy," cried her brother, "how I love you! How I love you, Floy!"

"And I you, dear!"

"Oh, I am sure, sure of that, Floy!"

He said no more about it, but all that evening sat close by her, very quiet; and in the night he called out from his little room within hers, three or four times, that he loved her.

There is no higher reward than that of the sympathetic teacher who for the first time lets light into a dark mind or heart.

The lady whom Florence overheard talking to her little orphaned niece about her father's cruel coldness toward her truly said: "Not an orphan in the wide world can be so deserted as the child who is an outcast from a living parent's care."

As d.i.c.kens was one of the first to urge that children had rights, so he was one of the first to show that there had been altogether too much thought about the duty of children to parents, and too little about the duty of parents to children. Alice Marwood, one of the characters in Dombey and Son, said to Harriet Carker:

"You brought me here by force of gentleness and kindness, and made me human by woman's looks and words and angel's deeds; I have felt, lying here, that I should like you to know this. It might explain, I have thought, something that used to help to harden me. I had heard so much, in my wrongdoing, of my neglected duty, that I took up with the belief that duty had not been done to me, and that as the seed was sown the harvest grew."

One other point in regard to sympathy was made in Dombey and Son, that a rough exterior may cover a sympathetic heart.

Long may it remain in this mixed world a point not easy of decision, which is the more beautiful evidence of the Almighty's goodness: the delicate fingers that are formed for sensitiveness and sympathy of touch, and made to minister to pain and grief, or the rough, hard Captain Cuttle hand, that the heart teaches, guides, and softens in a moment!

In the model school of d.i.c.kens Doctor Strong is said to have been "the idol of the whole school"; and David adds, "it must have been a badly composed school if he had been anything else, for he was the kindest of men." Doctor Strong's wife, who had been his pupil in early life, said:

"When I was very young, quite a little child, my first a.s.sociations with knowledge of any kind were inseparable from a patient friend and teacher--the friend of my dead father--who was always dear to me. I can remember nothing that I know without remembering him. He stored my mind with its first treasures, and stamped his character upon them all. They never could have been, I think, as good as they have been to me, if I had taken them from any other hands."

David said, when telling the story of his first introduction to Mr.

Murdstone:

"G.o.d help me, I might have been improved for my whole life, I might have been made another creature, perhaps, for life, by a kind word at that season. A word of encouragement and explanation, of pity for my childish ignorance, of welcome home, of rea.s.surance to me that it was home, might have made me dutiful to him in my heart henceforth, instead of in my hypocritical outside, and might have made me respect instead of hate him."

In Bleak House d.i.c.kens gave in Esther the most perfect type of human sympathy, and by his pathetic pictures of poor Jo, Phil, the Jellyby children, the Pardiggle children, and others, stirred a great wave of feeling, which led to a recognition of the duty of adulthood to childhood, and taught the value of sympathy in the training of children.

Esther laid down a new law, revealed by Froebel, but given to the English world by d.i.c.kens in the weighty sentence, "My comprehension is quickened when my affection is."

The lack of sympathy in adulthood is revealed for the condemnation of his readers in Mrs. Rachael's parting from Esther.

Mrs. Rachael was too good to feel any emotion at parting, but I was not so good, and wept bitterly. I thought that I ought to have known her better after so many years, and ought to have made myself enough of a favourite with her to make her sorry then. When she gave me one cold parting kiss upon my forehead, like a thaw drop from the stone porch--it was a very frosty day--I felt so miserable and self-reproachful that I clung to her and told her it was my fault, I knew, that she could say good-bye so easily.

"No, Esther!" she returned. "It is your misfortune!"

Poor child, she cried afterward because Mrs. Rachael was not sorry to part with her.

What a different parting she had when leaving the Miss Donnys' school, where for six years she had been a pupil, and for part of the time a teacher!

She received a letter informing her that she was to leave Greenleaf.

Oh, never, never, never shall I forget the emotion this letter caused in the house! It was so tender in them to care so much for me; it was so gracious in that Father who had not forgotten me, to have made my orphan way so smooth and easy, and to have inclined so many youthful natures toward me, that I could hardly bear it. Not that I would have had them less sorry--I am afraid not; but the pleasure of it, and the pain of it, and the pride and joy of it, and the humble regret of it, were so blended, that my heart seemed almost breaking while it was full of rapture.

The letter gave me only five days' notice of my removal. When every minute added to the proofs of love and kindness that were given me in those five days; and when at last the morning came, and when they took me through all the rooms that I might see them for the last time; and when some one cried, "Esther, dear, say good-bye to me here, at my bedside, where you first spoke so kindly to me!" and when others asked me only to write their names, "With Esther's love"; and when they all surrounded me with their parting presents, and clung to me weeping, and cried, "What shall we do when dear, dear Esther's gone!" and when I tried to tell them how forbearing and how good they had all been to me, and how I blessed and thanked them every one--what a heart I had!

And when the two Miss Donnys grieved as much to part with me as the least among them; and when the maids said, "Bless you, miss, wherever you go!" and when the ugly lame old gardener, who I thought had hardly noticed me in all those years, came panting after the coach to give me a little nosegay of geraniums, and told me I had been the light of his eyes--indeed the old man said so!--what a heart I had then!

This was intended to show the results of her sympathy toward the pupils and everybody connected with the school.

Mrs. Jellyby is an immortal picture of the woman who neglects her family on account of her interest in Borrioboola Gha, or some other place for which her sympathy is aroused. d.i.c.kens held that a woman's first duty is to her children. The wretched Mr. Jellyby, almost distracted by the poor meals, the disorder of his home, and the wild condition of his unfortunate family, said to his daughter, "Never have a mission, my dear."

Caddy emphasized the thought d.i.c.kens had given in Dombey and Son through Alice Marwood when she said to Esther:

"Oh, don't talk of duty as a child, Miss Summerson; where's ma's duty as a parent? All made over to the public and Africa, I suppose! Then let the public and Africa show duty as a child; it's much more their affair than mine. You are shocked, I dare say! Very well, so am I shocked, too; so we are both shocked, and there's an end of it!"

On another occasion, overcome by emotion at the thought of her mother's neglect, she said to Esther:

"I wish I was dead. I wish we were all dead. It would be a great deal better for us."

In a moment afterward she kneeled on the ground at my side, hid her face in my dress, pa.s.sionately begged my pardon, and wept. I comforted her, and would have raised her, but she cried, No, no; she wanted to stay there!