Dickens As an Educator Part 29

His character lacked seriousness. He had the fatal levity that led him to discuss the most sacred subjects in a flippant manner.

His mother knew that Creakle's school was not a proper place for him, but she wished to make him conscious of his superiority even over his teacher, and she knew that Creakle, tyrannical bully though he was, would yield to Steerforth, because his mother was wealthy.

"It was not a fit school generally for my son," said she; "far from it; but there were particular circ.u.mstances to be considered at the time, of more importance even than that selection. My son's high spirit made it desirable that he should be placed with some man who felt its superiority, and would be content to bow himself before it; and we found such a man there."

What a perversion of the ideal of freedom in the development of character, to suppose that it could only reach perfection by a consciousness of superiority; by having some one who should control him bow down before him! No man in the world is truly free who has a desire to dominate some one else--another man, a woman, or a child. Yet Mrs. Steerforth sacrificed her son's education in order that his manly spirit might be cultivated by the subordination of the man who should have governed him. She showed better judgment in deciding that a coercive tyrant like Creakle would make a subservient sycophant.

"My son's great capacity was tempted on there by a feeling of voluntary emulation and conscious pride," the fond lady went on to say. "He would have risen against all constraint; but he found himself the monarch of the place, and he haughtily determined to be worthy of his station. It was like himself."

As Steerforth began consciously to feel his better nature surrendering to his sensuality, he experienced the pangs that all strong natures feel at the loss of moral power, and one time when he and David were visiting Mr.

Peggotty at Yarmouth he seemed to be moody and disposed to sadness. He said suddenly to David when they were alone one day:

"David, I wish to G.o.d I had had a judicious father these last twenty years!"

"My dear Steerforth, what is the matter?"

"I wish with all my soul I had been better guided!" he exclaimed. "I wish with all my soul I could guide myself better!"

There was a pa.s.sionate dejection in his manner that quite amazed me.

He was more unlike himself than I could have supposed possible.

"It would be better to be this poor Peggotty, or his lout of a nephew," he said, getting up and leaning moodily against the chimney piece, with his face toward the fire, "than to be myself, twenty times richer and twenty times wiser and be the torment to myself that I have been, in this Devil's bark of a boat, within the last half hour!"

He had already begun to poison the fountains of little Emily's purity.

When Steerforth, after running away with Emily and deserting her, was drowned and brought home, Rosa Dartle, who had loved him, charged his mother with his ruin. She had a scar on her lip, made by a hammer thrown by Steerforth when he was a boy.

"Do you remember when he did this?" she proceeded. "Do you remember when in his inheritance of your nature, and in your pampering of his pride and pa.s.sion, he did this, and disfigured me for life? Look at me, marked until I die with his high displeasure, and moan and groan for what you made him!"

"Miss Dartle," I entreated her, "for Heaven's sake----"

"I _will_ speak," she said, turning on me with her lightning eyes. "Be silent you! Look at me, I say, proud mother of a proud false son! Moan for your nurture of him, moan for your corruption of him, moan for your loss of him, moan for mine!"

She clinched her hand, and trembled through her spare, worn figure, as if her pa.s.sion were killing her by inches.

"YOU resent his self-will!" she exclaimed. "YOU injured by his haughty temper! YOU, who opposed to both, when your hair was gray, the qualities which made both when you gave him birth! YOU, who from his cradle reared him to be what he was, and stunted what he should have been! Are you rewarded, _now_, for your years of trouble?"

"Miss Dartle," said I, "if you can be so obdurate as not to feel for this afflicted mother----"

"Who feels for me?" she sharply retorted. "She has sown this. Let her moan for the harvest that she reaps to-day!"

To show that the seed for the harvest had been sown by his mother was d.i.c.kens's aim in the delineation of his character. Yet she loved him as a part of her own life. She said to Mr. Peggotty, when he came to plead with her for Emily:

"My son, who has been the object of my life, to whom its every thought has been devoted, whom I have gratified from a child in every wish, from whom I have had no separate existence since his birth."

There was a double sadness in David's soliloquy about Steerforth, who had been his friend:

In the keen distress of the discovery of his unworthiness, I thought more of all that was brilliant in him, I softened more toward all that was good in him, I did more justice to the qualities that might have made him a man of a n.o.ble nature and a great name, than ever I had done in the height of my devotion to him.

In Bleak House a great deal of attention is paid to child training.

Esther's sadness because of her neglected birthday touches a tender chord.

It was my birthday. There were holidays at school on other birthdays; none on mine. There were rejoicings at home on other birthdays, as I knew from what I heard the girls relate to one another; there were none on mine. My birthday was the most melancholy day at home in the whole year.

There is more than mere sentiment in birthday celebrations both at home and in school. It develops a pleasant consciousness of individuality and community--two of the greatest educational ideals.

The cruelty of telling children of any supposed blight of heredity or of any other shadow that arrogant conventionality dares to throw over them, is criticised in the hard, gloomy way in which Esther's G.o.dmother referred to her mother.

Even worse than this in the refinement of its cruelty was her parting injunction. It is a shameful thing to make a child believe that she is different from other children in any sense of either badness or goodness.

"Submission, self-denial, diligent work, are the preparations for a life begun with such a shadow on it. You are different from other children, Esther, because you were not born, like them, in common sinfulness and wrath. You are set apart."

I went up to my room and crept to bed, and laid my doll's cheek against mine wet with tears, and holding that solitary friend upon my bosom cried myself to sleep. Imperfect as my understanding of my sorrow was, I knew that I had brought no joy, at any time, to anybody's heart, and that I was to no one upon earth what Dolly was to me.

d.i.c.kens evidently meant to reveal more than her G.o.dmother's cruelty in her closing moralizings. She made the mistake of using self-denial and diligent work as curses instead of blessings. They were for the time none the less curses to the child, however.

The gross negligence of parents in regard to the sacredness of the children's retiring hour is exposed in the management of the Jellyby children. Indeed, Mrs. Jellyby may be regarded as several volumes of treatises on how not to train children. Caddy expressed her views of the training they received by saying: "I wish I was dead. I wish we were all dead. It would be a great deal better for us." She wisely added: "Oh, don't talk of duty as a child! where's ma's duty as a parent?" Esther said wisely:

It struck me that if Mrs. Jellyby had discharged her own natural duties and obligations before she swept the horizon with a telescope in search of others, she would have taken the best precautions against becoming absurd; but I need scarcely observe that I kept this to myself.

Esther describes the process of putting the children to bed one evening she was visiting at the Jellyby home:

Mrs. Jellyby stopped for a moment her conversation with Mr. Quale, on the Brotherhood of Humanity, long enough to order the children to bed.

As Peepy cried for me to take him to bed, I carried him upstairs, where the young woman with the flannel bandage charged into the midst of the little family like a dragon, and overturned them into cribs.

Peepy was the unfortunate child who had fallen downstairs, who now interrupted the correspondence by presenting himself with a slip of plaster on his forehead, to exhibit his wounded knees, in which Ada and I did not know which to pity most, the bruises or the dirt. Mrs.

Jellyby merely added, with the serene composure with which she said everything, "Go along, you naughty Peepy!" and fixed her fine eyes on Africa again.

Here Mrs. Jellyby was guilty of two wrongs, one of commission, the other of omission. She did a positive wrong in unjustly calling the child "naughty" when he was merely unfortunate. Even if children are so badly guided that they do wrong, it is a serious mistake to make them feel consciously "bad" by calling them unpleasant names. It is always wrong to define in the child's consciousness a pa.s.sing wave of evil.

Mrs. Jellyby's sin of omission was her neglect of the opportunity of sympathizing with the suffering boy, and of training him to bear suffering bravely by the suggestion that he was "a brave little soldier home from the war."

Mr. Jarndyce, in speaking of Harold Skimpole's children, said, when Richard Carstone asked if he had any children:

"Yes, Rick! Half a dozen. More! Nearer a dozen, I should think. But he has never looked after them. How could he? He wanted somebody to look after _him_. He is a child, you know!" said Mr. Jarndyce.

"And have the children looked after themselves at all, sir?" inquired Richard.

"Why, just as you may suppose," said Mr. Jarndyce, his countenance suddenly falling. "It is said that the children of the very poor are not brought up, but dragged up. Harold Skimpole's children have tumbled up somehow or other----"

Again d.i.c.kens was impressing the responsibility of parents for the care and proper training of their children.

Mr. Jarndyce accounted for the utterly unpractical nature of Mr. Skimpole by saying:

"Why, he is all sentiment, and--and susceptibility, and--and sensibility--and--and imagination. And these qualities are not regulated in him, somehow. I suppose the people who admired him for them in his youth attached too much importance to them, and too little to any training that would have balanced and adjusted them; and so he became what he is."

Mrs. Pardiggle was given as a type of the philanthropic woman who does _not_ neglect her children, but whose training is worse--much worse than Mrs. Jellyby's neglect. The Jellyby children had as much motherly sympathy as the Pardiggles, and they had freedom. There is always this advantage in neglect. Louisa Gradgrind gave utterance to a philosophical principle when she said to her father: "Oh! if you had only neglected me, what a much better and much happier creature I should have been." d.i.c.kens did not teach that neglect is good training, but he did teach that it is a lighter curse than the Gradgrind or Pardiggle training.