Dickens As an Educator Part 41

MISCELLANEOUS EDUCATIONAL PRINCIPLES.

The need of apperception and correlation are shown in the result of Paul Dombey's first lessons under Miss Cornelia Blimber, and in the same book in the description of the learning Briggs carried away with him. It was like an ill-arranged luggage, so tightly packed that he couldn't get at anything he wanted. The absolute necessity for fixing apperceptive centres of emotion and thought in the lives of children by experience is shown in the case of Neville Landless in Edwin Drood. His early life had been so barren that, as he told his tutor, "It has caused me to be utterly wanting in I don't know what emotions, or remembrances, or good instincts--I have not even a name for the thing, you see--that you have had to work upon in other young men to whom you have been accustomed."

d.i.c.kens emphasized the fact that the lack of apperceptive centres of an improper kind is a great advantage.

That heart where self has found no place and raised no throne is slow to recognise its ugly presence when it looks upon it. As one possessed of an evil spirit was held in old time to be alone conscious of the lurking demon in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of other men, so kindred vices know each other in their hiding places every day, when virtue is incredulous and blind.

There is no more suggestive work on the contents of children's minds than Bleak House. When Poor Jo was summoned to give evidence at the inquest he was questioned in regard to himself and his theology. The results were startling.

Name, Jo. Nothing else that he knows on. Don't know that everybody has two names. Never heerd of sich a think. Don't know that Jo is short for a longer name. Thinks it long enough for _him_. _He_ don't find no fault with it. Spell it? No. _He_ can't spell it. No father, no mother, no friends. Never been to school. What's home? Knows a broom's a broom, and knows it's wicked to tell a lie. Don't recollect who told him about the broom, or about the lie, but knows both. Can't exactly say what'll be done to him after he's dead if he tells a lie to the gentlemen here, but believes it'll be something wery bad to punish him, and serve him right--and so he'll tell the truth.

Jo sweeps his crossing all day long, unconscious of the link, if any link there be. He sums up his mental condition, when asked a question, by replying that he "don't know nothink." He knows that it's hard to keep the mud off the crossing in dirty weather, and harder still to live by doing it. n.o.body taught him, even that much; he found it out.

Jo comes out of Tom-all-Alone's, meeting the tardy morning, which is always late in getting down there, and munches his dirty bit of bread as he comes along. His way lying through many streets, and the houses not yet being open, he sits down to breakfast on the doorstep of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, and gives it a brush when he has finished, as an acknowledgment of the accommodation. He admires the size of the edifice, and wonders what it's all about. He has no idea, poor wretch, of the spiritual dest.i.tution of a coral reef in the Pacific, or what it costs to look up the precious souls among the cocoanuts and breadfruits.

He goes to his crossing, and begins to lay it out for the day. The town awakes; the great teetotum is set up for its daily spin and whirl; all that unaccountable reading and writing, which has been suspended for a few hours, recommences. Jo and the other lower animals get on in the unintelligible mess as they can. It is market day. The blinded oxen, overgoaded, overdriven, never guided, run into wrong places and are beaten out; and plunge, red-eyed and foaming, at stone walls; and often sorely hurt the innocent, and often sorely hurt themselves. Very like Jo and his order; very, very like!

A band of music comes and plays. Jo listens to it. So does a dog--a drover's dog, waiting for his master outside a butcher's shop, and evidently thinking about those sheep he has had upon his mind for some hours, and is happily rid of. He seems perplexed respecting three or four; can't remember where he left them; looks up and down the street, as half expecting to see them astray; suddenly p.r.i.c.ks up his ears and remembers all about it. A thoroughly vagabond dog, accustomed to low company and public houses; a terrific dog to sheep; ready at a whistle to scamper over their backs, and tear out mouthfuls of their wool; but an educated, improved, developed dog, who has been taught his duties and knows how to discharge them. He and Jo listen to the music, probably with much the same amount of animal satisfaction; likewise, as to awakened a.s.sociation, aspiration, or regret, melancholy or joyful reference to things beyond the senses, they are probably upon a par. But, otherwise, how far above the human listener is the brute!

Turn that dog's descendants wild, like Jo, and in a very few years they will so degenerate that they will lose even their bark--but not their bite.

When Lady Dedlock met Jo, she asked him:

"Are you the boy I've read of in the papers?"

"I don't know," says Jo, staring moodily at the veil, "nothink about no papers. I don't know nothink about nothink at all."

When Guster, Mr. Snagsby's servant, got him some food, she said:

"Are you hungry?"

"Jist!" says Jo.

"What's gone of your father and your mother, eh?"

Jo stops in the middle of a bite, and looks petrified. For this orphan charge of the Christian saint whose shrine was at Tooting, has patted him on the shoulder; and it is the first time in his life that any decent hand had been so laid upon him.

"I never know'd nothink about 'em," says Jo.

"No more didn't I of mine," cries Guster.

When Allan Woodcourt took him to Mr. George's and had his wants attended to, he told Jo to be sure and tell him the truth always.

"Wishermaydie, if I don't," said Jo. "I never was in no other trouble at all, sir--'cept knowin' nothink and starvation."

When Allan saw that Jo was nearing the end, he said:

"Jo! Did you ever know a prayer?"

"Never know'd nothink, sir."

"Not so much as one short prayer?"

"No, sir. Nothink at all. Mr. Chadband he was a-prayin' wunst at Mr.

Snagsby's and I heerd him, but he sounded as if he wos a-speakin' to hisself, and not to me. He prayed a lot, but _I_ couldn't make out nothink on it. Different times, there was other genlmen come down Tom-all-Alone's a-prayin', but they all mostly sed as the t'other wuns prayed wrong, and all mostly sounded to be a-talkin' to theirselves, or a-pa.s.sin' blame on the t'others, and not a-talkin' to us. _We_ never know'd nothink. _I_ never know'd what it wos all about."

No? Mr. Chadband, your long sermon about "the Terewth" found no place in Jo in which to rest; nothing to which it could attach itself. No wonder he went asleep. He had no apperceptive centres in his experience or his training to which your kind of religious teaching was related.

Poor Jo! He was the first great ill.u.s.tration, and he is still the best, of the great pedagogical truth, that we see, and hear, and understand in all that is around us only what corresponds to what we are within; that our power to see, and hear, and understand increases as our inner life is cultured and developed; and that a life as barren as that of the great cla.s.s of whom Jo was made the type makes it impossible to comprehend any teaching of an abstract kind. This revelation is of course most valuable to primary teachers in cities.

d.i.c.kens showed his wonderful insight into the most profound problems of psychology in his great character sketch of poor Jo. He agreed with Herbart regarding the philosophy of apperception so far as it related to intellectual culture, but he painted Jo entirely out of harmony with Herbart's psychology in relation to soul development. After describing Mr.

Chadband's sermon on "Terewth" d.i.c.kens says:

All this time Jo has been standing on the spot where he woke up, ever picking his cap, and putting bits of fur in his mouth. He spits them out with a remorseful air, for he feels that it is in his nature to be an unimprovable reprobate, and it's no good _his_ trying to keep awake, for _he_ won't never know nothink. Though it may be, Jo, that there is a history so interesting and affecting even to minds as near the brutes as thine, recording deeds done on this earth for common men, that if the Chadbands, removing their own persons from the light, would but show it thee in simple reverence, would but leave it unimproved, would but regard it as being eloquent enough without their modest aid--it might hold thee awake, and thou might learn from it yet!

Jo never heard of any such book. Its compilers, and the Reverend Chadband, are all one to him--except that he knows the Reverend Chadband, and would rather run away from him for an hour than hear him talk for five minutes.

When Jo was eating at Mr. Snagsby's he stopped in the middle of his bite and looked petrified, because Guster patted him on the shoulder. "It was the first time in his life that any decent hand had been so laid upon him."

In The Haunted Man the six-year-old child was described as "a baby savage, a young monster, a child who had never been a child, a creature who might live to take the outward form of man, but who, within, would live and perish a mere beast."

Hugh, the splendid young animal who was John Willet's stable boy in Barnaby Rudge, was as deficient of most intellectual and spiritual apperceptive centres as poor Jo. When Mr. Chester asked him his name he replied:

"I'd tell it if I could. I can't. I have always been called Hugh; nothing more. I never knew nor saw, nor thought about a father; and I was a boy of six--that's not very old--when they hung my mother up at Tyburn for a couple of thousand of men to stare at. They might have let her live. She was poor enough."

Little George Silverman's mind was almost a blank when his mother and father died. He had been brought up in a cellar at Preston. He hardly knew what sunlight was. His mother's laugh in her fever scared him, because it was the first laugh he had ever heard. When discovered alone with the bodies of his father and mother in the cellar, one of the horrified bystanders said to him:

"Do you know your father and mother are both dead of fever?" and he replied:

"I don't know what it is to be dead. I am hungry and thirsty."

After he had been supplied with food and drink he told Mr. Hawkyard that "he didn't feel cold, or hungry, or thirsty," and in relating the story in manhood he said:

That was the whole round of human feelings, as far as I knew, except the pain of being beaten. To that time I had never had the faintest impression of duty. I had no knowledge whatever that there was anything lovely in this life. When I had occasionally slunk up the cellar steps into the street, and glared in at shop windows, I had done so with no higher feelings than we may suppose to animate a mangy young dog or wolf cub. It is equally the fact that I had never been alone, in the sense of holding unselfish converse with myself. I had been solitary often enough, but nothing better.

Redlaw, in The Haunted Man, said to the poor boy who came to his room:

"What is your name?"

"Got none."

"Where do you live?"

"Live! What's that?"

Such pictures were not drawn to entertain, or to add artistic effect to his stories. They were written to teach the world of wealth and culture that all around it were thousands of human souls with as little opportunity for development as young animals have; with defined apperceptive centres of cold, hunger, thirst, and pain only.