Complete Novels of Maria Edgeworth

by Maria Edgeworth

  Young people, of a torpid, indolent temperament, are much under the dominion of habit; if they happen to have contracted any disagreeable or bad habits, they have seldom sufficient energy to break them. The stimulus of sudden pain is necessary in this case. The pupil may be perfectly convinced, that such a habit ought to be broken, and may wish to break it most sincerely; but may yet be incapable of the voluntary exertion requisite to obtain success. It would be dangerous to let the habit, however insignificant, continue victorious, because the child would hence be discouraged from all future attempts to battle with himself. Either we should not attempt the conquest of the habit, or we should persist till we have vanquished. The confidence, which this sense of success will give the pupil, will probably, in his own opinion, be thought well worthy the price. Neither his reason nor his will was in fault; all he wanted, was strength to break the diminutive chains of habit; chains which, it seems, have power to enfeeble their captives exactly in proportion to the length of time they are worn.

  Every body has probably found, from their own experience, how difficult it is to alter little habits in manners, pronunciation, &c. Children are often teased with frequent admonitions about their habits of sitting, standing, walking, talking, eating, speaking, &c. Parents are early aware of the importance of agreeable, graceful manners; every body who sees children, can judge, or think that they can judge, of their manners; and from anxiety that children should appear to advantage in company, parents solicitously watch all their gestures, and correct all their attitudes according to that image of the “beau ideal,” which happens to be most fashionable. The most convenient and natural attitudes are not always the most approved. The constraint which children suffer from their obedience, obliges them at length to rest their tortured muscles, and to throw themselves, for relief, into attitudes the very reverse of those which they have practised with so much pain. Hence they acquire opposite habits in their manners, and there is a continual struggle between these. They find it impossible to correct, instantaneously, the awkward tricks which they have acquired, and they learn ineffectually to attempt a conquest over themselves; or else, which is most commonly the catastrophe, they learn to hear the exhortations and rebukes of all around them, without being stimulated to any degree of exertion. The same voices which lose their power on these trifling occasions, lose, at the same time, much of their general influence. More power is wasted upon trifling defects in the manners of children, than can be imagined by any who have not particularly attended to this subject. If it be thought indispensably necessary to speak to children eternally about their manners, this irritating and disagreeable office should devolve upon somebody whose influence over the children we are not anxious to preserve undiminished. A little ingenuity in contriving the dress, writing desks, reading desks, &c. of children, who are any way defective in their shape, might spare much of the anxiety which is felt by their parents, and much of the bodily and mental pain which they alternately endure themselves. For these patients, would it not be rather more safe to consult the philosophic physician, than the dancing master who is not bound to understand either anatomy or metaphysics?

  Every preventative which is discovered for any defect, either in manners, temper, or understanding, diminishes the necessity for punishment. Punishments are the abrupt, brutal resource of ignorance, frequently, to cure the effects of former negligence. With children who have been reasonably and affectionately educated, scarcely any punishments are requisite. This is not an assertion hazarded without experience; the happy experience of several years, and of several children of different ages and tempers, justifies this assertion. As for corporeal punishments, they may be necessary where boys are to be drilled in a given time into scholars; but the language of blows need seldom be used to reasonable creatures. The idea that it is disgraceful to be governed by force, should be kept alive in the minds of children; the dread of shame is a more powerful motive than the fear of bodily pain. To prove the truth of this, we may recollect that few people have ever been known to destroy themselves in order to escape from bodily pain; but numbers, to avoid shame, have put an end to their existence. It has been a question, whether mankind are most governed by hope or by fear, by rewards or by punishments? This question, like many others which have occasioned tedious debates, turns chiefly upon words. Hope and fear are sometimes used to denote mixed, and sometimes unmixed, passions. Those who speak of them as unmixed passions, cannot have accurately examined their own feelings. The probability of good, produces hope; the probability of evil, excites fear; and as this probability appears less or greater, more remote or nearer to us, the mind fluctuates between the opposite passions. When the probability increases on either side, so does the corresponding passion. Since these passions seldom exist in absolute separation from one another, it appears that we cannot philosophically speak of either as an independent motive: to the question, therefore, “which governs mankind the most, hope or fear?” we cannot give an explicit answer.

  When we would determine upon the probability of any good or evil, we are insensibly influenced, not only by the view of the circumstances before us, but also by our previous habits; we judge not only by the general laws of human events, but also by our own individual experience. If we have been usually successful, we are inclined to hope; have we been accustomed to misfortunes, we are hence disposed to fear. “Cæsar and his fortune are on board,” exclaimed the confident hero to the mariners. Hope excites the mind to exertion; fear represses all activity. As a preventative from vice, you may employ fear; to restrain the excesses of all the furious passions, it is useful and necessary: but would you rouse the energies of virtue, you must inspire and invigorate the soul with hope. Courage, generosity, industry, perseverance, all the magic of talents, all the powers of genius, all the virtues that appear spontaneous in great minds, spring from hope. But how different is the hope of a great and of a little mind; not only are the objects of this hope different, but the passion itself is raised and supported in a different manner. A feeble person, if he presumes to hope, hopes as superstitiously as he fears; he keeps his attention sedulously fixed upon all the probabilities in his favour; he will not listen to any arguments in opposition to his wishes; he knows he is unreasonable, he persists in continuing so; he does not connect any idea of exertion with hope; his hope usually rests upon the exertions of others, or upon some fortuitous circumstances. A man of a strong mind, reasons before he hopes; he takes in, at one quick, comprehensive glance, all that is to be seen both for and against him; he is, from experience, disposed to depend much upon his own exertions, if they can turn the balance in his favour; he hopes, he acts, he succeeds. Poets, in all ages, have celebrated the charms of hope; without her propitious influence, life, they tell us, would be worse than death; without her smiles, nature would smile in vain; without her promises, treacherous though they often prove, reality would have nothing to give worthy of our acceptance. We are not bound, however, to understand literally, the rhetoric of poets. Hope is to them a beautiful and useful allegorical personage: sometimes leaning upon an anchor; sometimes “waving her golden hair;” always young, smiling, enchanting, furnished with a rich assortment of epithets suited to the ode, the sonnet, the madrigal, with a traditionary number of images and allusions; what more can a poet desire? Men, except when they are poets, do not value hope as the first of terrestrial blessings. The action and energies which hope produces, are to many more agreeable than the passion itself; that feverish state of suspense, which prevents settled thought or vigorous exertion, far from being agreeable, is highly painful to a well regulated mind; the continued repetition of the same ideas and the same calculations, fatigues the mind, which, in reasoning, has been accustomed to arrive at some certain conclusion, or to advance, at least, a step at every effort. The exercise of the mind, in changing the views of its object, which is supposed to be a great part of the pleasure of hope, is soon over to an active imagination, which quickly runs through all the possible changes; or is this
exercise, even while it lasts, so delightful to a man who has a variety of intellectual occupations, as it frequently appears to him who knows scarcely any other species of mental activity? The vacillating state of mind, peculiar to hope and fear, is by no means favourable to industry; half our time is generally consumed in speculating upon the reward, instead of earning it, whenever the value of that reward is not precisely ascertainable. In all occupations, where judgment or accurate observation is essential, if the reward of our labour is brought suddenly to excite our hope, there is an immediate interruption of all effectual labour; the thoughts take a new direction; the mind becomes tremulous, and nothing decisive can be done, till the emotions of hope and fear either subside or are vanquished.

  M. l’Abbé Chappe, who was sent by the king of France, at the desire of the French Academy, to Siberia, to observe the transit of Venus, gives us a striking picture of the state of his own mind when the moment of this famous observation approached. In the description of his own feelings, this traveller may be admitted as good authority. A few hours before the observation, a black cloud appeared in the sky; the idea of returning to Paris, after such a long and perilous journey, without having seen the transit of Venus; the idea of the disappointment to his king, to his country, to all the philosophers in Europe; threw him into a state of agitation, “which must have been felt to be conceived.” At length the black cloud vanished; his hopes affected him almost as much as his fears had done; he fixed his telescope, saw the planet; his eye wandered over the immense space a thousand times in a minute; his secretary stood on one side with his pen in his hand; his assistant, with his eye fixed upon the watch, was stationed on the other side. The moment of the total immersion arrived; the agitated philosopher was seized with an universal shivering, and could scarcely command his thoughts sufficiently to secure the observation.

  The uncertainty of reward, and the consequent agitations of hope and fear, operate as unfavourably upon the moral as upon the intellectual character. The favour of princes is an uncertain reward. Courtiers are usually despicable and wretched beings; they live upon hope; but their hope is not connected with exertion. Those who court popularity, are not less despicable or less wretched; their reward is uncertain: what is more uncertain than the affection of the multitude? The Proteus character of Wharton, so admirably drawn by Pope, is a striking picture of a man who has laboured through life with the vague hope of obtaining universal applause.

  Let us suppose a child to be educated by a variety of persons, all differing in their tastes and tempers, and in their notions of right and wrong; all having the power to reward and punish their common pupil. What must this pupil become? A mixture of incongruous characters; superstitious, enthusiastic, indolent, and perhaps profligate: superstitious, because his own contradictory experience would expose him to fear without reason; enthusiastic, because he would, from the same cause, form absurd expectations; indolent, because the will of others has been the measure of his happiness, and his own exertions have never procured him any certain reward; profligate, because, probably from the confused variety of his moral lessons, he has at last concluded that right and wrong are but unmeaning words. Let us change the destiny of this child, by changing his education. Place him under the sole care of a person of an enlarged capacity, and a steady mind; who has formed just notions of right and wrong; and who, in the distribution of reward and punishment, of praise and blame, will be prompt, exact, invariable. His pupil will neither be credulous, rash, nor profligate; and he certainly will not be indolent; his habitual and his rational belief will, in all circumstances, agree with each other; his hope will be the prelude to exertion, and his fear will restrain him only in situations where action is dangerous.

  Even amongst children, we must frequently have observed a prodigious difference in the quantity of hope and fear which is felt by those who have been well or ill educated. An ill educated child, is in daily, hourly, alternate agonies of hope and fear; the present never occupies or interests him, but his soul is intent upon some future gratification, which never pays him by its full possession. As soon as he awakens in the morning, he recollects some promised blessing, and, till the happy moment arrives, he is wretched in impatience: at breakfast he is to be blessed with some toy, that he is to have the moment breakfast is finished; and when he finds the toy does not delight him, he is to be blessed with a sweet pudding at dinner, or with sitting up half an hour later at night than his usual bed-time. Endeavour to find some occupation that shall amuse him, you will not easily succeed, for he will still anticipate what you are going to say or to do. “What will come next?” “What shall we do after this?” are, as Mr. Williams, in his able lectures upon education, observes, the questions incessantly asked by spoiled children. This species of idle, restless curiosity, does not lead to the acquisition of knowledge, it prevents the possibility of instruction; it is not the animation of a healthy mind, it is the debility of an over-stimulated temper. There is a very sensible letter in Mrs. Macaulay’s book upon education, on the impropriety of filling the imagination of young people with prospects of future enjoyment: the foolish system of promising great rewards, and fine presents, she clearly shows creates habitual disorders in the minds of children.

  The happiness of life depends more upon a succession of small enjoyments, than upon great pleasures; and those who become incapable of tasting the moderately agreeable sensations, cannot fill up the intervals of their existence between their great delights. The happiness of childhood peculiarly depends upon their enjoyment of little pleasures: of these they have a continual variety; they have perpetual occupation for their senses, in observing all the objects around them, and all their faculties may be exercised upon suitable subjects. The pleasure of this exercise is in itself sufficient: we need not say to a child, “Look at the wings of this beautiful butterfly, and I will give you a piece of plum-cake; observe how the butterfly curls his proboscis, how he dives into the honeyed flowers, and I will take you in a coach to pay a visit with me, my dear. Remember the pretty story you read this morning, and you shall have a new coat.” Without the new coat, or the visit, or the plum-cake, the child would have had sufficient amusement in the story and the sight of the butterfly’s proboscis: the rewards, besides, have no natural connection with the things themselves; and they create, where they are most liked, a taste for factitious pleasures. Would you encourage benevolence, generosity, or prudence, let each have its appropriate reward of affection, esteem, and confidence; but do not by ill-judged bounties attempt to force these virtues into premature display. The rewards which are given to benevolence and generosity in children, frequently encourage selfishness, and sometimes teach them cunning. Lord Kames tells us a story, which is precisely a case in point. Two boys, the sons of the earl of Elgin, were permitted by their father to associate with the poor boys in the neighbourhood of their father’s house. One day, the earl’s sons being called to dinner, a lad who was playing with them, said that he would wait until they returned—”There is no dinner for me at home,” said the poor boy. “Come with us, then,” said the earl’s sons. The boy refused, and when they asked him if he had any money to buy a dinner, he answered, “No.” “Papa,” said the eldest of the young gentlemen when he got home, “what was the price of the silver buckles you gave me?” “Five shillings.” “Let me have the money, and I’ll give you the buckles.” It was done accordingly, says Lord Kames. The earl, inquiring privately, found that the money was given to the lad who had no dinner. The buckles were returned, and the boy was highly commended for being kind to his companion. The commendations were just, but the buckles should not have been returned: the boy should have been suffered steadily to abide by his own bargain; he should have been let to feel the pleasure, and pay the exact price of his own generosity.

  If we attempt to teach children that they can be generous, without giving up some of their own pleasures for the sake of other people, we attempt to teach them what is false. If we once make them amends for any sac
rifice they have made, we lead them to expect the same remuneration upon a future occasion; and then, in fact, they act with a direct view to their own interest, and govern themselves by the calculations of prudence, instead of following the dictates of benevolence. It is true, that if we speak with accuracy, we must admit, that the most benevolent and generous persons act from the hope of receiving pleasure, and their enjoyment is more exquisite than that of the most refined selfishness; in the language of M. de Rochefoucault, we should therefore be forced to acknowledge, that the most benevolent is always the most selfish person. This seeming paradox is answered, by observing, that the epithet selfish is given to those who prefer pleasures in which other people have no share; we change the meaning of words when we talk of its being selfish to like the pleasures of sympathy or benevolence, because these pleasures cannot be confined solely to the idea of self. When we say that a person pursues his own interest more by being generous than by being covetous, we take into the account the general sum of his agreeable feelings; we do not balance prudentially his loss or gain upon particular occasions. The generous man may himself be convinced, that the sum of his happiness is more increased by the feelings of benevolence, than it could be by the gratification of avarice; but, though his understanding may perceive the demonstration of this moral theorem, though it is the remote principle of his whole conduct, it does not occur to his memory in the form of a prudential aphorism, whenever he is going to do a generous action. It is essential to our ideas of generosity, that no such reasoning should, at that moment, pass in his mind; we know that the feelings of generosity are associated with a number of enthusiastic ideas; we can sympathize with the virtuous insanity of the man who forgets himself whilst he thinks of others; we do not so readily sympathize with the cold strength of mind of the person, who, deliberately preferring the greatest possible share of happiness, is benevolent by rule and measure.