Complete Novels of Maria Edgeworth

by Maria Edgeworth

  To induce children to exercise their memory, we must put them in situations where they may be immediately rewarded for their exertion. We must create an interest in their minds — nothing uninteresting is long remembered. In a large and literary family, it will not be difficult to invent occupations for children which may exercise all their faculties. Even the conversation of such a family, will create in their minds a desire for knowledge; what they hear, will recall to their memory what they read; and if they are encouraged to take a reasonable share in conversation, they will acquire the habit of listening to every thing that others say. By permitting children to talk freely of what they read, we are more likely to improve their memory for books, than by exacting from them formal repetitions of lessons.

  Dr. Johnson, who is said to have had an uncommonly good memory, tells us, that when he was a boy, he used, after he had acquired any fresh knowledge from his books, to run and tell it to an old woman, of whom he was very fond. This exercise was so agreeable to him, that it imprinted what he read upon his memory.

  La Gaucherie, one of the preceptors of Henry IV. having found that he had to do with a young prince of an impatient mind, and active genius, little suited to sedentary studies, instead of compelling his pupil to read, taught him by means of conversation: anecdotes of heroes, and the wise sayings of ancient philosophers, were thus imprinted upon the mind of this prince. It is said, that Henry IV. applied, in his subsequent life, all the knowledge he had acquired in this manner so happily, that learned men were surprised at his memory.

  By these observations, we by no means would insinuate, that application to books is unnecessary. We are sensible that accurate knowledge upon any subject, cannot be acquired by superficial conversation; that it can be obtained only by patient application. But we mean to point out, that an early taste for literature may be excited in children by conversation; and that their memory should be first cultivated in the manner which will give them the least pain. When there is motive for application, and when habits of industry have been gradually acquired, we may securely trust, that our pupils will complete their own education. Nor should we have reason to fear, that those who have a good memory for all other things, should not be able to retain all that is worth remembering in books. Children should never be praised for merely remembering exactly what they read, they should be praised for selecting with good sense what is best worth their attention, and for applying what they remember to useful purposes.

  We have observed how much the habit of inventing increases the wish for knowledge, and increases the interest men take in a number of ideas, which are indifferent to uncultivated and indolent people. It is the same with children. Children who invent, exercise their memory with pleasure, from the immediate sense of utility and success. A piece of knowledge, which they lay by in their minds, with the hopes of making use of it in some future invention, they have more motives for remembering, than what they merely learn by rote, because they are commanded to do so by the voice of authority.

  (June 19th, 1796.) S —— , a boy of nine years old, of good abilities, was translating Ovid’s description of envy. When he came to the Latin word suffusa, he pronounced it as if it had been spelled with a single f and a double s, sufussa; he made the same mistake several times: at last his father, to try whether it would make him remember the right pronunciation, desired him to repeat suffusa forty times. The boy did so. About three hours afterwards, the boy was asked whether he recollected the word which he had repeated forty times. No, he said, he did not; but he remembered that it meant diffused. His father recalled the word to his mind, by asking him what letter it was that he had sounded as if it had been a double letter; he said s. And what double letter did you sound as if it had been single? f, said the boy. Then, said his father, you have found out that it was a word in which there was a double ff and a single s, and that it is the Latin for diffused. Oh, suffusa, said the boy.

  This boy, who had such difficulty in learning a single Latin word, by repeating it forty times, showed in other instances, that he was by no means deficient in recollective memory. On the contrary, though he read very little, and seldom learned any thing by rote, he applied happily any thing that he read or heard in conversation.

  (March 31st, 1796.) His father told him, that he had this morning seen a large horn at a gentleman’s in the neighbourhood. It was found thirty spades depth below the surface of the earth, in a bog. With the horn was found a carpet, and wrapped up in the carpet a lump of tallow. “Now,” said his father, “how could that lump of tallow come there? Or was it tallow, do you think? Or what could it be?”

  H —— (a boy of 14, brother to S —— ) said, he thought it might have been buried by some robbers, after they had committed some robbery; he thought the lump was tallow.

  S —— said, “Perhaps some dead body might have been wrapped up in the carpet and buried; and the dead body might have turned into tallow.”

  “How came you,” said his father, “to think of a dead body’s turning into tallow?”

  “You told me,” said the boy, “You read to me, I mean, an account of some dead bodies that had been buried a great many years, which had turned into tallow.”

  “Spermaceti,” you mean? “Yes.”

  S —— had heard the account he alluded to above two months before this time. No one in company recollected it except himself, though several had heard it.

  Amongst the few things which S —— had learnt by heart, was the Hymn to Adversity. A very slight circumstance may show, that he did not get this poem merely as a tiresome lesson, as children sometimes learn by rote what they do not understand, and which they never recollect except in the arduous moments of formal repetition.

  A few days after S —— had learned the Hymn to Adversity, he happened to hear his sister say to a lady, “I observed you pitied me for having had a whitlow on my finger, more than any body else did, because you have had one yourself.” S — —’s father asked him why he smiled. “Because,” said S —— , “I was thinking of the song, the hymn to adversity;

  “And from her own she learned to melt at other’s wo.”

  A recollective memory of books appears early in children who are not overwhelmed with them; if the impressions made upon their minds be distinct, they will recur with pleasure to the memory when similar ideas are presented.

  July 1796. S —— heard his father read Sir Brook Boothby’s excellent epitaph upon Algernon Sidney; the following lines pleased the boy particularly:

  “Approach, contemplate this immortal name, Swear on this shrine to emulate his fame; To dare, like him, e’en to thy latest breath, Contemning chains, and poverty, and death.”

  S — —’s father asked him why he liked these lines, and whether they put him in mind of any thing that he had heard before. S —— said, “It puts me in mind of Hamilcar’s making his son Hannibal swear to hate the Romans, and love his countrymen eternally. But I like this much better. I think it was exceedingly foolish and wrong of Hamilcar to make his son swear always to hate the Romans.”

  Latin lessons are usually so very disagreeable to boys, that they seldom are pleased with any allusions to them; but by a good management in a tutor, even these lessons may be associated with agreeable ideas. Boys should be encouraged to talk and think about what they learn in Latin, as well as what they read in English; they should be allowed to judge of the characters described in ancient authors, to compare them with our present ideas of excellence, and thus to make some use of their learning. It will then be not merely engraved upon their memory in the form of lessons, it will be mingled with their notions of life and manners; it will occur to them when they converse, and when they act; they will possess the admired talent for classical allusion, as well as all the solid advantages of an unprejudiced judgment. It is not enough that gentlemen should be masters of the learned languages, they must know how to produce their knowledge without pedantry or affectation. The memory may in vain be stored with classical precedents, unless
these can be brought into use in speaking or writing without the parade of dull citation, or formal introduction. “Sir,” said Dr. Johnson, to some prosing tormentor, “I would rather a man would knock me down, than to begin to talk to me of the Punic wars.” A public speaker, who rises in the House of Commons, with pedantry prepense to quote Latin or Greek, is coughed or laughed down; but the beautiful unpremeditated classical allusions of Burke or Sheridan, sometimes conveyed in a single word, seize the imagination irresistibly.

  Since we perceive, that memory is chiefly useful as it furnishes materials for invention, and that invention can greatly abridge the mere labour of accumulation, we must examine how the inventive faculty can be properly exercised. The vague precept of, cultivate the memory and invention of young people at the same time, will not inform parents how this is to be accomplished; we trust, therefore, that we may be permitted, contrary to the custom of didactic writers, to illustrate a general precept by a few examples; and we take these examples from real life, because we apprehend, that fictions, however ingenious, will never advance the science of education so much as simple experiments.

  No elaborate theory of invention shall here alarm parents. It is a mistake, to suppose that the inventive faculty can be employed only on important subjects; it can be exercised in the most trifling circumstances of domestic life. Scarcely any family can be so unfortunately situated, that they may not employ the ingenuity of their children without violent exertion, or any grand apparatus. Let us only make use of the circumstances which happen every hour. Children are interested in every thing that is going forward. Building, or planting, or conversation, or reading; they attend to every thing, and from every thing might they with a little assistance obtain instruction. Let their useful curiosity be encouraged; let them make a part of the general society of the family, instead of being treated as if they had neither senses nor understanding. When any thing is to be done, let them be asked to invent the best way of doing it. When they see that their invention becomes immediately useful, they will take pleasure in exerting themselves.

  June 4th, 1796. A lady, who had been ruling pencil lines for a considerable time, complained of its being a tiresome operation; and she wished that a quick and easy way of doing it could be invented. Somebody present said they had seen pens for ruling music books, which ruled four lines at a time; and it was asked, whether a leaden rake could not be made to rule a sheet of paper at once.

  Mr. —— said, that he thought such a pencil would not rule well; and he called to S —— , (the same boy we mentioned before) and asked him if he could invent any method of doing the business better. S —— took about a quarter of an hour to consider; and he then described a little machine for ruling a sheet of paper at a single stroke, which his father had executed for him. It succeeded well, and this success was the best reward he could have.

  Another day Mr. —— observed, that the maid, whose business it was to empty a bucket of ashes into an ash-hole, never could be persuaded to do it, because the ashes were blown against her face by the wind; and he determined to invent a method which should make it convenient to her to do as she was desired. The maid usually threw the ashes into a heap on the sheltered side of a wall; the thing to be done was, to make her put the bucket through a hole in this wall, and empty the ashes on the other side. This problem was given to all the children and grown up persons in the family. One of the children invented the shelf, which, they said, should be like part of the vane of a winnowing machine which they had lately seen; the manner of placing this vane, another of the children suggested: both these ideas joined together, produced the contrivance which was wanted.

  A little model was made in wood of this bucket, which was a pretty toy. The thing itself was executed, and was found useful.

  June 8th, 1796. Mr. —— was balancing a pair of scales very exactly, in which he was going to weigh some opium; this led to a conversation upon scales and weighing. Some one said that the dealers in diamonds must have very exact scales, as the difference of a grain makes such a great difference in their value. S —— was very attentive to this conversation. M —— told him, that jewellers always, if they can, buy diamonds when the air is light, and sell them when it is heavy. S —— did not understand the reason of this, till his father explained to him the general principles of hydrostatics, and showed him a few experiments with bodies of different specific gravity: these experiments were distinctly understood by every body present. The boy then observed, that it was not fair of the jewellers to buy and sell in this manner; they should not, said he, use these weights. Diamonds should be the weights. Diamonds should be weighed against diamonds.

  November, 1795. One day after dinner, the candles had been left for some time without being snuffed; and Mr. —— said he wished candles could be made which would not require snuffing.

  Mrs. * * * * * * * * thought of cutting the wick into several pieces before it was put into the candle, that so, when it burned down to the divisions, the wick might fall off. M —— thought that the wick might be tied tight round at intervals, before it was put into the candle; that when it burned down to the places where it was tied, it would snap off: but Mr. —— objected, that the candle would most likely go out when it had burned down to her knots. It was then proposed to send a stream of oxygene through the candle, instead of a wick. M —— asked if some substance might not be used for wicks which should burn into powder, and fly off or sublime. Mr. —— smiled at this, and said, “Some substance; some kind of air; some chemical mixture! A person ignorant of chemistry always talks of, as an ignorant person in mechanics always says, “Oh, you can do it somehow with a spring.”

  As the company could not immediately discover any way of making candles which should not require to be snuffed, they proceeded to invent ways of putting out a candle at a certain time without hands. The younger part of the company had hopes of solving this problem, and every eye was attentively fixed upon the candle.

  “How would you put it out, S —— ?” said Mr. —— . S —— said, that if a weight, a very little lighter than the extinguisher, were tied to a string, and if the string were put over a pulley, and if the extinguisher were tied to the other end of the string, and the candle put exactly under the extinguisher; the extinguisher would move very, very gently down, and at last put out the candle.

  Mr. —— observed, that whilst it was putting out the candle, there would be a disagreeable smell, because the extinguisher would be a considerable time moving very, very gently down, over the candle after the candle had begun to go out.

  C —— (a girl of twelve years old) spoke next. “I would tie an extinguisher to one end of a thread. I would put this string through a pulley fastened to the ceiling; the other end of this string should be fastened to the middle of another thread, which should be strained between two posts set upright on each side of the candle, so as that the latter string might lean against the candle at any distance you want below the flame. When the candle burns down to this string, it will burn it in two, and the extinguisher will drop upon the candle.”

  This is the exact description of the weaver’s alarm, mentioned in the Philosophical Transactions which C —— had never seen or heard of.

  Mr. —— now showed us the patent extinguisher, which was much approved of by all the rival inventors.

  It is very useful to give children problems which have already been solved, because they can immediately compare their own imperfect ideas with successful inventions, which have actually been brought into real use. We know beforehand what ideas are necessary to complete the invention, and whether the pupil has all the necessary knowledge. Though by the courtesy of poetry, a creative power is ascribed to inventive genius, yet we must be convinced that no genius can invent without materials. Nothing can come of nothing. Invention is nothing more than the new combination of materials. We must judge in general of the ease or difficulty of any invention, either by the number of ideas necessary to be combined, or by the dissimilarity
or analogy of those ideas. In giving any problem to children, we should not only consider whether they know all that is necessary upon the subject, but also, whether that knowledge is sufficiently familiar to their minds, whether circumstances are likely to recall it, and whether they have a perfectly Clear idea of the thing to be done. By considering all these particulars, we may pretty nearly proportion our questions to the capacity of the pupil; and we may lead his mind on step by step from obvious to intricate inventions.

  July 30th, 1796. L —— , who had just returned from Edinburgh, and had taken down in two large volumes, Dr. Black’s Lectures, used to read to us part of them, for about a quarter of an hour, every morning after breakfast. He was frequently interrupted (which interruptions he bore with heroic patience) by Mr. — —’s explanations and comments. When he came to the expansive power of steam, and to the description of the different steam engines which have been invented, Mr. —— stopped to ask B —— , C —— , and S —— , to describe the steam engine in their own words. They all described it in such a manner as to show that they clearly understood the principle of the machine. Only the general principle had been explained to them. L —— , after having read the description of Savary’s and Newcomen’s steam engines, was beginning to read the description of that invented by Mr. Watt; but Mr. —— stopped him, that he might try whether any person present could invent it. Mr. E —— thus stated the difficulty: “In the old steam engine, cold water, you know, is thrown into the cylinder to condense the steam; but in condensing the steam, the cold water at the same time cools the cylinder. Now the cylinder must be heated again, before it can be filled with steam; for till it is heated, it will condense the steam. There is, consequently, a great waste of heat and fuel in the great cylinder. How can you condense the steam without cooling the cylinder?”