INDIVIDUALITY.
Dickens began to write definitely about individuality in Martin Chuzzlewit
in 1844. Martin described a company he met in America "who were so
strangely devoid of individual traits of character that any one of them
might have changed minds with the other and nobody would have found it
out."
In David Copperfield he makes Traddles, who was trained by Mr. Creakle,
say: "I have no invention at all, not a particle. I suppose there never
was a young man with less originality than I have."
David himself said sagely: "I have encountered some fine ladies and
gentlemen who might as well have been born caterpillars."
David emphasizes the phase of individuality that teaches the power of each
individual to do some special good, when he said to Martha when she spoke
of the river as the end of her useless life:
"In the name of the great Judge, before whom you and all of us must stand
at his dread time, dismiss that terrible idea! We can all do some good, if
we will."
In Bleak House Sir Leicester Dedlock is represented as of opinion that he
should at least think for every one in connection with his estate.
The present representative of the Dedlocks is an excellent master. He
supposes all his dependents to be utterly bereft of individual
characters, intentions, or opinions, and is persuaded that he was born
to supersede the necessity of their having any. If he were to make a
discovery to the contrary, he would be simply stunned--would never
recover himself, most likely, except to gasp and die.
The same absolute contempt for the individuality of the poor is ridiculed
in The Chimes. Sir Joseph Bowley is a type of the English squire who used
to act on the assumption that he had to care for the workmen on his
estate, and the poor of his neighbourhood, as he did for his horses and
other animals.
"I do my duty as the Poor Man's Friend and Father; and I endeavour to
educate his mind by inculcating on all occasions the one great moral
lesson which that class requires--that is, entire Dependence on
myself. They have no business whatever with--with themselves. If
wicked and designing persons tell them otherwise, and they become
impatient and discontented, and are guilty of insubordinate conduct
and black-hearted ingratitude--which is undoubtedly the case--I am
their Friend and Father still. It is so ordained. It is in the nature
of things. They needn't trouble themselves to think about anything. I
will think for them; I know what is good for them; I am their
perpetual parent. Such is the dispensation of an all-wise Providence."
It is strange that men so commonly ascribe to Providence the dreadful
conditions which have resulted from man's ignorance and selfishness, and
which Providence intended man to reform.
Esther, in Bleak House, speaking of the influence of the chancery suit on
Richard Carstone, said:
"The character of much older and steadier people may be even changed
by the circumstances surrounding them. It would be too much to expect
that a boy's, in its formation, should be the subject of such
influences, and escape them."
I felt this to be true; though, if I may venture to mention what I
thought besides, I thought it much to be regretted that Richard's
education had not counteracted those influences or directed his
character. He had been eight years at a public school, and had
learned, I understood, to make Latin verses of several sorts, in the
most admirable manner. But I never heard that it had been anybody's
business to find out what his natural bent was, or where his failings
lay, or to adapt any kind of knowledge to _him_. _He_ had been adapted
to the verses, and had learned the art of making them to such
perfection, that if he had remained at school until he was of age I
suppose he could only have gone on making them over and over again,
unless he had enlarged his education by forgetting how to do it.
Still, although I had no doubt that they were very beautiful, and very
improving, and very sufficient for a great many purposes of life, and
always remembered all through life, I did doubt whether Richard would
not have profited by some one studying him a little, instead of his
studying them quite so much.
Richard was one of those unstable men who have good abilities, but who do
not use them persistently in the accomplishment of any one purpose, and
who never seem to find the sphere for which they are best fitted. They are
man-products, not God-products. When Richard, after several attempts to
work at other things with high enthusiasm for a few weeks, decided to be a
physician, Esther said:
Mistrusting that he only came to this conclusion because, having never
had much chance of finding out for himself what he was fitted for, and
having never been guided to the discovery, he was taken with the
newest idea, and was glad to get rid of the trouble of consideration,
I wondered whether the Latin verses often ended in this, or whether
Richard's was a solitary case.
Richard very often came to see us while we remained in London (though
he soon failed in his letter writing), and with his quick abilities,
his good spirits, his good temper, his gaiety and freshness, was
always delightful. But though I liked him more and more the better I
knew him, I still felt more and more how much it was to be regretted
that he had been educated in no habits of application and
concentration. The system which had addressed him in exactly the same
manner as it had addressed hundreds of other boys, all varying in
character and capacity, had enabled him to dash through his tasks,
always with fair credit, and often with distinction; but in a fitful,
dazzling way that had confirmed his reliance on those very qualities
in himself which it had been most desirable to direct and train. They
were great qualities, without which no high place can be meritoriously
won; but, like fire and water, though excellent servants, they were
very bad masters. If they had been under Richard's direction, they
would have been his friends; but Richard being under their direction,
they became his enemies.
Any educational system that "addresses hundreds of boys exactly in the
same manner" must destroy their individuality.
In Hard Times Tom Gradgrind became a low, degraded, sensual, dissipated
criminal, and Dickens accounts for his failure by the unnatural restraint,
constant oversight, and the strangling of his imagination in his cradle
and afterward. In other words, the boy's selfhood never had a chance to
develop, and every power he had naturally to make him strong, true, and
independent had helped to work his ruin.
In Little Dorrit Mrs. General is herself a model to be avoided, and her
system of training is ridiculed because she paid no attention whatever to
the selfhood of her pupils except to conceal it artfully and prevent the
recognition of any of the evils by which it was surrounded and which it
should help to overcome.
Mrs. General had no opinions. Her way of forming a mind was to prevent
it from forming opinions. She had a little circular set of mental
grooves or rails, on which she started little trains of other people's
opinions, which never overtook one another and never got anywhere.
Even her propriety could not dispute that there was impropriety in the
world; but Mrs. General's way of getting rid of it was to put it out
of sight, and make believe that there was no such thing. This was
another of her ways of forming a mind--to cram all articles of
difficulty into cupboards, lock them up, and say they had no
existence. It was the easiest way and, beyond all comparison, the
properest.
Mrs. General was not to be told of anything shocking. Accidents,
miseries, and offences were never to be mentioned before her. Passion
was to go to sleep in the presence of Mrs. General, and blood was to
change to milk and water. The little that was left in the world, when
all these deductions were made, it was Mrs. General's province to
varnish. In that formation process of hers, she dipped the smallest of
brushes into the largest of pots, and varnished the surface of every
object that came under consideration. The more cracked it was, the
more Mrs. General varnished it.
There was varnish in Mrs. General's voice, varnish in Mrs. General's
touch, an atmosphere of varnish round Mrs. General's figure.
Dickens wished the training of the real inner selfhood, not the varnishing
of the surface merely. Not what George Macdonald describes as
"sandpapering a boy into a saint," but genuine character development by
the working out of the selfhood in the improvement of its environment,
physically, intellectually, and spiritually.
Briggs's education, in Dombey and Son, had been of such a character that
"his intellectual fruit had nothing of its original flavour remaining."
The character of his real selfhood had been destroyed, not developed, by
his "education."
In Our Mutual Friend Mr. Podsnap is used as a type of the men who not only
see no need for any person else forming opinions, but who take pains to
prevent others forming opinions, so far as possible.
As Mr. Podsnap stood with his back to the drawing-room fire, pulling
up his shirt collar, like a veritable cock of the walk literally
pluming himself in the midst of his possessions, nothing would have
astonished him more than an intimation that Miss Podsnap, or any young
person properly born and bred, could not be exactly put away like the
plate, brought out like the plate, polished like the plate, counted,
weighed, and valued like the plate. That such a young person could
possibly have a morbid vacancy in the heart for anything younger than
the plate, or less monotonous than the plate, or that such a young
person's thoughts could try to scale the region bounded on the north,
south, east, and west by the plate, was a monstrous imagination which
he would on the spot have flourished into space.
Eugene Wrayburn's criticism of his father's habit of choosing professions
for his sons almost as soon as they were born, or even before, without the
slightest possible consideration for their natural aptitudes for the work
to which they were assigned, is a severe attack on a condition which
exists even yet through the failure of the schools or the homes to
discover and reveal to boys and girls their highest powers, so that they
may reach their best growth in school or college and choose the profession
in which they can do most good and attain their most complete evolution.
There is no better field for co-ordinate work by the home and the school
than the joint study of the children to find their sphere of greatest
power. Every child should be helped to find the sphere in which he can
most successfully achieve the highest destiny for himself and for
humanity.
Eugene Wrayburn's father extended his paternal care and forethought for
his children not only by choosing their professions without regard for
their selfhood, but by considerately selecting partners for his sons
without regard for their individual tastes.
Eugene, speaking to Mortimer Lightwood, said:
"My respected father has found, down in the parental neighbourhood, a
wife for his not-generally-respected son."
"With some money, of course?"
"With some money, of course, or he would not have found her. My
respected father--let me shorten the dutiful tautology by substituting
in future M. R. F., which sounds military, and rather like the Duke of
Wellington."
"What an absurd fellow you are, Eugene!"
"Not at all. I assure you. M. R. F. having always in the clearest
manner provided (as he calls it) for his children by prearranging from
the hour of the birth of each, and sometimes from an earlier period,
what the devoted little victim's calling and course in life should be,
M. R. F. prearranged for myself that I was to be the barrister I am
(with the slight addition of an enormous practice, which has not
accrued), and also the married man I am not."
"The first you have often told me."
"The first I have often told you. Considering myself sufficiently
incongruous on my legal eminence, I have until now suppressed my
domestic destiny. You know M. R. F., but not as well as I do. If you
knew him as well as I do, he would amuse you."
"Filially spoken, Eugene!"
"Perfectly so, believe me; and with every sentiment of affectionate
deference toward M. R. F. But if he amuses me, I can't help it. When
my eldest brother was born, of course the rest of us knew (I mean the
rest of us would have known, if we had been in existence) that he was
heir to the family embarrassments--we call it before company the
family estate. But when my second brother was going to be born by and
by, 'This,' says M. R. F., 'is a little pillar of the church.' _Was_
born, and became a pillar of the church--a very shaky one. My third
brother appeared considerably in advance of his engagement to my
mother; but M. R. F., not at all put out by surprise, instantly
declared him a circumnavigator. Was pitchforked into the navy, but has
not circumnavigated. I announced myself, and was disposed of with the
highly satisfactory results embodied before you. When my younger
brother was half an hour old, it was settled by M. R. F. that he
should have a mechanical genius, and so on. Therefore I say M. R. F.
amuses me."
In the same book Bradley Headstone's school is described as one of a
system of schools in which "school buildings, school-teachers, and school
pupils are all according to pattern, and all engendered in the light of
the latest Gospel according to Monotony."
Bradley Headstone himself was a mechanical product of a mechanical system
of uniformity that destroyed independence and individuality of character.
Bradley Headstone, in his decent black coat and waistcoat, and decent
white shirt, and decent formal black tie, and decent pantaloons of
pepper and salt, with his decent silver watch in his pocket and its
decent hair guard round his neck, looked a thoroughly decent young man
of six-and-twenty. He was never seen in any other dress, and yet there
was a certain stiffness in his manner of wearing this, as if there
were a want of adaptation between him and it, recalling some mechanics
in their holiday clothes. He had acquired mechanically a great store
of teacher's knowledge. He could do mental arithmetic mechanically,
sing at sight mechanically, blow various wind instruments
mechanically, even play the great church organ mechanically. From his
early childhood up, his mind had been a place of mechanical stowage.
The arrangement of his wholesale warehouse, so that it might be always
ready to meet the demands of retail dealers--history here, geography
there, astronomy to the right, political economy to the left--natural
history, the physical sciences, figures, music, the lower mathematics,
and what not, all in their several places--this care had imparted to
his countenance a look of care.
Suppression of so much to make room for so much had given him a
constrained manner over and above.
The most remarkable description of a system of training that totally
ignored individuality and chipped and battered and moulded and squeezed
all students into the same pattern or mould is the description of the
normal school in which Mr. Gradgrind's teacher, Mr. M'Choakumchild, was
trained. "Mr. M'Choakumchild and one hundred and forty other schoolmasters
had been lately _turned_ at the same time, in the same factory, on the
same principles, like so many piano legs."
Volumes could not make the sacrifice of individuality clearer than this
sentence does.
At "the grinders' school boys were taught as parrots are."
Doctor Blimber was condemned because in his system "Nature was of no
consequence at all; no matter what a boy was intended to bear, Doctor
Blimber made him bear to pattern somehow or other."
In Doctor Strong's school "we had plenty of liberty." The boys had also
"noble games out of doors" in this model school of Dickens. Liberty and
noble outdoor sports are the best agencies yet revealed to man for the
development of full selfhood in harmony with the fundamental law of
education, self-activity.