important points.
I do not think I was naturally obstinate, but remember going without
food all day, and being sent hungry and exhausted to bed, because I
would not do some trifling thing required of me. I think it was to recite
some lines I knew by heart. I was punished as wilfully obstinate: but
what no one knew then, and what I know now as the fact, was, that
after refusing to do what was required, and bearing anger and threats
in consequence, I lost the power to do it. I became stone: the will was
petrified, and I absolutely could not comply. They might have hacked
me in pieces before my lips could have unclosed to utterance. The
obstinacy was not in the mind, but on the nerves; and I am persuaded
that what we call obstinacy in children, and grownup people, too, is
often something of this kind, and that it may be increased, by
mismanagement, by persistence, or what is called firmness, in the
controlling power, into disease, or something near to it.
There was in my childish mind another cause of suffering besides
those I have mentioned, less acute,
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but more permanent and always unacknowledged. It was fear—fear
of darkness and supernatural influences. As long as I can remember
anything, I remember these horrors of my infancy. How they had
been awakened I do not know; they were never revealed. I had heard
other children ridiculed for such fears, and held my peace. At first
these haunting, thrilling, stifling terrors were vague; afterwards the
form varied; but one of the most permanent was the ghost in Hamlet.
There was a volume of Shakspeare lying about, in which was an
engraving I have not seen since, but it remains distinct in my mind as
a picture. On one side stood Hamlet with his hair on end, literally “like
quills upon the fretful porcupine,” and one hand with all the fingers
outspread. On the other strided the ghost, encased in armour with
nodding plumes; one finger pointing forwards, and all surrounded with
a supernatural light. O that spectre! for three years it followed me up
and down the dark staircase, or stood by my bed: only the blessed
light had power to exorcise it. How it was that I knew, while I trembled
and quaked, that it was unreal, never cried out, never expostulated,
never confessed, I do not know. The figure of Apollyon looming over
Christian, which I had found in an old edition of the “Pilgrim’s
Progress,” was also a great torment. But worse, perhaps, were
certain phantasms without shape,
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things like the vision in Job—“A spirit passed before my face; it stood
still, but I could not discern the form thereof:”—and if not intelligible
voices, there were strange unaccountable sounds filling the air
around with a sort of mysterious life. In daylight I was not only
fearless, but audacious, inclined to defy all power and brave all
danger,—that is, all danger I could see. I remember volunteering to
lead the way through a herd of cattle (among which was a dangerous
bull, the terror of the neighbourhood) armed only with a little stick; but
first I said the Lord’s Prayer fervently. In the ghastly night I never
prayed; terror stifled prayer. These visionary sufferings, in some form
or other, pursued me till I was nearly twelve years old. If I had not
possessed a strong constitution and a strong understanding, which
rejected and contemned my own fears, even while they shook me, I
had been destroyed. How much weaker children suffer in this way, I
have since known; and have known how to bring them help and
strength, through sympathy and knowledge, the sympathy that
soothes and does not encourage—the knowledge that dispels, and
does not suggest, the evil.
People, in general, even those who have been much interested in
education, are not aware of the sacred duty of truth, exact truth in
their intercourse
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with children. Limit what you tell them according to the measure of
their faculties; but let what you say be the truth. Accuracy not merely
as to fact, but well-considered accuracy in the use of words, is
essential with children. I have read some wise book on the treatment
of the insane, in which absolute veracity and accuracy in speaking is
prescribed as a curative principle; and deception for any purpose is
deprecated as almost fatal to the health of the patient. Now, it is a
good sanatory principle, that what is curative is preventive; and that
an unhealthy state of mind, leading to madness, may, in some
organisations, be induced by that sort of uncertainty and perplexity
which grows up where the mind has not been accustomed to truth in
its external relations. It is like breathing for a continuance an impure
or confined air.
Of the mischief that may be done to a childish mind by a falsehood
uttered in thoughtless gaiety, I remember an absurd and yet a painful
instance. A visitor was turning over, for a little girl, some prints, one of
which represented an Indian widow springing into the fire kindled for
the funeral pile of her husband. It was thus explained to the child,
who asked innocently, whether, if her father died, her mother would
be burned? The person to whom the question was addressed, a
lively, amiable woman, was probably much amused by the question,
and an
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swered, giddily, “Oh, of course,—certainly!” and was believed
implicitly. But thenceforth, for many weary months, the mind of that
child was haunted and tortured by the image of her mother springing
into the devouring flames, and consumed by fire, with all the
accessories of the picture, particularly the drums beating to drown her
cries. In a weaker organisation, the results might have been
permanent and serious. But to proceed.
These terrors I have described had an existence external to myself: I
had no power over them to shape them by my will, and their power
over me vanished gradually before a more dangerous infatuation,—
the propensity to reverie. This shaping spirit of imagination began
when I was about eight or nine years old to haunt my inner life. I can
truly say that, from ten years old to fourteen or fifteen, I lived a double
existence; one outward, linking me with the external sensible world,
the other inward, creating a world to and for itself, conscious to itself
only. I carried on for whole years a series of actions, scenes, and
adventures; one springing out of another, and coloured and modified
by increasing knowledge. This habit grew so upon me, that there
were moments—as when I came to some crisis in my imaginary
adventures,—when I was not more awake to outward things than in
sleep,—scarcely took cognisance of the beings around me.
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When punished for idleness by being placed in solitary confinement
(the worst of all punishments for children), the intended penance was
nothing less than a delight and an emancipation, giving me up to my
dreams. I had a very strict and very accomplished governess, one of
the cleverest women I have ever met with in my life; but nothing of
this was known or even suspected by her, and I exulted in possessing
something which her power could not reach. My reveries were my
real life: it was an unhealthy state of things.
Those who are engaged in the training of children will perhaps pause
here. It may be said, in the first place, How are we to reach those
recesses of the inner life which the God who made us keeps from
every eye but his own? As when we walk over the field in spring we
are aware of a thousand influences and processes at work of which
we have no exact knowledge or clear perception, yet must watch and
use accordingly,—so it is with education. And secondly, it may be
asked, if such secret processes be working unconscious mischief,
where the remedy? The remedy is in employment. Then the mother
or the teacher echoes with astonishment, “Employment! the child is
employed from morning till night; she is learning a dozen sciences
and languages; she has masters and lessons for every hour of every
day: with her pencil,
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her piano, her books, her companions, her birds, her flowers,—what
can she want more?” An energetic child even at a very early age, and
yet farther as the physical organisation is developed, wants
something more and something better; employment which shall bring
with it the bond of a higher duty than that which centres in self and
self-improvement; employment which shall not merely cultivate the
understanding, but strengthen and elevate the conscience;
employment for the higher and more generous faculties; employment
addressed to the sympathies; employment which has the aim of
utility, not pretended, but real, obvious, direct utility. A girl who as a
mere child is not always being taught or being amused, whose mind
is early restrained by the bond of definite duty, and thrown out of the
limit of self, will not in after years be subject to fancies that disturb or
to reveries that absorb, and the present and the actual will have that
power they ought to have as combined in due degree with desire and
anticipation.
The Roman Catholic priesthood understand this well: employment,
which enlists with the spiritual the sympathetic part of our being, is a
means through which they guide both young and adult minds.
Physicians who have to manage various states of mental and moral
disease understand this well; they speak of the necessity of
employment (not mere
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amusement) as a curative means, but of employment with the direct
aim of usefulness, apprehended and appreciated by the patient, else
it is nothing. It is the same with children. Such employment, chosen
with reference to utility, and in harmony with the faculties, would
prove in many cases either preventive or curative. In my own case,
as I now think, it would have been both.
There was a time when it was thought essential that women should
know something of cookery, something of medicine, something of
surgery. If all these things are far better understood now than
heretofore, is that a reason why a well educated woman should be
left wholly ignorant of them? A knowledge of what people call
“common things”—of the elements of physiology, of the conditions of
health, of the qualities, nutritive or remedial, of substances commonly
used as food or medicine, and the most economical and most
beneficial way of applying both,—these should form a part of the
system of every girls’ school—whether for the higher or the lower
classes. At present you shall see a girl studying chemistry, and
attending Faraday’s lectures, who would be puzzled to compound a
rice-pudding or a cup of barley-water: and a girl who could work
quickly a complicated sum in the Rule of Three, afterwards wasting a
fourth of her husband’s wages through want of management.
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In my own case, how much of the practical and the sympathetic in my
nature was exhausted in airy visions!
As to the stuff out of which my waking dreams were composed, I
cannot tell you much. I have a remembrance that I was always a
princess-heroine in the disguise of a knight, a sort of Clorinda or
Britomart, going about to redress the wrongs of the poor, fight giants,
and kill dragons; or founding a society in some far-off solitude or
desolate island, which would have rivalled that of Gonsalez, where
there were to be no tears, no tasks, and no laws,—except those
which I made myself,—no caged birds nor tormented kittens.
Enough of the pains, and mistakes, and vagaries of childhood; let me
tell of some of its pleasures equally unguessed and unexpressed. A
great, and exquisite source of enjoyment arose out of an early,
instinctive, boundless delight in external beauty. How this went hand
in hand with my terrors and reveries, how it could coexist with them, I
cannot
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tell now—it was so; and if this sympathy with the external, living,
beautiful world, had been properly, scientifically cultivated, and
directed to useful definite purposes, it would have been the best
remedy for much that was morbid: this was not the case, and we
were, unhappily for me, too early removed from the country to a town
residence. I can remember, however, that in very early years the
appearances of nature did truly “haunt me like a passion;” the stars
were to me as the gates of heaven; the rolling of the wave to the
shore, the graceful weeds and grasses bending before the breeze as
they grew by the wayside; the minute and delicate forms of insects;
the trembling shadows of boughs and leaves dancing on the ground
in the highest noon; these were to me perfect pleasures of which the
imagery now in my mind is distinct. Wordsworth’s poem of “The
Daffodils,” the one beginning—
“I wandered lonely as a
cloud,”
may appear to some unintelligible or overcharged, but to me it was a
vivid truth, a simple fact; and if Wordsworth had been then in my
hands I think I must have loved him. It was this intense sense of
beauty which gave the first zest to poetry: I love it, not because it told
me what I did not know, but because it helped me to words in which
to clothe my own knowledge and perceptions, and reflected back
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the pictures unconsciously hoarded up in my mind. This was what
made Thomson’s “Seasons” a favourite book when I first began to
read for my own amusement, and before I could understand one half
of it; St. Pierre’s “Indian Cottage” (“La Chaumière Indienne”) was also
charming, either because it reflected my dreams, or gave me new
stuff for them in pictures of an external world quite different from that I
inhabited,—palm-trees, elephants, tigers, dark-turbaned men with
flowing draperies; and the “Arabian Nights” completed my Oriental
intoxication, which lasted for a long time.
I have said little of the impressions left by books, and of my first
religious notions. A friend of mine had once the wise idea of collecting
together a variety of evidence as to the impressions left by certain
books on childish or immature minds: If carried out, it would have
been one of the most valuable additions to educational experience
ever made. For myself I did not much care about the books put into
my hands, nor imbibe much information from them. I had a great
taste, I am sorry to say, for forbidden books; yet it was not the
forbidden books that did the mischief, except in their being read
furtively. I remember impressions of vice and cruelty from some parts
of the Old Testament and Goldsmith’s “History of England,” which I
shudder to recall. Shakspeare was on the forbidden
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shelf. I had read him all through between seven and ten years old. He
never did me any moral mischief. He never soiled my mind with any
disordered image. What was exceptionable and coarse in language I
passed by without attaching any meaning whatever to it. How it might
have been if I had read Shakspeare first when I was fifteen or
sixteen, I do not know; perhaps the occasional coarsenesses and
obscurities might have shocked the delicacy or puzzled the
intelligence of that sensitive and inquiring age. But at nine or ten I had
no comprehension of what was unseemly; what might be obscure in
words to wordy commentators, was to me lighted up by the idea I
found or interpreted for myself—right or wrong.
No; I repeat, Shakspeare—bless him!—never did me any moral
mischief. Though the Witches in Macbeth troubled me,—though the
Ghost in Hamlet terrified me (the picture that is,—for the spirit in
Shakspeare was solemn and pathetic, not hideous),—though poor
little Arthur cost me an ocean of tears,—yet much that was obscure,
and all that was painful and revolting was merged on the whole in the
vivid presence of a new, beautiful, vigorous, living world. The plays
which I now think the most wonderful produced comparatively little
effect on my fancy: Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Macbeth, struck me
then less than the historical plays, and far less
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than the Midsummer Night’s Dream and Cymbeline. It may be
thought, perhaps, that Falstaff is not a character to strike a child, or to
be understood by a child:—no; surely not. To me Falstaff was not
witty and wicked—only irresistibly fat and funny; and I remember lying
on the ground rolling with laughter over some of the scenes in Henry
the Fourth,—the mock play, and the seven men in buckram. But The
Tempest and Cymbeline were the plays I liked best and knew best.
Altogether I should say that in my early years books were known to
me, not as such, not for their general contents, but for some especial
image or picture I had picked out of them and assimilated to my own
mind and mixed up with my own life. For example out of Homer’s
Odyssey (lent to me by the parish clerk) I had the picture of Nasicaa
and her maidens going down in their chariots to wash their linen: so
that when the first time I went to the Pitti Palace, and could hardly see
the pictures through blinding tears, I saw that picture of Rubens,
which all remember who have been at Florence, and it flashed delight
and refreshment through those remembered childish associations.
The Syrens and Polypheme left also vivid pictures on my fancy. The
Iliad, on the contrary, wearied me, except the parting of Hector and
Andromache, in which the child, scared by its father’s
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dazzling helm and nodding crest, remains a vivid image in my mind
from that time.
The same parish clerk—a curious fellow in his way—lent me also
some religious tracts and stories, by Hannah More. It is most certain
that more moral mischief was done to me by some of these than by
all Shakspeare’s plays together. These so-called pious tracts first
introduced me to a knowledge of the vices of vulgar life, and the
excitements of a vulgar religion,—the fear of being hanged and the
fear of hell became co-existent in my mind; and the teaching resolved
itself into this,—that it was not by being naughty, but by being found
out, that I was to incur the risk of both. My fairy world was better!
About Religion:—I was taught religion as children used to be taught it
in my younger days, and are taught it still in some cases, I believe—
through the medium of creeds and catechisms. I read the Bible too
early, and too indiscriminately, and too irreverently. Even the New
Testament was too early placed in my hands; too early made a lesson
book, as the custom then was. The letter of the Scriptures—the
words—were familiarised to me by sermonising and dogmatising,
long before I could enter into the spirit. Meantime, happily, another
religion was growing up in my heart, which, strangely enough,
seemed to me quite apart from
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that which was taught,—which, indeed, I never in any way regarded
as the same which I was taught when I stood up wearily on a Sunday
to repeat the collect and say the catechism. It was quite another
thing. Not only the taught religion and the sentiment of faith and
adoration were never combined, but it never for years entered into my
head to combine them; the first remained extraneous, the latter had
gradually taken root in my life, even from the moment my mother
joined my little hands in prayer. The histories out of the Bible (the
Parables especially) were, however, enchanting to me, though my
interpretation of them was in some instances the very reverse of
correct or orthodox. To my infant conception our Lord was a being
who had come down from heaven to make people good, and to tell
them beautiful stories. And though no pains were spared to
indoctrinate me, and all my pastors and masters took it for granted
that my ideas were quite satisfactory, nothing could be more
confused and heterodox.
It is a common observation that girls of lively talents are apt to grow
pert and satirical. I fell into this danger when about ten years old.
Sallies at the expense of certain people, ill-looking, or ill-dressed, or
ridiculous, or foolish, had been laughed at and applauded in
company, until, without being
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naturally malignant, I ran some risk of becoming so from sheer vanity.
The fables which appeal to our higher moral sympathies may
sometimes do as much for us as the truths of science. So thought our
Saviour when he taught the multitude in parables.
A good clergyman who lived near us, a famous Persian scholar, took
it into his head to teach me Persian (I was then about seven years
old), and I set to work with infinite delight and earnestness. All I
learned was soon forgotten; but a few years afterwards, happening to
stumble on a volume of Sir William Jones’s works—his Persian
grammar—it revived my Orientalism, and I began to study it eagerly.
Among the exercises given was a Persian fable or poem—one of
those traditions of our Lord which are preserved in the East. The
beautiful apologue of “St. Peter and the Cherries,” which Goethe has
versified or imitated, is a well known example. This fable I allude to
was something similar, but I have not met with the original these forty
years, and must give it here from memory.
“Jesus,” says the story, “arrived one evening at the gates of a certain
city, and he sent his disciples forward to prepare supper, while he
himself, intent on doing good, walked through the streets into the
market place.
“And he saw at the corner of the market some
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people gathered together looking at an object on the ground; and he
drew near to see what it might be. It was a dead dog, with a halter
round his neck, by which he appeared to have been dragged through
the dirt; and a viler, a more abject, a more unclean thing, never met
the eyes of man.
“And those who stood by looked on with abhorrence.
“‘Faugh!’ said one, stopping his nose; ‘it pollutes the air.’ ‘How long,’
said another, ‘shall this foul beast offend our sight?’ ‘Look at his torn
hide,’ said a third; ‘one could not even cut a shoe out of it.’ ‘And his
ears,’ said a fourth, ‘all