“How old are you, Phil?”
Phil’s answer is intended to indicate the lack of even mathematical power in those who, like Phil, never had any training of the imagination, nor any other training to define their apperceptive centres of number beyond ten.
“I’m something with a eight in it. It can’t be eighty. Nor yet eighteen. It’s betwixt ’em somewheres. I was just eight, agreeable to the parish calculation, when I went with the tinker. That was April Fool Day. I was able to count up to ten; and when April Fool Day came round again I says to myself, ‘Now, old chap, you’re one and a eight in it.’ April Fool Day after that I says, ‘Now, old chap, you’re two and a eight in it.’ In course of time I come to ten and a eight in it; two tens and a eight in it. When it got so high it got the upper hand of me; but this is how I always know there’s a eight in it.”
The folly of trying to make a man moral by precept alone; the fact that character is developed by what we do, by true living, by what goes out in action, not by what comes in in maxims or theories, is shown in Martin Chuzzlewit.
It has been remarked that Mr. Pecksniff was a moral man. So he was. Perhaps there never was a more moral man than Mr. Pecksniff, especially in his conversation and correspondence. It was once said of him by a homely admirer that he had a Fortunatus’s purse of gold sentiments in his inside. In this particular he was like the girl in the fairy tale, except that if they were not actual diamonds which fell from his lips, they were the very brightest paste and shone prodigiously. He was a most exemplary man; fuller of virtuous precept than a copy book. Some people likened him to a direction post, which is always telling the way to a place, and never goes there.
The best of architects and land surveyors kept a horse, in whom the enemies already mentioned more than once in these pages pretended to detect a fanciful resemblance to his master. Not in his outward person, for he was a raw-boned, haggard horse, always on a much shorter allowance of corn than Mr. Pecksniff; but in his moral character, wherein, said they, he was full of promise, but of no performance. He was always, in a manner, going to go, and never going.
One of the worst results that can follow a system of training is to make a man a hypocrite. It is nearly as bad to store a mind with good thoughts or fill a heart with good feelings without giving the character the tendency by practical experience to carry into effect so far as possible its good feelings and high purposes. Mr. Pecksniff was a moral monstrosity. We should create no more Pecksniffs. A different ideal is taught in the remark made by Martin Chuzzlewit to Mary, “Endeavouring to be anything that’s good, and being it, is, with you, all one.”
Executive training is emphasized in Nicholas Nickleby. Old Ralph Nickleby said of Nicholas: “The old story—always thinking, and never doing.” The same thought is expressed very clearly in the pregnant sentence written about Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities: “Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise.” The saddest sight in the world is a man or woman using power for evil. It is nearly as sad to see a man or woman with power, but without power to use it wisely.
In A Tale of Two Cities he caricatures admirably the class who cling to old customs and conventions, and decline even to discuss changes or improvements, in his description of Tellson’s Bank.
Tellson’s Bank by Temple Bar was an old-fashioned place, even in the year one thousand seven hundred and eighty. It was very small, very dark, very ugly, very incommodious. It was an old-fashioned place, moreover, in the moral attribute that the partners in the house were proud of its smallness, proud of its darkness, proud of its ugliness, proud of its incommodiousness. They were even boastful of its eminence in those particulars, and were fired by an express conviction that, if it were less objectionable, it would be less respectable. This was no passive belief, but an active weapon which they flashed at more convenient places of business. Tellson’s (they said) wanted no elbowroom, Tellson’s wanted no light, Tellson’s wanted no embellishment. Noakes and Co.’s might, or Snooks Brothers’ might: but Tellson’s, thank heaven!