A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies. / 2nd ed.

by Mrs. Jameson

In regard to truth—always such a difficulty in education,—I certainly had, as a child, and like most children, confused ideas about it. I had a more distinct and absolute idea of honour than of truth,—a mistake into which our conventional morality leads those who educate and those who are educated. I knew very well, in a general way, that to tell a lie was wicked; to lie for my own profit or pleasure, or to the hurt of others, was, according to my infant code of morals, worse than wicked—it was dishonourable. But I had no compunction about telling fictions;—inventing scenes and circumstances, which I related as real, and with a keen sense of triumphant enjoyment in seeing the listener taken in by a most artful and ingenious concatenation of impossibilities. In this respect “Ferdinand Mendez Pinto, that liar of the first magnitude,” was nothing in comparison to me. I must have been twelve years old before my conscience was first awakened up to a sense of the necessity of truth as a principle, as well as its holiness as a virtue. Afterwards, having to set right the minds of others cleared my own mind on this and some other 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, 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, 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 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 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. 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, 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 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.