Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0057/00575.txt

Text File | 1993-07-27 | 13KB | 259 lines

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$Pretitle{}
$Title{Hard Times
Chapter II}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Dickens, Charles}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{gradgrind
fact
sir
gentleman
thomas
upon
girl
sissy
always
room}
$Date{}
$Log{}
Title:       Hard Times
Book:        Book The First: Sowing
Author:      Dickens, Charles

Chapter II

Murdering The Innocents

     Thomas Gradgrind, sir.  A man of realities.  A man of facts and
calculations.  A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are
four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for any
thing over.  Thomas Gradgrind, sir - peremptorily Thomas - Thomas Gradgrind.
With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his
pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell
you exactly what it comes to.  It is a mere question of figures, a case of
simple arithmetic.  You might hope to get some other nonsensical belief into
the head of George Gradgrind, or Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or
Joseph Gradgrind (all supposititious, non-existent persons), but into the head
of Thomas Gradgrind - no, sir!

     In such terms Mr. Gradgrind always mentally introduced himself, whether
to his private circle of acquaintance, or to the public in general.  In such
terms, no doubt, substituting the words "boys and girls," for "sir," Thomas
Gradgrind now presented Thomas Gradgrind to the little pitchers before him,
who were to be filled so full of facts.

     Indeed, as he eagerly sparkled at them from the cellarage before
mentioned, he seemed a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and
prepared to blow them clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge.
He seemed a galvanising apparatus, too, charged with a grim mechanical
substitute for the tender young imaginations that were to be stormed away.

     "Girl number twenty," said Mr. Gradgrind, squarely pointing with his
square forefinger, "I don't know that girl.  Who is that girl?"

     "Sissy Jupe, sir," explained number twenty, blushing, standing up, and
curtseying.

     "Sissy is not a name," said Mr. Gradgrind.  "Don't call yourself Sissy.
Call yourself Cecilia."

     "It's father as calls me Sissy, sir," returned the young girl in a
trembling voice, and with another curtsey.

     "Then he has no business to do it," said Mr. Gradgrind.  "Tell him he
mustn't.  Cecilia Jupe.  Let me see.  What is your father?"

     "He belongs to the horse-riding, if you please, sir."

     Mr. Gradgrind frowned, and waved off the objectionable calling with his
hand.

     "We don't want to know anything about that, here.  You mustn't tell us
about that, here.  Your father breaks horses, don't he?"

     "If you please, sir, when they can get any to break, they do break horses
in the ring, sir."

     "You mustn't tell us about the ring here.  Very well, then.  Describe
your father as a horsebreaker.  He doctors sick horses, I dare say?"

     "Oh yes, sir."

     "Very well, then.  He is a veterinary surgeon, a farrier, and
horsebreaker.  Give me your definition of a horse."

     (Sissy Jupe thrown into the greatest alarm by this demand.)

     "Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!" said Mr. Gradgrind, for
the general behoof of all the little pitchers.  "Girl number twenty possessed
of no facts, in reference to one of the commonest of animals! Some boy's
definition of a horse.  Bitzer, yours."

     The square finger, moving here and there, lighted suddenly on Bitzer,
perhaps because he chanced to sit in the same ray of sunlight which, darting
in at one of the bare windows of the intensely whitewashed room, irradiated
Sissy.  For, the boys and girls sat on the face of the inclined plane in two
compact bodies, divided up the centre by a narrow interval; and Sissy, being
at the corner of a row on the sunny side, came in for the beginning of a
sunbeam, of which Bitzer, being in the corner of a row on the other side, a
few rows in advance, caught the end.  But, whereas the girl was so dark-eyed
and dark-haired, that she seemed to receive a deeper and more lustrous colour
from the sun, when it shone upon her, the boy was so light-eyed and
light-haired that the self-same rays appeared to draw out of him what little
colour he ever possessed.  His cold eyes would hardly have been eyes, but for
the short ends of lashes which, by bringing them into immediate contrast with
something paler than themselves, expressed their form.  His short-cropped hair
might have been a mere continuation of the sandy freckles on his forehead and
face.  His skin was so unwholesomely deficient in the natural tinge, that he
looked as though, if he were cut, he would bleed white.

     "Bitzer," said Thomas Gradgrind.  "Your definition of a horse."

     "Quadruped.  Graminivorous.  Forty teeth, namely twenty four grinders,
four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive.  Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy
countries, sheds hoofs, too.  Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron.
Age known by marks in mouth." Thus (and much more) Bitzer.

     "Now girl number twenty," said Mr. Gradgrind.  "You know what a horse
is."

     She curtseyed again, and would have blushed deeper, if she could have
blushed deeper than she had blushed all the time.  Bitzer, after rapidly
blinking at Thomas Gradgrind with both eyes at once, and so catching the light
upon his quivering ends of lashes that they looked like the antennae of busy
insects, put his knuckles to his freckled forehead, and sat down again.

     The third gentleman now stepped forth.  A mighty man at cutting and
drying, he was; a government officer; in his way (and in most other people's
too), a professed pugilist; always in training, always with a system to force
down the general throat like a bolus, always to be heard at the bar of his
little Public-office, ready to fight all England.  To continue in fistic
phraseology, he had a genius for coming up to the scratch, wherever and
whatever it was, and proving himself an ugly customer.  He would go in and
damage any subject whatever with his right, follow up with his left, stop,
exchange, counter, bore his opponent (he always fought All England) to the
ropes, and fall upon him neatly.  He was certain to knock the wind out of
common sense, and render that unlucky adversary deaf to the call of time.  And
he had it in charge from high authority to bring about the great public-office
Millennium, when Commissioners should reign upon earth.

     "Very well," said this gentleman, briskly smiling, and folding his arms.
"That's a horse.  Now, let me ask you girls and boys, Would you paper a room
with representations of horses?"

     After a pause, one half the children cried in chorus, "Yes, sir!" Upon
which the other half, seeing in the gentleman's face that Yes was wrong, cried
out in chorus, "No sir!" - as the custom is, in these examinations.

     "Of course, No.  Why wouldn't you?"

     A pause.  One corpulent slow boy, with a wheezy manner of breathing,
ventured the answer, Because he wouldn't paper a room at all, but would paint
it.

     "You must paper it," said the gentleman, rather warmly.

     "You must paper it," said Thomas Gradgrind, "whether you like it or not.
Don't tell us you wouldn't paper it.  What do you mean boy?"

     "I'll explain to you, then," said the gentleman, after another and a
dismal pause, "why you wouldn't paper a room with representations of horses.
Do you ever see horses walking up and down the sides of rooms in reality - in
fact?  Do you?"

     "Yes, sir!" from one half.  "No, sir!" from the other.

     "Of course no," said the gentleman, with an indignant look at the wrong
half.  "Why, then, you are not to see anywhere, what you don't see in fact;
you are not to have anywhere, what you don't have in fact.  What is called
Taste, is only another name for Fact."

     Thomas Gradgrind nodded his approbation.

     "This is a new principal, a discovery, a great discovery," said the
gentleman.  "Now I'll try you again.  Suppose you were going to carpet a room.
Would you use a carpet having a representation of flowers upon it?"

     There being a general conviction by this time that "No, sir!" was always
the right answer to this gentleman, the chorus of No was very strong.  Only a
few feeble stragglers said Yes; among them Sissy Jupe.

     "Girl number twenty," said the gentleman, smiling in calm strength of
knowledge.

     Sissy blushed, and stood up.

     "So you would carpet your room - or your husband's room, if you were a
grown woman, and had a husband - with representations of flowers, would you,"
said the gentleman, "Why would you?"

     "If you please, sir, I am very fond of flowers," returned the girl.

     "And is that why you would put tables and chairs upon them, and have
people walking over them with heavy boots?"

     "It wouldn't hurt them, sir.  They wouldn't crush and wither if you
please, sir.  They would be the pictures of what was very pretty and pleasant,
and I would fancy - "

     "Ay, ay, ay!  But you mustn't fancy," cried the gentleman, quite elated
by coming so happily to his point.  "That's it!  You are never to fancy."

     "You are not, Cecelia Jupe," Thomas Gradgrind solemnly repeated, "to do
anything of that kind."

     "Fact, fact, fact!" said the gentleman.  And "Fact, fact, fact!" repeated
Thomas Gradgrind.

     "You are to be in all things regulated and governed," said the gentleman,
"by fact.  We hope to have before long, a board of fact, composed of
commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and
of nothing but fact.  You must discard the word fancy altogether.  You have
nothing to do with it.  You are not to have, in any object of use or ornament,
what would be a contradiction in fact.  You don't walk upon flowers in fact;
you cannot be allowed to walk upon flowers in carpets.  You don't find that
foreign birds and butterflies come and perch upon your crockery; you can not
be permitted to paint foreign birds and butterflies upon your crockery.  You
never meet with quadrupeds going up and down walls; you must have not have
quadrupeds represented upon walls.  You must use," said the gentleman, "for
all these purposes, combinations and modifications (in primary colours) of
mathematical figures which are susceptible of proof and demonstrations. This
is the new discovery.  This is fact.  This is taste."

     The girl curtseyed and sat down.  She was very young, and she looked as
if she were frightened by the matter of fact prospect the world afforded.

     "Now, if Mr. M'Choakumchild," said the gentleman, "will proceed to give
his first lesson here, Mr. Gradgrind, I shall be happy, at your request, to
observe his mode of procedure."

     Mr. Gradgrind was much obliged.  "Mr. M'Choakumchild, we only wait for
you."

     So, Mr. M'Choakumchild began in his best manner.  He and some 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 pianoforte legs.  He had
been put through an immense variety of paces, and had answered volumes of
head-breaking questions.  Orthography, etymology, syntax, and prosody,
biography, astronomy, geography, and general cosmography, the sciences of
compound proportion, algebra, land-surveying and levelling, vocal music and
drawing from models, were all the ends of his ten chilled fingers.  He had
worked his stony way into Her Majesty's most Honourable Privy Council's
Schedule B, and had taken the bloom off the higher branches of mathematics and
physical science, French, German, Latin, and Greek.  He knew all about all the
Water Sheds of all the world (whatever they are), and all the histories of all
the peoples, and all the names of all the rivers and mountains, and all the
productions, manners, and customs of all the countries, and all their
boundaries and bearings on the two and thirty points of the compass.  Ah,
rather overdone, M'Choakumchild.  If he had only learned a little less, how
infinitely better he might have been taught much more!

     He went to work in this preparatory lesson, not unlike Morgiana in the
Forty Thieves: looking into all the vessels ranged before him, one after
another, to see what they contained.  Say, good M'Choakumchild. When from thy
boiling store, thou shalt fill each jar brim full by and by, dost thou think
that thou wilt always kill outright the robber Fancy lurking within - or
sometimes only maim him and distort him!