Hard Times
room with representations of horses?’
After a pause, one half of 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 principle, 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 the 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, Cecilia 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 cannot be permitted to paint foreign birds
and butterflies upon your crockery. You never meet with quadrupeds going
up and down walls; you must 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 demonstration. 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 at 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 learnt a little less,
how infinitely better he might have 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!
CHAPTER III
A LOOPHOLE
MR. GRADGRIND walked homeward from the school, in a state of considerable
satisfaction. It was his school, and he intended it to be a model. He
intended every child in it to be a model—just as the young Gradgrinds
were all models.
There were five young Gradgrinds, and they were models every one. They
had been lectured at, from their tenderest years; coursed, like little
hares. Almost as soon as they could run alone, they had been made to run
to the lecture-room. The first object with which they had an
association, or of which they had a remembrance, was a large black board
with a dry Ogre chalking ghastly white figures on it.
Not that they knew, by name or nature, anything about an Ogre Fact
forbid! I only use the word to express a monster in a lecturing castle,
with Heaven knows how many heads manipulated into one, taking childhood
captive, and dragging it into gloomy statistical dens by the hair.
No little Gradgrind had ever seen a face in the moon; it was up in the
moon before it could speak distinctly. No little Gradgrind had ever
learnt the silly jingle, Twinkle, twinkle, little star; how I wonder what
you are! No little Gradgrind had ever known wonder on the subject, each
little Gradgrind having at five years old dissected the Great Bear like a
Professor Owen, and driven Charles’s Wain like a locomotive
engine-driver. No little Gradgrind had ever associated a cow in a field
with that famous cow with the crumpled horn who tossed the dog who
worried the cat who killed the rat who ate the malt, or with that yet
more famous cow who swallowed Tom Thumb: it had never heard of those
celebrities, and had only been introduced to a cow as a graminivorous
ruminating quadruped with several stomachs.
To his matter-of-fact home, which was called Stone Lodge, Mr. Gradgrind
directed his steps. He had virtually retired from the wholesale hardware
trade before he built Stone Lodge, and was now looking about for a
suitable opportunity of making an arithmetical figure in Parliament.
Stone Lodge was situated on a moor within a mile or two of a great
town—called Coketown in the present faithful guide-book.
A very regular feature on the face of the country, Stone Lodge was. Not
the least disguise toned down or shaded off that uncompromising fact in
the landscape. A great square house, with a heavy portico darkening the
principal windows, as its master’s heavy brows overshadowed his eyes. A
calculated, cast up, balanced, and proved house. Six windows on this
side of the door, six on that side; a total of twelve in this wing, a
total of twelve in the other wing; four-and-twenty carried over to the
back wings. A lawn and garden and an infant avenue, all ruled straight
like a botanical account-book. Gas and ventilation, drainage and
water-service, all of the primest quality. Iron clamps and girders,
fire-proof from top to bottom; mechanical lifts for the housemaids, with
all their brushes and brooms; everything that heart could desire.
Everything? Well, I suppose so. The little Gradgrinds had cabinets in
various departments of science too. They had a little conchological
cabinet, and a little metallurgical cabinet, and a little mineralogical
cabinet; and the specimens were all arranged and labelled, and the bits
of stone and ore looked as though they might have been broken from the
parent substances by those tremendously hard instruments their own names;
and, to paraphrase the idle legend of Peter Piper, who had never found
his way into their nursery, If the greedy little Gradgrinds grasped at
more than this, what was it for good gracious goodness’ sake, that the
greedy little Gradgrinds grasped it!
Their father walked on in a hopeful and satisfied frame of mind. He was
an affectionate father, after his manner; but he would probably have
described himself (if he had been put, like Sissy Jupe, upon a
definition) as ‘an eminently practical’ father. He had a particular
pride in the phrase eminently practical, which was considered to have a
special application to him. Whatsoever the public meeting held in
Coketown, and whatsoever the subject of such meeting, some Coketowner was
sure to seize the occasion of alluding to his eminently practical friend
Gradgrind. This always pleased the eminently practical friend. He knew
it to be his due, but his due was acceptable.
He had reached the neutral ground upon the outskirts of the town, which
was neither town nor country, and yet was either spoiled, when his ears
were invaded by the sound of music. The clashing and banging band
attached to the horse-riding establishment, which had there set up its
rest in a wooden pavilion, was in full bray. A flag, floating from the
summit of the temple, proclaimed to mankind that it was ‘Sleary’s
Horse-riding’ which claimed their suffrages. Sleary himself, a stout
modern statue with a money-box at its elbow, in an ecclesiastical niche
of early Gothic architecture, took the money. Miss Josephine Sleary, as
some very long and very narrow strips of printed bill announced, was then
inaugurating the entertainments with her graceful equestrian Tyrolean
flower-act. Among the other pleasing but always strictly moral wonders
which must be seen to be believed, Signor Jupe was that afternoon to
‘elucidate the diverting accomplishments of his highly trained performing
dog Merrylegs.’ He was also to exhibit ‘his astounding feat of throwing
seventy-five hundred-weight in rapid succession backhanded over his head,
thus forming a fountain of solid iron in mid-air, a feat never before
attempted in this or any other country, and which having elicited such
rapturous plaudits from enthusiastic throngs it cannot be withdrawn.’
The same Signor Jupe was to ‘enliven the varied performances at frequent
intervals with his chaste Shaksperean quips and retorts.’ Lastly, he was
to wind them up by appearing in his favourite character of Mr. William