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You've got to have heart

"Father, you trained me from my cradle. How could you give me life and take from me all those precious things that make life worth living. Where are the graces of my soul? Where are the sentiments of my heart? What have you done, oh Father, with the garden that should have bloomed in this great wilderness here?" And with that she struck her breast.

So spoke young Louisa to her stern father, Mr. Gradgrind, in Dickens's novel Hard Times. And Mr. Gradgrind deserved to be spoken to in those terms, for he had been a strict advocate of fact over fantasy. He ran his household the way he ran his school, whose policy was "to teach these boys and girls nothing but facts", to eradicate all sentimentality and imagination, to make the heart subservient to the calculating brain for profit's sake.

The very ambiance of Gradgrind's school reflected something of the hollowness of the man himself and the culture he would create: a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a place. His mouth was thin and hard set, his voice inflexible and dry, his carriage obstinate. His square coat, square knees, square shoulders all served to emphasize his resistance to the least glimmer of romantic fantasy. As Dickens puts it: "As he stared upon the children before him with galvanizing effect from his deep set eyes, he seemed a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, prepared to blow them clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge."

Dickens saw in Mr. Gradgrind and the other movers and shakers of his novel, like Mr. Bounderby and Mr. McChoakumchild, symbols of the increasingly heartless empirical environment in which he lived. Of course, what goes around comes around. Eliminate all pathos from human society; ridicule all faith as foolish illusion and all "bleeding hearts" as wimps and the moment may arrive when people like Mr. Gradgrind may regret their hardnosed philosophy.

Indeed, later in the story, when Gradgrind has to plead with one of his former pupils who is in a position to save his son from prison, he gets the cold shoulder. "But have you no heart?" says Gradgrind. And the old pupil responds in the properly factual way he had been taught, "The circulation, sir, couldn't be carried without one. No man, sir, acquainted with the facts established by Dr. Harvey relative to the circulation of the blood can doubt that I have a heart." In other words, "We all have pumps, Mr. Gradgrind. Isn't that what you taught us?"

The chill of that confrontation followed later by the rebuke of his daughter spoken at the beginning of this essay finally awoke Mr. Gradgrind to the dreadful nature of his blindly "factual, empirical" approach to life. By the end of the novel we find him living to a ripe old age bending his once inflexible theories to appointed circumstances, making his facts and figures subservient to Faith, Hope and Charity; and no longer trying to grind that Heavenly trio in his dusty little mills.

-- Geoff Wood