Library Collections: Document: Full Text


Editor's Study

Creator: Charles Dudley Warner (author)
Date: May 1896
Publication: Harper’s New Monthly Magazine
Source: Available at selected libraries


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The story of Helen Keller is too well known to need repetition here. My only excuse for increasing the publicity of it, which she and her judicious friends have never sought, is the exceedingly interesting mental and moral problems involved in it. A child of great apparent promise and most winning qualities, she became deaf, dumb, and blind at the age of nine-teen months. Thenceforward, till her seventh year, the soul within her was sealed up from any of the common modes of communication with the world. It could only faintly express itself, and there seemed no way that knowledge could reach it. What was it during that silent period? Was it stagnant, or was it growing? If it was taking in no impressions, usually reckoned necessary to education, was it expanding by what used to be called "innate ideas"? When her teacher, with infinite patience, tact. and skill, at length established communication with her, she found a mind of uncommon quality, so rare that in its rapid subsequent development one is tempted to apply the epithet of genius to it. It was sound, sweet, responsive to a wonderful degree. The perceptions, if I may use that word, were wonderfully acute; the memory was extraordinary; in short, there was discovered a mind of uncommon quality. Was it really a blank that the teacher had to work on, or was there a mind in process of developing independent of contact with other minds? The development, or the growth, was very rapid. Helen Keller is now fifteen, and better educated in literature and languages, with greater activity of thought, more vivacity, quickness of appreciation, and greater facility of happy expression of her thoughts, than most girls her superior in years. Considering her limited facilities for acquiring information, the result is very puzzling from a merely materialistic point of view.

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Another train of thought is suggested by her character and disposition. She is what her infancy promised. Great amiability and sweetness of disposition have been preserved in her intellectual development, and I believe that she is the purest-minded human being ever in existence. She has never known or thought any evil. She does not suspect it in others. The world to her is what her own mind is. She has not even learned that exhibition upon which so many pride themselves of "righteous indignation." Some time ago, when a policeman shot dead her dog, a dearly loved daily companion, she found in her forgiving heart no condemnation for the man; she only said, "If he had only known what a good dog he was, he would not have shot him." It was said of old time, "Lord, forgive them, they know not what they do!" Of course the question will arise whether, if Helen Keller had not been guarded from the knowledge of evil, she would have been what she is to-day. But I cannot but fancy that there was in her a radical predisposition to goodness.

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I said that Helen is what her infancy promised. This point needs further explanation. Up to the time, at the age of nineteen months, when illness left her deaf, dumb, and blind, she was a most amiable, tractable child, not only winning and lovely, but with apparently an even, sweet temper and an unselfish disposition. From that date until, in her seventh year, when Miss Sullivan found means to communicate with her, she had been isolated from the world. She could only express herself as an animal might. She could only be influenced by physical means -- there was no way of telling her what to do or what not to do but by laying hands on her. She could make signs if she were hungry or thirsty. Her soul was absolutely shut in from influence or expression. In this condition she began to be more and more like a caged bird, beating its wings and bruising itself against the bars, to its physical injury. When Miss Sullivan took her it was almost impossible to control her. The fiery spirit within exhibited itself in outward violent temper. How could it be otherwise in what must have been an internal rage at the want of ability to make herself understood? But from the day that communication was established with her all was changed. She apprehended at once the means of communication, and was docile and controllable, only eager to learn more. And then she became again what she had promised to be in infancy, sweet-tempered, loving, and gentle. All the investiture of the years of seclusion fell off her as if it had been an ill-fitting garment. And never since for an hour, for a moment, has she been impatient or variable in temper, never otherwise than amiable and unselfish, and always happy.

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And this opens the way to what, after all, is the radical question in this case -- the educational question. In all her education Helen has been put in communication with the best minds, with the best literature. She has known no other. Her mind has neither been made effeminate by the weak and silly literature, nor has it been vitiated by that which is suggestive of baseness. In consequence her mind is not only vigorous, but it is pure. She is in love with noble things, with noble thoughts, and with the characters of noble men and women. It is not a possible condition for most of us in the world, but, nevertheless, the experiment of her education is very suggestive. If children in the family and in the public schools were fed with only the best literature, if their minds were treated with as much care in regard to the things sown in them as our wheat fields, what a result we should have! It is not possible to guard any normal person from the knowledge of evil and from the thoughts of a disordered world, but it is possible to encourage the growth in education of love for the noblest literature, for that which is pure and stimulating. And this result we shall have some time when education is taken out of politics, out of the hands of persons who are untrained in psychology or pedagogy, and committed to those who are experts in dealing with the vital problem of the character of the generations to succeed us. Any one who converses with Helen Keller will find that her high training in the best literature has not destroyed her power of discrimination, her ability to make quick deductions and distinctions. On one occasion she repeated for me Longfellow's "Psalm of Life "with proper emphasis. She has learned to talk so as to articulate words with fair distinctness. In order to test her loyalty to Longfellow, who is one of her heroes, as Bishop Brooks also is, I asked her if it had never occurred to her that the "sands" in the poem was a poor material upon which to leave enduring footprints. "No," she said, "I never thought of that; but the waves tumbling in on the sea-shore do obliterate the marks on the sand." And then her face lighted up with imaginative comprehension, and she added, "Perhaps it is different with the sands of time." Such a mind as that, in time can be trusted to make acquaintance with any literature, for it will be equipped for judgment.

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