Читать книгу Charles Dickens - Social Reformer - William Walter Crotch - Страница 7

There is one aspect, seen from which, the genius of Dickens stands pre-eminent in the whole realm of English literature. He is emphatically our greatest, in some respects our only, interpreter of childhood. More; he it was who first introduced children into fiction. His supreme triumph, in fact, lies in this: that, while his predecessors were driven almost to exclude children from their works, he wrote of them as freely, naturally, and convincingly, as of their elders.

To-day we are all familiar with children in fiction. We have almost a surfeit of books, in which they play a real part, even where they are not the central figures. Their bright fancies have lit up many a dull page of contemporary novels; their charm has held many a creaky story together. Often their psychology interests us long after we have surrendered their elders in boredom and despair. Some of the most vivid stories of our time have been written round the personalities of little children. Who has not cried over Baa, Baa Black Sheep, or laughed with Pett Ridge's Soil of the State? But, remember, till Dickens wrote, such stories were not dreamt of in the philosophy of the novelist. Strange as it seems, till the sun of his genius rose, childhood found practically no expression in English literature. The sketch of Arthur in King John, a few fragments of Sir Walter Scott; a chapter or so of Tristram Shandy and one or two incredible schoolgirls by Jane Austen — that is all we have of childhood in our literature till Dickens appeared. There has been since an extraordinary output of books, in which children are prominent, from Uncle Tom's Cabin to Little Lord Fauntleroy; from Alice in Wonderland to Peter Pan, and Tom Brown's School Bays. But, in those far-off unhappy days, the only work one can recall as being concerned much with children is that egregious libel upon them, Sandford and Merton. The psychology of the child was almost a closed book and the poorer classes were not only taboo, but anathema, in literature, the typical view of any attempt to depict their condition being that of the Quarterly Review, which objected, it will be remembered, in toto to Oliver Twist, with " its representations of the haunts, deeds, language and characters of the very dregs of the community; " an objection that gives us a tolerably good insight into the England that Dickens scourged and shamed, and lashed and laughed away, until it is no more. Dickens, in fact, re-discovered childhood for England, and as an interpreter of its thousand and one varying moods, its extraordinary intuitions, its swift and solemn confidences, its elusive reticences, its joys, and its sorrows, he stands, not merely supreme but almost alone, without a rival or a competitor, with only his pupils and his imitators in the whole of English Literature. While other novelists write of children as of exotics, and with an obvious strain and effort, catching only a few of their moods and presenting these to us as a triumph, Dickens's pages are crowded with all sorts and conditions of children, jostling each other and their elders, ranging from poor little Paul Dombey, with the premonition of death lying heavy upon his tender spirit, to the robustious Master Jack Dawson, alias " The Artful Dodger," facing the Bow Street magistrate — and the hulks and transportation — with unruffled impudence and unbroken front; from Little Nell, with ashen face lined by cares beyond her years, to the beautifully nonchalant Marchioness, playing " crib " in the damp kitchen. The veriest glimpse of a child through his magic spectacles is worth more than half a dozen completed studies from other pens. Only Meredith approaches him in his almost uncanny intuition into the strange world of boyhood, through which we have all travelled and which opens again to us only at a magician's touch. But Meredith's excursions into boyland are few and far between. Generally his juvenile leads are given a scene or two all to themselves. Dickens's boys and girls, on the other hand, come on and off the stage with the other characters and one is conscious that the master writes of them with no more effort than he does of the adults, whom they alternately dismay and delight. Dickens realized that every man is at heart a boy, or at least, that boyhood is latent to him, and it was his appreciation of this fact that led him to some of his most superb triumphs in characterization — to the immortal Micawber, to Sam Weller, and to that Swiveller who played " Away with melancholy" all night on the flute, what time his landlady waited outside his door to give him notice — surely the most unconscionable boy in all fiction!

But, there was another reason for that instinctive grip of boyhood that never left Dickens all his days. As I have already shown, the facts of life had been beaten into his young soul when he was of an age at which most men of letters are leading careless, happy, untroubled lives at school. There is a passage in Copperfield, where David at the age of seven goes to call on Captain Hopkins in the Marshalsea prison, and " found him with a very dirty lady in his little room and two wan little girls, his daughters, with shock heads of hair. I thought it was better to borrow Captain Hopkins's knife and fork, than Captain Hopkins's comb. The Captain himself was in the last extremity of shabbiness, with large whiskers, and an old, old brown great coat with no other coat below it. I saw his bed rolled up in a corner; and what plates and dishes and pots he had, on a shelf; and I divined (God knows how) that though the two girls with the shock heads of hair were Captain Hopkins's children, the dirty lady was not married to Captain Hopkins. My timid station on his threshold was not occupied more than a couple of minutes at most; but I came down again with all this in my knowledge, as surely as the knife and fork were in my hand."

The mind that wrote these lines had been hurt into feeling, shocked into consciousness, forced to realize the facts, years and years before most children have ceased to play. He became a man, while he was yet a boy, but — as we shall see — he never lost his boyhood, and the result was, that as has been finely said, Dickens grew up, not to feel for children but with them. It was this fact that enabled him to achieve what no other English man of letters had then attempted, and to interpret the childhood that till then, had been unrepresented, in the whole realm of literature.

And if we accept for a moment the definition of a reformer given in a previous chapter: that the real pioneer is not he who frames Acts of Parliament and by-laws, but rather the man whose compelling genius creates such an atmosphere as renders them inevitable, then indeed we shall see in this achievement of Dickens the greatest service he has rendered to social reform. We have only to let our minds dwell for a moment on the horrors of child-life when Dickens first wrote, to contrast the extraordinary apathy and unconcern with which England viewed its appalling and ghastly waste, with the temper of mind that prevails to-day upon the subject, to realize how tremendous an obligation we are under to Dickens in this respect. The England into which he was born had practically forgotten childhood, or at least had ceased to think of it, as something precious and beautiful, to be cherished and protected whenever possible. The cry of the little ones was drowned in the ceaseless rattle of the cotton mills, whose wheels they pushed with tired, puny hands. They were " seeking death in life, as best to have." Almost alone in England, William Blake continually raised his voice — that of one crying in the wilderness — against the abomination of forcing their stunted frames up narrow chimneys to clear away the soot. There was no one to denounce the horror of their little naked bodies trembling beneath the cruel weight of a coal truck, in the bowels of the earth. No longer in Mrs. Browning's words do we " stand to move the world on a child's heart," or " stifle down with mailed heel its palpitation."

Today we have changed all that — the child is paramount! A hundred Acts of Parliament protect its rights, philanthropists, whose name is legion, cry aloud its needs. Class distinctions, political obsessions, even religious differences, all are forgotten in its service, whose welfare is now the supreme law.

And the credit of effecting this great and bloodless revolution must be given to Dickens.

Should proof be required let the reader ponder over his observations of child-life as is revealed in Great Expectations; remark his descriptions of the little Necketts and of Charley; or re-enact mentally the scene between the Constable and Jo; or weep in pity at the story of Jo's death and the author's compassionate moralizings on waifs — all in Bleak House. In no tenderer note could we have heard the pathetic story of the hunger of a child than in Oliver Twist, and no more resentful voice could have thundered forth its remonstrance against child-labour than that which arises from Nicholas Nickleby. Verily, Dickens was chief among the early liberators of the Innocent Young.

True, there have been others at work in the child's cause. There has been the constant activity of legislators, backed up by newspaper campaigns, popular agitations, and above all by the ceaseless pressure of public opinion. But who was it that first created that opinion if not Charles Dickens? What was the reason — to go a little deeper into the matter — -that cruelties such as those I have described were ever tolerated by a people so naturally kind-hearted as our own? Surely it was because England had forgotten; it had lost the charm of childhood. Mr. G. K. Chesterton has said very finely of Dickens in another connection, that to really reform a thing, you must first love it. And the great and crowning glory of Dickens is that he re-taught us so to love little children that the thought of their suffering thus became intolerable, until to-day, as I have said, the child's cause is everywhere supreme.

It was characteristic of the courage and insight with which Dickens essayed the task of bringing the nation to some sense of its responsibilities in regard to the coming generation, that his most touching and powerful examples were drawn from emphatically the worst class of children, and that these examples were themselves conspicuous for daring and for evil even among bad companions. It was the child thief, the boy criminal, the juvenile robber that Dickens was most successful in portraying, and the boy thief and criminals he chose were like the Artful Dodger, preeminent for intellectual keenness, as well as for moral obliquity, with the result that the English people were stirred to a degree that no mere narrative of suffering innocence and ill-used but honourable juvenility, could perhaps have effected. They saw in the Artful Dodger, with his thorough-going villainy, his daring, his very callousness, qualities that had he been given instruction, proper training and a fair opportunity, would have made a strong resolute man, an asset to the nation; they realized, as they read the pages of Oliver Twisty that the very virtues of the " Dodger," his ingenuity, his sangfroid, his fearlessness, had been distorted to his own undoing, and they asked themselves, remembering that the " greater the sinner, the greater the saint," whether it was not time that they did something to give a helping hand to the neglected of the gutter, to the child criminal and the boy thief, who, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, England had passed over for the unconverted of the heathen, for the remote Chinese and the elusive Esquimaux. From the moment that Dickens published Oliver Twist, the reaction against this brutality and neglect set in. The handful of devoted workers, who, under Lord Shaftesbury and Leone Levi had been pleading for the street arabs — and pleading largely in vain — suddenly found themselves caught up and borne forward by a great flood of sympathy and support that the pictures of Fagin's school for boy-thieves had evoked among all classes. To realize even faintly, the immense service that Dickens rendered our race, in thus liberating their frozen sympathies and revivifying their lost confidence in childhood, we have but to turn to the fearful records of juvenile crime and the more fearful records of juvenile punishment, in which his time abounds. " I know of one infant," said Dickens himself, " six years old, who has been twice as many times in the hands of the police as years have passed over him." This alas! was no unusual case. A little fellow eight years of age was tried in August, 1845, at Clerkenwell for stealing boxes. He was sentenced to a month and a whipping. In January, 1846, he was again tried for robbing a till. After that he was twice summarily convicted and then again tried at the Central Criminal Court later in the same year — to be sentenced to seven years' transportation when only nine years of age! This sentence was commuted. " But," says Mr. Montague, in his Sixty Years of Waifdom, " in 1852, when he was only thirteen years of age, and but four feet, two inches high, he was a hardened jailbird, with whom the law was powerless to deal."

Worse even than this is the fact that in England children were regularly and systematically trained in the arts of theft. According to Mr. Montague, " a little fellow whose father and mother were dead, who was alone and uncared for, told his teacher one Sunday that he and twenty more boys were kept by a man and a woman in Wentworth Street, Whitechapel, and taught to pick pockets. The training took six months. Daily the woman dressed herself, put a bell in her pocket, also a purse containing 6d.; any of the pupils who could take the purse from her pocket without causing the bell to tinkle got the 6d., as a reward for his dexterity. When proficient, the boys were sent out to plunder for the pair."

The confession of another thief's tutor was as follows: —

" He had been twenty years living a criminal life, and had been twenty times in prison. He resided in a low lodging-house where he carried on his craft of training young lads to steal. The best hands among them were sent into the streets, and they brought home the plunder on which the criminal school lived. He was too well known to the police to dare to go out himself. ' But,' said he, ' I never can keep the young 'uns long, for as soon as I have made them clever at their profession, if they are not taken by the police, they leave me and start for themselves; so I am obliged to look out for new hands.' Being asked how many lads he supposed he had trained to be thieves during the twenty years, he replied that he had kept no account, and could not exactly tell, but of this he was sure, that it was not less than five hundred.'"

It is estimated that 1500 children, infants for the most part, passed through the cruel and soul-destroying horrors of imprisonment during one year, children whom there were none to befriend on their release, who almost certainly went to swell the permanent prison population. Dr. Guthrie, in his Pleas for Ragged Schools, paints a fearful picture of the juvenile delinquents who thus found their way to prison.

" No man cared for their souls, or commiserated their condition. Banishing what it did not hang, the country shipped off thousands to rot and fester in our colonies, till these, rising as one man, declared that they would have no more of our refuse and waste; that, if we would grow criminals, we should keep them. Many seemed born for the gallows, and coolly calculated on being hanged, as sailors do on being drowned, or soldiers, in time of war, on being shot. I happened once to find them at their rehearsals. They had a ragged urchin suspended by a rope thrown over the door-lintel of an old house. The noose was dexterously placed under his arm-pits; but the way he hung his head and mimicked the dying spasms, drew up his legs, and kicked, was perfect. So thought his companions. The young savages danced round him in wildest glee, and greeted each kick with roars of laughter. They were familiar with hanging; not much wonder, since Newgate, for instance, used to show ten or a dozen old ruffians with boys, strung up like vermin, and slowly turning round in the morning air, with their white caps — waiting to be cut down. Horrible sight! "

" Let me say," said Dickens, in one of his articles in the Daily News, " that I know the prisons of London well; that I have visited the largest of them more times than I could count; and that the children in them are enough to break the heart and hope of any man. I have never taken a foreigner or a stranger of any kind to one of these establishments, but I have seen him so moved at the sight of the child offenders, and so affected by the contemplation of their utter renouncement and desolation outside the prison walls, that he has been as little able to disguise his emotion, as if some great grief had suddenly burst upon him. Mr. Chesterton, and Lieutenant Tracey (than whom more intelligent and humane Governors of Prisons it would be hard, if not impossible, to find) know perfectly well that these children pass and repass through the prisons all their lives; that they are never taught; that the first distinctions between right and wrong are, from their cradles, perfectly confounded and perverted in their minds; that they come of untaught parents, and will give birth to another untaught generation; that in exact proportion to their natural abilities, is the extent and scope of their depravity; and that there is no escape or chance for them in any ordinary revolution of human affairs. Happily, there are schools in these prisons now. If any readers doubt how ignorant the children are, let them visit these schools and see them at their tasks, and hear how much they knew when they were sent there. If they would know the produce of this seed, let them see a class of men and boys together, at their books (as I have seen them in the House of Correction for this County of Middlesex), and mark how painfully the full-grown felons toil at the very shape and form of letters; their ignorance being so confirmed and solid.

" The contrast of this labour in the men, with the less blunted quickness of the boys; the latent shame and , sense of degradation struggling through their dull attempts at infant lessons; and the universal eagerness to learn, impress me, in this passing retrospect, more painfully than I can tell."

I This, then, was the position in which the children of the poor stood in relation to the law, when Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, following fast on the unprecedented success of Pickwick, stirred the nation to its depths and aroused a fervour and compassion for the young such as no one had suspected was to be found in all England. The first practical effect of the pictures of child-life which they contained, was to place upon the Statute Book an epoch-making piece of legislation, the first of a number of Acts that have revolutionized the position of the child in regard to the State, which was called the Reformatory School Act of 1854. Its effect was instantaneous. It broke up the schools of crime that had flourished under men like Fagin and for the first time, in the history of England, it allowed a magistrate to send a boy guilty of some childish offence, not to prison permanently, but to an industrial school where he got valuable training, healthy discipline and. kindly supervision. To-day, when our Chairmen of Quarter Sessions wax enthusiastic over the diminution of juvenile crime, when the records show the success that has attended the passing of the First Offenders' Act, when on all sides the feeling is growing that the child must be kept free from contamination, no matter what its class, or how poor its parents, let it be remembered that the first man to rescue children from the jail was the great novelist of whom we write, and who for this reason has earned surely the gratitude of every humanitarian to-day.

Dickens's own personal efforts in the great revival centred mainly round the Ragged School Union, to whose funds he induced the Baroness Burdett Coutts to subscribe.

He described the work of the schools in an article of irresistible force entitled " A Sleep to Startle us," which appeared in Household Words during 1852:

" I found my first Ragged School, in an obscure place called West Street, Saffron Hill, pitifully struggling for life, under every disadvantage. It had no means, it had no suitable rooms, it derived no power or protection from being recognized by any authority, it attracted within its wretched walls, a fluctuating swarm of faces — young in years, but youthful in nothing else, that scowled Hope out of countenance. It was held in a low-roofed den, in a sickening atmosphere, in the midst of taint and dirt and pestilence: with all the deadly sins let loose, howling and shrieking at the doors. Zeal did not supply the place of method and training; the teachers knew little of their office; the pupils with an evil sharpness, found them out, got the better of them, derided them, made blasphemous answers to scriptural questions, sang, fought, danced, robbed each other; seemed possessed by legions of devils. The place was stormed and carried, over and over again; the lights were blown out, the books strewn in the gutters, and the female scholars carried off triumphantly to their old wickedness. With no strength in it but its purpose, the school stood it all out, and made its way. Some two years since, I found t, one of many such, in a large convenient loft in this transition part of Farringdon Street quiet and orderly, full, lighted with gas, well whitewashed, numerously attended, and thoroughly established.

" The number of houseless creatures who resorted to it, and who were necessarily turned out when it was closed, to hide where they could in heaps of moral and physical pollution, filled the managers with pity. To relieve some of the more constant and deserving scholars, they rented a wretched house, where a few common beds — a dozen and a half perhaps — were made upon the floor. This was the Ragged School Dormitory; and when I found the school in Farringdon Street, I found the Dormitory in a court hard by, which in the time of the Cholera had acquired a dismal fame. The Dormitory was, in all respects, save as a small beginning, a very discouraging Institution. The lair was bad; the dark and ruinous building, with its small close rooms, was quite unsuited to the purpose; and a general supervision of the sleepers was impossible. I had great doubts at the time whether, excepting that they found a crazy shelter for their heads, they were better there than in the streets.

" Having heard, in the course of the last month, that this Dormitory (there were others elsewhere) had grown as the School had grown, I went the other night to make another visit to it. I found the School in the same place, still advancing. It was now an Industrial School too; and besides the men and boys who were learning, some aptly enough; some, with painful difficulty; some, sluggishly and wearily; some, not at all — to read and write and cipher; there were two groups, one of shoemakers, and one (in a gallery) of tailors, working with great industry and satisfaction. Each was taught and superintended by a regular workman engaged for the purpose, who delivered out the necessary means and implements. All were employed in mending, either their own dilapidated clothes or shoes, or the dilapidated clothes or shoes of some of the other pupils. They were of all ages, from young boys to old men. They were quiet, and intent upon their work. Some of them were almost as unused to it as I should have shown myself to be if I had tried my hand, but all were deeply interested and profoundly anxious to do it somehow or other. They presented a very remarkable instance of the general desire there is, after all, even in the vagabond breast, to know something useful. One shock-headed man when he had mended his own scrap of a coat, drew it on with such an air of satisfaction, and put himself to so much inconvenience to look at the elbow he had darned, that I thought a new coat (and the mind could not imagine a period when that coat of his was new!) would not have pleased him better. In the other part of the school, where each class was partitioned off by screens adjusted like the boxes in a coffee-room, with some very good writing, and some singing of the multiplication table, the latter, on a principle much too juvenile and innocent for some of the singers. There was also a ciphering class, where a young pupil teacher out of the streets, who refreshed himself by spitting every half-minute, had written a legible sum in compound addition, on a broken slate, and was walking backward and forward before it as he worked it, for the instruction of his class."

His support of the Union proved invaluable and it was through reading one of his articles on their work that Spurgeon was induced to come forward and give it his powerful support. While he was in Doughty Street and Marylebone, Dickens continually visited the schools and the following letters written concerning their work show the intensely practical nature of the interest he evinced in the development of the schools.

" Broadstairs, Kent.

" September 24th, 1843.

" Dear Sir,

" Allow me to ask you a few questions in reference to that most able undertaking in which you are engaged — with a view, I need scarcely say, to its advancement and extended usefulness. For the present I could wish it, if you please, to be considered as put in confidence, but not to the exclusion of the gentlemen associated with you in the management of the Ragged School on Saffron Hill.

"It occurred to me, when I was there, as being of the most immense importance that, if practicable, the boys should have an opportunity of washing themselves before beginning their tasks. Do you agree with me? If so, will you ascertain at about what cost a washing-place — a large trough or sink, for instance, with a good supply of running water, soap, and towels — could be put up! In case you consider it necessary that some person should be engaged to mind it, and to see that the boys availed themselves of it in an orderly manner, please to add the payment of such a person to the expense.

"Have you seen any place, or do you know of any place in that neighbourhood — any one or two good spacious lofts or rooms — which you would like to engage (if you could afford it), as being well suited for the school? If so, at what charge could it be hired, and how soon?

" In the event of my being able to procure you the funds for making these great improvements, would you see any objection to expressly limiting visitors (I mean visiting teachers — volunteers, whoever they may be) to confining their questions and instructions, as a point of honour, to the broad truths taught in the School by yourself and the gentlemen associated with you? I set great store by the question, because it seems to me of vital importance that no persons, however well-intentioned, should perplex the minds of these unfortunate creatures with religious mysteries that young people with the best advantages can but imperfectly understand. I heard a lady visitor, the night I was among you, propounding questions in reference to ' The Lamb of God ' which I most unquestionably would not suffer any one to put to my children; recollecting the immense absurdities that were suggested to my childhood by the like injudicious catechizing.

" I return to Town on Monday, the 2nd of next month; if you write to me before then, please to address your letter here. If after that date, to my house in town.

" With a cordial sympathy in your great and Christian labour,

" I am, dear Sir,

" Faithfully yours,

" Charles Dickens."

" Mr. Storey."

" Devonshire Terrace,

" 1st February, 1844.

" Dear Sir,

" Will you have the goodness to turn over in your mind, and to note down for me, as briefly as you please, any little facts or details connected with the Ragged School which you think it would benefit the Union to have publicly known! If you could make it convenient to favour me with a call any evening next week, or on Sunday week, and will let me hear from you to that effect, I shall be glad to make an appointment with you. But pray do not hesitate to let me know what time suits you best, as I can easily accommodate myself to your engagements.

"The kind of thing I wish to know is — your average number of scholars — whether it increases or falls off — whether any boys are pretty constant in their attendance, whether after absenting themselves these return again, whether the ignorance of their parents is one of your rocks ahead, and the like. In short, I think I can turn any result of your experience and observation of these unfortunate creatures to the account you would desire.

" Pray mention to me the discouraging as well as the encouraging circumstances, for they are equally a part of the sad case, and without a knowledge of them it is impossible to state it forcibly.

" You are at perfect liberty to mention this to the masters in the School. But beyond this, or such other limits as you may consider necessary, I could wish our correspondence to be confidential.

" Faithfully yours,

" Charles Dickens."

" Mr. R. Storey."

But Dickens's work went far beyond the Ragged School Union, far beyond even the blessed jail delivery that he effected for the children of his country. There is no doubt that, not only was Dickens the first great fictionist who accustomed us to meet children in his pages, but he broke down once and for all that gloomy and dreadful doctrine of child depravity, which, like an evil inheritance, pressed so hardly on many an English home at the beginning of the last century.

The doctrine has so utterly disappeared from our consciousness that it may be questioned whether we realize how enormous is our obligation to the great champion of childhood in this respect. Our views have changed fundamentally. We no longer look on childhood as something to be sternly repressed, kept in incessant check, made to feel the conviction of sin. We none of us dare to question the right of a child to be joyous. We realize that its unrestrained mirth is a holy and a beautiful thing; that to repress it would be a crime against that child's nature. Far otherwise was it in that early Victorian period which somebody has said were the real dark ages, when children were suspect always, suspect most when they were most like children. Who doesn't remember when Mr. Bumble breathlessly exclaimed:

"'Mr. Limbkins, I beg your pardon, sir! Oliver Twist has asked for more! '

" There was a general start. Horror was depicted on every countenance.

" ' For more," said Mr. Limbkins. ' Compose yourself, Bumble, and answer me distinctly. Do I understand that he asked for more after he had eaten the supper allotted by the dietary? '

" ' He did, sir,' replied Bumble.

" ' That boy will be hung,' said the gentleman in the white waistcoat. ' I know that boy will be hung.' "

And that night five pounds and Oliver Twist was offered to any man or woman who wanted an apprentice to any trade, business, or calling."

Today Bumble's indignation would be laughed at even by a Board of Guardians, and the white-waist-coated gentleman would have been regarded as an eccentric. To-day nearly everybody likes, if they do not love, children. To-day the man who grudges them a service is looked at askance. To-day we all feel the happier when we see children happy and that is the supreme triumph of the genius of Charles Dickens.

Someone (I think it must have been Mr. G. K. Chesterton) says somewhere that, from the frequency with which Dickens attempted the portrait, he must have known in the dark days of his own upbringing some child, prematurely grave and careworn, putting out its little strength against the world and charged with tasks far beyond its powers. It has always seemed to me that that child was Dickens himself — Dickens taking round the circulars of his mother's school, bargaining with the pawnbrokers for the small sum on the remnant of the house, and helping to eke out for his family his miserable earnings of six shillings a week, until at length " nothing remained but a few bits of furniture, mother and children encamping in the two parlours of the empty house; the boy's own little bed (with the brass coalscuttle, a roasting jack, and a birdcage ' to make a lot of it ') went for a song — ' so I heard mentioned, and I wondered what song and thought what a dismal song it must have been to sing.' " Perhaps it is for this very reason that this particular portrait of childhood never proves quite so convincing, so arresting and vibrant as the blither pictures of his boys and girls, laughing at the troubles that seem to overwhelm them. After all, such sadness and depression was but a part of Dickens's great nature, which refused, not only to be soured, but even permanently saddened by the grey and dreadful morning of his days — a morning that did not rob him of his spirits, his gaiety, his quick eye for contrast and his immense appreciation of the colour side of life. So, perhaps, it comes about that Dickens succeeds more with these presentations of children who show us these qualities also, rather than with those who are so crushed that it is difficult for us to remember that there is anything of childhood about them — more with " the Marchioness " than with Little Nell, more with " The Artful Dodger " than with Oliver Twist. Both appeal with the pathos of those who are overmatched and cruelly weighted down, but somehow then* appeal becomes irresistible when allied with the freshness, the good spirits, the abandon of youth, rather than when it is borne with the resignation of premature old age. If Kipling's drummer boys of the Fore and Aft had crept back with the discreet and wary steps of veterans, there would have been no story to write about them. It is when they strike up the British Grenadiers and swagger along as oblivious of their own danger as though in the barrack yard, that they capture our hearts. And singular to say, Dickens's own grown-up characters seem to find this potency of youthful fearlessness, for it is just to these wayward irresponsible types of true childhood that even the very worst of them succumb. I say the worst, excluding deliberately those of his characters whom we feel instinctively are fundamentally bad — Rudge the outcast, Jonas with blood upon his hands, Jasper the brooding murderer — these are men from whom one realizes children would shrink as they in their turn would from childhood. But others there are, distinctly to be classified as bad, between whom and the children of his creation, strange bonds of unspoken sympathy and understanding grow up naturally and without any formal expression, but are yet binding upon both parties — unto death. There is a striking, as it always seemed to me, a wonderful illustration of this in Martin Chuzzlewit. It occurs during that last awful journey of Montague Tigg, from which he knows that Jonas does not mean that he should return alive, the journey on which he will not enter without that " monkey of a boy," whom Mr. Jonas — it is midnight when they set out — tries to send to bed. Alas poor little Bailey who has " climbed into the rumble is thrown out of the carriage in an accident sheer over a five-barred gate."

" ' When I said to-night that I wish I had never started on this journey,' cried his master, ' I knew it was an ill-fated one. Look at this boy! '

" ' Is that all,' growled Jonas. ' If you call that a sign of it '

" ' Why, what should I call it a sign of? ' asked Montague hurriedly. ' What do you mean? '

" ' I mean,' said Jonas, stooping down over the body, ' that I never heard you were his father or had any particular reason to care much about him.' "

Then, later, when the surgeon " gives it for his opinion that Mr. Bailey's mortal course is run ":

" ' I would rather have lost,' he said, ' a thousand pounds than lost the boy just now. But I'll return home alone. I am resolved upon that. Chuzzlewit shall go forward first and I will follow in my own time. I'll have no more of this,' he added, wiping his damp forehead, ' twenty-four hours of this would turn my hair grey.' "

" For some unexpressed reason," says Dickens, " he attached a strange value to the company and presence of this mere child." There is surely something infinitely pathetic in this dilemma of poor Tigg, scoundrel as he was. The one human creature on whose devotion he could count was " this mere child." The men he had dined and wined in the flat in Pall Mall, who had toasted him as their friend, who had battened on him, as men do on a popular and successful swindler, whom he had helped with small favours or encouraged with liberal promises — he would have laughed at the thought of relying upon these. But not so upon the little street boy, the child-drudge of Todger's boarding-house! There is something supremely wonderful in the idea of this superlative scoundrel, who trusted no one of necessity, realizing that so long as this child was with him he had protection against the evil presence of Jonas.

As for the boy, he trusted, even reverenced, the dashing Montague, on whose dog-cart perhaps the proudest moments of his life had been passed, prouder even than when " divesting himself of his neckcloth he sat down in the easy shaving-chair of Mr. Poll Sweedlepipe " and requested to be shaved.

" ' The barber stood aghast . . . there was no resisting his manner. The evidence of sight and touch became as nothing. His chin was as smooth as a new-laid egg or a scraped Dutch cheese; but Poll Sweedlepipe wouldn't have ventured to deny, on affidavit, that he had the beard of a Jewish Rabbi.

" ' Go with the grain. Poll, all round please,' said Mr. Bailey screwing up his face for the reception of the lather. ' You may do what you like with the bits of whiskers. I don't care for 'em.'

" The neat little barber stood gazing at him with the brush and soap dish in his hand, stirring them round and round in a ludicrous uncertainty, as if he were disabled by some fascination from beginning. At last he made a dash at Mr. Bailey's cheek. Then he stopped again, as if the ghost of a beard had suddenly receded from his touch, but receiving mild encouragement from Mr. Bailey, in the form of an adjuration to ' go in and win ' he lathered him bountifully. Mr. Bailey smiled through the suds and with satisfaction.

" ' Gently over the stones, Poll. Go a tip-toe over the pimples! ' "

It was this beardless infant that Tigg trusted for protection and who looked up to Tigg, villain as he was, with the same worship that Quilp's boy, Tom Scott, bestowed upon the dwarf between him and whom there existed a strange kind of mutual liking how born or bred, or nourished upon blows and threats on one side and retorts and defiance on the other, is not to the purpose! Quilp, certainly, would suffer nobody to contradict him but the boy, and the boy would assuredly not have submitted to be so knocked about by anybody but Quilp when he had the power to run away any time he choose.

" ' Now,' said Quilp, passing into the wooden country house, ' you mind the wharf. Stand upon your head again, and I'll cut one of your feet off.'

" The boy made no answer, but directly Quilp had shut himself in, stood on his head before the door, then walked on his hands to the back and stood on his head there, and then to the opposite side and repeated the performance. There were indeed, four sides to the country house, but he avoided that one where the window was, deeming it probable that Quilp would be looking out of it."

It was from the bottom of this wharf that Quilp stepped into the river, which carried him miles down and laid him, a torn mass, on a marshy bank there to be discovered days later, when poor Tom Scott sheds the only tears wept over his master and wants to fight the jury for returning a verdict of Felo de se.

These two men, need we say, are presented to us as bad, but not in the sense that Jonas or that Rudge is. There is an old-fashioned saying, that has dropped into desuetude, to the effect that a man to whom children take readily is not given over wholly to the powers of darkness, and that there is some good in him at bottom. And we may know that this is true even of Tigg and of Quilp by the fact that we read of both, even as we despise both, with avidity. Of Jonas, or say, of Jasper, we read with repulsion; we shudder as we turn the page, and of a certainty our children would shrink from them. But they might well laugh, as we do, at Quilp's antics and make friends with the eccentric Mr. Tigg. For, as Dickens made us realize, the unspoilt perceptions of the child, its untroubled and discerning vision, are often more reliable guides than all the tests and creeds which we have fashioned for the judgment of the soul of man.

Again and yet again Dickens uses this magic touchstone of a child's innocence to confound the elders given over to the pomps and vanities of this world, and blind to the realities that the fresher mind perceives. Who does not remember little Paul Dombey's question of his father:

" ' Papa, what's money after all? '

" Heaven and Earth, how old his face was as he turned it up again towards his father.

" ' What is money after all,' said Mr. Dombey, . . . gazing in sheer amazement at the presumptuous atom that propounded such an inquiry.

" ' I mean, Papa, what can it do? ' returned Paul, folding his arms (they were hardly long enough to fold), and looking at the fire, and up at him, and at the fire, and up at him again.

" Mr. Dombey drew his chair back to its former place and patted him on the head. ' You'll know better by-and-by, my man,' he said. ' Money can do anything.' He took hold of the little hand and beat it softly against one of his own, as he said so.

" ' Anything, Papa? '

" ' Yes, anything — almost,' said Mr. Dombey. . . .

" ' If it's a good thing and can do anything,' said the little fellow thoughtfully, as he looked at the fire, ' I wonder why it didn't save me my mamma.

" ' It can't make me strong and quite well. Papa, can it? ' asked Paul."

Perhaps that is the supreme exemplification of the question that Dickens asked of our civilization in the name of the Child, whom he found and set up again in our midst. What does our wealth, our resources, our pomp, our dignity avail if it leaves us cold, frigid, haughty prisoners in the midst of it all, with stunted sympathies and sterile understandings, and with the heir to our glories starved of affection, aged in mind, stricken in body? What after all does it avail a nation, more than a man, if it gain the whole world and lose its own soul?