The Philosophy of Dickens; A Study of His Life and Teaching as a Social Reformer (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1905. Excerpt: ... (63) CHAPTER IV. The Philosophy Of Children. There is throughout the pages of Dickens a terrible silence, as solemn as the stillness of death, and more grim--it is the utter silence from the laughter of children. Dickens never wrote about a happy child. That perfect hush from the wild lilting laughter of children, which strikes cold like the air in vasty church vaults, is the tragedy of this philosopher. It is rather a serious thought that the gayest of our humorists stopped short at this, as a thing impossible to depict; and it shows what a wound his own early sufferings left; it also shows, for he was never idly sentimental, that he meant the men and women of his day to see to the wrongs of children. And his method was brilliant. To leave that fearful void where the gaiety of little ones should be, was like Christmas bell-ringers pulling at bells for ever dumb; or recalls that dim, terrible old legend of the evil spirit, who, disguised as a chorister, entered the monastery choir, and sang so divinely that the good brothers thought him to be an archangel--only that whenever one word occurred he was dumb. It was an ominous word--he could not utter the Holy Name. The pure fresh fount of a child's laughter, a child that laughs suddenly, wildly, joyously, not for fun or humour so much as for the mere mad joy of living; that shrill, gay, trilling music like the tintinnabulation of millions of little silver bells; that ringing, fresh, irresistible thing which comes as naturally to the silly happy youth of the human baby, as the song comes to the bird, or light to a sunbeam; treble cadences that call up instantaneously to the mind's eye the flashing of falling water in the sunlight, daisy speckled meadows, paradises of cowslips and the singing of larks, the mus...