“The birches birched him as soundly as if he had been a nobleman at Eton, and over the face too (which is not fair swishing, as all brave boys will agree)” (page 235).
What could you imagine more amusing in its way than the extremely absurd “argument” the author makes for the existence of water babies (page 254): “You never heard of a water baby? Perhaps not. That is the very reason why this story was written. There are a great many things in the world which you never heard of; and a great many more which nobody ever heard of; and a great many things, too, which nobody ever will hear of. No water babies, indeed! Why, wise men of old said that everything on earth had its double in the water; and you may see that that is, if not quite true, still quite as true as most other theories which you are likely to hear for many a day. There are land babies, then why not water babies? Are there not water rats, water flies, water crickets, water crabs, water tortoises, water scorpions, water tigers and so on without end? To be sure, there must be water babies. Am I in earnest? Oh dear no!”
Read the account of the policemen, beginning on page 306, for an example of a broader humor.
Page 347: “And the sun acted policeman, and worked round outside every day, peeping just over the top of the icewall, to see that all went right; and now and then he played conjuring tricks, or had an exhibition of fireworks, to amuse the sea fairies. For he would make himself into four or five suns at once, or paint the sky with rings and crosses and crescents of white fire and stick himself in the middle of them, and wink at the fairies; and I dare say they were very much amused, for anything’s fun in the country.”
Do not think of “skipping” the Moral. No more attractive “moral” was ever written for fable or fairy tale!
IV. Pathos. Tom, the Chimney Sweep is always pathetic. He enlists our sympathies wholly from the time we meet him where there was “plenty of money for Tom to earn and his master to spend,” until he “pulled off all his clothes in such haste that he tore some of them, which was easy enough with such ragged old things,” “put his poor, hot, sore feet into the water,” “tumbled himself as quick as he could into the clear, cool stream” and in two minutes “fell fast asleep, into the quietest, sunniest, coziest sleep that he had ever had in his life and—dreamt of nothing at all.” It is only as Tom the Water Baby that he does not make us sad.
Poor little, dirty, ignorant Tom! Little enough to climb up the sooty chimney flues; so dirty that he knew not what cleanliness meant; so ignorant that he “never had heard of God, or of Christ, except in words which you never have heard,” and his idea of happiness was to “sit in a public house with a quart of beer and a long pipe,” to play cards for silver money, to “keep a white bull dog with one gray ear, and carry her puppies in his pocket just like a man,” to have apprentices and to bully them, to knock them about and make them carry soot sacks while he “rode before them on his donkey, with a pipe in his mouth and a flower in his button hole, like a king at the head of his army!” “Yes, when his master let him have a pull at the leavings of his beer, Tom was the jolliest boy in the whole town.”
To him who reads understandingly, there is pathos on nearly every page of the first two chapters. Sometimes it is seen in hints and shown by indirection but in other instances it is direct, positive, powerful.
Just read (page 231), how Tom learns that he is naught but a “little black ape,” an “ugly, black, ragged figure with bleared eyes and grinning white teeth.”
In his terrible race for life he “thought he heard church bells ringing a long way off” and thought “where there is a church there will be houses and people,” and perhaps someone will give him a “bit and a sup.” So he follows the ringing in his ears till he comes to the top of the great crag and sees “a mile off and a thousand feet down” the old dame in her garden. We lose our own breath in following him down that awful descent, find ourselves panting, and at last, suddenly, “b-e-a-t, beat!” After the old dame has given him the old rug and bidden him sleep off his weariness, comes the fever with the ringing of the church bells and the persistent, agonizing thought, “I must be clean, I must be clean.” It is this that drives him out to the “clear, clear limestone water, with every pebble at the bottom bright and clean” the cool, cool, cool water for his weary feet.