Then came two noble passages, nobly delivered.
First—when there were no eyes unmoistened among the listeners—
“The golden ripple on the wall came back again, and nothing else stirred in the room. The old, old fashion! The fashion that came in with our first garments, and will last unchanged until our race has run its course, and the wide firmament is rolled up like a scroll. The old, old fashion—Death!”
And lastly—with a tearful voice—
“Oh, thank God, all who see it, for that older fashion yet of Immortality! And look upon us, Angels of young children, with regards not quite estranged, when the swift river bears us to the ocean!”
Remembering which exquisite words as he himself delivered them, having the very tones of his voice still ringing tenderly in our recollection, the truth of that beautiful remark of Dean Stanley's comes back anew as though it were now only for the first time realised, where, in his funeral sermon of the 19th June, 1870, he said that it was the inculcation of the lesson derived from precisely such a scene as this which will always make the grave of Charles Dickens seem “as though it were the very grave of those little innocents whom he created for our companionship, for our instruction, for our delight and solace.” The little workhouse-boy, the little orphan girl, the little cripple, who “not only blessed his father's needy home, but softened the rude stranger's hardened conscience,” were severally referred to by the preacher when he gave this charming thought its affecting application. But, foremost among these bewitching children of the Novelist's imagination, might surely be placed the child-hero of a story closing hardly so much with his death as with his apotheosis.
MR CHOPS, THE DWARF.
It remains still a matter of surprise how so much was made out of this slight sketch by the simple force of its humorous delivery. “Mr. Chops, the Dwarf,” as, indeed, was only befitting, was the smallest of all the Readings. The simple little air that so caught the dreamer's fancy, when played upon the harp by Scrooge's niece by marriage, is described after all, as may be remembered by the readers of the Carol, to to have been intrinsically “a mere nothing; you might learn to whistle it in two minutes.” Say that in twenty minutes, or, at the outside, in half-an-hour, any ordinarily glib talker might have rattled through these comic recollections of Mr. Magsman, yet, when rattled through by Dickens, the laughter awakened seems now in the retrospect to have been altogether out of proportion. In itself the subject was anything but attractive, relating, as it did, merely to the escapade of a monstrosity. The surroundings are ignoble, the language is illiterate, the narrative from first to last is characterised by its grotesque extravagance. Yet the whole is presented to view in so utterly ludicrous an aspect, that one needs must laugh just as surely as one listened. Turning over the leaves now, and recalling to mind the hilarity they used to excite even among the least impressionable audience whenever they were fluttered (there are not a dozen of them altogether) on the familiar reading-desk, one marvels over the success of such an exceedingly small oddity as over the remembrance, let us say, of the brilliant performance of a fantasia on the jew's-harp by Rubenstein.
Nevertheless, slight though it is, the limning all through has touches of the most comic suggestiveness. Magsman's account of the show-house during his occupancy is sufficiently absurd to begin with—“the picter of the giant who was himself the heighth of the house,” being run up with a line and pulley to a pole on the roof till “his 'ed was coeval with the parapet;” the picter of the child of the British Planter seized by two Boa Constrictors, “not that we never had no child, nor no Constrictors either;” similarly, the picter of the Wild Ass of the Prairies, “not that we never had no wild asses, nor wouldn't have had 'em at a gift.” And to crown all, the picter of the Dwarf—who was “a uncommon small man, he really was. Certainly not so small as he was made out to be; but where is your Dwarf as is?” A picter “like him, too considering, with George the Fourth, in such a state of astonishment at him as his Majesty couldn't with his utmost politeness and stoutness express.” Wrote up the Dwarf was, we are told by Mr. Magsman, as Major Tpschoffski—“nobody couldn't pronounce the name,” he adds, “and it never was intended anybody should.” Corrupted into Chopski by the public, he gets called in the line Chops, partly for that reason, “partly because his real name, if he ever had any real name (which was dubious), was Stakes.” Wearing a diamond ring “(or quite as good to look at)” on his forefinger, having the run of his teeth, “and he was a Woodpecker to eat—but all dwarfs are,” receiving a good salary, and gathering besides as his perquisites the ha'pence collected by him in a Chaney sarser at the end of every entertainment, the Dwarf never has any money somehow. Nevertheless, having what his admiring proprietor considers “a fine mind, a poetic mind,” Mr. Chops indulges himself in the pleasing delusion that one of these days he is to Come Into his Property, his ideas respecting which are never realised by him so powerfully as when he sits upon a barrel-organ and has the handle turned! “Arter the wibration has run through him a little time,” says Mr. Magsman, “he screeches out, 'Toby, I feel my property a-coming—gr-r-rind away! I feel the Mint a-jingling in me. I'm a-swelling out into the Bank of England!' Such,” reflectively observes his proprietor, “is the influence of music on a poetic mind!” Adding, however, immediately afterwards, “Not that he was partial to any other music but a barrel-organ; on the contrairy, hated it.” Indulging in day-dreams about Coming Into his Property and Going Into Society, for which he feels himself formed, and to aspire towards which is his avowed ambition, the mystery, as to where the Dwarf's salary and ha'pence all go, is one day cleared up by his winning a prize in the Lottery, a half-ticket for the twenty-five thousand pounder.