CHARLES DICKENS' HUMOUR.

Colonist, Volume LIV, Issue 13380, 1 April 1912, Page 7

CHARLES DICKENS' HUMOUR.

'■'Th© centenary of Dickens is more than the triumph of: Dickons; it is the triumph of tho simple person over the superior person/ says'Mr. James Douglas in the "Morning Leader." "It is tho victory of the common man over tho cultured critic. Us is tho survival and revival of human nature, it is ihe death of decadence. • Bishop Wclldon, in "Manchester Cathedral," says:—"Dickons was the greatest, I think, because ho was tho purest of all humorists. Nobody has mado so many laffgh innocently as he. ] He has sent a ripple of guileless laughter across tho face of the Englishspeaking world. What imagos of merriment ariso in the mind at the very mention of tho characters whom he has made to he living men and women! But his humour is always restraint, always refined. Even when he treats of persons and places most dearly associated with tho vulgar and the criminal side of life, as in 'Oliver Twist.' he shrinks with instinctive reserve from all that would needlessly offend good taste. 'To tlie pure all things arc pure,,' and oven impurity itself seems somehow to be purified in his hands. "It is easy to desecrate the sanctities of life, and perilously near to sin has been in Christian times the humour of a Rabelais, a Voltaire, or a Swift. Nobler and finer is tho humour of a Moliere, or an Addison, because it is more free from vulgarity. But in these great writers the fun is not so irrepressible as it is in Dickens. In him it bubbles up always and everywhere. 1 There is scarcely a side of English life which he does not touch with the light shaft of his humour. But he never defiles what he touches. His wit is not like the jewel sparkling on.a foul hand. The cup of laughter which he holds to men's lips contains no sediment."