Yet they are fitter subjects for any other kind of
jesting. In the first place they are quite defenceless, but besides and
before this, it might have been supposed that nothing in a child could
provoke the equal passion of scorn. Between confessed unequals scorn is
not even suggested. Its derisive proclamation of inequality has no sting
and no meaning where inequality is natural and manifest.
Children rouse the laughter of men and women; but in all that laughter
the tone of derision is more strange a discord than the tone of anger
would be, or the tone of theological anger and menace. These, little
children have had to bear in their day, but in the grim and serious
moods--not in the play--of their elders. The wonder is that children
should ever have been burlesqued, or held to be fit subjects for irony.
Whether the thing has been done anywhere out of England, in any form,
might be a point for enquiry. It would seem, at a glance, that English
art and literature are quite alone in this incredible manner of sport.
And even here, too, the thing that is laughed at in a child is probably
always a mere reflection of the parents' vulgarity. None the less it is
an unintelligible thing that even the rankest vulgarity of father or
mother should be resented, in the child, with the implacable resentment
of derision.
John Leech used the caricature of a baby for the purposes of a scorn that
was not angry, but familiar.
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