As an example of Dickens's literary work, _A Tale of Two Cities_ is not
wrongly named. It is his most typical contact with the civic ideals of
Europe. All his other tales have been tales of one city. He was in
spirit a Cockney; though that title has been quite unreasonably twisted
to mean a cad. By the old sound and proverbial test a Cockney was a man
born within the sound of Bow bells. That is, he was a man born within
the immediate appeal of high civilisation and of eternal religion.
Shakespeare, in the heart of his fantastic forest, turns with a splendid
suddenness to the Cockney ideal as being the true one after all. For a
jest, for a reaction, for an idle summer love or still idler summer
hatred, it is well to wander away into the bewildering forest of Arden.
It is well that those who are sick with love or sick with the absence of
love, those who weary of the folly of courts or weary yet more of their
wisdom, it is natural that these should trail away into the twinkling
twilight of the woods. Yet it is here that Shakespeare makes one of his
most arresting and startling assertions of the truth. Here is one of
those rare and tremendous moments of which one may say that there is a
stage direction, "Enter Shakespeare." He has admitted that for men weary
of courts, for men sick of cities, the wood is the wisest place, and he
has praised it with his purest lyric ecstasy. But when a man enters
suddenly upon that celestial picnic, a man who is not sick of cities,
but sick of hunger, a man who is not weary of courts, but weary of
walking, then Shakespeare lets through his own voice with a shattering
sincerity and cries the praise of practical human civilisation:
If ever you have looked on better days,
If ever you have sat at good men's feasts,
If ever been where bells have knolled to church,
If ever from your eyelids wiped a tear
Or know what 'tis to pity and be pitied.
There is nothing finer even in Shakespeare than that conception of the
circle of rich men all pretending to rough it in the country, and the
one really hungry man entering, sword in hand, and praising the city.
"If ever been where bells have knolled to church"; if you have ever been
within sound of Bow bells; if you have ever been happy and haughty
enough to call yourself a Cockney.
We must remember this distinction always in the case of Dickens. Dickens
is the great Cockney, at once tragic and comic, who enters abruptly upon
the Arcadian banquet of the aesthetics and says, "Forbear and eat no
more," and tells them that they shall not eat "until necessity be
served." If there was one thing he would have favoured instinctively it
would have been the spreading of the town as meaning the spreading of
civilisation. And we should (I hope) all favour the spreading of the
town if it did mean the spreading of civilisation. The objection to the
spreading of the modern Manchester or Birmingham suburb is simply that
such a suburb is much more barbaric than any village in Europe could
ever conceivably be. And again, if there is anything that Dickens would
have definitely hated it is that general treatment of nature as a
dramatic spectacle, a piece of scene-painting which has become the
common mark of the culture of our wealthier classes. Despite many fine
pictures of natural scenery, especially along the English roadsides, he
was upon the whole emphatically on the side of the town. He was on the
side of bricks and mortar. He was a citizen; and, after all, a citizen
means a man of the city. His strength was, after all, in the fact that
he was a man of the city. But, after all, his weakness, his calamitous
weakness, was that he was a man of one city.
For all practical purposes he had never been outside such places as
Chatham and London. He did indeed travel on the Continent; but surely no
man's travel was ever so superficial as his. He was more superficial
than the smallest and commonest tourist. He went about Europe on stilts;
he never touched the ground. There is one good test and one only of
whether a man has travelled to any profit in Europe. An Englishman is,
as such, a European, and as he approaches the central splendours of
Europe he ought to feel that he is coming home. If he does not feel at
home he had much better have stopped at home. England is a real home;
London is a real home; and all the essential feelings of adventure or
the picturesque can easily be gained by going out at night upon the
flats of Essex or the cloven hills of Surrey. Your visit to Europe is
useless unless it gives you the sense of an exile returning. Your first
sight of Rome is futile unless you feel that you have seen it before.
Thus useless and thus futile were the foreign experiments and the
continental raids of Dickens. He enjoyed them as he would have enjoyed,
as a boy, a scamper out of Chatham into some strange meadows, as he
would have enjoyed, when a grown man, a steam in a police boat out into
the fens to the far east of London. But he was the Cockney venturing
far; he was not the European coming home. He is still the splendid
Cockney Orlando of whom I spoke above; he cannot but suppose that any
strange men, being happy in some pastoral way, are mysterious foreign
scoundrels. Dickens's real speech to the lazy and laughing civilisation
of Southern Europe would really have run in the Shakespearian words:
but whoe'er you be
Who in this desert inaccessible,
Under the shade of melancholy boughs
Lose and neglect the creeping hours of time.
If ever you have looked on better things,
If ever been where bells have knolled to church.
If, in short, you have ever had the advantage of being born within the
sound of Bow bells. Dickens could not really conceive that there was any
other city but his own.
It is necessary thus to insist that Dickens never understood the
Continent, because only thus can we appreciate the really remarkable
thing he did in _A Tale of Two Cities_. It is necessary to feel, first
of all, the fact that to him London was the centre of the universe. He
did not understand at all the real sense in which Paris is the capital
of Europe. He had never realised that all roads lead to Rome. He had
never felt (as an Englishman can feel) that he was an Athenian before he
was a Londoner. Yet with everything against him he did this astonishing
thing. He wrote a book about two cities, one of which he understood; the
other he did not understand. And his description of the city he did not
know is almost better than his description of the city he did know. This
is the entrance of the unquestionable thing about Dickens; the thing
called genius; the thing which every one has to talk about directly and
distinctly because no one knows what it is. For a plain word (as for
instance the word fool) always covers an infinite mystery.
_A Tale of Two Cities_ is one of the more tragic tints of the later life
of Dickens. It might be said that he grew sadder as he grew older; but
this would be false, for two reasons. First, a man never or hardly ever
does grow sad as he grows old; on the contrary, the most melancholy
young lovers can be found forty years afterwards chuckling over their
port wine. And second, Dickens never did grow old, even in a physical
sense. What weariness did appear in him appeared in the prime of life;
it was due not to age but to overwork, and his exaggerative way of doing
everything. To call Dickens a victim of elderly disenchantment would be
as absurd as to say the same of Keats. Such fatigue as there was, was
due not to the slowing down of his blood, but rather to its unremitting
rapidity. He was not wearied by his age; rather he was wearied by his
youth. And though _A Tale of Two Cities_ is full of sadness, it is full
also of enthusiasm; that pathos is a young pathos rather than an old
one. Yet there is one circumstance which does render important the fact
that _A Tale of Two Cities_ is one of the later works of Dickens. This
fact is the fact of his dependence upon another of the great writers of
the Victorian era. And it is in connection with this that we can best
see the truth of which I have been speaking; the truth that his actual
ignorance of France went with amazing intuitive perception of the truth
about it. It is here that he has most clearly the plain mark of the man
of genius; that he can understand what he does not understand.
Dickens was inspired to the study of the French Revolution and to the
writing of a romance about it by the example and influence of Carlyle.
Thomas Carlyle undoubtedly rediscovered for Englishmen the revolution
that was at the back of all their policies and reforms. It is an
entertaining side joke that the French Revolution should have been
discovered for Britons by the only British writer who did not really
believe in it. Nevertheless, the most authoritative and the most recent
critics on that great renaissance agree in considering Carlyle's work
one of the most searching and detailed power. Carlyle had read a great
deal about the French Revolution. Dickens had read nothing at all,
except Carlyle. Carlyle was a man who collected his ideas by the careful
collation of documents and the verification of references. Dickens was a
man who collected his ideas from loose hints in the streets, and those
always the same streets; as I have said, he was the citizen of one city.
Carlyle was in his way learned; Dickens was in every way ignorant.
Dickens was an Englishman cut off from France; Carlyle was a Scotsman,
historically connected with France. And yet, when all this is said and
certified, Dickens is more right than Carlyle. Dickens's French
Revolution is probably more like the real French Revolution than
Carlyle's. It is difficult, if not impossible, to state the grounds of
this strong conviction. One can only talk of it by employing that
excellent method which Cardinal Newman employed when he spoke of the
"notes" of Catholicism. There were certain "notes" of the Revolution.
One note of the Revolution was the thing which silly people call
optimism, and sensible people call high spirits. Carlyle could never
quite get it, because with all his spiritual energy he had no high
spirits. That is why he preferred prose to poetry. He could understand
rhetoric; for rhetoric means singing with an object. But he could not
understand lyrics; for the lyric means singing without an object; as
every one does when he is happy. Now for all its blood and its black
guillotines, the French Revolution was full of mere high spirits. Nay,
it was full of happiness. This actual lilt and levity Carlyle never
really found in the Revolution, because he could not find it in himself.
Dickens knew less of the Revolution, but he had more of it. When Dickens
attacked abuses, he battered them down with exactly that sort of cheery
and quite one-sided satisfaction with which the French mob battered down
the Bastille. Dickens utterly and innocently believed in certain things;
he would, I think, have drawn the sword for them. Carlyle half believed
in half a hundred things; he was at once more of a mystic and more of a
sceptic. Carlyle was the perfect type of the grumbling servant; the old
grumbling servant of the aristocratic comedies. He followed the
aristocracy, but he growled as he followed. He was obedient without
being servile, just as Caleb Balderstone was obedient without being
servile. But Dickens was the type of the man who might really have
rebelled instead of grumbling. He might have gone out into the street
and fought, like the man who took the Bastille. It is somewhat
nationally significant that when we talk of the man in the street it
means a figure silent, slouching, and even feeble. When the French speak
of the man in the street, it means danger in the street.
No one can fail to notice this deep difference between Dickens and the
Carlyle whom he avowedly copied. Splendid and symbolic as are Carlyle's
scenes of the French Revolution, we have in reading them a curious sense
that everything is happening at night. In Dickens even massacre happens
by daylight. Carlyle always assumes that because things were tragedies
therefore the men who did them felt tragic. Dickens knows that the man
who works the worst tragedies is the man who feels comic; as for
example, Mr. Quilp. The French Revolution was a much simpler world than
Carlyle could understand; for Carlyle was subtle and not simple. Dickens
could understand it, for he was simple and not subtle. He understood
that plain rage against plain political injustice; he understood again
that obvious vindictiveness and that obvious brutality which followed.
"Cruelty and the abuse of absolute power," he told an American
slave-owner, "are two of the bad passions of human nature." Carlyle was
quite incapable of rising to the height of that uplifted common-sense.
He must always find something mystical about the cruelty of the French
Revolution. The effect was equally bad whether he found it mystically
bad and called the thing anarchy, or whether he found it mystically good
and called it the rule of the strong. In both cases he could not
understand the common-sense justice or the common-sense vengeance of
Dickens and the French Revolution.
Yet Dickens has in this book given a perfect and final touch to this
whole conception of mere rebellion and mere human nature. Carlyle had
written the story of the French Revolution and had made the story a mere
tragedy. Dickens writes the story about the French Revolution, and does
not make the Revolution itself the tragedy at all. Dickens knows that an
outbreak is seldom a tragedy; generally it is the avoidance of a
tragedy. All the real tragedies are silent. Men fight each other with
furious cries, because men fight each other with chivalry and an
unchangeable sense of brotherhood. But trees fight each other in utter
stillness; because they fight each other cruelly and without quarter. In
this book, as in history, the guillotine is not the calamity, but rather
the solution of the calamity. The sin of Sydney Carton is a sin of
habit, not of revolution. His gloom is the gloom of London, not the
gloom of Paris.
[Illustration: Charles Dickens, Circa 1860
Photograph by J. & C. Watkins.]