Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens | Page 8

between swift revolutionism in
Paris and slow evolutionism in London. Sidney Carton is one of those
sublime ascetics whose head offends them, and who cut it off. For him
at least it was better that the blood should flow in Paris than that the
wine should flow any longer in London. And if I say that even now the
guillotine might be the best cure for many a London lawyer, I ask you
to believe that I am not merely flippant. But you will not believe it.
BARNABY RUDGE
It may be said that there is no comparison between that explosive
opening of the intellect in Paris and an antiquated madman leading a
knot of provincial Protestants. The Man of the Hill, says Victor Hugo
somewhere, fights for an idea; the Man of the Forest for a prejudice.
Nevertheless it remains true that the enemies of the red cap long
attempted to represent it as a sham decoration in the style of Sim
Tappertit. Long after the revolutionists had shown more than the
qualities of men, it was common among lords and lacqueys to attribute
to them the stagey and piratical pretentiousness of urchins. The kings
called Napoleon's pistol a toy pistol even while it was holding up their
coach and mastering their money or their lives; they called his sword a

stage sword even while they ran away from it. Something of the same
senile inconsistency can be found in an English and American habit
common until recently: that of painting the South Americans at once as
ruffians wading in carnage, and also as poltroons playing at war. They
blame them first for the cruelty of having a fight; and then for the
weakness of having a sham fight. Such, however, since the French
Revolution and before it, has been the fatuous attitude of certain
Anglo-Saxons towards the whole revolutionary tradition. Sim Tappertit
was a sort of answer to everything; and the young men were mocked as
'prentices long after they were masters. The rising fortune of the South
American republics to-day is symbolical and even menacing of many
things; and it may be that the romance of riot will not be so much
extinguished as extended; and nearer home we may have boys being
boys again, and in London the cry of "clubs."
THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER
The Uncommercial Traveller is a collection of Dickens's memories
rather than of his literary purposes; but it is due to him to say that
memory is often more startling in him than prophecy in anybody else.
They have the character which belongs to all his vivid incidental
writing: that they attach themselves always to some text which is a fact
rather than an idea. He was one of those sons of Eve who are fonder of
the Tree of Life than of the Tree of Knowledge--even of the knowledge
of good and of evil. He was in this profoundest sense a realist. Critics
have talked of an artist with his eye on the object. Dickens as an
essayist always had his eye on an object before he had the faintest
notion of a subject. All these works of his can best be considered as
letters; they are notes of personal travel, scribbles in a diary about this
or that that really happened. But Dickens was one of the few men who
have the two talents that are the whole of literature--and have them
both together. First, he could make a thing happen over again; and
second, he could make it happen better. He can be called exaggerative;
but mere exaggeration conveys nothing of his typical talent. Mere
whirlwinds of words, mere melodramas of earth and heaven do not
affect us as Dickens affects us, because they are exaggerations of
nothing. If asked for an exaggeration of something, their inventors

would be entirely dumb. They would not know how to exaggerate a
broom-stick; for the life of them they could not exaggerate a tenpenny
nail. Dickens always began with the nail or the broom-stick. He always
began with a fact even when he was most fanciful; and even when he
drew the long bow he was careful to hit the white.
This riotous realism of Dickens has its disadvantage--a disadvantage
that comes out more clearly in these casual sketches than in his
constructed romances. One grave defect in his greatness is that he was
altogether too indifferent to theories. On large matters he went right by
the very largeness of his mind; but in small matters he suffered from
the lack of any logical test and ready reckoner. Hence his comment
upon the details of civilisation or reform are sometimes apt to be jerky
and jarring, and even grossly inconsistent. So long as a thing was
heroic enough to admire, Dickens admired it; whenever it