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Dickens and the Fiery Past: "A Tale of " Reconsidered Author(s): G. Robert Stange Source: The English Journal, Vol. 46, No. 7 (Oct., 1957), pp. 381-390 Published by: National Council of Teachers of English Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/808362 Accessed: 02-05-2016 21:02 UTC

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This content downloaded from 134.129.182.74 on Mon, 02 May 2016 21:02:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Dickens and the Fiery Past: A Tale of Two Cities Reconsidered

G. Robert Stange

During this school year, as for decades past, thousands of high school students will study A Tale of Two Cities. Is the novel a good choice for the high school program? This appraisal will help in answering the question. The author is an associate professor of English at the University of Minnesota.

BUT WHY waste time on Dickens errors that Dickens continually falls when one can read Henry James?" into; he could never have cried over The sophisticated graduate student his characters so unabashedly, nor who asked the question did not laughed so uproariously. When we really want an answer; he wanted read the great fictional craftsmen we to provoke critical discussion. The are impressed by the justness with obvious reply is that life, thank God, which they have rendered a character is long enough to include both these or an aspect of life; we approve them novelists, but the question's chief use by considering that they have been is to define two permanent poles of faithful to our experience of the world. literary art. James, in his search for a But the characters of Dickens' novels flawless technique, sustained control, have an independent existence; his and delicate effect, is worlds apart world operates by its own laws, and from the sprawling, uneven, essentially after being immersed in it we return imperfect Dickens. In this respect, at to our world with heightened percep- least, Dickens is like the "imperfect" tions and a finer sense of reality. In Shakespeare; by dint of his extraordi- reading Dickens one tends to compare nary creative energy, the very scope the characters of real life with those in of his art, he enters the rare category his novels: no one ever praised Grand- of writers who have ceased to be de- father Smallweed or Mr. Micawber or tached objects of contemplation, and Mrs. Gamp for being faithfully ren- become instead parts of everyone's dered; we find instead human beings past. who resemble them. Seen under the aspect of eternity There are many reasons why Dick- Dickens may not be a greater novelist ens' novels are the best kind of thing than James, but he can speak more for young people to read. On the most easily than James could to many more general level, his great creative energy, people. James could not have afforded the easy extensiveness of his work, help to be vulgar as Dickens was; he could suggest to the young the joyful possi- not have allowed himself the artistic bilities of all art. His sensitivity to the 381

This content downloaded from 134.129.182.74 on Mon, 02 May 2016 21:02:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 382 THE ENGLISH JOURNAL beauty and interest of the humblest scientious teachers must have regarded aspects of life, his vibrant sympathy, the historical background of the novel are fine examples of responses that as a kind of unearned dividend that must inform any permanently signifi- could be drawn on at need. If one cant literature. A novel by Dickens could get a little history in by the back should be in every high school curricu- door, so much the better. lum. But I have sometimes wondered Some of these reasons have lost their why that novel has almost invariably force over the last thirty or forty been A Tale of Two Cities. Reflection years. There may be some point in suggests an initial advantage in its reconsidering the exclusive assignment being the shortest-next to of this novel (if I were choosing for a -of Dickens' fourteen novels. How- high school course I should pick Great ever, I think there are other more Expectations or ), worthy reasons, and some of them are but I do not think we need regard A good. Tale of Two Cities as a really bad This particular novel was most choice. It may be-along with Hard widely accepted as a high school as- Times-the least Dickensian of the signment about half a century ago. At novels, but no novel of Dickens is that time, we must assume, it reflected uninteresting; none can fail to enchant contemporary literary enthusiasms. In or to instruct us. The very weaknesses the 1890's Freeman Wills' play, The of Dickens are illuminating, and if in Only Way, an adaptation of Dickens' this novel he has, as I believe, failed to novel, was an enormous success. I sus- achieve his ambitious plans, the novel pect that, for this reason, our peda- nevertheless has qualities which make gogical forbears found A Tale the it uniquely valuable. most immediately relevant, the most "modern" of all Dickens' novels. In considering the general scheme of The fact that this novel is unlike A Tale of Two Cities we can discern three main points of departure from most of Dickens' work may also have recommended it to teachers. There are which the conception obviously de- velops. Dickens tells us in his preface more big scenes in it than in any of his that the main idea of the story came other novels; there is less of the gro- to him while he was performing in an tesque, fewer episodes and characters amateur production of ' that the inexperienced reader might play, . This melo- consider quaint or antiquated; and drama, which was much admired by there is, almost uniquely in Dickens, a Dickens and his friends, is about two single plot that is unravelled with men, Antarctic explorers, who are in speed and concision, and which always love with the same girl. One of the dominates both the characters and heroes (played by Dickens) sacrifices their milieux. The novel's relatively his life to save his rival's, and by this simple construction makes it easy for sacrifice is morally regenerated. Dick- the reader to get into and through the ens' comment on the play helps em- story; it invites an immediate and phasize the fact that in the novel Syd- simple response. In addition to these ney Carton's sacrificial death, and not inconsiderable advantages con- more important, the whole theme of

This content downloaded from 134.129.182.74 on Mon, 02 May 2016 21:02:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms DICKENS AND THE FIERY PAST 383 violent death and regeneration, must dispose his private dramas. He was de- be regarded as the "main idea." voted to Carlyle's history, "the book Though A Tale ends with Carton's of all others," according to his Ameri- execution, its beginning and middle are can friend, J. T. Fields, "which he dominated by the sufferings of Doctor read perpetually and of which he Manette, the prisoner. Dickens never tired-a book for inexhaustible- had considered calling the novel ness to be placed before every other "Buried Alive," or "The Doctor of book." In 1850 Dickens wrote to his Beauvais," and the theme of imprison- friend and biographer, John Forster, ment runs darkly through it, second in that he was reading The French Revo- importance only to the theme of re- lution "again, for the 500th time," and birth. During the years to which A he concluded the preface to his novel Tale of Two Cities belongs Dickens with the statement that "no one can seems to have been obsessed by the hope to add anything to the philos- notion of a prisoner buried alive, sud- ophy of Mr. Carlyle's wonderful denly released to the light of everyday book." life, and having to re-form his connec- Many of the details of Dickens' tions with free men, to learn again the novel are drawn directly from Carlyle. meaning of love and responsibility. Certain great scenes, such as the storm- Both , which preceded A ing of the Bastille or the operation of Tale, and , which the guillotine, are as firmly based on followed it, develop the prison theme; Carlyle's history as are such smaller one works out the comic and tragic details as the firing of the chateaux or, conditions of prison life itself, the even, the four valets who help Mon- other treats with pathos and searing seigneur to dress. But in emphasizing irony the ideas of innocence and guilt these specific obligations one may in terms of the bond between the con- overlook the more fundamental debt. vict and the "free" and "guiltless" men Dickens' choice of the historical event who judge and sentence him. "Re- which would be the subject of his called to Life" is the title of the first novel, the ideas about history and book of A Tale. Doctor Manette's man's relation to it which shape his story is not developed with irony or treatment of that subject, all derive complication, but the narrative of his from Carlyle. experiences is as much an inciting As Carlyle saw it, history evolved motif of the novel as is the story of through successive stages of destruc- . Both lives are broadly tion and reconstruction. The study of conceived in the pattern of suffering, the past had not so much an intellec- death (either real or symbolic), and tual as a moral purpose: every fact of regeneration. Both private lives reflect life is a matter of divine revelation; by and mesh with the great public events scanning history, the inspired writer which, we are to see, follow the same finds the prophetic truth that would pattern. guide the future. Fundamental to Car- From 's French lyle's views was the belief that each Revolution, originally published in new age was born like the phoenix 1837, Dickens derived the account of out of the ashes of the past. The men historical events within which he could of his time were entering, he felt, an

This content downloaded from 134.129.182.74 on Mon, 02 May 2016 21:02:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 384 THE ENGLISH JOURNAL age of reconstruction and rebirth; the Both the general approach and the preceding age of Revolution he inter- structure of A Tale of Two Cities are preted as the period of apocalyptic fire shaped by Carlylean doctrines. Dick- out of which the new world would ens chose the as his rise. In his book he only implied his subject because he, too, saw it as the moral judgments of the French Revo- event which ushered in the modern lution; in conversation he was more world. And then, his idea of the past direct, and described it as "the suicidal led him to write with explosion of an old wicked world, too a difference. By nature Dickens was wicked, false and impious for living contemptuous of the past: he had longer." His book was planned to em- neither the patient enthusiasm of the phasize the dramatic-and symbolic- antiquarian nor the curious eye of the aspects of the historical event: its three scholar; he wished to regard history sections are concerned with the ancien only from a moral (and preferably regime, the Terror, and the building of superior) standpoint. Consequently, the new society. we do not have in this novel the care- Two attitudes that emerge from ful reconstruction of manners and Carlyle's view of history are particu- morals which occasionally gives such larly important to Dickens' fiction. richness to the novels of Scott or First, though Carlyle was disgusted by Thackeray. Dickens' reader is not the theories and practice of the revolu- made to feel that he has been projected tionists, he was able to welcome their into a bygone time. Instead, the novel- fury as a cleansing flame. He observed ist uses the condescending "in those the noble and vicious events of the days" formula; he continually reminds catastrophe with a grim, religious cer- us that we have escaped from the tainty, never moved by revolutionary trammels and superstitions of the past ardour, but never doubting the neces- into a freer, better age: "But indeed, at sity of revolutionary violence. And that time, putting to death was a recipe second, he did not entertain the con- much in vogue with all trades and pro- ception of the past as a subject of fessions, and not least of all with Tell- study in its own right. We of the son's." (Book II, Ch. 1.) Or we find twentieth century are so imbued with him sneering at "dear old institutions," the notion of a "scientific," "objective" which turn out to be such things as study of history that we forget how the pillory, the whipping post, and recent an idea it is. For Carlyle the past blood money, all fragments of "ances- lay like a scripture which, being inter- tral wisdom, systematically leading to preted, revealed the eternal and in- the most frightful mercenary crimes exorable laws of sin, expiation, and that could be committed under redemption. That a past time might be Heaven." (Book II, Ch. 2.) dispassionately reconstructed, or that Dickens, then, is encouraged by it might be interpreted, not by the Carlyle's theory to regard the past pri- standards and beliefs of the present, marily as a storehouse of lessons, a but by its own systems of order and terrible moral drama. In constructing value, never occurred to the historian his novel-it seems clear-he conceived Carlyle, nor to his disciple Charles his problem as one of integrating the Dickens. personal lives of his characters with

This content downloaded from 134.129.182.74 on Mon, 02 May 2016 21:02:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms DICKENS AND THE FIERY PAST 385 the wider pattern of history. It is the that it set loose. "The world," Dickens principal scheme of the novel to show is reported to have said, "is so much the individual fate mirroring and being smaller than we think it; we are all so mirrored by the fate of the social connected by fate without knowing it; order. The lives of both Doctor Man- people supposed to be far apart are so ette and Sydney Carton are, in a sense, constantly elbowing each other; and parables of the Revolution, of social tomorrow bears so close a resemblance regeneration through suffering and to nothing half so much as to yester- sacrifice. The Doctor's return to life day." illustrates the stumbling course of the This notion of reciprocity between new order, released from its dark private and public, England and dungeon of oppression and misery, France, past and present, imposes a finding its place in a new and juster pattern of parallelism on Dickens' world. And Carton embodies both the novel. It had to be a tale of two cities, novel's central narrative theme and its not just a story of revolutionary . profoundest moral view: his past of Every device that ingenuity suggested sinful negligence parallels the past of was used to connect the seemingly eighteenth-century Europe; his noble placid world of England with the up- death demonstrates the possibility of heaval in France. Symbolically the rebirth through love and expiation. point is emphasized by the footsteps The web of moral interdependence which echo on the quiet corner of is very closely spun. John Forster, who where Lucie lives with her hus- often echoed Dickens' own views, em- band and father. These echoes, be- phasized this aspect as the finest feature coming increasingly ominous, finally of the novel: "There is no piece of mingle with the "headlong and dan- fiction known to me, in which the gerous footsteps . . . raging in Saint domestic life of a few simple private Antoine afar off." (Book II, Ch. 21.) people is in such a manner knitted and Mechanically considered, the novel is interwoven with the outbreak of a divided almost equally between the terrible public event, that the one two countries: of the forty-five chap- seems but part of the other." Indeed, ters, two recount the parallelism of in a work of serious historical interest events in England and France, nine- it is necessary that the reader have a teen are set in England, and twenty- sense of his own connection with- four in France. The subject, however, even his own responsibility for-a so- did not permit a true balance of em- cial crisis. A modern example would be phasis; all of Book III takes place in Ernest Hemingway's persuasive epi- France, so that the movement of the graph reminding the American or novel is directed away from England English reader that the knell that toward the heart of the revolutionary sounded the death of the Spanish Re- strife. public tolled also for him. Dickens, in In terms of action Dickens seems to a similar manner, set himself the task have tried to establish a correspond- of persuading his readers that they ence between the two nations, but not were not islands entire of themselves, to have quite succeeded. Tellson's but involved in the injustice that led to Bank is to some extent conceived as the Revolution and in the violence agent of the Old Order, and therefore

This content downloaded from 134.129.182.74 on Mon, 02 May 2016 21:02:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 386 THE ENGLISH JOURNAL as evidencing its guilt, but it turns out violate both fictional probability and to be quite an attractive (perhaps be- historical possibility by transporting cause thoroughly English) place. The them all to Paris in the Year of Terror, description of the mob attack- 1792. Then, the absence of English ing the funeral procession of the Old backgrounds prevents, I think, the Bailey spy (Book II, Ch. 14) must unhampered flowering of his comic have been designed to balance the de- spirit. The comedy that appears in A scriptions of French mob violence with Tale is only a faint echo of the old a home-grown variety. But Dickens. Mrs. Cruncher's "flopping" the episode seems irrelevant to the is purely verbal humor, and attached story, and is handled in an oddly per- to a pathetic situation. There are some functory way, ending in a moralistic deft satirical strokes in the description rather than a dramatic strain: " . . . the of Darnay's first trial, and a droll de- crowd gradually melted away, and scription of the fresco of Cupid in perhaps the Guards came, and perhaps Tellson's Paris office, "still to be seen they never came, and this was the on the ceiling in the coolest linen, aim- usual progress of a mob." Jerry ing (as he very often does) at money Cruncher, the grave-robber, who for from morning to night." But these professional reasons joins the attack on touches are few and comparatively the funeral, was probably conceived as weak. an English counterpart to the im- Dickens' comic spirit was, I am sure, placable Defarge, but no significant inhibited by the nature of his material. parallel is established. Comedy is based on the familiar and The process of doubling is observ- the particular; the wide gestures of in- able in the treatment of the main char- tense passion or suffering are far re- acters. The shiftless Carton and the moved from the minute turns of comic virtuous are doubles. vexation. For this reason comedy Darnay is tried as an enemy of the would obviously be inappropriate to a state both in England and in France; study of revolution. However, there in both cases he is unjustly accused, is another reason for the gravity of and in both is saved by Carton. Darnay A Tale of Two Cities: Dickens' best has an original French name, D'Evr6- comedy is verbal; Mrs. Gamp (in monde, a coupling of the English word ) is supremely every and the French word comic because of the wild irrelevance monde. The association is with tout of her speech, a speech which rises le monde, suggesting that Darnay is from the carefully perceived cadences an Anglo-French Everyman. Lucie of the vulgar language. Since Dickens Manette, finally, is the child of an rarely made good comedy out of the English mother and a French father. well-bred, it seems likely that in this The difficulty in this attempt to novel, where he was pretty much con- yoke the worlds of London and Paris fined to upper middle-class people, by violence together is that Dickens aristocrats, and foreigners, he was be- had to forego his usual confident plac- reft of the native, colloquial speech ing of English characters in English upon which his genius fed. He was scenes. He was able to make use of a not up to creating comic French char- number of Englishmen, but he had to acters and, indeed, for reasons of his-

This content downloaded from 134.129.182.74 on Mon, 02 May 2016 21:02:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms DICKENS AND THE FIERY PAST 387 torical consistency, the Frenchmen These episodes are peculiarly interest- had to be a grim crew. ing in that they are imagined to exist In the absence of the comic spirit in the spatial dimensions of picture other means had to be used to vivify rather than in the temporal flow of the novel, so it is no surprise to find narrative or verbal description. Dick- that Dickens spoke of setting himself ens concludes his picture of the grind- "the little task of making a picturesque stone, for example, by saying: "All story, rising in every chapter, with this was seen in a moment, as the vision characters true to nature, but whom of a drowning man, or of any human the story should express more than creature at any very great pass, could they should express themselves by dia- see a world if it were there." These logue." It is one of the great weak- three most elaborate pictures serve to nesses of the novel that Dickens at- create an intense emotional impression tempted to rely on plot rather than on of the historical action of the novel. character, but it is one of its strengths- Each is a scene of passion and violence, as well as its most distinctive feature- each is presented with the clarity and that it became a novel of pictures. So overcharged feeling of a vision in de- marked is the painterly quality of A lirium. This frenzy, Dickens would Tale that one's memory of it is domi- have us conclude, is the Revolution. It nated by a series of tableaux vivants, is through picture that he chose to scenes without dialogue, but with a control our responses: "It has been one composition so clear that one tends to of my hopes," so runs the preface, "to see them within the limits of a frame. add something to the popular and pic- The most memorable scenes are turesque means of understanding that charged with symbolism and become a terrible time, though no one can hope primary means of shaping the reader's to add anything to the philosophy of judgment of the Revolution. The first Mr. Carlyle's wonderful book." (The glimpse of France that the novel pro- italics are mine.) vides is the scene of the broken wine Though there are no other pictures cask in Chapter Five. The two para- as highly wrought as these I have men- graphs in which this is contained are tioned, the tableau technique is the rul- so purely visual that they might almost ing method of the book. Dickens tends stand for the description of a painting throughout to make important epi- called-let us say-"The Broken Cask." sodes into set-pieces which are more To this the novelist has added a nota- visual than strictly dramatic. Since tion of sound effects, "a shrill sound such passages are obviously separable of laughter and amused voices," and from the surrounding matrix of nar- a final sentence that sends the partici- rative, the unity of tone in the novel pants back to their usual tasks, and suffers, but in his use of the stylized rounds out the scene. The great para- image Dickens developed a method graph which describes the Carmagnole that owes nothing either to the theatre is another tour de force of word paint- (the source of much of his technique) ing (Book III, Ch. 5), as is the picture or to the fiction of his predecessors and of the men sharpening their bloody contemporaries. There is a groping "hatchets, knives, bayonets, swords" toward a new form of the literary pic- at the grindstone (Book III, Ch. 2). turesque, the creation of an image

This content downloaded from 134.129.182.74 on Mon, 02 May 2016 21:02:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 388 THE ENGLISH JOURNAL which derives more from the conven- cent breast, and that it lies there alone, and will be shared by no one?" (Book II, tions of painting than of literature, but Ch. 13.) which makes use in an impressionistic way of sound and movement. Dickens What is wrong in this passage is not spoke justifiably of adding something so much the emotional situation, which to the "picturesque" means of under- we could be persuaded to believe in, as standing. the language: there are too many dreams, and souls, and homes, and in- The general conception of A Tale nocent breasts. of Two Cities is so grand that one is Some of Dickens' characteristic tempted to overlook the novel's tech- mannerisms grew all out of bounds in nical faults. But faults there are, some A Tale. Repetition was an endemic of them unforgivable, many of them Victorian rhetorical device of which quite instructive. The elements of Dickens was always fond, but in no sentimentality and melodrama are no other novel is it so obtrusive. Observe more persistent here than in some of the opening paragraph: "It was the the earlier novels, but as always, they best of times, it was the worst of times, are unpalatable to the modern reader. it was the age of wisdom, it was the 's heart-rending reunion age of foolishness, it was the epoch of with the father she has never known is belief, it was the epoch .. .," etc. Per- simply not prepared for: haps some of the repetitions and paral- "And if, when I shall tell you of my lels were intended to emphasize the name, and of my father who is living, and interconnections of twin realms of the of my mother who is dead, you learn that novel, but too often the device be- I have to kneel to my honored father, and implore his pardon for having never comes merely a trick. It does not add for his sake striven all day and lain awake to the reader's experience to find the and wept all night, because the love of titles of chapters in balanced pairs, my poor mother hid his torture from me, "The Fellow of Delicacy" followed weep for it, weep for it!" (Book I, Ch. 6.) by "The Fellow of No Delicacy," The illustrious analogue here is the and "Knitting" followed by "Still reunion of Cordelia and Lear, but to Knitting." These verbal devices evi- define the differences between the two dence a curious lack of control, a scenes is merely to become impatient tendency to depend for effect on mere with Dickens. smartness. Similarly, Sydney Carton's declara- One stylistic problem that Dickens tion of love to Lucie is entirely possi- did not quite overcome was the chal- ble, even noble, but it is undermined lenge of rendering the quality of for- by sentimentality: eign speech. Many novelists (and more "In my degradation, I have not been so dramatists) have been defeated in their degraded but that the sight of you with efforts to make foreigners sound really your father, and of this home made such foreign; on the whole Dickens has a home by you, has stirred old shadows done pretty well. He was for the most that I thought had died out of me. part content to give the French dia- "Will you let me believe, when I recall logue a slightly stilted quality, the this day, that the last confidence of my result usually of a literal translation life was reposed in your pure and inno- of French idiom. M. Defarge's first

This content downloaded from 134.129.182.74 on Mon, 02 May 2016 21:02:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms DICKENS AND THE FIERY PAST 389 statements are illustrative: " 'Say, then, ens makes it obvious that the wine my Gaspard, what do you do there?' symbolizes blood, and the multiple ... 'What now? Are you a subject for meanings of wine and blood are then the mad-hospital?'" This, at least, developed. Defarge's wineshop is the sounds exotic without suggesting that center of revolutionary action; we are the speaker has an imperfect grasp of led to reflect that the fellowship of his own language, but the method of blood and wine has many guises. Af- rendering idioms literally can easily fecting the reader, however, on a more become absurd. One bit of dialogue instinctual level are the images-which runs, " 'One can depart, citizen?' 'One tend to run together-of fountains, can depart,' " and French readers have flood, and fire. The fountain which is been particularly annoyed by such the center of the life of Saint Antoine solecisms as "the Bridge of the Pont- becomes a symbol of the irrepressible Neuf." However, clumsy as these lo- force of humanity welling up against cutions are, it is profitable-and to repression. After the wicked Mon- Dickens' advantage-to compare his ef- seigneur's carriage has run down a forts with Hemingway's valiant at- child, the novelist tells us, "The water tempt to render the spirit of Spanish of the fountain ran, the swift river speech in For Whom the Bell Tolls. ran, the day ran into evening, so much Hemingway's earthy Spaniards sound life in the city ran into death according as queer as Dickens' Parisians. to rule ... all things ran their course." But if there are weaknesses in Dick- (Book II, Ch. 7.) The Saint Antoine ens' technique, there is also strength in fountain has its rural counterparts: many of the smaller touches which "The fountain in the village flowed give richness to the novel. Much of the unseen and unheard, and the fountain effect of A Tale is a result of artful at the chateau dropped unseen and un- patterns of imagery. The pervading heard-both melting away, like the image of the road, for example, runs minutes that were falling from the through the whole book. The first spring of Time." In the passages that chapter, which opens with a general follow, the water of the chateau foun- description of the period, ends with a tain seems to turn to blood, and the reference to the figurative road along village fountain becomes the rallying which all men will be carried in the place for the populace, the symbol of years ahead of them. The second chap- their common humanity, of the force ter, which begins the narrative, makes of life that cannot be put down. In the figure of speech literal: "It was the the chain of imagery the fountain road that lay, on a Friday night images give way to a flood, a sea, and late in November. . . ." When, in the the sea is succeeded by fire. The flow- course of the novel, we encounter ing water may be curbed or checked, many roads upon which the characters but it cannot be stopped, and it can drive or ride, none, thanks to the ex- soon turn from a beneficent to a de- plicitness of the opening chapter, is structive force. without metaphorical significance. One of the powerful features of Sometimes the imagery is allegorical. Dickens' art which should not go un- In the scene of the broken wine cask, mentioned is his strong sense of the which I have already mentioned, Dick- lusts and guilts and passions which lie

This content downloaded from 134.129.182.74 on Mon, 02 May 2016 21:02:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 390 THE ENGLISH JOURNAL under the surface of human conscious- understanding of the French Revolu- ness. It is notable that his treatment of tion. And the more I consider this the Revolution is free of sentimental novel as an interpretation of that event, notions as to the essential goodness of the more successful it seems to me. man. The Terror is conceived as both One may quarrel with this or that de- a cleansing and polluting force, but tail of documentation, but the histori- men are shown to be attracted to vio- cal view, in its broad outlines, is a lence for its own sake. There is also a sound one. Dickens suggested that deal of deep psychological understand- "this terrible Revolution" was an in- ing in the treatment of Charles Dar- evitable response to injustice, but he nay's attraction by the "Loadstone showed also how revolutionary ardor Rock" of the Revolution. And for us produced its own forms of injustice. who live in a world of concentration Carton, describing the Revolution as a camps, of political betrayals, and in- dark phase in the development of explicable confessions there is some- modern history, saw "the evil of this thing almost prophetic in Dickens' time and of the previous time of which analysis of the prisoner's state of mind: this is the natural birth, gradually mak- Similarly, though with a subtle difference, ing expiation for itself and wearing a species of fervor or intoxication, known, out." This view of history was tem- without a doubt, to have led some per- porarily out of fashion, but there is sons to brave the guillotine unnecessarily, some evidence that historians are now and to die by it, was not mere boastful- returning to it. Experience of the revo- ness, but a wild infection of the wildly lutionary era of our own century has shaken public mind. In seasons of pesti- led more influential writers to see the lence, some of us will have a secret attrac- French Revolution as the critical event tion to the disease-a terrible passing in- clination to die of it. (Book III, Ch. 6.) of modern history, as a cataclysm whose effects are still with us. This is not only brilliant psychol- ogy; it has turned out to be good A Tale of Two Cities is a pro- foundly thoughtful, if not a theoretical history. It is in its grasp of its subject book. It is the sort of novel that should that the power and brilliance of this be enormously usable for young novel are finally seen to lie. The novel's chief weaknesses are the results people and for their teachers. Its tech- nical weaknesses are of a kind that can of its excessive artificiality: its con- illustrate the nature and problems of struction constantly calls attention to fiction, but what is much more im- itself. But in reacting against these portant, its conception can vivify for smaller details we must not forget that us the meanings of the past, can offer Dickens' main intention was to present us a reading of history, humane and a view of, to "add something" to our deep, by a great artistic intelligence.

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