If he does not feel at home he had much better have stopped at home. 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. There is one good test and one only of whether a man has travelled to any profit in Europe. He went about Europe on stilts he never touched the ground. He was more superficial than the smallest and commonest tourist. He did indeed travel on the Continent but surely no man's travel was ever so superficial as his. But, after all, his weakness, his calamitous weakness, was that he was a man of one city.įor all practical purposes he had never been outside such places as Chatham and London. His strength was, after all, in the fact that he was a man of the city. He was a citizen and, after all, a citizen means a man of the city. Despite many fine pictures of natural scenery, especially along the English roadsides, he was upon the whole emphatically on the side of the town. 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. 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 we should (I hope) all favour the spreading of the town if it did mean the spreading of civilisation. Dickens is the great Cockney, at once tragic and comic, who enters abruptly upon the Arcadian banquet of the æsthetics 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. We must remember this distinction always in the case of Dickens. "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. 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. Or know what 't is to pity and be pitied.
If ever been where bells have knolled to church, If ever you have sat at good men's feasts, 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: 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. Yet it is here that Shakespeare makes one of his most arresting and startling assertions of the truth. 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. 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.
Shakespeare, in the heart of his fantastic forest, turns with a splendid suddenness to the Cockney ideal as being the true one after all. That is, he was a man born within the immediate appeal of high civilisation and of eternal religion. By the old sound and proverbial test a Cockney was a man born within the sound of Bow bells.
He was in spirit a Cockney though that title has been quite unreasonably twisted to mean a cad. All his other tales have been tales of one city. It is his most typical contact with the civic ideals of Europe. FROM: Appreciations and Criticisms of the works of Charles Dickens, by Gilbert Keith ChestertonĪs an example of Dickens's literary work, A Tale of Two Cities is not wrongly named.
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