rything, even of its
own melancholy. _The Tale of Two Cities_ is a great tragedy, but it is
still a sentimental tragedy. It is a great drama, but it is still a
melodrama. But this tale of _Hard Times_ is in some way harsher than all
these. For it is the expression of a righteous indignation which cannot
condescend to humour and which cannot even condescend to pathos. Twenty
times we have taken Dickens's hand and it has been sometimes hot with
revelry and sometimes weak with weariness; but this time we start a
little, for it is inhumanly cold; and then we realise that we have
touched his gauntlet of steel.

One cannot express the real value of this book without being irrelevant.
It is true that one cannot express the real value of anything without
being irrelevant. If we take a thing frivolously we can take it
separately, but the moment we take a thing seriously, if it were only an
old umbrella, it is obvious that that umbrella opens above us into the
immensity of the whole universe. But there are rather particular reasons
why the value of the book called _Hard Times_ should be referred back to
great historic and theoretic matters with which it may appear
superficially to have little or nothing to do. The chief reason can
perhaps be stated thus--that English politics had for more than a
hundred years been getting into more and more of a hopeless tangle (a
tangle which, of course, has since become even worse) and that Dickens
did in some extraordinary way see what was wrong, even if he did not see
what was right.

The Liberalism which Dickens and nearly all of his contemporaries
professed had begun in the American and the French Revolutions. Almost
all modern English criticism upon those revolutions has been vitiated
by the assumption that those revolutions burst upon a world which was
unprepared for their ideas--a world ignorant of the possibility of such
ideas. Somewhat the same mistake is made by those who suggest that
Christianity was adopted by a world incapable of criticising it; whereas
obviously it was adopted by a world that was tired of criticising
everything. The vital mistake that is made about the French Revolution
is merely this--that everyone talks about it as the introduction of a
new idea. It was not the introduction of a new idea; there are no new
ideas. Or if there are new ideas, they would not cause the least
irritation if they were introduced into political society; because the
world having never go