e us saying, as Sydney Carton mounted the scaffold, words
which, splendid in themselves, have never been so splendidly quoted--"I
am the Resurrection and the Life; whoso believeth in Me though he be
dead yet he shall live." In Sydney Carton at least, Dickens shows none
of that dreary submission to the environment of the irrevocable that had
for an instant lain on him like a cloud. On this occasion he sees with
the old heroic clearness that to be a failure may be one step to being a
saint. On the third day he rose again from the dead.

[Illustration: Charles Dickens, 1859
From an oil painting by W. P. Frith, R.A.]

A TALE OF TWO CITIES

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 b