much better have stopped at home. England is a real home;
London is a real home; and all the essential feelings of adventure or
the picturesque can easily be gained by going out at night upon the
flats of Essex or the cloven hills of Surrey. Your visit to Europe is
useless unless it gives you the sense of an exile returning. Your first
sight of Rome is futile unless you feel that you have seen it before.
Thus useless and thus futile were the foreign experiments and the
continental raids of Dickens. He enjoyed them as he would have enjoyed,
as a boy, a scamper out of Chatham into some strange meadows, as he
would have enjoyed, when a grown man, a steam in a police boat out into
the fens to the far east of London. But he was the Cockney venturing
far; he was not the European coming home. He is still the splendid
Cockney Orlando of whom I spoke above; he cannot but suppose that any
strange men, being happy in some pastoral way, are mysterious foreign
scoundrels. Dickens's real speech to the lazy and laughing civilisation
of Southern Europe would really have run in the Shakespearian words:

but whoe'er you be
Who in this desert inaccessible,
Under the shade of melancholy boughs
Lose and neglect the creeping hours of time.
If ever you have looked on better things,
If ever been where bells have knolled to church.

If, in short, you have ever had the advantage of being born within the
sound of Bow bells. Dickens could not really conceive that there was any
other city but his own.

It is necessary thus to insist that Dickens never understood the
Continent, because only thus can we appreciate the really remarkable
thing he did in _A Tale of Two Cities_. It is necessary to feel, first
of all, the fact that to him London was the centre of the universe. He
did not understand at all the real sense in which Paris is the capital
of Europe. He had never realised that all roads lead to Rome. He had
never felt (as an Englishman can feel) that he was an Athenian before he
was a Londoner. Yet with everything against him he did this astonishing
thing. He wrote a book about two cities, one of which he understood; the
other he did not understand. And his description of the city he did not
know is almost better than his description of the city he did know. This
is the entrance of the unquestionable thing about Dickens; the thing
called genius; the thing which every one has to talk about directly and