man in the street it
means a figure silent, slouching, and even feeble. When the French speak
of the man in the street, it means danger in the street.

No one can fail to notice this deep difference between Dickens and the
Carlyle whom he avowedly copied. Splendid and symbolic as are Carlyle's
scenes of the French Revolution, we have in reading them a curious sense
that everything is happening at night. In Dickens even massacre happens
by daylight. Carlyle always assumes that because things were tragedies
therefore the men who did them felt tragic. Dickens knows that the man
who works the worst tragedies is the man who feels comic; as for
example, Mr. Quilp. The French Revolution was a much simpler world than
Carlyle could understand; for Carlyle was subtle and not simple. Dickens
could understand it, for he was simple and not subtle. He understood
that plain rage against plain political injustice; he understood again
that obvious vindictiveness and that obvious brutality which followed.
"Cruelty and the abuse of absolute power," he told an American
slave-owner, "are two of the bad passions of human nature." Carlyle was
quite incapable of rising to the height of that uplifted common-sense.
He must always find something mystical about the cruelty of the French
Revolution. The effect was equally bad whether he found it mystically
bad and called the thing anarchy, or whether he found it mystically good
and called it the rule of the strong. In both cases he could not
understand the common-sense justice or the common-sense vengeance of
Dickens and the French Revolution.

Yet Dickens has in this book given a perfect and final touch to this
whole conception of mere rebellion and mere human nature. Carlyle had
written the story of the French Revolution and had made the story a mere
tragedy. Dickens writes the story about the French Revolution, and does
not make the Revolution itself the tragedy at all. Dickens knows that an
outbreak is seldom a tragedy; generally it is the avoidance of a
tragedy. All the real tragedies are silent. Men fight each other with
furious cries, because men fight each other with chivalry and an
unchangeable sense of brotherhood. But trees fight each other in utter
stillness; because they fight each other cruelly and without quarter. In
this book, as in history, the guillotine is not the calamity, but rather
the solution of the calamity. The sin of Sydney Carton is a sin of
habit, not of revolution. H