documents and the verification of references. Dickens was a
man who collected his ideas from loose hints in the streets, and those
always the same streets; as I have said, he was the citizen of one city.
Carlyle was in his way learned; Dickens was in every way ignorant.
Dickens was an Englishman cut off from France; Carlyle was a Scotsman,
historically connected with France. And yet, when all this is said and
certified, Dickens is more right than Carlyle. Dickens's French
Revolution is probably more like the real French Revolution than
Carlyle's. It is difficult, if not impossible, to state the grounds of
this strong conviction. One can only talk of it by employing that
excellent method which Cardinal Newman employed when he spoke of the
"notes" of Catholicism. There were certain "notes" of the Revolution.
One note of the Revolution was the thing which silly people call
optimism, and sensible people call high spirits. Carlyle could never
quite get it, because with all his spiritual energy he had no high
spirits. That is why he preferred prose to poetry. He could understand
rhetoric; for rhetoric means singing with an object. But he could not
understand lyrics; for the lyric means singing without an object; as
every one does when he is happy. Now for all its blood and its black
guillotines, the French Revolution was full of mere high spirits. Nay,
it was full of happiness. This actual lilt and levity Carlyle never
really found in the Revolution, because he could not find it in himself.
Dickens knew less of the Revolution, but he had more of it. When Dickens
attacked abuses, he battered them down with exactly that sort of cheery
and quite one-sided satisfaction with which the French mob battered down
the Bastille. Dickens utterly and innocently believed in certain things;
he would, I think, have drawn the sword for them. Carlyle half believed
in half a hundred things; he was at once more of a mystic and more of a
sceptic. Carlyle was the perfect type of the grumbling servant; the old
grumbling servant of the aristocratic comedies. He followed the
aristocracy, but he growled as he followed. He was obedient without
being servile, just as Caleb Balderstone was obedient without being
servile. But Dickens was the type of the man who might really have
rebelled instead of grumbling. He might have gone out into the street
and fought, like the man who took the Bastille. It is somewhat
nationally significant that when we talk of the