Page:Dickens - A tale of two cities, 1898.djvu/19

Rh them." Seldom, indeed, have fictitious characters been more severely "pounded." As Mr. Forster says, Dickens does rely more on incident than character; but perhaps it would be as true to say that he drops that surplusage of description of character, and that Carlylean trick of iteration played on some personal feature, as on Pancks's snort or Carker's teeth. Most in his regular manner are the bullying Stryver, and the Resurrectionist. The humour of Jerry's remarks on the barbarity of quartering a criminal, because it spoils a "subject," are exactly in the manner of Dennis, the hangman, in Barnaby Rudge. Mr. Forster, usually a most lenient critic, thinks Dickens's experiment "hardly successful," from the absence of humour, and of "rememberable figures." But it is not well to be humorous in scenes of oppression, popular or patrician; while Dr. Manette, and Sydney Carton, and Mr. Stryver, and Madame Defarge are surely characters memorable enough. Carton has been argued against, as not a plausible character, and, in the nature of the case, he is not a usual character. But there is nothing impossible, or gravely improbable, in him. He does not set a pin's fee on a life which he has wrecked, and lacks the energy to rebuild. He has a great passion; "greater love has no man than this, that a man should give his life for his friend." He makes a noble end of a wasted existence, as he might do, under the stress of his affection for Mrs. Darnay, and perhaps more tears have been shed over Sydney Carton than over any personage in Dickens's novels. Nobody need grudge them to the school-fellow of Mr. Stryver, whose last scene is in a high degree pathetic, yet not melodramatic. There were too many such farewells to life, when the mob had its will and its way.

According to the right rule of historical fiction, the characters are unhistorical. "The domestic life of a few simple