A similar treatment of a historic movement occurs in _A Tale of Two Cities_; but in this case, precisely because Dickens kept a closer hold upon his story and fixed his eyes more steadily upon his principal characters and his main issues--precisely because he did not lose himself in the setting of his novel, in the “world” of his story--the same cataclysmic result is not so apparent, the tremendous sweep of the destroying storm is not so graphically reproduced. The story is less irritating because we do not lose sight of the characters whose fate is the theme of the novel, but the Revolution does not come so powerfully as a devastating wave and at the same time it does not come with the awful precipitancy of the Gordon Riots in _Barnaby Rudge_, but it is anticipated and prepared for in advance. Still, even here, the historical idea that stands out is the spectacle of a movement of the people that is overwhelming in the havoc that it plays with the individual lives and concerns caught within its orbit. In these instances the set of conditions in which the individual is involved are not static, but dynamic; and the character of them, and the sweep of them, come out at their points of contact with individual lives, and are revealed in the way they touch the concerns of men and break in upon the personal fortunes of a few people. In these instances, therefore, the wind is described by its effect on the feather that drifts helplessly in it, and we follow the flood by keeping our eyes on some particular object floating in it and swept forward by it. All this would be sufficient to make a historical novel and to justify it; for such a novel would in a way outstrip the history-book in the telling of history, since it would not merely describe a distant past to us, but would take us into it; it would not be a telescope as history is, enabling us to see something far away, but would be a bridge leading us over the gulf that divides past and present, and so annihilating time. In such a novel we should see the past from the point of view of the past, and recapture an age as it comes to individuals in it; we should be not merely twentieth-century spectators watching a distant scene, but would become contemporary with the past, and having an inside knowledge of it. In all this the historical novel would challenge the history-book in its own fields.