in Barnaby Rudge, in Dombey, in Bleak House, in the Tale of Two Cities, there are indications of his possessing this power, and in certain parts of these tales we seem to be in the presence of a great master of epical narration.  But the power is not sustained; and it must be confessed that in none of these tales is there a complete and equal scheme.  In most of the other books, especially in those after Bleak House, the plot is so artless, so decousu, so confused, that even practised readers of Dickens fail to keep it clear in their mind.  The serial form, where a leading character wanders about to various places, and meets a succession of quaint parties, seems to be that which suited his genius and which he himself most entirely enjoyed.

In contrast with the Pickwickian method of comic rambles in search of human “curios,” Dickens introduced some darker effects and persons of a more or less sensational kind.  Some of these are as powerful as anything in modern fiction; and Fagin and Bill Sikes, Smike and Poor Jo, the Gordon riots and the storms at sea, may stand beside some tableaux of Victor Hugo for lurid power and intense realism.  But it was only at times and during the first half of his career that Dickens could keep clear of melodrama and somewhat stagey blue fire.  And at times his blue fire was of a very cheap kind.  Rosa Dartle and Carker, Steerforth and Blandois, Quilp and Uriah Heep, have a melancholy glitter of the footlights over them.  We cannot see what the villains want, except to look villainous, and we fail to make out where is the danger to the innocent victims.  We find the villain of the piece frantically struggling to get some paper, or to get hold of some boy or girl.  But as the scene is in London in the nineteenth century, and not in Naples in the fifteenth century, we cannot see who is in real danger, or why, or of what.  And with all this, Dickens was not incapable of bathos, or tragedy suddenly exploding in farce.  The end of Krook by spontaneous combustion is such a case; but a worse case is the death of Dora, Copperfield’s baby wife, along with that of the lap-dog, Jip.  This is one of those unforgotten, unpardonable, egregious blunders in art, in feeling, even in decency, which must finally exclude Charles Dickens from the rank of the true immortals.

But his books will long be read for his wonderful successes, and his weaker pieces will entirely be laid aside as are the failures of so many great men, the rubbish of Fielding, of Goldsmith, of Defoe; which do nothing now to dim the glory of Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield, and Robinson Crusoe.  The glory of Charles Dickens will always be in his Pickwick, his first, his best, his inimitable triumph.  It is true that it is a novel without a plot, without beginning, middle, or end, with much more of caricature than of character, with some extravagant tom-foolery, and plenty of vulgarity.  But its