be said that he has ever essayed it. The serial form in parts,
wherein almost all his stories were cast, requiring each number of
three chapters to be "assorted," like sugar-plums, with grave and gay,
so as to tell just enough but not too much, made a highly-wrought
scheme almost impossible. It is plain that Charles Dickens had nothing
of that epical gift which gave us _Tom Jones_ and _Ivanhoe_. Perhaps
the persistent use of the serial form shows that he felt no interest in
that supreme art of an immense drama duly unfolded to a prepared end.
In _Pickwick_ there neither was, nor could there be, any organic plot.
In _Oliver Twist_, 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 fift