to a tragedy. It required a man with the
courage and coarseness of Dickens actually to put tragic episodes into a
farce. But they are not caught up into the story at all. In _Oliver
Twist_, however, the thing broke out with an almost brutal inspiration,
and those who had fallen in love with Dickens for his generous
buffoonery may very likely have been startled at receiving such very
different fare at the next helping. When you have bought a man's book
because you like his writing about Mr. Wardle's punch-bowl and Mr.
Winkle's skates, it may very well be surprising to open it and read
about the sickening thuds that beat out the life of Nancy, or that
mysterious villain whose face was blasted with disease.

As a nightmare, the work is really admirable. Characters which are not
very clearly conceived as regards their own psychology are yet, at
certain moments, managed so as to shake to its foundations our own
psychology. Bill Sikes is not exactly a real man, but for all that he is
a real murderer. Nancy is not really impressive as a living woman; but
(as the phrase goes) she makes a lovely corpse. Something quite childish
and eternal in us, something which is shocked with the mere simplicity
of death, quivers when we read of those repeated blows or see Sikes
cursing the tell-tale cur who will follow his bloody foot-prints. And
this strange, sublime, vulgar melodrama, which is melodrama and yet is
painfully real, reaches its hideous height in that fine scene of the
death of Sikes, the besieged house, the boy screaming within, the crowd
screaming without, the murderer turned almost a maniac and dragging his
victim uselessly up and down the room, the escape over the roof, the
rope swiftly running taut, and death sudden, startling and symbolic; a
man hanged. There is in this and similar scenes something of the quality
of Hogarth and many other English moralists of the early eighteenth
century. It is not easy to define this Hogarthian quality in words,
beyond saying that it is a sort of alphabetical realism, like the cruel
candour of children. But it has about it these two special principles
which separate it from all that we call realism in our time. First, that
with us a moral story means a story about moral people; with them a
moral story meant more often a story about immoral people. Second, that
with us realism is always associated with some subtle view of morals;
with them realism was always associated with some simple vie