ABSTRACT
Charles Dickens was famous—but he had not won his fame as a writer of tragedy. With ever-renewed spirit he sought to rise to tragic levels, and time after time he merely attained to melodrama. The frontier line of his powers was clearly drawn. His attempts to cross it were invariably lamentable. English readers may find A Tale of Two Cities and Bleak House works of high creative power; for Continentals they are damned, because the great moments in them are forced. Dickens cannot make even his "goats" genuinely rascally, genuinely immoral; their blood runs pale despite their evil instincts. This typically Victorian hypertrophy of the moral sense is responsible for the fact that Dickens's grandest and noblest inspirations fall flat, that he is never able to give us a tragedy in the sublimest sense of the word. Dickens was never able to reach the shores where dwell the tearless, wordless, ultimate powers of despairing pain.
