Maylie in the fields beyond Shepperton, we know his
security is false. The seasons may pass, but safety depends not
on time but on daylight. As children we all knew that: how
all day we could forget the dark and the journey to bed. It is
with a sense of relief that at last in twilight we see the faces
of the Jew and Monks peer into the cottage window between
the sprays of jessamine. At that moment we realise how the
whole world, and not London only, belongs to these two
after dark. Dickens, dealing out his happy endings and his
unreal retributions, can never ruin the validity and dignity of
that moment. 'They had recognised him, and he them; and
their look was as firmly impressed upon his memory, as if it
had been deeply carved in stone, and set before him from his
birth.'

'From his birth' -- Dickens may have intended that phrase
to refer to the complicated imbroglios of the plot that lie
outside the novel, 'something less terrible than the truth.'
As for the truth, is it too fantastic to imagine that in this novel,
as in many of his later books, creeps in, unrecognised by the
author, the eternal and alluring taint of the Manichee, with
its simple and terrible explanation of our plight, how the
world was made by Satan and not by God, lulling us with the
music of despair?

GRAHAM GREENE

-xiv-