Chapter VII

What remains, then, of a world thus emptied of religion, thought, science?

I reserve the answer for a minute or two.

But I start my approach to it thus: Be the world of Dickens what you will, he had the first demiurgic gift, of entirely believing in what he created. The belief may be as frantic as you will: for any true artist it is the first condition. Well, this remains: nobody has ever doubted that, in the preface to _David Copperfield_, he wrote the strict truth:

It would concern the reader little, perhaps, to know how
sorrowfully the pen is laid down at the end of a two-years’
imaginative task; or how an Author feels as if he were dismissing
some portion of himself into the shadowy world, when a crowd of
all the creatures of his brain are going from him forever. Yet I
had nothing else to tell, unless indeed I were to confess (which
might be of less moment still) that no one can ever believe this
Narrative in the reading more than I believed it in the writing.

Well, there, Gentlemen--just there, and so simply--you have the first condition of a work of art--its own creator is so possessed that he thoroughly believes in it. As Henry James once said to me (I recall the words as nearly as I can), “Ah, yes, how jollily the little figures dance under the circle of the lamp, until _Good-bye_, and off they go, to take their chance of the dark!”