Chapter I

“I remember,” says Henry James in a wise little Essay on _The Art of Fiction_--

I remember an English novelist, a woman of genius, telling me
that she was much commended for the impression she had managed
to give in one of her tales of the nature and way of life of the
French Protestant youth. She had been asked where she learned
so much about this recondite being, she had been congratulated
on her peculiar opportunities. These opportunities consisted in
her having, once, in Paris, as she ascended a staircase, passed
an open door where, in the household of a _pasteur_, some of the
young Protestants were seated at table round a finished meal. The
glimpse made a picture; it lasted only a moment, but that moment
was experience.

I wish I could make you promise, Gentlemen, to bear this little story in mind whenever some solemn fellow assures you that a man rustically born and bred could not have written _Hamlet_ or _The Tempest_; “he would never have seen this, learned or experienced that” and so on: the simple answer being that under such disadvantage _they_ would never have written _Hamlet_ or _The Tempest_. They are, in fact, not even Shakespeares to the extent of understanding how an artist creates, how the imaginative mind operates.

Henry James, who was an artist and understood that operation, simply comments on his anecdote that the lady had caught her direct personal impression and it was enough:

She knew what youth was, and what Protestantism: she also had the
advantage of having seen what it was to be French, so that she
converted these ideas into a concrete image and produced a reality.

Above all, however, she was blessed with the faculty which when
you give it an inch takes an ell, and which for the artist is a
much greater source of strength than any accident of residence
or of place in the social scale. The power to guess the unseen
from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the
whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in
general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any
particular corner of it--this cluster of gifts may almost be said
to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town,
and in the most different stages of education.

Yes, Mr. James, for the purpose of your immediate argument “this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.” But for our argument it does, and accurately, constitute imaginative genius. It is the gift that taught Xenophanes, watching the stars, to catch the whole piece from the pattern and cry out “All is one--” the gift that suddenly hitches the particular upon the universal and gives us a Falstaff, a Don Quixote, a Tartuffe, My Uncle Toby, the Vicar of Wakefield--

Forms more real than living man.

You know--you must know--that none of these is a photographic portrait of a living person--of a certain eccentric lodger whom Dickens had studied in Goswell Street, of a certain bibulous nurse resident in Kingsgate Street, High Holborn, “at a bird-fancier’s, next door but one to the celebrated mutton-pie shop”--but children of imagination begotten upon it by some such observant moment as was vital to Mr. James’s lady novelist. What, in fact, was the genesis of Mr. Pickwick? Dickens, you recall, was to write the letterpress accompaniment to a series of humorous sporting sketches by Seymour. The publisher Mr. Chapman, of Chapman and Hall, has left this uncontradicted record:

As this letter is to be historical, I may as well claim what
little belongs to me in the matter, and that is the figure of
Pickwick. Seymour’s first sketch was of a long, thin man. The
present immortal one he made from my description of a friend of
mine at Richmond--a fat old beau who would wear, in spite of the
ladies’ protests, drab tights and black gaiters. His name was John
Foster.[1]

[1] Is there not a blend of Mr. Tracy Tupman here?

Seymour drew the figure from Mr. Chapman’s description: Dickens put life into it--yet more life--and made it a “nurseling of immortality.” That, believe me, is how it happens; just so, and in no other way: and the operative power is called Genius. Remind yourselves of this when learned men, discussing Shakespeare, assure you they have fished the particular murex up which dyed Hamlet’s inky cloak. Themselves are the cuttle, and only theirs is the ink.

II

But we talk of Dickens: and the trouble with Dickens is that he--whose brain in creating personage I suppose to be the most fecund that ever employed itself on fiction--to the end of his days kept a curious distrust of himself and a propensity for this childish expedient of “drawing from the life.” It is miserable, to me, to think of this giant who could turn off a Pickwick, a Sam Weller, a Dick Swiveller, a Mark Tapley, a Sarah Gamp, Captain Cuttle, Mr. Dick, Mr. Toots, Mr. Crummles, Mr. Mantalini, Dodson and Fogg, Codlin and Short, Spenlow and Jorkins, Mrs. Jellaby, Mrs. Billickin, Mrs. Gargery, Mrs. Wilfer, Mr. Twemlow, Mr. and Mrs. Micawber, Mr. Sapsea, Silas Wegg, and indeed anyone you take into your own experience of life--from Mr. Chadband to the Dolls’ Dressmaker, with hundreds of lesser characters no less distinct--it is miserable to me, I say, that a Genius with all this largess to mint and scatter should have taxed his acquaintance to stamp their effigies upon poorer coin.