IV
Now if you accept no more than a much lower estimate of Dickens than I am preaching, you will be apt to dismiss what I have just been saying as “tall talk”: and you will be quite mistaken, because it applies from Shakespeare down to men of infinitesimally less desert than Dickens; to every small artist, in fact, whose conscience will not cease harrying him until he improves on his best: a process which obviously—and, as a matter of history, with the great authors—never stops until they come to the grave.
At which point my now notorious discursiveness, Gentlemen, also stops and gets back to Dickens. You see, the trouble of the matter is that in these experiments an author can never be sure. He takes an infinite risk, it may be against his own true genius. Where is the critic to correct him?