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!”