So I broke off, or almost, upon a saying of Tasso’s—you may find it repeated in Ben Jonson’s Timber, or Discoveries—that in this world none deserves the name of Creator save God himself and the Poet—by “Poet” meaning, of course, the great imaginative artist whether working in restricted verse or in “that other harmony of prose.”
And you may be thinking—I don’t doubt, a number will be thinking—that in a discourse on Dickens, I am putting the claim altogether too high. I can feel your minds working, I think—working to some such tune as this “Dickens and Virgil, now—Dickens and Dante—Oh, heaven alive!”
You cannot say that I have shirked it—can you?
Well now, fair and softly! If I had said “Dickens and Shakespeare,” it would have given you no such shock: and if I had said “Shakespeare and Dante,” or “Dickens and Molière,” it would have given you no shock at all. I am insisting, you understand, that the first test of greatness in an imaginative writer is his power to create: and I propose to begin with that which, if there should by any chance happen to be a fool in this apparently representative gathering, he will infallibly despise for the easiest thing in the world, the creation of a fool. I beg to reassure him and, so far as I can, restore his self-respect. It is about the hardest thing in the world, to create a fool and laugh at him. It is a human, nay, even a Godlike function (so and not by others shared) to laugh. Listen, before we go further, to these stanzas on divine laughter:
Nay, ’tis a Godlike function; laugh thy fill!
Mirth comes to thee unsought:
Mirth sweeps before it like a flood the mill
Of languaged logic: thought
Hath not its source so high;
The will