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!”
VIII
Having that, you have artistic sincerity: of which I wonder, as experience enlarges, how many faults it cannot excuse—or indeed what is the fault it cannot excuse.
All that remains of the merely artistic secret has been summarised by Mr. Saintsbury:
It cannot have taken many people of any competence in criticism very long to discover where, at least in a general way, the secret of this “new world” of Dickens lies. It lies, of course, in the combination of the strictest realism of detail with a fairy-tale unrealism of general atmosphere. The note of one or the other or both, is sometimes forced and then there is a jar: in the later books this is frequently the case. But in Pickwick it hardly ever occurs; and therefore, to all happily fit persons, the “suspension of disbelief,” to adopt and shift Coleridge’s great dictum from verse to prose fiction, is, except in the case of some of the short inset stories, never rudely broken. Never, probably, was there a writer who knew or cared less about Aristotle than Dickens did. If he had spoken of the father of criticism, he would probably have talked—one is not certain that he has not sometimes come near to talking—some of his worst stuff. But certainly, when he did master it (which was often) nobody ever mastered better than Dickens, in practice, the Aristotelian doctrine of the impossibility rendered probable or not improbable.
Well, there you have the artistic secret of Dickens’ world accurately given, and not by me. It lies in the combination of the strictest realism of detail with a fairy-tale unrealism of general atmosphere.
Let me give you, to illustrate this, a single instance out of many. In his Christmas story, The Perils of Certain English Prisoners—an adventurous story of the sort that Stevenson loved and some of you make the mistake of despising—a handful of a British garrison with their women and children in a stockaded fort in South America tensely await an attack of pirates hopelessly outnumbering them. Now listen to one paragraph:
(It is a corporal of Marines who tells it.)
“Close up here, men, and gentlemen all!” said the sergeant. “A place too many in the line.”