That it may please Thee to defend, and provide for, the fatherless children, and widows, and all that are desolate and oppressed.
That is the last secret of Dickens: and that is what George Santayana means when he writes:
If Christendom should lose everything that is now in the melting-pot, human life would still remain amiable and quite adequately human. I draw this comforting assurance from the pages of Dickens.
DICKENS (V)
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.