Above all, however, she was blessed with the faculty which when you give it an inch takes an ell, and which for the artist is a much greater source of strength than any accident of residence or of place in the social scale. The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it—this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most different stages of education.
Yes, Mr. James, for the purpose of your immediate argument “this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.” But for our argument it does, and accurately, constitute imaginative genius. It is the gift that taught Xenophanes, watching the stars, to catch the whole piece from the pattern and cry out “All is one—” the gift that suddenly hitches the particular upon the universal and gives us a Falstaff, a Don Quixote, a Tartuffe, My Uncle Toby, the Vicar of Wakefield—
Forms more real than living man.
You know—you must know—that none of these is a photographic portrait of a living person—of a certain eccentric lodger whom Dickens had studied in Goswell Street, of a certain bibulous nurse resident in Kingsgate Street, High Holborn, “at a bird-fancier’s, next door but one to the celebrated mutton-pie shop”—but children of imagination begotten upon it by some such observant moment as was vital to Mr. James’s lady novelist. What, in fact, was the genesis of Mr. Pickwick? Dickens, you recall, was to write the letterpress accompaniment to a series of humorous sporting sketches by Seymour. The publisher Mr. Chapman, of Chapman and Hall, has left this uncontradicted record:
As this letter is to be historical, I may as well claim what little belongs to me in the matter, and that is the figure of Pickwick. Seymour’s first sketch was of a long, thin man. The present immortal one he made from my description of a friend of mine at Richmond—a fat old beau who would wear, in spite of the ladies’ protests, drab tights and black gaiters. His name was John Foster.[1]
[1] Is there not a blend of Mr. Tracy Tupman here?
Seymour drew the figure from Mr. Chapman’s description: Dickens put life into it—yet more life—and made it a “nurseling of immortality.” That, believe me, is how it happens; just so, and in no other way: and the operative power is called Genius. Remind yourselves of this when learned men, discussing Shakespeare, assure you they have fished the particular murex up which dyed Hamlet’s inky cloak. Themselves are the cuttle, and only theirs is the ink.
II
But we talk of Dickens: and the trouble with Dickens is that he—whose brain in creating personage I suppose to be the most fecund that ever employed itself on fiction—to the end of his days kept a curious distrust of himself and a propensity for this childish expedient of “drawing from the life.” It is miserable, to me, to think of this giant who could turn off a Pickwick, a Sam Weller, a Dick Swiveller, a Mark Tapley, a Sarah Gamp, Captain Cuttle, Mr. Dick, Mr. Toots, Mr. Crummles, Mr. Mantalini, Dodson and Fogg, Codlin and Short, Spenlow and Jorkins, Mrs. Jellaby, Mrs. Billickin, Mrs. Gargery, Mrs. Wilfer, Mr. Twemlow, Mr. and Mrs. Micawber, Mr. Sapsea, Silas Wegg, and indeed anyone you take into your own experience of life—from Mr. Chadband to the Dolls’ Dressmaker, with hundreds of lesser characters no less distinct—it is miserable to me, I say, that a Genius with all this largess to mint and scatter should have taxed his acquaintance to stamp their effigies upon poorer coin.