“You don’t begin far enough back. My spring-board is not—what is Madala? but—what is genius? How does it happen? Is it immaculate birth? or is it begotten of accident upon environment? That is to say—is it inspiration or is it experience? I speak of the divine fire, you understand, not of the capacity for resolving it into words or paint or stone. That’s craft, a very different thing. You say that Madala was not a genius in the big sense—yes, I’ll admit that even, for the argument’s sake—but even you will concede her the beginnings of it. So my difficulty is just the same. I’ve never believed in instinctive genius. Yet how can she, at twenty, have had the experience (that she had the craft is amazing enough) to cope with Eden Walls? Romantic curiosity isn’t enough explanation, Jasper! Look at her certainty of touch. Look at her detail. Look how she gets inside that woman’s mind. That’s the fascination of it. It’s such a document. Now how does she know it? That’s what intrigues me. Madala and a street woman! Where’s the connection? How does she get inside her? Because she does get inside her.”
“Oh, it’s real enough,” said the blonde lady.
“It must be. You should have seen the letters she received! Amazing, some of them.”
“Anita, they amazed her. I remember her getting one while she was staying with us. She looked thoroughly frightened. She said—‘But, Lila, I didn’t realize—it was just a story. But this poor thing, she says it’s true! She says it’s happened to her! What are we to do?’ You know, she was nearly crying. It was some hysterical woman who had read the book. But Madala always believed in people. I know she wrote to her. I believe she helped her. But she never told you much about her doings.”
“Oh, her sentimental side doesn’t interest me. What I ask myself is—how does she know, as she obviously does know, all that her wretched drab of a heroine thought and felt and suffered?”
“Instinct! Imagination!” said the Baxter girl. “It must be the explanation.”
“It isn’t. It isn’t. Oh, I’ve puzzled it out. I’m convinced that from the beginning it’s experience. Don’t flare, Lila, I don’t mean literal experience. Not in Eden Walls, anyhow. Later, of course—but we’re discussing Eden Walls. Imagination, do you say, Beryl? But the imagination must have a fact for its root. I’ll grant you that imagination is so essentially a quality of youth that the merest rootlet of a reality is enough to set a young artist beanstalk climbing. But the older he grows, the wiser, the more versed in reality, the less he trusts his imagination, the more, in consequence, his imagination flags and withers; till he ends—one sees it happen again and again—as the recorder merely of his own actual experiences and emotions. It’s only the greatest who escape that decay of the imagination. Do you think that Madala did? Look at Eden Walls. Remember what we know about her. Can’t you see that the skeleton of Eden Walls is Madala’s own life? Consider her history. She leaves what seems to have been a happy childhood behind her and sets out on adventure—very young. So does the woman in Eden Walls. The parallel’s exact. Madala’s Westering Hill and the Breckonridge of the novel are the same place. The house, the lane, the country-side, she doesn’t trouble to disguise them. Again—Madala’s adventure is ushered in by calamity: and tragedy—(you can see the artist transmuting the mere physical calamity into tragedy) tragedy happens to the woman in Eden Walls. Remember how much more Madala dwelt on the sense of loneliness and lovelessness, on the anguish of the loss of something to love her, than on what one might call the—er—official emotions of a betrayed woman. Didn’t it strike you? Doesn’t that show that she was depending on her experience rather than on her imagination, fitting her own private grief to an imaginary case? Then, in America, she has the struggle for meat and drink, for mere existence. So does the woman in Eden Walls. Madala does not go under. The woman in Eden Walls does. It’s the first real difference. But I maintain that in reality the parallel still continues, that, in imagination, Madala did go under over and over again: that she had ever in front of her the ‘suppose, suppose,’ that, in drawing the woman in Eden Walls, she is saying to herself—‘Here, but for the grace of God, go I.’ And then, you know, when you think of her, hating that big city, saving up her pennies, and coming home at last in a passion of homesickness (if it was homesickness—sickness anyhow), can’t you see how it makes her write of that other woman? It’s the gift, the genius, stirring in her: born, not immaculately, but of her own literal experience. Jasper’s right—you can always make facts fit if you think them out: and because I possess that underlying shadow-work (I admit it’s no more) of fact to guide me in deciphering her method in the first book, therefore, in the second book and the third book, I find it safe to deduce facts to cover the stories, even when I don’t possess them. I consider that I’m justified, that Eden Walls justifies me. Don’t you?”
“It’s plausible,” said Mr. Flood thoughtfully.
“Oh, it’s convincing,” said the Baxter girl reverently. “I feel I’ve never known Madala Grey before. What it will be when you get it into shape, Miss Serle——”
“In fact,” said Miss Howe, “there’s only one drawback——”