em.

There is an odd literary question which I wonder is not put more often
in literature. How far can an author tell a truth without seeing it
himself? Perhaps an actual example will express my meaning. I was once
talking to a highly intelligent lady about Thackeray's _Newcomes_. We
were speaking of the character of Mrs. Mackenzie, the Campaigner, and in
the middle of the conversation the lady leaned across to me and said in
a low, hoarse, but emphatic voice, "She drank. Thackeray didn't know it;
but she drank." And it is really astonishing what a shaft of white light
this sheds on the Campaigner, on her terrible temperament, on her
agonised abusiveness and her almost more agonised urbanity, on her
clamour which is nevertheless not open or explicable, on her temper
which is not so much bad temper as insatiable, bloodthirsty, man-eating
temper. How far can a writer thus indicate by accident a truth of which
he is himself ignorant? If truth is a plan or pattern of things that
really are, or in other words, if truth truly exists outside ourselves,
or in other words, if truth exists at all, it must be often possible for
a writer to uncover a corner of it which he happens not to understand,
but which his reader does happen to understand. The author sees only two
lines; the reader sees where they meet and what is the angle. The author
sees only an arc or fragment of a curve; the reader sees the size of the
circle. The last thing to say about Dickens, and especially about books
like _The Old Curiosity Shop_, is that they are full of these
unconscious truths. The careless reader may miss them. The careless
author almost certainly did miss them. But from them can be gathered an
impression of real truth to life which is for the grave critics of
Dickens an almost unknown benefit, buried treasure. Here for instance is
one of them out of _The Old Curiosity Shop_. I mean the passage in which
(by a blazing stroke of genius) the dashing Mr. Chuckster, one of the
Glorious Apollos of whom Mr. Swiveller was the Perpetual Grand, is made
to entertain a hatred bordering upon frenzy for the stolid, patient,
respectful, and laborious Kit. Now in the formal plan of the story Mr.
Chuckster is a fool, and Kit is almost a hero; at least he is a noble
boy. Yet unconsciously Dickens made the idiot Chuckster say something
profoundly suggestive on the subject. In speaking of Kit Mr. Chuckster
makes use of these two remarkable phrases; that Kit is "mee