impartial critic's eagerness to discredit even
the value of the emotion awakened in such men as Jeffrey by such
creations as Little Nell, he reverses all he has been saying about the
cultivated and uncultivated, and presents to us a cultivated
philosopher, in his ignorance of the stage, applauding an actor whom
every uncultivated playgoing apprentice despises as stagey. But the bold
stroke just exhibited, of bringing forward Dickens himself in the actual
crisis of one of his fits of hallucination, requires an additional word.

To establish the hallucinative theory, he is said on one occasion to
have declared to the critic that every word uttered by his characters
was distinctly _heard_ by him before it was written down. Such an
averment, not credible for a moment as thus made, indeed simply untrue
to the extent described, may yet be accepted in the limited and quite
different sense which a passage in one of Dickens's letters gives to it.
All writers of genius to whom their art has become as a second nature,
will be found capable of doing upon occasion what the vulgar may think
to be "hallucination," but hallucination will never account for. After
Scott began the _Bride of Lammermoor_ he had one of his terrible
seizures of cramp, yet during his torment he dictated[262] that fine
novel; and when he rose from his bed, and the published book was placed
in his hands, "he did not," James Ballantyne explicitly assured
Lockhart, "recollect one single incident, character, or conversation it
contained." When Dickens was under the greatest trial of his life, and
illness and sorrow were contending for the mastery over him, he thus
wrote to me. "Of my distress I will say no more than that it has borne a
terrible, frightful, horrible proportion to the quickness of the gifts
you remind me of. But may I not be forgiven for thinking it a wonderful
testimony to my being made for my art, that when, in the midst of this
trouble and pain, I sit down to my book, some beneficent power shows it
all to me, and tempts me to be interested, and I don't invent it--really
do not--_but see it_, and write it down. . . . It is only when it all fades
away and is gone, that I begin to suspect that its momentary relief has
cost me something."

Whatever view may be taken of the man who wrote those words, he had the
claim to be judged by reference to the highest models in the art which
he studied. In the literature of his time, from 1836 to 1870, he held
t