t barbaric; it is rather Platonic. The idea existed
before any of the machinery which made manifest the idea. Justice
existed when there was no need of judges, and mercy existed before any
man was oppressed.

However this may be in the matter of religion and philosophy, it can be
said with little exaggeration that this truth is the very key of
literature. The whole difference between construction and creation is
exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is
constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists, as the
mother can love the unborn child. In creative art the essence of a book
exists before the book or before even the details or main features of
the book; the author enjoys it and lives in it with a kind of prophetic
rapture. He wishes to write a comic story before he has thought of a
single comic incident. He desires to write a sad story before he has
thought of anything sad. He knows the atmosphere before he knows
anything. There is a low priggish maxim sometimes uttered by men so
frivolous as to take humour seriously--a maxim that a man should not
laugh at his own jokes. But the great artist not only laughs at his own
jokes; he laughs at his own jokes before he has made them. In the case
of a man really humorous we can see humour in his eye before he has
thought of any amusing words at all. So the creative writer laughs at
his comedy before he creates it, and he has tears for his tragedy before
he knows what it is. When the symbols and the fulfilling facts do come
to him, they come generally in a manner very fragmentary and inverted,
mostly in irrational glimpses of crisis or consummation. The last page
comes before the first; before his romance has begun, he knows that it
has ended well. He sees the wedding before the wooing; he sees the death
before the duel. But most of all he sees the colour and character of the
whole story prior to any possible events in it. This is the real
argument for art and style, only that the artists and the stylists have
not the sense to use it. In one very real sense style is far more
important than either character or narrative. For a man knows what style
of book he wants to write when he knows nothing else about it.

_Pickwick_ is in Dickens's career the mere mass of light before the
creation of sun or moon. It is the splendid, shapeless substance of
which all his stars were ultimately made. You might split up _Pickwick_
into innumerable novels