God. And I think I can give
reasons, both for my intolerance and for my toleration, "rightly and in
mine own division."

The reason why I think that Panurge is rightly and Valmont wrongly
"copied or re-created" is that Panurge is made at the hazard of the
artist, Valmont according to prescription. There might be--there have
been--fifty or a hundred Valmonts, the prescription being followed, and
slightly--still remaining a prescription--altered. There is and can be
only one Panurge. This difference reminds me of, and may be illustrated
by, a fact which, in one form or another, must be familiar to many
people. I was once talking to a lady who had just come over from China,
and who wore a dress of soft figured silk of the most perfect
love-in-a-mist colour-shade which I had ever seen, even in turning over
the wonder-drawers at Liberty's. I asked her if (for she then intended
to go back almost at once) she could get me any like it. "No," she said,
"at least not exactly. They never make two pieces of just the same
shade, and in fact they couldn't if they tried. They take handfuls of
different dyes, measured and mixed, as it seems, at random." Now that is
the way God and, in a lesser degree, the great artists work, and the
result is living creatures, according to the limitations of artistic and
the no-limitations of natural life. The others weigh out a dram of lust,
a scruple of cleverness, an ounce of malice, half an ounce of
superficial good manners, etc., and say, "Here is a character for you.
Type No. 12345." And it is not a living creature at all. But, having
been made by regular synthesis,[346] it can be regularly analysed, and
people say, "Oh, how clever he is." The first product, having grown
rather than been made, defies analysis, and they say, "How commonplace!"

One can perhaps lay out the ropes of the ring of combat most
satisfactorily and fairly by using the distinction of the reviewer (if I
do not misunderstand him), that I have neglected the interval between
"to copy" and "to re-create." I accept this dependence, which may
perhaps be illustrated further from that (in itself) foolish and vulgar
boast of Edmond de Goncourt's that his and his brother's epithets were
"personal" while Flaubert's were only "admirably good specimens of the
epithets of _tout le monde_."

To translate: Should the novelist aim, by _mimesis_--it is a misfortune
which I have lamented over and over again in print that "Imitation" and
"C