Literature always anticipates life.It does not copy it,but moulds it to its purpose.The nineteenth century,as we know it,is largely an invention of Balzac.Our Luciens de Rubempre,our Rastignacs,and De Marsays made their first appearance on the stage of the COMEDIE HUMAINE.We are merely carrying out,with footnotes and unnecessary additions,the whim or fancy or creative vision of a great novelist.I once asked a lady,who knew Thackeray intimately,whether he had had any model for Becky Sharp.She told me that Becky was an invention,but that the idea of the character had been partly suggested by a governess who lived in the neighbourhood of Kensington Square,and was the companion of a very selfish and rich old woman.I inquired what became of the governess,and she replied that,oddly enough,some years after the appearance of VANITY FAIR,she ran away with the nephew of the lady with whom she was living,and for a short time made a great splash in society,quite in Mrs.Rawdon Crawley's style,and entirely by Mrs.Rawdon Crawley's methods.Ultimately she came to grief,disappeared to the Continent,and used to be occasionally seen at Monte Carlo and other gambling places.The noble gentleman from whom the same great sentimentalist drew Colonel Newcome died,a few months after THE NEWCOMER had reached a fourth edition,with the word 'Adsum'on his lips.Shortly after Mr.Stevenson published his curious psychological story of transformation,a friend of mine,called Mr.Hyde,was in the north of London,and being anxious to get to a railway station,took what he thought would be a short cut,lost his way,and found himself in a network of mean,evil-looking streets.Feeling rather nervous he began to walk extremely fast,when suddenly out of an archway ran a child right between his legs.It fell on the pavement,he tripped over it,and trampled upon it.Being of course very much frightened and a little hurt,it began to scream,and in a few seconds the whole street was full of rough people who came pouring out of the houses like ants.They surrounded him,and asked him his name.He was just about to give it when he suddenly remembered the opening incident in Mr.Stevenson's story.He was so filled with horror at having realised in his own person that terrible and well-written scene,and at having done accidentally,though in fact,what the Mr.Hyde of fiction had done with deliberate intent,that he ran away as hard as he could go.He was,however,very closely followed,and finally he took refuge in a surgery,the door of which happened to be open,where he explained to a young assistant,who happened to be there,exactly what had occurred.The humanitarian crowd were induced to go away on his giving them a small sum of money,and as soon as the coast was clear he left.As he passed out,the name on the brass door-plate of the surgery caught his eye.It was 'Jekyll.'At least it should have been.
Here the imitation,as far as it went,was of course accidental.
In the following case the imitation was self-conscious.In the year 1879,just after I had left Oxford,I met at a reception at the house of one of the Foreign Ministers a woman of very curious exotic beauty.We became great friends,and were constantly together.And yet what interested me most in her was not her beauty,but her character,her entire vagueness of character.She seemed to have no personality at all,but simply the possibility of many types.Sometimes she would give herself up entirely to art,turn her drawing-room into a studio,and spend two or three days a week at picture galleries or museums.Then she would take to attending race-meetings,wear the most horsey clothes,and talk about nothing but betting.She abandoned religion for mesmerism,mesmerism for politics,and politics for the melodramatic excitements of philanthropy.In fact,she was a kind of Proteus,and as much a failure in all her transformations as was that wondrous sea-god when Odysseus laid hold of him.One day a serial began in one of the French magazines.At that time I used to read serial stories,and I well remember the shock of surprise I felt when I came to the deion of the heroine.She was so like my friend that I brought her the magazine,and she recognised herself in it immediately,and seemed fascinated by the resemblance.Ishould tell you,by the way,that the story was translated from some dead Russian writer,so that the author had not taken his type from my friend.Well,to put the matter briefly,some months afterwards I was in Venice,and finding the magazine in the reading-room of the hotel,I took it up casually to see what had become of the heroine.It was a most piteous tale,as the girl had ended by running away with a man absolutely inferior to her,not merely in social station,but in character and intellect also.Iwrote to my friend that evening about my views on John Bellini,and the admirable ices at Florian's,and the artistic value of gondolas,but added a post to the effect that her double in the story had behaved in a very silly manner.I don't know why Iadded that,but I remember I had a sort of dread over me that she might do the same thing.Before my letter had reached her,she had run away with a man who deserted her in six months.I saw her in 1884in Paris,where she was living with her mother,and I asked her whether the story had had anything to do with her action.She told me that she had felt an absolutely irresistible impulse to follow the heroine step by step in her strange and fatal progress,and that it was with a feeling of real terror that she had looked forward to the last few chapters of the story.When they appeared,it seemed to her that she was compelled to reproduce them in life,and she did so.It was a most clear example of this imitative instinct of which I was speaking,and an extremely tragic one.
