Chapter II

So far we have spoken of poets--fairly selected, I trust--and have found that there are poets and poets; and some are Olympian in attitude, looking down deep below the surface from a great height as a gannet spies his fish; but high aloof, concerned rather with universal themes than with the woman of Canaan clamorous in the street crying for her daughter, “Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.”

Now if we turn to our novelists, from Defoe to Scott, we find that the novel from its first virtual beginning in our country and for a century or more, has for social diseases in the body politic little concern and practically no sense at all. Defoe has strong political sense, but keeps it for his tracts and pamphlets: in _Robinson Crusoe_ (and specially in the third volume, _The Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe_), in _Moll Flanders_, in _Roxana_, he is always a moralist, but a religious moralist. If--to twist a line of _Hamlet_--there’s something rotten in the _state_ of Denmark, it does not come within the scope of the novelist whose office is to combine amusement with general edification. So--leaving out the edification--it is in _Tristram Shandy_, so in _The Vicar of Wakefield_. Richardson is all for the human heart as he reads it, and female virtue. Fielding with his genial manly morality--Fielding, magistrate of a London Police Court, and a humane one--discloses little sense in his novels of any _vera causa_ in our system supplying the unfortunates for whom, in daily life, he tempers justice with mercy. You will not, I think, cite _Jonathan Wild_ against me. Noble fellow, as he drops down the Thames--stricken to death, and knowing it--on that hopeless voyage to Lisbon, his thoughts are hopeful for England and the glory of her merchant shipping: and (says he) it must be our own fault if it doth not continue glorious:

for continue so it will, as long as the flourishing state of our
trade shall support it, and this support it can never want, till
our legislators, shall cease to give sufficient attention to the
protection of our trade, and our magistrates want sufficient power,
ability, and honesty to execute the laws: a circumstance not to be
apprehended, as it cannot happen till our senates and our benches
shall be filled with the blindest ignorance, or with the blackest
corruption.

Smollett’s recipe for a novel is just a rattling picaresque story enlivened by jocular horse-play. Respect Fanny Burney and idolise Jane Austen as we will, they move their plots on a narrow and sheltered stage: while the romantics, working up from Horace Walpole to Scott, call in the past to redress the poverty of the present and the emptiness of a general theory of the arts which, deservedly sovereign in its day, has passed by imitation into convention, and through convention, as always, into mere inanition.