it enters into life at every corner and pore.  We are like men under the glamour of some great change impending.  The spell of a new order holds us undecided and expectant.  There is something in the air, and that something is a vague and indescribable sense that a new time is coming.  Men felt it in France, and indeed all over Europe, from 1780 till 1790.  It was an uncertain and rather pleasing state of expectancy.  It did not check activity, nor enjoyment, nor science.  But it diverted the profounder minds from the higher forms of imaginative work.

There is no reason to assume that Socialism or the ideals of Socialism are at all hostile to literature or even imaginative poetry, provided they are not too close, not actually causing direct agitation.  But when men are debating bills in heated meetings, they do not often see these questions in the halo of romance.  Rousseau’s Heloise and Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield were quite a generation before the Revolution, at a time when franchise and agrarian politics had hardly begun.  The poetry and the romance of a great social reformation are never visible to men in the midst of it, who are ready to tear each other’s eyes out in the name of Eight-Hours Bills and Land Nationalisation.  When men have got to this stage they want lighter matter to amuse them at home; but they can hardly appreciate, even if they could find, the loftier flights of social romance.  Sam Weller to-day has joined a union, and reads his Henry George.  Rawdon Crawley of our own generation is a mere drunken ruffian, only fit to point the moral in a lecture on the drink traffic.  And Becky Sharp is voted to be a stupid libel on the social destiny of the modern school “marm.”

The great advance in the material comfort and uniformity of life and manners dries up the very sources of prose romance, even more than it ruins poetry.  The poet is by nature an isolated spirit dwelling in an ideal world of his own.  But the prose novelist draws life as he sees it in the concrete from intimate knowledge of real men and women.  How intensely did Fielding, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Miss Austen, Miss Edgeworth know by experience the characters they drew!  A romance cannot be constructed out of the novelist’s inner consciousness as Paradise Lost, Shelley’s Prometheus, and Wordsworth’s Excursion were constructed.  Even Scott becomes grave and melodramatic when he peoples his stage with those whose like he never saw.  But how vastly more romantic was the Scotland of Scott than is the Scotland of Stevenson!  The Vicar of Wakefield and Squire Western are not to be found in an age that is busy with railways and telegraphs and the Review of Reviews.  Pickwick and Oliver Twist have been improved off the face of the earth by cheap newspapers and sanitary reform.  The fun has gone out of Vanity Fair, and the House of the Seven Gables is an hotel with seven hundred beds.