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.
Comfort, electric light, railway sleeping-cars, and equality are
excellent things, but they are the death of romance. The essence of
romance is variety, contrast, individuality, the eccentric, the
unconventional. Level up society, put nineteen out of every twenty on
fairly equal terms, popularise literature, and turn the Ten
Commandments into a code of decorum, and you cut up by the roots all
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