at any rate to the outer eye. The _mise-en-scene_ of external life is
less rich in colour and in contrast. Magnificence, squalor, oddity,
historic survivals, and picturesque personalities grow rarer year by
year. Everybody writes a grammatical letter in conventional style,
wears the clothes in fashion, and conforms to the courtesies of life.
It is right, good, and wise: but a little dull. It is the lady-like
age, the epoch of the dress-coat, of the prize lad and the girl of the
period. Mr. Charles Pearson, in his remarkable forecast of _National
Life and Character_, warned us how the universal levelling of modern
democracy must end in a certain monotony and a lowered vitality. We
live longer, but in quiet, comfortable, orderly ways. This is not at
all injurious to morality, politics, industry, science, philosophy, or
religion. It is not necessarily injurious to poetry, at least of the
lower flight. But it is adverse to high art. And it is asphyxiating
to romance.
The novelist must draw from the living model and he must address the
people of his own age. He cannot write for posterity, nor can he live
in a day-dream world of his own. The poet is often lost to his own
contemporaries. It may need two or three, five or six, generations to
reveal him, as Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, and Wordsworth may remind
us. But the novelist must live in his generation, be of it most
intensely, and if he is to delight at all, like the actor, he must
delight his own age. What sons of their own time were Fielding, Scott,
Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope: how intensely did they drink with both
hands from the cup of life. George Eliot, George Meredith, Louis
Stevenson, Howells, James, look on life from a private box. We see
their kid gloves and their opera-glass and we know that nothing could
ever take them on to the stage and ruffle it with the world of the day,
like men of the world who mean to taste life. There is no known
instance of a great novelist who lived obscure in a solitary retreat or
who became famous only after the lapse of many generations.
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