ch of them, as nothing else yet
mentioned in this chapter can claim to be, a permanent and capital
contribution to English literature--Johnson's _Rasselas_ (1759) and
Goldsmith's _Vicar of Wakefield_ (1766).

It is not from the present writer that any one need look for an attempt
to belittle Johnson: and there is no doubt (for the _Lives of the Poets_
is but a bundle of essays) that _Rasselas_ is Johnson's greatest _book_.
But there may be, in some minds, as little doubt that attempts to defend
it from the charge of not being a novel are only instances of that not
wholly unamiable frenzy of eagerness to "say _not_ ditto to Mr. Burke"
which is characteristic of clever undergraduates, and of periods which
are not quite of the greatest in literature. _Rasselas_ is simply an
extended and glorified moral apologue--an enlarged "Vision of Mirza." It
has no real story; it has no real characters; its dialogue is "talking
book;" it indulges in some but not much description. It is in fact a
prose _Vanity of Human Wishes_, admirably if somewhat stiffly arranged
in form, and as true to life as life itself. You will have difficulty in
finding a wiser book anywhere; but although it is quite true that a
novel need not be foolish, wisdom is certainly not its determining
_differentia_. Yet for our purposes _Rasselas_ is almost as valuable as
_Tom Jones_ itself: because it shows how imperative and wide-ranging was
the struggle towards production of this kind in prose. The book is
really--to adapt the quaint title of one of the preceding
century--_Johnson al Mondo_: and at this time, when Johnson wanted to
communicate his thoughts to the world in a popular form, we see that he
chose the novel.

The lesson is not so glaringly obvious in the _Vicar of Wakefield_,
because this _is_ a novel, and a very delightful one. The only point
of direct contact with _Rasselas_ is the knowledge of human
nature, though in the one book this takes the form of melancholy
aphorism and apophthegm, in the other that of felicitous trait and
dialogue-utterance. There is plenty of story, though this has not been
arranged so as to hit the taste of the martinet in "fable;" the book has
endless character; the descriptions are Hogarth with less of _peuple_
about them; the dialogue is unsurpassable. Yet Goldsmith, untiring hack
of genius as he was, wrote no other novel; evidently felt no particular
call or predilection for the style; would have been dramatist, poet,
e