ventional morality--they deal simply with
eighteenth-century life as seen by eighteenth-century eyesight. All
romantic virtue, all idealised passion, they rigorously eschew. Prudence
they make the guide, happiness the end, of life. And they do well. They
undertake to copy present life, and they do so. They have to reflect
man's habitual consciousness; it is not for them to anticipate a
consciousness which has not yet been attained, or to represent man's
lower nature as absorbed in a spiritual movement which, because we
cannot arrest it, we habitually ignore. It is just their deficiency in
this respect which gives them their peculiar fascination. Man is not
really mere man, though he may think himself so. He is always something
potentially, which he is not actually; always inadequate to himself; and
as such, disturbed and miserable. The novel, on the contrary, represents
him as being what he vainly tries to be--adequate to himself. It offers
to his imagination the full enjoyment of earthly life, unchallenged by
obstinate surmises, untroubled by yearnings after the divine. Ordinary
men are satisfied with this enjoyment; the highest are allured by its
temptation. The "reading public" is charmed with the contemplation of
its own likeness, "twice as natural" as life. Its own wisdom, its own
wishes, its own vanity, are set before it in little with a completeness
and finish which the deeper laws of the universe, vindicating themselves
by apparent disorder and misfortune, happily prevent from being attained
in real life.[13] It is thus pleasantly flattered into contentment with
itself--a contentment not disturbed by the occasional censure of
practices which good taste condemns as ungraceful, or prudence as
prejudicial to happiness. But the man of keener insight, who, instead of
wrestling with the riddle of life, seeks for a time to forget it, and
to place in its stead the rounded representation of activity which the
novelist supplies, cannot but find the vanity of hiding his face from
the presence which he dreads. Out of heart with the world about
him--conscious of its actual meanness, and without vigor to re-cast it
in the mould of his own thought--he fancies that after a sojourn in the
world of fiction he may come back braced for his struggle with life. In
his study, with a novel, he hopes to overlook the walls of his
prison-house, to see the beginning and the end of human strife. But he
soon finds himself in the embrace of the