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 _Héloïse_ 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_