st gives
a more adequate conception of its surface. Though he cannot raise us to
a point of view from which circumstances appear subordinate to spiritual
laws, he yet saves us from being blinded, if not from being influenced,
by the circumstances of our own position. Though he cannot show the
prisoners the way of escape from their earthly confinement, yet by
breaking down the partitions between the cells he enables them to
combine their strength for a better arrangement of the prison-house. The
most wounding social wrongs more often arise from ignorance than from
malice, from acquiescence in the opinion of a class rather than from
deliberate selfishness. The master cannot enter into the feelings of the
servant, nor the servant into those of his master. The master cannot
understand how any good quality can lead one to "forget his station"; to
the servant the spirit of management in the master seems mere
"driving." This is only a sample of what is going on all society over.
The relation between the higher and lower classes becomes irritating,
and therefore injurious, not from any conscious unfairness on either
side, but simply from the want of a common understanding; while at the
same time every class suffers within its own limits from the prevalence
of habits and ideas, under the authority of class-convention, which
could not long maintain themselves if once placed in the light of
general opinion. Against this twofold oppression, the novel, from its
first establishment as a substantive branch of literature, has made
vigorous war. From Defoe to Kingsley its history boasts of a noble army
of social reformers; yet the work which these writers have achieved has
had little to do with the morals--commonly valueless, if not false and
sentimental--which they have severally believed themselves to convey.
Defoe's notion of a moral seems to have been the vulgar one that vice
must be palpably punished and virtue rewarded; he recommends his "Moll
Flanders" to the reader on the ground that "there is not a wicked action
in any part of it but is first or last rendered unhappy and[22]
unfortunate." The moral of Fielding's novels, if moral it can be called,
is simply the importance of that prudence which his heroes might have
dispensed with, but for the wildness of their animal license. Yet both
Defoe and Fielding had a real lesson to teach mankind. The thieves and
harlots whom Defoe prides himself on punishing, but whose adventures he
des