A child, digging on the
beach, may shape a heap of sand into a similitude of Vesuvius; but is it
nothing that Vesuvius towers above the clouds, and overwhelms Pompeii?
* * * * *
In proceeding from the general to the particular,--to the novel as it
actually exists in England and America,--attention will be confined
strictly to the contemporary outlook. The new generation of novelists (by
which is intended not those merely living in this age, but those who
actively belong to it) differ in at least one fundamental respect from the
later representatives of the generation preceding them. Thackeray and
Dickens did not deliberately concern themselves about a philosophy of
life. With more or less complacency, more or less cynicism, they accepted
the religious and social canons which had grown to be the commonplace of
the first half of this century. They pictured men and women, not as
affected by questions, but as affected by one another. The morality and
immorality of their personages were of the old familiar Church-of-England
sort; there was no speculation as to whether what had been supposed to be
wrong was really right, and _vice versa_.
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