It may be that
the general obliteration of distinctions of rank in this country,
which is generally considered a detriment to the novelist, will in the
end turn to his advantage by compelling him to depend for his effects
on the contrasts and collisions of innate character, rather than on
those shallower traits superinduced by particular social arrangements,
or by hereditary associations. Shakespeare drew ideal, and Fielding
natural men and women; Thackeray draws either gentlemen or snobs, and
Dickens either unnatural men or the oddities natural only in the
lowest grades of a highly artificial system of society. The first two
knew human nature; of the two latter, one knows what is called the
world, and the other the streets of London. Is it possible that the
very social democracy which here robs the novelist of so much romance,
so much costume, so much antithesis of caste, so much in short that is
purely external, will give him a set-off in making it easier for him
to get at that element of universal humanity which neither of the two
extremes of an aristocratic system, nor the salient and picturesque
points of contrast between the two, can alone lay open to him?
"We hope to see this problem solved by Mrs. Stowe. That kind of
romantic interest which Scott evolved from the relations of lord and
vassal, of thief and clansman, from the social more than the moral
contrast of Roundhead and Cavalier, of far-descended pauper and
_nouveau riche_ which Cooper found in the clash of savagery with
civilization, and the shaggy virtue bred on the border-land between
the two, Indian by habit, white by tradition, Mrs.
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