The cord divergent sweeps,
The throb of what great heart bestirs the middle deeps.
Thou also weavest meshes, fine and thin,
And leaguer’st all the forest ways:
But of that sea, and the great heart therein
Thou knowest nought: whole days
Thou toil’st, and hast thy end—good store of pies and jays.
II
So far we have spoken of poets—fairly selected, I trust—and have found that there are poets and poets; and some are Olympian in attitude, looking down deep below the surface from a great height as a gannet spies his fish; but high aloof, concerned rather with universal themes than with the woman of Canaan clamorous in the street crying for her daughter, “Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.”
Now if we turn to our novelists, from Defoe to Scott, we find that the novel from its first virtual beginning in our country and for a century or more, has for social diseases in the body politic little concern and practically no sense at all. Defoe has strong political sense, but keeps it for his tracts and pamphlets: in Robinson Crusoe (and specially in the third volume, The Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe), in Moll Flanders, in Roxana, he is always a moralist, but a religious moralist. If—to twist a line of Hamlet—there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark, it does not come within the scope of the novelist whose office is to combine amusement with general edification. So—leaving out the edification—it is in Tristram Shandy, so in The Vicar of Wakefield. Richardson is all for the human heart as he reads it, and female virtue. Fielding with his genial manly morality—Fielding, magistrate of a London Police Court, and a humane one—discloses little sense in his novels of any vera causa in our system supplying the unfortunates for whom, in daily life, he tempers justice with mercy. You will not, I think, cite Jonathan Wild against me. Noble fellow, as he drops down the Thames—stricken to death, and knowing it—on that hopeless voyage to Lisbon, his thoughts are hopeful for England and the glory of her merchant shipping: and (says he) it must be our own fault if it doth not continue glorious: