12. The most pleasing expression of this self-satisfaction of the age is
found in the _Spectator_, the first and best representative of that
special style of literature--the only really popular literature of our
time--which consists in talking to the public about itself. Humanity is
taken as reflected in the ordinary life of men; and, as thus reflected,
it is copied with the most minute fidelity. No attempt is made either to
suppress the baser elements of man's nature, or to transfigure them by a
stronger light than that of the common understanding. No deeper laws are
recognised than those which vindicate themselves to the eye of daily
observation, no motives purer than the "mixed" ones which the practical
philosopher delights to analyse, no life higher than that which is
qualified by animal wants. The reader never finds himself carried into a
region where it requires an effort to travel, or which is above the
existing level of opinion and morality. It is from this levelness with
life that the _Spectator_ derives its interest--an interest so nearly
the same, barring the absence of plot, with that of the novel, as to
lead Macaulay to pronounce Addison "the forerunner of the great English
novelists."[11] The elements of the novel, indeed, already existed in
Addison's time, and only required combination. Fictitious biography,
which may be regarded as its raw material, had been written by Defoe
with a life-like reality which has never since been equalled; and the
popular drama furnished plots, in the shape of love stories drawn from
present life. Let the adventures of the fictitious biography, instead of
being merely external to the man, as in Defoe, be made subservient to
that display of character in which Addison had shown himself a master,
and let them become steps in the development of a love-plot, and the
novel--the novel of the last century, at any rate--is fully formed. As
was the self-contented, and therefore uncreative and prosaic, thought of
the age, which produced the novel, such the novel itself continued to
be. Man, comfortable and acquiescent, wished to amuse himself by a
reflex of the life which he no longer aspired to transcend. He wanted to
enjoy himself twice over--in act and in fancy; or, if the former were
denied him, at least to explore in fancy the world of pleasure and
excitement, of which circumstances abridged or disturbed his enjoyment
in fact. In "the smooth tale, generally of love,"[12] the novelist
supplied the want.