that he has not attained his full stature as a man; that he has
faculties which he can never use, capacities for admiration and
affection which can never meet with an adequate object. To this feeling,
probably, are mainly due our lamentations over a past age of
hero-worship and romance, when action was more decisive and passion a
fuller stream. Its alleviation, if not its remedy, is to be found in the
newspaper and the novel. Every one indeed must lay in his own experience
the foundation of the imaginary world which he rears for himself. There
is a primary "virtue which cannot be taught." No man can learn from
another the meaning of human activity or the possibilities of human
emotion. But this [Greek: pou sto] being given, even the cloistered
student may find that, as his soul passes into the strife of social
forces and the complication of individual experience, which the
newspaper and the novel severally represent, his sympathies break from
the bondage of his personal situation and reach to the utmost confines
of human life. The personal experience and the fictitious act and react
on each other, the personal experience giving reality to the fictitious,
the fictitious expansion to the personal. He need no longer envy the man
of action and adventure, or sigh for new regions of enterprise. The
world is all before him. He may explore its recesses without being
disturbed by its passions; and if the end of experience be the knowledge
of God's garment, as preliminary to that of God Himself, his eye may be
as well trained for the "vision beatific," as if he had himself been an
actor in the scenes to which imagination transfers him.

B. AN EXPANDER OF SYMPATHIES

23. The novelist not only works on more various elements, he appeals to
more ordinary minds than the poet. This indeed is the strongest
practical proof of his essential inferiority as an artist. All who are
capable of an interest in incidents of life which do not affect
themselves, may feel the same interest more keenly in a novel; but to
those only who can lift the curtain does a poem speak intelligibly. It
is the twofold characteristic, of universal intelligibility and
indiscriminate adoption of materials, that gives the novel its place as
the great reformer and leveller of our time. Reforming and levelling are
indeed more closely allied than we are commonly disposed to admit.
Social abuses are nearly always the result of defective organisation.
The demarc