22. But there is another side to this question which we must not allow
ourselves to overlook. We have shown what the novel cannot do, and its
ill effect on those who trust to it for their culture. We must not
forget that it has a proper work of its own which, if modern progress be
anything more than a euphemism, must be a work for good. Least of all
should it be depreciated by the student, who may find in it deliverance
from the necessary confinement of his actual life. For the production of
poetic effect, as we have seen, large abstraction is necessary. It is
with man in the purity of his inward being, with nature in its simple
greatness, that the poet deals. The glory which he casts on life is far
higher than any which the novelist knows, but it is only on certain of
the elements of life that it can be cast at all. The novelist works on a
far wider field. With choice of subject and situation he scarcely need
trouble himself, except in regard to his own intellectual
qualifications. Wherever human thought is free, and human character can
display itself, whether in the servants' hall or the drawing-room,
whether in the country mansion or the back alley, he may find his
materials. He is thus a great expander of sympathies; and if he cannot
help us to make the world our own by the power of ideas, he at least
carries our thought into many a far country of human experience, which
it could not otherwise have reached. We hear much in these days of the
sacrifice of the individual to society through professional limitations.
In the progressive division of labor, while we become more useful as
citizens, we seem to lose our completeness as men. The requirements of
special study become more exacting, at the same time that the perfect
organisation of modern society removes the excitement of adventure and
the occasion for independent effort. There is less of human interest to
touch us within our calling, and we have less leisure to seek it beyond.
Hence it follows that one who has made the most of his profession is apt
to feel 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 stô] 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.