The novel will afford them an
opportunity of bringing in a variety of scattered details; scraps of
knowledge too scanty for an essay, and scraps of experience too meagre
for independent publication. Others, again, attempt histories, or works
of popular philosophy and science; not because they have any special
stores of knowledge, or because any striking novelty of conception
urges them to use up old material in a new shape, but simply because
they have just been reading with interest some work of history or
science, and are impatient to impart to others the knowledge they have
just acquired for themselves. Generally it may be remarked that the
pride which follows the sudden emancipation of the mind from ignorance
of any subject, is accompanied by a feeling that all the world must be
in the state of darkness from which we have ourselves emerged. It is
the knowledge learned yesterday which is most freely imparted today.
We need not insist on the obvious fact of there being more irritability
than mastery, more imitation than creation, more echoes than voices in
the world of Literature.
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