21. Novel-reading thus aggravates two of the worst maladies of modern times, self-consciousness and want of reverence. Many a man in these days, instead of doing some sound piece of work for mankind, spends his time in explaining to himself why it is that he does not do it, and how, after all, he is superior to those who do. Even men of a higher sort never seem to forget themselves in their work. Our popular writers generally take the reader into confidence as to their private feelings as they go along; our men of action are burdened by a sense of their reputation with "intelligent circles." No one loses himself in a cause. Scarcely understanding what is meant by a "divine indifference" as to the fate of individual existences in the evolution of God's plan, we weary heaven with complaints that we find the world contrary, or that we cannot satisfy ourselves with a theory of life. Thus "measuring ourselves by ourselves, and comparing ourselves among ourselves, we are not wise." The novel furnishes the standard for the measurement, and the data for the comparison. It presents us with a series of fictitious experiences, in the light of which we read our own, and become more critically conscious of them. Instead of idealising life, if we may so express ourselves, it sentimentalises it. It does not subordinate incidents to ideas; yet it does not treat them simply as phenomena to excite curiosity, but as misfortunes or blessings to excite sentiment. The writer of the "Mill on the Floss" reaches almost the tragic pitch towards the close of her book, and if she had been content to leave us with the death of the heroine and her brother[20] in the flood, we might have supposed that in this case, as representing the annihilation of human passion in the struggle with destiny, the novelist had indeed attained the ideal view of life. But the novelistic instinct does not allow her to do so. At the conclusion we are shown the other chief actors standing, with appropriate emotions, over the heroine's grave, and thus find that the catastrophe has not really been the manifestation of an idea, but an occasion of sentiment. The habitual novel-reader, from thus looking sentimentally at the fictitious life which is the reflex of his own, soon comes to look sentimentally at himself. He thinks his personal joys and sorrows of interest to angels and men; and instead of gazing with awe and exultation upon the world, as a theatre for the display of God's glory and the unknown might of man, he sees in it merely an organism for affecting himself with pains and pleasures. Thus regarded, it must needs lose its claim on his reverence, for it is narrowed to the limits of his own consciousness. Conversant with present life in all its outward aspects, he forgets the infinite spaces which lie around and above it. This confinement of view, which among the more intelligent appears merely as disbelief in the possibilities of man,