Like the novel

"Like the novel, the paper is a scholarly gadget for saying nearly everything in regards to nearly anything. By convention, nearly by definition, the paper is a short piece, and it is subsequently difficult to give everything full play inside the cutoff points of a solitary exposition. Be that as it may, an accumulation of articles can make nearly as much progress, and cover it nearly as completely, as can a long novel. Montaigne's Third Book is the proportional, practically, of a decent cut of the Comédie Humaine. Articles have a place with a scholarly animal types whose outrageous inconstancy can be considered most adequately inside a three-poled casing of reference. There is the post of the individual and the personal; there is the shaft of the target, the authentic, the solid specific; and there is the post of the dynamic widespread. Most writers are at home and getting it done in the area of just a single of the paper's three posts, or and no more just in the area of two of them. There are the overwhelmingly individual writers, who compose parts of intelligent personal history and who take a gander at the world through the keyhole of story and depiction. There are the transcendently target writers who don't talk straightforwardly of themselves, yet turn their consideration outward to some artistic or logical or political topic. … And how marvelous, how genuinely mysterious are the expressions of the immense generalizers! … The most luxuriously fulfilling articles are those which make the best not of one, not of two, but rather of all the three universes in which it is feasible for the paper to exist" (Collected Essays, "Introduction").