And sympathy does not mean so much
feeling with all who feel, but rather suffering with all who suffer. And
it was inevitable, under such an inspiration, that more attention should
be given to the awkward corners of life than to its even flow. The very
promising domestic channel dug by the Victorian women, in books like
_Cranford_, by Mrs. Gaskell, would have got to the sea, if they had been
left alone to dig it. They might have made domesticity a fairyland.
Unfortunately another idea, the idea of imitating men's cuffs and
collars and documents, cut across this purely female discovery and
destroyed it.
It may seem mere praise of the novel to say it is the art of sympathy
and the study of human variations. But indeed, though this is a good
thing, it is not universally good. We have gained in sympathy; but we
have lost in brotherhood. Old quarrels had more equality than modern
exonerations. Two peasants in the Middle Ages quarrelled about their two
fields. But they went to the same church, served in the same semi-feudal
militia, and had the same morality, which ever might happen to be
breaking it at the moment.
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