e,
or rather kingdom; the play of personalities in private, the real
difference between Tommy and Joe. It is right that womanhood should
specialise in individuals, and be praised for doing so; just as in the
Middle Ages she specialised in dignity and was praised for doing so.
People put the matter wrong when they say that the novel is a study of
human nature. Human nature is a thing that even men can understand.
Human nature is born of the pain of a woman; human nature plays at
peep-bo when it is two and at cricket when it is twelve; human nature
earns its living and desires the other sex and dies. What the novel
deals with is what women have to deal with; the differentiations, the
twists and turns of this eternal river. The key of this new form of art,
which we call fiction, is sympathy. 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. The very cause of their quarrel was the cause
of their fraternity; they both liked land. But suppose one of them a
teetotaler who desired the abolition of hops on both farms; suppose the
other a vegetarian who desired the abolition of chickens on both farms:
and it is at once apparent that a quarrel of quite a different kind
would begin; and that in that quarrel it would not be a question of
farmer against farmer, but of individual against individual. This
fundamental sense of human fraternity can only exist in the presence of
p