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
positive religion. Man is merely man only when he is seen against the
sky. If he is seen against any landscape, he is only a man of that land.
If he is seen against any house, he is only a householder. Only where
death and eternity are intensely present can human beings fully feel
their fellowship. Once the divine darkness against which we stand is
really dismissed from the mind (as it was very nearly dismissed in the
Victorian time) the differences between human beings become