We must have not only the fullest treatment of the temptations,
vanities, abuses, and absurdities of office, but all its dreams, its
sense of constructive order, its consolations, its sense of service, and
its nobler satisfactions. You may say that is demanding more insight and
power in our novels and novelists than we can possibly hope to find in
them. So much the worse for us. I stick to my thesis that the
complicated social organisation of to-day cannot get along without the
amount of mutual understanding and mutual explanation such a range of
characterisation in our novels implies. The success of civilisation
amounts ultimately to a success of sympathy and understanding. If people
cannot be brought to an interest in one another greater than they feel
to-day, to curiosities and criticisms far keener, and co-operations far
subtler, than we have now; if class cannot be brought to measure itself
against, and interchange experience and sympathy with class, and
temperament with temperament then we shall never struggle very far
beyond the confused discomforts and uneasiness of to-day, and the
changes and complications of human life will remain as they are now,
very like the crumplings and separations and complications of an immense
avalanche that is sliding down a hill.
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