ashamed. She ought not to listen with this queer rabid curiosity. After all,
one may hear the most private affairs of other people, but only in a spirit
of respect for the struggling, battered thing which any human soul is, and
in a spirit of fine, discriminative sympathy. For even satire is a form of
sympathy. It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really
determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel,
properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our
sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from
things gone dead. Therefore, the novel, properly handled, can reveal the
most secret places of life: for it is in the passional secret places of
life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow,
cleansing and freshening.
But the novel, like gossip, can also excite spurious sympathies and
recoils, mechanical and deadening to the psyche. The novel can glorify the
most corrupt feelings, so long as they are conventionally `pure'. Then the
novel, like gossip, becomes at last vicious, and, like gossip, all the more
vicious because it is always ostensibly on the side of the angels. Mrs
Bolton's gossip was always on the side of the angels. `And he was such a bad
fellow, and she was such a nice woman.' Whereas, as Connie could see even
from Mrs Bolton's gossip, the woman had been merely a mealy-mouthed sort,
and the man angrily honest. But angry honesty made a `bad man' of him, and
mealy-mouthedness made a `nice woman' of her, in the vicious, conventional
channelling of sympathy by Mrs Bolton.
For this reason, the gossip was humiliating. And for the same reason,
most novels, especially popular ones, are humiliating too. The public
responds now only to an appeal to its vices.
Nevertheless, one got a new vision of Tevershall village from Mrs
Bolton's talk. A terrible, seething welter of ugly life it seemed: not at
all the flat drabness it looked from outside. Clifford of course knew by
sight most of the people mentioned, Connie knew only one or two. But it
sounded really more like a Central African jungle than an English village.
`I suppose you heard as Miss Allsopp was married last week! Would you
ever! Miss Allsopp, old James' daughter, the boot-and-shoe Allsopp. You know
they built a house up at Pye Croft. The old man died last year from a fall;
eighty-three, he was, an' nimble as a lad. An' then he slipped on Bestwood
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