D.H Lawrence on the Novel part 2

 Does a decline in novel reading indicate a loss of sympathetic consciousness? 

Depends seems my best answer. I can see biographies and history building a sympathetic consciousness but a sympathetic imagination may require the novel for its good health. 

Film might also feed our sympathetic consciousness. I'd like think so except there is little to hope for such nourishment in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice than say, with, Pelle the Conqueror. Previously, I quoted D. H. Lawrence about the 'novel properly handled" as nourishing our  sympathetic consciousness, but he also noted what was not the novel properly handled:

Bu 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....

Chapter IX;  Lady Chatterley's Lover

sch 

2/21/20