And from this there results for
him a great loss of vividness, but a great compensating gain in his
power over the subject; so that he can now subordinate one thing to
another in importance, and introduce all manner of very subtle detail,
to a degree that was before impossible. He can render just as easily the
flourish of trumpets before a victorious emperor and the gossip of
country market women, the gradual decay of forty years of a man's life
and the gesture of a passionate moment. He finds himself equally
unable, if he looks at it from one point of view--equally able, if he
looks at it from another point of view--to reproduce a colour, a sound,
an outline, a logical argument, a physical action. He can show his
readers, behind and around the personages that for the moment occupy the
foreground of his story, the continual suggestion of the landscape; the
turn of the weather that will turn with it men's lives and fortunes,
dimly foreshadowed on the horizon; the fatality of distant events, the
stream of national tendency, the salient framework of causation. And all
this thrown upon the flat board--all this entering, naturally and
smoothly, into the texture of continuous intelligent narration. This touches the difference between Fielding and Scott. In the work of
the latter, true to his character of a modern and a romantic, we become
suddenly conscious of the background. Fielding, on the other hand,
although he had recognised that the novel was nothing else than an epic
in prose, wrote in the spirit not of the epic, but of the drama. This is
not, of course, to say that the drama was in any way incapable of a
regeneration similar in kind to that of which I am now speaking with
regard to the novel. The notorious contrary fact is sufficient to guard
the reader against such a misconstruction. All that is meant is, that
Fielding remained ignorant of certain capabilities which the novel
possesses over the drama; or, at least, neglected and did not develop
them. To the end he continued to see things as a playwright sees them. The world with which he dealt, the world he had realised for himself and
sought to realise and set before his readers, was a world of exclusively
human interest. As for landscape, he was content to under-line stage
directions, as it might be done in a play-book: Tom and Molly retire
into a practicable wood. As for nationality and public sentiment, it is
curious enough to think that Tom Jones is laid in the year forty-five,
and that the only use he makes of the rebellion is to throw a troop of
soldiers into his hero's way. It is most really important, however, to
remark the change which has been introduced into the conception of
character by the beginning of the romantic movement and the consequent
introduction into fiction of a vast amount of new material. Fielding
tells us as much as he thought necessary to account for the actions of
his creatures; he thought that each of these actions could be decomposed
on the spot into a few simple personal elements, as we decompose a force
in a question of abstract dynamics. The larger motives are all unknown
to him; he had not understood that the nature of the landscape or the
spirit of the times could be for anything in a story; and so, naturally
and rightly, he said nothing about them. But Scott's instinct, the
instinct of the man of an age profoundly different, taught him
otherwise; and, in his work, the individual characters begin to occupy a
comparatively small proportion of that canvas on which armies
manoeuvre, and great hills pile themselves upon each other's
shoulders. Fielding's characters were always great to the full stature
of a perfectly arbitrary will. Already in Scott we begin to have a sense
of the subtle influences that moderate and qualify a man's personality;
that personality is no longer thrown out in unnatural isolation, but is
resumed into its place in the constitution of things. It is this change in the manner of regarding men and their actions,
first exhibited in romance, that has since renewed and vivified history. For art precedes philosophy, and even science. People must have noticed
things and interested themselves in them before they begin to debate
upon their causes or influence. And it is in this way that art is the
pioneer of knowledge; those predilections of the artist he knows not
why, those irrational acceptations and recognitions, reclaim, out of the
world that we have not yet realised, ever another and another corner;
and after the facts have been thus vividly brought before us and have
had time to settle and arrange themselves in our minds, some day there
will be found the man of science to stand up and give the explanation. Scott took an interest in many things in which Fielding took none; and
for this reason, and no other, he introduced them into his romances. If
he had been told what would be the nature of the movement that he was so
lightly initiating, he would have been very incredulous and not a little
scandalised. At the time when he wrote, the real drift of this new
manner of pleasing people in fiction was not yet apparent; and, even
now, it is only by looking at the romances of Victor Hugo that we are
enabled to form any proper judgment in the matter. These books are not
only descended by ordinary generation from the Waverley Novels, but it
is in them chiefly that we shall find the revolutionary tradition of
Scott carried further; that we shall find Scott himself, in so far as
regards his conception of prose fiction and its purposes, surpassed in
his own spirit, instead of tamely followed. We have here, as I said
before, a line of literary tendency produced, and by this production
definitely separated from others. When we come to Hugo, we see that the
deviation, which seemed slight enough and not very serious between Scott
and Fielding, is indeed such a great gulf in thought and sentiment as
only successive generations can pass over: and it is but natural that
one of the chief advances that Hugo has made upon Scott is an advance in
self-consciousness. Both men follow the same road; but where the one
went blindly and carelessly, the other advances with all deliberation
and forethought. There never was artist much more unconscious than
Scott; and there have been not many more conscious than Hugo. The
passage at the head of these pages shows how organically he had
understood the nature of his own changes. He has, underlying each of the
five great romances (which alone I purpose here to examine), two
deliberate designs: one artistic, the other consciously ethical and
intellectual.