novel was looking one way and seeking one set of effects in
the hands of Fielding; and in the hands of Scott it was
looking eagerly in all ways and searching for all the effects
that by any possibility it could utilise. The difference
between these two men marks a great enfranchisement. With
Scott the Romantic movement, the movement of an extended
curiosity and an enfranchised imagination, has begun. This
is a trite thing to say; but trite things are often very
indefinitely comprehended: and this enfranchisement, in as
far as it regards the technical change that came over modern
prose romance, has never perhaps been explained with any
clearness.

To do so, it will be necessary roughly to compare the two
sets of conventions upon which plays and romances are
respectively based. The purposes of these two arts are so
much alike, and they deal so much with the same passions and
interests, that we are apt to forget the fundamental
opposition of their methods. And yet such a fundamental
opposition exists. In the drama the action is developed in
great measure by means of things that remain outside of the
art; by means of real things, that is, and not artistic
conventions for things. This is a sort of realism that is
not to be confounded with that realism in painting of which
we hear so much. The realism in painting is a thing of
purposes; this, that we have to indicate in the drama, is an
affair of method. We have heard a story, indeed, of a
painter in France who, when he wanted to paint a sea-beach,
carried realism from his ends to his means, and plastered
real sand upon his canvas; and that is precisely what is done