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