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 farther 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 gulph 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