nearly as important a ROLE, as the man, Gilliat, who opposes
and overcomes them. So we find the fortunes of a nation put
upon the stage with as much vividness as ever before the
fortunes of a village maiden or a lost heir; and the forces
that oppose and corrupt a principle holding the attention
quite as strongly as the wicked barons or dishonest attorneys
of the past. Hence those individual interests that were
supreme in Fielding, and even in Scott, stood out over
everything else and formed as it were the spine of the story,
figure here only as one set of interests among many sets, one
force among many forces, one thing to be treated out of a
whole world of things equally vivid and important. So that,
for Hugo, man is no longer an isolated spirit without
antecedent or relation here below, but a being involved in
the action and reaction of natural forces, himself a centre
of such action and reaction or an unit in a great multitude,
chased hither and thither by epidemic terrors and
aspirations, and, in all seriousness, blown about by every
wind of doctrine. This is a long way that we have travelled:
between such work and the work of Fielding is there not,
indeed, a great gulph in thought and sentiment?

Art, thus conceived, realises for men a larger portion of
life, and that portion one that it is more difficult for them
to realise unaided; and, besides helping them to feel more
intensely those restricted personal interests which are
patent to all, it awakes in them some consciousness of those
more general relations that are so strangely invisible to the
average man in ordinary moods. It helps to keep man in his
place in nature, and, above all, it helps him to understand