ear gain of liberty and
largeness of competence. Thus, painting, in which the round outlines of
things are thrown on to a flat board, is far more free than sculpture,
in which their solidity is preserved. It is by giving up these
identities that art gains true strength. And so in the case of novels as
compared with the stage. Continuous narration is the flat board on to
which the novelist throws everything. 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