.
The world with which he dealt, the world he had realised for himself and
sought to realise and set before his readers, was a world of exclusively
human interest. As for landscape, he was content to under-line stage
directions, as it might be done in a play-book: Tom and Molly retire
into a practicable wood. As for nationality and public sentiment, it is
curious enough to think that Tom Jones is laid in the year forty-five,
and that the only use he makes of the rebellion is to throw a troop of
soldiers into his hero's way. It is most really important, however, to
remark the change which has been introduced into the conception of
character by the beginning of the romantic movement and the consequent
introduction into fiction of a vast amount of new material. Fielding
tells us as much as he thought necessary to account for the actions of
his 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 ha