ve been thus vividly brought before us and have
had 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 further; 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 gulf 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 the head of these pages shows how organically he had
understood the nature of his own changes. He has, underlying each of the
five great romances (which alone I purpose here to examine), two
deliberate designs: one artistic, the other consciously ethical and
intellectual. This is a man living in a different world from Scott, who
professes sturdily (in one of his introductions) that he does not
believe in novels having any moral influence at all; but still Hugo is
too much of an artist to let himself be hampered by his dogmas; and the
truth is that the artistic result seems, in at least one great instance,
to have very little connection with t