began to show themselves timidly, as adjuncts, in the novels of Walter
Scott, have usurped ever more and more of the canvas; until we find the
whole interest of one of Hugo's romances centring around matter that
Fielding would have banished from his altogether, as being out of the
field of fiction. So we have elemental forces occupying nearly as large
a place, playing (so to speak) 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 gulf of 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 more intelligently
the responsibilities of his place in society. And in all this
generalisation of interest, we never miss those small humanities that
are at the opposite pole of excellence in art; and while we admire the
intellect that could see life thus largely, we are touched with another
sentiment for the tender heart that slipped the piece of gold into
Cosette's sabot,