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 have 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 farther 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.
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