cribes with the minuteness of affection, are what we ourselves might
have been; and in their histories we hear, if not the "music," yet the
"harsh and grating cry" of suffering humanity. Fielding's merit is of
the same kind; but the sympathies which he excites are more general, as
his scenes are more varied, than those of Defoe. His coarseness is
everywhere redeemed by a genuine feeling for the contumelious buffets to
which weakness is exposed. He has the practical insight of Dickens and
Thackeray, without their infusion of sentiment. He does not moralise
over the contrast between the rich man's law and the poor man's, over
the "indifference" of rural justice, over the lying and adultery of
fashionable life. He simply makes us see the facts, which are everywhere
under our eyes, but too close to us for discernment. He shows society
where its sores lie, appealing from the judgment of the diseased class
itself to that public intelligence which, in spite of the cynic's sneer
on the task of "producing an honesty from the combined action of
knaves," has really power to over-ride private selfishness. The same
sermon has found many preachers since, the unconscious missionaries
being perhaps the greatest. Scott was a Tory of the purest water. His
mind was busy with the revival of a pseudo-feudalism: no thought of
reforming abuses probably ever entered it. Yet his genial human insight
made him a reformer against his will. He who makes man better known to
man takes the first steps toward healing the wounds which man inflicts
on man. The permanent value of Scott's novels lies in his pictures of
the Scotch peasantry. He popularised the work which the Lake poets had
begun, of re-opening the primary springs of human passion. "Love he had
found in huts where poor men lie," and he announced the discovery;
teaching the "world" of English gentry what for a century and a half
they had seemed to forget, that the human soul, in its strength no less
than in its weakness, is independent of the accessories of fortune. He
left no equals, but the combined force of his successors has been
constantly growing in practical effect. They have probably done more
than the journalists to produce that improvement in the organisation of
modern life which leads to the notion that, because social grievances
are less obvious, they have ceased to exist. The novelist catches the
cry of suffering before it has obtained the strength, or general
recognition, which ar