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328 the historical novel, glitteringly coloured, but superficial and insignificant. Criticism, however, was eventually able to correct such exaggerations, and the benefits alone were left. No one can write a sound history of historical writing in the Nineteenth Century without giving generous credit to Walter Scott.

In the third connexion we must keep the problem of Scott distinct from the problem of art, in so far, that is, as we are interested in Scott's technical skill as a novelist. This deftness we must not measure with the ingenuity of our own day—a comparison from which it suffers badly (because Scott's methods are now quite familiar and outworn, so that a cry of "old stuff" would greet any one trying to revive them); but rather with the devices in vogue before him and with the expectations of the public to which he sold. Goethe, for example, notoriously awkward and unimaginative in plot-construction, had profound admiration for Scott as a story-teller. The "new art" he found in the great Scotchman, a "new art governed by its own inner laws," gave him "much food for thought." Scott studied his subject matter carefully as an antiquarian and a tourist. He described landscapes, based his action on manners and customs, maintained "suspense" by the use of mysterious characters endowed with extraordinary powers, created the "illusion of reality" in tales of Norman, Saxon, Puritan, and Jacobite, by making people of other times talk and act as they really talked and acted. The epic he lightened with comedy, benevolently smiling at personages limited to one idea, one desire, one motive. And unfailingly he kept his main people in the foreground, people noble and valorous, certain to hold the sympathy and interest of the reader.

In the fourth place the artistic criterion fails for Scott for the simple reason that art—or poetry, if you wish—was a secondary matter with him. The critic who looks for the artist in Scott inevitably ends with what we Italians call the "stroncatura"—the slashing, the flaying, which, however apposite it may be in the literary campaigns of our own day, becomes sheer bad manners, sheer ill-temper, when used on men of the past. Certainly when a writer like Gosse steps forward and denies anybody's right to find defects in Scott, asserting that "England can challenge the world to produce in its literature a purer spirit, a more brilliant mind, a creator of more heroic works, a more marvellous painter of historical pictures," the impulse to indulge in a bit of mirth becomes almost ir-