bosom interests of mankind are those he depicts, because they are universal.  It is his gift for giving them a particular dress in romance after romance which makes the result so often satisfactory, even splendid.  Yet, despite the range of time and grasp of Life’s essentials, there is in Scott’s interpretation of humanity a certain lack which one feels in comparing him with the finest modern masters:  with a Meredith, a Turgeneff or a Balzac.  It is a difference not only of viewpoint but of synthetic comprehension and philosophic penetration.  It means that he mirrored a day less complex, less subtle and thoughtful.  This may be dwelt upon and illustrated a little in some further considerations on his main qualities.

Scott, like the earlier novelists in general, was content to depict character from without rather than from within:  to display it through act and scene instead of by the probing analysis so characteristically modern.  This meant inevitable limitations in dealing with an historical character or time.  A high-church Tory himself, a frank Jacobite in his leanings—­Taine declared he had a feudal mind—­he naturally so composed a picture as to reflect this predilection, making effects of picturesqueness accordingly.  The idea given of Mary Queen of Scots from “The Abbot” is one example of what is meant; that of Prince Charley in “Waverley” is another.  In a sense, however, the stories are all the better for this obvious bias.  Where a masculine imagination moved by warm affection seizes on an historic figure the result is sure to be vivid, at least; and let it be repeated that Scott has in this way re-created history for the many.  He shows a sound artistic instinct in his handling of historic personages relative to those imaginary:  rarely letting them occupy the center of interest, but giving that place to the creatures of his fancy, thereby avoiding the hampering restriction of a too close following of fact.  The manipulation of Richard Coeur de Lion in “Ivanhoe” is instructive with this in mind.

While the lights and shadows of human life are duly blended in his romances, Scott had a preference for the delineation of the gentle, the grand (or grandiose), the noble and the beautiful:  loving the medieval, desiring to reproduce the age of chivalry, he was naturally aristocratic in taste, as in intellect, though democratic by the dictates of a thoroughly good heart.  He liked a pleasant ending—­or, at least, believed in mitigating tragedy by a checker of sunlight at the close.  He had little use for the degenerate types of mankind:  certainly none for degeneracy for its own sake, or because of a kind of scientific interest in its workings.  Nor did he conceive of the mission of fiction as being primarily instructional:  nor set too high a value on a novel as a lesson in life—­although at times (read the moral tag to “The Heart of Midlothian”) he speaks in quite the preacher’s tone of the improvement to be got from the teaching of the tale.  Critics