to-day are, I think, inclined to place undue emphasis upon what they regard as Scott’s failure to take the moral obligations of fiction seriously:  they confuse his preaching and his practice.  Whatever he declared in his letters or Journal, the novels themselves, read in the light of current methods, certainly leave an old-fashioned taste on the palate, because of their moralizings and avowments of didactic purpose.  The advantages and disadvantages of this general attitude can be easily understood:  the loss in philosophic grasp is made up in healthiness of tone and pleasantness of appeal.  One recognizes such an author as, above all, human and hearty.  The reserves and delicacies of Anglo-Saxon fiction are here, of course, in full force:  and a doctored view of the Middle Ages is the result, as it is in Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King.”  A sufficient answer is that it is not Scott’s business to set us right as to medievalism, but rather to use it for the imaginative purposes of pleasure.  The frank intrusion of the author himself into the body of the page o in the way of footnotes is also disturbing, judged by our later standards:  but was carried on with much charm by Thackeray in the mid-century, to reappear at its end in the pages of Du Maurier.

In the more technical qualifications of the story-maker’s art, Scott compensated in the more masculine virtues for what he lacked in the feminine.  Possessing less of finesse, subtlety and painstaking than some who were to come, he excelled in sweep, movement and variety, as well as in a kind of largeness of effect:  “the big bow-wow business,” to use his own humorously descriptive phrase when he was comparing himself with Jane Austen, to his own disadvantage.  And it is these very qualities that endear him to the general and keep his memories green; making “Ivanhoe” and “Kenilworth” still useful for school texts—­unhappy fate!  Still, this means that he always had a story to tell and told it with the flow and fervor and the instinctive coherence of the story-teller born, not made.

When the fortunes of his fictive folk were settled, this novelist, always more interested in characters than in the plot which must conduct them, often loses interest and his books end more or less lamely, or with obvious conventionality.  Anything to close it up, you feel.  But of action and incident, scenes that live and situations with stage value, one of Scott’s typical fictions has enough to furnish the stock in trade for life of many later-day romanticists who feebly follow in his wake.  He has a special skill in connecting the comparatively small private involvement, which is the kernel of a story, with important public matters, so that they seem part of the larger movements or historic occurrences of the world.  Dignity and body are gained for the tale thereby.