At its worst, Scott’s style may fairly be called ponderous, loose, monotonous:  at its finest, the adequate instrument of a natural story-teller who is most at home when, emerging from his longueur, he writes of grand things in the grand manner.

Thus, Sir Walter Scott defined the Romance for modern fiction, gave it the authority of his genius and extended the gamut of the Novel by showing that the method of the realist, the awakening of interest in the actualities of familiar character and life, could be more broadly applied.  He opposed the realist in no true sense:  but indicated how, without a lapse of art or return to outworn machinery, justice might yet be done to the more stirring, large, heroic aspects of the world of men:  a world which exists and clamors to be expressed:  a world which readers of healthy taste are perennially interested in, nay, sooner or later, demand to be shown.  His fiction, whether we award it the somewhat grudging recognition of Carlyle or with Ruskin regard its maker as the one great novelist of English race, must be deemed a precious legacy, one of literature’s most honorable ornaments—­especially desirable in a day so apparently plain and utilitarian as our own, eschewing ornament and perchance for that reason needing it all the more.

CHAPTER VII

FRENCH INFLUENCE

In the first third of the nineteenth century English fiction stood at the parting of the ways.  Should it follow Scott and the romance, or Jane Austen and the Novel of everyday life?  Should it adopt that form of story-making which puts stress on action and plot and is objective in its method, roaming all lands and times for its material; or, dealing with the familiar average of contemporary society, should it emphasize character analysis and choose the subjective realm of psychology for its peculiar domain?  The pen dropped from the stricken hand of Scott in 1832; in that year a young parliamentary reporter in London was already writing certain lively, closely observed sketches of the town, and four years later they were to be collected and published under the title of “Sketches by Boz,” while the next year that incomparable extravaganza, “The Pickwick Papers,” was to go to an eager public.  English fiction had decided:  the Novel was to conquer the romance for nearly a century.  It was a victory which to the present day has been a dominant influence in story-making; establishing a tendency which, until Stevenson a few years since, with the gaiety of the inveterate boy, cried up Romance once more, bade fair to sweep all before it.