Of late the recrudescence of the historical novel has revived the discussion as to the value of the genre.  It may be readily admitted that Scott’s best work is realistic, and is to be looked for in such novels as “The Antiquary,” “Old Mortality,” “The Heart of Mid-Lothian,” and in characters like Andrew Fairservice, Bailie Nicol Jarvie, Dandie Dinmont, Dugald Dalgetty, Jeanie Deans, Edie Ochiltrie, which brought into play his knowledge of men, his humour, observation of life, and insight into Scotch human nature.  Scott knew these people; he had to divine James I., Louis XI., and Mary Stuart.  The historical novel is a tour de force.  Exactly how knights-templars, burgomasters, friars, Saracens, and Robin Hood archers talked and acted in the twelfth century, we cannot know.  But it is just because they are strange to our experience that they are dear to our imagination.  The justification of romance is its unfamiliarity—­“strangeness added to beauty”—­“the pleasure of surprise” as distinguished from “the pleasure of recognition.”  Again and again realism returns to the charge and demands of art that it give us the present and the actual; and again and again the imagination eludes the demand and makes an ideal world for itself in the blue distance.

Two favourite arts, or artifices, of all romantic schools, are “local colour” and “the picturesque.”  “Vers l’an de grace 1827,” writes Prosper Merimee, “j’etais romantique.  Nous disions aux classiques; vos Grecs ne sont pas des Grecs, vos Romains ne sont pas des Romains; vous ne savez pas donner a vos compositions la couleur locale.  Point de salut sans la couleur locale.” [36]

As to the picturesque—­a word that connotes, in its critical uses, some quality in the objects of sense which strikes us as at once novel, and characteristic in its novelty—­while by no means the highest of literary arts, it is a perfectly legitimate one.[37] Crecy is not, at bottom, a more interesting battle than Gettysburg because it was fought with bows and arrows, but it is more picturesque to the modern imagination just for that reason.  Why else do the idiots in “MacArthur’s Hymn” complain that “steam spoils romance at sea”?  Why did Ruskin lament when the little square at the foot of Giotto’s Tower in Florence was made a stand for hackney coaches?  Why did our countryman Halleck at Alnwick Towers resent the fact that “the Percy deals in salt and hides, the Douglas sells red herring”?  And why does the picturesque tourist, in general, object to the substitution of naphtha launches for gondolas on the Venetian canals?  Perhaps because the more machinery is interposed between man and the thing he works on, the more impersonal becomes his relation to nature.