now obliges everyone who discusses Defoe to supply a contradiction; for the truth is that Drelincourt’s book was so highly popular as to have gone through several editions before the ghost of Mrs. Veal mentioned it.  Moreover, if Scott’s little tale was fictitious, Defoe’s, on the other hand, was really a reporter’s version of an experience actually related by the person to whom he assigns it, and his skill in achieving verisimilitude was perhaps in this case less wonderful than his critics have generally supposed.[214]

On the subject of realism, Scott was not in general very rigid.  In his Life of Richardson he says:  “It is unfair to tax an author too severely upon improbabilities, without conceding which his story could have no existence; and we have the less title to do so, because, in the history of real life, that which is actually true bears often very little resemblance to that which is probable."[215] But this is perhaps only a plea for one kind of realism.  He also refers to the question of historical “keening,” and concludes that it is possible to have so much accuracy that the public will refuse to be interested, as Lear would hardly be popular on the stage if the hero were represented in the bearskin and paint which a Briton of his time doubtless wore.[216]

The motive of the novel is a subject which naturally engages the attention of the novelist-critic.  Romantic fiction, he thinks may have sufficient justification if it acts as an opiate for tired spirits.  A significant antithesis between his point of view in this matter and the more common attitude taken by critics in his time is illustrated by two reviews of Mrs. Shelley’s Frankenstein, to which we may refer, though the book was later than those included in the Novelists’ Library.  Scott wrote in Blackwood’s:  “We ... congratulate our readers upon a novel which excites new reflections and untried sources of emotion."[217] The Quarterly reviewer took the opposite and more conservative attitude and expressed himself thus:  “Our taste and our judgment alike revolt at this kind of writing, and the greater the ability with which it may be executed the worse it is—­it inculcates no lesson of conduct, manners, or morality; it cannot mend, and will not even amuse its readers, unless their taste has been deplorably vitiated—­it fatigues the feelings without interesting the understanding; it gratuitously harasses the heart, and wantonly adds to the store, already too great, of painful sensations."[218] In general Scott minimizes the effect of any moral that may be expressed in the novel, but occasionally he seems inconsistent, when he is talking of sentiments that are peculiarly distasteful to him.[219] But his thesis is that “the direct and obvious moral to be deduced from a fictitious narrative is of much less consequence to the public than the mode in which the story is treated in the course of its details."[220] In the Life of Fielding he says of novels:  “The best which can be hoped is that they may sometimes instruct the youthful mind by real pictures of life, and sometimes awaken their better feelings and sympathies by strains of generous sentiment, and tales of fictitious woe.  Beyond this point they are a mere elegance, a luxury contrived for the amusement of polished life.”