It is, however, obviously true that Scott’s heroes are mostly created for the sake of the facility they give in delineating the other characters, and not the other characters for the sake of the heroes.  They are the imaginative neutral ground, as it were, on which opposing influences are brought to play; and what Scott best loved to paint was those who, whether by nature, by inheritance, or by choice, had become unique and characteristic types of one-sided feeling, not those who were merely in process of growth, and had not ranged themselves at all.  Mr. Carlyle, who, as I have said before, places Scott’s romances far below their real level, maintains that these great types of his are drawn from the outside, and not made actually to live.  “His Bailie Jarvies, Dinmonts, Dalgettys (for their name is legion), do look and talk like what they give themselves out for; they are, if not created and made poetically alive, yet deceptively enacted as a good player might do them.  What more is wanted, then?  For the reader lying on a sofa, nothing more; yet for another sort of reader much.  It were a long chapter to unfold the difference in drawing a character between a Scott and a Shakespeare or Goethe.  Yet it is a difference literally immense; they are of a different species; the value of the one is not to be counted in the coin of the other.  We might say in a short word, which covers a long matter, that your Shakespeare fashions his characters from the heart outwards; your Scott fashions them from the skin inwards, never getting near the heart of them.  The one set become living men and women; the other amount to little more than mechanical cases, deceptively painted automatons."[35] And then he goes on to contrast Fenella in Peveril of the Peak with Goethe’s Mignon.  Mr. Carlyle could hardly have chosen a less fair comparison.  If Goethe is to be judged by his women, let Scott be judged by his men.  So judged, I think Scott will, as a painter of character—­of course, I am not now speaking of him as a poet,—­come out far above Goethe.  Excepting the hero of his first drama (Goetz of the iron hand), which by the way was so much in Scott’s line that his first essay in poetry was to translate it—­not very well—­I doubt if Goethe was ever successful with his pictures of men. Wilhelm Meister is, as Niebuhr truly said, “a menagerie of tame animals.”  Doubtless Goethe’s women—­certainly his women of culture—­are more truly and inwardly conceived and created than Scott’s.  Except Jeanie Deans and Madge Wildfire, and perhaps Lucy Ashton, Scott’s women are apt to be uninteresting, either pink and white toys, or hardish women of the world.  But then no one can compare the men of the two writers, and not see Scott’s vast pre-eminence on that side.