There is, I admit, an intolerable amount of redundant verbiage in Scott’s novels.  Those endless and unnecessary introductions make the shell very thick before you come to the oyster.  They are often admirable in themselves, learned, witty, picturesque, but with no relation or proportion to the story which they are supposed to introduce.  Like so much of our English fiction, they are very good matter in a very bad place.  Digression and want of method and order are traditional national sins.  Fancy introducing an essay on how to live on nothing a year as Thackeray did in “Vanity Fair,” or sandwiching in a ghost story as Dickens has dared to do.  As well might a dramatic author rush up to the footlights and begin telling anecdotes while his play was suspending its action and his characters waiting wearily behind him.  It is all wrong, though every great name can be quoted in support of it.  Our sense of form is lamentably lacking, and Sir Walter sinned with the rest.  But get past all that to a crisis in the real story, and who finds the terse phrase, the short fire-word, so surely as he?  Do you remember when the reckless Sergeant of Dragoons stands at last before the grim Puritan, upon whose head a price has been set:  “A thousand marks or a bed of heather!” says he, as he draws.  The Puritan draws also:  “The Sword of the Lord and of Gideon!” says he.  No verbiage there!  But the very spirit of either man and of either party, in the few stern words, which haunt your mind.  “Bows and Bills!” cry the Saxon Varangians, as the Moslem horse charges home.  You feel it is just what they must have cried.  Even more terse and businesslike was the actual battle-cry of the fathers of the same men on that long-drawn day when they fought under the “Red Dragon of Wessex” on the low ridge at Hastings.  “Out!  Out!” they roared, as the Norman chivalry broke upon them.  Terse, strong, prosaic—­the very genius of the race was in the cry.

Is it that the higher emotions are not there?  Or is it that they are damped down and covered over as too precious to be exhibited?  Something of each, perhaps.  I once met the widow of the man who, as a young signal midshipman, had taken Nelson’s famous message from the Signal Yeoman and communicated it to the ship’s company.  The officers were impressed.  The men were not.  “Duty!” they muttered.  “We’ve always done it.  Why not?” Anything in the least highfalutin’ would depress, not exalt, a British company.  It is the under statement which delights them.  German troops can march to battle singing Luther’s hymns.  Frenchmen will work themselves into a frenzy by a song of glory and of Fatherland.  Our martial poets need not trouble to imitate—­or at least need not imagine that if they do so they will ever supply a want to the British soldier.  Our sailors working the heavy guns in South Africa sang:  “Here’s another lump of sugar for the Bird.”  I saw a regiment go into action to the refrain of “A little bit off the top.”