nsciously perceived principles in the books
themselves. A man does not suddenly, and by mere blind instinct, avoid
such a pitfall as that of incongruous speech and manners, which has been
noticed above. It is not mere happy-go-lucky blundering which makes him
invariably decline another into which people still fall--the selection
of historical personages of the first importance, and elaborately known,
for the _central_ figures of his novels. Not to believe in luck is a
mark of perhaps greater folly than to over-believe in it: but luck will
not always keep a man clear of such perils as that unskilful wedging of
great blocks of mere history into his story, which the lesser historical
novelists always commit, or that preponderance of mere narrative itself
as compared with action and conversation from which even Dumas, even
Thackeray, is not free.

That he knew what he was doing and what he had to do is thus certain;
that he did it to an astounding extent is still more certain; but it
would not skill much to deny that he did not always give himself time to
do it perfectly in every respect, though it is perhaps not mere paradox
or mere partisanship to suggest that if he had given himself more time,
he would hardly have done better, and might have done worse. The
accusation of superficiality has been _already_ glanced at: and it is
pretty certain that it argues more superficiality, of a much more
hopeless kind, in those who make it. The accusation of careless and
slovenly style is not much better: for Scott had, perfectly, the style
suited to his own work, and you cannot easily have a better style than
that. But there are two defects in him which were early detected by good
and friendly judges: and which are in fact natural results of the
extraordinary force and fertility of his creative power. One--the less
serious, but certainly to some extent a fault in art and a point in
which he is distinguished for the worse from Shakespeare--is that he is
rather given to allow at first, to some of his personages, an
elaborateness and apparent emphasis of drawing which seems to promise an
importance for them in the story that they never actually attain. Mike
Lambourne in _Kenilworth_ is a good example of this: but there are many
others. The fact evidently was that, in the rush of the artist's plastic
imagination, other figures rose and overpowered these. It is an excuse:
but it is hardly a justification. The other and more serious is a
t