main piece is lost in minute
description of events which do not affect its progress."

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