the romance, which is Scott's business, is
distinguished from this in its use of past time and historic
personages, its heightening of effect by the introducing of the
exceptional in scene and character, its general higher color in
the conductment of the narrative: and above all, its emphasis
upon the larger, nobler, more inspiring aspects of humanity.
This, be it understood, is the romance of modern times, not the
elder romance which was irresponsible in its picture of life,
falsely idealistic. When Sir Walter began his fiction, the trend
of the English Novel inheriting the method and purpose of
Richardson, was away from the romantic in this sense. The
analysis given has, it may be hoped, made this plain. It was by
the sheer force of his creative gift, therefore, that Scott set
the fashion for the romance in fiction: aided though he
doubtless was by the general romanticism introduced by the
greater English poets and expressive of the movement in
literature towards freedom, which followed the French
Revolution. That Scott at this time gave the fiction an impulse
not in the central flow of development is shown in the fact of
its rapid decadence after he passed away. While the romance is
thus a different thing from the Novel, modern fiction is close
woven of the two strands of realism and romance, and a
comprehensive study must have both in mind. Even authors like
Dickens, Thackeray and Eliot, who are to be regarded as stalwart
realists, could not avoid a single sally each into romance, with
"A Tale of Two Cities," "Henry Osmond" and "Romola"; and on the
other hand, romanticists like Hawthorne and Stevenson have used
the methods and manner of the realist, giving their loftiest
flights the most solid groundwork of psychologic reality. It
must always be borne in mind that there is a romantic way of
dealing with fact: that a novel of contemporary society which
implies its more exceptional possibilities and gives due regard
to the symbol behind every so-called fact, can be, in a good
sense, romantic. Surely, that is a more acceptable use of the
realistic formula which, by the exercise of an imaginative grasp
of history, makes alive and veritable for us some hitherto
unrealized person or by-gone epoch. Scott is thus a romanticist
because he gave the romantic implications of reality: and is a
novelist in that broader, better definition of the word which
admits it to be the novelist's business to portray social
humanity, pas