what
they regard as Scott's failure to take the moral obligations of
fiction seriously: they confuse his preaching and his practice.
Whatever he declared in his letters or Journal, the novels
themselves, read in the light of current methods, certainly
leave an old-fashioned taste on the palate, because of their
moralizings and avowments of didactic purpose. The advantages
and disadvantages of this general attitude can be easily
understood: the loss in philosophic grasp is made up in
healthiness of tone and pleasantness of appeal. One recognizes
such an author as, above all, human and hearty. The reserves and
delicacies of Anglo-Saxon fiction are here, of course, in full
force: and a doctored view of the Middle Ages is the result, as
it is in Tennyson's "Idylls of the King." A sufficient answer is
that it is not Scott's business to set us right as to
medievalism, but rather to use it for the imaginative purposes
of pleasure. The frank intrusion of the author himself into the
body of the page o in the way of footnotes is also disturbing,
judged by our later standards: but was carried on with much
charm by Thackeray in the mid-century, to reappear at its end in
the pages of Du Maurier.

In the more technical qualifications of the story-maker's art,
Scott compensated in the more masculine virtues for what he
lacked in the feminine. Possessing less of finesse, subtlety and
painstaking than some who were to come, he excelled in sweep,
movement and variety, as well as in a kind of largeness of
effect: "the big bow-wow business," to use his own humorously
descriptive phrase when he was comparing himself with Jane
Austen, to his own disadvantage. And it is these very qualities
that endear him to the general and keep his memories green;
making "Ivanhoe" and "Kenilworth" still useful for school
texts--unhappy fate! Still, this means that he always had a story to
tell and told it with the flow and fervor and the instinctive
coherence of the story-teller born, not made.

When the fortunes of his fictive folk were settled, this
novelist, always more interested in characters than in the plot
which must conduct them, often loses interest and his books end
more or less lamely, or with obvious conventionality. Anything
to close it up, you feel. But of action and incident, scenes
that live and situations with stage value, one of Scott's
typical fictions has enough to furnish the stock in trade for
life of many later-day romanticist