his insight into both sides of a public quarrel, and his
colourless heroes gave him the instrument he needed. Both in Morton's
case (in _Old Mortality_), and in Waverley's, the hesitation is
certainly well described. Indeed in relation to the controversy
between Covenanters and Royalists, while his political and martial
prepossessions went with Claverhouse, his reason and educated moral
feeling certainly were clearly identified with Morton.

It is, however, obviously true that Scott's heroes are mostly created
for the sake of the facility they give in delineating the other
characters, and not the other characters for the sake of the heroes.
They are the imaginative neutral ground, as it were, on which opposing
influences are brought to play; and what Scott best loved to paint was
those who, whether by nature, by inheritance, or by choice, had become
unique and characteristic types of one-sided feeling, not those who
were merely in process of growth, and had not ranged themselves at
all. Mr. Carlyle, who, as I have said before, places Scott's romances
far below their real level, maintains that these great types of his
are drawn from the outside, and not made actually to live. "His Bailie
Jarvies, Dinmonts, Dalgettys (for their name is legion), do look and
talk like what they give themselves out for; they are, if not
_created_ and made poetically alive, yet deceptively _enacted_ as a
good player might do them. What more is wanted, then? For the reader
lying on a sofa, nothing more; yet for another sort of reader much. It
were a long chapter to unfold the difference in drawing a character
between a Scott and a Shakespeare or Goethe. Yet it is a difference
literally immense; they are of a different species; the value of the
one is not to be counted in the coin of the other. We might say in a
short word, which covers a long matter, that your Shakespeare fashions
his characters from the heart outwards; your Scott fashions them from
the skin inwards, never getting near the heart of them. The one set
become living men and women; the other amount to little more than
mechanical cases, deceptively painted automatons."[35] And then he
goes on to contrast Fenella in _Peveril of the Peak_ with Goethe's
Mignon. Mr. Carlyle could hardly have chosen a less fair comparison.
If Goethe is to be judged by his women, let Scott be judged by his
men. So judged, I think Scott will, as a painter of character--of
course, I am not now speaking of