d at the same moment, while
providing opportunities for the production of literature proper not
inferior to those of any literary kind except poetry--that this was a
gift of higher scope, if of vaguer definition, than any of those
referred to. It was that gift which no one except Shakespeare has ever
possessed in larger measure, though others have possessed it in greater
partial intensity and perfection--the gift of communicating life to the
persons, the story, the dialogue. To some extent Scott had this treasure
in an earthen vessel. He could not, like Thackeray, like Fielding, like
Miss Austen even, make everybody that he touched alive: his heroes very
generally are examples to the contrary. And as a rule, when he did
perform this function of the wizard,--a name given to him by a more than
popular appropriateness,--he usually did it, not by the accumulation of
a vast number of small strokes, but by throwing on the canvas, or rather
panel, large outlines, free sweeps of line, and breadths of colour,
instinct with vivacity and movement. Yet he managed wholly to avoid that
fault of some creative imaginations which consists in personifying and
individualising their figures by some easily recognisable label of
mannerism. Even his most mannered characters, his humourists in the
seventeenth century sense, of whom Dugald Dalgetty is the prince
and chief--the true commander of the whole _stift_ of this
_Dunkelspiel_--stand poles asunder from those inventions of Dickens and
of some others who are ticketed for us by a gesture or a phrase repeated
_ad nauseam_. And this gift probably is most closely connected with
another: the extraordinary variety of Scott's scene, character, and--so
far as the term is applicable to his very effective but rather loose
fashion of story-telling--plot. It is a common and a just complaint of
novelists, especially when they are fertile rather than barren, that
with them scene, plot, and character all run into a kind of mould, that
their stories with a little trouble can be thrown into a sort of common
form, that their persons simply "change from the blue bed to the brown,"
and that the blue and brown beds themselves are seen, under their
diverse colours, to have a singular and not very welcome uniformity of
pattern and furniture. Even Scott does not escape this almost invariable
law of the brain-artist: it is one of the sole Shakespearian
characteristics that Shakespeare does escape it entirely and alt