g
Scott's imagination in general, his faculty in narrative and dialogue,
wherever his scene may be, from whatever period the facts of his story
may be drawn.

Scott's superiority to his American rival comes out, says Balzac,
chiefly in his secondary personages and in his talent for comedy. The
American makes careful mechanical provision for laughter: Balzac takes
this all to pieces, and leaves Scott unchallenged and inexhaustible.

Scott's reputation has suffered a little through suspicion of his
politics, and, strangely enough, of his religion. He has been made
responsible for movements in Churches about which opinions naturally
differ, but of which it is certain Scott never dreamed. Those who
suspect and blame his work because it is reactionary, illiberal, and
offensive to modern ideas of progress, are, of course, mainly such
persons as believe in 'the march of intellect,' and think meanly of each
successive stage as soon as it is left behind. The spokesman of this
party is Mark Twain, who wrote a burlesque of the Holy Grail, and who in
his _Life on the Mississippi_ makes Scott responsible for the vanities
and superstitions of the Southern States of America:--

'The South has not yet recovered from the debilitating
influence of his books. Admiration of his fantastic heroes and
their grotesque "chivalry" doings and romantic juvenilities
still survives here, in an atmosphere in which is already
perceptible the wholesome and practical nineteenth century
smell of cotton-factories and locomotives.'

It is useless to moralise on this, and the purport and significance of
it may be left for private meditation to enucleate and enjoy. But it
cannot be fully appreciated, unless one remembers that the author of
this and other charges against chivalry is also the historian of the
feud between the Shepherdsons and the Grangerfords, equal in tragedy to
the themes of the _chansons de geste_: of _Raoul de Cambrai_ or _Garin
le Loherain_. Mark Twain in the person of Huckleberry Finn is committed
to the ideas of chivalry neither more nor less than Walter Scott in
_Ivanhoe_ or _The Talisman_. I am told further--though this is perhaps
unimportant--that Gothic ornament in America is not peculiarly the taste
of the South, that even at Chicago there are imitations of Gothic towers
and halls.

Hazlitt, an unbeliever in most of Scott's political principles, is also
the most fervent and expressive admirer of