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 CONTENTS 
 
 BoMANCE. By W. P. Ker. (No. 10.) 
 
 STILL REMAINS TO BE DONE FOR THE SCOTTISH DiALECTS. 
 
 W. Grant. (No. 11.) 
 
 jRSONAL Aspect of Shakespeare's Art. By Sidney Lee, 
 D.LitV (No. 13.) 
 Dialogue. ]&v Anthony Hope Hawkins. 
 
 - A Shakespeare Re^ference Library. By Sidney Lee, D.Litt. (No. 15 ) 
 
 The Bearing op English Studies upon the National Life. By 
 
 C. H. Herford, D.Litfc. (No. 16.) 
 ' Science and Literature. By Viscount Morley of Blackburn, O.M. 
 > John Bunyan. By C. H. Firth, LL.D. (No. 19.) 
 
 >SoME Characteristics of Scots Literature. By J. C. Smith. 
 (No. 22.) 
 
 A Discourse on Modern Sibyls. By Lady Ritchie. (No. 24.) 
 
 The Eighteenth Century. By W. P. Ker, LL.D. (No. 35.) 
 
 The Perspective of Biography. By Sir Sidney Lee, D.Litt. 
 (No. 41.) 
 
 Some Remarks on Translation and Translators. By Professor 
 J. S. Phillimore. (No. 42.) 
 
 The Greek Strain in English Literature. By John Burnet, 
 / F.B.A. (No. 45.) \ 
 
 iviSOlGO^ 
 
 /^•» 
 
Li 
 
 ROMANCE' 
 
 The eighteenth century is generally supposed to have been anti- 
 romantic in literature, through the revolution in taste which is 
 described by Hurd in his Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762) : 
 
 'Henceforth, the taste of wit and poetry took a new tiurn, and 
 the Muse who had wandered so long in the world of fiction was 
 now constrained against her will — 
 
 To stoop with disenchanted wings to truth, 
 
 as Sir John Denham somewhere expresses her present enforced state, 
 not unhappily. What we have gotten by this revolution, you will 
 say, is a great deal of good sense. What we have lost is a world of 
 fine fabling.' 
 
 It could not be put better than this, the difference between the 
 two ages — Spenser and Pope. It is an historical judgement that 
 really describes a real difference, and the judgement is all the more 
 significant because it is uttered by a man who is living in the 
 middle of what he describes, who belongs as an eighteenth-century 
 literary man to a world of good sense — a world which is thus 
 conscious of itself, and able to describe itself. What Hurd says in 
 the lifetime of Dr. Johnson could not be improved by any one 
 writing in a later age with all the opportunities for comparison and 
 revision of judgement that are afforded by later revolutions in taste. 
 Hurd is one of the chief advocates of the Faerie Queene in the 
 eighteenth century ; one of those who were not quite satisfied with 
 good sense. His Letters on Chivalry and Romance are a protest 
 against the restriction of poetry, a claim for freedom, a justification 
 of the things which were popularly condemned as Gothic and 
 fanciful. His protest throughout is delightfully written, and full of 
 good sayings and good temper. It is not extravagant or effusive ; it 
 is all the more telling as a proof of the literary reaction against 
 
 * A lecture delivered to the members of the English Association at the Annual 
 General Meeting, January 15, 1909. 
 
2 ROMANCE 
 
 common sense. Here is a very reasonable man, no anarchist or 
 revolutionary, writing in elegant language to defend the miraculous 
 things in Ariosto, Tasso and Spenser. 'The Fairy tales of Tasso 
 do him more honour than what are called the more natural, that 
 is the classical, parts of his poem. We make a shift to run over the 
 passages he has copied fi-om \^irgil. We are all on fire amidst the 
 magical feats of Ismen, and the enchantments of Armida.' 
 
 Hurd, of course, could not have written as he did if he had been 
 alone in his taste. He was writing on behalf of many unknown 
 readers, who agreed with him. There was a strong romantic tradition 
 in the eighteenth century, though it is not the main influence and 
 does not give its character to the literature of the time. 'The 
 fictions of the Gothic romances are not so remote from credibility 
 as is commonly supposed,"* said Dr. Johnson ; he amused himself in 
 Skye by thinking of his long days in the saddle or at sea, as the 
 journey of a knight errant who finds entertainment, at the end of 
 his day, in some gracious gentle house at Raasay or Dunvegan. 
 
 Dr. Johnson was fond of old romances, and so no doubt were 
 other people in his time, and many other people who did not share 
 this taste had at one time shared it, had wandered like Milton in 
 the fables of chivalry, had at any rate in the nursery, like Steele's 
 young friend, passed from the fiction of Aesop's Fables to the history 
 of Belianis of Greece and the Seven Champions of Christendom.^ 
 Wordsworth, like Dr. Johnson, had much more reading than he 
 ever turned to use in his own works, and AVordsworth gives evidence 
 about the vogue of old romances in his own early days. He has 
 nothing but gratitude for them, and he cannot bear to see them 
 
 ' ' — a great Master of all the Learninp: on t'other Side Eight Years old. I per- 
 ceived him a very great Historian in j^sop's Fables : But he frankly declared to me 
 his mind, that he did not delight in that learning, because he did not believe they were 
 true ; for which reason I found that he had very much turned his studies for about 
 a twelvemonth past into the Lives and Adventures of Don Bellianis of Greece, Guy 
 of Warwick, the Seven Champions, and other historians of that age. . . . He 
 would tell you the mismanagenjentsof John Hickathrift, find fault with the passion- 
 ate temper in Bevis of Southampton, and loved St. George for being the champion 
 of England ; and by this means had his tliouglits insensibly moulded into the notions 
 of discretion, virtue, and honour. I was extolling his accomplishments when the 
 mother told me that the little girl who led me in this morning was in her way 
 a better scholar than he : " Betty " (says she) " deals chieHy in Fairies and Sprights, 
 andrsomctinies in a winter night will terrify the maids with her accounts till they 
 arcjafraid to go up to bed."' Tatler No. 95. (Steele.) 
 
ROMANCE 3 
 
 displaced bv the crude new educational substitutes which are provided 
 by modern progress and the march of intellect : — 
 
 Oh ! give us once again the wishing cap 
 Of Fortunatus, and the invisible coat 
 Of Jack the Giant-Killer, Robin Hood, 
 And Sabra in the forest with St. George ! 
 
 Now if one puts together Kurd's remark — ' We have lost a world 
 of fine fabling ' — with Wordsworth's complaint against the modern 
 educator, a rather unexpected result may appear. Hurd means 
 that the change of taste (we may call it ' eighteenth century ', 
 though of course it began before that) expelled romance from 
 poetry, and did harm to poetry by confining it in range and 
 method. Wordsworth, writing early in the nineteenth century, 
 finds that whatever may be the fortune of poetry the common 
 prose children of England are being defrauded of their inheritance ; 
 their allowance of fairy tales is stopped. The result, when these 
 two statements are put together, is this : that the eighteenth century, 
 which generally did without romance in its literature, kept up the 
 supply of romance for its children, and at least allowed the read- 
 ing of romance to its gro^\'n men ; while the nineteenth century, 
 coming in with a great romantic revolution in literature, cuts off 
 the tradition of romance among simpler unliterary people, takes 
 away the Seven Champion-f from the schoolboy and the ballads 
 from the country-side — at the same time that motives of romance 
 are being sought for everywhere by literary artists for their o^vn 
 purposes. 
 
 Few revolutions or general changes of habit have been more 
 important than that which cut off the old romantic popular traditions 
 of folk-lore and ballads in the nineteenth century, and put modern 
 educational textbooks in their place. This means a change in the 
 minds of modern civilized human beings, making them unlike all 
 their ancestors. They learn nothing now in the way that all 
 generations, including those of the enlightened eighteenth century, 
 learned their ballads and fairy stories. These things may come to 
 them by way of books ; they do not come as part of their real 
 life, from the mouth of their nurss or grandmother ; and so the 
 child is taken away from his native earth and his home, and is 
 turned into an abstract educational product, owing the contents of 
 
4 ROMANCE 
 
 his mind to schoolmasters. In the nineteenth century almost 
 everywhere the old immemorial traditions of popular romance have 
 withered up. The shepherds of Ettrick and Liddesdale know 
 nothing of the old ballads, or know them only as any foreigner 
 might know the Border Minstrelsy, out of books. The Fairy Tales 
 that once were English are known now mostly through Grimm, 
 where they are known at all. Every child knows the Travelling 
 Companion,, which was Peele's Old Wives'" Tale, but they know it 
 from Hans Andersen, not from their grandmothers. 
 
 The appetite for romance has always been strong, even in the 
 most reasonable and scientific ages. The eighteenth century was 
 fairly well supplied ; it had, as Dr. Johnson proves, the old books 
 of chivalry, it had the Arabian Nights, it had the Orlando and the 
 Faerie Queene. The favourite reading of Edward Waverley in his 
 boyhood was that of Charles James Fox through all his life. But 
 the craving was unsatisfied ; there were not enough new stories. 
 We know more or less how the fashion changed again ; how literary 
 good sense went down in value, how Macpherson's Ossian triumphed 
 and took captive some of the strongest minds ih Europe. 
 
 Peacock has described the new fashions in the essay which 
 provoked Shelley to his Defence of Poetry : — j 
 
 * Mr. Scott digs up the poachers and cattle-stealers of the ancient 
 border. Lord Byron cruises for thieves and pirates on the shores 
 of the Morea and among the Greek islands. Mr. Southey wades 
 through ponderous volumes of travels and old chronicles, from 
 which he carefully selects all that is false, useless, and absurd, as 
 being essentially poetical ; and when he has a commonplace book 
 full of monstrosities, strings them into an epic. Mr. Wordsworth 
 picks up village legends from old women and sextons ; and 
 Mr. Coleridge to the valuable information derived from similar 
 sources superadds the dreams of crazy theologians and the mysticisms 
 of German metaphysics, and favours the world with visions in verse 
 in which the quadruple elements of sexton, old woman, Jeremy 
 Taylor, and Emanuel Kant, are harmonized into a delicious poetical 
 compound.' 
 
 In this revolution one is often amazed at the feebleness of the 
 victors, the disproportion between the trifling interest of the Castle 
 of Otranto and its immense success — or between the present value of 
 Macphcrson and the praise of Ossian in Goethe's Werther. Among 
 
ROMANCE 6 
 
 the strange things in history is the relation of Monk Lewis and 
 Scott. The tales of Terror and Wonder are mostly trash : — 
 
 Not long lived the Baron and none since that time 
 
 To inhabit the castle presume, 
 For chroniclers tell that by order sublime 
 There Imogene suffers the pain of her crime 
 
 And mourns her deplorable doom. 
 
 At midnight four times in the year does her sprite, 
 
 When mortals in slumber are bound, 
 Arrayed in her bridal apparel of white 
 Appear in the hall with the skeleton-knight, 
 
 And shriek as he whirls her around. 
 
 While they drink out of skulls newly torn from the grave. 
 
 Dancing round them pale spectres are seen ; 
 Their liquor is blood, and this horrible stave 
 They howl : ' To the health of Alonzo the brave 
 And his consort the False Imogene ! ' 
 
 This verse Coleridge says ' has an effect not unlike that of galloping 
 over a paved road in a German stage-waggon without springs '. But 
 he thinks Alonzo and Imogene worth mentioning. 
 
 The appetite was so strong that almost anything with a touch of 
 romance was welcome. ' Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious 
 Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan 
 of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries. Those will last us some time.' 
 The evidence of Miss Austen is not to be refused. 
 
 Those who provided the ' horrid mysteries "* were often clear enough 
 in their own mind as to their value. Lewis parodies his own romance, 
 and adds to his Tales of Wonder a satirical ballad which, to use 
 * a selection from the language spoken among men \ gives the whole 
 thing away. Smedley's Ghost speaks (out of the Dunciad) : 
 
 Ah ! knew'st thou in the happier days 
 
 How smooth the way to fame. 
 That now e'en D— r — n wears the bays, 
 
 E'en Kn — t acquires a name : 
 
 Thyself would leave the hackneyed themes 
 
 That Pope, that Dryden tired ; 
 Thyself indulge in German dreams 
 
 By great Goethe inspired. 
 
6 ROMANCE 
 
 ' Loves not Invention ever young 
 The Wcser's golden strand ? 
 Has not the harp wild genius strung 
 In Schiller's magic hand ? 
 
 O come with foreign fable fraught 
 
 And weave the Runic rhyme, 
 Drink as I drank the siren draught 
 
 In Thames"' congenial slime. 
 
 Though first the nymph thou hast not led 
 
 From Danube's parent shore, 
 Still may'st thou to the tuneful dead 
 
 Add one dull Briton more. 
 
 The truth seems to be that all romantic revivals are followed by 
 crowds of impostors ; sham romance appears to be easy ; it has often 
 been profitable. It is found in many different periods, and the 
 explorer who goes back into the Middle Ages to get the genuine 
 thing will too often find only the ancestors of Monk Lewis — mechanical 
 contrivers, professional dealers of more or less ingenuity and various 
 degrees of dullness. Oberon in Huon of Bordeaux is a son of Julius 
 Caesar and Fata Morgana, and that is a type of the incongruous 
 things to be found in the old romantic schools. A great philologist 
 has told me how, in his youth, he was drawn to read William and tlie 
 Werwolf \ the title was promising. But the result was so disappoint- 
 ing that he gave up romance and took to the study of Middle English. 
 Tliere are similar cases of disappointment to be confessed by those 
 whom Carlyle once led to his German romantic authors. 
 
 Where is true romance ? A\Tiere is it, the blaiie Blume ? Where is 
 
 the island of Bimini ? It is not to be found where the professional 
 
 agents of the romantic schools have ' opened up the country '. The 
 
 fashionable romance of the twelfth century has little more of the true 
 
 magic than Macpherson or the German work that followed him ; the 
 
 ' horrid mysteries ' of the Elizabethan drama often fail as grievously 
 
 as the emphasis of Manfred or Hernani, in comparison with what one 
 
 knows for the true test of romance, the spell of the Ancient Manner 
 
 or some of the old ballads. The Widow .s- Satis, The Milldams of Binnoiie 
 
 — or let us say, to the due honour of the despised rationalist eighteenth 
 
 century, the magic of the Castle oflndoknce : 
 
 Full in the passage of the vale above 
 
 A sable silent solemn forest stood. 
 
 Where nought but shadowy forms were seen to move. 
 
 As Idless fancied in her dreaming mood ; 
 
ROMANCE 7 
 
 And up the hills on either side a wood 
 
 Of blackening pines aye waving to and fro 
 
 Sent forth a sleepy horror through the blood, 
 
 And where the valley winded out below, 
 
 The murmuring main was heard and scarcely heard to flow. 
 
 Many a reader of romance has fared badly and returned in depres- 
 sion like the gentleman who went in the twelfth century to look for 
 the marvels of the forest of Broceliande. 
 
 A fool I went, a fool I came, 
 Folly I sought, and mine the blame. 
 
 Is the magic world anywhere to be found ? One good rule in this as 
 in other holiday explorations is to do without the organizers of traffic 
 as far as possible. Romance is often near its best with authors who 
 are not thinking about it, or who think other things more important ; 
 with Homer, and with Dante, who like Dr. Johnson was a reader of 
 books of chivalry, but did not imitate them directly. The romance 
 that springs up along with the graver intentions of Dante and Milton 
 is often more worth than the deliberate romance of Ovid or Ariosto. 
 
 Then, quite at the other side and far away from the great poets, 
 are the anonymous authors of ballads and tellers of folk-lore stories, 
 and along with these I would put some authors who have the gift of 
 bringing back the charm of a winters tale to stories that have been 
 sophisticated or overdressed by professional literary men. I think 
 particularly of the old Italian writer from whom Tennyson took the 
 Lady of Shalott ; I think of the beautiful Welsh prose stories of 
 Peredur Sindi the Lady of the Fountain and Geraint and Enid — stories 
 recovered from the French and restored from the verse of the 
 fashionable French poet — admirable in its own way — to a simpler 
 and more effective form. 
 
 It would be a great mistake to think of popular folk-lore fairy 
 tales as containing no more than the matter of romance — plots and 
 adventures that may serve an ambitious poet and be turned into a 
 noble form of poetry in the Odyssey. This no doubt is one of the 
 uses of fairy tales ; to be the matter for successive poets, from Homer 
 onwards. But they are not mere material ; and one language differs 
 from another in the fashion of its fairy tales. We know how easy it 
 is for tradition to go wrong, to mix and deface and mangle stories. 
 Yet often we find stories surviving unimpaired, with the unities 
 
8 ROMANCE 
 
 preserved, taking different shapes, all good and sound, in different 
 countries — like that of the Travelling Companion, which is better and 
 fresher in a West Irish traditional version, written down in the 
 nineteenth century, than in many of the older mediaeval literary 
 renderings. It is enough to compare Dr. Hyde's Irish stories or 
 Campbell's Talr.s- of the West Higldwuh with Grimm or with Dasent's 
 Tales from the Norse, to see how much variety of style and what 
 admirable form there may be in traditional stories. 
 
 I take one example which is the more remarkable because it 
 gives an incident that comes at the beginning of Percival and may be 
 compared with Peredur and the other versions of that story by those 
 who are interested specially in such things. 
 
 Tliis that I am going to quote is not from a variant of Percival, 
 though it has some resemblances in detail ; it is the opening of the 
 story of TTie Knight of the Red Shield in Campbell of Islay's second 
 volume : — 
 
 'There was before now a king of Eirinn and he went himself and 
 his people and his warriors and his nobles and his great gentles to the 
 hill of hunting and game. They sat on a hillock coloured green colour, 
 where the sun would rise early and where she would set late. Said the one 
 of swifter mouth than the rest : " Who now in the four brown quarters 
 of the universe would have the heart to put an affront and disgrace 
 on the King of Eirinn, and he in the midst of the people and the 
 warriors, great gentles and nobles of his realm .'' " 
 
 ' *' Are ye not silly," said the king ; " he might come, one who should 
 put an affront and disgrace on me, and that ye could not pluck the 
 worst hair in his beard out of it." 
 
 ' It was thus it was. They saw the shadow of a shower coming from 
 the western airt and going to the eastern airt, and the rider of a black 
 filly coming cheerily after it.' (Here follows one of the ornamental 
 rliL'torical amplifications which are common in the Gaelic ; unnecessary 
 for the story.) 
 
 'Then he spoke to them in the understanding quieting truly wise 
 words of real knowledge ; and before there was anv more talk between 
 them he put over the fist, and he struck the king between the mouth 
 and the nose, and he drove out three of his teeth, and he caught them 
 in his fist, and he put them in his pouch, and he went away. 
 
 ' " Did not I say to you," said the king, " that one might come who 
 should put an affront and disgrace on me, and that you could not 
 pluck the worst hair in his beard out of it.'*"' 
 
 Let me quote another passage of romance from another Gaelic 
 
 story, the voyage of Mael Duin. Its translator, Mr. Whitley Stokes 
 
 (many thanks to him for that and many other good gifts to the 
 
ROMANCE 9 
 
 lovers of stories), has noted this as having the ' natural magic ' of 
 which Mr. Arnold spoke in his Lectures on Celtic Literature : — 
 
 * Thereafter they voyaged till they found a great silvern column. 
 It had four sides, and the width of each of these sides was two oar- 
 strokes of the boat, so that in its whole circumference there were 
 eight oarstrokes of the boat. And not a single sod of earth was 
 about it, but only the boundless ocean. And they saw not how its 
 base was below nor how its summit was above. Out of its summit 
 came a silvern net far away from it ; and the boat went under sail 
 through a mesh of that net. 
 
 ' And then they heard a voice from the summit of yonder pillar, 
 mighty, and clear, and distinct. But they knew not the tongue it 
 spake, nor the words it uttered.' 
 
 Sometimes one is inclined to think that Romance, like Happiness, 
 is ' there where thou art not ' ; if it were real, would it be romance ? 
 Is it not all vague, impalpable — less true to its own nature in the 
 Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which is a complete and reasonable 
 thing, than in the music of Kubla Khan ? It is strange how often it 
 seems to spring up in the most unlikely ground, in burlesque even, 
 like the Castle of Indolence, or in satire, like the Vision of Judgement. 
 But perhaps one ought not to be led away like this by the magic of 
 the artists who play with shadowy recollections, who show the land- 
 scape of romance, as in the Castle of Indolence, but never tell the 
 story, who evoke the form of it, as in Kubla Khan, and leave the 
 matter, a caput mortuum, to be thrown away. Sometimes one is 
 inclined to take Romance as a name for the most subtle spirit of 
 imagination, for the quintessence of poetry ; and this may be right. 
 But it is too difficult, for the present purpose at any rate, and there 
 are other meanings of the word and other considerations which may 
 be dealt with more familiarly ; I come back to plainer ground. 
 
 Though it is true that the story-tellers are often disappointing, 
 yet the poor stories, even th(;se ridiculed in Sir Thopas and Don 
 Quiocote, have their value and an important place in history. Many 
 of them seem only fit for puppet-shows, like that of Don Gayferos ; 
 but the puppet-shows and chap-books, the beggar minstrels and 
 reciters, have had a great deal to do with the making of people's 
 minds. The uses of romance — in its ruder form we need not scruple 
 to consider what is the use of it — may be seen most beautifully in 
 the passage of Barbour's Bruce where the good King Robert takes 
 the romance of Ferumhras to amuse his people on the shore of Loch 
 
10 ROMANCE 
 
 Lomond, whilo the slow ferryboat works to and fro bringing the rest 
 of the party across : 
 
 The king the quhilis meryly 
 
 Red to thaini that war him by 
 
 Ronianys of worthi Feranibrace 
 
 That worthily our-cunimvn was 
 
 Throw the rycht douchty Olywer. 
 
 The gud king upon this nianer 
 Comfortyt thaim that war him ner ; 
 And maid thaim gamyn and solace 
 Till that his folk all passyt was. 
 I bought a copy of the same story as a chap-book in Madrid, and 
 think there must be something in it to have lasted so long. In 
 Italy you may still find / Reali di Francia on bookstalls, alongside 
 of the realists of France, and you may remember the old story of the 
 man found weeping in an Italian market-place because he had just 
 heard from a reciter the news of the death of Roland. It was from 
 tastes and interests of that sort that the Orlando grew to its poetical 
 form with Boiardo and Ariosto ; and so the old Italian audiences and 
 the story-tellers of the market-place have their share in Spenser's Faerie 
 Quecne, together with the family of Sir Thopas, as Warton has 
 shown. In Jusserand's English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare 
 we may trace the fortunes of many of the old books of chivalry; 
 Mr. Firth, in his introduction to the Pilgrim's Progress, has made 
 out the debt of Bunyan to Sir Bevis of Southampton — one of the 
 pleasantest of demonstrations, in a kind of science which is often 
 horribly abused by dull people, but not on that account to be rejected. 
 The Pilgrirn's Progress is one of the results of mediaeval romance ; ^ 
 it lias the sort of plan which saves even some of the dull romances 
 from total failure, and is found in some of the best. It is the simplest 
 thing in the world ; scarcely to be called a plot — merely a journey 
 with adventures. Yet what more is wanted to give the romancer 
 his opportunity ? It is one of the things that never grow old, from 
 Theseus and Jason to Sir Percival, and so on to the Pilgrims Progress 
 and so to modern examples, which any one may think of for him- 
 self. Rob Roy has it. The second part of Roh Roif^ the Highland 
 
 ' * Tlie .S(ri|)tures, thoiifjlit I, what are they ? A dead letter, a little ink and paper, 
 of three or four shilliiif^s worth. Give me a ballad, a newsbook, George on horse- 
 back or Bcvis of Southampton, give me some book that teaches curious arts, that 
 tells of old fables ; but for the holy Scriptures I cared not.' 
 
ROMANCE 11 
 
 adventures and Bailie Nicol Jarvie, have generally rather eclipsed the 
 first part, but not so as to spoil the impression of Francis 
 Osbaldistone's journey northward, with the accompaniment of ' Mr. 
 Campbell ' — surely one of the best things in the whole of Scott for 
 suspense and gradual deepening of interest. 
 
 Here I come to perilous ground, and I ask for sympathy. I have 
 known about it all along, and so far I have succeeded in evading that 
 particular risk. But now I come, to use the old ambiguous phrase, 
 * into the danger ' of Stevenson's Essay on Romance. The danger is 
 twofold ; first, when one thinks of what Stevenson has written, it is 
 more difficult than ever to have ideas of one's own ; but again he speaks 
 rather slightingly of the art of Scott, and ends not quite generously 
 with a note of depreciation — a mistake, surely, in his own art. Of 
 com"se Stevenson is very far from the enemies of Scott — from those 
 who see no more in him than Peacock saw, or Mark Twain, with his 
 philosophical proof that all the vanity of Southern chivalry — that is, 
 of the Southern States in America — is attributable to Ivanhoe. And 
 it can hardly be said that Stevenson's criticism of the one particular 
 passage in Guy Mannering is unreasonable or unjustified, as far as it 
 goes. But it gives a wrong impression, and the conclusion — Scott 
 ' an idle child ' — is a failure of critical judgement. There is every 
 kind of interest and every variety of art in Scott. There is the 
 machinery of the ordinary historical novel so easily imitated by 
 G. P. R. James and many others in all the tongues of Europe, so hope- 
 lessly antiquated now. One remembers the story of Niebuhr ; how 
 when he was on his deathbed he had Fenimore Cooper recommended to 
 him for diversion, and tried him, and then asked for Josephus instead. 
 And there is the adventure which is of quite a different sort from the 
 antiquarian furniture and the conventional dialogue — adventures like 
 those of which I have spoken in Roh Roy — like that of Sir Dugald 
 Dalgetty in his escape from Inverary, or Everard in Woodstock; when 
 he is caught in the dark and held down with the sword-point pricking 
 at his throat. I have cause to remember that, because it is the first 
 thing of Scott's that I remember ; the book was being read aloud, and 
 it seemed to me that it would be worth looking into. There is the 
 admirable plot of the Talisman^ a story which does not bring into 
 play any of the comic genius of the author, and so attains a different 
 kind of success from the richer books like Old Mortality and the 
 
12 ROMANCE 
 
 Heart of Midlothian, Oiiy Mannering, and the Fair Maid of Perth^ 
 where there are interests woven into romance — interests of character 
 and conversation — which are not, properly speaking, romantic at all 
 — the humours of Dandie Dinmont and Cuddie Headrigg. 
 
 Quite unlike the diffuse historical manner of much of WaverleysLwd 
 Kenilworth and Qiientin Dtirward, there is the form, or rather many 
 forms, of short story: Wandering Willie's Tale in Redgauntlet — The 
 Highland Widow — The Two Drovers: these last bringing in a tragic 
 element of mistake and misundei*standing with more effect than any 
 of the longer novels. And in verse there is the same enormous 
 variety — between the plain straightforward narrative of the Lady of 
 the Lake and the lyrical mystery of County Guy and some other of 
 the shorter pieces. All which goes to prove what needs no particular 
 proof, that Romance means almost everything — from the two horsemen 
 riding together at the beginning of the historical novel, or from the 
 pasteboard Moors of the puppet-show, to the spell of the enchanted 
 ground, the music of dreams and shadows. 
 
 ADDITIONAL NOTE 
 
 The following passage from the Citizen of the World gives a 
 glimpse of a romantic school not now very clearly remembered : — 
 
 ' I was going to expose his mistakes when it was insisted that I had nothing of 
 the true Eastern manner in my delivery. " This gentleman's conversation," said one 
 of the ladies who was a great reader, " is like our own — mere chit-chat and common 
 sense ; there is nothing like sense in the true Eastern style, where nothing more is 
 required but sublimity. Oh ! for a history of Aboulfaouris the grand voyager, of 
 genii, magicians, rocks, bags of bullets, giants and enchanters, where all is great, 
 obscure, magnificent, and unintelligible." " I have written many a sheet of Eastern 
 tale myself," interrupts the author, '* and I defy the severest critic to say but that I 
 have stuck close to the true manner. I have compared a lady's chin to the snow 
 upon the mountains of Banek ; a soldier's sword to the clouds that obscure the face 
 of heaven. If riches are mentioned, I compare them to the flocks that graze the 
 verdant Tefflis ; If poverty, to the mists that veil the brow of Mount Baku. I have 
 used thee and thmi upon all occasions ; I have described fallen stars and splitting 
 mountains, not forgetting the little houris who make a pretty figure in every 
 description. But you shall hear how I generally begin : * Ebcn-benbolo who wfis the 
 son of Ban, was born on the foggy summits of Benderabassi. His beard was 
 whiter than the feathers which veil the breast of the penguin ; his eyes were like 
 the eyes of doves when washed by the dews of the morning ; his hair, which hung 
 like the willow weeping over the glossy stream, was so beautifid that it seemed to 
 reflect its own brightness, and his feet were as the feet of a wild deer which fleeth to 
 the tops of the mountains.' There, there is the true Eastern taste for you ; every 
 advance made towards sense is only a deviation from sound. Eastern tales should 
 always be sonorous, lofty, musical, and unmeaning.'" Goldsmith, Citizen of the 
 World, Letter XXXIII. 
 
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