By the bye, the italics in Black's quotations are mine. Good wording I think.
But how one does go back with delight to Scott! I confess I think to have written the Heart of Midlothian is to have put on record the existence of a moral atmosphere in one's own nation as grand as the ozone of mountains. What a contrast to that of French novels (with no disrespect to the brilliant art and refreshing brain quickness of the latter); but Ruskin's appeal to the responsibility of those who wield Arts instead of Trades recurs to one as one under which Scott might have laid his hand upon his breast, and looked upwards with a clear conscience....
March 16, 1880.
I quite agree with you about an artlessness and roughness in Scott's work. I thought what I had dwelt on was the magnificent tone of the H. of Midlothian. Also he has two of the first (first in rank and order if not first in degree) qualifications for a writer of fiction—Dramatism and individuality amongst his characters. He had (rather perhaps one should say), the quality which is nascitur non fit—Imagination. It is the great defect, I think, of some of our best modern writers. They are marvellously fit and terribly little nascitur. It is why I can never concede the highest palm in her craft to G. Eliot. Her writing is glorious—Imagination limited—Dramatism—nil!
She draws people she has seen (Mrs. Poyser) like a photograph—she imagines a Daniel Deronda, and he is about "as natural as waxworks."
"I've been reading Jean Ingelow's Fated to be Free lately, and it is a marvellous mixture of beauty and failure. But lovely passages. Incisive as G. Eliot, and from the point of view of a tenderer mind and experience. This is beautiful, isn't it?
"Nature before it has been touched by man is almost always beautiful, strong, and cheerful in man's eyes; but nature, when he has once given it his culture and then forsaken it, has usually an air of sorrow and helplessness. He has made it live the more by laying his hand upon it and touching it with his life. It has come to relish of his humanity, and it is so flavoured with his thoughts, and ordered and permeated by his spirit, that if the stimulus of his presence is withdrawn it cannot for a long while do without him, and live for itself as fully and as well as it did before."
The double edge of the sentiment is very exquisite, and the truth of the natural fact very perfect as observation, and the book is full of such writing. But oh, dear! the confusion of plot is so maddening you have a delirious feeling that everybody is getting engaged to his half-sister or widowed stepmother, and keep turning back to make sure! But the dramatism is very good and leads you on....