But great as was the interest that Scott took in the historical aspect of his work, his artistic sense guided his use of materials, and he was well aware of the danger of over-working the mine. The principles on which he chose periods and events to represent are illustrated in many of the introductions. Of The Fortunes of Nigel he said: "The reign of James I., in which George Heriot flourished, gave unbounded scope to invention in the fable, while at the same time it afforded greater variety and discrimination of character than could, with historical consistency, have been introduced if the scene had been laid a century earlier."[431]
His first published attempt at fiction-writing was a conclusion to the novel, Queenhoo-Hall,[432] of which his opinion was that it would never be popular because antiquarian knowledge was displayed in it too liberally. "The author," he says, "forgot ... that extensive neutral ground, the large proportion, that is, of manners and sentiments which are common to us and to our ancestors, having been handed down unaltered from them to us, or which, arising out of the principles of our common nature, must have existed in either state of society."[433] Scott's practice in regard to the language of his historical novels was based on much the same theory. He intended to admit "no word or turn of phraseology betraying an origin directly modern,"[434] but to avoid obsolete words for the most part; and he never attempted to follow with fidelity the style of the exact age of which he was writing. The translation of Froissart by Lord Berners seemed to him a sufficiently good model to serve for the whole mediaeval period.[435] In his review of Tales of My Landlord he says of the proem to his book: "It is written in the quaint style of that prefixed by Gay to his Pastorals, being, as Johnson terms it, 'such imitation as he could obtain of obsolete language, and by consequence, in a style that was never written or spoken in any age or place.'"
His Journal contains observations on several historical novels which were of little consequence, as, for example, on one by a Mr. Bell,—"He goes not the way to write it; he is too general, and not sufficiently minute";[436] and on The Spae-Wife, by Galt,—"He has made his story difficult to understand, by adopting a region of history little known."[437] On the other hand he remarked, when someone had suggested a number of historical subjects to him,—"People will not consider that a thing may already be so well told in history, that romance ought not in prudence to meddle with it";[438] and at another time he spoke of "the usual habit of antiquarians," to "neglect what is useful for things that are merely curious."[439]
Aside from the familiar knowledge of ancient manners which he thought enabled him to give his tales the necessary touch of novelty, and from the "hurried frankness," or spontaneity of style which endowed them with vitality, Scott believed that his talents included a special knack at description. He felt, however, that a sense of the picturesque in action was a different thing from a similar perception in regard to scenery, and that though the first was natural to him, he was obliged to use effort to develop the second.[440] Some study of drawing in his youth helped him to comprehend the demands of perspective, and he endeavored to carry out the principle of describing a scene in the way in which it would naturally strike the spectator, neither overloading with confused detail nor over-emphasizing what should be subordinate.[441] That his plan was consciously adopted may be seen from his discussion of Byron's skill in description and from his comments on the descriptive passages of the mediaeval romances.[442]
At the same time he understood the advantages of the realistic method. On one occasion he stated as his creed, "that in nature herself no two scenes were exactly alike, and that whoever copied truly what was before his eyes would possess the same variety in his descriptions, and exhibit apparently an imagination as boundless as the range of nature in the scenes he recorded; whereas, whoever trusted to imagination would soon find his own mind circumscribed and contracted to a few favourite images, and the repetition of these would sooner or later produce that very monotony and barrenness which had always haunted descriptive poetry in the hands of any but the patient worshippers of truth."[443] Wordsworth disapproved of Scott's method in description. He is quoted as having said: "Nature does not permit an inventory to be made of her charms! He should have left his pencil and note-book at home [and] fixed his eye as he walked with a reverent attention on all that surrounded him."[444] Somewhat like a rejoinder sounds another remark of Scott's, in phrases that Wordsworth would have detested. Scott said cheerfully, "As to the actual study of nature, if you mean the landscape gardening of poetry ... I can get on quite as well from recollection, while sitting in the Parliament house, as if wandering through wood and wold."[445] At another time he said, "If a man will paint from nature, he will be likely to amuse those who are daily looking at it."[446]
Though Scott prided himself somewhat on his descriptive powers he realized that he could not do his best work on minute canvases. We have already seen how he contrasted himself with Jane Austen. "The exquisite touch," he said, "which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is denied to me."[447]
Of Scott's opinion in regard to the ethical effect of novels, I have already spoken.[448] The fact that he refused to use the conventional plea of a desire to improve public morals, and that he understood how little a reader is really influenced by the exalted sentiments of heroes of fiction, gave Carlyle a fit of righteous indignation;[449] but it is futile to say that Scott "had no message to deliver to the world." He might have retorted, in the words which he once used about Homer,—"Doubtless an admirable moral may be often extracted from his poem; because it contains an accurate picture of human nature, which can never be truly presented without conveying a lesson of instruction. But it may shrewdly be suspected that the moral was as little intended by the author as it would have been the object of an historian, whose work is equally pregnant with morality, though a detail of facts be only intended."[450] It was a comfort to Scott at the end of his life to reflect that the tendency of all he had written was morally good,[451] and we can well believe that he was pleased by the enthusiastic tribute of his young critic, J.L. Adolphus, who said of his books: "There is not an unhandsome action or degrading sentiment recorded of any person who is recommended to the full esteem of the reader."[452]
That Scott considered poetical power very important for a writer of novels, he made evident in his Lives of the Novelists. Mr. Herford has said, but surely without good reason, that Scott wholly lacked the sense of mystery, and that in this respect Mrs. Radcliffe was more modern than he.[453] Yet it was Scott who censured Mrs. Radcliffe for explaining her mysteries. He had a vein of superstition in his nature, too, about which he might have said, using the words given to a character in one of his stories,—"It soothes my imagination, without influencing my reason or conduct."[454] A liking for the wonderful and terrible, which he felt from his earliest childhood, was one manifestation of a poetical temperament which is so apparent that there is no need of reciting the evidence. The poetical qualities in the Waverley novels gave Adolphus one of his favorite arguments in the attempt to prove that Scott was the author.
Yet Scott seemed to feel that his position as a writer of popular fiction, however much the novel is capable of being the vehicle of imagination and poetical power, was not a really high one. James Ballantyne persuaded him to omit from one of his introductions a passage that seemed to belittle the occupation of his life,[455] but in the introduction to The Abbot he wrote: "Though it were worse than affectation to deny that my vanity was satisfied at my success in the department in which chance had in some measure enlisted me, I was nevertheless far from thinking that the novelist or romance-writer stands high in the ranks of literature." The ideal which he set for himself is indicated in the following passage of his article on Tales of My Landlord: "If ... the features of an age gone by can be recalled in a spirit of delineation at once faithful and striking ... the composition is in every point of view dignified and improved; and the author, leaving the light and frivolous associates with whom a careless observer would be disposed to ally him, takes his seat on the bench of the historians of his time and country." He once expressed the opinion that the historical romance approaches, in some measure, when it is nobly executed, to the epic in poetry.[456] When a medal of Scott, engraved from the bust by Chantrey, was struck off, he suggested the motto which was used:
"Bardorum citharas patrio qui reddidit Istro,"