culture--a sorrow which is now throbbing in the hearts of all peoples.
For national memories lie deeper in the human breast than is generally
thought." But whatever rank may be ultimately assigned to the historical
novel as an art form, Continental critics are at one with the British in
crediting its invention to Scott. "It is an error," says Heine, "not to
recognise Walter Scott as the founder of the so-called historical
romance, and to endeavour to trace it to German imitation." He adds that
Scott was a Protestant, a lawyer and a Scotchman, accustomed to action
and debate, in whose works the aristocratic and democratic elements are
in wholesome balance; "whereas our German romanticists eliminated the
democratic element entirely from their novels, and returned to the ruts
of those crazy romances of knight-errantry that flourished before
Cervantes." [41] "Quel est Fouvrage litteraire," asks Stendhal in
1823,[42] "qui a le plus reussi en France depuis dix ans? Les romans de
Walter Scott. . . . On s'est moque a Paris pendant vingt ans du roman
historique; l'Academie a prouve doctement le ridicule de ce genre; nous y
croyions tous, lorsque Walter Scott a paru, son Waverley a la main; et
Balantyne, son libraire vient de mourir millionaire." [43]

Lastly the service of the Waverley Novels to history was an important
one. Palgrave says that historical fiction is the mortal enemy of
history, and Leslie Stephen adds that it is also the enemy of fiction.
In a sense both sayings are true. Scott was not always accurate as to
facts and sinned freely against chronology. But he rescued a wide realm
from cold oblivion and gave it back to human consciousness and sympathy.
It is treating the past more kindly to misrepresent it in some
particulars, than to leave it a blank to the imagination. The
eighteenth-century historians were incurious of life. Their spirit was
general and abstract; they were in search of philosophical formulas.
Gibbon covers his subject with a lava-flood of stately rhetoric which
stiffens into a uniform stony coating over the soft surface of life.
Scott is primarily responsible for that dramatic, picturesque treatment
of history which we find in Michelet and Carlyle. "These historical
novels," testifies Carlyle, "have taught all men this truth, which looks
like a truism, and yet was as good as unknown to writers of history and
others, till so taught; that the bygone ages of the world were actually
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