t or present, by means of a unified, progressive
prose narrative. Scott, although he takes advantage of the
romancer's privilege of a free use of the historic past, the
presentation of its heroic episodes and spectacular events, is a
novelist, after all, because he deals with the recognizably
human, not with the grotesque, supernatural, impossible. He
imparts a vivid sense of the social interrelations, for the most
part in a medieval environment, but in any case in an
environment which one recognizes as controlled by human laws;
not the brain-freak of a pseudo-idealist. Scott's Novels, judged
broadly, make an impression of unity, movement and climax. To
put it tersely: he painted manners, interpreted character in an
historic setting and furnished story for story's sake. Nor was
his genius helpless without the historic prop. Certain of his
major successes are hardly historical narratives at all; the
scene of "Guy Mannering," for example, and of "The Antiquary,"
is laid in a time but little before that which was known
personally to the romancer in his young manhood.

It will be seen in this theory of realism and romance that so
far from antagonists are the story of truth and the story of
poetry, they merely stand for diverging preferences in handling
material. Nobody has stated this distinction better than
America's greatest romancer, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Having "The
House of the Seven Gables" in mind, he says:

When a writer calls his work a romance, it need hardly be
observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude both as
to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt
himself entitled to assume, had he professed to be writing
a novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to aim
at a very minute fidelity, not only to the possible, but to
the probable and ordinary course of man's experience. The
former, while as a work of art it must rigidly subject
itself to laws and while it sins unpardonably so far as it
may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart, has
fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances to
a great extent of the author's own choosing or creation. If
he think fit, also, he may so manage his atmospherical
medium as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and
enrich the shadows of the picture. He will be wise, no
doubt, to make a very moderate use of the privileges here
stated, an