the
animate and inanimate. A two-handed sword might be carried only by a
menial in a procession, but it was something important and immeasurably
fascinating--it was a two-handed sword.

There is one quality which is supreme and continuous in Scott which is
little appreciated at present. One of the values we have really lost in
recent fiction is the value of eloquence. The modern literary artist is
compounded of almost every man except the orator. Yet Shakespeare and
Scott are certainly alike in this, that they could both, if literature
had failed, have earned a living as professional demagogues. The feudal
heroes in the "Waverley Novels" retort upon each other with a passionate
dignity, haughty and yet singularly human, which can hardly be
paralleled in political eloquence except in "Julius Caesar." With a
certain fiery impartiality which stirs the blood, Scott distributes his
noble orations equally among saints and villains. He may deny a villain
every virtue or triumph, but he cannot endure to deny him a telling
word; he will ruin a man, but he will not silence him. In truth, one of
Scott's most splendid traits is his difficulty, or rather incapacity,
for despising any of his characters. He did not scorn the most revolting
miscreant as the realist of to-day commonly scorns his own hero. Though
his soul may be in rags, every man of Scott can speak like a king.

This quality, as I have said, is sadly to seek in the fiction of the
passing hour. The realist would, of course, repudiate the bare idea of
putting a bold and brilliant tongue in every man's head, but even where
the moment of the story naturally demands eloquence the eloquence seems
frozen in the tap. Take any contemporary work of fiction and turn to the
scene where the young Socialist denounces the millionaire, and then
compare the stilted sociological lecture given by that self-sacrificing
bore with the surging joy of words in Rob Roy's declaration of himself,
or Athelstane's defiance of De Bracy. That ancient sea of human passion
upon which high words and great phrases are the resplendent foam is just
now at a low ebb. We have even gone the length of congratulating
ourselves because we can see the mud and the monsters at the bottom.

In politics there is not a single man whose position is due to eloquence
in the first degree; its place is taken by repartees and rejoinders
purely intellectual, like those of an omnibus conductor. In discussing
questions like