are merely material accidents, like
toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege
and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.
The boast of the realist (applying what the reviewers call his scalpel)
is that he cuts into the heart of life; but he makes a very shallow
incision if he only reaches as deep as habits and calamities and sins.
Deeper than all these lies a man's vision of himself, as swaggering and
sentimental as a penny novelette. The literature of candour unearths
innumerable weaknesses and elements of lawlessness which is called
romance. It perceives superficial habits like murder and dipsomania, but
it does not perceive the deepest of sins--the sin of vanity--vanity
which is the mother of all day-dreams and adventures, the one sin that
is not shared with any boon companion, or whispered to any priest.

In estimating, therefore, the ground of Scott's pre-eminence in romance
we must absolutely rid ourselves of the notion that romance or
adventure are merely materialistic things involved in the tangle of a
plot or the multiplicity of drawn swords. We must remember that it is,
like tragedy or farce, a state of the soul, and that, for some dark and
elemental reason which we can never understand, this state of the soul
is evoked in us by the sight of certain places or the contemplation of
certain human crises, by a stream rushing under a heavy and covered
wooden bridge, or by a man plunging a knife or sword into tough timber.
In the selection of these situations which catch the spirit of romance
as in a net, Scott has never been equalled or even approached. His
finest scenes affect us like fragments of a hilarious dream. They have
the same quality which is often possessed by those nocturnal
comedies--that of seeming more human than our waking life--even while
they are less possible. Sir Arthur Wardour, with his daughter and the
old beggar crouching in a cranny of the cliff as night falls and the
tide closes around them, are actually in the coldest and bitterest of
practical situations. Yet the whole incident has a quality that can only
be called boyish. It is warmed with all the colours of an incredible
sunset. Rob Roy trapped in the Tolbooth, and confronted with Bailie
Nicol Jarvie, draws no sword, leaps from no window, affects none of the
dazzling external acts upon which contemporary romance depends, yet that
plain and humorous dialogue is full of the essential