th 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 the farm-burning in South Africa no critic of the war
uses his material as Burke or Grattan (perhaps exaggeratively) would
have used it--the speaker is content with facts and expositions of
facts. In another age he might have risen and hurled that great song in
prose, perfect as prose and yet rising into a chant, which Meg Merrilees
hurled at Ellangowan, at the rulers of Britain: 'Ride your ways, Laird
of Ellangowan; ride your ways, Godfrey Bertram--this day have ye
quenched seven smoking hearths. See if the fire in your ain parlour
burns the blyther for that. Ye have riven the thack of seven cottar
houses. Look if your ain roof-tree stands the faster for that. Ye may
stable your stirks in the sheilings of Dern-cleugh. See that the hare
does not couch on the hearthstane of Ellangowan. Ride your ways, Godfr