Nor is that strange. The din and dust of the conflict puzzled even the protagonists engaged in it. You have Goethe declaring The Classic is health, the Romantic disease.' And you have Victor Hugo, dubbed, like Scott, a leader of the Romantics, denying the existence of the conflict and even the meaning of the terms. Hugo asserts, in 1824, that the two battle-cries-les deux mots de guerre-have no meaning unless, indeed, 'Classic' meant only literature of an earlier epoch, and Romantic only literature that had developed with the nineteenth century. But that will not do. The romantic movement, and the conflict, were each of them real enough. And two qualifications must be added. In the first place, the romantic movement derived from a date far anterior to 1800, from Macpherson's Ossian (1761-63), Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764), and Bishop Percy's Reliques (1765). The movement then migrated to Germany, and became fantastic. It returned to Britain and became gruesome. In the second place, the conflict was not a straight issue between Classics and Romantics. That is why Hugo and others misunderstood what they were fighting about. The conflict was more truly a triangular turmoil between Classics, Romantics, and Realists. It was launched by Classics on the monstrous developments to which romantic and realistic methods had been pushed. The Classics were making reprisals on both, and Scott defeated those reprisals by combining the two. Romance founded on imagination, and Realism. founded on observation, are the primary methods by which the mind seeks to express the need of the heart. The classic method is a secondary mode. It can be, and had been, applied alike to the Romantic and the Realistic. Throughout the eighteenth century the classic mode had selected and polished until the element of wonder had disappeared from literature's image of life. The romantic image, classically treated, had become, as it were, a statue in a nobleman's park. The realistic image, classically treated, had become, as it were, any party of nobodies- buddies,' I think, you call them in Scotland-seated round a table, and applying delicate seismometers to every tremor, however faint, with which the heart responds to any fact, however trivial. This was too dull; yes, and too false to life, in which wonder is the most constant element. After smoothing the romantic into the inane, it had to be galvanised into the diabolic. After sweetening the realistic with sentiment, it had to be salted with satire. The passion for wonder revived, and was gratified. It was indulged till the Romantic School, developing into the School of Horror, turned their statue into a hobgoblin; and the Realistic School, developing into a School of Scandal, turned their 'nobodies' into high-tobymen and demi-reps. Each tried to tickle or shock. The romance of Ossian was exaggerated to the gruesome by Monk Lewis. The realism of Defoe was spiced to the satirical; delightfully by the incomparable Jane Austen, and outrageously by ruder hands. Peacock, whose Maid Marian appeared in 1819 with Ivanhoe, combines both extravagances in the satiricalfantastic. It is here that Scott intervenes with momentous effect and enduring results. He eschewed, as Senior noted, the excesses of the Realists. But he also eschewed the excesses of the Romantics. He re jected the fantastic from romance, and the cynical from realism. His huge performance was to hark back to the first springs of each, at the moment when the Classics declared war on the enormities to which both were committed. Scott stepped back-so to say-to embrace a wider panorama of humanity and, from a position of artistic detachment, painted what he saw, tinged by the aerial perspective of wonder. His image of life is the verissima, dulcissima imago '; true, but not trite; sweet, but not false; wonderful, but not inhuman. He made an epoch in literature by creating romantic-realism; by clothing actuality with atmosphere; by striking a richer chord from notes of human experience, which till then had been sounded singly. He No doubt he was lucky-like all conquerors. happened to have loved the old romantic poetry, and imitated it admirably in his early poems. He happened to have understood the new realistic prose, and explained Defoe's method in his famous analysis of Mrs. Veal's apparition' the next day after her death.' So, in 1814, he trained the two into one channel, and drew off their united power from the welter of literary cross-currents. He produced a pure stream of literary energy. And that stream flowed for fifty years and more, turning the mills of many movements even outside literature; of the Oxford movement in religion; the Young England movement in politics, and the Morris-Rossetti movement in art. His achievement as an artist is that he appealed to the general feelings of mankind by truth, wonder, and charm. Perhaps his strangest charm is woven by his un expected reconciliations-of the lawyer and outlaw, of the servant and master, of the Jacobite and Hanoverian, of Scotland and England, of 'Time long past' and 'To-day.' By these reconciliations, by searching for hidden chords of human experience, he feels his way to the supreme reconciliation of man to man's destiny. That is the work, often unconscious, of great masters. But for their magical counterpoint the present would be all to each of us; an apex,' Pater calls it, 'between two hypothetical eternities'; a naked note, so poignant that it pierces. As Landor puts it, 'The present, like a note of music, is nothing but as it appertains to what is past and what is to come.' But how few among writers, classic, romantic, or realistic, have shown this by their art. Walter Scott is of those few. He extracted secrets from oblivion to endow what is with the mystery of what has been; and, so, puts us in case to expect the future. He strikes a full chord upon the keys of time. It is only the greatest musicians of humanity, who thus exalt the present by fealty to the past, and make it a herald of eternal harmonies. He leads us through the maze of time and seems to hold a clue. We wander with him, and we wonder with him, till we believe with him that the labyrinth of man's fate must lead some whither worth our seeking. And he made light of all this. But for necessity that clamped him to the desk till his pen dropped from a dying hand, he would have bade farewell to his task with a Sidney's Splendidis longum valedico nugis. Yet his radiant trifles are the regalia of his native |