SOURCE: "The Historical Novel," in The Historical Novel and Other Essays, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1901, pp. 3-28.

[An American critic, playwright, and novelist, Matthews wrote extensively on world drama and served for a quarter century at Columbia University as professor of dramatic literature; he was the first to hold that title at an American university. Matthews was also a founding member and president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Because his criticism is deemed both witty and informative, Matthews has been called "perhaps the last of the gentlemanly school of critics and essayists" in America. In the following essay written in 1897, Matthews argues that the only truly representative and "trustworthy" historical novel is that whose subject matter is contemporary with the author's experience.]

When Robert Louis Stevenson wrote his 'Note on Realism,' and declared that "the historical novel is dead," he did not think he would live to be the author of the Master of Ballantrae. But when Prosper Merimee expressed to a correspondent his belief that the historical novel was a "bastard form," he could look back without reproach upon his own Chronique de Charles IX—one of the finest examples of the kind of fiction he chose to despise. Whether or not most readers of English fiction at the end of the nineteenth century approve Merim& opinion that the historical novel is illegitimate by birth, few of them will agree with Stevenson in deeming it defunct. If we can judge by the welcome it receives from the writers of newspaper notices, it is not moribund even; and if we are influenced by the immense sale of Ben-Hur and by the broadening vogue of Quo Vadis, we may go so far as to believe that it was never stronger or fuller of life.

We might even suggest that the liking for historical fiction is now so keen that the public is not at all particular as to the veracity of the history out of which the fiction has been manufactured, since it accepts the invented facts of the Chronicles of Zenda quite as eagerly as it receives the better-documented Memoirs of a Minister of France.

More than any other British author of his years, Stevenson worked in accord with the theories of art which have been elaborated and expounded in France; and it may be that when he declared the historical novel to be dead he was thinking rather of French literature than of English. There is no doubt that in France the historical novel is not cherished. No one of the living masters of fiction in France has attempted any but contemporary studies. M. Daudet, M.Zola, M. Bourget, find all the subjects they need in the life of their own times. Flaubert's fame is due to his masterly Madame Bovary, and not to his splendid Salmmbo. So sharp is the Franch reaction against Romanticism that even impressionist critics like M. Jules Lemaltre and M. Anatole France do not overpraise the gay romances of the elder Dumas, as Stevenson did. In France the historical novel has no standing in the court of serious criticism. As Merimee wrote in the correspondence from which one quotation has already been made, "History, in my eyes, is a sacred thing."

Historical fiction suffers in France from the same discredit as historical painting, and for the same reasons. It is either too easy to be worth while—a French critic might say—or so difficult as to be impossible. When a young man once went to Courbet for advice, saying that his vocation was to be a historical painter, the artist promptly responded: "I don't doubt it; and therefore begin by giving three months to making a portrait of your father!"

Perhaps French opinion is nowhere more accurately voiced than by M. Anatole France in the 'Jardin d'Epicure':

We cannot reproduce with any accuracy what no longer exists. When we see that a painter has to take all the trouble in the world to represent to us, more or less exactly, a scene in the time of Louis Philippe, we may despair of his ever being able to give us the slightest idea of an event contemporary with Saint Louis or Augustus. We weary ourselves copying armor and old chests; but the artists of the past did not worry themselves about so empty an exactness. They lent to the hero of legend or history the costume and the looks of their own contemporaries; and thus they depicted naturally their own soul and their own century. Now what can an artist do better?

In other words, Paul Veronese's Marriage at Cana is frankly a revelation of the Italian Renascence; and this revelation is not contaminated by any fifteenth-century guess at the manners and customs of Judea in the first century. It is difficult to surmise how some of the laboriously archeological pictures of the nineteenth century will affect an observer of the twenty-first century. As in painting, so in the drama: Shakspere made no effort to suggest the primitive manners and customs of Scotland to the spectators of his Macbeth; and if the characters of Julius Caesar are Roman, it is chiefly because of the local color that chanced to leak through from North's Plutarch. What Shakspere aimed at was the creation of living men and women—interesting because of their intense humanity, eternal because of their truth and vitality. He never sought to differentiate Scotchmen and Danes of the past from Englishmen of the present. He lent to all his personages the vocabulary, the laws, the usages, the costumes which were familiar to the playgoers that flocked to applaud his pieces. Archeology was unknown to him and to them; anachronism did not affright them or him. Probably he would have brushed aside any demand for exactness of fact as an attempt to impose an unfair restraint upon the liberty of the dramatist—whose business it was to write plays to be acted in a theater, and not to prepare lectures to be delivered in a college hall. Shakspere and Veronese, each in his own art, worked freely, as though wholly unconscious of any difference between their own contemporaries and the subjects of the Caesars.

The compilers of the 'Gesta Romanorum' had no conception of the elements of either geography or chronology; and the authors of the Romances of Chivalry seem to have been as ignorant, although their scientific nihilism is perhaps wilful—like Stockton's when he tells us a Tale of Negative Gravity.' The essential likeness of the Romances of Chivalry to the Waverley Novels has been pointed out more than once; and in each group of tales we find the hero, or the technical hero's rescuing friend, omnipresent, omniscient, and almost omnipotent. The essential difference between the two kinds of fiction is quite as obvious also: it lies in the fact that Scott and his followers know what history is, and that even when they vary from it they are aware of what they are doing.

The historical novel, as we understand it today, like the historical drama and like historical painting, could not come into being until after history had established itself, and after chronology and geography had lent to history their indispensable aid. Nowadays the novelist and the dramatist and the painter are conscious that people do not talk and dress and behave as they did a hundred years ago, or a thousand. They do not know precisely how the people of those days did feel and think and act: they cannot know these things. The most they can do is to study the records of the past and make a guess, the success of which depends on their equipment and insight. They accept their obligation to history and to its handmaids—an obligation which Shakspere and Veronese would have denied quite as frankly as the compilers of the 'Gesta Romanorum' or the writers of the Romances of Chivalry. Scott was appealing to a circle of more or less sophisticated readers, any one of whom might be an antiquary: he was to be tried by a jury of his peers. But the author of Amadis of Gaul, for example, wrote for a public that cared as little as he himself did about the actual facts of the countries or of the periods his hero traversed in search of strange adventure.

Although it is not difficult to detect here and there in Scott's predecessors the more or less fragmentary hints of which he availed himself, it would be absurd to deny that Scott is really the inventor of the historical novel, just as Poe was afterward the inventor of the detective story. In the Castle of Otranto Horace Walpole essayed to recall to life the Gothic period as he understood it; but—if we may judge by Mrs. Radcliffe and the rest of his immediate imitators—it was the tale of mystery he succeeded in writing and not the true historical novel. For this last, Walpole was without two things which Scott possessed abundantly—the gift of story-telling and an intimate knowledge of more than one epoch of the past.

And Scott had also two other qualifications which Walpole lacked: he was a poet and he was a humorist. As it happens, the steps that led Scott to the Waverley Novels are not hard to count. He began by collecting the ballads of the Border; and soon he wrote new ballads in the old manner. Then he linked ballads together, and so made Marmion and the Lady of the Lake. When he thought that the public was weary of his verse, he told one of these ballad tales in prose, and so made Waverley. But he had read Miss Edgeworth, and he wished to do for the Scottish peasant what she had done for the Irish: thus it is that the prose tales contained sketches of character at once robust and delicate. In time, when he tired of Scotch subjects, he crossed the Border; and in Ivanhoe he first applied to an English subject the formula he had invented for use in North Britain, helped in his handling of a medieval theme by his recollections of the Götz von Berlichingen of Goethe, which he had translated in his prentice days. After a while he crossed the Channel, and found that the method acquired in telling the Scotch stories enabled him to write Quentin Durward, a story of France, and the Talisman, a story of Palestine. Although he had to forego his main advantage when he left his native land, Scott did not abandon his humor; and these later tales contain more than one memorable character, even if they reveal none so unforgetable as are a dozen or more in the Scotch stories.

Probably the immense vogue of the Waverley Novels, as they came forth swiftly one after another in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, was due rather to the qualities they had in common with the Castle of Otranto than to the qualities they had in common with Castle Rackrent. No doubt it was the union of the merits of both schools that broadened the audience to which the Waverley Novels appealed; but, in attaining his contemporary triumph, Scott owed more to Horace Walpole than to Maria Edgeworth. He surpassed Walpole immeasurably, because he was a man of deeper knowledge and broader sympathy. His audience was far wider than Miss Edgeworth's, because he infused into his Scottish tales a romantic flavor which she carefully excluded from her veracious portrayals of Irish character.

Yet it may be suggested that the stories of Scott most likely to survive the centenary of their publication and to retain readers in the first quarter of the twentieth century are perhaps those in which he best withstands the comparison with Miss Edgeworth—the stories in which he has recorded types of Scottish character, with its mingled humor and pathos. For mere excitement our liking is eternal: but the fashion thereof is fickle; and we prefer our romantic adventures cut this way to-day and another way to-morrow. Our interest in our fellow-man subsists unchanged forever, and we take a perennial delight in the revelation of the subtleties of human nature. It is in the Antiquary and in the Heart of Midlothian that Scott is seen at his best; and it is by creating characters like Caleb Balderstone and Dugald Dalgetty and Wandering Willie that he has deserved to endure.

In work of this kind Scott showed himself a Realist. He revealed himself as a humorist with a compassionate understanding of his fellow-creatures. He gave play to that sense of reality which Bagehot praises as one of the most valuable of his characteristics. When he is dealing with medieval life,—which he knew not at first hand, as he knew his Scottish peasants, but afar off from books,—the result is unreal. He was as well read in history as any man of his time; and he himself explained his superiority over the host of imitators who encompassed him about, by saying that they read to write, while he wrote because he had read. But this knowledge was second-hand, at best: it was not like his day-in-day-out acquaintance with the men of his own time; and this is why the unreality of Ivanhoe, for instance, is becoming more and more obvious to us. The breaking of the lances in the lists of Ashby-de-la-Zouch is to us a hollow sham, like the polite tournament at Eglinton. The deeds of daring of Ivanhoe and of the Black Knight and of Robin Hood still appeal to the boy in us; but they are less and less convincing to the man.

Although Ivanhoe and Robin Hood and the Black Knight are boldly projected figures, their psychology is summary. How could it be anything else? With all his genius, Scott was emphatically a man of his own time and of his own country, with the limitations and the prejudices of the eighteenth century and of the British Isles. Few of his warmest admirers would venture to suggest that he was as broad in sympathy as Shakspere, or as universal in his vision; and yet he was trying to reconstruct the past for us, in deed and feeling and thought—the very thing that Shakspere never attempted. The author of Much Ado about Nothing and of the Comedy of Errors was content to people the foreign plots he borrowed so lightly with the Elizabethans he knew so well. The author of Ivanhoe and of the Talisman made a strenuous effort to body forth the very spirit of epochs and of lands wholly unlike the spirit of the eighteenth century in the British Isles. It is a proof of Scott's genius that he came so near success; but failure was inevitable. "After all," said Taine, "his characters, to whatever age he transports them, are his neighbors—canny farmers, vain lairds, gloved gentlemen, young marriageable ladies, all more or less commonplace, that is, well ordered by education and character, hundreds of miles away from the voluptuous fools of the Restoration or the heroic brutes and forcible beasts of the Middle Ages."

The fact is that no man can step off his own shadow. By no effort of the will can he thrust himself backward into the past and shed his share of the accumulations of the ages, of all the myriad accretions of thought and sentiment and knowledge, stored up in the centuries that lie between him and the time he is trying to treat. Of necessity he puts into his picture of days gone by more or less of the days in which he is living. Shakspere frankly accepted the situation: Scott attempted the impossible. Racine wrote tragedies on Greek subjects; and he submitted to be bound by rules which he supposed to have been laid down by a great Greek critic. To the spectator who saw these plays when they were first produced, they may have seemed Greek; but to us, two hundred years later, they appear to be perhaps the most typical product of the age of Louis XIV; and a great French critic has suggested that to bring out their full flavor they should be performed nowadays by actors wearing, not the flowing draperies of Athens, but the elaborate court-dress of Versailles. Phedre is interesting to us to-day, not because it is Greek, but because it is French; and some of Scott's stories, hailed on their publication as faithful reproductions of medieval manners, will doubtless have another interest, in time, as illustrations of what the beginning of the nineteenth century believed the Middle Ages to be.

Not only is it impossible for a man to get away from his own country, but it is equally impossible for him to get away from his own nationality. How rarely has an author been able to create a character of a different stock from his own! Certainly most of the great figures of fiction are compatriots of their makers. We have had many carpetbag novelists of late—men and women who go forth gaily and study a foreign country from the platform of a parlor-car; and some of these are able to spin yarns which hold the attention of listening thousands. What the people of the foreign countries think of these superficial tales we can measure when we recall the contempt in which we Americans hold the efforts made by one and another of the British novelists to lay the scene of a story here in the United States. Dickens and Trollope and Reade were men of varied gifts, keen observers all of them; but how lamentable the spectacle when they endeavored to portray an American! Probably most American endeavors to portray an Englishman are quite as foolish in the eyes of the British. Dickens twice chose to compete with the carpet-bag novelists; and if we Americans are unwilling to see a correct picture of our life in Martin Chuzzlewit, we may be sure that the French are as unwilling to acknowledge the Tale of Two Cities as an accurate portrayal of the most dramatic epoch in their history. There are those who think it was a piece of impertinence for a Londoner like Dickens to suppose that he could escape the inexorable limitations of his birth and education and hope to see Americans or Frenchman as they really are; finer artists than Dickens have failed in this—artists of a far more exquisite touch.

The masterpieces of the great painters instantly declare the race to which the limner himself belonged. Rubens and Velasquez and Titian traveled and saw the world; they have left us portraits of men of many nationalities: and yet every man and woman Rubens painted seems to us Dutch; every man and woman Velasquez painted seems to us Spanish; every man and woman Titian painted seems to us Italian. The artists of our own time, for all their cosmopolitanism, are no better off; and when M. Bonnat has for sitters Americans of marked characteristics he cannot help reproducing them on canvas as though they had been reflected in a Gallic mirror. In short, a man can no more escape from his race than he can escape from his century; it is the misfortune of the historical novelist that he must try to do both.

The Atalanta in Calydon of Mr. Swinburne has been praised as the most Greek of all modern attempts to reproduce Greek tragedy; and it may deserve this eulogy—but what of it? It may be the most Greek of the modern plays, but is it really Greek after all? Would not an ancient Greek have found in it many things quite incomprehensible to him? Even if it is more or less Greek, is it as Greek as the plays the Greeks themselves wrote? Why should an Englishman pride himself on having written a Greek play? At best he has but accomplished a feat of main strength, a tour deforce, an exercise in literary gymnastics! A pastiche, a paste jewel, is not a precious possession. A Greek play written by a modern Englishman remains absolutely outside the current of contemporary literature. It is a kind of thing the Greeks never dreamed of doing; they wrote Greek plays because they were Greeks and could do nothing else; they did not imitate the literature of the Assyrians nor that of the Egyptians; they swam in the full center of the current of their own time. If Sophocles were a modern Englishman, who can doubt that he would write English plays, with no backward glance toward Greek tragedy? The lucidity, the sobriety, the elevation of the Greeks we may borrow from them, if we can, without taking over also the mere external forms due to the accidents of their age.

Art has difficulties enough without imposing on it limitations no longer needful. Let the dead past bury its dead. This has been the motto of every great artist, ancient and modern, of Dante, of Shakspere, and of Moliere. A man who has work to do in the world does not embarrass himself by using a dead language to convey his ideas. Milton's Latin verse may be as elegant as its admirers assert; but if he had written nothing else, this page might need a footnote to explain who he was. If a layman may venture an opinion, the use of Gothic architecture in America at the end of the nineteenth century seems an equivalent anachronism. Gothic is a dead language; and no man to-day in the United States uses it naturally, as he does the vernacular. One of the most accomplished of American architects recently drew attention to the fact that "such a perfect composition and exquisite design as M. Vaudremer's church of Montrouge, Paris, unquestionably the best and ablest attempt in our time to revive medieval art, is considered cold even by his own pupils"; and then Mr. Hastings explains that "this is because it lacks the life we are living, and at the same time is without the real medieval life." Gothic was at its finest when it was the only architecture that was known, and when it was used naturally and handled freely and unconsciously—just as the best Greek plays were written by the Greeks.

In other words, the really trustworthy historical novels are those which were a-writing while the history was amaking. If the Tale of Two Cities misrepresents the Paris of 1789, the Pickwick Papers represents with amazing humor and with photographic fidelity certain aspects of the London of 1837. The one gives us what Dickens guessed about France in the preceding century, and the other tells us what he saw in England in his own time. Historical novel for historical novel, Pickwick is superior to the Tale of Two Cities, and Nicholas Nickleby to Barnaby Rudge. No historical novelist will ever be able to set before us the state of affairs in the South in the decade preceding the Civil War with the variety and the veracity of Uncle Tom's Cabin, written in that decade. No American historian has a more minute acquaintance with the men who made the United States than Mr. Paul Leicester Ford; and yet one may venture to predict that Mr. Ford will never write a historical novel having a tithe of the historical value possessed by his suggestive study of the conditions of contemporary politics in New York city, the Honorable Peter Stirling. Nevertheless there are few librarians bold enough to catalogue Pickwick and Uncle Tom and Peter Stirling under historical fiction.

One of the foremost merits of the novel, as of the drama, is that it enlarges our sympathy. It compels us to shift our point of view, and often to assume that antithetic to our custom. It forces us to see not only how the other half lives, but also how it feels and how it thinks. We learn not merely what the author meant to teach us: we absorb, in addition, a host of things he did not know he was putting in—things he took for granted, some of them, and things he implied as a matter of course. This unconscious richness of instruction cannot but be absent from the historical novel—or at best it is so obscured as to be almost non-existent.

In Anna Karenina one can see Russian life in the end of this century as Tolstoy knows it, having beheld it with his own eyes: in War and Peace we have Russian life in the beginning of this century as Tolstoy supposes it to have been, not having seen it. One is the testimony of an eye-witness: the other is given on information and belief. Pendennis and the Newcomes and Vanity Fair—for all that the last includes the battle of Waterloo, fought when Thackeray was but a boy—are written out of the fulness of knowledge: Henry Esmond is written out of the fulness of learning only. In the former there is an unconscious accuracy of reproduction, while in the latter unconsciousness is impossible. The historical novel cannot help being what the French call voulu—a word that denotes both effort and artificiality. The story-teller who deals honestly with his own time achieves, without taking thought, a fidelity simply impossible to the story-teller who deals with the past, no matter how laboriously the latter may toil after it.

In fact, the more he labors, the less life is there likely to be in the tale he is telling: humanity is choked by archeology. It calls for no research to set forth the unending conflict of duty and desire, for example. If we examine carefully the best of the stories usually classed under historical fiction we shall find those to be the most satisfactory in which the history is of least importance, in which it is present only as a background. The examination may lead to a subdivision of the class of historical fiction into the actual historical novel and the novel in which history is wholly subordinate, not to say merely incidental.

A British critic, Professor George Saintsbury, has laid down the law that "the true historical novelist employs the reader's presumed interest in historical scene and character as an instrument to make his own work attractive." Although it would be easy to dissent from this dictum, it may be used to explain the distinction drawn in the preceding paragraph. A tale of the past is not necessarily a true historical novel: it is a true historical novel only when the historical events are woven into the texture of the story. Applying this test, we see that the Bride of Lammermoor is not a true historical novel; and this is perhaps the reason why it is held in high esteem by all lovers of genuine Romance. By the same token, the Scarlet Letter is not a true historical novel.

Neither in the Bride of Lammermoor nor in the Scarlet Letter is there any reliance upon historical scene or character for attraction. Scott was narrating again a legend of an inexplicable mystery: but although the period of its occurrence was long past when he wrote, he presented simply the characters enmeshed in the fateful adventure, and relied for the attractiveness of his story upon the inherent interest of the weird climax toward which the reader is hurried breathless under the weight of impending doom. Hawthorne was captivated by a study of conscience, the incidents of which could be brought out more conveniently and more effectively by throwing back the time of the tale into the remote past.

In another story of Scott's, not equal to the Bride of Lammermoor in its tragic intensity, but superb in its resolute handling of emotion, the Heart of Midlothian, there is perhaps a stiffer infusion of actual history; but it would be rash to suggest that in its composition the author relied on historical scene or character to make his work attractive. The attraction of the Heart of Midlothian lies in its presentation of character at the crisis of its existence. So in the Romola of George Eliot, although the author obviously spent her strength in trying to transmute the annals of Florence into her narrative, the historical part is unconvincing; the episode of Savonarola is seen to be an excrescence; and what remains erect now is a wholly imaginary trinity—the noble figure of Romola, the pretty womanliness of little Tessa, and the easy-going Tito, with his moral fiber slowly disintegrating under successive temptations. Tito is one of the great triumphs of modern fiction, not because he is a Greek of the Renascence, but because he is eternal and to be found whenever and wherever man lacks strength to resist himself.

If we were thus to go down the list of so-called historical novels, one by one, we might discover that those which were most solidly rooted in our regard and affection are to be included in the subdivision wherein history itself is only a casual framework for a searching study of human character, and that they are cherished for the very same qualities as are possessed by the great novels of modern life. Without going so far as to say that the best historical novel is that which has the least history, we may at least confess the frank inferiority of the other subdivision in which the author has been rash enough to employ historical scene and character to make his own work attractive. What gives charm and value to Henry Esmond is exactly what gives charm and value to Vanity Fair—Thackeray's understanding of his fellow-man, his sympathetic insight into human nature, his happy faculty for dramatically revealing character by situation. Perhaps the eighteenthcentury atmosphere, with which Thackeray was able to surround Esmond only by infinite skill, is not breathed comfortably by the most of those who enjoy the book for its manly qualities. One feels that the author has won his wager—but at what a cost, and at what a risk!

Some logical readers of this essay may be moved to put two and two together, and to accuse the present writer of a desire to disparage the historical novel, because he has tried to show, first, that the novelists cannot reproduce in their pages the men and women of another epoch as these really thought and felt, and, second, that the novelists who have attempted historical fiction have best succeeded when they brought the fiction to the center of the stage and left the history in the background. But to draw this conclusion would be unjust, since the writer really agrees with the views of Sainte-Beuve as expressed in a letter to Champfleury: "The novel is a vast field of experiment, open to all the forms of genius. It is the future epic, the only one, probably, that modern manners will hereafter justify. Let us not bind it too tightly; let us not lay down its theory too rigidly; let us not organize it."

To point out that a historical novel is great—when it is great—because of its possession of the identical qualities that give validity to a study of modern life, is not to suggest that only the contemporary novel is legitimate. To dwell on the deficiencies of the historical novel is not to propose that only realistic fiction be tolerated hereafter. But perhaps a due consideration of these inherent defects of the historical novel may lead the disinterested reader to confess its essential inferiority to the more authentic fiction, in which the story-teller reports on humanity as he actually sees it. And if Romance is preferred to Realism, Romance is purest when purged of all affection.

Genuine Romance is always as delightful as shoddy Romanticism is always detestable. Fantasy is ever beautiful, when it presents itself frankly as fantasy. Undine does not pretend to accuracy; and the Arabian Nights never vaunted itself as founded on the facts of Haroun-al-Rashid's career. Stevenson's romances, artistically truthful, though they contradict the vulgar facts of every-day existence,—Markheim, for example, and the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,—bid fair to outlive his Romanticist admixtures of Scott and Dumas; and the New Arabian Nights, with its matter-of-fact impossibility, will outweigh the Master of Ballantrae a dozen times over. But pure Romance and frank fantasy are strangely rare; there are very few Hoffmanns and Fouques, Poes and Stevensons, in a century—and only one Hawthorne.

Not long ago an enterprising American journalist wrote to some twoscore of the story-tellers of Great Britain and of the United States to inquire what, in their opinion, the object of the novel was. Half a dozen of the replies declared that it was "to realize life"; and the rest—an immense majority—were satisfied to say that it was "to amuse." Here we see the practitioners of the art divided in defining its purpose; and a like diversity of opinion can be detected among the vast army of novel-readers. Some think that fiction ought to be literature, and that "literature is a criticism of life." Some hold that fiction is mere story-telling—the stringing together of adventure, the heaping up of excitement, with the wish of forgetting life as it is, of getting outside of the sorry narrowness of sordid and commonplace existence into a fairy-land of dreams where Cinderella always marries Prince Charming and where the haughty sisters always meet with their just punishment. It is to readers of this second class that the ordinary historical novel appeals with peculiar force; for it provides the drug they desire, while they can salve their conscience during this dissipation with the belief that they are, at the same time, improving their minds. The historical novel is aureoled with a pseudo-sanctity, in that it purports to be more instructive than a mere story: it claims—or at least the claim is made in its behalf—that it is teaching history. There are those who think that it thus adds hypocrisy to its other faults.

Bagehot—and there is no acuter critic of men and books, and none with less literary bias—Bagehot suggested that the immense popularity of Ivanhoe was due to the fact that "it describes the Middle Ages as we should wish them to be." This falsification characteristic of the historical novel in general is one of its chief charms in the eyes of those who like to be ravished out of themselves into an illusion of a world better than the one they, unfortunately, have to live in. "All sensible people know that the Middle Ages must have been very uncomfortable," continues Bagehot. "No one knew the abstract facts on which this conclusion rests better than Scott; but his delineation gives no general idea of the result: a thoughtless reader rises with the impression that the Middle Ages had the same elements of happiness which we have at present, and that they had fighting besides." Scott knew better, of course; but though "when aroused, he could take a distinct view of the opposing facts, he liked his own mind to rest for the most part in the same pleasing illusion." Perhaps Bagehot might have agreed with some later critics who have held that many of Scott's novels are immoral because of this falsification of historic truth—a charge which receives no support from the Bride of Lammermoor, for example, nor from the Heart of Midlothian, and half a dozen other of his stories, in which Scott's strong sense of reality and his fine feeling for Romance are displayed in perfect harmony.