There is, I admit, an intolerable amount of redundant verbiage in
Scott's novels. Those endless and unnecessary introductions make
the shell very thick before you come to the oyster. They are often
admirable in themselves, learned, witty, picturesque, but with no
relation or proportion to the story which they are supposed to
introduce. Like so much of our English fiction, they are very good
matter in a very bad place. Digression and want of method and order
are traditional national sins. Fancy introducing an essay on how
to live on nothing a year as Thackeray did in "Vanity Fair," or
sandwiching in a ghost story as Dickens has dared to do. As well
might a dramatic author rush up to the footlights and begin
telling anecdotes while his play was suspending its action and his
characters waiting wearily behind him. It is all wrong, though every
great name can be quoted in support of it. Our sense of form is
lamentably lacking, and Sir Walter sinned with the rest. But get
past all that to a crisis in the real story, and who finds the terse
phrase, the short fire-word, so surely as he? Do you remember when
the reckless Sergeant of Dragoons stands at last before the grim
Puritan, upon whose head a price has been set: "A thousand marks or
a bed of heather!" says he, as he draws. The Puritan draws also:
"The Sword of the Lord and of Gideon!" says he. No verbiage there!
But the very spirit of either man and of either party, in the few
stern words, which haunt your mind. "Bows and Bills!" cry the Saxon
Varangians, as the Moslem horse charges home. You feel it is just
what they must have cried. Even more terse and businesslike was the
actual battle-cry of the fathers of the same men on that long-drawn
day when they fought under the "Red Dragon of Wessex" on the low
ridge at Hastings. "Out! Out!" they roared, as the Norman chivalry
broke upon them. Terse, strong, prosaic--the very genius of the