manesque," the pastiche, the imbroglio, and interest ends—not altogether, to be sure, for we are certain to encounter here and there figures like that of the Curate of Saint Roman (since I have mentioned this novel) drawn with a moving and delicate kindliness that has a very real charm.
This kindly smile of Walter Scott is perhaps the most truly poetic thing about him. It illuminates even his comic characters who tend toward the "fixed type," but are sometimes kept within proper bounds. By virtue of it, The Heart of Midlothian surpasses, so it seems to me, all the other novels. This story, known on the Continent as The Prison of Edinboro, is penetrated through and through with kindliness, not in details only, but in the very composition of the plot. Even here there is intrigue galore, with the usual brigands (brigands, who are not brigands so much as gentlemen of supernal delicacy) and other make-ups from the travelling bag of the melodramatist. But how escape the spell of the gentle Effie, falsely accused of infanticide, or of her sister Jennie, who will not lie to save her, but who does save her in the end by persistence in the face of every danger? The sentimental "Laird," Dumb Dikes, the malicious and generous, the shrewd and jealous Madge, are handled in the most realistic, pitiful, truth. Scott spares David Deans none of the latter's pedantry and self-conceit; but the man's sterling nobility in the midst of bitter trial, his tenderness, his humility for all of his religious austerity, do not fail to move us. Even the good-natured Saddletree is presented in a singularly subtle blend of unselfishness and pride. I note as a matter of curiosity that the scene at supper in the fisherman’s hut where David Deans, about to say grace, pushes Effie's empty chair away from the table as though to remove every earthly association from the reading of the Scriptures, had a great fortune in Italy in the plagiarism made of it by Grossi in his Marco Visconti.
This stream of very human goodness, this undercurrent of smiling sympathy and charitableness, finds its way through the bulk of Scott's work, here and there breaking to the surface in what may be called real art, a modest, unpretentious art, to be sure, where all the rest is erudition, skill, business; but with poetry enough to let us depart in good humour from an author who delighted our fathers and grandfathers, and who, for this reason if for no other, deserves courteous treatment from their children and grandchildren.
