Not long ago, in Edinburgh, I amused myself in looking up some of the localities made famous in Scott’s romances, which are as real in the mind as any historical places.  Afterwards I read “The Heart of Midlothian.”  I was surprised to find that, as a work of art, it was inferior to my recollection of it.  Its style is open to the charge of prolixity, and even of slovenliness in some parts; and it does not move on with increasing momentum and concentration to a climax, as many of Scott’s novels do; the story drags along in the disposition of one character after another.  Yet, when I had finished the book and put it away, a singular thing happened.  It suddenly came to me that in reading it I had not once thought of Scott as the maker; it had never occurred to me that he had created the people in whose fortunes I had been so intensely absorbed; and I never once had felt how clever the novelist was in the naturally dramatic dialogues of the characters.  In short, it had not entered my mind to doubt the existence of Jeanie and Effie Deans, and their father, and Reuben Butler, and the others, who seem as real as historical persons in Scotch history.  And when I came to think of it afterwards, reflecting upon the assumptions of the modern realistic school, I found that some scenes, notably the night attack on the old Tolbooth, were as real to me as if I had read them in a police report of a newspaper of the day.  Was Scott, then, only a reporter?  Far from it, as you would speedily see if he had thrown into the novel a police report of the occurrences at the Tolbooth before art had shorn it of its irrelevancies, magnified its effective and salient points, given events their proper perspective, and the whole picture due light and shade.

The sacrifice of action to some extent to psychological evolution in modern fiction may be an advance in the art as an intellectual entertainment, if the writer does not make that evolution his end, and does not forget that the indispensable thing in a novel is the story.  The novel of mere adventure or mere plot, it need not be urged, is of a lower order than that in which the evolution of characters and their interaction make the story.  The highest fiction is that which embodies both; that is, the story in which action is the result of mental and spiritual forces in play.  And we protest against the notion that the novel of the future is to be, or should be, merely a study of, or an essay or a series of analytic essays on, certain phases of social life.

It is not true that civilization or cultivation has bred out of the world the liking for a story.  In this the most highly educated Londoner and the Egyptian fellah meet on common human ground.  The passion for a story has no more died out than curiosity, or than the passion of love.  The truth is not that stories are not demanded, but that the born raconteur and story-teller is a rare person.  The faculty of telling a story is a much rarer gift than the ability