It is as difficult to sum up in a brief article the work and the
influence of Sir Walter Scott as it is to make an estimate of
Shakespeare, for Scott holds the same position in English prose
fiction that Shakespeare holds in English poetry. In neither
department is there any rival. In sheer creative force Scott stands
head and shoulders above every other English novelist, and he has no
superior among the novelists of any other nation. He has made Scotland
and the Scotch people known to the world as Cervantes made Spain and
the Spaniards a reality for all times.
But he did more than Cervantes, for his creative mind reached over the
border into England and across the channel to France and Germany, and
even to the Holy Land, and found there historical types which he made
as real and as immortal as his own highland clansmen. His was the
great creative brain of the nineteenth century, and his work has made
the world his debtor. His work stimulated the best story teller of
France and gave the world _Monte Cristo_ and _The Three Guardsmen_. It
fired the imaginations of a score of English historical novelists; it
was the progenitor of Weyman's _A Soldier of France_ and Conan Doyle's
_Micah Clarke_ and _The White Company_.
Scott's mind was Shakespearean in its capacity for creating characters
of real flesh and blood; for making great historical personages as
real and vital as our next-door neighbors, and for bursts of sustained
story telling that carry the reader on for scores of pages without an
instant's drop in interest.
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