one. Palgrave says that historical fiction is the mortal enemy of
history, and Leslie Stephen adds that it is also the enemy of fiction.
In a sense both sayings are true. Scott was not always accurate as to
facts and sinned freely against chronology. But he rescued a wide realm
from cold oblivion and gave it back to human consciousness and sympathy.
It is treating the past more kindly to misrepresent it in some
particulars, than to leave it a blank to the imagination. The
eighteenth-century historians were incurious of life. Their spirit was
general and abstract; they were in search of philosophical formulas.
Gibbon covers his subject with a lava-flood of stately rhetoric which
stiffens into a uniform stony coating over the soft surface of life.
Scott is primarily responsible for that dramatic, picturesque treatment
of history which we find in Michelet and Carlyle. "These historical
novels," testifies Carlyle, "have taught all men this truth, which looks
like a truism, and yet was as good as unknown to writers of history and
others, till so taught; that the bygone ages of the world were actually
filled by living men, not by protocols, state papers, controversies, and
abstractions of men. . . . It is a great service, fertile in
consequences, this that Scott has done; a great truth laid open by
him." [44] In France, too, historians like Barante and Augustin Thierry,
were Scott's professed disciples. The latter confesses, in a well-known
passage, that "Ivanhoe" was the inspirer of his "Conquête d'Angleterre,"
and styles the novelist "le plus grand maître qu'il y ait jamais eu en
fait de divination historique." [45]

Scott apprehended the Middle Ages on their spectacular, and more
particularly, their military side. He exhibits their large, showy
aspects: battles, processions, hunts, feasts in hall, tourneys,[46]
sieges, and the like. The motley mediaeval world swarms in his pages,
from the king on his throne down to the jester with his cap and bells.