VII. THE PRE-RAPHAELITES

VIII. TENDENCIES AND RESULTS




A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM.


CHAPTER I.

Walter Scott.[1]

It was reserved for Walter Scott, "the Ariosto of the North," "the
historiographer royal of feudalism," to accomplish the task which his
eighteenth-century forerunners had essayed in vain. He possessed the
true enchanter's wand, the historic imagination. With this in his hand,
he raised the dead past to life, made it once more conceivable, made it
even actual. Before Scott no genius of the highest order had lent itself
wholly or mainly to retrospection. He is the middle point and the
culmination of English romanticism. His name is, all in all, the most
important on our list. "Towards him all the lines of the romantic
revival converge." [2] The popular ballad, the Gothic romance, the
Ossianic poetry, the new German literature, the Scandinavian discoveries,
these and other scattered rays of influence reach a focus in Scott. It
is true that his delineation of feudal society is not final. There were
sides of mediaeval life which he did not know, or understand, or
sympathize with, and some of these have been painted in by later artists.
That his pictures have a coloring of modern sentiment is no arraignment