were constructed. Even Scott becomes grave and melodramatic when he
peoples his stage with those whose like he never saw. But how vastly
more romantic was the Scotland of Scott than is the Scotland of
Stevenson! The Vicar of Wakefield and Squire Western are not to be
found in an age that is busy with railways and telegraphs and the
_Review of Reviews_. Pickwick and Oliver Twist have been improved off
the face of the earth by cheap newspapers and sanitary reform. The fun
has gone out of Vanity Fair, and the House of the Seven Gables is an
hotel with seven hundred beds.

Comfort, electric light, railway sleeping-cars, and equality are
excellent things, but they are the death of romance. The essence of
romance is variety, contrast, individuality, the eccentric, the
unconventional. Level up society, put nineteen out of every twenty on
fairly equal terms, popularise literature, and turn the Ten
Commandments into a code of decorum, and you cut up by the roots all
romantic types of life. The England of Fielding and the Scotland of
Scott were breezy, boisterous, disorderly, picturesque, and jolly
worlds, where gay and hot spirits got into mischief and played mad
pranks as, in the words of the old song, "They powlered up and down a
bit and had a rattling day." Laws, police, total abstinence, general
education, and weak digestions have put an end to pranks, as we are all
proud to say. The result is that Romance, finding little of romance in
the real world, has taken two different lines in the desperate effort
to amuse us somehow. The virtuous line is the phonographic
reproduction of everyday life in ordinary situations. The disreputable
line is Zolaesque bestiality, and forced, unreal, unlovely, and
hysterical sensationalism.

It cannot be more than a paradox to pretend that _fin de siècle_ has