Sir Walter's fingers would have broken a spinet. His was no elaborately patterned music threaded with the light delicacies of melody. He struck big chords and used the loud pedal. His was the art of a Wagner rather than that of a Scarlatti. 'The Big Bow-wow strain,' he wrote, comparing himself with Jane Austen, 'I can do like any now going; but the exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is denied to me.' 'One man can do but one thing. Universal pretensions end in nothing.' Scott knew that jewellery-work was not for him, and never tried his eyes by peering through the watchmaker's glass. He saw life, as a short-sighted man sees a landscape, in its essentials. He could spread over it what dress of detail he preferred, and chose that which came readiest to his hand, flinging over humanity the cloak of his boyish dreams. Humanity was not hampered by it, but moves through his pages like a stout wind over a northern moor. THE ROMANTICISM OF 1830 THE ROMANTICISM OF 1830 [The mingling of the arts.] DUMAS in _La Femme au Collier de Velours_ thus describes Hoffmann's room: 'It was the room of a genius at once capricious and picturesque, for it had the air of a studio, a music-shop, and a study, all together. There was a palette, brushes, and an easel, and on the easel the beginnings of a sketch. There was a guitar, a violin, and a piano, and on the piano an open sonata. There was pen, ink, and paper, and on the paper the first scrawled lines of a ballad. Along the walls were bows, arrows, and arbalests of the fifteenth century, sixteenth-century drawings, seventeenth-century musical instruments, chests of all times, tankards of all shapes, jugs of all kinds, and, lastly, glass necklaces, feather fans, stuffed lizards, dried flowers, a whole world of things, but a whole world not worth twenty-five silver thalers.'