"High minds, of native pride and force,
Most deeply feel thy pangs, Remorse!
Fear for their scourge mean villains have,
Thou art the torturer of the brave!"
do they not seem to foreshadow the famous passage in _The Giaour?_--
"The mind that broods o'er guilty woes,
Is like the scorpion girt by fire;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The sting she nourished for her foes,
Whose venom never yet was vain,
Gives but one pang and cures all pain,
And darts into her desperate brain."
There is not merely a certain similarity between Marmion's and Lara's
position and character; they also die in the same manner--fall on the
battle-field, unyielding and ungodly to the last moment of their lives.
But this is all the resemblance between them; and it is just sufficient
to throw Byron's distinguishing characteristics into relief. To Scott,
Marmion's personality is not the principal matter; he makes use of it
for the purpose of grouping round it figures and incidents illustrative
of his country's past; he requires the vices of his hero to set his
simple tale going, but he is not the least absorbed in them, and
describes them quite _impersonally_. When Byron, on the other hand,
describes his earliest criminal heroes, his main object is to arouse
interest in them. Their countenances attract the attention and interest
of every one that sees them, and suggest pride, guilt, hatred, and
defiance; never once in their lives are they, like Marmion, unable to
look their accusers in the face; they live the life of the fabulous
scorpion, "around it flame, within it death." Without hope in heaven,
without solace upon earth, their hearts writhe in haughty agony until
they cease to beat. Marmion was a stony-hearted, selfish knight, but
his last thought and his last words were given to England; he is part
of a greater whole than his own egoistic life. It is quite different
with Byron's earliest heroes. They live entirely in their own inner
life, which forms, as it were, a complete and separate world in itself;
and the poet has been careful to allow the reader to catch sight of
a similar dark, complete, and separate world in his, Byron's, soul.
We catch a glimpse of his own _Ego_ behind the fictitious one; we are
conscious of a heart that has suffered, and that seeks relief in veiled
confessions and mysterious outbursts: the manner of presentation is, in
short, personal in the highest degree; and this means a revolution in
English poetical art.
The success of Scott's genuinely epic poem was not due to its hero, but
to its events, and especially to the battle scenes in the last canto,
which enthusiastic critics declared to be the finest out of Homer.
And if the poem was well adapted to excite the admiration of Scott's
sedate countrymen, it was not less adapted to please the court. Byron
was right when he said to the Prince Regent that Scott struck him as
being "more particularly the poet of _Princes_, as they never appeared
more fascinating than in _Marmion_ and _The Lady of the Lake_." It
is even probable that there are in _Marmion_ direct allusions to the
Prince Regent and his wife. The former can hardly have read unmoved the
description of King James in his gorgeous court dress:--
"For royal was his garb and mien,
His cloak of crimson velvet piled,
Trimmed with the fur of marten wild;
His vest of changeful satin sheen,
The dazzled eye beguiled."
--_Marmion_, v. 8.
And the unfortunate, disgraced Princess of Wales, whose personal
acquaintance Scott made when he was lionised in London for the first
time, in 1806, and to whose party he, as a Tory, belonged, may well
have applied to her own case the poem's description of the forsaken
Queen Margaret, who led such a lonely life whilst the chivalrous,
dissolute monarch spent his time with his mistresses.
Begun in 1806, _Marmion_ was published in 1808, and when, in the
following year, Scott for the second time visited London, he met with
a reception that would have turned any other man's head. He played his
part of lion with a good-nature and humour rare in a man who is the
hero of the moment in a great metropolis. We read that once, after
he had been entertaining a large company with his stories and quaint
humour, when most of the guests had gone; leaving him with only a few
intimate friends, he laughed at himself and quoted: "I know that I one
Snug the joiner am--no lion fell." And so modest was he that, when the
conversation one day turned on himself in connection with Burns, he
emphatically declared himself unworthy to be named on the same day as
that great poet.
But if Scott was a tame, gentle lion, he was a remarkably fierce Tory.
The special purpose of his journey to London was the enlistment of
contributors to the _Quarterly Review_. He desired that this periodical
should be conducted on strictly Conservative principles, and he was
especially firm on the subject of Catholic Emancipation. His theory was
that if a particular sect of religionists are _ipse facto_ connected
with foreign politics and placed under the spiritual direction of a
class of priests of unrivalled dexterity and activity, the state ought
to be excused from entrusting them with confidential posts. "If a
gentleman chooses to walk about with a couple of pounds of gunpowder
in his pocket, if I give him the shelter of my roof, I may at least
be permitted to exclude him from the seat next the fire." Scott
continued all his life to be of this opinion. Only a few years before
his death, he said to his son-in-law: "I hold Popery to be such a mean
and depraving superstition, that I am not sure I could have found
myself liberal enough for voting the repeal of the penal laws as they
existed before 1780. But now that you have taken the plaster off the
old lady of Babylon's mouth, and given her free respiration, I cannot
see the sense of keeping up the irritation about the claim to sit in
Parliament." We understand in what need the English public stood of
poets like Moore, like Byron and Shelley, when we hear a man of Scott's
noble nature and culture express himself with such shameful and cruel
narrow-mindedness.
In 1810 appeared the _The Lady of the Lake_, a work which still further
increased its author's popularity. The fresh breezes from the woods
and hills which blow through this beautiful poem, its gentle ardour,
its genuine feeling, which never becomes wild passion, its story, the
effect of which is not, as so often with Wordsworth, destroyed by the
introduction of charitable sentiments and religious exhortations--all
this captivated the reading public. As a proof of the interest taken
in the book, it may be mentioned that the receipts of the post-houses
nearest the district where its scene is laid were doubled. To find a
parallel incident we must again turn to the pages which tell the story
of Scott's life. When _Guy Mannering_, of which 6000 copies were sold
in two days, came out, it was reported that Scott had called Dandie
Dinmont's two dogs, Pepper and Mustard, after two actually existing
terriers, to which a Liddesdale farmer had given these odd names. This
man, whose name was Davidson, and who was not really portrayed in the
novel at all, became so famous that people took long journeys to see
him; a lady of rank, who desired to possess a couple of dogs of the
famous breed, but who did not know the farmer's name, addressed her
letter to "Dandie Dinmont," and it reached its proper destination.
_The Lady of the Lake_ met with an almost equally cordial reception.
We read that on the day when it reached Sir Adam Fergusson, a Scottish
captain serving in Portugal, he was posted with his company on a point
of ground exposed to the enemy's artillery. The men were ordered to
lie prostrate on the ground, and while they kept that attitude, the
captain, kneeling at their head, read aloud the description of the
battle in Canto vi., and the listening soldiers only interrupted him
by a joyous huzza whenever the French shot struck the bank close above
them.
What the modern and foreign reader of this poem finds in it now is,
in the first place, strong national feeling; the memories of ancient
days, of feudal customs, of Scottish royalty, of the clan's fidelity
to its chief, are chanted in lucid, vivid, simple verse. Along with
this, he finds descriptions of nature with the dew as fresh on them
as on Christian Winther's. What he does not find is any attempt at
psychological character portrayal. There is an old bard, Allan by name,
and another Romantic old character, half Druid, half prophet, Brian by
name; there are Romantic dreams which come true, and prophecies which
are fulfilled. But these personages and incidents have their place in
the poem because they belong to the period and the people, not because
they are mysterious. There is not a trace to be found of the Romantic
belief in horrors. For, much as Scott enjoyed hearing or writing
anything of the nature of a ghost story, he was, unlike the German
Romanticists, totally unimpressionable as regarded the mysteriously
horrible. He tells somewhere that, having arrived one evening at a
country inn, he was informed that there was no bed for him. "No place
to lie down at all?" said he. "No," said the people of the house,
"none, except a room in which there is a corpse lying." "Well," said
he, "did the person die of any contagious disorder?" "Oh no; not at
all," said they. "Well, then," continued he, "let me have the other
bed." "So," said Sir Walter, "I laid me down, and never had a better
night's sleep in my life."
There is no want of freshness in the Romantic flavour of _The Lady
of the Lake_; what really takes away from its attractiveness for us,
nowadays, is the theatricalness of its representation of manners and
customs. Scott has not succeeded in steering quite clear of this most
perilous of reefs for the Romantic epic, the reef on which Southey
suffered shipwreck. Take, for example, the description of the call
of the clan to arms by the youth bearing the blood-stained cross.
Everything is pushed to an extreme to produce the theatrical effect.
The young man comes first to a house where funeral rites are being
held, and forces the son to leave his father's corpse and his weeping
mother; then he meets a wedding procession, and takes the bridegroom
away from the bride. We seem to see the procession crossing the stage,
and to feel the impressive effect produced by the sudden appearance of
the cross-bearer from behind the scenes. Things happen just as they do
in the theatre: a loud whistle, and empty valleys are filled and bare
heights covered with armed men--a wave of the hand, and they disappear
again. They are _general effects_ that we are conscious of; we feel
that the poet is interested in the people, not in the individual. His
first and chief aim was to represent in strong relief the beautiful
traditional customs of his country: the stranger is welcomed in the
hut without a question being asked--the combatant chivalrously shares
his plaid with his exhausted antagonist. His second aim was to excite
his reader pleasurably by means of surprises: Fitzjames's Highland
guide suddenly makes himself known as the redoubted chief, Roderick
Dhu--Fitzjames himself proves to be the King of Scotland. But how light
and joyous and healthfully pure is the flow of this hymn of praise of
Scotland and the Scotch! The King, high-spirited and honourable as
one of Calderon's kings, masters his own passion; and the Highlanders
and the Lowlanders, men and women, have their hearts in the right
place. We enjoy the glimpse into the harmonious world, and do not miss
Wordsworth's castigatory and admonitory psychology.
We have a really interesting counterpart to _The Lady of the Lake_ in
Wordsworth's _White Doe of Rylstone_, a narrative poem founded on one
of the ballads in Percy's collection, and also begun in 1809. It is in
this work that the poet of Rydal Mount, who probably felt the spirit of
rivalry stir within him, approaches nearest to Scott's peculiar domain.
No one would dream of denying that the feeling in Wordsworth's poem is
much deeper. His dislike of dazzling virtues and brilliant vices has
led him to choose a hero who, although an obedient son and a valiant
knight, refuses, from a sense of duty, to follow his father and his
brother when they raise the standard of revolt against Queen Elizabeth
of England, and who, misunderstood and repudiated, is obliged, without
taking his share of the danger, to witness his kinsmen's defeat
and ignominious punishment. Wordsworth has endowed this hero with
self-abnegation, fortitude, generosity, and Christian piety; but there
is too much affectation of profundity in the poem, too much dragging
in of the half-supernatural, too much sentimentality and unction.
Scott viewed nature and the old customs with the eye of a lover of the
chase, Wordsworth with the eye of the moralist. Wordsworth's ponderous
cargo-boat ploughs its way heavily through the water; Scott's poet's
skiff flies along with all sails set, leaving only light bubbles of
fancy behind in the reader's memory; it is like the boat in the Third
Canto of his poem, which flies so fast that
"The bubbles where they launched the boat
Were all unbroken and afloat,
Dancing in foam and ripple still,
When it had neared the mainland hill."
It is easy to understand that Scott's writings, with their
glorification of the chivalrous virtues, of daring and courage, even
when displayed by rebel chiefs, pirates, gipsies, smugglers, &c.; in
short, with its tendency in the direction of Byronic partiality for the
bold and wild, were, from one point of view, highly objectionable in
the eyes of the moral and Christian poets of the Lake School. Coleridge
charged his novels with "ministering to the depraved appetite for
excitement, and creating sympathy for the vicious and infamous, solely
because the fiend is daring"; and he concluded his ill-natured attack
with the incorrect prophecy: "Not twenty lines of Scott's poetry will
ever reach posterity; it has relation to nothing."
In 1812 the first two cantos of _Childe Harold_ saw the light. Not
long after their publication, Byron wrote a most friendly letter to
Scott, containing a hearty apology for the foolish attack in _English
Bards and Scotch Reviewers_. The younger poet had hastily taunted
and reproached the elder, not only with choosing as his favourite
hero a mixture of felon and knight ("not quite a felon, yet but half
a knight"), but with accepting payment for his works ("racking his
brains for lucre, not for fame")--a thing which, in his youth, Byron's
aristocratic pride prevented his doing, much as he stood in need of
money. After he left England for the second time, he, too, learned to
make his art a lucrative profession. He repented his rash condemnation
of Scott as heartily as he repented all his other hasty judgments of
the same nature, and the strained relationship between the two great
and noble-hearted men gave way to the most friendly feeling.
The influence of _Childe Harold_ on Scott's literary career was
decisive. He was unbiassed enough to see plainly that he could not
compete with Byron in narrative poetry, and he therefore determined to
turn his attention to another branch of literature, that in which he
was soon to stand unrivalled.
The various utterances on this subject, and all the utterances
regarding Byron, which are to be found in Scott's Life and Letters
testify to the kindly disposition and attractive frankness of the great
Scottish author. In 1821 he said to a friend: "In truth, I have long
given up poetry. I have had my day with the public; and being no great
believer in poetical immortality, I was very well pleased to rise a
winner, without continuing the game till I was beggared of any credit
I had acquired. Besides, I felt the prudence of giving way before the
more forcible and powerful genius of Byron. If I were either greedy, or
jealous of poetical fame, I might comfort myself with the thought, that
I would hesitate to strip myself for the contest so fearlessly as Byron
does; or to command the wonder and terror of the public by exhibiting,
in my own person, the sublime attitude of the dying gladiator. But with
the old frankness of twenty years since, I will fairly own, that this
same delicacy of mine may arise more from conscious want of vigour
and inferiority, than from a delicate dislike to the nature of the
conflict." And when, the year before his death, he was asked why he
had relinquished poetry, he said quite simply: "Because Byron beat
me." The gentleman with whom he was talking rejoined that he, for his
part, remembered as many passages of his friend's poetry as of Byron's.
Scott replied: "That may be, but he beat me out of the field in the
description of the strong passions, and in deep-seated knowledge of
the human heart." The recognition of this fact must have been a blow
to Scott, but he could seek solace in the thought which he himself
expressed thus: "If I had occasion to be mortified by the display
of genius which threw into the shade such pretensions as I was then
supposed to possess, I might console myself that, in my own case, the
materials of mental happiness had been mingled in a greater proportion."
_Waverley_, published anonymously in February 1814, was the first of
the long series of novels which made Scott and his country famous
throughout the whole civilised world. These works appeared at the time
when the conclusion of peace with France and the hopeful prospects of
the country generally, had occasioned a special access of national
pride. They are not works which, like those of the greatest writers,
Goethe and Shelley, for instance, indicate different stages of their
author's development and culture; nor are they works inspired by
profoundly moving personal experiences; they are the mature productions
of an inexhaustible gift of story-telling and an extraordinary talent
for description both of men and things. They mark a distinct advance in
two matters--the understanding of history, and the representation of
the life of the middle and lower classes.
The historians of the eighteenth century, who saw, or expected, the
realisation of the ideal in their own day, took up the position rather
of orators than of authors; they occupied themselves with theoretical
questions of government and civilisation, without consideration
of the influence of climatic and geographical conditions, or of
the past history of a nation--the conception of a nation as a race
seldom suggesting itself to them. Sir Walter Scott, on the other
hand, made it his endeavour as a writer of historical fiction to
give a vivid impression of the peculiarities of certain periods and
countries; and he felt the less temptation to endow his heroes with the
characteristics of his own day, as he in his inmost heart preferred the
bright, stirring life of the past to the colourless reasonableness of
that of his own century.
A few years previously, Chateaubriand had, in _Les Martyrs_, made the
first attempt to measure each age by its own standard, and to present
the past to us in living pictures. But Scott was the real discoverer
and first employer of that _local colouring_ in literature which
became the basis of the whole production of French Romanticism. Hugo,
Mérimée, and Gautier took to it at once. And Scott's historic sense
not only made him the pioneer of a whole school of poetry; it gave
his unassuming novels an immense influence over the whole historical
literature of the new century. It was, for example, his _Ivanhoe_, with
its description of the strained relations between the Normans and the
Saxons, which first suggested to Augustin Thierry the idea that the
original force which produced such results as the exploits of Clovis,
Charlemagne, and Hugo Capet, was the racial antagonism between the
Gauls and the Franks. The man whose gift of insight into the inner
life of the modern individual human being was so slight, and who in
an age of peculiarly independent individual development, was hampered
and biassed by the prejudices of patriotism, loyalty, and orthodox
piety--this man, thanks to his vigorous Naturalism, had, when he
observed these same individuals as a clan, as a nation, or as a race,
a perfect understanding of their character as such. Accustomed as he
was to reflect on the difference between Scotchmen and Englishmen, it
was not unnatural that the idea of the racial antipathy between the
Anglo-Saxons and the Normans should, as by an inspiration, occur to
him; and his understanding in such matters makes his descriptions of
the same value to the student of racial, as Byron's are to the student
of individual, psychology.
And to this merit has to be added the great merit of his tales as
descriptions of typical representatives of all classes of society. In
the novels of the eighteenth century--Fielding's, for example--we pass
from one tavern scene to another; in Scott's we are introduced into
private life, with all its domestic details. The descriptions owe their
peculiar excellence to the vigorous realism with which each separate
personage is depicted. Englishmen have always specially prized in their
authors the gift of describing with such distinct, tangible detail
that the object described stands out in relief before the reader's
eye; their sturdy, healthy intellects enjoy the graphic vigour. They
like the poetical picture executed in such strong colours that we see
it before us as if it were a coat of arms painted on a shield. Scott,
as a novelist, gratified this taste. His readers gladly forgave him
the terrible prolixity of his descriptions and his conversations,
because the result was a graphic representation, attained either by
enumerating a long list of attributes or by perpetual insistence upon
some one characteristic trait. And there is no doubt, that, tiresome
as his procedure may sometimes be, he is one of the greatest character
portrayers in all literature. Romanticism has produced nothing finer
than such female characters as Diana Vernon in _Rob Roy_ and Jeanie
Deans in _The Heart of Midlothian_, or such a historic portrait as
Louis XI. in _Quentin Durward_.
But in his production of fiction, Scott was from the beginning guilty
of one great malpractice, a malpractice which descended to a whole
group of talented novelists of a younger generation, namely, the
inartistic hurry with which, tempted by the prospect of an enormously
high price, he produced book after book as if they had been so many
articles of manufacture. In 1809, he had entered into business
relations with a firm of printers and publishers of the name of
Ballantyne, who printed and published the _Quarterly Review_ for him;
after he began to write novels he actually became a partner in this
firm, which was, unfortunately, a more enterprising than safe one.
_Guy Mannering_ was written and printed in twenty-five days; and Scott
was soon producing at the average rate of twelve volumes in a year; it
was quite an ordinary thing for him to write forty printed pages in
a morning. The sale corresponded to the enormous production; 10,000
copies of _Rob Roy_ were sold in one week; and the later novels were
disposed of even faster. In the year 1822, 145,000 volumes of the
novels, old and new, were issued. The prices Scott received increased
with the circulation of his books. For the two first editions of the
_Life of Napoleon_ he was paid £18,000, and his yearly receipts until
1826 were never less than £12,000. He spent his money in improving and
enlarging his estate of Abbotsford, and in the erecting thereon of a
castle-like mansion, where, with princely hospitality, he entertained
hosts of visitors, many of whom settled down and made a lengthy stay.
His fame and popularity increased steadily.
On the occasion of a visit to London in 1815, during which he was
_fêted_, not only as the author, but as the patriot--the distinguished
citizen of Edinburgh who had made himself conspicuous by his ardent
hatred of Napoleon--he was presented to the Prince Regent, who showed
him many marks of favour. An anecdote has been preserved which gives
an idea of the kind of wit with which the heir-apparent succeeded in
ingratiating himself for a short time with those whose friendship he
desired. There was a supper-party at the Prince Regent's, and Scott,
as the guest of the evening, had been kept talking and telling stories
almost without intermission, the Prince all the time trying, jestingly,
to inveigle him into owning himself to be the author of the Waverley
Novels. Scott skilfully extricated himself from one dilemma after
another. To prevent further questioning he entertained the company
with a true story of an old acquaintance, the Scottish judge, Lord
Braxfield. When on circuit, Braxfield was in the habit of spending a
night at the house of a wealthy landed proprietor, who, like himself,
was a keen chess-player. They often left a game to be finished the
following year. The said landed proprietor committed a forgery, and
it fell to Braxfield's lot to pronounce the sentence of death on his
friend, and opponent in the game. He put on the black cap and read the
sentence, which ends with the words, "to be hanged by the neck until
you be dead." Having concluded the awful formula with due solemnity,
he took off the cap, and with a satisfied smile and nod to his old
partner, added: "And now, Donald, my man, I think I've checkmated
ye for ance." The words were hardly out of Scott's mouth when the
Prince Regent shouted: "A bumper with all the honours to the author
of _Waverley!_ and another of the same to the author of _Marmion!_"
adding, with a laugh at Scott's conscious expression and gestures of
denial: "And now, Walter, my man, I have checkmated you for _ance!_"
_The Heart of Midlothian_ one of the best of Scott's works, appeared
in 1818, and raised him to the height of his fame. It was followed,
in December 1819, by _Ivanhoe_, which was also received with the most
enthusiastic approbation. We learn, in connection with this masterly
novel, how few and how insignificant were the elements of reality which
Scott required as a foundation for his imaginary world. A certain Mr.
Skene, who had been travelling in Germany, told him a good deal about
the condition of the Jews there, their peculiar dress and customs, and
the severity with which they were treated. This was enough foundation
for a story of such quality as that of Isaac and Rebecca. Scott in
private life held, as we have seen, extremely narrow-minded opinions on
the question of the political rights of dissenters from the established
religion of the country; it is, consequently, all the greater honour to
him that, as an author, he was unprejudiced enough to make a Jewess the
heroine of his novel, and to endow her with such a matchlessly ideal
and yet natural character.
In 1823 appeared _Quentin Durward_, a work in which Sir Walter for the
first time chose a foreign theme, and which made his fame as great in
France, Germany, and Italy as it already was in England and America. A
perusal of the journal of Mr. Skene's tour in France was all that was
necessary to enable the author to give his tale its admirable local
colouring.
Scott's name was now in every one's mouth, and was familiar even to
the most uneducated of his countrymen. In London, at the time of the
coronation of George IV., he got into a crowd on the line of the royal
procession, and was in actual danger because of his lameness. He
addressed a sergeant, begging to be allowed to pass by him into the
open ground in the middle of the street. The man answered shortly that
his orders were strict, that the thing was impossible. Some new wave
of turbulence approaching from behind, Sir Walter's companion cried in
a loud voice: "Take care, Sir Walter Scott, take care!" The stalwart
dragoon, on hearing the name, said: "What! Sir Walter Scott! He shall
get through anyhow!" He then addressed the soldiers near him--"Make
room, men, for Sir Walter Scott, our great countryman!" The men
answered: "Sir Walter Scott!--God bless him!"--and he was in a moment
within the guarded line of safety. We are reminded of the story of the
French army in Africa receiving Horace Vernet with flourish of trumpet
and beat of drum, and all the military honours due to a general. One
can hardly imagine a greater triumph for an artist than this homage of
the people.
In 1826 came a turn in the great man's fortunes. The firm of
Ballantyne, in which he was a partner, failed; and to the horror of
Sir Walter, who in all private money matters was scrupulously exact,
the deficit proved to amount to the enormous sum of £117,000. He bore
his ruin like a man. The Royal Bank sent a deputation to him with
the message that it placed itself at his disposal; he received an
anonymous offer of a gift of £30,000; but these and all other offers of
assistance he refused. He heroically resolved on the desperate course
of endeavouring to pay off the enormous debt with his pen, determining
to work without respite until he had discharged the liabilities with
which the recklessness and carelessness of others had burdened him.
It is not surprising that from this time onwards the quality of his
works degenerated steadily. The unfortunate author signed contracts for
books--bound himself to produce so and so many volumes per year, of the
contents of which, nay, of the very titles of which he had not even
thought.
At this unhappy time, only a few months after the failure, he lost
his beloved wife. The pressure of business was such that he was
unable to sit by her deathbed. He wrote ceaselessly--half a volume
of _Woodstock_ in four days--harassed all the time by the claims of
unfortunate creditors. The man who was accustomed to have his house
full of visitors, now lived the life of a hermit. Captain Basil Hall
has described the painful impression it made on him to see Sir Walter
Scott, who had been in the habit of taking his meals with his wife
opposite him and friends and strangers round his table, sitting down
alone, to a table laid for one.
He undertook several journeys--one to Paris, for the purpose of
collecting authentic anecdotes concerning Napoleon. On this occasion
a deputation of the _dames de la halle_ presented him with a monster
bouquet. He issued a complete edition of his works; of the first
nine volumes 35,000 copies were sold. He paid many of his debts. The
political reforms in England were a subject of great grief to him;
in 1830 he declared: "England is no longer a place for an honest
man." Exhausted, ill, with part of his face disfigured by a stroke of
paralysis, he went abroad for the last time. In Naples he actually
still busied himself in collecting the greatest possible number of
old Italian ballads and songs. He became so ill that he hastened home
to die in his own country, and breathed his last at Abbotsford in
September 1832, exactly six months after Goethe.
All his life Scott was a sincere, mildly rationalistic believer,
entirely unaffected by the questioning, daring science of his century.
In 1825 he said: "There are few, I trust, who disbelieve the existence
of a God; nay, I doubt if at all times, and in all moods, any single
individual ever adopted that hideous creed." In the course of the
same conversation, however, he allowed that "penal fires and heavenly
melody" were possibly only metaphorical expressions. And we know that
Lord Byron's dedication of _Cain_ to him, instead of offending him,
gave him pleasure. In religion, as in politics and literature, he never
attained to personal emancipation from the traditions by which the
individual is fettered from his birth. Here, too, he left a task which
the position of affairs plainly imposed, to be accomplished by the next
generation of authors.
When we look back from the vantage-ground of our own day on the second,
the prose, period of Scott's authorship, we find it impossible to see
the long series of the Waverley Novels in the same light in which they
appeared to his contemporaries. We understand the satisfaction which
lay in the certainty that they would never give offence, that they
might always be welcomed gladly, not only as gifted, but as perfectly
moral works. This particular qualification is, however, exactly
what makes them less attractive to us. There is no exaggeration in
declaring it to be a law in the modern literature of every country,
that an author must cause offence to at least one generation of his
contemporaries, and be considered immoral by it, if he is not to
seem tiresome and narrow-minded to readers of the period immediately
succeeding his own. To us the defects of Scott's novels are very
plain. They give pleasure by their excellent character-drawing and
the liveliness of their dialogue, but they do not satisfy the reason,
do not appeal very strongly to the feelings, do not even arouse any
great degree of curiosity. They are soulful, but idealess. We feel that
Scott, as a patriotic author, was determined to keep up the interest in
Scotland which Macpherson and Burns had awakened in the reading public;
therefore he writes in such a manner as to estrange not even the most
narrow-minded reader. Himself denied the sensual organisation of the
artist, he is so discreet in his treatment of the relations between
the sexes that there is next to no description of erotic situations.
And, the moral to be conveyed seeming of greater importance to him
than art, he represents past ages with such a toning down of all the
coarse elements that historic truth suffers terribly. The species of
fiction which Scott introduced, and which indicated a distinct step in
advance of the older novel, is now in its turn antiquated; the literary
critics of every country lean to the opinion that the historical novel,
with all its merits, is a bastard species--now it is so hampered
with historical material that the poetic development of the story is
rendered impossible, again it is so free in its paraphrase of history
that the real and the fictitious elements produce a very discordant
whole. In the third volume of _The Heart of Midlothian_ (Chap, x.),
for example, the manner in which imaginary speeches are mixed up with
the historical utterances of the Duke of Argyle, distinctly offends
the critical taste. It becomes, moreover, increasingly evident how
different the general impression conveyed by Scott's pictures of
past times is from the essential character of these far-off days, an
unvarnished representation of which, supposing it to be understood
at all, would certainly fail to awaken sympathy. His _Tales of
the Crusaders_ are circulating-library novels, which describe the
wonder-lands and the romantic, adventurous deeds of the Crusades with
almost as little regard to reality as Tasso's _Gerusalemme Liberata_;
but which do not display anything like the Italian's poetic talent, or
his artistically conscientious attention to style.
How could it be otherwise in the case of an author like Scott, who
wrote without ever re-reading, much less correcting, a page, who
had not the gift of conciseness, and who made no serious demands on
himself in the matter of composition? He demands still less of his
readers, as far as attention and quick apprehension are concerned. He
repeats himself and allows his characters to repeat themselves, puts
in his word in the middle of the story, points out and explains. Not
satisfied with showing the temperament and character of his personages
by their mode of action, he makes them, when necessary, give account
of themselves in such phrases as: "I am speaking with calmness, though
it is contrary to my character"; or in speeches in which the speaker
draws the moral lesson from his own wicked actions, in case the reader
should by any chance miss it and be tempted to imitation. (Read, for
example, George Staunton's whole confession to Jeanie Deans, a model of
bad style and false psychology.) With such serious faults as these in
the details, it is of little avail that the plots of the best novels
are excellent, leading up naturally to dramatic crises, one or more as
the case may be. A book which is to retain its fame for centuries must
not only be poetically planned, but artistically elaborated in every
detail--a task for which Scott, from the moment he began to write in
prose, never left himself time. Even the most dramatic scene he ever
wrote--the splendid and powerfully affecting trial-scene in _The Heart
of Midlothian_, in which Jeanie, with a bleeding heart, but with noble
devotion to the truth, gives witness against her own sister--loses
half of its effect from the careless prolixity of the style. We learn
from Moore's _Memoirs_ that the main theme of the book--the story of
the young girl who refuses to give witness in court in favour of her
sister, and afterwards undertakes the long journey to beg a pardon for
her--is a true story, which was communicated to Scott in an anonymous
letter. He has evidently had the keenest perception of the moral beauty
of the incident, but very little of its essentially dramatic character.
If he had possessed only half the amount of talent that he had, along
with double the amount of culture and instinct of self-criticism, he
would doubtless have made less stir in the world, but he would have
produced works of greater and more enduring value.[3] He himself felt
that what prevented him from attaining to the highest in the domain of
literature was his defective education. In his _Journal_ (i. 56, 57)
there is a curious little survey of his life: "What a life mine has
been!--_half educated, almost wholly neglected or left to myself_,
stuffing my head with most nonsensical trash, undervalued in society
for a time by most of my companions, getting forward, and held a bold,
clever fellow, contrary to the opinion of all who thought me a mere
dreamer.... Now taken in my pitch of pride, and nearly winged, because
London chooses to be in an uproar, and in the tumult of bulls and
bears, a poor inoffensive lion like myself is pushed to the wall."
It is a dangerous thing for a modern author to be entirely unaffected
by the progress of science. If he has not, like Byron, the gift
of divining by a kind of clairvoyance what science is seeking and
ascertaining, his works fall from the hands of the cultivated reader,
to be seized by readers who are only seeking entertainment; or they
are preserved and bound by the cultivated readers, to be given away
as birthday and Christmas gifts to their sons and daughters, nephews
and nieces. Such has been Scott's fate. The author who in the second
and third decades of the nineteenth century ruled the book-market,
whose influence was felt in every country of Europe, who in France had
imitators like Alfred de Vigny, Hugo, Mérimée, Balzac, and the elder
Dumas (_The Three Musketeers_), in Italy a disciple like Manzoni,
in Germany an intellectual kinsman like Fouqué, in Denmark admirers
and pupils like Poul Möller, Ingemann, and Hauch, has become, by the
silent, instructive verdict of time, the favourite author of boys and
girls of fourteen or thereabouts, an author whom all grown-up people
have read, and no grown-up people read.
[1] In the same year the Danish poet Oehlenschläger made his first
appearance before the public, also with a collection of remodelled
ballads. _Digt_, 1803.
[2] Masson: _Scottish Influence in British Literature_.
[3] He does not seem to have had any understanding of plastic art.
Desiring to give an impression of the old Puritan in _The Heart of
Midlothian_, he evolves the following artistically impossible fabulous
creature: "The whole formed a picture, of which the lights might have
been given by Rembrandt, but the outline would have required the force
and vigour of Michael Angelo."