"lord of the ascendant" for the time being. He is just half what the
human intellect is capable of being: if you take the universe, and
divide it into two parts, he knows all that it _has been_; all that
it _is to be_ is nothing to him. His is a mind brooding over
antiquity--scorning "the present ignorant time." He is "laudator
temporis acti"--a "_prophesier_ of things past." The old world is to him
a crowded map; the new one a dull, hateful blank. He dotes on all well-
authenticated superstitions; he shudders at the shadow of innovation.
His retentiveness of memory, his accumulated weight of interested
prejudice or romantic association have overlaid his other faculties. The
cells of his memory are vast, various, full even to bursting with life
and motion; his speculative understanding is empty, flaccid, poor, and
dead. His mind receives and treasures up every thing brought to it by
tradition or custom--it does not project itself beyond this into the
world unknown, but mechanically shrinks back as from the edge of a
prejudice. The land of pure reason is to his apprehension like _Van
Dieman's Land_;--barren, miserable, distant, a place of exile, the
dreary abode of savages, convicts, and adventurers. Sir Walter would
make a bad hand of a description of the _Millennium_, unless he could
lay the scene in Scotland five hundred years ago, and then he would
want facts and worm-eaten parchments to support his drooping style.
Our historical novelist firmly thinks that nothing _is_ but what _has
been_--that the moral world stands still, as the material one was
supposed to do of old--and that we can never get beyond the point where
we actually are without utter destruction, though every thing changes
and will change from what it was three hundred years ago to what it is
now,--from what it is now to all that the bigoted admirer of the good
old times most dreads and hates!
It is long since we read, and long since we thought of our author's
poetry. It would probably have gone out of date with the immediate
occasion, even if he himself had not contrived to banish it from our
recollection. It is not to be denied that it had great merit, both of
an obvious and intrinsic kind. It abounded in vivid descriptions, in
spirited action, in smooth and flowing versification. But it wanted
_character_. It was poetry "of no mark or likelihood." It slid out of
the mind as soon as read, like a river; and would have been forgotten,
but that the public curiosity was fed with ever-new supplies from the
same teeming liquid source. It is not every man that can write six
quarto volumes in verse, that are caught up with avidity, even by
fastidious judges. But what a difference between _their_ popularity and
that of the Scotch Novels! It is true, the public read and admired the
_Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion_, and so on, and each individual was
contented to read and admire because the public did so: but with
regard to the prose-works of the same (supposed) author, it is quite
_another-guess_ sort of thing. Here every one stands forward to applaud
on his own ground, would be thought to go before the public opinion,
is eager to extol his favourite characters louder, to understand them
better than every body else, and has his own scale of comparative
excellence for each work, supported by nothing but his own enthusiastic
and fearless convictions. It must be amusing to the _Author of Waverley_
to hear his readers and admirers (and are not these the same thing?[A])
quarrelling which of his novels is the best, opposing character to
character, quoting passage against passage, striving to surpass each
other in the extravagance of their encomiums, and yet unable to settle
the precedence, or to do the author's writings justice--so various,
so equal, so transcendant are their merits! His volumes of poetry were
received as fashionable and well-dressed acquaintances: we are ready
to tear the others in pieces as old friends. There was something
meretricious in Sir Walter's ballad-rhymes; and like those who keep
opera _figurantes_, we were willing to have our admiration shared, and
our taste confirmed by the town: but the Novels are like the betrothed
of our hearts, bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh, and we are
jealous that any one should be as much delighted or as thoroughly
acquainted with their beauties as ourselves. For which of his poetical
heroines would the reader break a lance so soon as for Jeanie Deans?
What _Lady of the Lake_ can compare with the beautiful Rebecca? We
believe the late Mr. John Scott went to his death-bed (though a painful
and premature one) with some degree of satisfaction, inasmuch as he had
penned the most elaborate panegyric on the _Scotch Novels_ that had as
yet appeared!--The _Epics_ are not poems, so much as metrical romances.
There is a glittering veil of verse thrown over the features of nature
and of old romance. The deep incisions into character are "skinned and
filmed over"--the details are lost or shaped into flimsy and insipid
decorum; and the truth of feeling and of circumstance is translated into
a tinkling sound, a tinsel _common-place_. It must be owned, there is a
power in true poetry that lifts the mind from the ground of reality to
a higher sphere, that penetrates the inert, scattered, incoherent
materials presented to it, and by a force and inspiration of its own,
melts and moulds them into sublimity and beauty. But Sir Walter (we
contend, under correction) has not this creative impulse, this plastic
power, this capacity of reacting on his first impressions. He is a
learned, a literal, a _matter-of-fact_ expounder of truth or fable:[B]
he does not soar above and look down upon his subject, imparting his own
lofty views and feelings to his descriptions of nature--he relies
upon it, is raised by it, is one with it, or he is nothing. A poet is
essentially a _maker_; that is, he must atone for what he loses in
individuality and local resemblance by the energies and resources of his
own mind. The writer of whom we speak is deficient in these last. He has
either not the faculty or not the will to impregnate his subject by an
effort of pure invention. The execution also is much upon a par with
the more ephemeral effusions of the press. It is light, agreeable,
effeminate, diffuse. Sir Walter's Muse is a _Modern Antique_. The
smooth, glossy texture of his verse contrasts happily with the quaint,
uncouth, rugged materials of which it is composed; and takes away any
appearance of heaviness or harshness from the body of local traditions
and obsolete costume. We see grim knights and iron armour; but then they
are woven in silk with a careless, delicate hand, and have the softness
of flowers. The poet's figures might be compared to old [C] tapestries
copied on the finest velvet:--they are not like Raphael's _Cartoons_,
but they are very like Mr. Westall's drawings, which accompany, and are
intended to illustrate them. This facility and grace of execution is the
more remarkable, as a story goes that not long before the appearance of
the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_ Sir Walter (then Mr.) Scott, having, in
the company of a friend, to cross the Frith of Forth in a ferry-boat,
they proposed to beguile the time by writing a number of verses on a
given subject, and that at the end of an hour's hard study, they found
they had produced only six lines between them. "It is plain," said the
unconscious author to his fellow-labourer, "that you and I need never
think of getting our living by writing poetry!" In a year or so after
this, he set to work, and poured out quarto upon quarto, as if they had
been drops of water. As to the rest, and compared with true and great
poets, our Scottish Minstrel is but "a metre ballad-monger." We would
rather have written one song of Burns, or a single passage in Lord
Byron's _Heaven and Earth_, or one of Wordsworth's "fancies and
good-nights," than all his epics. What is he to Spenser, over whose
immortal, ever-amiable verse beauty hovers and trembles, and who has
shed the purple light of Fancy, from his ambrosial wings, over all
nature? What is there of the might of Milton, whose head is canopied in
the blue serene, and who takes us to sit with him there? What is there
(in his ambling rhymes) of the deep pathos of Chaucer? Or of the
o'er-informing power of Shakespear, whose eye, watching alike the
minutest traces of characters and the strongest movements of passion,
"glances from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven," and with the
lambent flame of genius, playing round each object, lights up the
universe in a robe of its own radiance? Sir Walter has no voluntary
power of combination: all his associations (as we said before) are those
of habit or of tradition. He is a mere narrative and descriptive poet,
garrulous of the old time. The definition of his poetry is a pleasing
superficiality.
Not so of his NOVELS AND ROMANCES. There we turn over a new
leaf--another and the same--the same in matter, but in form, in power
how different! The author of Waverley has got rid of the tagging of
rhymes, the eking out of syllables, the supplying of epithets, the
colours of style, the grouping of his characters, and the regular march
of events, and comes to the point at once, and strikes at the heart
of his subject, without dismay and without disguise. His poetry was a
lady's waiting-maid, dressed out in cast-off finery: his prose is a
beautiful, rustic nymph, that, like Dorothea in Don Quixote, when she is
surprised with dishevelled tresses bathing her naked feet in the brook,
looks round her, abashed at the admiration her charms have excited! The
grand secret of the author's success in these latter productions is that
he has completely got rid of the trammels of authorship; and torn off at
one rent (as Lord Peter got rid of so many yards of lace in the _Tale of
a Tub_) all the ornaments of fine writing and worn-out sentimentality.
All is fresh, as from the hand of nature: by going a century or two back
and laying the scene in a remote and uncultivated district, all becomes
new and startling in the present advanced period.--Highland manners,
characters, scenery, superstitions, Northern dialect and costume, the
wars, the religion, and politics of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, give a charming and wholesome relief to the fastidious
refinement and "over-laboured lassitude" of modern readers, like the
effect of plunging a nervous valetudinarian into a cold-bath. The
_Scotch Novels_, for this reason, are not so much admired in Scotland as
in England. The contrast, the transition is less striking. From the top
of the Calton-Hill, the inhabitants of "Auld Reekie" can descry, or
fancy they descry the peaks of Ben Lomond and the waving outline of Rob
Roy's country: we who live at the southern extremity of the island can
only catch a glimpse of the billowy scene in the descriptions of the
Author of Waverley. The mountain air is most bracing to our languid
nerves, and it is brought us in ship-loads from the neighbourhood
of Abbot's-Ford. There is another circumstance to be taken into the
account. In Edinburgh there is a little opposition and something of
the spirit of cabal between the partisans of works proceeding from Mr.
Constable's and Mr. Blackwood's shops. Mr. Constable gives the highest
prices; but being the Whig bookseller, it is grudged that he should
do so. An attempt is therefore made to transfer a certain share of
popularity to the second-rate Scotch novels, "the embryo fry, the little
airy of _ricketty_ children," issuing through Mr. Blackwood's shop-door.
This operates a diversion, which does not affect us here. The Author of
Waverley wears the palm of legendary lore alone. Sir Walter may, indeed,
surfeit us: his imitators make us sick! It may be asked, it has been
asked, "Have we no materials for romance in England? Must we look to
Scotland for a supply of whatever is original and striking in this
kind?" And we answer--"Yes!" Every foot of soil is with us worked up:
nearly every movement of the social machine is calculable. We have no
room left for violent catastrophes; for grotesque quaintnesses; for
wizard spells. The last skirts of ignorance and barbarism are seen
hovering (in Sir Walter's pages) over the Border. We have, it is true,
gipsies in this country as well as at the Cairn of Derncleugh: but they
live under clipped hedges, and repose in camp-beds, and do not perch
on crags, like eagles, or take shelter, like sea-mews, in basaltic
subterranean caverns. We have heaths with rude heaps of stones upon
them: but no existing superstition converts them into the Geese of
Micklestane-Moor, or sees a Black Dwarf groping among them. We have
sects in religion: but the only thing sublime or ridiculous in that way
is Mr. Irving, the Caledonian preacher, who "comes like a satyr staring
from the woods, and yet speaks like an orator!" We had a Parson Adams
not quite a hundred years ago--a Sir Roger de Coverley rather more than
a hundred! Even Sir Walter is ordinarily obliged to pitch his angle
(strong as the hook is) a hundred miles to the North of the "Modern
Athens" or a century back. His last work,[A] indeed, is mystical,
is romantic in nothing but the title-page. Instead of "a
holy-water sprinkle dipped in dew," he has given us a fashionable
watering-place--and we see what he has made of it. He must not come down
from his fastnesses in traditional barbarism and native rusticity: the
level, the littleness, the frippery of modern civilization will undo him
as it has undone us!
Sir Walter has found out (oh, rare discovery) that facts are better than
fiction; that there is no romance like the romance of real life; and
that if we can but arrive at what men feel, do, and say in striking and
singular situations, the result will be "more lively, audible, and full
of vent," than the fine-spun cobwebs of the brain. With reverence be it
spoken, he is like the man who having to imitate the squeaking of a pig
upon the stage, brought the animal under his coat with him. Our author
has conjured up the actual people he has to deal with, or as much as he
could get of them, in "their habits as they lived." He has ransacked old
chronicles, and poured the contents upon his page; he has squeezed out
musty records; he has consulted wayfaring pilgrims, bed-rid sibyls; he
has invoked the spirits of the air; he has conversed with the living and
the dead, and let them tell their story their own way; and by borrowing
of others, has enriched his own genius with everlasting variety, truth,
and freedom. He has taken his materials from the original, authentic
sources, in large concrete masses, and not tampered with or too much
frittered them away. He is only the amanuensis of truth and history. It
is impossible to say how fine his writings in consequence are, unless we
could describe how fine nature is. All that portion of the history of
his country that he has touched upon (wide as the scope is) the manners,
the personages, the events, the scenery, lives over again in his
volumes. Nothing is wanting--the illusion is complete. There is a
hurtling in the air, a trampling of feet upon the ground, as these
perfect representations of human character or fanciful belief come
thronging back upon our imaginations. We will merely recall a few of
the subjects of his pencil to the reader's recollection; for nothing we
could add, by way of note or commendation, could make the impression
more vivid.
There is (first and foremost, because the earliest of our acquaintance)
the Baron of Bradwardine, stately, kind-hearted, whimsical, pedantic;
and Flora MacIvor (whom even _we_ forgive for her Jacobitism), the
fierce Vich Ian Vohr, and Evan Dhu, constant in death, and Davie
Gellatly roasting his eggs or turning his rhymes with restless
volubility, and the two stag-hounds that met Waverley, as fine as ever
Titian painted, or Paul Veronese:--then there is old Balfour of Burley,
brandishing his sword and his Bible with fire-eyed fury, trying a
fall with the insolent, gigantic Bothwell at the 'Change-house, and
vanquishing him at the noble battle of Loudonhill; there is Bothwell
himself, drawn to the life, proud, cruel, selfish, profligate, but with
the love-letters of the gentle Alice (written thirty years before), and
his verses to her memory, found in his pocket after his death: in the
same volume of _Old Mortality_ is that lone figure, like a figure in
Scripture, of the woman sitting on the stone at the turning to the
mountain, to warn Burley that there is a lion in his path; and
the fawning Claverhouse, beautiful as a panther, smooth-looking,
blood-spotted; and the fanatics, Macbriar and Mucklewrath, crazed with
zeal and sufferings; and the inflexible Morton, and the faithful Edith,
who refused to "give her hand to another while her heart was with her
lover in the deep and dead sea." And in _The Heart of Mid-Lothian_ we
have Effie Deans (that sweet, faded flower) and Jeanie, her more than
sister, and old David Deans, the patriarch of St. Leonard's Crags, and
Butler, and Dumbiedikes, eloquent in his silence, and Mr. Bartoline
Saddle-tree and his prudent helpmate, and Porteous swinging in the
wind, and Madge Wildfire, full of finery and madness, and her ghastly
mother.--Again, there is Meg Merrilies, standing on her rock, stretched
on her bier with "her head to the east," and Dirk Hatterick (equal to
Shakespear's Master Barnardine), and Glossin, the soul of an attorney,
and Dandy Dinmont, with his terrier-pack and his pony Dumple, and the
fiery Colonel Mannering, and the modish old counsellor Pleydell, and
Dominie Sampson,[D] and Rob Roy (like the eagle in his eyry), and
Baillie Nicol Jarvie, and the inimitable Major Galbraith, and Rashleigh
Osbaldistone, and Die Vernon, the best of secret-keepers; and in the
_Antiquary_, the ingenious and abstruse Mr. Jonathan Oldbuck, and the
old beadsman Edie Ochiltree, and that preternatural figure of old Edith
Elspeith, a living shadow, in whom the lamp of life had been long
extinguished, had it not been fed by remorse and "thick-coming"
recollections; and that striking picture of the effects of feudal
tyranny and fiendish pride, the unhappy Earl of Glenallan; and the Black
Dwarf, and his friend Habbie of the Heughfoot (the cheerful hunter), and
his cousin Grace Armstrong, fresh and laughing like the morning; and the
_Children of the Mint_, and the baying of the blood-hound that tracks
their steps at a distance (the hollow echoes are in our ears now), and
Amy and her hapless love, and the villain Varney, and the deep voice of
George of Douglas--and the immoveable Balafre, and Master Oliver the
Barber in Quentin Durward--and the quaint humour of the Fortunes of
Nigel, and the comic spirit of Peveril of the Peak--and the fine old
English romance of Ivanhoe. What a list of names! What a host of
associations! What a thing is human life! What a power is that of
genius! What a world of thought and feeling is thus rescued from
oblivion! How many hours of heartfelt satisfaction has our author given
to the gay and thoughtless! How many sad hearts has he soothed in pain
and solitude! It is no wonder that the public repay with lengthened
applause and gratitude the pleasure they receive. He writes as fast as
they can read, and he does not write himself down. He is always in the
public eye, and we do not tire of him. His worst is better than any
other person's best. His _backgrounds_ (and his later works are little
else but back-grounds capitally made out) are more attractive than the
principal figures and most complicated actions of other writers. His
works (taken together) are almost like a new edition of human nature.
This is indeed to be an author!