Scott's experience enabled him to add a command of rich and rare
material: his subject-matter was quite worthy of the powers which he
brought to bear upon it. Indeed, few literary men have been more
favoured by time and place. For, letting alone the fact that the West
Indies were in those days virgin soil to the romance-writer, letting
alone the glorious opportunities afforded by a familiarity with Nature
in the tropics, studied in storm and calm, by land and sea--and
especially to a man of Scott's taste for strong effects, one gifted with
his eye for atmosphere, whose genius itself has something of tropical
grandeur and luxuriance, were these opportunities valuable,--letting
alone, also, the rich and varied social order amid which he moved--its
quaint and original types of planter and seaman, the picturesqueness of
its desperadoes, and the naivete of its coloured people--Scott's sojourn
in the islands was timed at a particularly stirring epoch in their
history. Warfare, smuggling and piracy, slavery and the suppression of
the slave-trade were being carried on before his eyes; and it is even
suggested that such scenes as the boarding of the _Wave_, the
examination of Job Rumble-tithump, and the trial and execution of the
pirates, may very probably have had their foundation in things actually
witnessed by the writer. Now I suppose that I am not singular, and that
like myself many genuine lovers of romance delight to cherish the belief
that what they are reading, if not actually true, is at least in some
way related to the author's experience. In this respect Scott satisfies
us perfectly. And herein lies his immense advantage over other
competitors in the same field. For in reading, for instance (admirable
as they are), the pirate scenes of the _Master of Ballantrae_, we cannot
but miss this sense,--so that whilst we hear with bated breath of bloody
deeds and hairbreadth 'scapes, we are haunted all the while by an uneasy
feeling that this is all but a most brilliantly executed _fantasia_, or
variation, upon documents.
Granting, then, that rarely if ever have more brilliant pictures of more
interesting incidents been more lavishly set before a reader than in the
pages of _Tom Cringle's Log_, we are impelled to enquire what are the
corresponding weaknesses which have debarred the author from taking the
highest rank as a writer. The answer is not far to seek; it is a defect
of constructive power. If he possessed much genius, Michael Scott had
but little art. The effect of his fine pictures is not cumulative; each
is alike revealed, as it were, by a powerful flash, and the result is
that they obliterate one another. For it is surely needless to point out
that every work of high artistic achievement is a whole, and that in
that whole, and in relation to that whole, each part has a value
greatly exceeding its value when considered separately. But in Scott's
stories this is not so. Remove any one incident from one of his stories,
and the reader will be the poorer by the loss of an interesting
incident, and by no more. And so, with injury only of the same kind, his
books might be extended or curtailed, whilst their incidents might be
transposed without injury at all. I am aware that to write in this
somewhat heavily academic style of a writer than whom no man of equal
gifts made ever less pretention, may be to incur the imputation of
taking too high a ground, and to draw down criticism upon the critic's
head. I can only reply that the extreme excellence, within their own
limits, of Scott's literary achievements has provoked me to it, and that
had his works shown less surprising merit they should have been treated
in a lighter vein.
The same neglect of constructive power which strikes us in the conduct
of the tales is apparent in the treatment of the characters. It is the
practice of masters of characterisation to make their characters, so to
speak, _turn round_ before the reader, so that, ere the end of the book
is reached, no aspect of them shall have been left unseen. But with
Scott one aspect is exhibited repeatedly, and thus our knowledge is
circumscribed. That the characters live we feel assured, but with one or
two such exceptions as Aaron and Obed, it is as members of a class that
we recognise them, not as _individuals_, whilst again and again as we
read we are compelled to turn back would we distinguish from his fellows
any particular one among the quaintly-named officers and seamen.
In female portraiture Scott attempts but little, in which he is
probably well-advised. For though Cringle's sweetheart is certainly a
pleasing sketch enough, in his more ambitious and quasi-Byronic
flights--the delineation of the pirate's leman or the bride of
Adderfang--the author for the moment leaves nature behind him, and
consequently gives us almost the only passages in his books which do not
ring true. These passages may perhaps be held to justify the
condemnation of Captain Marryat, who pronounced him melodramatic.
But--despite the strong nature of the fare which he provides--melodramatic,
except in such passages, he certainly is not. For to describe thrilling
situations, with the eye not fixed upon the situations themselves but
intent on their _effect_, is melodrama in the true sense; and of this
the genial author of _The Pirate and Three Cutters_ himself supplies
some choice examples.
It strikes a reader as strange that the occasion of Cringle's visit to
Carthagena evokes no allusion to Smollett, for it is with Smollett and
Marryat that we most naturally think of comparing Cringle's creator.
Michael Scott does not rise to the Cervantic heights of humour of the
former; but few, indeed, are the writers who have done this. Nor, of
course, has he Smollett's style; though, on the other side of the
account, with thankfulness we acknowledge that his page is quite free
from Smollett's filth and coarseness. Marryat also possessed more of the
gifts of the novelist than Scott, or at least had greater opportunities
of showing them. But there is one point, and that a most telling one, in
which Scott has immeasurably the advantage of the others--he comes far
_nearer to the reader_ than either of them. Of course his easy and
homely style, his use of the first person, his occasional confidential
digressions, are means employed towards this end, but equally of course
the secret of his success lies in his personality. Personality, or, in
other words, genius it is which gives him his power over the reader--a
power which makes even the refractory and fastidious to follow him, as a
dog follows its master. Constitutionally a reader may have small relish
for farce, and a positive distaste for horse-play; and yet when Scott is
in the mood for either, the reader will become so too. And in a higher
and sweeter kind of humour, his power is equally in proportion to the
demand of the occasion--in support of which I can cite no better
evidence than the delightful scenes in which the sailors of the _Midge_
seek to resuscitate the apparently drowned baby boy, afterwards
nicknamed Dicky Phantom; and in which their joy is expressed when he
gives signs of life; with Dogvane's mission to the officer in command to
plead on behalf of his mess-mates for the custody of the child (which
shall replace in their affections a parrot blown away in a gale, a
monkey washed overboard, and a cat which has died of cold) and the
subsequent scenes in which, with a comical shamefaced roundaboutness,
one after another, to the admiral himself, puts in his claim for the
care of the babe. Scenes more winningly human than these would, I think,
be far to seek. In equal degree does this beloved writer hold the key to
our manlier enthusiasms. Far distant be the day when amongst
generous-minded boys such books as his shall lose their popularity, for
it is by these that the best lessons of our history are enforced. It has
been said of the playwright Shakespeare that his works are proof that he
had it in him to strike a stout blow in a good cause. The spirit of
Agincourt was not found wanting at Trafalgar, and the same may be said
with truth of the Glasgow merchant, Scott. The voice of Britain's
greatness itself speaks in his books, and as we read them we seem
brought nearer to the spirit of Drake or of Dundonald.
In conclusion, Scott's stories have here been considered together, for
though the _Log_ is on the whole justly the favourite of the two, in
general characteristics they are almost identical. Quite towards the
close, both books display some slight tendency to 'drag,' but in this
respect the _Cruise_ is the worse transgressor. It is also the more
loosely put together, and this despite the fact that in the relations
subsisting between Lennox and Adderfang, and the mystery which surrounds
young De Walden, the author has obviously been at pains to sustain
interest by something in the nature of a plot. Again, if he does not
repeat himself in the _Cruise_, Scott at least does not steer quite
clear of all danger of doing so; for, in addition to the fact that the
general pattern of the two tales is the same, several incidents of the
latter have counterparts in the former. And yet, on the whole, such fine
books are they both that to criticise either is deservedly to incur the
imputation of being spoiled with good things.
FOOTNOTES:
[9] No. 198 Atholl Place. Article in _Glasgow Herald_, 1st May 1895.
THOMAS HAMILTON
The statement--somewhat disquieting to the professed litterateur--that
almost any man may if he choose write one good book in a life-time,
finds something like confirmation in the case of Thomas Hamilton. Not
primarily a writer, and not gifted by nature with any very remarkable
talent or grace of the pen, he yet contrived to produce a book for which
a few transcripts of military life in peace and war, a few pictures of
travel, perhaps a portrait or two drawn from the life, have sufficed to
preserve, after seventy years, a portion of the favour with which it was
greeted on its first appearance. The materials for a sketch of his
career are scanty, but blanks in the narrative may to some extent be
filled in from a perusal of _Cyril Thornton_.
Born in the year 1789, he was the younger son of William Hamilton,
Professor of Anatomy and Botany in the University of Glasgow, his elder
brother becoming in time Sir William Hamilton, the celebrated
metaphysician and intellectual luminary of Edinburgh. He was put to
school in the south of England, and about the year 1803 entered the
Glasgow University, where he studied for three winters, giving evidence,
as his brother has borne witness, of ability rather than of application.
His taste for a military life was at first opposed, but having satisfied
his friends by experiment that he was unsuited for a commercial career,
in 1810 he obtained by purchase a commission in the 29th Regiment. He
had hardly joined, when the corps was ordered out to active service in
the Peninsula, where it bore the brunt of the hardly-won battle of
Albuera, in which Hamilton himself was wounded by a musket bullet in the
thigh. During his short military career, he was once more on active
service in the Peninsula, and also served in Nova Scotia and New
Brunswick during the American War, subsequent to which he returned to
Europe, his regiment being sent as part of the army of occupation to
France. Retiring on half-pay about the year 1818, he came to reside in
Edinburgh, and began to turn his attention to literature. He had
received a good classical education, and being well introduced, he was
hailed as a congenial spirit by the Blackwood circle, and becoming
associated with the magazine, threw himself into the spirit of the
enterprise, to which he furnished contributions both in verse and prose.
In the _Noctes Ambrosianae_ he occasionally figures as 'O'Doherty,' a
name, however, which was also applied to Dr Maginn. He is described in
_Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk_ as possessing a 'noble grand
Spaniard-looking head,' with a very sombre expression of countenance,
and a tall graceful person. The natural freedom of his movements seems,
however, to have been to some extent impeded by his wound. Carlyle, who
knew him later, describes him as a 'pleasant, very courteous, and
intelligently talking man, enduring, in a cheery military humour, his
old Peninsular hurts,' and altogether it is easy to see that he must
have formed an interesting and popular figure in the Edinburgh society
of his day.
Having married in 1820, he resided for several summers at the
picturesque little dwelling of Chiefswood, near Melrose, where he had an
appreciative neighbour in the person of Sir Walter Scott, and where the
greater part of the _Youth and Manhood of Cyril Thornton_ was written.
This book appeared in 1827, and at once attracted attention. In 1829,
the author followed it up with _Annals of the Peninsular Campaigns, from
1808 to 1814_, and in 1833, after a visit to the New World, by _Men and
Manners in America_. In later life, having lost his first wife and
married again, he settled at Elleray, in the Lake District, where he saw
a good deal of Wordsworth, of whom he had long been an admirer,
frequently, as we are told, accompanying the poet upon long mountain
walks. His death, occasioned by a shock of paralysis, took place at
Pisa, whilst he was travelling with Mrs Hamilton, on the 7th December
1842. He was buried at Florence.
No doubt the novel of _Cyril Thornton_ has in time past owed much of its
popularity to its varied action and frequently shifting scene, and if we
are to judge it now on literary grounds we have no choice but to
acknowledge that great portion of its interest has perished. Still,
there remain a few admirable passages, and in this particular instance
the lines of cleavage between true and false are marked with peculiar
distinctness. For the book may be described as fragments of
autobiography embedded in a paste of romance. Now imagination was by no
means Hamilton's strong point; his fancy was neither very happy nor very
abundant, and when he essays character-painting on an important
scale--as in the case of old David Spreull, the conventional eccentric
but beneficent uncle of the story, and his faithful servant Girzy, he is
as deficient in anything like true insight as he is in lightness of
touch. But though his fiction is of this heavy quality, he could present
to admiration what he himself had seen and taken part in, and from time
to time he has thought fit to do so, with excellent effect.
Cyril Thornton is the scion of an old county family, who, at a very
early age, has the misfortune accidentally to kill his elder brother.
His father's affection is in consequence alienated from him, and he
grows up under a cloud. In time he is sent to the University, and the
scene of the story shifts to Glasgow, thus affording opportunity for
some scathing portraiture of the merchant life of that city. At Glasgow
Cyril makes the acquaintance of his uncle, and by the amiability and
independence of his character conquers the affection of the rich old
childless man. He has now arrived at man's estate, and whilst visiting
his aristocratic connection, the Earl of Amersham, at Staunton Court, he
sees, loves, and is beloved by, the beautiful and fascinating Lady
Melicent, the daughter of the house. Their scarcely-avowed attachment is
interrupted by the fatal illness of Cyril's mother, and being summoned
to return home with all speed, Cyril is there informed that, in a spirit
of cruel vindictiveness, his father has disinherited him. His gloom
deepens, and after some further romantic and amatory experience, at
length--alas! it is, indeed, at length--he joins the army. This is what
we have been waiting for, and our patience is now rewarded. At first he
is quartered at Halifax, where, at that time, the Duke of Kent was
Commander-in-Chief, and we are treated to a satirical portrait of His
Royal Highness, followed by a good deal of interesting description of
the military life of those days, interspersed with characteristic
anecdote, and varied by love-intrigue and a duel. Then follow travel and
sea-faring, with eloquent picture of an ascent of the Peak of Teneriffe,
of the Bermuda islands, and Gibraltar. Whilst Cyril is at the last-named
station, the vicissitudes of military life are illustrated by an
outbreak of yellow-fever, and when he is on his way back to England the
transport ship which bears him becomes engaged with a French privateer.
From all this it will be seen that of incident and movement there is no
lack, yet it is not until after the outbreak of the Spanish War of
Independence, when the hero is ordered with his regiment to the
Peninsula, that our expectations are fully satisfied. In such passages
as, for instance, those which describe the storming of the heights of
Roleia, the night spent by Cyril on out-piquet duty, or the capture of
the fort witnessed by the light of fire-balls, we have, not only the
scenes of war, but the poetry of the soldier's life set before us to
admiration. Scarcely less excellent is the account of Cyril's further
service under Wellington, Sir Rowland Hill, and Marshal Beresford, at
the lines of Torres Vedras, the siege of Badajos, and the battle of
Albuera, our interest in which is greatly strengthened by knowledge that
the writer was himself a part of what he describes. Our only regret is
that he has devoted so comparatively little of his book to what he does
so well. For all too soon we have the hero back in London once more,
frightfully disfigured by a wound received in action, and as a
consequence slighted by the dazzling but shallow Lady Melicent, who
before had looked so graciously upon the handsome soldier. And now the
novel begins to drag lamentably. The hero's domestic misfortunes strike
us as superfluous, whilst the madhouse scenes, where the characters
discourse in 'poetic prose,' are in the basest style of melodrama. Nor
do we care enough for Mr Spreull and his Girzy to have much patience
with the languid and long-drawn concluding scenes in which they take
part. Suffice it then to say that, ere we bid adieu to Cyril, he is
restored to his family estate, enriched by the inheritance of his
uncle's fortune, and consoled for the loss of the fickle Melicent by
worth and affection in the person of Laura Willoughby, the friend of his
youth.
The writer of the obituary of Hamilton in _Blackwood_ is eloquent in
praise of the literary style of the book. But when we find the novelist,
who writes in the first person, declaring that 'the elements of thought
and feeling within him were conglomerated into confused and inextricable
masses,' or describing a housemaid as being 'busied in her matutinal
vocation,' or alluding to the 'supererogatory decoration of shaving,'
or, when he wishes to inform us that there was a doctor in a certain
village, employing the locution that the village 'had the advantage of
including in its population a professor of the healing art,'--then we
dispute the competency of his critic. This inflation of style is the
more curious in that, fortified by his English education, Hamilton, like
Miss Ferrier, is by no means inclined to deal mercifully with the
foibles of his countrymen, as is amply shown by his portrait of Mr
Archibald Shortridge, or his account of the visit of the five Miss
Spreulls, of Balmalloch, and their mother to Bath. But for this we
should naturally have passed over any slips in his own style, preferring
to regard them as the not unamiable lapses of a hand more skilled to
wield the sword than drive the pen. His book on the Peninsular
Campaigns is written in good straightforward English, but in _Men and
Manners in America_ he again falls victim to the temptation never to use
one word where two will do nearly as well. When the characters in _Cyril
Thornton_ converse--be they officers in the army, charming young ladies,
peers of the realm, or (like Miss Mansfield) daughters of respectable
tradesmen--they uniformly make use of finely rounded and elaborately
constructed periods, preferring as a rule the third person as a form of
address--as, for instance, when a lady, addressing the hero, observes,
'I should be surprised to hear that Captain Thornton was of those,' and
so on. This, however, is, of course, no fault of the author's, but
simply a not ungraceful literary convention of the age in which he
wrote.
Though he professed Whig politics, Hamilton's pose throughout his
writings is one of aristocratic hauteur, and we are consequently the
less surprised to learn that the book in which he embodied his
observations on America gave dire offence in that country, provoking
angry reprisals. It may be that the comments of the gallant captain are
made occasionally in a spirit neither wholly free from insular
prejudice, nor from that particular pedantry which is sometimes
generated by a military training. But it is also manifest that the
existence which he surveyed--in a world, as must be remembered, at that
time really new--was in many respects a sufficiently bare, comfortless,
inelegant, and unrefined one, strangely lacking in the elements of
elevation in public or private life. Hamilton strove to judge it fairly,
and his observations are those of an intelligent and honest critic.
Passing easily, as they do, from grave to gay--now commenting on the
tendencies of democratic government or of the tariff, now comparing the
constitutions of the different States, now describing the prison or
scholastic systems of the country, and now touching upon the beauty and
the dress of the ladies, upon dinner parties, modes of eating,
barbarisms of language, and the like--they may be read with interest and
historically not without profit to this day.
Of his _Annals of the Peninsular Campaigns_, the author tells us that it
was intended to appeal to a wider public than was likely to be available
for the lengthy histories of Napier and Southey, its object being to
extend a knowledge of the great achievements of the British arms and an
appropriate pride in them. Hamilton had special qualifications for the
task, and he supplied an admirably terse and lucid narrative, but this
was not accomplished without a sacrifice of much of that picturesque and
personal detail which does so much to save history from dryness, and to
make it attractive and memorable to the general reader. So that his end
was but half attained.
* * * * *
FAMOUS SCOTS SERIES
_The following Volumes are in preparation:_--
NORMAN MACLEOD. By John Wellwood.
SIR WALTER SCOTT. By Professor Saintsbury.
GEORGE BUCHANAN. By Robert Wallace, M.P.
JEFFREY AND THE EDINBURGH REVIEWERS. By Sir Hugh Gilzean Reid.
ADAM SMITH. By Hector C. Macpherson.
KIRKCALDY OF GRANGE. By Louis Barbe.
MUNGO PARK. By T. Banks Maclachlan.
ROBERT FERGUSSON. By A. B. Grosart.
JAMES THOMSON. By William Bayne.
DAVID HUME. By Professor Calderwood.