Like many another innocent, no doubt, I was seduced not long ago by the
potent spell of Mr. Andrew Lang's name into reading his voluminous
_History of Scotland_. Being too, like Mr. Lang, sealed of the tribe of
Sir Walter, and knowing in a general way some of the romantic features
of Scotch annals, I was led to suppose that these bulky volumes would be
crammed from cover to cover with the pageantry of fair Romance. Alas, I
soon learned, as I have so often learned before, that a little knowledge
is a dangerous thing; and I was taught, moreover, a new application of
several well-worn lines of Milton. Amid the inextricable feuds of
Britons, Scots, Picts, and English; amid the incomprehensible medley of
Bruces, Balliols, Stuarts, Douglases, Plantagenets, and Tudors; amid the
horrid tumult of Roberts, Davids, Jameses, Malcolms (may their tribes
decrease!), Mr. Lang's reader, if he be of alien blood and foreign
shores, wanders helpless and utterly bewildered. On leaving that _selva
oscura_ I felt not unlike Milton's courageous hero (in courage only, I
trust) before the realm of Chaos and eldest Night, where naught was
perceptible but eternal anarchy and noise of endless wars. Yet with
this bold adventurer it might be said by me:
I come no spy,
With purpose to explore or to disturb
The secrets of your realm; but by constraint
Wandering this darksome desert, as my way
Led through your spacious empire up to light.
For throughout the labyrinth of all this anfractuous narrative
there was indeed one guiding ray of light. As often as the author
by way of anecdote or allusion--and happily this occurred pretty
frequently--mentioned the works of Scott, a new and powerful interest
was given to the page. The very name of Scott seemed providentially
symbolical of his office in literature, and through him Scots history
has become a theme of significance to all the world.
On the other hand, one is equally impressed by the fact that the novels
owe much of their vitality to the manner in which they voice the spirit
of the national life; and we recognise the truth, often maintained and
as often disputed, that the final verdict on a novelist's work is
generally determined by the authenticity of his portraiture, not of
individuals, but of a people, and consequently by the lasting
significance of the phase of society or national life portrayed.
The conditions of the novel should seem in this respect to be quite
different from those of the poem. We are conscious within ourselves of
some principle of isolation and exclusion--the _principium
individuationis_, as the old schoolmen called it--that obstructs the
completion of our being, of some contracting force of nature that dwarfs
our sympathies with our fellow-men, that hinders the development of our
full humanity, and denies the validity of our hopes; and the office of
the imagination and of the imaginative arts is for a while to break down
the walls of this narrowing individuality and to bestow on us the
illusion of unconfined liberty.
But if the end of the arts is the same, their methods are various, and
this variety extends even to the different genres of literature. The
manner of the epic, and in a still higher degree of the tragedy, is so
to arouse the will and understanding that their clogging limitations
seem to be swept away, until through our sympathy with the hero we feel
ourselves to be acting and speaking the great passions of humanity in
their fullest and freest scope; for this reason we call the characters
of the poem types, and we believe that the poet under the impulse of his
inspiration is carried into a region above our vision, where, like the
exalted souls in Plato's dream, he beholds face to face the great ideas
of which our worldly life and circumstances are but faulty copies. In
this way Achilles stands as the perfect warrior, and Odysseus as the
enduring man of wiles; Hamlet is the man of doubts, and Satan the
creature of rebellious pride. It may be that this effort or inspiration
of the poet to represent mankind in idealised form will account in part
for the peculiar tinge of melancholy that is commonly an attribute of
the artistic temperament,--for the brooding uncertainty of Shakespeare,
if as many think Hamlet is the true voice of his heart, for the feeling
of baffled despair which led Goethe to create Faust, and for the
self-tormenting of Childe Harold. It is because the dissolving power of
genius and the personality of the man can never be quite reconciled; he
is detached from nature and attached to her at the same time. On the one
hand his genius draws him to contemplate life with the disinterestedness
of a mind free from the attachments of the individual, while on the
other hand his own personality, often of the most ardent character,
drags him irresistibly to seek the satisfaction of individual emotions.
Like the Empedocles of Matthew Arnold, baffled in the ineffable longing
to escape themselves, these bearers of the divine light are haled
unwillingly
Back to this meadow of calamity,
This uncongenial place, this human life.
What to the reader is merely a pleasant and momentary illusion, or a
salutary excitation from without, is in the creative poet a partial
dissolution of his own personality. Shakespeare was not dealing in empty
words when he likened the poet to the lover and the lunatic as being of
imagination all compact; nor was Plato speaking mere metaphor when he
said that "the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is
no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses
and the mind is no longer in him." In the hour of inspiration some
darkened window is opened on the horizon to eyes that are ordinarily
confined within the four walls of his meagre self, a door is thrown open
to the heaven-sweeping gales, he hears for a brief while the voice of
the Over-soul speaking a language that with all his toil he can barely
render into human speech;--and when at last the door is closed, the
vision gone, and the voice hushed, he sits in the darkened chamber of
his own person, silent and forlorn.
I would not presume to describe absolutely the inner state of the poet
when life appears to him in its ideal form, but the means by which he
conveys his illusion to the reader is quite clear. The rhythm of his
verse produces on the mind something of the stimulating effect of music
and this effect is enhanced by the use of language and metaphor lifted
out of the common mould. Prose, however, has no such resources to impose
on the fancy a creation of its own, in which the individual will is
raised above itself. On the contrary, the office of the novel--and this
we see more clearly as fiction grows regularly more realistic--is to
represent life as controlled by environment and to portray human beings
as the servants of the flesh. This, I take it, was the meaning of
Goethe in his definition of the genres: "In the novel sentiments and
events chiefly are exhibited, in the drama characters and deeds." The
procedure of the novel must be, so to speak, a passive one. It depicts
man as a creature of circumstance, and its only method of escape is so
to encompass the individual in circumstance as to lend to his separate
life something of the pomp of universality. It effects its purpose by
breadth rather than by exaltation. Its truest aim is not to represent
the actions of a single man as noteworthy in themselves, but to
represent the life of a people or a phase of society; in the great sweep
of human activity something of the same largeness and freedom is
produced as in the poetic idealisation of the individual will in the
drama. Thus it happens that the artistic validity of a novel depends
first of all on the power of the author to portray broadly and
veraciously some aspect of this wider existence.
Balzac, in some respects the master novelist, was clearly conscious of
this aim of his art; and his _Comedie Humaine_ is a supreme effort to
grasp the whole range of French society. Nor would it be difficult in
the case of the greater English novelists to show that unwittingly--an
Englishman rarely if ever has the same knowledge of his art as a
Frenchman--they obeyed the same law. We admire Fielding and Smollett not
so much for their individual characterisations as for the joy we feel in
escaping our conventional timidity in the old-time tumultuous country
life of England, with all its rude strength and even its vulgarity. By a
natural contrast we read Jane Austen for her picture of rural security
and stability, and are glad to forget the vexations and uncertainties of
life's warfare in that gentle round of society, where greed and passion
are reduced to petty foibles, and where the errors of mankind only
furnish material for malicious but innocent satire. With Thackeray we
put on the veneer of artificial society which was the true idealism
inherited by him from the eighteenth century; and we move more freely
amidst that _gai monde_ because there runs through the story of it such
a biting satire of worldliness and snobbishness as flatters us with the
feeling of our own superiority. In Dickens we are carried into the very
opposite field of life, and for a while we move with those who are the
creatures of grotesque whims and emotions: caricatures we call his
people, but deep in our hearts we know that each of us longs at times to
be as humanity is in Dickens's world, the perfect and unreflecting
creature of his dearest whim--for this too is liberty. Thus it is that
the interest of the novel depends as much, or almost as much, on the
intrinsic value of the national life or phase of society reproduced as
on the skill of the writer. The prose author is in this respect far less
a free agent than the poet and far more the subject of his environment;
for he deals less with the unchanging laws of character and more with
what he perceives outwardly about him. It is this fact which leads many
readers to prefer the English novelists to the French, although the
latter are unquestionably the greater masters of their craft.
Now the peculiar good fortune of Scott in this matter was most strongly
brought home to me in reading the narrative work of Mr. Lang. Fine and
entertaining as are Scott's more professedly historical novels, such as
_Ivanhoe_ and _Quentin Durward_, I do not believe they could ever have
resisted the invasion of time were they not bolstered up by the stories
that deal more directly with the realities of Scotch life. There is, to
be sure, in the foreign tales a wonderfully pure vein of romance; but
romantic writing in prose cannot endure unless firmly grounded in
realism, or unless, like Hawthorne's work, it is surcharged with
spiritual meanings. Not having the power possessed by verse to convey
illusion, it lacks also the vitality of verse. Younger readers may take
naturally to _Ivanhoe_ or _The Talisman_, because very little is
required to evoke illusion with them. More mature readers turn oftenest
to _Guy Mannering_ and those tales in which the romance is the realism
of Scotch life, finding here a fulness of interest that is more than a
compensation for the frequent slovenliness of Scott's language and for
the haphazard construction of his plots.
These negligences of the indifferent craftsman might, perhaps, need no
such compensation, for we have grown hardened at last to slovenliness
in fiction. But there are other limitations to Scott's powers that show
more clearly how much of his fame rests on the substratum of national
life on which he builds. An infinite variety of characters, from kings
in the council hall down to strolling half-witted gaberlunzies, move
through the pages of his novels; but, and the fact is notorious, the
great Scotchman was little better at painting the purple light of young
desire than was our own Cooper. There is something like love-making in
_Rob Roy_, and Di Vernon has been signalised by Mr. Saintsbury as one of
his five chosen heroines; but in general the scenes that form the
ecstasy of most romance are dead and perfunctory in Scott. And this is
the more remarkable since we know that he himself was a lover--and a
disappointed lover, which is vastly more to the point in art, as all the
world knows. But in fact this inability to portray the softer emotions
is not an isolated phenomenon in Scott; he skims very lightly over most
of the deeper passions of the heart, seeming to avoid them except in so
far as they express themselves in action. His novels contain no adequate
picture of remorse or hatred, love or jealousy; neither do they contain
any such psychological analysis of the emotions as has made the fame of
subsequent writers. But there is an infinite variety of characters in
action, and a perfect understanding of that form of the imagination
which displays itself in whimsicalities corresponding to the
"originals" or "humourists" of the Elizabethan comedy.
The numberless quotations from "old plays" at the head of Scott's
chapters are not without significance. At times he approaches closer to
Shakespeare than any other writer, whether of prose or verse. In one
scene at least in _The Bride of Lammermoor_, where he describes the
"singular and gloomy delight" of the three old cummers about the body of
their contemporary, he lets us know that he has in mind the meeting of
the witches in _Macbeth_, and I think on the whole he excels the
dramatist in his own field. After all is said, the Shakespearian
witch-scene is an arbitrary exercise of the fancy, which fails to carry
with it a complete sense of reality: the illusion is not fully
maintained. The dialogue in the novelist, on the contrary, is instinct
with thrilling suggestiveness, for the very reason that it is based on
the groundwork of national character. The superstitious awe is here
simple realism, from the beginning of the scene down to the warning cry
of the paralytic hag from the cottage:
"He's a frank man, and a free-handed man, the Master," said Annie
Winnie, "and a comely personage--broad in the shouthers, and
narrow around the lunyies. He wad mak a bonny corpse; I wad like
to hae the streiking and winding o' him."
"It is written on his brow, Annie Winnie," returned the
octogenarian, her companion, "that hand of woman, or of man
either, will never straught him; dead-deal will never be laid on
his back, make you your market of that, for I hae it frae a sure
hand."
"Will it be his lot to die on the battle-ground then, Ailsie
Gourlay? Will he die by the sword or the ball, as his forbears hae
dune before him, mony ane o'them?"
"Ask nae mair questions about it--he'll no be graced sae far,"
replied the sage.
"I ken ye are wiser than ither folk, Ailsie Gourlay. But wha
tell'd ye this?"
"Fashna your thumb about that, Annie Winnie," answered the sibyl.
"I hae it frae a hand sure eneugh."
"But ye said ye never saw the foul thief," reiterated her
inquisitive companion.
"I hae it frae as sure a hand," said Ailsie, "and frae them that
spaed his fortune before the sark gaed ower his head."
"Hark! I hear his horse's feet riding aff," said the other; "they
dinna sound as if good luck was wi' them."
"Mak haste, sirs," cried the paralytic hag from the cottage, "and
let us do what is needfu', and say what is fitting; for, if the
dead corpse binna straughted, it will girn and thraw, and that
will fear the best o' us."
But more often Scott approaches the lesser lights of the Elizabethan
comedians, whose work is in general subject to the same laws as the
novel, and who filled their plays with whimsical creatures--
Bawd, squire, impostor, many persons more,
Whose manners, now called humours, feed the stage.
You cannot read through the _dramatis personae_ of one of these plays
(Witgood, Lucre, Hoard, Limber, Kix, Lamprey, Spichcock, Dampit, etc.)
without being reminded of the long list of originals that figure in the
Scotch novels; and in one case at least, Baron Bradwardine of
_Waverley_, Scott goes out of his way to compare him with a character of
Ben Jonson's. And you cannot but feel that Scott has surpassed his
models on their own ground, partly because his genius was greater and
partly because the novel is a wider and freer field for such characters
than the drama--at least when the drama is deprived of its stage
setting. But Scott's greatest advantage is due to the fact that what in
England was mainly an exaggeration of the more unsociable traits of
character seems in Scotland to reach down to the very foundation of the
popular life. His characters are not the creation of individual
eccentricities only, but spring from an inexhaustible quaintness of the
national temper. From every standpoint we are led back to consider the
greatness of the author as depending on his happy genius in finding a
voice for a rare and noteworthy phase of society.
Much of the Scotch temperament, its self-dependence, clan attachments,
cunning, its gloomy exaltations relieved at times by a wide and serene
prospect, may be traced, as Buckle has so admirably shown, to the
physical conditions of the land; and in reading the history of Scotland,
with its stories of the adventures of Wallace and Bruce and its battles
of Bannockburn and Prestonpans, it seems quite fitting that the wild
scenery of the country should be constantly associated with the deeds
of its heroes. There is something of charm in the very names of the
landscape--in the haughs, corries, straths, friths, burns, and braes.
The fascination of the Scotch lakes and valleys was one of the first to
awaken the world to an admiration of savage nature, as we may read in
Gray's letters; and Scott, from Waverley's excursion into the wild
fastnesses of highland robbers and chiefs to the lonely sea-scenes of
Zetland in _The Pirate_, has carried us through a succession of natural
pictures such as no other novelist ever conceived. And he has maintained
always that most difficult art of describing minutely enough to convey
the illusion of a particular scene and broadly enough to evoke those
general emotions which alone justify descriptive writing. Perhaps his
most notable success is the visit of Guy Mannering to Ellangowan, where
sea, sky, and land unite to form a picture of strangely luminous beauty.
He not only succeeded in exciting a new romantic interest in Scotch
scenery, but he has actually added to the market price of properties. It
is said that his descriptions are mentioned in the title deeds of
various estates as forming a part of their transmitted value.
But the scenery depicted by Scott is only the setting of a curious and
paradoxical life, and it is the light thrown on this life that lends the
chief interest to Mr. Lang's History. Owing in part to the peculiar
position and formation of the land, and in part to the strain of Celtic
blood in the Highland tribes, there was bred in the Scotch people an
unusual mingling of romance and realism, of imagination and worldly
cunning, that sets them quite apart from other races; and this
paradoxical mingling of opposite tendencies shows itself in the quality
of their politics, their religion, and in all their social manners.
Not the least interesting of Mr. Lang's chapters is that in which he
analyses the feudal chivalry of Scotland, and explains how it rested on
a more imaginative basis than in other countries; how the power of the
chief hung on unwritten rights instead of formal charters, and how the
loyalty of the clansmen was exalted to the highest pitch of personal
enthusiasm. But to complete the picture one should read Buckle's
scathing arraignment of a loyalty which was ready to sell its king and
was no purer than the faith that holds together a band of murderous
brigands. So, too, in religion the Scotch were perhaps more given to
superstition, and were more ready to sacrifice life and all else for
their belief than any other people of Europe, except the Spaniards,
while at the same time their bigotry never interfered with a vein of
caution and shrewd worldliness. There is in _Waverley_ an admirable
example at once of this paradoxical nature, and of the true basis of
Scott's strength. In the loyalism of Flora MacIvor he has attempted to
embody an ideal of the imagination not based on this national mingling
of qualities--though, of course, isolated individuals of that heroic
type may have existed in the land; and as a result he has produced a
character that leaves the reader perfectly cold and unconvinced. But the
moment Waverley comes from the MacIvors and descends to the real life of
Scotland, mark the change. We are immediately put on terra firma by the
cautious reply of Waverley's guide when asked if it is Sunday: "Could na
say just preceesely; Sunday seldom cam aboon the pass of Bally-Brough."
Consider the mixture of bigotry and worldly greed in Mr. Ebenezer
Cruikshanks, the innkeeper, who compounds for the sin of receiving a
traveller on fastday by doubling the tariff. In any other land Mr.
Ebenezer Cruikshank would have been a hypocrite and a scoundrel; in
Scotland his religious fervour is quite as genuine as his cunning; and
the very audacity of the combination carries with it the conviction of
realism.
The same contrast of qualities will be found to mark the lesser traits
of character. Consider the long list of servants and retainers with
their stiff-necked devotion and their incorrigible self-seeking. In one
of his notes Scott relates the story of a retainer who when ordered to
leave his master's service replied: "In troth, and that will I not; if
your honour disna ken when ye hae a gude servant, I ken when I hae a
gude master, and go away I will not." At another time, when his master
cried out in vexation: "John, you and I shall never sleep under the
same roof again!" the fellow calmly retorted, "Where the deil can your
honour be ganging?" In like manner the mixture of devotion and
self-seeking in that quaintest of followers, Richie Moniplies, is worth
a thousand false idealisations. To read almost on the same page his
immovable loyalty to Nigel and his brazen treachery in presenting his
own petition first to the King, is to gain at once an entrance into a
new region of psychology and to acquire a truer understanding of Scotch
history. At another time, when catechised about the alleged spirit in
Master Heriot's house, the good Moniplies gives an example of combined
superstition, scepticism, and cunning, which must be read at length--and
all the world has read it--to be appreciated. Perhaps the most useful
illustration to be gained from this same Moniplies is the strange
contrast of solemnity and humour, of reverence and familiarity,
exhibited by him. I need not repeat the description of that
"half-pedant, half-bully," nor quote the whole of his account of meeting
with the King; let it be enough to call attention to the curious
mingling of mirth and solemnity in the way he apostrophises the royal
James: "My certie, lad, times are changed since ye came fleeing down the
backstairs of auld Holyrood House, in grit fear, having your breeks in
your hand without time to put them on, and Frank Stewart, the wild Earl
of Bothwell, hard at your haunches." There is in the temper of worthy
Moniplies something wholly different from the boisterous humour of
England and from the dry laughter of America; and this is due to the
continually upcropping substratum of imagination and romance in his
character. He would resemble the grotesque seriousness of Don Quixote,
were it not for a strain of sourness and suspicion that are quite
foreign to the generous Hidalgo.
So we might follow the paradox of Scotch character through its union of
gloomy moroseness with homely affections, of unrestrained emotionalism
with cold calculation, of awesome second-sight with the cheapest
charlatanry. In the end, perhaps, all these contradictions would resolve
themselves into the one peculiar anomaly of seeing the free romance of
enthusiasm rising like a flower--a flower often enough of sinister
aspect--out of the most prosaic grossness. Certainly it is the chief
interest of Scotch history--by showing that these contradictions
actually exist in the national temperament and by explaining so far as
may be their origin--to confirm for us our belief in what may be called
the realism of Scott's romance. This is that guiding thread which leads
the weary voyager through the mists and chaotic confusions of Caledonian
annals up to light. And in that region of light what wonderful cheer for
the soul! Here, if anywhere in prose, the illusions of the imagination
may take pleasant possession of our heart, for they come with the
authority of a great national experience and walk hand in hand with the
soberest realities. Even the wild enthusiasm of a Meg Merrilies barely
awakens the voice of slumbering scepticism in the midst of our secure
conviction. And sojourning for a while in that world of strange
enchantment we seem to feel the limitations that vex our larger hopes
and hem in our wills broken down at the command of a magic voice. It is
as if that incompleteness of our nature, which the schoolmen called in
their fantastic jargon the _principium individuationis_ and ascribed to
the bondage of these material bodies, were for a time forgotten, while
we form a part of that free and complex existence so faithfully
portrayed in the Scotch novels.